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

[NoSmilez]

Our trains are so trash. I don't know why Asia countries can get it done much cheaper. It is embarrassing when people come over from Asia and they are like why are the trains so old here?

 

[Arkain2K]

Spending for California’s bullet train divides state leaders as never before
By Ralph Vartabedian | Nov. 15, 2019

FRESNO — Even after a decade of abrupt U-turns for California’s high-speed rail project, state leaders are now split like never before.

Gov. Gavin Newsom insists the state stick with his plan to use all of the remaining funds to build an operating segment in the San Joaquin Valley between Merced and Bakersfield.

But others, including Assembly Speaker Anthony Rendon (D-Lakewood), are calling for limiting that $20.5-billion blueprint and shifting a quarter of the investments to high-speed rail segments in Southern California and the Bay Area.

The argument boils down to where the money can do the most good, in terms of carrying more passengers, reducing greenhouse gases and generating political support to find an additional $60 billion to connect Los Angeles and San Francisco.

The fractures came into sharper focus this week at a testy Assembly Transportation Committee hearing in Fresno, where state rail officials argued with their own board members, legislators chided the California High-Speed Rail Authority’s highly paid consultants, and outside experts warned that the state was lurching from one plan to another without any long-term strategy for success.

“It is sad that we are having the discussion the way we are having it,” rail authority Chief Executive Brian Kelly said amid the debate at a standing-room-only hearing room in Fresno, about 100 feet from the future bullet train tracks.

Others said an open and spirited debate about the project is long overdue, particularly because it faces such a cascade of problems, including cost increases, schedule delays, battles with the Trump administration and questions about whether it can ever fulfill the mandate for a two-hour-and-40-minute ride between the state’s urban mega-centers.

“The problem I am seeing is how this discussion is being framed: us vs. them, all or nothing, in or out,” said Daniel Curtin, a rail authority board member and director of the California Conference of Carpenters. Curtin, who backs reallocating the funds, was appointed to the rail authority by former Assembly Speaker Toni Atkins (D-San Diego), now the Senate leader, who has declined to respond to questions about her current position on the project.

Under Newsom’s plan — which he reiterated to the Fresno Bee editorial board just a week before the hearing — the state rail authority would build a 171-mile segment that would run electrically powered trains between Bakersfield and Merced. The authority argues that it would demonstrate to voters and private investors that the state can actually build and operate a bullet train.

The plan adds 50 miles to the current 119 miles of construction contracts in the Central Valley and would present significant new challenges for the project. Even with the previous 119-mile goal, the rail authority had consistently missed targets to have that amount of track completed by 2022, as required under a federal grant deadline.

In response to a question at Tuesday’s hearing, Kelly said the authority will complete less than $50 million of construction work this month. But the spending rate to meet the 2022 deadline is at least $180 million a month, meaning the project is still struggling.

In an email Friday, Kelly said the authority “has not been shy in discussing” how challenges involving right-of-way procurement and third-party agreements have affected the project’s construction pace. “However, we are progressing on those fronts and we are seeing momentum in our construction activity,” he said.

The authority recently released a document with all of the approved delay claims and change orders that have been filed by its three construction teams on the 119 miles. The document lists more than 1,000 change orders over 266 pages. They range from $126 million, approved in August, to one for $1,376.03 approved in 2017.

In total, the authority has approved demands for about $810 million by its three major construction teams, and completion is at 54% of the job. Many of the changes stem from delays the authority caused by not having land for the contractors to build on.

Ron Tutor, chief executive of Tutor Perini, which is building the Fresno section of the rail structures, told investment analysts recently that he expects his contract will ultimately reach $2 billion, a 100% cost increase from its original price.

Separately, personnel turmoil continues at the authority, The Times learned Thursday. The agency in recent days removed Don Odell, director of real property, and Fred Arnold, a key consultant manager also handling land acquisition. Neither could be reached for comment.

Odell, an attorney who negotiated directly with farmers and their attorneys, was reportedly put on administrative leave. The moves follow several other changes of bullet train personnel in recent months.

