This is the most California article ever written. The author admits that if the line was run along the I-5 it probably wouldn't need all the costly grade-separation and state property issues it's now facing. It may have even finished with its original funding! But instead of immediately being able to serve the upwards of 18M people of Greater Los Angeles and 7.5M people of the Bay Area, the 1M people of the Central Valley would have to wait for branches to be built.

SO INSTEAD we took the more circuitous route through Central Valley so that the 1M people feel immediately included and NO ONE is getting a high speed rail.

Sir! ChatGPT couldn't come up with a more California scented boondoggle.

this is actually exactly what has been happening over the past few decades, and with the current proposal, for HSR from Toronto to Montreal, two of the largest cities in terms of both population and economy in Canada.

Ottawa felt excluded, and is where the federal govt is based, so instead of going along the 401, a straight highway that follows a river valley and lake and has existing rail corridors, it has to go from Montreal to Ottawa (a short stretch also along a river) and then cut from Ottawa to Toronto via Peterborough, which requires new track, fixing old windy track to allow HSR, some sections have to be speed limited, and has to build through hills and dense forest.

Also, Quebec feels that they don't get "enough" out of the project connecting their largest city to another economic powerhub, so it of course also has to be extended the extra 250km to Quebec city (luckily along a river)

The logical method would be to build Toronto to Montreal 30 years ago, then build a branch to Ottawa one day, and an extension to Quebec another day. The Canadian economy would probably be much stronger if that was the case.

Or we can just wait 30 more years and have this project not be implemented.

The fact is that politicians are insanely car-brained and nobody has any enthusiasm for improving rail infrastructure. Via Rail is trapped in this insane spiral of service cuts where it's miserable for staff and riders, and the solution is to cut more to make up for declining ridership.

The new HSR is only happening because with the innovation of P3 deals the government can pay for the project but give all the profits to their private-sector pals. Suddenly investing in public infrastructure is appealing again (as long as the public doesn't actually get to own it!)

I’m sorry I don’t really see the problem with this, connecting Toronto, Ottawa, Montreal, and Quebec city seems like a pretty reasonable route

The problem is it doesn't get built.

Exactly. A huge part of these projects is proving to the public the value. So even a short, direct line is useful - as some will start to use it and then extending it becomes a simple "this thing we have is good, it should be good more."

But the short direct line might also not get built, if the projections show passenger volume will not be high enough to justify the costs.

Passenger rail has high fixed costs and low marginal costs. Even with high-speed rail, you generally want to maximize the number of passengers rather than speed. Making detours to nearby major cities often makes sense, while stopping at smaller cities the route already passes through might not.

A direct connection between Toronto and Montreal would serve one pair of major cities, while a Toronto – Ottawa – Montreal – Quebec City route would serve six. The longer route could be economically more viable, even if the costs are twice as high, as the number of potential passengers is much higher.

Spending money on projects that never get built is the kind of job that never ends.

Great for former government employees who want to be a consultant.

No one is accountable for the waste so politicians can just promise to spend more next time.

I was surprised to find out it was going the Peterborough route. Didn't make a lot of sense.

SNCF was one of the early bidders for this project, proposing the I5 route. They later pulled out from the politics of the Central Valley line in 2011, and went on to successfully implement high speed rail in Morocco instead - which went live in 2018.

Here we are 8 years after they finished a different project with nothing. American infrastructure at its finest.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SNCF#Modern_era

In my region (Latin America) when a "boondoggle" of such high monetary cost happens, we call it for what it usually is— corruption.

All those billions of dollars are going to someone's pockets. There's a lot of money to be made from inefficient infrastructure projects.

Take a look at the voting data for Prop 1A. It is very likely HSR would not have been approved in the first place if the central valley had been excluded. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_California_Proposition_...

> likely HSR would not have been approved in the first place if the central valley had been excluded

Then don't build it. That money would have been far better spent improving urban metro and regional rail. (And airports and roads and charging stations, et cetera.)

> Then don't build it. That money would have been far better spent...

...only literally anything else!

Did it have to be funded by a proposition? Could the CA legislature not have passed a law?

Tax increases and bond measures have to go through the voters. The alternative is to get enough of the legislature, including probably some in Central Valley, to agree to cut a bunch of other more popular programs in order to fund it out of the general fund.

Even if you insist on going through the cities in the valley they chose a construction sequence that takes the longest time to show any process. If they fast tracked LA-Bakersfield they could have extended the Amtrak San Joaquin service to LA by now. Concentrat on the SF-Merced section next and then you can work on the Merced-Bakersfield piece meal.

I thought they were unclear if LA-Bakerfield is even possible.

My understanding comes from a podcast that wasn't about the rail at all, it was about how to make decisions. In the podcast they gave the example that if you decide to have a music box and a dancing monkey at a fair to make money, which do you do first, make the music box or train the monkey. The answer is, train the monkey, because if you can't train the monkey there is no point in making the music box (something you know can be made).

Her point was people delude themselves into thinking they're making progress on a project by starting with the easy stuff. But the easy stuff is pointless if the hard stuff is impossible.

She gave the example of the California high-speed rail. They're building the flat easy part first but engineers have not figured out how they're going to build the train between Bakersfield and Los Angeles through the Tehachapi Mountains. Until they've figured that out the flat part is a waste of time and a false example of progress.

But neither would have to be the first step.

Making the route from San Diego to LA high-speed is perfectly doable (the route exists already), and would be a great stepping stone.

Even if it turns out the Tehachapi is basically the mountains of Mordor and the project ends, you'd still have a valuable high-speed corridor.

You'd think. But efforts long underway to incrementally improve the SD-LA section are now caught in a deep mire of NIMBYism:

https://www.trains.com/trn/news-reviews/news-wire/new-study-...

"they're going to build the train between Bakersfield and Los Angeles through the Tehachapi Mountains."

OMG, just join the I-5 after Bakersfield. It's right there. Why are we barreling through the mountains?

You mean the train? I don't think they do well with steep grades [1].

[1] https://engineering.stackexchange.com/questions/23106/what-d...

Unless, of course, the flat easy part has value anyway.

note: I'm not arguing whether it does or does not.

Not sure what specifically is “california” about this - There is very little support from either side of the aisle in continuing this project, which of course, the article states because it is an unavoidable truth. The criticisms offered by both sides are valid and the few proponents that still hold water for this dismiss these arguments with very bad or incomplete reasoning as written here.

For instance, brushing over the “possible original sin” of the project was way underestimating cost. Yea, no shit, that’s like 95% of the problem voters have with it, that and how long it’s taken with very little usable progress. Author spends very little time on this.

The problem is that this should've been a federal project from the start, one of many running concurrently nationwide. Doing it nationwide would give economies of scale that wouldn't be possible with these local half-measures.

California, and every other of the dozen plus states where this rolled out should've barely even had any say in the matter. Maybe deciding what artwork to put up in the stations and what to name them. At the same time, it should've been completely federally funded.

>should've been a federal project from the start, one of many running concurrently nationwide.

With Congress Gridlocked over issues that really should he bipartisan, it'd unironically take less time for the States to figure it out instead.

> The problem is that this should've been a federal project from the start, one of many running concurrently nationwide. Doing it nationwide would give economies of scale that wouldn't be possible with these local half-measures.

What economies of scale are even possible here? California in particular is relatively isolated from the rest of the country because the thing directly to the east of it is a major desert, followed by a sparsely populated mountain range and then a very large amount of farmland.

The nearest city to California with more than a million people is Phoenix, AZ which is "only" a couple hours from the California border. The next nearest is San Antonio, TX. The distance between Phoenix and San Antonio is about a thousand miles. Neither of those cities themselves have a functional mass transit system for anyone to use even if you put a rail stop there.

