This is just flat out embarrassing. 20 Countries world wide has high speed rail.
The US fails? WTH has happened to this country? We can’t pull off a large scale engineering project anymore? Can we accept being 2nd rate losers?
I think about the massive construction projects our Grandparents completed. The TVA is still producing electricity. The Orville dam in Calif is 770 ft tall. Hoover dam is 726 ft. We created the Interstate system across the country.
LA Times headline
Bullet train went from peak California innovation to the project from hell
Well, in fairness, it appears from the article that it wasn’t a passenger that was killed.
As to the OP, the U.S. (and it’s especailly true in California, IMHO) populace (with no little propaganda from car manufacturers, pretty much gave up on medium-distance train travel (like LA-SF) in the 50’s and 60’s, and the advent of relatively cheap and abudant air travel did in the long-distance trains.
So besides costs, it becomes overcoming 40-50 years of…conditioning is the best word I have for it…while most other areas of the world never lost their passenger train network.
I will be interested in seeing China in about 20-30 years (albeit I’ll be 85-95 years old then), as when I was there last year airline flights in and around the country were becoming more and more available and airports were expanding their capabilities.
I agree, California wasn’t the best choice to attempt the first high speed rail in the US. They should have considered earthquakes before attempting the project and wasting money.
Isn’t there plans for high speed rail along the East coast into D.C.? Or has that been abandoned too?
I’m sure glad there aren’t any earthquakes in Japan.
Most of the California line was to go inland away from the faults. Since the major cities are on fault lines, kind of hard to avoid them entirely.
Parts of the Amtrak Acela route between Boston and Washington can run at 150 mph (210 km/h), which qualifies as high speed rail. Or at least reasonably quick rail.
Amtrak has been operating the Acela Express on the Northeast Corridor (Washington - Baltimore - Philadelphia - New York - Boston) since 2000. It reaches a top speed of 150mph, though it can’t go that fast on the entire route, as it shares tracks with freight and commuter trains. It averages 70 mph over its entire route (including stops).
There are plans underway to upgrade to even faster trains, which are closer in design to the French TGV, on the Northeast Corridor route over the next few years. There are also plans to build / convert to dedicated tracks in the Corridor, to provide true HSR, though those plans are still a decade or more away.
That’s just the point. If we don’t want to pay for infrastructure repairs, which we certainly are able to do, it is not surprising that we don’t want to pay for new stuff.
The incompetence is purely political, not technical. While some people think America’s fairly low tax rates are very very high relative to the world, of course there is no money for it.
California at least voted for a gas tax increase, the first in ages, to pay for infrastructure repair.
The US is particularly ill suited for High Speed Rail in that it is a big country with long distances between metro areas. The exception is the Northeast which is too built up for new HSR lines. The US uses rail for freight and has the best freight rail system in the world. Luckily, the airliner has been invented rendering HSR pointless for passengers.
The larger reasons that the US can no longer build massive infrastructure projects are federalism and environmentalism.
Federalism means that any project will have to go through multiple layers of approval and people at all of the levels will cause delays and have their hand out.
Environmentalism because every project needs to do an environmental impact statement. This will then have a public review time. Then the regulators will review and approve the plan. Then professional environmental groups will sue to have the approval overturned. This will go through a long court case. After the case is won there may be a need for an updated plan because so much time has passed facts on the ground have changed. There could be a setback at any one of these steps that could either delay or kill the project. So any project must have at least a decade of paying high priced consultants, lawyers, and regulatory compliance people before one shovel of dirt is overturned. Once all that is done the people doing the actual work will know that the government is pot committed and gouge like crazy. There is actually a law that says it is illegal to try to get a good deal on labor for government projects.
An example is the Southeastern High Speed Rail Corridor, which despite its name is not actually high speed rail. It was proposed in 1992 and the last bit of progress was the release of the Tier 2 Draft Environmental Impact Statement by the Department of Transportation in 2017.
California probably isn’t the right place, but not because of earthquakes, but horrible bloated bureaucracy. China gets things done because they’re authoritarian.
Given all of the problems with this train over the years, I find it less embarrassing that they finally canned it rather than proceed. What a waste of money.
High speed rail lines are really not the kind of thing to build because other countries have them. If that’s a good reason for any public project, which one might argue, it’s not for this.
The lines should be built if they make economic sense in US conditions, with room for consideration of externalities (unpriced impact of GHC’s*, etc). It’s always seemed to me quite unlikely that’s the case. And now even a quite liberal Democrat in California, once he’s actually governor and responsible for following through with it, realizes it. I’d credit him for that. And that’s how I’d basically take this news, rather than some international competition.
Secondarily though, it might be worth looking at the specific aspects of the US legal system, particularly, that might make this kind of project more expensive here. As in acquiring land and permits. And public contracting practices viewed as positive for social welfare but which fairly seriously inflate the costs of public construction projects. General technological incompetence, not so much the issue I don’t think.
*but assuming some price for carbon you could reasonably apply to the whole economy and not have a collapse, not just whatever high price you want to, or have to, use to justify the highly questionable idea that rail could beat air on a route like the originally contemplate SF>LA>SD. The answer for that route, rather than the US being a failure and laughing stock, is probably that airplanes make more sense.
