$231 B can subsidize over 400 years of free air travel between LA and SF (assuming $200 per round trip and 2.7 million flights per year [1]).
The hope is that the high speed rail would allow way more trips between the two cities, as well as the central valley cities in between, bolstering the economy, compared to the current amount of flights. I will keep my fingers crossed for the next 30 years.
I think the end-goal is to extract resources and money from taxpayers to wealthy individuals and corporations.
In the end we’re working for creating a form of transportation that could move people from point A to point B. However, everything from land use to infrastructure development costs a lot of money and nobody has any reason to lower their prices either.
I bet a brand new fully sustainable city could be created with that amount of money. But nimby will make it impossible, because (I believe) it’s about resource extraction and not service delivery.
Of course, and having to pay certain land owners billions of dollars to build a couple tracts passing through their property doesn’t help either. At least the union members will spend that money within that community and not stash it in Cayman Islands or some other tax shelter.
I don't think unions are the primary problem. Maybe cal can use immeninent domain to get land for tracks. $231 billion is a stupid number whatever the goal.
> Is that why other countries with substantially more unions are wildly cheaper and astoundingly faster?
Unions, the laws around them, political systems, and union culture are different everywhere. In the US, unions blindly support candidates who support more government spending, more big projects, more benefits for their union or projects, etc. They get money by the forced collection of union dues from workers and use it to influence politics. They extort the public by regularly striking - for example the seasonal predictable strikes by teachers, hurting a critical service of education - all while resisting accountability and competition. The collusion inherent to industry wide unions leads to reduced competition and increased labor prices.
Unions are definitely a part of the CA HSR problem. They benefit greatly from this boondoggle, and taxpayer money is basically stolen from others and funneled to them. But I do acknowledge that they may not be the biggest problem in terms of the cost overrun.
However they play a big role in the politics of it - supporting legislation, candidates, and contracts that help them. It’s why Newsom keeps talking up the union labor involved in CA HSR and how so many union jobs are created by it.
> With all do respect, and I mean this sincerely, it makes you look stupid.
Never seeing a good public transport project everyone assumes that it’s not possible. It is possible when the goal is to provide transportation services, not resource extraction from masses to limited (in the grand scheme of things) number of individuals.
Not faster by enough to matter, a difference of 1 hour that airport security, taxi, boarding, and takeoff/landing easily eats up.
You also can't be productive on a flight packed in like sardines and being required to put away your laptop for for a large portion of the flight time.
in addition... you need a real id or a passport to fly. a lot of people have extreme anxiety about flying. those are big hurdles that a train does not have.
I made an appointment at the DMV, walked in, waited about 10 minutes, answered a few questions, and walked out with a piece of paper saying I'd get the real ID mailed to me, which happened.
As for getting a birth certificate, I googled how to get a birth certificate from XX state, followed the directions, and got a birth certificate in the mail.
One of the premises behind the CAHSR is that the existing airports and runways in LA and SF are nearing capacity. There's no room to expand, and the metropolitan regions are so sprawling you'd end up driving an additional hour or more to any newly built airport. Cars and buses don't solve the problem, either, precisely because of the sprawl and traffic--it can take longer to traverse Bay Area and LA sprawl than it does to zoom the hundreds of miles down I-5.
From an engineering and planning perspective HSR makes sense anyway you look at it. The problem is our inability to build major infrastructure projects. Even highway construction and expansion in these regions is becoming absurdly expensive, along with all other forms of development. Completely independent from HSR, we need to fix our regulatory policies. The ballooning price tag for CAHSR shouldn't inspire ire against HSR, it should inspire ire against our regulatory policies and governance.
Is that really true? LAX and SFO are near capacity, at least during certain times of the day. But we still have room to increase flights at SJC, STS, OAK, ONT, BUR, SNA, and LGB. With a little more work it should also be possible to shift some cargo flights to NUQ in order to free up SFO capacity.
That analysis may be biased, but it does a decent job sketching out how to compare modes and capacities. Also, regulatory obstruction and cost inflation apply just as much to airport and highway expansion as it does to HSR. In some ways it's much worse. SFO should build a new runway, and it'd be incredibly cost effective, but NIMBY opposition was so intense SFO repudiated the idea years ago and dare not even speak of it, now.
No, that report doesn't address my point. Did you even read it? OAK in particular has been losing flights lately and is well below capacity. We don't need to build a new runway there, the existing ones are under utilized.
It gives number for how much airport (gates and runways) and highway expansion would be needed to meet future demands without the HSR. And it does so apportioning traffic across the 3 major Bay Area airports and 5 LA airports.
The OAK situation only drives home the point. It's not as convenient, at least relative to the segment of people flying. Location matters. If you want to optimally utilize existing airports, we need more infrastructure, including better mass transit systems. OAK is connected to BaRT, but it's yet another transfer with about an extra 15 minutes of travel time, not including walking through the stations. And BaRT itself isn't an effective mass transit system; it's more commuter train than subway.
I'm traveling to LA next month from SF and still haven't decided whether to fly or drive. With CAHSR point-to-point the decision would be easier--take the train and rent a car.
> Turning a whole lot of flights into energy and carbon-saving train trips is a huge benefit.
Consider the embodied carbon of 500 miles of train tracks and embankment. The carbon released from producing all that cement, smelting the steel, and diesel fuel to move the earth is immense.
They’d probably get some good results if they spent $100 billion on coming up with more fuel-efficient ways of flying and still have enough left over for 200 years of flights
The next generation of small airliners with thin wings and open-rotor turbofans are expected to be significantly more fuel efficient. Hybrid battery-electric propulsion also holds some promise for shorter flights.
I'm very in favor of high-speed rail, in general. But I remember when the price tag had jumped to "only" $100B, and that was already considered a scandal.