The seeming disarray and turnover have left the project vulnerable to arguments that it must change direction.

Rendon began the debate this summer when he called for spending more money on the bullet train route from Burbank to Anaheim and in San Francisco. Assemblywoman Laura Friedman (D-Glendale) and Assemblyman Tom Daly (D-Anaheim) became outspoken proponents of that plan, writing an opinion piece that ran last week in the Orange County Register.

But Kelly argued strongly that the only way the state can have a bullet train system is with a “building-block approach.”

“We have never had all of the money we need to build it all,” he told the legislators. The alternative is to get some kind of service operating as soon as possible.

“One hundred seventy-one miles is not a chump-change route,” Kelly said at the hearing.

Opponents say the state should instead run modern 125-mph diesel trains through the San Joaquin Valley until the system is ready to connect with Los Angeles and San Francisco. Their plan to divert funding would also defer building a link from Wasco at the south end to Bakersfield and possibly from Madera to Merced at the north end.

The changes would save about $5 billion that could help build a tunnel under downtown San Francisco and track improvements on the future bullet train alignment from Burbank to Anaheim.

Friedman, a member of the Assembly Transportation Committee, argued Tuesday that investing money in the segments with the highest population density and the biggest need for improved rail service would result in the greatest ridership, rejecting the analysis of the rail authority’s German consulting firm Deutsche Bahn that showed the Central Valley was a better bet.

The firm’s “preliminary finding” said investments in Southern California would result in only “incremental” benefits, while those in the Central Valley would be “substantial.” Friedman wanted to know how the firm could reach that conclusion before it had conducted actual ridership model studies.

“You can’t have a preliminary finding when you don’t have ridership numbers,” she told Mark Evans, the Deutsche Bahn official who testified. “It shows me you don’t have a finding. I want to see a train with a lot of people on it.”

Under Newsom’s plan, the bullet train would terminate in Merced, where passengers could transfer to San Francisco on the Altamont Corridor Express, a diesel-powered commuter train.

Curtin argued that running 125-mph diesel trains in the Central Valley on the high-speed track would not require a change of train in Merced to continue to the Bay Area, resulting in a bigger passenger draw and a faster trip than having a somewhat faster electric train at 170 mph that would require a transfer. And until the line in the Central Valley is ready to hook up with electric trains traveling through mountain tunnels from San Francisco to Los Angeles, the investment does not make sense, he said.

But Kelly rejects that as a worst outcome: “What I think would be a tragedy is if you diverted the money to different places and you were left with incremental speed improvement on diesel service.”

Assemblyman Joaquin Arambula (D-Fresno), who chaired the meeting in the absence of Transportation Committee Chairman Jim Frazier, argued against Friedman, saying the Central Valley plan is consistent with the requirements of the bond act.

The current discussion sidesteps a much bigger problem facing the project: where it will get the money to build a completed system, said Louis Thompson, chairman of the state-appointed peer review panel. Creating a partial operating system in the Central Valley will make no sense if the state never connects it to Los Angeles and San Francisco, he said. That means it must now identify how it will pay the roughly $50-billion to $60-billion tab, assuming costs do not continue to rise.

And the risks keep going up every time the state lurches in a new direction, said Stacey Mortensen, the chief of both the ACE commuter train in the Bay Area and the San Joaquin service that is marketed by Amtrak.

Mortensen said she voted against the 2008 bond act because she was “worried that exactly this would happen.”

She added, “The project should not be such a roller coaster ride.”

https://www.latimes.com/california/...ia-bullet-train-project-state-leaders-divided

 

[Arkain2K]

Promises Not Kept: Small Businesses Say High-Speed Rail Has Cost Rather Than Benefited Them
High-Speed Rail projects delays and failures to obtain proper rights of way before beginning construction have nearly put companies out of business.
By Stephen Stock, Michael Horn and Kevin Nious | Nov 21, 2019

The promise of an economic windfall for small businesses has instead put a handful of companies on the brink of financial ruin, according to several Central Valley contractors working on California’s multibillion-dollar high-speed rail project.

