Economy Updated project canceled: California bullet train costs soar to $77 billion

I like how the high speed bullet train will commute from SF to LA now twice as fast as my 2011 Nissan could. Definitely worth the costs.
by the time this project is done it might not end up in SF it might be closer to the 99 fwy and assuming they do get it running there might not be that many trains running per day. it actually would have been more efficient to build an extra fwy on between the 5 fwy and the 99 to ease traffic from LA. to S.F.
 
77 is 16 billion more than Lithuania's GDP.

All of the goods and services provided each year in Lithuania (a country of 3 million people) are valued less than the bullet train. Kinda weird.
 
iirc this train is also not a real bullet train but a closer to the current Amtrak and metrolink trains we already have.

What they're cobbling together now is not anywhere near what Californians voted for in 2008.

 
California bullet train costs soar to $77 billion, opening delayed
https://www.cnbc.com/2018/03/09/cali...g-delayed.html

The projected cost of California's bullet train from San Francisco to Los Angeles has jumped to $77 billion and the opening date has been pushed back four years to 2033, according to a business plan released Friday.

The two-year plan presented by the California High-Speed Rail Authority is the first under new chief executive Brian Kelly, who has promised more transparency about the project's challenges after years of cost increases and delays.
While the goal is to connect the two major cities, the new plan focuses primarily on opening track between San Francisco and the Central Valley, an agriculturally dominant, less-populated portion of inland California. That portion of track is now set to be finished by 2029, also marking a four-year delay, and significant challenges remain.

One of them is how to cross through a section of mountains — a critical segment to link Silicon Valley to the Central Valley. Rail officials are still working on how best to do that, Kelly wrote in the plan's introduction.

The $77 billion cost, a 20 per cent increase, is a baseline estimate, but Kelly also included high and low ranges in the plan based on potential risks.
It says 119 miles (192 kilometres) of track in the Central Valley is scheduled to open by 2022, which would make it the first operational segment. That's 14 years after voters approved a $10 billion bond for high-speed rail in November 2008.

A summary of the plan reviewed by The Associated Press offers limited details on the portion from Central Valley to Los Angeles. The agency hopes to complete all necessary environmental reviews for the entire line by 2022, a delay from initial timelines that planned for environmental clearance by 2017 for most parts of the track.
How to pay for the entire project remains "uncertain," Kelly said.

The state has spent $2.5 billion in federal stimulus money and has an additional $930 million in federal money on the table. That's on top of the $10 billion bond from voters.
The rest of the money comes from California's cap-and-trade auctions, a system meant to limit carbon emissions by selling credits to pollute and a volatile source of revenue that can be diverted by lawmakers in the future. Predicted private investment has not come in either.


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Thats last paragraph is beyond troubling, thats a whole lot of carbon credits
I don't know the technicals on the cost outlay, so I wonder how much of the claimed cost is genuine cost of building the rail line and how much is grafts and overbilling. It is not uncommon at all for private contractors to overbill the government.
 
As a life long Californian this idea was one that really pissed me off. So the train takes me to LA - so fucking what. LA is massively sprawled with hardly any public transit. I’d have to Uber around which can be expensive. It’s way cheap and fast to just fly down from sfo to any number of airports down there.

Instead we should’ve massively expanded the bart system in nor cal. We still don’t have it in the South Bay and it needs to be expanded possibly even to Sacramento. A lot of people commute in from as far as Modesto, Napa, Santa Rosa and Vallejo and it’s fucking all done by cars.

BART isn’t the best public transit ever, but it’s also not the worst. Which is saying something considering how neglected of a system it is.

The last major improvement was a small shuttle that goes from the coliseum to Oakland airport. Took them fucking years to build it too. There’s rampant corruption in whoever we contract with for construction and it’s fuckin crazy at the lack of accountability.