At some point the state has to say, "our requirements are making it insanely expensive. We need to consider a different route, or a lower speed."
A better route can lower costs, but there are places in the world that build on much worse land for less.
Lower speed is unlikely to change anything, you can have a few sharper corners, but nothing that is a big deal. Meanwhile lower speed makes this much less useful vs flying. (and starts to make driving competitive - at least you have your car when you get there)
CA (and the US) has issues, and I don't know what they are. Every time someone suggests something they feel like a drop in the bucket, and all the different drops don't add up to much.
Land acquisition costs are one issue. The California Environment Quality Act (CEQA) is another. While well intentioned, it allows almost anyone to tie up any development project in court indefinitely based on trivial concerns. If we want to have a functioning industrial economy then we're going to have to scale back CEQA and accept a certain amount of environmental damage.
Your understanding of how the route affects the price is misguided.
It has nothing (or very very little) to do with how difficult the terrain is to navigate, it has everything to do with who owns the land, and how much they want to charge for it.
Often these "owners" only purchase the land once informed that it is a potential high speed rail route.
I don’t think the tech or the route is remotely the problem. This is purely a matter of political will.
Not sure if you’ve read Abundance. But the basic idea is that rich, developed countries have onerous processes in place to satisfy many needs, which is antithetical to building stuff.
For example, CA requires strict analysis and studies. CA has myriad legislation to protect private property. It has restrictions on what can be purchased, from whom, and from whence labor can be sourced. Together, this vast web of limitations makes big projects like HSR extremely expensive and unwieldy.
It’s not that the scope or ambition of the project is a problem in itself. It’s that the mega project comes along with many requirements aside from just building it.
Effectively, CA is working at cross-purpose.
The resolution is actually very simple. You just exempt your mega-project from all the legislation constraining it.
If CA wanted to they could simply change the law. Skip labor-sourcing laws, skip community feedback, skip permitting and approval (aside from safety), skip domestic parts requirements, and apply eminent domain with no feedback process.
We don’t do that for political reasons. This isn’t a technical problem
“What you should in fact do is employ all the world's top male and female supermodels, pay them to walk the length of the train handing out free Chateau Petrus for the entire duration of the journey. You'll still have about 3 billion pounds left in change and people will ask for the trains to be slowed down.” ~Rory Sutherland
Someone mentioned sunk costs a couple of days ago, and here’s a glaringly stupid example but watch everyone justify the price tag with all sorts of reasons.
I am too, but folks have to realize this is handout to big construction and construction unions, it's not to solve problem of high speed travel between SF and LA. While that has always been a thing in public works, unfortunately in recent decades in the US we've gotten to point where it doesn't really matter if the project makes sense or is ever completed. It's a shame.
They also started construction before they even finalized the route, including not realizing they would have to move tons of utility lines along the way (they didn't get sign off from the public utilities beforehand), then it got bogged down by environmental reviews, land acquisition issues, etc.
The California High Speed Rail Authority just posted about how many "good-paying jobs" they created, as if that's the goal rather than building a functioning railroad. Disgusting.
The state is capable, it is just unwilling to leverage its power to achieve a meaningful outcome. This is relatively normal across the country; NIMBYs and small landowners have outsized influence and ability to delay.
China builds high speed rail at half the cost of the US.
European countries of comparable size and GDP to California do not experience own-goals of this magnitude.
Other countries do this just fine and we can easily build freeways and highways. This is because of intentional sabotage. US politics are actively harming citizens by sabotaging projects to 'prove how bad x is' when in reality x is the right answer if you don't have active bad actors.
In Japan the cost of building the tunnels through mountains and undersea for Shinkansen ranges from $20-100M/km. Since there's no default ownership of subsurface land rights in CA it would be cheaper and faster to dig tunnels than pay for the land rights and environmental impacts.
For the $231B you ought to be able to get 2-3000 miles of tunnel done (3x what is proposed on the surface). Of course the stations are still a huge cost, because those have to be above ground, but you could choose where to put them. The bridges and aqueducts that have been built so far (Bakersfield to Merced) are intentionally where land costs are low and no one will ride them.
I agree, this isn't about figuring out how to build high-speed rail for riders. This is about figuring out how to extract maximum funds from tax/rate payers. It's just like PG&E. I'd go as far as to say that all the consultants and construction companies that have been paid should be banned from future public infrastructure builds unless the money spent is paid back.
You are claiming that this is anti train and pro car conspiracy. Counter ponint : the SF Bay_Bridge cost 6.5 Billion, but was originally budgeted at 200 Million.
The US can't build anything efficiently. It's due to the massive mismanagement, bureaucratic nonsense, environmental review, permitting and NIMBY lawsuits.
The real conspiracy is that "they" never wanted a train, "they" wanted an endless jobs project.
It's mostly that we allow whiners to control the project and that's literally it.
This is the only actual difference between the US and other places
Take Los Angeles, the Santa Monica train slows down around a stop called farmdale because some whiner ran a bogus fear mongering campaign in 2011. I was at those meetings nobody liked this guy.
15 years later every trip, every day is still delayed because of this one man's stupid bitchfest
To be fair our interstate highways were built many decades ago by mostly just disregarding poor neighborhoods and taking land from them indescriminately.
We do build new ones (I26 is happening now) and that doesn't cost hundreds of billions of dollars. We can and have built big projects. We can and will build bigger ones. This is just sabotage at every possible chance. I have seen this my whole life. We are so far behind on solar adoption because of groups actively making things worse, often at a real cost to the group, just to make it look like actual good ideas are bad ones. Our politics are toxic and the core problem here, not the idea or the technology. This is toxic sabotage politics where it is better to break things than to let the other side have a good idea.
