California's High Speed Rail Project Runs Out of Money

The train must arrive on time at all costs!

 

This idea that urban residents NEED high speed rail is baloney. I already told you that city folk have four ways to get to other cities that don't involve owning a car: rental car, bus, low-speed train, or airplane. You haven't responded to that small fact yet. For the rural resident, the choice to get to town and bring back groceries (for example) is to drive their vehicle on the road or what? Drive a horse and buggy across the wilderness (and likely over someone else's property)? Is that what you expect? Maybe 150 years ago, when most rural people grew their own food, paved roads were not a necessity, but the U.S. has moved beyond "Little House on the Prairie" lifestyles, don't you think? You haven't responded to that fact yet, either.

All I am saying is that you need a certain minimum population density per mile for HSR to be successful. (By successful, I mean "not a significant burden on the average taxpayer who is never going to regularly use HSR".) And only one place in the U.S. (the NE corridor) at this time clearly has that population density per mile. It makes the most sense to me to start at the part of the country where HSR is most likely to be successful, and then decide if we want to branch out further to other cities. If we build L.A. to S.F. and TPA-ORL-MIA high speed rail lines and they fail, we most likely will decide to never build HSR from N.Y. to D.C. There is a political dimension to this. If you screw yourself and put HSR in places where it won't succeed, the voters will not let you put any more HSR anywhere, even in places where it likely would succeed. You would become the boy who cried wolf (except it would be "high speed rail" instead of "wolf"). I am not declaring ALL high speed rail to be a boondoggle. But the voters who watch the first two HSR lines fail will call all HSR to be a boondoggle. Can you blame them?

By world standards, few of our cities are truly BIG cities. With the urban population of Los Angeles area just below 4 million people, the U.S. only has one city above 4 million people (urban population). China has twenty seven. The U.S. has no cities with an urban population over 9 million people, while China has eight. If you want to build HSR rail in a very large country like the U.S., it helps to have the population to fill those trains. Europe has three cities with more population than New York. And the area of western Europe is comparable to the eastern fourth of the U.S.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_by_population

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_in_China_by_population

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_European_cities_by_population_within_city_limits

If you don't hit the minimum population density per mile for HSR, then yes, it is a boondoggle. It will siphon off public funds that could be used on other things. The western two thirds of the country is running out of water. Most places west of the Rockies have been experiencing a drought. The area east of the Rockies is losing water from its aquifer (the Oglalla Aquifer) at an alarming rate, and parts of the Aquifer have already begun to dry up. A former co-worker of mine was planning on building a house in Utah, but the drought is so bad there, they stopped issuing building permits because there would be no water to send to the new house. Solving massive problems like a water shortage takes a lot of money.

We also need to find the best way to fight global warming. If the trains run full all the time, then yes, HSR is a good way to fight GW. But if they run empty, then you are using energy to move the empty trains and therefore HSR is a bad (and very expensive) way to fight global warming. The money might be better spent on electric cars and upgrades to the electrical grid.

 

You would never build slow rail on elevated tracks. Since slow rail is at grade, it has to allow road crossings. Road crossings will have businesses adjacent to the tracks that will need to be torn down to build elevated rail. Slow rail is also tolerant of much sharper curves than HSR, so the tendency will be to save money and "straighten out the track later". This will be costly. Low speed rail track is already a little expensive at $1-2 million per mile, not including crossings, track switches, etc.

The best thing they could do to prepare for HSR in the future is identify potential routes for HSR first (and station locations), and then specific pathways for the track. Also identify any major challenges (like swamps, large rivers and mountain ranges) that need to be overcome. Then the gov't could start the process of acquiring the narrow strips of land required for future track. If people are still using the land, put a lien on the property such that they can only sell it to the government when they finish using it, or by using eminent domain if the decision is made to build HSR before they finish using it. There is no need to build any rail at this time if there is already Amtrak service between the cities. What would a second low-speed rail system achieve as far as transporting people that the first one can't?

Buying the land and designating it for future HSR use will be difficult enough. You may have to tear down a historic building or two in various cities before HSR construction can start. There is a lot of cost in just buying the land, especially inside cities. It may not be glamorous to have a HSR program that has a lot of empty strips of land snaking through cities, but that is far better than waiting for the decision to build HSR a century from now, and seeing apartment buildings and shopping centers where your track needs to go.

As far as the west coast goes, I would not do anything to encourage higher populations there until the water shortage issues are worked out.

 

Anytime you are dealing with advanced technology, building now for some future need means tearing it down to put in something new when new technology becomes available. If the new technology is not compatible with the old technology, that means tearing out the elevated track, which is more expensive. So in the end, you have put in two very expensive systems before the trains even have a chance to fill up. If you just purchase the land for the track and stations, it would be much cheaper and more practical. Build the track when there is enough population to support it.

Why does the future have to be dense? People are having fewer kids, so maybe the future becomes less dense. Right now, with Covid and remote work, people are moving out of cities. What if that trend continues?

 

What the areas without water typically do is persuade (or mandate) that homeowners not have lawns. You can have weeds, cactus, or rock gardens.

Otherwise, I don't disagree with what you are saying. However, there are certain drivers that persuade people to move out of cities. That can include crime, traffic, noise pollution, pandemics, high cost of living, high taxes, etc. For coastal cities, that also needs to include global warming. Half of Miami may be abandoned in a hundred years. Will the high speed rail line going to Miami look so good then? New York has its own problems with global warming and flooding during storms. Will parts of New York need to be abandoned in the future?

I'm all for starting high speed rail construction, as long as it is done in the area where it is most likely to succeed. Then we can branch out to areas that are borderline as far as chances for success, and see how it goes.

 

More news from California's HSR Project: apparently they have not finished buying the land for HSR. Why would you start installing track before you had secured all the land?

California’s high-speed rail project still needs to purchase hundreds of pieces of land

 

The distance between San Fran and L.A. is too great, and the population is insufficient to fully support HSR. There are only 278 flights per day between S.F. and L.A. (versus 476 for D.C. to N.Y.), no major cities between the two large cities to add large amounts of passengers (compared to at least two major cities--Philly and Baltimore--for the N.Y. to D.C. route), and the distance is 347 miles direct (versus 237 miles for N.Y. to D.C.). California has the dilemma of deciding whether to make all the stops at smaller cities to pick up additional passengers (which slows the train down and makes flying between the cities more convenient) or ignoring the smaller cities. Add in additional costs for making the system safe to operate (i.e., survivable) when an earthquake hits, and this is truly a massive boondoggle.