“They had, quote unquote, promised us a whole lot more work on this high-speed rail,” said Kristin Nelson, corporate secretary for Bill Nelson General Engineering Construction, Inc. “We were way in over our head. We had to get rid of everything if we were going to survive (financially.)”

Nelson said her father’s company had to sell off dozens of road graders, earth movers, loaders, water trucks, crew trucks and more to avoid going out of business after the company failed to get paid what they were promised.

The family’s general engineering construction company has been doing wet and dry utility work on projects large and small based out of their headquarters south of Fresno. The company was started by Nelson’s grandfather, in 1954.

Front yard of Bill Nelson Construction after selling off all their equipment.​

After initially signing a contract in 2017 with Dragados\Flatiron Joint Venture to complete subcontract work on the high-speed rail project Nelson’s father, Bill Nelson, said his investment hiring more manpower and buying new machinery all sat idle because high-speed rail authorities did not obtain the proper rights of way to actually begin construction.

“We signed the contract for $2.2 million, and we got started off (hiring and) putting one crew on” the high speed rail project Bill Nelson said.

Bill Nelson says that most of that promised work never materialized.

“Not one work order that we ever did, did we ever complete it. Not one,” Bill Nelson said. “We (gave) them some quotes (for contract work) of up to about $30 million worth of work. None of that ever came to fruition.”

California’s High-Speed Rail Authority “just never had the permission for right of way,” said Kristin Nelson. “And so, you would go out there and expect to perform the work and it was never ready for what work you were supposed to be doing.”

As for the work the company actually did perform, Kristin says it took up to seven months for the money to funnel down from the state, to Dragados\Flatiron Joint Venture, and then finally to Nelson’s bank account.

And when the progress payments did arrive, Kristin says the checks didn’t cover the company’s costs.

“We receive(d) a little over $5,000,” said Kristin – far less than the $60,000 they were expecting. “As a construction company, you have more than one job. But this was a big one that we were truly banking on.”

NBC Bay Area reached out to Dragados/Flatiron for comment. A company spokesperson responded with a statement: “The Dragados/Flatiron Joint Venture values its relationship with all of its contractors and suppliers, especially the small business enterprises working on the Project, and makes payments within the timelines agreed between the joint venture and the respective contractor or supplier.”

Bill and Kristin Nelson show Senior Investigative Reporter Stephen Stock what's left of their company after liquidating their equipment.​

Nelson Construction isn’t the only small business to struggle with idle crews, late payments or other compensation issues.

In January 2018, another small business, West Pacific Electric Company Corp., filed a federal lawsuit against Dragados/Flatiron alleging very much the same issues facing Nelson Construction.

In its answer to the federal lawsuit, lawyers for Dragados said the company wasn’t to blame for CA High-Speed Rail Authority’s failure to obtain the proper right of way and that West Pacific still had to honor its obligations.

According to the lawsuit filed in the US District Court for the Eastern District of California, West Pacific Electric was hired on as a subcontractor on the high-speed rail project. The suit says West Pacific invested more than $2 million to ramp up for the work but then couldn’t make the deadlines signed in its contract with Dragados/Flatiron because the High-Speed Rail Authority didn’t have the rights of way to the land where the work was to occur.

It’s a pattern and problem David Mendoza said he’s seen again and again. Mendoza serves as Project Manager at the Minority Business Development Agency, a division of the US Department of Commerce, in Fresno.

“Very few (companies) are getting paid on time,” Mendoza told NBC Bay Area’s Investigative Unit.

Mendoza says many different business owners in the Central Valley tell him the same story.

He says that all of the companies he’s heard from are subcontractors who couldn’t put their crews to work because of failure to obtain right of way, who got paid late by the prime contractors, or who, in some cases, didn’t get paid at all.

A handful of other companies, Mendoza says, are close to declaring bankruptcy like Nelson Construction almost did.

“Several, not just one or two. Several,” Mendoza said. “Their (payments are) being delayed or not paid (at all.) And a couple (of companies where it’s) been over a year without being paid.”

https://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/loc...-High-Speed-Rail-has-Cost-Them-565309792.html

 

[superpunch]

Our trains are so trash. I don't know why Asia countries can get it done much cheaper. It is embarrassing when people come over from Asia and they are like why are the trains so old here?

