This is one of the funniest articles I have read in a long, long time. It is nearly everything I point at and laugh when it comes to the Left trying to efficiently run...well, anything.

Every small section is already overrunning budget by billions. Idiots. this thing is going to cost taxpayers half a trillion (trillion with a "t") dollars when its all said and done....and my guess is it never gets completely finished.

Unnecessary. Unrealistic. Dishonest. Unfunded....

Now if only we could just find a way to make it from San Fran to LA in less than 12 hours...

http://www.latimes.com/local/california/...story.html

Boondoggle Express all aboard

It will be interesting to see if Texas Central breaks ground in 2018. They are scheduled to. Their $10 billion plan to connect Houston and Dallas is up to about $15 billion, but they are continuing to make progress on planning and land acquisition.

do you all think that high speed rail is a bad idea to begin with, or just the way it's currently being approached?

this is all one needs to know....

Quote:As the project’s lead proponent, Gov. Jerry Brown.....

I havent read this article yet, but the one I read a few weeks ago stated that Brown wanted them to start with an unimportant but easy section in order to show rapid progress. And even with that, they have failed.

Bad idea to begin with. Too expensive with little benefit. In order for it to be viable, the entire US rail infrastructure would have to be overhauled and mostly elevated, a shitton of real estate purchased, and then local infrastructure is lacking outside DC, NY, and Chicago (what are you going to do when you get to your terminal, rent a car?). Not to mention, sprawl has pushed much of business well outside the cities and beyond local mass transit reach. We already have the capability to get to these destinations that are too far to drive... it is called airplanes. The money would be better spent improving and making more efficient the capabilities we already have, roads and air travel.

(01-19-2018 09:41 AM)EverRespect Wrote:  Bad idea to begin with. Too expensive with little benefit. In order for it to be viable, the entire US rail infrastructure would have to be overhauled and mostly elevated, a shitton of real estate purchased, and then local infrastructure is lacking outside DC, NY, and Chicago (what are you going to do when you get to your terminal, rent a car?). Not to mention, sprawl has pushed much of business well outside the cities and beyond local mass transit reach. We already have the capability to get to these destinations that are too far to drive... it is called airplanes. The money would be better spent improving and making more efficient the capabilities we already have, roads and air travel.

XACLY!

(01-19-2018 09:41 AM)EverRespect Wrote:  Bad idea to begin with. Too expensive with little benefit. In order for it to be viable, the entire US rail infrastructure would have to be overhauled and mostly elevated, a shitton of real estate purchased, and then local infrastructure is lacking outside DC, NY, and Chicago (what are you going to do when you get to your terminal, rent a car?). Not to mention, sprawl has pushed much of business well outside the cities and beyond local mass transit reach. We already have the capability to get to these destinations that are too far to drive... it is called airplanes. The money would be better spent improving and making more efficient the capabilities we already have, roads and air travel.

Airports are nearing capacity. Rail makes great sense in certain corridors. Houston-Dallas is perfect. Boston-DC is perfect. LA-SF has a couple sets of mountains to cross that make it less than ideal.

(01-19-2018 10:28 AM)bullet Wrote:  

(01-19-2018 09:41 AM)EverRespect Wrote:  Bad idea to begin with. Too expensive with little benefit. In order for it to be viable, the entire US rail infrastructure would have to be overhauled and mostly elevated, a shitton of real estate purchased, and then local infrastructure is lacking outside DC, NY, and Chicago (what are you going to do when you get to your terminal, rent a car?). Not to mention, sprawl has pushed much of business well outside the cities and beyond local mass transit reach. We already have the capability to get to these destinations that are too far to drive... it is called airplanes. The money would be better spent improving and making more efficient the capabilities we already have, roads and air travel.

Airports are nearing capacity.

Agree, that is part of where the money should be going.

(01-19-2018 10:28 AM)bullet Wrote:  Rail makes great sense in certain corridors. Houston-Dallas is perfect. Boston-DC is perfect. LA-SF has a couple sets of mountains to cross that make it less than ideal.

Boston to DC is nowhere near perfect. How much would it cost to build a bridge that far? Or a tunnel? Because that is the only way that works because everything in between is either a big city or a small, old industrial city and there is NEVER going to be a bullet train barreling through the likes of Wilmington, Chester, Philly, Camden, Trenton, Newark, Jersey City, Bronx/Harlem/Westchester, Greenwich, Stamford, Fairfield, Bridgeport, New Haven, Hartford, and Worcester. Even if you fund the bridge/tunnel, no way are any or the above areas signing up for it without benefiting by having their own depot. I doubt they could even save any time off the service Amtrak already provides. It would probably cost about $500B and then the political implications of leaving everyone else out as it goes through their back yards.

I don't know enough about Houston-Dallas to speak intelligently, but LA-SF is 400 miles. No way air isn't by far the best option at that distance.