If you need further proof, read articles on the bay bridge. Massive fraud and fuckups happened in building thr bridge yet nobody fucking cares. So it doesn’t surprise me in the slightest that the high speed train is a complete fuck up.

I wanted to hit like on this several times. It’s pretty much the conversation I had with my wife yesterday. We live in Southern Orange County now, and I was saying we could take the Metrolink up to LA - but we might as well not because it’ll take longer than driving with traffic and then we’d have to cab/Lyft around because LA public transit sucks.



To your point about BART delays - BART took a hit on the strike too. Workers needed to be paid more to keep up with the local CPI but that money had already been set aside for improvements. Tough nut to crack there.

I feel like the line through Antioch and down to San Jose has taken forever too.
 
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Jerry Brown’s embarrassing bullet-train bragging to Trump
Daniel Borenstein | March 16, 2018​

sjm-l-hsr-0310-1.jpg

In an open letter to Donald Trump this week, Gov. Jerry Brown bragged that California’s bullet train exemplifies the sort of infrastructure project the president supposedly wants to “Make America Great Again.”

“You have lamented that ‘we don’t have one fast train’ in our country,” Brown wrote. “Well, Mr. President, in California we are trying to fix that. We have a world-class train system under construction.”

World-class? How embarrassing.

012418-ca-hsr-map_2016.jpg

Especially given the timing of Brown’s letter, written just three days after the California High-Speed Rail Authority released its latest round of ever-increasing cost estimates.

Construction of the state’s bullet-train system, still in its infancy, is already at least four years behind schedule, over budget and lacking most of the funding needed to complete the project.

Worse, to raise the down payment, $9 billion of state bond money, backers deceived voters with the very sort of lies and false promises for which Democrats — rightfully — now demonize the president.

It’s time to put an end to the high-speed rail boondoggle. Or, at the very least, give voters another say. Surprisingly, even Dan Richard, chair of the bullet train authority board and Brown’s political front man on the issue, welcomes a vote.

“I actually would be OK with that,” he told me Thursday morning. “I do think this is a choice that people ought to make. … At some point, sure, I’m happy to call the question with the voters.”

Let’s do it.

But, this time, let’s provide voters independent and realistic cost estimates, funding sources and timetables for completion.

Richard suggested placing a measure on the ballot in 2020. This year would be better; delay would allow Richard to continue spending money and laying more trackways, making it incrementally harder for voters to abandon the project. It’s an ongoing cynical strategy to convince the public to keep throwing good money after bad.

Indeed, Brown and Richard’s entire funding plan is predicated on buying time — especially on the notion that if they start building it, private investors will come. Thus far, not a single company has taken the bait.

Maybe voters, given a chance to make an informed decision, will go along. After all, the idea of a European-style bullet-train ride through rural California from San Francisco to Los Angeles is alluring.

If we had plenty of money to burn and otherwise stellar transportation infrastructure, high-speed rail might make sense. But California and its local governments are buried deeply in debt and the state’s transit systems and roadways are crumbling.

The bullet train, however enticing, is not wise use of tens of billions of transportation dollars. It wasn’t when voters passed Proposition 1A in 2008, and the situation is worse today.

To understand how badly this project has gone off the rails, compare what voters were told then with the rail authority’s reality last week:

A decade ago, voters were told the project would cost $45 billion for service from San Diego to San Francisco and Sacramento.

Today, the estimated cost is $63 billion-$98 billion for just the portion from Los Angeles (actually Anaheim) to San Francisco. Richard says he has no idea what the rest of the promised system would cost.

In 2008, the ride from Los Angeles to San Francisco was forecast to take about 2 1/2 hours and cost $50 one-way, or about $61 in today’s dollars. Today, the authority estimates the ride will take nearly three hours and the fare will be $93.

Voters were told then that sufficient money would come from federal, private, local and state sources.

The reality 10 years later: No private investment so far. Only about $20 billion of funding has been found, not even enough to complete the link between Bakersfield and San Francisco, which is now supposed to be done by 2029.