We have a much lower population density. Japan has like half the US population in a place the size of California, for example. Public transportation doesn't make as much sense here. It's both more costly and less useful. What use is a train when every store is a mile away from the other store?

Public transportation is only useful when cities and suburbs are walkable from each metro stop. That's why we drive cars in America.

Side note, that's why I love Asian cities. They're all dense and walkable. Everyone is outside walking and interacting with each together. Streets are full of people. They're much more lively compared to US cities that just feel dead with empty sidewalks.

 

[NoSmilez]

We have a much lower population density. Japan has like half the US population in a place the size of California, for example. Public transportation doesn't make as much sense here. It's both more costly and less useful. What use is a train when every store is a mile away from the other store?

Public transportation is only useful when cities and suburbs are walkable from each metro stop. That's why we drive cars in America.

Side note, that's why I love Asian cities. They're all dense and walkable. Everyone is outside walking and interacting with each together. Streets are full of people. They're much more lively compared to US cities that just feel dead with empty sidewalks.

I was criticizing the train system in NY.

 

[PrinceOfPain]

This corrupt state is the same one that has a "people shitting in the streets" problem, right? The one whose residents have a habit of talking down to the rest of their country?
Heh.

 

[Low Test With da Best]

Spending for California’s bullet train divides state leaders as never before
By Ralph Vartabedian | Nov. 15, 2019

https://www.latimes.com/california/...ia-bullet-train-project-state-leaders-divided

We're told that in 30 years California's central valley will become a scorching, dust bowl hellhole, and yet leadership thinks enough folks will still be living there to justify a HSR from freaking Merced to Bakersfield??

 

[freakroor]

We're told that in 30 years California's central valley will become a scorching, dust bowl hellhole, and yet leadership thinks enough folks will still be living there to justify a HSR from freaking Merced to Bakersfield??

people wanted a train from LA to SF. instead we will get one from one hot shitty tweaker town to another,

 

[Arkain2K]

A ‘low-cost’ plan for California bullet train brings $800 million in overruns, big delays
By Ralph Vartabedian | Feb. 22, 2021

HANFORD, Calif. — A 65-mile section of California’s bullet train through the San Joaquin Valley that a contractor assured could be constructed much more cheaply — with radical design changes — has become another troubling and costly chapter in the high-speed rail project, a Times investigation found.

The segment runs across rivers, migratory paths for endangered species and an ancient lake bed through the length of Kings County, a fertile agricultural belt south of Fresno. Before awarding a contract for the section, the California High-Speed Rail Authority and its consultants knew about these sensitive issues and prepared lengthy environmental reports aimed at accelerating construction by avoiding legal obstacles.

But in 2014, when the rail authority awarded the contract, it went with the lowest bidder — a Spanish company named Dragados — which promised $300 million in cost savings by altering the design that the authority had proposed to regulators.

Seven years later, these changes have been largely abandoned and have contributed to more than $800 million in cost overruns on the Kings County segment. That figure is 62% above the contract price tag, which the rail authority has agreed to pay, according to interviews and technical and contractual documents reviewed by The Times.

In addition, the rail authority awarded the contract without first completing a scientific assessment of how sinking land in the area — a result of decades of excess groundwater pumping — could affect the rail route. California is now paying tens of millions of dollars to raise track embankments over 21 miles.

In a written statement, the California High-Speed Rail Authority said it is working with regulatory agencies to resolve design issues. The agency declined to make top officials available to answer questions but asserts it is making good progress on completing an initial 171-mile line through the San Joaquin Valley, which includes the Kings County section. It also said that it was not required to finalize the study on land subsidence before construction began in 2015.

“We continue to apply lessons learned to our current and future work to ensure issues of the past do not repeat themselves,” the authority said, adding that in the last two years, the state agency has established 35 active construction sites across 119 miles of the Central Valley.