Is there a breakdown of the estimated costs anywhere?
I see a lot of speculation over how "it's expensive because of X" (e.g., unions, land owners, regulations, etc.), but I don't think I've ever seen a detailed breakdown of the estimated costs which would support anyone's hypotheses as to why it's actually as expensive as it is.
For all I know, the high-speed rail project is going to cost $231B because it calls for using osmium rails in its tracks.
At this point it's extremely unlikely the needed funds will be secured for the foreseeable future. Even if the federal government were willing to contribute, spending $100+ billion of federal tax money on a regional rail project would be a hard sell to say the least.
Most likely the Bakersfield to Merced segment will be the only segment completed. It will end up as a white elephant racking up operational losses until Sacramento finally decides to pull the plug.
I wish that they had done just San Jose to Burbank with a couple stops on the west side of the central valley (starting building from both directions at the same time). I think that was the maximum achievable initial goal.
The Big Dig in Boston cost almost $30 billion in inflation-adjusted money and had nowhere near the impact on the region as a high speed rail system would have in California.
It basically had zero impact outside of the City of Boston.
(And it should have been spent on demolishing that highway, not burying it and not replacing it, then expanding regional rail and transit connectivity in the Boston metropolitan area.)
Silver Line was part of the Big Dig, but I agree the North/South Rail Link should have been part of it. Having no direct connection between North Station and South Station is stupid.
Spain has so far spent about 60 billion Eur on its (much more extensive) HSR network. It has a lot of harsh terrain as well, crossing mountains and semi-deserts.
There are functional HSRs in Morocco and Uzbekistan, Egypt is building its first own HSR.
Can't blame unions, considering how easily Europe gets it done. Most likely issue is that in the US, every landowner and minor municipality is empowered to delay and obstruct these projects and thus milk them.
Yea I would definitely like to know what the response is to eminent domain in other countries where its working better. I've never been in that situation and I can totally understand the resistance to losing your property, but I can't see American's being particularly unique in that feeling. Maybe the laws are just more permissive in the US for contesting the government.
In California specifically there are also environmental regulations like CEQA that provide another avenue for blocking such things, independent of eminent domain issues. Even if someone is building on their own land, lots of environmental review is required, and individuals or groups can sue on the basis that such review was inadequate. This ties things up for a long time. There are legitimate reasons to want environmental review, but the way it works in CA now, CEQA is largely just a tool people use to delay projects they don't want.
Details matter. Most countries have environmental laws, but their teeth differ.
Polish environmental law is quite notorious for being deliberately easy on developers (at least outside national parks), which translates into a lot of construction activity.
OTOH Californian CEQA is such a NIMBY/BANANA weapon of mass anti-construction that I have heard of it, despite being located a third of a world away.
That is only a $1.2bn deal and shared with another firm. Having different contractors from all over the world do different little parts isn't a good way to reduce costs.
I recall a lot of the original funding (Billions of dollars) was spent on 3rd party consultants to run various multi-year long review processes (environmental, legal compliance, eminent domain, community agreements etc.)
Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson tackle this specific example (along with others) in their book Abundance that came out last year. It's a pretty easy read, and a really interesting examination of why projects like this struggle.
But as other commenters have pointed out — a lot of it is NIMBYism (plus a heavy dose of overregulation).
Conservatives tend to point at projects like this as examples of why our incompetent government shouldn't be allowed to build large projects.
But other countries can do this (including a good chunk of Europe), so I think it's really valuable to dig in and understand why we struggle.
I have worked on CAHSR and I can tell you that some of the extra expense is that State of CA procurement rules are highly complex and cause a great deal of added expense. Bureaucracy creates added costs.
I ride BART and Caltrain multiple times a week. Trains are delightful. And so are planes.
It typically costs about $100, and takes an hour to fly from SF to LA. The train will be slower and almost certainly more expensive. Where is the benefit?
Long distance trains work in Europe because they are supported by a rich network of public transit options stemming from city centers, and a population that uses transit frequently.
But California public transit is a mess. When you rock up at LA Union Central and want to get out to say, Newport Beach, it's another three hours of navigating buses and the metrolink.
The money would have been far better spent integrating agencies and building out high speed rail in our urban areas. BART should be running out to Sacto, Stockton, Silicon Valley, and Marin. Requisition the Amtrak line and build a highspeed rail from San Diego to Santa Barbara - now that'd be something.
This HSR line makes a good deal of sense if it could be built. Your analysis of flying is wildly incorrect. The train will be faster door to door than the average flight.
But the main benefit will come from massive secondary economic growth. Cities along the line will experience dramatic increases in demand and economic activity. Cities at the terminus will have a massively increased share of workers in the commute threshold.
Further, the HSR line serves as a backbone for future lines, tying the state together.
The plan is very good on paper. It’s getting creamed in implementation because CA is not politically aligned on this project. Half the state doesn’t want it to succeed at all.
Asking $200+ billion AND still need private investors.
Is the rail made out of gold?
>Under current projections, assuming funding and construction proceed as planned, service between San Francisco and Bakersfield could begin around 2033, while the full Los Angeles to San Francisco connection could extend to 2040.
Brilliant stuff.
I predict the rail will never happen and only more and more money going "somewhere".
This is awful and perhaps what is most awful is that this is the headline folks see, then they have a gut-reaction that because this project is so fucked up that all transit projects must be like this. And of course, there's the fun fact that many highway and road construction projects come in way over budget too.
If you don't live in California, the lesson to take away here is to figure out what the transportation departments and highway lobby did to secure the space needed for highways, and copy those tactics, not to look at California's failure and believe that extrapolates to your state or area.