California itself constitutes more than half the population of the entire western US, which is otherwise enormous with a very low population density. It doesn't make sense to put high speed rail anywhere in the western US outside of California because there aren't enough people there to use it.

If you don't try and reinvent everything, you can get economies of scale by doing what the rest of the world is already doing.

Washington state decided to have light rail. But instead of using off-the-shelf rail cars, they just had to have them "custom designed" for the Pacific Northwest. Nobody was ever able to identify what about the PNW needed custom rail cars, but they sure cost a lot!

The only light rail operating in Washington State is LINK Light Rail, which Sound Transit operates using Siemens Mobility’s S700 model (although some older train sets are still used on the same tracks).

Looking at the Wikipedia page for the S700, you can find these trains all over the US, including California, Arizona, Georgia, North Carolina, Minnesota, Oregon, Texas, and Virginia. They seem to be popular in Europe, too. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siemens_S700_and_S70

From what I can tell, these train sets are as off-the-shelf as can be reasonably expected, although apparently LINK has ordered their trains to run on 1500 volts as that’s what their catenaries use. Perhaps you’re thinking of BART?

-An occasional S700 passenger

No, I am thinking the Sound Transit light rail. I wouldn't be surprised if they canceled the "design for the PNW" cars and bought off the shelf ones.

Before it was built is when they said they would be custom cars.

Light rail is almost always some sort of bespoke system.

It's reflective of the imbalance of political power in the state and the corruption this power base now suborns. They don't care about the rail project. They're the least likely people to need or use it. They either want it to not happen or if it does at least it provides them with ample opportunities for creating further graft and corruption.

It was almost impossible to find a map where the proposed HSR routes are overlaid with the current Interstate routes. I wonder why. Anyways, in all it's glory I give you this [0]. A route designed to waste money and serve the fewest people.

If it was twice as fast and half the hassle of just driving from Sacramento to Los Angeles on I-5 I would genuinely consider using this service. Which is a really low bar. 120mph average speed with comfortable seating and I'm yours. They just can't manage to incorporate this, which I feel, is refelective of the majority of people in CA who actually need this trail to exist.

[0]: https://imgur.com/a/J15pDPG

This was both a very good read and thoroughly depressing.

It makes a lot of sense to connect San Diego/LA/Sacramento/San Francisco.

It makes a lot less sense to try to connect Merced, Bakersfield, Fresno, et al. People there like to have cars, like to drive, there isn't a lot of traffic. Once you arrive in those places, there is very little transit infrastructure. You basically need a car. And they're far more centred around ag or industry, so more reason to have commercial / truck traffic and a lot less for just passenger cars.

Meanwhile, there are over 100 flights a day between LA area and SF. Meanwhile, Merced has 2 flights a day to LA on a tiny prop, Bakersfield has 2 to SF, and Fresno around 5 a day. There aren't any flights at all between Bakersfield/Sacramento/Fresno/Merced.

Whereas SF/LA/San Diego make complete sense to have a train station with plenty of transit options to get around once you arrive.

(To get an idea of what I'm talking about - traffic on I-5 is so heavy, we would often take 99 instead, when going between SD/LA and Sacramento. 99 is 2 miles farther than I-5.)

San Diego/LA/SF/Sacramento is one of the few markets in America that could reasonably support high speed rail. And it's sad to see it being strangled in the crib.

I agree with you, but infrastructure is often built to expand future regions. Before the Golden Gate and Bay Bridges, there was a lot less commuting to SF. They only had ferries. Building the bridges allowed the broader region to expand and prosper.

Well, Bakersfield at al is not exactly a "future region" - it's been there for a long time with a giant freeway into it (and railroads, too, including rail service from Bakersfield all the way to Stockton with connections to San Francisco and Sacramento) and it has remained a sleepy agricultural corridor. The weather is awful and it's just not where most people in California want to live.

Exactly, as people are priced out of the cities, having good HSR connections to SF and LA would be able to spur a lot of regional growth.

This is a pretty common kind of blindspot for people to have, talking about how crazy it is to build transit to places with or lower populations or less population density, but forget that a lot of well-connected, dense places with good transit weren't very dense before good transit was built!

Transit to... Bakersfield? It's 112 miles from Los Angeles. Dumping high-speed rail (which in the current plan won't be high speed at all between Bakersfield and LA, but is going to be a slow, circuitous route going through Palmdale and Lancaster) is not really going to be realistic for any kind of commuting to LA.

There is a reason these cities never got developed more than they are. It's kind of flat, unappealing scenery and it's boiling hot in the summer. People would rather live in LA. California has huge swathes of land with very, very low population density because nobody wants to live there.

One issue with "CA HSR" is that it isn't even "high speed".

We may have happily referred to is as "high speed rail" 30 or 40 years ago but, given a possible completion date of 2035 (or whatever) the 2:40 travel time from SF <-> LA is unimpressive ... and even that will not be achieved:

"California legislative overseers do not expect the 2 hr 40 min target will be achieved."[1]

The simple fact is that the I-5 corridor is the spine of California and should be leveraged for all additional infrastructure build-out ... which would yield economies of scale and network effects for rail, network lines, water transmission, electrical distribution and (eventually) autonomous trucking.

Instead we're spending billions to build a slow, circuitous route to Fresno.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_High-Speed_Rail

The operating speed on the fast stretch is actually one of the fastest in the world at 350 km/h, it's just that it has to waste half an hour on the Caltrain tracks from San Francisco to Gilroy and from Burbank to Anaheim. It's kinda like how the TGV from Paris to Nice goes from Paris to Marseille super fast but then has to spend hours to go from Marseille to Nice even though the latter part is a small fraction of the distance.

And yes, I agree that this "blended" design that has a lengthy slow section is very lame and bad. If only Caltrain could be quad tracked elevated viaducts.

This is actually a very common operating pattern, particularly for new services. It took years after initial service opened for the Korean KTX to run all the way from Seoul to Busan, and both France and Japan have a number of TGV/Shinkansen services where part of the line is regular track running at regular speed:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mini-shinkansen

CA should've just bitten the bullet and built the whole SF-SJ section underground. It's about 50 miles, about the length of one mid-sized subway line in many part of the world, and it would've simplified the issue of acquiring prime suburban land.

Besides, I just don't see how HSR and Caltrain can share the same railway and avoid major service capacity issues. I think Caltrain is close to capacity as is, and at least a few years ago, major (an hour or more) delays were common.

South Korea built its second branch of HSR reaching Seoul almost entirely underground, with a single 31-mile tunnel [1]. I guess it was faster than trying to acquire land on top of it.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yulhyeon_Tunnel

That's still something that wouldn't be that difficult to change in the future. Probably easier to fund once the initial system is operational and the case for the extra expenditure is clearly demonstrable.

Having it connect into Caltrain is probably something that is nice to have anyway (like if there's maintenance required in the hypothetical tunnel or whatever kind of direct bypass, so you can still run services on the slower route) so it's not a waste to have both.

>Instead we're spending billions to build a slow, circuitous route to Fresno.

Because with a big project like this, everyone wants to claim some slice for themselves. The optimal route crosses counties like Fresno, which means they can veto the project (or at least delay it). They use that as leverage to extract benefits for themselves, like changing the route so it passes through their county seat.

Once you count airport time, 2:40 is about on par with what it’d take to fly from SF to LA. It’s about half what it takes to drive between them, even without traffic.

Fresno / Central Valley is not the circuitous route, which is quite close to the I-5 near Bakersfield. The true circuitous detour is between Bakersfield and LA, where the route is planned to go East through the Antelope Valley with a station at Palmdale.

It's utterly asinine, and will result in "low speed rail". Which already exists... you can take the Coastal Starlight if you aren't in a hurry. There is no market (none) for rail service between LA and Bakersfield.