(01-19-2018 10:50 AM)EverRespect Wrote:  

(01-19-2018 10:28 AM)bullet Wrote:  

(01-19-2018 09:41 AM)EverRespect Wrote:  Bad idea to begin with. Too expensive with little benefit. In order for it to be viable, the entire US rail infrastructure would have to be overhauled and mostly elevated, a shitton of real estate purchased, and then local infrastructure is lacking outside DC, NY, and Chicago (what are you going to do when you get to your terminal, rent a car?). Not to mention, sprawl has pushed much of business well outside the cities and beyond local mass transit reach. We already have the capability to get to these destinations that are too far to drive... it is called airplanes. The money would be better spent improving and making more efficient the capabilities we already have, roads and air travel.

Airports are nearing capacity.

Agree, that is part of where the money should be going.

(01-19-2018 10:28 AM)bullet Wrote:  Rail makes great sense in certain corridors. Houston-Dallas is perfect. Boston-DC is perfect. LA-SF has a couple sets of mountains to cross that make it less than ideal.

Boston to DC is nowhere near perfect. How much would it cost to build a bridge that far? Or a tunnel? Because that is the only way that works because everything in between is either a big city or a small, old industrial city and there is NEVER going to be a bullet train barreling through the likes of Wilmington, Chester, Philly, Camden, Trenton, Newark, Jersey City, Bronx/Harlem/Westchester, Greenwich, Stamford, Fairfield, Bridgeport, New Haven, Hartford, and Worcester. Even if you fund the bridge/tunnel, no way are any or the above areas signing up for it without benefiting by having their own depot. I doubt they could even save any time off the service Amtrak already provides. It would probably cost about $500B and then the political implications of leaving everyone else out as it goes through their back yards.

I don't know enough about Houston-Dallas to speak intelligently, but LA-SF is 400 miles. No way air isn't by far the best option at that distance.

250-500 miles is the "sweet spot" for high speed rail. With remote airports, security, taxiing, loading and unloading, 600 mph in the air vs. 200 mph doesn't help much.

(01-19-2018 09:41 AM)EverRespect Wrote:  Bad idea to begin with. Too expensive with little benefit. In order for it to be viable, the entire US rail infrastructure would have to be overhauled and mostly elevated, a shitton of real estate purchased, and then local infrastructure is lacking outside DC, NY, and Chicago (what are you going to do when you get to your terminal, rent a car?). Not to mention, sprawl has pushed much of business well outside the cities and beyond local mass transit reach. We already have the capability to get to these destinations that are too far to drive... it is called airplanes. The money would be better spent improving and making more efficient the capabilities we already have, roads and air travel.

can planes run on anything other than jet fuel? talking about what's in store for the future. otherwise i see your point

(01-19-2018 10:50 AM)EverRespect Wrote:  

(01-19-2018 10:28 AM)bullet Wrote:  

(01-19-2018 09:41 AM)EverRespect Wrote:  Bad idea to begin with. Too expensive with little benefit. In order for it to be viable, the entire US rail infrastructure would have to be overhauled and mostly elevated, a shitton of real estate purchased, and then local infrastructure is lacking outside DC, NY, and Chicago (what are you going to do when you get to your terminal, rent a car?). Not to mention, sprawl has pushed much of business well outside the cities and beyond local mass transit reach. We already have the capability to get to these destinations that are too far to drive... it is called airplanes. The money would be better spent improving and making more efficient the capabilities we already have, roads and air travel.

Airports are nearing capacity.

Agree, that is part of where the money should be going.

Address this problem the way Europe is. Privatize them. Airports, air traffic control (like Canada), TSA. Privatizing means that capital can be deployed based upon demand, not politics.

Quote:

(01-19-2018 10:28 AM)bullet Wrote:  Rail makes great sense in certain corridors. Houston-Dallas is perfect. Boston-DC is perfect. LA-SF has a couple sets of mountains to cross that make it less than ideal.

Boston to DC is nowhere near perfect. How much would it cost to build a bridge that far? Or a tunnel? Because that is the only way that works because everything in between is either a big city or a small, old industrial city and there is NEVER going to be a bullet train barreling through the likes of Wilmington, Chester, Philly, Camden, Trenton, Newark, Jersey City, Bronx/Harlem/Westchester, Greenwich, Stamford, Fairfield, Bridgeport, New Haven, Hartford, and Worcester. Even if you fund the bridge/tunnel, no way are any or the above areas signing up for it without benefiting by having their own depot. I doubt they could even save any time off the service Amtrak already provides. It would probably cost about $500B and then the political implications of leaving everyone else out as it goes through their back yards.
I don't know enough about Houston-Dallas to speak intelligently, but LA-SF is 400 miles. No way air isn't by far the best option at that distance.

All those problems, and more, exist in Europe and Japan, on steroids. They made it work. Just like they have made freeways work.

Our problem is that what passes for "high sped rail" in the US is crap. Mainly because what passes for passenger rail is crap. We have a great freight rail system, but crap passenger rail. The crash of the "high speed" train near Seattle the other day occurred where it had to slow from 80 to 30. Slowing from 80 to 30 is not "high speed rail."