In Central Ohio voters overwhelmingly approved a ballot measure to fund bus transit and dedicated lanes in high-density corridors in Columbus. Now the project is already being set back perhaps as long as a year and a half, because the Ohio Department of Transportation is concerned car traffic may be negatively affected and wants a new traffic study. Huge waste of time, the exact kind of thing you would have wanted a DOGE in its most idealized form to nuke. You have to imagine these kinds of tactics x1000 because once California and others see the success of rail the jobs programs that are most state DOTs are going to be in serious trouble.
We'll get there, it's just going to be a long battle against entrenched lobbying and special interest groups (highway departments, construction companies, auto manufacturers, &c.) which need to profit off of your requirement to have a car to participate in society.
By the way, I'm not "against" cars or anything. Have one and love it. But the primary mode of transportation in our more dense areas has to change.
They should investigate alternatives to solid gold carriages. Gold is not only expensive, it’s very heavy, requiring much more energy to operate. It also has less tensile strength and its way too ductile compared to aluminum.
I’m not a railway engineer, but encrusting the tracks with “pillow cut” diamonds from “actual pirate hoards” seems like a security risk. And pirate hoards are only more rare over time.
Meanwhile private rail is connecting cities in Florida. Somehow with less fuss.
Something about blue states make progress on basic things costly, time consuming, and difficult. Every stakeholder needs their say. Any NIMBY can veto. The loudest, most obnoxious snowflakes dominate public comment. And officials don’t tell them to STFU.
And I don’t see a lot of appetite for soul searching in these states. Just “let’s raise taxes”
You don’t have to convince me we have a broken society where the oligarchs have too much power+wealth. But I’m also not willing to pay more taxes without blue states removing veto points on these projects so can’t easily be derailed by every dumb special interest.
We’re all paying more so loudest amongst can derail and shape progress on important issues.
Make corruption, appearance of corruption, or anything that looks like it might possibly look like corruption (including having ever had lunch with someone who knows someone who has heard of someone whom you pick as a contractor) at minimum a lifetime-in-jail offense and watch the prices and timelines melt.
Corruption and waste. The real problem is that the quality of people in public office and appointed by them cannot responsibly manage these amounts of money. But also that the incentives are all broken.
California isn’t the only state with this problem though. Oregon and Washington and New York are just as bad. And the big cities in these states have the same problems at the city level.
How long can they go before they can no longer raise debt to do things?
They need to just accept their lost and cancel the project. I think the people of CA have given this enough money and time. It's become a joke and nothing more than a giant way for they governor to launder money. Looking at you NEWSCUM.
The purpose of large rail projects is to take public money and give it to engineering firms, construction companies, consultants, and politicians. In no scenario does this project even make the top 10 in a list of ways to transport people between these locations. It would be cheaper to give away 5 million cars!
$231 B can subsidize over 400 years of free air travel between LA and SF (assuming $200 per round trip and 2.7 million flights per year [1]).
The hope is that the high speed rail would allow way more trips between the two cities, as well as the central valley cities in between, bolstering the economy, compared to the current amount of flights. I will keep my fingers crossed for the next 30 years.
[1] https://simpleflying.com/san-francisco-los-angeles-flight-ma...
I think the end-goal is to extract resources and money from taxpayers to wealthy individuals and corporations.
In the end we’re working for creating a form of transportation that could move people from point A to point B. However, everything from land use to infrastructure development costs a lot of money and nobody has any reason to lower their prices either.
I bet a brand new fully sustainable city could be created with that amount of money. But nimby will make it impossible, because (I believe) it’s about resource extraction and not service delivery.
> I think the end-goal is to extract resources and money from taxpayers to wealthy individuals and corporations.
Don’t forget unions. The big large union networks (like SEIU, teachers unions, etc) corrupt politics but also benefit from that corruption.
Of course, and having to pay certain land owners billions of dollars to build a couple tracts passing through their property doesn’t help either. At least the union members will spend that money within that community and not stash it in Cayman Islands or some other tax shelter.
I don't think unions are the primary problem. Maybe cal can use immeninent domain to get land for tracks. $231 billion is a stupid number whatever the goal.
Is that why other countries with substantially more unions are wildly cheaper and astoundingly faster?
Look at Spain. More unionized, 1/10th the cost and they build the entire length of the CA HSR every two years.
The fastest, cheapest construction of hsr is literally by communists...
Why is there always someone who blames unions for everything with zero empirical analysis?
With all do respect, and I mean this sincerely, it makes you look stupid.
> Is that why other countries with substantially more unions are wildly cheaper and astoundingly faster?
Unions, the laws around them, political systems, and union culture are different everywhere. In the US, unions blindly support candidates who support more government spending, more big projects, more benefits for their union or projects, etc. They get money by the forced collection of union dues from workers and use it to influence politics. They extort the public by regularly striking - for example the seasonal predictable strikes by teachers, hurting a critical service of education - all while resisting accountability and competition. The collusion inherent to industry wide unions leads to reduced competition and increased labor prices.
Unions are definitely a part of the CA HSR problem. They benefit greatly from this boondoggle, and taxpayer money is basically stolen from others and funneled to them. But I do acknowledge that they may not be the biggest problem in terms of the cost overrun.
However they play a big role in the politics of it - supporting legislation, candidates, and contracts that help them. It’s why Newsom keeps talking up the union labor involved in CA HSR and how so many union jobs are created by it.
> With all do respect, and I mean this sincerely, it makes you look stupid.
Read the site guidelines.
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While I think the project should cost less money, thinking purely in terms of money is a slippery slope.
The $20 I spend on feeding myself a healthy dinner could buy 10 sundaes at McDonald's, that doesn't mean I should eat 10 sundaes.
Turning a whole lot of flights into energy and carbon-saving train trips is a huge benefit.
> thinking purely in terms of money is a slippery slope
I agree. Flights would also be much faster and more flexible.