> One issue with "CA HSR" is that it isn't even "high speed"

Not really an issue. The problem is first and foremost it hasn't been built. If it had been built, by now, it would have worked, even if that success were only measured in the Bay Area and greater LA area.

Article states that I-5 corridor skips all major towns in central valley which kinda kills the purpose of HSR connecting SF to central valley towns to LA

"... which kinda kills the purpose of HSR connecting SF to central valley towns to LA ..."

Yes, that's exactly right.

The original - and highest value - purpose was a high speed rail route between SF and LA.

The meandering route through Fresno (and the new, ex post facto "purpose" the article refers to) is the result of political machinations that happened after the fact and traded utility for brief, local (and trivial) political gains.

there is no need to connect SF to LA only, there are many airports in each town that connect these large metro areas.

the purpose of HSR is to transform large swatchs of land into a large megalopolis, like in China.

China's HSR connects large metro areas into one giant megalopolis with up to 250+ mln population that totally changes the ballgame in terms of economic output

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

It’s also less than that in travel time, since CAHSR goes at its full 350 km/h on the Central Valley vs just 130 km/h on the Caltrain corridor from SF to Gilroy. It adds about 10 minutes to non-stop travel time.

The real benefit is opening the Central Valley to commuter development. San Jose to Madeira on CAHSR is around 45 minutes, not much more than commuting from Palo Alto with current traffic on 101, and so it’d open vast tracts of land in the Central Valley to housing. It might actually be practical to work in the Bay Area on something non-tech, live in a SFH, and commute less than an hour again.

the opportunity cost isn't a 7% increase in length, it's the tens of billions in extra infrastructure to build 350km/h right of way straight through the middle of every town all the way down the central valley, and the massive hit to SF-LA run time that will come with that. beyond the stop penalty, HSR just doesn't run at full speed through city centers anywhere in the world. doesn't happen.

As I wrote elsewhere, the average speed of CA HSR (as planned) is 250 km/h, which is very competitive, internationally. It's about as fast as the fastest French TGV routes. It only really lags behind the fastest Chinese routes, which run at average speeds of about 290 km/h.

If CA HSR can go through the cities in the Central Valley and still achieve an average speed of 250 km/h, that's well worth it.

I thunk it boils down to the fact that acquiring land near San Francisco or LA through imminent domain would be both hideously expensive and extremely unpopular.

Building "High Speed Rail to nowhere" in the Central Valley allowed them kick that can of political infighting down the road.

>and extremely unpopular

Who's shedding a tear for some farmer getting paid above market rates (presumably) for their land? California is probably the last place I'd expect people to think using eminent domain in this case is a slipper slope to communism or whatever.

Eventually you will have to build out the rail line in densely populated areas (especially near San Francisco and LA). High speed rail requires that you to avoid unnecessary curves.

At that point, you're going to have to start using imminent domain.

Putting it off until after you have billions of dollars in sunk costs in the Central Valley doesn't change that.

*eminent domain, from a Latin-ish phrase "dominium eminens."

>Eventually you will have to build out the rail line in densely populated areas (especially near San Francisco and LA). High speed rail requires that you to avoid unnecessary curves.

why can't you have it run slowly in built up areas? As another commenter mentioned that's how it works in France.

Because competing with the airlines requires some semblance of "high speed"?

California is fairly densely packed once you get away from the Central Valley and nearer to the coast where the people are.

The current plan actually accounts for this; the 2:40 includes the amount of time it takes to run on the current Caltrain tracks from San Jose to SF which will not be running at the highest speeds.

Said another way, that SF/San Jose stretch accounts for 25-30% of the total time. That’s similarly true for the last stretch of LA meaning a truly engineering driven design could have done it within ~1h50. And note that the 2h40 goal is admitted as a pipe dream by everyone involved, particularly because of the last mile issues and the circuitous route.

/s?

CA HSR actually is "high speed."

The distance from LA to SF is about 665 km (following the planned HSR route). A travel time of 2:40 means the train has an average (not top) speed of 250 km/h, which is very competitive internationally. Even if we use the shorter I-5 route as the baseline, the average speed is still 230 km/h.

That's competitive with the fastest French TGV lines, and much faster than most European HSR lines. For reference, the fastest lines in the world run at an average speed of about 290 km/h (e.g., Beijing - Shanghai).

Calling this a "slow, circuitous route" is really not accurate at all. If CA HSR gets built as originally planned, it will be one of the faster systems in the world, and nearly as good as the best systems in Europe.

It would be one thing if they were just going to Fresno. There are three major cities in the Central Valley: Bakersfield, Fresno and Sacramento. You get Bakersfield for free; Sacramento is north of SF and has existing commuter rail. Fresno is big enough to justify a stop; it has room to grow, too. You could put a stop that's ten miles outside of Fresno, and you don't have to cut through the city too much. That's what they do with airports. Throw in a LRT while you're at it.

But the plan also calls for Tulare and Madera to have stops. Now you're doing three times the work for a 20-40% increase in the population served. Then they want a line to Sacramento that goes through Merced and Visalia At this point it looks silly. Fresno is larger than Tulare, Madera, Merced and Visalia combined. Stockton already has the Altamont Commuter Express line to San Jose.

Having HSR stops inside cities is one of the things that make it far better than flying for certain distances. Put the station outside the city and you're killing a lot of your benefits...

Stops in Tulare and Visalia... they're 12 miles apart!

It's Fresno clamoring for more ways to get out of Fresno.

Unfortunately there simply isn't enough demand between SF and LA alone to justify the insanely long stretches of a direct rail project.

A better way would have been to build it out from the city into the suburbs first as a commuter rail project. There isn't a ton of intercity demand for this rail, but there is tons of traffic in and out of each singular city to justify even medium speed rail.

"Unfortunately there simply isn't enough demand between SF and LA alone to justify the insanely long stretches of a direct rail project."

I will stipulate that that is correct at this very moment.

However, it is my contention that a truly high speed rail link (sub two hour) between SF and LA would have manufactured demand as an entirely new set of trips, activities and lifestyles would have been enabled by the ability to step on a train in LA and step off at the salesforce tower 1:55 later ...

This could be absolutely true if people adapt to it, but that wouldn't happen overnight.

I would also strongly doubt that even after full adoption, Bakersfield to LA in 30 minutes is going to be much more useful and heavily trafficked on a daily basis than SF to LA in 2 hours would.

Even in Europe, their marquee city-to-city rail routes contribute a small share of overall rail traffic compared to their daily commuters.

I'm not convinced. The train is not competing with driving to SF, the train is competing with flying to SF. LAX -> SFO is 1.25 hours. There's time to the airport, time to check in, time through security of course, but there's going to be similar issues at the train station so the customer has to be convinced that the train is a time savings.

Plus, of course, SWA has 4 direct flights to SFO, 6 to Oakland, 4 to San Jose. If you miss your flight you get on the next one. It is going to be really hard for a high speed train to complete with that.

Sounds like you've never taken a train. Time through security? There's basically no security in American train stations (or French TGV stations). I've only experienced Chinese train stations with security but with wait times far less than American airports. Time to the airport? Well yes because the airports are inconveniently located. Train stations are right there in the downtown.

International HSTs with passport required border crossings (ie Schengen-UK) have passport control and security - I think the security checks are to minimise the risk of terror attacks in the channel tunnel though.

But yeah, for intra-Schengen you just go to the platform a few minutes before departure, find where your carriage will be, and step in once the train comes to a stop.

So much less faff than air travel, and I’ve noticed better pubs at major stations meaning waiting for your train isn’t as boring as it used to be…

> Train stations are right there in the downtown.

A train station in downtown LA or SF would be inconveniently located for most people in these cities.

The train stations have connections to other transit - hard to see them as any less convenient than airports (LA's famously had no train connection until recently).