Each little 6 mile section is running multiple BILLIONS over...and anyone who thinks that will be the limit on overruns for those individual sections is licking lead paint windowsills. This is the greatest waste of taxpayer funds in US history.

Oh, and it’s being funded by pulling money out of the state highway fund which is why people pay all of that gas tax at the pump. Highways are going to look like a wagon rut after they go broke on this boondoggle.

That entire state is proper f#cked.

How much weekly auto traffic is there along the route? Is there even passenger demand along the route?

(01-19-2018 11:21 AM)rath v2.0 Wrote:  Each little 6 mile section is running multiple BILLIONS over...and anyone who thinks that will be the limit on overruns for those individual sections is licking lead paint windowsills. This is the greatest waste of taxpayer funds in US history.

Oh, and it’s being funded by pulling money out of the state highway fund which is why people pay all of that gas tax at the pump. Highways are going to look like a wagon rut after they go broke on this boondoggle.

That entire state is proper f#cked.

in my microcosm in the 'burg, I can easily say 'yea' to how funds have been misappropriated......

what a bunch o' dipshites.....

maybe we fund cloning horses so they can move at a clippity-clop.....

eventually we'll need trains right?

Quote:Will California's high-speed rail plan go bankrupt before the state even finishes building the first leg? Maybe, if we're lucky.

On Tuesday, the officials in charge of the massive $64 billion boondoggle were formally told what everybody with any lick of sense has been saying from the start: They had wildly underestimated the costs and woefully underbudgeted just the first stretch of train construction by billions.

The first 119-mile stretch of the bullet train project in the central part of the state is going to cost $10.7 billion, which is much higher than the original $6 billion budgeted. This is actually the second time the cost for just the first leg of the project has skyrocketed. In September, the cost of the initial leg of the project jumped $1.7 billion.

None of this is a shocker to anybody who has been remotely paying attention to this project. From the very beginning, critics who analyzed the state's bullet train plan warned that the projections were way off. And deliberately so: The ballot initiative authorizing the train's construction requires that it not demand additional operational state subsidies, so there was a pretty significant incentive for the project's proponents to insist that it would be built within specifications. In 2008, a decade ago, Reason Foundation analysis determined that the projections for the costs of both building and operating the train were off by billions.

They were right. So was the Federal Railroad Administration, which predicted a year ago that the cost of this first leg would rise to $10 billion.

And to be clear, right now there does not appear to be much real thought about how this train project can actually progress beyond this initial phase. Ralph Vartabedian of the Los Angeles Times politely understates:

It remains unclear how the Central Valley cost increases will affect the total program, which under the 2016 business plan is supposed to cost $64 billion. But the jump in the Central Valley — a 77% increase above the original estimate — suggests the authority and its consultants have vastly underestimated the difficulties of buying land, obtaining environmental approvals, navigating through complex litigation and much else.

Assuming the rest of the project saw the same budget increase, the whole project would skyrocket to more than $113 billion. And you probably shouldn't assume that the project's unexpected budget increases will scale at the same rate. The train's construction will get more challenging as it heads toward San Francisco and Los Angeles.

Or maybe "if it heads toward San Francisco and Los Angeles" is a better way to talk about the train's future. This boondoggle has been propped all along the way by Gov. Jerry Brown, who is entering into his final stretch as governor this year. He has been insistent in setting aside money to keep the project going even as more Democrats within the state have been increasingly concerned.

But as the Los Angeles Times notes, they may be a little shy about speaking too loudly. Vartabedian says Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom, running to succeed Brown as governor, has declined for the past two years repeated requests to be interviewed about the high-speed train project's future.

Back in 2014, though, Newsom was more vocal and public when he reversed position. Like many institutional California Democrats, he supported the bullet train at first. But then once he recognized the costs growing out of control, he turned against it. He also said at the time that many Democrats felt the way he did, but few were saying so publicly.

That was before he announced he was running for governor, though. Newsom's acknowledgement tracks with observations by Reason's Matt Welch and former editor Virginia Postrel that the political class in California knew full well this was all a fancy boondoggle designed to appeal those who glamourized zipping across the Golden State landscape in a shiny, superfast train.

Does Newsom still oppose Brown's train project? Or, assuming he becomes California's next governor, will he dip into the $13.5 billion "rainy day" fund and the state's surplus to try to keep the boondoggle going and the pockets of the train project's crony beneficiaries lined?

http://reason.com/blog/2018/01/17/califo...train-abou

This thing was never going to work in highly populated areas where you had to move a metric sh!t ton of utilities and acquire thousands of parcels of land through purchasing at bloated rates or going through protracted eminent domain litigation.

These pols who used this are all either complete effing idiots or they were out to make fat piles of cash off of this boondoggle for their donors and lobbyists. Anyone who supported this should pound themselves in the forehead with a 2x4.

how did japan do it?

(01-19-2018 11:15 AM)Owl 69/70/75 Wrote:  The crash of the "high speed" train near Seattle the other day occurred where it had to slow from 80 to 30. Slowing from 80 to 30 is not "high speed rail."

Exactly.