But flights emit co2, and a train system is electrified. It can be completely powered by renewables.
Given California's extreme susceptibility to climate related disasters, avoiding flights is a great idea.
Have you ever been to Europe?
Bingo.
Never seeing a good public transport project everyone assumes that it’s not possible. It is possible when the goal is to provide transportation services, not resource extraction from masses to limited (in the grand scheme of things) number of individuals.
Yes. Isn't Ryanair more popular for the distance this California project would cover? (800 km)
Both options exist and both are heavily utilized. Having multiple options helps alleviate congestion issues.
Not faster by enough to matter, a difference of 1 hour that airport security, taxi, boarding, and takeoff/landing easily eats up.
You also can't be productive on a flight packed in like sardines and being required to put away your laptop for for a large portion of the flight time.
in addition... you need a real id or a passport to fly. a lot of people have extreme anxiety about flying. those are big hurdles that a train does not have.
I made an appointment at the DMV, walked in, waited about 10 minutes, answered a few questions, and walked out with a piece of paper saying I'd get the real ID mailed to me, which happened.
As for getting a birth certificate, I googled how to get a birth certificate from XX state, followed the directions, and got a birth certificate in the mail.
"Works for me, WONTFIX"
Spoken like a true software engineer
True, but at these prices you could have a dedicated terminal to make the process as easy as getting on a bus.
One of the premises behind the CAHSR is that the existing airports and runways in LA and SF are nearing capacity. There's no room to expand, and the metropolitan regions are so sprawling you'd end up driving an additional hour or more to any newly built airport. Cars and buses don't solve the problem, either, precisely because of the sprawl and traffic--it can take longer to traverse Bay Area and LA sprawl than it does to zoom the hundreds of miles down I-5.
From an engineering and planning perspective HSR makes sense anyway you look at it. The problem is our inability to build major infrastructure projects. Even highway construction and expansion in these regions is becoming absurdly expensive, along with all other forms of development. Completely independent from HSR, we need to fix our regulatory policies. The ballooning price tag for CAHSR shouldn't inspire ire against HSR, it should inspire ire against our regulatory policies and governance.
Is that really true? LAX and SFO are near capacity, at least during certain times of the day. But we still have room to increase flights at SJC, STS, OAK, ONT, BUR, SNA, and LGB. With a little more work it should also be possible to shift some cargo flights to NUQ in order to free up SFO capacity.
These questions have been exhaustively studied. For example, https://hsr.ca.gov/wp-content/uploads/docs/about/business_pl...
That analysis may be biased, but it does a decent job sketching out how to compare modes and capacities. Also, regulatory obstruction and cost inflation apply just as much to airport and highway expansion as it does to HSR. In some ways it's much worse. SFO should build a new runway, and it'd be incredibly cost effective, but NIMBY opposition was so intense SFO repudiated the idea years ago and dare not even speak of it, now.
No, that report doesn't address my point. Did you even read it? OAK in particular has been losing flights lately and is well below capacity. We don't need to build a new runway there, the existing ones are under utilized.
> that report doesn't address my point
It gives number for how much airport (gates and runways) and highway expansion would be needed to meet future demands without the HSR. And it does so apportioning traffic across the 3 major Bay Area airports and 5 LA airports.
The OAK situation only drives home the point. It's not as convenient, at least relative to the segment of people flying. Location matters. If you want to optimally utilize existing airports, we need more infrastructure, including better mass transit systems. OAK is connected to BaRT, but it's yet another transfer with about an extra 15 minutes of travel time, not including walking through the stations. And BaRT itself isn't an effective mass transit system; it's more commuter train than subway.
I'm traveling to LA next month from SF and still haven't decided whether to fly or drive. With CAHSR point-to-point the decision would be easier--take the train and rent a car.
There's no terminal that's going to make getting on a flight as simple or quick as getting on a bus.
Many smaller airports are comparable. Like a few minutes from parking to being at the gate.
> Turning a whole lot of flights into energy and carbon-saving train trips is a huge benefit.
Consider the embodied carbon of 500 miles of train tracks and embankment. The carbon released from producing all that cement, smelting the steel, and diesel fuel to move the earth is immense.
This claim that train infrastructure construction will negate the carbon savings of train travel is just a factually untrue argument.
You also can’t power planes with renewables like solar.
They’d probably get some good results if they spent $100 billion on coming up with more fuel-efficient ways of flying and still have enough left over for 200 years of flights
The next generation of small airliners with thin wings and open-rotor turbofans are expected to be significantly more fuel efficient. Hybrid battery-electric propulsion also holds some promise for shorter flights.
I'm very in favor of high-speed rail, in general. But I remember when the price tag had jumped to "only" $100B, and that was already considered a scandal.
At some point the state has to say, "our requirements are making it insanely expensive. We need to consider a different route, or a lower speed."
I doubt those will fix the issues.
A better route can lower costs, but there are places in the world that build on much worse land for less.
Lower speed is unlikely to change anything, you can have a few sharper corners, but nothing that is a big deal. Meanwhile lower speed makes this much less useful vs flying. (and starts to make driving competitive - at least you have your car when you get there)
CA (and the US) has issues, and I don't know what they are. Every time someone suggests something they feel like a drop in the bucket, and all the different drops don't add up to much.
Land acquisition costs are one issue. The California Environment Quality Act (CEQA) is another. While well intentioned, it allows almost anyone to tie up any development project in court indefinitely based on trivial concerns. If we want to have a functioning industrial economy then we're going to have to scale back CEQA and accept a certain amount of environmental damage.
Your understanding of how the route affects the price is misguided.
It has nothing (or very very little) to do with how difficult the terrain is to navigate, it has everything to do with who owns the land, and how much they want to charge for it.