The SF one would apparently be near union square. Having been there, that seems easy enough to get to, insofar as anywhere is easy to get to in SF (it does not exactly have the greatest public transport in the world).

Station location of course plays a role (i.e. if it gets stuffed somewhere out of town with crappy transport links its no good, and rail links into the middle of an existing city are expensive), but I don't know a major airport where people would routinely trust less than 45 mins for checkin and passing security. Whereas for a train station its 10 mins.

> If you miss your flight you get on the next one. It is going to be really hard for a high speed train to complete with that.

Why would you bother to build a fancy new HSR line and then not run trains every hour, or more if demand is there? Running trains is not that expensive once you've got the infrastructure.

Forget security; I used SFO last week and just going from long term parking to where security is took 20 min, and the reverse (around midnight) took 30+ min. A train starting in downtown SF could as well be past San Jose at that point.

To be fair long-term parking at a train station would also be inconvenient (although at least in this case you'd not share facilities with all the international travelers), and honestly didn't even register as an option to me, so I was assuming local train/shuttle bus/cab/uber dropping off in a convenient central location.

I think the differentiating factor is that a rail station is more likely to be in the city center, where you can get to by other means (bus, BART, whatever), while going to SFO is much less convenient.

If you miss your high speed train in Tokyo, you get on the next one five minutes later. Sometimes just 3.5 minutes later.

> There's time to the airport, time to check in, time through security of course, but there's going to be similar issues at the train station

... Eh? You get to the station (generally well-located), you walk through a turnstile or similar, you get on the train. There's no check-in or security on most intercity trains. Or walking for miles in sprawling airports, for that matter. In a big intercity station, you go in the door, there are some shops, there are a row of platforms, you go to your platform, you get on your train. That is it. Also, you probably get there on public transport which goes either into the station itself, outside the door, or to the local station beside the intercity station, depending on local taste (this really does seem to be a very regional thing).

I can't help feeling that a lot of the people who object to this concept have never actually been on an intercity train at all. Or, er, seen a film or TV show where someone goes on a train. It's kind of bizarre, really.

> seen a film or TV show

I've run through Source Code with Jake Gyllenhaal a few times; does that count?

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

... similar issues at the train station?

With Amtrak, you just show up at the train station a few minutes before departure time.

I took Amtrak from Richmond VA (well, Ashland, VA) to NYC once precisely to avoid the song and dance with getting around NYC airports. I showed up a few minutes before departure at the Ashland station (saving a drive to Richmond), relaxed on the train for 5 hours, arrived in Penn Station, and then took a short walk to the Roosevelt Hotel where my business meeting was.

High-speed rail can have multiple trains per day. If you miss one, you get on the next one.

I think it's actually the opposite. The latent demand is only present in LA and SF. Fresno and Bakersfield are not car-less cities. Taking a train between them makes no sense (you're gonna have to rent a car on either end).

While connecting the LA Metro and SF BART with a high speed rail line makes the most sense. Regardless of the construction inefficiencies this is really the original sin beating at the heart of this project.

> you're gonna have to rent a car on either end

BTW, this is one big reason HSR isn't a great fit for the US.

In most countries, you arrive to major city by train, and you then move around the city using the local train network.

This is only barely true for a few US cities, so even if HSR lines are built, they won't be as useful here.

I agree with you today, but by the time it's finished self driving car services like Waymo will be ubiqutous. I'm already addicted.

That's actually a decent point.

I also expect much of the SDR taxi era!

I don't agree. There are around 145 flights a day between metro LA airports and metro SF airports (based on a quick Google Flights search for a random Friday). Assuming there's 75 seats on each plane, that's 10,000 seats a day. That's a lot of trains. A typical TGV is 500 seats. (If I add San Diego to SF, that's another 50 flights or 3,700 seats...)

The market is there and exists, and that's with the gigantic hassle of having to get to and from the airports, as opposed to a convenient downtown train station

Commuter rail is also a good idea but it's not the same thing as high speed rail. And commuter rail already exists: COASTER in San Diego, MetroLink in LA.

Currently you either have an almost 11-hour trip on Amtrak, a 6 ½ hour drive, or a flight between LA and SF. The ridership is clearly there. (Believe it or not the Amtrak trains are often sold out.)

That’s entirely unfounded. There are more than 100 daily flights between the Bay Area and LA metro.

That’s ridiculously high demand.

https://simpleflying.com/san-francisco-los-angeles-flight-ma...

It's hard to know for sure, but the majority of these flights are probably going to be transfers. I've never set foot in LA but I've taken that flight several times.

Even so, there are only ~20k daily seats between the two cities. The ridership on successful high speed rail lines elsewhere in the world are measured in the hundreds of thousands per day.

Why couldn't one part of the journey be by rail, and the other by air? There is a already a lot of shared planning to allow this to happen, with some railway stations even having IATA codes.

Hundreds of thousands? A TGV holds 500 people, so you're saying a successful TGV line does... 400 trips a day?

I mention it elsewhere, but it looks like about 20k people fly each way between the Bay Area and LA every day. That's enough, and if this thing actually existed very few people would fly.

there absolutely is, SF-LA is an ideal city pair

Do people actually travel between SF and LA?

It makes sense in the east coast: traveling from the seat of government in DC to the seat of finance in NYC. But does california have that dynamic?

> Do people actually travel between SF and LA?

Yes. The most obvious example of a company that's built around that corridor is Netflix: tech in the Bay Area, film production in L.A.

Outside of work reasons I don't know many people who actually travel between these cities on a regular basis. Maybe once or twice a year for that?

I would argue the east coast works much differently. The traffic patterns are not so much between NYC and DC, but most people moving in and out of dense areas. Much of the Acela is M-F commuter traffic.

If it actually worked like Japan (and China?) maybe? In Japan, if I want to go from Tokyo to Osaka, I just take a local train/subway to the station and buy a ticket for the next bullet train. I can get the tickets on my phone as I'm on the subway (or buy them at the machine at the station). There is always a train within 5-10 minutes. There are trains pretty much every 5 minutes, some are express (5 stops to Osaka), some less express (~12 stops), and some go all they way to Kyushu. The only time this isn't true is the 3-4 weeks a year when everyone travels and the trains are full. On those weeks you need to get tickets in advance.

The point being, it's so convienent I can decide to visit my friends for a picnic and come back the same day (yes I have done this) with no pre-planning. I have not pre-purchased a ticket in years.

I don't expect California to have trains every 5 to 10 minutes. I also expect they might fuck it up like Spain and require baggage inspection. I do expect that if they finish building it (I don't think they will) that by the time they do, Waymo and similar services will be ubiquitous and so it might actually be useful.

there are a ton of nonstop flights between SFO and LAX so i'm going with yes

Yes but they take Southwest Airlines which is already really convenient.

>Southwest Airlines

Is it though? My experience with Southwest is that its the worst airline I have ever used.

I have had great experiences with Alaska though. Always fast and efficient, and usually take off ahead of schedule

Before he moved to Texas Musk used to commute between the Bay Area and LA almost daily.

A number of VCs are based out of the Bay Area but actually live in LA (or did, before the Palisades Fire).

It's absolutely critical that a country with California's GDP learns how to rearchitect itself to build again -- literally critical for America's progression. Nothing in this article makes me feel any better about the prospects of that happening.

It’s structurally impossible. The half of the political coalition that contains virtually all the people who want to build any sort of urban infrastructure is too fractured into groups that each have their own distinct priorities unrelated to infrastructure or good governance. And of course the other half of the polity hates the government.

If you’re a democrat in california, where does infrastructure fall on your list of priorities? What big voting bloc does it get you?

Here in Maryland, we’ve been building a 16 mile above ground, mostly non-grade-separated light rail for a decade already and it’s nowhere near done: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purple_Line_(Maryland). I don’t know a single person other than myself who is motivated to make it happen. Nobody is agitating to get our miserable commuter rail system to run more timely. Road construction is the only thing that ever penetrates into the public consciousness. Making anything better is very low on everyone’s list of priorities.