Officials for Dragados — which has extensive bullet train experience across Europe but less of a track record in California — did not respond to telephone and emailed requests for comment, saying they are “required to coordinate responses to media questions” with the state.

Some experts say this marks yet another black eye for the project that has been beset by cost overruns and delays that now threaten it. The price tag of the massive project to build a Los Angeles-to-San Francisco high-speed rail system has shot up from an original estimate in 2008 of $33 billion with service starting in 2020 to at least $100 billion with an uncertain start date.

“The rail authority should have been concerned about the low bid,” said William Ibbs, a UC Berkeley professor of civil engineering who has consulted around the world on high-speed rail projects. “The devil is always in the details.”

When the rail authority launched the Kings County work, Obama administration officials were exerting “immense pressure,” in the words of one former rail authority official, to get construction moving, even though it had fewer than 30 employees and was dependent on consultants. Four years earlier, the federal government had issued grants for what was supposed to be a “shovel ready” public works project, the nation’s largest.

Today, Dragados has not started construction on about half of its bridges and viaducts, four years after the original deadline of 2017, and it had completed less than 50% of its planned work by December, according to rail authority progress reports. The rail authority bears a share of responsibility, having failed to deliver 278 of 998 parcel land purchases needed for construction.

But numerous change orders — which include design revisions sought partly by Dragados — are a large part of the problem.

The Times’ review found that California has approved 273 change orders for the Spanish contractor — about one every week since mid-2015. These changes covered items that included extra insurance premiums, delay costs, route changes and land shortages, adding up to more than $800 million.

“It is not like a single project, but a lot of projects strung over a distance,” said USC civil engineering professor Gregg Brandow, who was asked by The Times about the process. “Even then, it seems like a lot of change orders,” he added, terming the cost increases “extravagant.”

The rail authority, however, said it found nothing of concern about Dragados’ significantly lower bid, citing “a public, transparent, multi-year two-step process that was approved by the board of directors.”

California’s high-speed rail endeavor still has support from Gov. Gavin Newsom and other state leaders, who hope it will ultimately relieve congested airports, spur economic development in the Central Valley and provide a cleaner alternative for linking the Bay Area, the Central Valley and Southern California.

But with continued cost increases and delays, the project potentially could run out of money before an initial 171-mile line from Merced to Bakersfield is completed. The Dragados segment, which is part of that initial line, is just part of the problem.

Two other construction teams have filed their own massive change orders. Far more land than ever imagined is needed in the Central Valley, and it is coming at a higher cost. Consultants have racked up hundreds of millions of dollars in higher costs to develop environmental statements. Relocating underground utilities has proved more complex than expected.

When California selected Dragados in 2014, the $1.2-billion contract was the rail authority’s largest ever, but it was $506 million less than the next-lowest bidder, Tutor Perini, and $834 million less than the third bidder, Samsung. The exact bid number — $1,234,567,890 — was considered cheeky in the no-nonsense construction industry with its sequence of all 10 numerals.

At the time, rail authority Chief Executive Jeff Morales heralded the low price tag as a “significant milestone.” Others, however, say the wide gap among the bids should have been a red flag.

“Tutor Perini bid a half-billion dollars more and it was already working on the project,” said UC Berkeley’s Ibbs. “So they knew more about it and had more experience in California construction.”

In its bid, Dragados proposed fundamental changes to what the authority’s environmental consultants — URS, Hatch Mott MacDonald and Arup — had envisioned in Kings County, with its complicated landscape of creek beds, wildlife habitats, roads and other infrastructure.

To avoid potential conflicts, the authority’s consultants proposed building the rail line on an elevated platform as it entered a future train station south of Hanford. But Dragados — offering up “alternative technical concepts” and “design refinements” — proposed constructing the rail station and adjacent line on ground level. The change was supposed to save $130 million.

Yet the Spanish firm underestimated the challenges, records show and project officials say. These included moving a nearby four-lane freeway into a trench and rerouting track owned by Union Pacific Railroad. The freeway trench was far more complex than expected. No agreement was reached with the railroad. The California Department of Fish and Wildlife was opposed, according to two officials knowledgeable about the matter who asked to remain anonymous because they were not authorized to talk to the media.