Often these "owners" only purchase the land once informed that it is a potential high speed rail route.
In a way, it’s a transfer of wealth from masses to these land owners (or brokers in a sense).
They will do the same to a different route. Once you buy land you become committed to a route. Reform is needed, but I'm not sure what.
I don’t think the tech or the route is remotely the problem. This is purely a matter of political will.
Not sure if you’ve read Abundance. But the basic idea is that rich, developed countries have onerous processes in place to satisfy many needs, which is antithetical to building stuff.
For example, CA requires strict analysis and studies. CA has myriad legislation to protect private property. It has restrictions on what can be purchased, from whom, and from whence labor can be sourced. Together, this vast web of limitations makes big projects like HSR extremely expensive and unwieldy.
It’s not that the scope or ambition of the project is a problem in itself. It’s that the mega project comes along with many requirements aside from just building it.
Effectively, CA is working at cross-purpose.
The resolution is actually very simple. You just exempt your mega-project from all the legislation constraining it.
If CA wanted to they could simply change the law. Skip labor-sourcing laws, skip community feedback, skip permitting and approval (aside from safety), skip domestic parts requirements, and apply eminent domain with no feedback process.
We don’t do that for political reasons. This isn’t a technical problem
I’ve heard a better idea.
“What you should in fact do is employ all the world's top male and female supermodels, pay them to walk the length of the train handing out free Chateau Petrus for the entire duration of the journey. You'll still have about 3 billion pounds left in change and people will ask for the trains to be slowed down.” ~Rory Sutherland
Someone mentioned sunk costs a couple of days ago, and here’s a glaringly stupid example but watch everyone justify the price tag with all sorts of reasons.
I am too, but folks have to realize this is handout to big construction and construction unions, it's not to solve problem of high speed travel between SF and LA. While that has always been a thing in public works, unfortunately in recent decades in the US we've gotten to point where it doesn't really matter if the project makes sense or is ever completed. It's a shame.
It should also be noted that the original route was from:
San Diego to San Fransisco
The state representative from San Diego was the original proposer of the high speed rail (after returning from Japan of course).
Once the crime and graft roulette wheel went into action, San Diego was almost immediately removed from "the route".
They also started construction before they even finalized the route, including not realizing they would have to move tons of utility lines along the way (they didn't get sign off from the public utilities beforehand), then it got bogged down by environmental reviews, land acquisition issues, etc.
The California High Speed Rail Authority just posted about how many "good-paying jobs" they created, as if that's the goal rather than building a functioning railroad. Disgusting.
https://x.com/CaHSRA/status/2040474563847278877
Here in WA state, politicians list their accomplishments with lines like "spent $XXX million on YYY".
Or, maybe, at some point, the state has to say No, to real estate mafia insider trading?
Oh, never mind, that's obviously not going to happen...
And that’s the real issue. It’s a continuous rent seeking behavior and resource extraction from masses to a limited number of individuals.
The Why Nations Fail book pointed out this exact issue that institutions that doesn’t serve the people’s interests is the main culprit.
The state has to consider whether it is capable of doing this at all (obviously, it isn't).
The state is capable, it is just unwilling to leverage its power to achieve a meaningful outcome. This is relatively normal across the country; NIMBYs and small landowners have outsized influence and ability to delay.
China builds high speed rail at half the cost of the US.
European countries of comparable size and GDP to California do not experience own-goals of this magnitude.
The state in the US, especially California, is not competent.
The state in China, is competent.
What is the best evidence that it is capable? I believe it isn't, as demonstrated in this and other areas.
For comparison, the construction cost of AlBoraq 200mph bullet train in Morroco is $5.3–5.7 billion in today's dollars. The line length is 200 miles.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al_Boraq
Other countries do this just fine and we can easily build freeways and highways. This is because of intentional sabotage. US politics are actively harming citizens by sabotaging projects to 'prove how bad x is' when in reality x is the right answer if you don't have active bad actors.
In Japan the cost of building the tunnels through mountains and undersea for Shinkansen ranges from $20-100M/km. Since there's no default ownership of subsurface land rights in CA it would be cheaper and faster to dig tunnels than pay for the land rights and environmental impacts.
For the $231B you ought to be able to get 2-3000 miles of tunnel done (3x what is proposed on the surface). Of course the stations are still a huge cost, because those have to be above ground, but you could choose where to put them. The bridges and aqueducts that have been built so far (Bakersfield to Merced) are intentionally where land costs are low and no one will ride them.
I agree, this isn't about figuring out how to build high-speed rail for riders. This is about figuring out how to extract maximum funds from tax/rate payers. It's just like PG&E. I'd go as far as to say that all the consultants and construction companies that have been paid should be banned from future public infrastructure builds unless the money spent is paid back.
And I WANT highspeed rail.
You are claiming that this is anti train and pro car conspiracy. Counter ponint : the SF Bay_Bridge cost 6.5 Billion, but was originally budgeted at 200 Million.
The US can't build anything efficiently. It's due to the massive mismanagement, bureaucratic nonsense, environmental review, permitting and NIMBY lawsuits.
The real conspiracy is that "they" never wanted a train, "they" wanted an endless jobs project.
The SF Bay Bridge cost $6.5B, and somehow still didn't include a bike lane.
It's mostly that we allow whiners to control the project and that's literally it.
This is the only actual difference between the US and other places
Take Los Angeles, the Santa Monica train slows down around a stop called farmdale because some whiner ran a bogus fear mongering campaign in 2011. I was at those meetings nobody liked this guy.
15 years later every trip, every day is still delayed because of this one man's stupid bitchfest
To be fair our interstate highways were built many decades ago by mostly just disregarding poor neighborhoods and taking land from them indescriminately.