"Nowhere near done" seems like a bit of an exaggeration, given that the link at the top of your linked page suggests that it's over 3/4ths done[1].

It's also, to my understanding, not grade-separated in various important places. I was in College Park two weeks ago and saw lots of at-grade development on the line, which presumably gets bogged down by Route 1 and the other high-traffic roads nearby.

(This isn't to imply that the construction isn't slow or inefficient; it's almost certainly both of those things.)

[1]: https://purplelinemd.com/media/jdwhz3kj/purple-line-press-re...

The last 10-20% of these projects always takes surprisingly long. The 2027 opening date is already looking questionable: https://wjla.com/news/local/purple-line-construction-project.... And it was supposed to open in 2022.

> If you’re a democrat in california, where does infrastructure fall on your list of priorities? What big voting bloc does it get you?

As of now, nothing because everything takes forever to build. The authors of Abundance talk about how rural broadband is gummed up in bureaucratic processes. Same with CHIPS. Biden couldn’t point to it as an accomplishment because…it wasn’t accomplished yet.

Other countries can build entire rail lines entirely on viaducts for the same cost as it takes to grade separate a single Caltrain station. For example it was recently estimated that grade separating Broadway Station with a center platform would take $889 million and 5-5.5 years [1]. This is mind boggling.

[1] https://burlingameca.granicus.com/DocumentViewer.php?file=bu...

Building in earthquake territory generally increases costs by at least 2x. Ignoring private land rights also generally helps but costs.

More young people need to actually start voting to get all the NIMBYism out of the government, and then change can happen.

If by NIMBY you mean litigation-mediated environmental regulation and union-optimized labor & wage rules, sure!

California will need to hit Rock Bottom hard more than once before replacing CEQA with something sane becomes possible. And that's just one of several wet moldy blankets blocking progress.

As Californians will tell you, local communities are more important than all that.

Why?

California has a massive ecosystem advantage in terms of the tech industry, no other state comes close. If California can't build, America can't build.

Well, let's not get too pessimistic. Brightline built rail from Tampa/Orlando to Miami, and it seems to be pretty popular, although it's not high speed rail.

Unfortunately our country has no motion any longer and the crumbling infrastructure is a good sign of prolonged decay that has started.

I think this whole article/title is ragebait at best.

> claim that the relative failure of the California High-Speed Rail “boondoggle” represents the political dysfunction of either California

> This criticism also misunderstands one of the main challenges that CAHSR has faced. Al Boraq had full funding lined up before the project began. CAHSR did not. This led to delays that reduced support and encouraged critics, which starved it of funding commitments and thus led to further delays. California undermined CAHSR from the start.

That just sounds like describing dysfunctional government using more words. Either the government can get it done or they can’t. Allowing endless vetos and delays to gum up the process is a political decision.

There are some really good details in the article. But, to quote: > Despite more than a decade of predictions of its failure, the project has persevered — even if its completion is in limbo.

I'm not sure that's much of an endorsement.

Yeah. Reports of its death may have been exaggerated, but reports of its life are a bit flimsy.

Once a project is measured in papal reigns instead of years … yeah.

It's taken longer than WW1 and WW2 combined. Time to kill it.

To everyone saying SF-LA already has plenty of flights, consider the following benefits of trains:

- No need to worry about how much luggage I have. It will likely be a minimal charge if there is even one

- Trains are more comfortable with larger seats, usually

- Trains will make tickets cheaper, putting downward pressure on flight tickets as well (competition)

- Less security theatre and less worrying about what I can and can't carry

- You can still have good internet access

This is in addition to the environmental benefits of trains.

Perfect is the enemy of good. More sections and branches can be added. Piecemeal is how transportation infrastructure grows everywhere. It does not come to fulfill everyone's needs all at once.

You know most of these are business travelers right?

The last thing I want (as a former consultant who did like 400k plus miles flying) is to spend more time traveling.

Not to mention flights booked out in advance are like sub 200 bucks, or even 100-150. It takes like 2-3 hours from leaving home to arriving at destination.

Have you flown between SFO and LAX? SFO is easy to get to, no real headaches. So is San Jose and Oakland. LA is a hellhole when it comes to getting to an airport regardless of where you are in that sprawl. LAX is a nightmare unless you’re already working in El Segundo. Otherwise you’ll fly out of Burbank or the other one I forget the name now depending on where you are.

Once you have flown like 4-5 weeks in a row you learn how to board your flight just-in-time. I’d almost always arrive at the gate like 5-10 minutes before departure and never missed a single flight.

The train is slow AF and from experience riding Amtrack (daily for over a year) if it’s anywhere similar to that the train will be delayed more often than the flight.

As I read through this, I got the distinct impression that the author mainly intends to complain about people describing the cause of failures as "political dysfunction", but then describes actual causes that I would absolutely summarize as being forms of political dysfunction.

In the exact same amount of time, China has gone from 0 to 25,000 miles in high speed rail.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_high-speed_railway_lin...

It probably helps when you can simply take the land you need. One major issue with the California project has been the difficulty in securing land rights. Additionally, California’s strict environmental laws have made construction even more challenging. In contrast, China can largely ignore these obstacles.

> helps when you can simply take the land you need

When America built, this is exactly what we did. CAHSR should have been exempted from CEQA. Its commission should have been delegated eminent-domain powers vetoable only by the Governor or a majority of the legislature.

But the goal wasn't to build a train. It was to dole out the dough. And the dough be doleth. Just to litigators, union bosses and Central Valley landowners.

This is pure copium hahaha. Literally everything about China here is wrong and just Reddit memes. California simply lacks everything: the engineers are rubbish, the policymakers are rubbish, and the locals don't want the product. Beijing averages a 115 IQ over 21 million people. California just doesn't have enough smarts in policy or civil engineering. It all goes to higher paying jobs.

Even if untrue (there is plenty of reason to believe it's true), making claims about the government of a country is not "racist". To "lie" also requires intent (there is every reason to believe GP is writing in good faith). Your source is a few pictures taken 11 years ago and doesn't even really demonstrate "respect for personal property" anyway.

Aren't most companies at least partially government owned in China? What is the chinese definition of personal property?

Billionaires are not the reason CA HSR failing

I remember when BART was first built and San Mateo county opted out of BART. You couldn't take BART to SFO or even South San Francisco. Now they are talking about extending it to San Jose? This may sound very Californian, but I always support trains because once you have it it doesn't go away and eventually you get more that makes the train even more useful.

> I always support trains because once you have it it doesn't go away

Plenty of trains have gone away...

Likely few trains will ever go away again. The lesson of having to rebuild the damn things was far too expensive.

Reading stuff like this is so tiresome. Is the fate of living in the United States just watching China casually lap us in every possible major infrastructural project, completing everything faster, cheaper, and at a much higher quality?

It feels almost humiliating at this point reading any story about a public works/transportation project in the US, just endless delays, comically high costs, and a strangely small focus on the actual material realities of the matter and a failure to deliver promises on time.

> Only if the Central Valley alignment had been selected would CAHSR actually the “train to nowhere” that critics deride it as.

Can't wait to pay $400 per trip to visit all of these lovely places: https://hsr.ca.gov/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/20220427-Agend...

Not prioritizing the linking of two major cities (SF <-> LA <-> SD - take your pick) is a major mistake. If this project does end up cancelled then we will end up with a "High[sic]-Speed-Rail" that only joins California's interior cities with a ridership level that will never justify the cost.

Where are you getting $400 from?

The ironic thing is it probably will be an (extremely expensive) boon to Merced -> Bakersfield.