By that point, the rail authority had purchased a 27-acre walnut grove for the at-grade rail station. Faced with hurdles, the rail authority and Dragados went back to the drawing board and designed a 2-mile-long, 60-foot-high concrete platform, which the contractor is now building at an unknown additional cost for the Hanford station. The rail authority issued a $99-million change order for the viaduct’s foundation in 2020. The girders and deck costs have not been determined.

Since the rail authority was stuck with the walnut farm, it decided to use the land for a concrete mixing plant, according to state documents and Mark Wasser, the attorney who represented the farmer. The rail authority later bought a temporary easement for 29 adjacent acres from the same farmer to store pre-cast parts for structures made at the concrete plant.

It was a costly site for storage and mixing concrete. The state recently agreed to pay the farmer $3.5 million, or $63,000 per acre, substantially more than market value, Wasser said. “They paid him a premium price and he gets half of [the land] back,” he added.

Dragados also said its plan would save $79 million by replacing a proposed 2-mile-long viaduct over a network of waterways of the Kings River with 13 box culverts. And it proposed saving $43 million by lowering and shortening bridges over Cross Creek and Deer Creek, near Allensworth.

The California Department of Fish and Wildlife nixed the plans.

In an October 2019 decision, it approved a 1,883-foot-long viaduct — about one-third of a mile — with 57 culverts for wildlife over the Kings River waterways. A separate decision in May 2020 ordered additional culverts and animal protections for the creeks, including 14 escape dens for kit foxes that will have to be maintained “in perpetuity.” The authority has approved at least one change order of $5 million for a viaduct over the river, and others are pending.

In a statement, rail authority officials said the wildlife issues were resolved, but the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, which has its own role to enforce the National Environmental Policy Act, told The Times that was not so.

In a statement, the service’s Sacramento office said it has contacted the rail authority about reviewing the latest plans for the segment, which the agency had originally approved based on a biological opinion under the U.S. Endangered Species Act. This new review “may result in the USFWS issuing an amended biological opinion on the revised project segment,” the wildlife service added.

Engineers who worked on the original environmental approvals, and asked to remain anonymous because they were not authorized to discuss project details, said they weren’t surprised the rail authority is now running into regulatory hurdles under federal and state environmental laws.

“It is mind-boggling that they would entertain some of the things that Dragados proposed,” said one senior engineer. “To have changes like this, they should have just started with a new environmental document and gone back to the beginning.”

Four senior project officials who spoke to The Times on background said the state was lax in not holding Dragados accountable for the increased costs.

In its statement, the rail authority disputed it was accepting the costs for the Dragados design alterations despite agreeing to pay for the change orders. It said it is evaluating each issue to determine who is responsible. In a “finding of fact,” which The Times obtained in a Public Records Act request, the rail authority justified paying for the Hanford viaduct by asserting it would help meet a federal grant deadline.

Another 2014 decision that has caused higher costs and delays is the rail authority’s instruction that potential bidders could disregard land subsidence in what geologists call the Corcoran subsidence bowl, even though a geotechnical report on the issue had not been completed.

When it was finished in 2017, the report found that some areas of the rail passage were expected to sink 20 feet between 2016 and 2036. The analysis said it wouldn’t affect the operation of high-speed trains — because the slopes would be within the design specifications of the track — but flooding risks would increase.

Last March, the authority approved two change orders by a Dragados subcontractor to elevate embankments over 21 miles, at an additional cost of $40 million, because the flood plain changed. In addition, the authority in August approved another change order for $61 million for embankment materials.

Although the rail authority initially rejected paying for the extra flood protection measures, it later agreed to cover the cost, saying the measures have “merit,” according to an agency document.

Ideally, the state agency would have studied and recognized the subsidence problem before issuing a contract and would have put the required embankments into its bidding, letting different firms compete on the price, project engineers told The Times.