We do build new ones (I26 is happening now) and that doesn't cost hundreds of billions of dollars. We can and have built big projects. We can and will build bigger ones. This is just sabotage at every possible chance. I have seen this my whole life. We are so far behind on solar adoption because of groups actively making things worse, often at a real cost to the group, just to make it look like actual good ideas are bad ones. Our politics are toxic and the core problem here, not the idea or the technology. This is toxic sabotage politics where it is better to break things than to let the other side have a good idea.
Is there a breakdown of the estimated costs anywhere?
I see a lot of speculation over how "it's expensive because of X" (e.g., unions, land owners, regulations, etc.), but I don't think I've ever seen a detailed breakdown of the estimated costs which would support anyone's hypotheses as to why it's actually as expensive as it is.
For all I know, the high-speed rail project is going to cost $231B because it calls for using osmium rails in its tracks.
In Seattle, the money disappears and nobody is able to account for what happened to it:
https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/politics/does-noth...
At this point it's extremely unlikely the needed funds will be secured for the foreseeable future. Even if the federal government were willing to contribute, spending $100+ billion of federal tax money on a regional rail project would be a hard sell to say the least.
Most likely the Bakersfield to Merced segment will be the only segment completed. It will end up as a white elephant racking up operational losses until Sacramento finally decides to pull the plug.
I wish that they had done just San Jose to Burbank with a couple stops on the west side of the central valley (starting building from both directions at the same time). I think that was the maximum achievable initial goal.
The Big Dig in Boston cost almost $30 billion in inflation-adjusted money and had nowhere near the impact on the region as a high speed rail system would have in California.
It basically had zero impact outside of the City of Boston.
(And it should have been spent on demolishing that highway, not burying it and not replacing it, then expanding regional rail and transit connectivity in the Boston metropolitan area.)
Or perhaps we should bring up military spending: https://irancost.com/
Silver Line was part of the Big Dig, but I agree the North/South Rail Link should have been part of it. Having no direct connection between North Station and South Station is stupid.
But you can't just get rid of 93
You absolutely can just get rid of 93 within city limits, especially if 30 billion was spent on adding more commuter rail.
The idea that highways must cut through the city, especially one as geographically small as Boston, has been thoroughly debunked.
Don't forget the original $33B was for the entire line, not just Merced to Bakersfield.
Cancel it and sell what is built to the highest bidder, you can be assured that some company will buy it and complete it.
> you can be assured that some company will buy it and complete it
I don't think any profit-driven company would touch this. It's a massive money loser.
Seems like California needs to figure out how to use Eminent Domain.
They already acquired 99% of the land needed to the line.
That is absolutely fascinating.
Spain has so far spent about 60 billion Eur on its (much more extensive) HSR network. It has a lot of harsh terrain as well, crossing mountains and semi-deserts.
There are functional HSRs in Morocco and Uzbekistan, Egypt is building its first own HSR.
What's wrong with Californian governance?
Can't blame unions, considering how easily Europe gets it done. Most likely issue is that in the US, every landowner and minor municipality is empowered to delay and obstruct these projects and thus milk them.
Yea I would definitely like to know what the response is to eminent domain in other countries where its working better. I've never been in that situation and I can totally understand the resistance to losing your property, but I can't see American's being particularly unique in that feeling. Maybe the laws are just more permissive in the US for contesting the government.
In California specifically there are also environmental regulations like CEQA that provide another avenue for blocking such things, independent of eminent domain issues. Even if someone is building on their own land, lots of environmental review is required, and individuals or groups can sue on the basis that such review was inadequate. This ties things up for a long time. There are legitimate reasons to want environmental review, but the way it works in CA now, CEQA is largely just a tool people use to delay projects they don't want.
Most countries has that but it still doesn't take many decades to build a simple piece of railway.
Details matter. Most countries have environmental laws, but their teeth differ.
Polish environmental law is quite notorious for being deliberately easy on developers (at least outside national parks), which translates into a lot of construction activity.
OTOH Californian CEQA is such a NIMBY/BANANA weapon of mass anti-construction that I have heard of it, despite being located a third of a world away.
Both sound like intent.
unions in the US aren't necessarily even comparable to in EU.
It's that foot dragging whiners have outsized power and can gum up any project they want in the courts and tack on higher price tags
All you need is a few people who don't like it for any reason whatsoever and the other 99.99% of people who want it ... They no longer get a voice.
Only the blockers, the nimbys, the ideological naysayers, they get all the power - the podium, the press, and the ear of the court.
The yes people have effectively Zero political power
That's the American difference: we grant whiners sainthood
Actually, the Spanish HSR builders have been involved with the project.
[1] https://www.globalconstructionreview.com/europe8an-gian8t-be...
That is only a $1.2bn deal and shared with another firm. Having different contractors from all over the world do different little parts isn't a good way to reduce costs.
I recall a lot of the original funding (Billions of dollars) was spent on 3rd party consultants to run various multi-year long review processes (environmental, legal compliance, eminent domain, community agreements etc.)
Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson tackle this specific example (along with others) in their book Abundance that came out last year. It's a pretty easy read, and a really interesting examination of why projects like this struggle.
But as other commenters have pointed out — a lot of it is NIMBYism (plus a heavy dose of overregulation).
Conservatives tend to point at projects like this as examples of why our incompetent government shouldn't be allowed to build large projects.
But other countries can do this (including a good chunk of Europe), so I think it's really valuable to dig in and understand why we struggle.
Ironically it is largely because of private actors (those NIMBYs) that such things wind up being slow and expensive.
I have worked on CAHSR and I can tell you that some of the extra expense is that State of CA procurement rules are highly complex and cause a great deal of added expense. Bureaucracy creates added costs.
We need a proposition to cancel the project.