Reading the article I think CAHSR is using agile method of delivering value. Electrification of caltrain in sfbay, removing rr crossings in LA, finishing overall plan and acquisitions, laying relatively low cost and easy central valley track, while putting the most costly activities to the end: boring an actual tunnels in mountain ranges

If by agile you mean "exploiting sunk cost fallacy", sure

the real sunk cost would be the opposite approach: spending 60 blns on boring tunnels through mountains that nothing else connect to.

what would be the benefit of tunnel from LA across the mountain range? or a tunnel from SF across the diablo range???

keep in mind these ar elike half of the project cost

The problem is that it takes a long time to bore tunnels. If anything they should have started that early.

this statement has little bearing on how this project is actually playing out, but if it were true - why would we want to manage massive infrastructure projects in the same way bad software projects are managed? via a method regarded by everyone except middle managers with a massive eye roll and a sigh

imagine the opposite situation: boring tunnels costs like 60 blns+.

and taxpayer won't see a penny of the benefit from some tunnel somewhere in mountain ranges that nothing else connects to

This piece seems to concede all of the problems critics of CAHSR (notably Ezra Klein) bring up, and then argues they never should have been problems in the first place or begs their underlying questions. For instance, yes, it took forever for funding to get secured. That's part of the state capacity critique of CAHSR!

Or, for another example, yes, the current Central Valley routing is practically just as hard (per mile) as a direct I5 route which would actually serve the largest population centers in CA. But, the piece argues, this would leave "more than a million people" in the Central Valley underserved. Uh... and? The I5 route would have served over twenty million people.

Yeah, I had the exact same reaction to this that you did. One of Klein and Thompson’s primary arguments is that we are failing by letting the perfect be the enemy of the good. This article’s thesis seems to be ‘yeah but perfect is better than good, so we should do that.’

The reality is for every government constraint, there are even more difficult economic constraints that it has to work against.

A 90-minute flight between these SF and LA can be had for ~$80 or less. A 7-hour bus ticket between these two cities is ~$50. To put it another way, the train would have to be only half-again more expensive per passenger to operate than a bus to beat a flight on price.

I get it that there are niche reasons some individuals would prefer a train. But the economies of scale that they need to achieve here is ridiculous.

It's a similar distance to Paris to Marseille, a 3 hour journey. Price for that seems to vary between 29 and 80 EUR depending on time of day.

That's "get on the train, get off the train three hours later", so in practice is much faster than a 90 minute flight, which is "get to airport, go through security, walk seemingly endlessly to gate, fly, walk seemingly endlessly through baggage claim etc etc, get out of airport". The train is, of course, also _far_ more comfortable than a plane. Personally, I'd opt for the train...

I suspect if the damn thing ever gets built, flying between SF and LA will more or less become a thing of the past. Like, why would you?

I love trains! And I agree that they are superior in comfort and ease than flying. But the train still has to generate massive amounts of new traffic that doesn't currently exist to justify its huge costs.

The TGV is something of an anomaly, and tough to compare against. It both beats all ridership estimates, and also comes in at half the price of even the Shinkansen: https://pedestrianobservations.com/2023/06/21/why-does-tgv-r...

Eh, ICE journeys of similar distance seem to be in the same general price range.

> But the train still has to generate massive amounts of new traffic that doesn't currently exist to justify its huge costs.

There are apparently about 130 SF Bay Area to LA flights daily. Let's say on average 200 person planes, at 80% occupancy, so 20,000 people. The biggest high speed trains have a capacity on the order of 1300, though those are very long trains; 800 or less is more common. Assuming an 18 hour day, that's a train every 45 minutes or so. That seems... fine? You'd also expect some traffic to the intermediate destinations, and possibly some increase in travel because, really, it is so much less bloody awful than flying (anyone who tells you otherwise has either never been on an intercity train or never been on a plane).

One weird aspect of American exceptionalism is that it is not _just_ Americans saying "we're the best"; sometimes it is Americans saying "we can't have the nice things that all other large rich countries have because [whatever]". The US can manage a high speed rail line or two.

Trains are routinely competitive with flights on corridors like this. Thats why its being built in this stretch

The flight doesn’t include the time to get to and from the airport plus TSA screening.

I greatly prefer taking a train because I can just show up and go.

90 minutes in the air + 1 hour on each end at the airport.

On a train I can work the entire time with internet.

Having a high-speed train be less expensive to operate than a bus isn’t unrealistic, as long as the train is packed. You have to pay the bus driver, while the train amortizes operational salaries over many more people.

That's 90 minutes in the air, not total trip time.

The HSR is 160 minutes from downtown to downtown. There's no check-in, no security check, no arriving 1-2 hours early, no travel to and from the airport. When you count all of that, HSR will be faster than flying. It's also far, far more comfortable - there's no comparison there.

I simply cannot see HSR sharing track with Caltrain between San Jose and SF working at all. There are only two tracks (North and South) and there is no room to build more. So it would seem that no high speed rail could go faster than caltrain on that segment and could not achieve the target travel time.

What I wish- although it may not be feasible- was a straight shot from Burbank to San Jose- as a single tunnel.

Caltrain has passing tracks at Sunnyvale and Brisbane. There are joint plans with CAHSR to add 4-track segments at Millbrae, San Mateo (between Hayward Park and Hillsdale), Redwood City, and Palo Alto (California Ave).

The Millbrae tracks are part of the new station design: they are removing one of the 3 BART tracks (superfluous because BART terminates at Millbrae) and using the space to construct two dedicated HSR tracks on the inside of Caltrain, as well as a HSR platform.

The San Mateo area is relatively straightforward: Caltrain already owns the land, it is currently surface parking lots for the Hillsdale station as well as the land used for the old station (which was moved a few years ago).

Redwood City is elevating the entire Caltrain/HSR track above the city as part of their grade separation strategy. The new viaduct will be built with 4 tracks instead of 2.

The only major sticking point is Cal Ave, where there is limited space and an unfriendly city.

5-6 passing track sections should be plenty for running blended service.

Ah, thanks for the reminder there are passing tracks already.

Are passing tracks really practical? Wouldn't they have to be extremely long to accomodate high speed trains mixed with local Caltrains? I have a hard time picturing this all working out even under ideal circumstances.

Usually they pass when the local train is at the station. This doesn't take all that much space; speed delta is 80mph (125mph once they grade-separate everything). Everything is computer controlled.

It occurs to me that this might be why they've chosen those particular areas. Sunnyvale, Redwood City, Hillsdale, Millbrae, and South San Francisco (just south of Brisbane) are all baby bullet stops, where all of the local, limited, and express trains stop, and so you can reliably count on every Caltrain stopping there and letting a HSR train pass. Cal Ave is the odd one out, but it still has local + limited service.

> There are only two tracks (North and South) and there is no room to build more.

The SP/Caltrain/Bayshore-Cutoff line into SF used to be partially quad-tracked. It's easiest to see at Tunnel 2 just south of 22nd Street Station. The current two-track main uses one tunnel and there's a second tunnel portal blocked off next to it.

Here are the north and south ends respectively:

- https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/90/Tunnel_n...

- https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/9f/South_po...

Ironically the Caltrain electrification project blocked it off even further by putting the supports for the overhead wires right where the other tracks used to be.

Caltrain has sections with four tracks. At these sections express trains overtake local trains. They did this improvement long time ago and called the service "baby bullet" back then.

It is an advantage that HSR uses Caltrain track to get to SF. It would be super expensive to build a separate high speed line, and it wouldn't be worth the time savings. Caltrain should spend money grade separating the whole line, adding passing lines where possible, and increasing the speed to 125mph or 150mph since it would be good for Caltrain service. At 125mph, HSR (250mph) would save 10 minutes, and 150mph would save 6 minutes.

Even if it succeeds on its current trajectory, it will be studied for 100 years as a massive failure.