That $20 billion includes the $9 billion of voter-approved bond borrowing — which must be paid back with taxpayer money in the state’s coffers — and $3.5 billion of federal funding approved by the Obama administration. There’s no chance of more federal money unless Democrats take back control of Congress and the White House.

The only thing keeping the program financially afloat is $8 billion the authority is counting on by 2030 from the state’s tenuous cap-and-trade pollution offset program.

Yet, the authority keeps tearing up the Central Valley building what could turn out to be tracks to nowhere.

This is no way to run a railroad — or build it. But this is the bullet-train program, the supposedly masterful infrastructure project, that Brown touted to Trump.

Sometimes it’s better to say nothing at all.

https://www.mercurynews.com/2018/03...let-train-bragging-to-trump-embarrassing/amp/
 
This train reminds me of Stringer Bell getting jerked around by contractors.
 
Make no mistake, it's going to end up a lot higher. Over 100bn, imo. If they told the truth from the beginning, nothing would've been approved. Now they just incrementally increase the estimate over a period of time to manage public relations.Very effective political tactic.

I acknowledge i'm making a lot of assumptions, but that's what happens when you lose the benefit of the doubt. These are untrustworthy people.
 
Surely this 80 billion is included in that surplus they’re bragging about
 
$77 Billion----Fuck. Give the right person 76 Billion and I am pretty sure by 2030 they could deliver some Star Trek level transporter shit.

 
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It's a damn joke among us Californians that left that still have a brain in our skulls. The train will never pay for itself and never be efficient. You will still beat it with a fast car as it will have so many stops in cow towns, because their politician's vote was needed to make it happen.

We should be building desalinization plants down the coast to produce water from the ocean to end any drought issues for good, but that wouldn't mean a huge payoff for Democrats, so it won't happen.
 
Just curious, is the Amtrak that goes up and down the coast simply not good enough? Is it even slower than sitting in traffic?

Also I just noticed, there is an Amtrak from LA to pretty close to LV. It stops right at the tip of NV at Needles CA. I wonder is this a packed train? Do lots of SoCal denizens use this route to get to LV. They can call an Uber to bring them north?

I am planning a trip to LV, but want to go to LA too, but dont want to fly. How much money is the Amtrak?
 
To play Devil's Advocate... not everyone owns a car but I get your point.

Fair enough, but the cost to take the train now would exceed a Southwest Airlines deal for $49 each way.... and yes save $70 BILLION.
 
Fair enough, but the cost to take the train now would exceed a Southwest Airlines deal for $49 each way.... and yes save $70 BILLION.

To be fair will it be as frustrating as dealing with the airlines? Getting bumped, 2 hours to check in, nowhere to park, etc?

I say go for it and keep on building it. While it's going to be a ball-ache for the next decade or so, once it's built, I believe it'll be more useful than people are currently giving it credit. Sure, you can drive for maybe faster or cheaper, but there's something to be said about being able to get boozed up and enjoy the trip versus driving in traffic. You can also take a solid nap and show up at your destination energized rather than exhausted and pissed off.

I grew up in Las Vegas and I remember people talking about the train from Vegas to San Diego and man...that would be awesome for both cities.
 
I wish the front runners in the CA Governor/Senator election would discuss outrageously wasteful spendings such as this white elephant on rail, but alas, they're busy virtue-signalling.
 
It's a damn joke among us Californians that left that still have a brain in our skulls. The train will never pay for itself and never be efficient. You will still beat it with a fast car as it will have so many stops in cow towns, because their politician's vote was needed to make it happen.

We should be building desalinization plants down the coast to produce water from the ocean to end any drought issues for good, but that wouldn't mean a huge payoff for Democrats, so it won't happen.

Agreed on your points so much. The cost for a desalinization plant is around 1 billion dollars depending on the size of the city you live in. Heck I would be fine if they even used the money to fix some of the freeways out here.
 
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