Isn't Artemis weighing in at somewhere about $100B?
Sadly, the economics of this will never work out.
I ride BART and Caltrain multiple times a week. Trains are delightful. And so are planes.
It typically costs about $100, and takes an hour to fly from SF to LA. The train will be slower and almost certainly more expensive. Where is the benefit?
Long distance trains work in Europe because they are supported by a rich network of public transit options stemming from city centers, and a population that uses transit frequently.
But California public transit is a mess. When you rock up at LA Union Central and want to get out to say, Newport Beach, it's another three hours of navigating buses and the metrolink.
The money would have been far better spent integrating agencies and building out high speed rail in our urban areas. BART should be running out to Sacto, Stockton, Silicon Valley, and Marin. Requisition the Amtrak line and build a highspeed rail from San Diego to Santa Barbara - now that'd be something.
This HSR line makes a good deal of sense if it could be built. Your analysis of flying is wildly incorrect. The train will be faster door to door than the average flight.
But the main benefit will come from massive secondary economic growth. Cities along the line will experience dramatic increases in demand and economic activity. Cities at the terminus will have a massively increased share of workers in the commute threshold.
Further, the HSR line serves as a backbone for future lines, tying the state together.
The plan is very good on paper. It’s getting creamed in implementation because CA is not politically aligned on this project. Half the state doesn’t want it to succeed at all.
Asking $200+ billion AND still need private investors.
Is the rail made out of gold?
>Under current projections, assuming funding and construction proceed as planned, service between San Francisco and Bakersfield could begin around 2033, while the full Los Angeles to San Francisco connection could extend to 2040.
Brilliant stuff.
I predict the rail will never happen and only more and more money going "somewhere".
A truly unbelievable amount of grift and inefficiency.
This is awful and perhaps what is most awful is that this is the headline folks see, then they have a gut-reaction that because this project is so fucked up that all transit projects must be like this. And of course, there's the fun fact that many highway and road construction projects come in way over budget too.
If you don't live in California, the lesson to take away here is to figure out what the transportation departments and highway lobby did to secure the space needed for highways, and copy those tactics, not to look at California's failure and believe that extrapolates to your state or area.
In Central Ohio voters overwhelmingly approved a ballot measure to fund bus transit and dedicated lanes in high-density corridors in Columbus. Now the project is already being set back perhaps as long as a year and a half, because the Ohio Department of Transportation is concerned car traffic may be negatively affected and wants a new traffic study. Huge waste of time, the exact kind of thing you would have wanted a DOGE in its most idealized form to nuke. You have to imagine these kinds of tactics x1000 because once California and others see the success of rail the jobs programs that are most state DOTs are going to be in serious trouble.
We'll get there, it's just going to be a long battle against entrenched lobbying and special interest groups (highway departments, construction companies, auto manufacturers, &c.) which need to profit off of your requirement to have a car to participate in society.
By the way, I'm not "against" cars or anything. Have one and love it. But the primary mode of transportation in our more dense areas has to change.
They should investigate alternatives to solid gold carriages. Gold is not only expensive, it’s very heavy, requiring much more energy to operate. It also has less tensile strength and its way too ductile compared to aluminum.
I’m not a railway engineer, but encrusting the tracks with “pillow cut” diamonds from “actual pirate hoards” seems like a security risk. And pirate hoards are only more rare over time.
Meanwhile private rail is connecting cities in Florida. Somehow with less fuss.
Something about blue states make progress on basic things costly, time consuming, and difficult. Every stakeholder needs their say. Any NIMBY can veto. The loudest, most obnoxious snowflakes dominate public comment. And officials don’t tell them to STFU.
And I don’t see a lot of appetite for soul searching in these states. Just “let’s raise taxes”
You don’t have to convince me we have a broken society where the oligarchs have too much power+wealth. But I’m also not willing to pay more taxes without blue states removing veto points on these projects so can’t easily be derailed by every dumb special interest.
We’re all paying more so loudest amongst can derail and shape progress on important issues.
> Meanwhile private rail is connecting cities in Florida. Somehow with less fuss.
I wouldn't cite that as a success story, Brightline is going bankrupt: https://www.wlrn.org/business/2026-01-23/brightline-business...
Make corruption, appearance of corruption, or anything that looks like it might possibly look like corruption (including having ever had lunch with someone who knows someone who has heard of someone whom you pick as a contractor) at minimum a lifetime-in-jail offense and watch the prices and timelines melt.
Corruption and waste. The real problem is that the quality of people in public office and appointed by them cannot responsibly manage these amounts of money. But also that the incentives are all broken.
California isn’t the only state with this problem though. Oregon and Washington and New York are just as bad. And the big cities in these states have the same problems at the city level.
How long can they go before they can no longer raise debt to do things?
Musk could probably do it for $3 billion.
If the rail is just routed through minority neighborhoods, I'm sure eminent domain can be arranged...
NOTE: The above sentence is referred to as "dark sarcasm"
This rail would displace a huge amount of air travel, thus, it's not "viable" in terms of airline industry losses...
NOTE: The above sentence is referred to as "dark reality"
They need to just accept their lost and cancel the project. I think the people of CA have given this enough money and time. It's become a joke and nothing more than a giant way for they governor to launder money. Looking at you NEWSCUM.
Maybe California should ask Brightline to take a look at it. They've had some pretty good success in Florida, although it's a totally different model.
Brightline is going bankrupt: https://www.wlrn.org/business/2026-01-23/brightline-business...
The purpose of large rail projects is to take public money and give it to engineering firms, construction companies, consultants, and politicians. In no scenario does this project even make the top 10 in a list of ways to transport people between these locations. It would be cheaper to give away 5 million cars!
Do the 5 million cars come with a free highway?
Yes, and it's already built!