All civil engineering projects are failures until people forget what it cost to build them and just start taking the infrastructure for granted. Eleven people died constructing the Golden Gate Bridge, 96 for the Hoover dam, thousands for the Panama Canal. Do we remember them, or think that these projects were failures for killing people? No. We just think of how convenient they are.

I grew up contemporaneous with the Big Dig in Boston. People called that a massive failure too, even though it only killed one person instead of thousands. 15 years after completion, it’s a big success.

When a wikipedia page has a whole section dedicated to how massive of a issue construction was then it's result may still be good even if the project was a big failure

I doubt it. People were literally gaslighting people into thinking the Big Dig was a good deal for the money as the roof panels were falling on cars. This will be a "failure" for 20yr, tops.

Does anyone know how Florida’s Miami–Orlando Brightline is doing? I believe that’s the only higher-speed rail route opened since Acela.

The Florida Brightline is limited to 125 mph. Also no grade separation which is needed for higher speeds. Generally countries use grade separation when speeds exceed 110-120 mph. California really needs the 200-220 mph to make the trip worthwhile so it needs to be grade separated. A lot of the work done so far in California is the overpasses over freeways and roads its crossing.

Brightline has had a lot of fatalities due to lack of grade separation.

https://www.miaminewtimes.com/news/death-train-a-timeline-of...

It's actually doing really well but it has not much to do with them being a red state and everything to do with them having an aging or tourist transit population that needs to get between cruise lines and theme parks.

Besides those cases there are not a lot of reasons to be transiting that route, or at least not nearly compared to the number of folks that would want to transit SF <-> LA. Totally different needs that are easier to address, and less pressure to prove out value / fewer digestible alternatives.

The problem with local infrastructure projects is their responsibility and execution fall to local community leaders (in this case local = state of California). These leaders are far less efficient and impactful than the federal government, a bar which is already way too low. Nearly every city in the US has had recent collisions with corruption, blatant mismanagement, ideological forces co-opting process, etc. and so most local infrastructure projects are doomed from the start.

The problem with high speed rail, then, is that it is always going to be a local (=state) infrastructure project. America is far, far, far too large for high speed rail to be feasible at a national level, and so we have invested in airports. This is largely a success; much of the year you can travel from NYC to Miami (~1200 mi, roughly UK -> Spain) for $100-200 in a few hours. There are, of course, many issues with air travel that we are still working on, but unless there is a breakthrough to make supersonic land travel affordable, we are stuck with air travel at a national level.

But where do we go from here? We know the federal process is too bloated to succeed with infrastructure projects, and when it is forced to it ends up being prohibitively expensive. We know the state process is doomed to fail and similarly be very expensive. We have already tried privatizing it and failed, and even when subsidizing private industry we get subpar results at best. What options are even left at this point?

We could actually just pay more money to public governmental employees, allow them to build careers (and raise families), and stop contracting out everything. This would also increase competition for such roles.

How we got here is ultimately, especially for CA, land and legal cost, cost of living, and public employee salary relative to private salaries. That’s endemic to major metro areas in the US, with some small exceptions, but especially true in CA.

Before it was shut down, we did see a real reversal with 18F in getting things through, for software projects. Of course, they weren’t even being paid industry wages there.

> We could actually just pay more money to public governmental employees

When their pensions are taken into account, government employees are ridiculously overcompensated already. They’re basically minor nobility at this point.

I have done the numbers for myself, and even taking pension and treating an extra week of vacation as a 1/52 pay raise, doing a software job for the government would be a huge step down for me financially. Basically gives me 0% chance of ever buying a home where I currently live

For every underpaid government software engineer there's an overpaid paper pusher, and they're both paid the same amount.

> me 0% chance of ever buying a home where I currently live

The housing crisis is the Everything Crisis. It’s destroying competence of government services, as no one ambitious will accept this fate.

It destroyed competitiveness of our industry because you can’t pay a worker less than it costs to rent.

It’s causing apathy and rise in extremist views among younger population as they realise they have no path to dignified future.

I am hoping that China does well for itself and one day we can just consider them as an example of competent and coherent governance and sort out our shit.

Then you would have two retirees for every three working age people. And given that only ~70% of working age Americans are actually working, it would mean three non-working adults for every two adults with jobs. Either the retirees would have a really low standard of living, or workers would get much smaller share of the value they create than they currently do.

If you are not already retired or close to retirement, you should assume that the normal retirement age is ~70 years. Anything lower cannot be sustained with the current demographic structure.

but nobody likes working even longer to pay for others to retire earlier.

You can do it entirely “yourself” if you adopt FIRE concepts early in your working career.

This is an absurd statement.

I guess we'll see how I'm doing in 20 years to compare, but as of now, my dad is a former California public employee on a pension who had to move to the middle of the desert to stay within his budget, does all domestic work himself, and regularly needs to ask me for money. "Minor nobility" is a laughable characterization of his status in life.

For what it's worth, it's also quite illuminating these days to compare injury history with him. We've had a lot of the same stuff happen, but when it happens to me, he always overestimates the effect because he's still suffering from never recovering properly thanks to a lifetime of no-premium but shitty Kaiser HMO treatment that used the lowest-cost option for literally everything, whereas I had to pay for stuff but at least got the latest available surgical procedures and proper supervised rehab, so my injuries actually healed and I'm not just suffering for the rest of my life like he does.

You're right and everyone -- including government contractors -- has been quietly shouting this for ages, but existing efforts have already been ideologically co-opted and new efforts are too brash and can't wrap their head around spending more to save more.

Also 18F was not truly shut down and still lives on at GSA, albeit only the worst parts. They're hard at work adding as much red tape as they can imagine to procurement of software and recently boasted about their collective organization answering a whopping 1200 emails in a month.

> has been quietly shouting

That’s one hell of a contradiction

So I think the best argument against this is that the US has done massive infrastructure projects in the past. Some cities had (and some still have) decent public transportation and we've done large canals and even the interstate highway project. I've also seen local infrastructure (and I mean actually local, on the city/county level) be very impactful in the community.

My experience is that unless the community really wants the infrastructure it won't get done and I've seen a lot of opposition to forms of transport that aren't just roads (with the most extreme case of a vocal group in a town not wanting a rail line into the city because they were worried people from the city would come out to their town. They literally didn't want too easy of transportation into/out of the city).

Some of the massive projects done by the USA involved tons of heartache and stress - but were deemed necessary.

When we want to, we move, and quickly. CA HSR is more indicative of people not really caring than of any major failure.

That doesn’t make sense. California is bigger and richer than all but the largest European countries. It has some of the top universities in the world. Why shouldn’t it have a higher caliber of public official than say Denmark?

> It has some of the top universities in the world. Why shouldn’t it have a higher caliber of public official than say Denmark?

Many officials in the current administration who are wreaking havoc on the US economy went to the top universities, like Harvard, Columbia, etc. Attending those universities doesn't imply responsibility or sense of duty to public service at all.

CA does have "high caliber" public officials, but it also produces very corrupt ones. As everyone knows, CA has exported many from both categories to the national stage.

CA is not like Denmark in many ways. California has huge wealth inequality, and its economy and governance are heavily influenced by plutocrats from industries that grow via massive scaling properties, like tech, entertainment, and agriculture.

Two of those industries have a history of labor exploitation, and the other has been actively trying to snuff out the power and leverage it mistakenly gave to its workers over the past several decades.

Without a doubt, Denmark has problems also, and it has plutocrats, but its politicians hold them more accountable to the populace that CA does.

Why are the politicians in California different than the ones in Denmark? And are those reasons related to it being a sub-national entity, which seems to have been the argument being made above.

> Why are the politicians in California different than the ones in Denmark?

> And are those reasons related to it being a sub-national entity, which seems to have been the argument being made above.

I'm sure it plays a role, but there are tons of convolved factors? They're different places, and your question is too non-specific to have a single answer.

> What options are even left at this point?

I suspect we're dealing with the fallout of the loss of an American nomos (shared values, traditions, and moral principles formalized into law, custom, and convention) -- the very issue John Adams wrote about in a 1798 letter:

While our country remains untainted with the principles and manners which are now producing desolation in so many parts of the world; while she continues sincere, and incapable of insidious and impious policy, we shall have the strongest reason to rejoice in the local destination assigned us by Providence. But should the people of America once become capable of that deep simulation towards one another, and towards foreign nations, which assumes the language of justice and moderation, while it is practising iniquity and extravagance, and displays in the most captivating manner the charming pictures of candour, frankness, and sincerity, while it is working diligently under the cover of these pleasing appearances and employing the most insidious and base artifices, this country will be the most miserable habitation in the world. Because we have no government, armed with power, capable of contending with human passions, unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge and licentiousness would break the strongest cords of our Constitution, as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.

When moral virtue is not valued, who will rise to the top and be elected to public office but non-virtuous people?

Failing the development of something like what John Adams is referring to, I fear that the only way "forward" (if it can be called that) is a different form of government, in which individual liberties will be greatly reduced or denied altogether.

My personal opinion -- it's a spiritual problem that needs a spiritual solution. Pray for the nation.

Or we can just keep trying to run through molasses :)

>But should the people of America once become capable of that deep simulation towards one another, and towards foreign nations, which assumes the language of justice and moderation, while it is practising iniquity and extravagance, and displays in the most captivating manner the charming pictures of candour, frankness, and sincerity, while it is working diligently under the cover of these pleasing appearances and employing the most insidious and base artifices

It's always amazing to me that slave owning men on stolen land could not see the hypocrisy of such a statement

John Adams in particular was not a slave owner, and he called slavery an "evil of colossal magnitude." So he and those like him (and there were many) shouldn't be condemned in any sense along that line.

I agree that slavery and ill treatment of Native Americans were egregious problems. But on both issues, there were prominent voices speaking out in favor of what was right, including among the founding fathers -- Ben Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, etc. Also, William Penn (founder of Pennsylvania) was an awesome example of someone who insisted on honest, fair dealings with Native Americans, and he won their respect in a big way.

It is hypocrisy to preach about freedom and the equality of man while also owning slaves and believing some men to be unequal. It's not that this was unknown at the time either. Abolitionism was not a new idea in 1798.

edited my comment already before I saw your response. Yes, I agree.

Well sure, Adams in particular maybe not, but for him to warn about this hypothetical scenario while it was ostensibly unfolding in front of his eyes is still something i can find a bit ridiculous.

> for him to warn about this hypothetical scenario while it was ostensibly unfolding in front of his eyes

Well why wouldn't he? See something, say something.

I'm sure he saw direct reasons to be worried about people becoming ungovernably immoral, and I bet slavery was one of those reasons -- after all, he did believe it to be a colossal evil.

So I'm not sure I understand your point.

Because he's talking about it as if it weren't happening. "Should the day ever come..." Well, sure seems like it already had

That's a misquote - that phrase doesn't appear in the letter. I don't think that idea was present either. Could you clarify which phrase(s) conveyed that to you?

Here's a link to the full text of the letter: https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Adams/99-02-02-3102

If anything, I think he felt compelled to write what he did (not only in this letter) because he felt a sense of imminent danger -- that if the people individually and collectively failed to rise to the high calling of good moral character, the new republic would not last. Remember, the longevity of the United States was by no means a foregone conclusion at the time -- the US Constitution had been ratified a mere 10 years before he wrote this letter, and Adams himself had just been elected as the second president the year before.

(All of which doesn't make his thoughts inapplicable to our time.)

Calling the leaders of the State of California, the 4th largest economy in the world, "local" and less efficient than the federal government is interesting.

The main advantage the feds have is they can preempt the state. Versa vice doesn’t work.

Additionally the U.S. Government requires that the states have balanced budgets, a requirement that is not stipulated for federal national spending. Unfunded spending obligations are not a problem, the federal government just raises the debt ceiling.

Your theory does not explain why the state of California is capable of discharging $25 billion into freeway construction annually. It obviously cannot be the case that US states are incapable of executing public works projects.

It is so, so, so much easier to build freeways, roads, and highways than rail systems.

It is also absolutely necessary to have roads to move people and goods as not everyone and everything can be transported on rail or even is near rail (even post-HSR).

It is also an income center. California _makes_ money from spending on roads because of job creation (=tax revenue), taxes on vehicle sales, taxes on fuel, tolls, freight fees, and more: https://www.calbike.org/there-is-no-deficit-in-californias-t...

> It is also an income center. California _makes_ money from spending on roads because of job creation (=tax revenue), taxes on vehicle sales, taxes on fuel, tolls, freight fees, and more: https://www.calbike.org/there-is-no-deficit-in-californias-t...

Please provide a reference for CA making money by building roads. Road building is foundational to other economic activity, but AFAIK, it's not turning a profit (nor should it be expected to). Unfortunately, we have a double standard where we consider public transport to be a failure if it doesn't generate a profit.

This is not really the point. Again, your hypothesis lacks explanatory powers. Virtually all of the works undertaken so far on the "rail" project have been roads: bridges, trenches, and relocations of car stuff. So if California can spend tens of billions every year on car stuff through the caltrans budget, it should be more than capable of moving a few of those dollars over the get the HSR project finished. It's a matter of political leadership.

CA has built tens of miles, probably hundreds, maybe even into the thousands of miles of tracked transit in the time HSR has been building. CA can certainly do what it wants - or maybe do what it needs.

HSR is perfectly viable for the east. decades of steady investment could have built a massive network out through chicago by now, and with a few more we could be closing in on the last gap in the network between kansas city and las vegas.

If you look at it by map there's not much more interstate highway than railway.

Interstate highway is also far cheaper to build and maintain than you would imagine. It took around $114 billion to build interstate across the entire country, while the high speed rail project in just California is already upwards of $128 billion.

On Europe that is kind of exactly my point, high speed rail in Europe is built and maintained by federal governments with high levels of participation, interest and oversight from their population. This can never happen in the US because our federal government has to oversee a very wide amount of area and states are not so autonomous and self-governed that their populations primarily interest themselves with their state governments.

the inflation adjusted cost of the interstate system is closer to a trillion

There hasn't been that much inflation.

>The construction of the Interstate Highway System cost approximately $114 billion (equivalent to $618 billion in 2023).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstate_Highway_System#:~:t...

Those interstates move millions of pounds of goods - probably way more important than the people.

And the US freight rail system is the envy of the world.

I assure you, it is not, but union pacific repeats that line enough that everyone seems to believe it

This would work if we could run state governments like mini "countries" but there is not enough interest from the electorate and thus very little oversight so they end up in a bad way.

I would like very much for California's state legislature to be on par with, say, South Korea (similar population size & dispersion with great bullet train infrastructure). Unfortunately it operates much more like Thailand or El Salvador pre-"throw everyone in jail".

> This would work if we could run state governments like mini "countries" but there is not enough interest from the electorate and thus very little oversight so they end up in a bad way.

Which is circular; there's less attention because we don't.

> I would like very much for California's state legislature to be on par with, say, South Korea (similar population size & dispersion with great bullet train infrastructure).

About 1/4th the land area of California and much more .. "square". The long line in South Korea is 275 miles long; versus roughly 800 miles for the California HSR system. And California's system is facing a public that's much less accustomed to and receptive to rail, and endpoints that basically require you to have a car anyways.

We should have spent all this money on making local rail awesome. It'd make a much bigger difference in day to day life, would pay off quicker, and would prepare the ground for doing HSR.