It did not. Current bullet train leaders, facing deadlines of their own, are now grappling with those past decisions.

https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2021-02-22/california-bullet-train-dragados-design-changes

 

[llperez22]

800 million dollars so far approved just in change orders lol. 33 billion and operating by 2020 has turned into 100 billion and no timetable on when it might be completed with the price tag climbing every week. What a clusterfuck.

 

[Ayin]

800 million dollars so far approved just in change orders lol. 33 billion and operating by 2020 has turned into 100 billion and no timetable on when it might be completed with the price tag climbing every week. What a clusterfuck.

Is there an accepted point of failure known to the public here? As in, is there any accepted point where the project could just be scrapped, or is that an unthinkable and thus unplanned situation?

 

[GoldenWolf87]

A ‘low-cost’ plan for California bullet train brings $800 million in overruns, big delays
By Ralph Vartabedian | Feb. 22, 2021

https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2021-02-22/california-bullet-train-dragados-design-changes

Found a abit long article on this similar story. I was wondering whatever happened to this project in Calif.

Seems like a waste of money. When they could have used the money for the communities in the state.

California bullet train actually crawling

 

[ElKarlo]

We have a much lower population density. Japan has like half the US population in a place the size of California, for example. Public transportation doesn't make as much sense here. It's both more costly and less useful. What use is a train when every store is a mile away from the other store?

Public transportation is only useful when cities and suburbs are walkable from each metro stop. That's why we drive cars in America.

Side note, that's why I love Asian cities. They're all dense and walkable. Everyone is outside walking and interacting with each together. Streets are full of people. They're much more lively compared to US cities that just feel dead with empty sidewalks.

Yep and Japan only has one real bullet train track and it’s just now getting to the northern island of Hokkaido. So basically Japan has a single rail that can service most the major population centers with minor branch lines. It really doesn’t make sense for the USA. The USA should concentrate on passenger trains that don’t suck. Baby steps

 

[Bunk Moreland]

USA! USA!

 

[Proud American]

The taxpayers of California are being robbed blind by corrupt companies and their own corrupt officials here. This is in tandem

will corrupt democrats in federal government send more money america doesn’t have to bail out California’s corrupt failures?

 

[llperez22]

Is there an accepted point of failure known to the public here? As in, is there any accepted point where the project could just be scrapped, or is that an unthinkable and thus unplanned situation?

good question. I googled it myself and read couple articles that seemed informative on the future of the project. Apparently california governor gavin newsome has already pumped the brakes on the majority of the project eliminating it ever getting close to either los angeles or san francisco and instead just keeping it 171 miles of inland california which is currently vast open farmland with fresno being the only large city. That decision to downsize the project now puts it around 22 billion dollars (estimated). That makes me question the value of doing this project at all seeing as how the value of reducing traffic and emissions and speeding up travel time around the state (the primary goals of this whole thing to begin with) drops drastically once you remove los angeles and the bay area from the equation. Some articles are saying there is still great value as the wide open central california is focus of development in the state going forward and the train can always grow over future generations.

The funny thing is just how inept this all has been. I mean we are over a decade into this thing and they are still trying to buy the land needed to build the damn thing on. They are just now finding issues as they survey the land that they have purchased with erosion and sinking that needs to be accounted for with many millions in unexpected dollars. I mean, Id think an F student in an entry level community college course on Project Management could have foreseen these mistakes.

 

[llperez22]

The taxpayers of California are being robbed blind by corrupt companies and their own corrupt officials here. This is in tandem

will corrupt democrats in federal government send more money america doesn’t have to bail out California’s corrupt failures?

Thats why every time something for taxes comes up on a prop to be voted on, I dont care how much I agree with the need such as schools, roads etc... I always vote no. They need to learn to spend the money they already take wiser.

 

[Peter_Panner]

Our trains are so trash. I don't know why Asia countries can get it done much cheaper. It is embarrassing when people come over from Asia and they are like why are the trains so old here?

How many kids in Japan have a car?
You have to take into account the different culture before you feel embarrassed.

When did you go to High School?
When I went to High School, most of the cars in the parking lot were from the students. The USA's public transport is so different than most countries because so many people drive themselves. A lot of people in USA view public transport as something for poor people ( except for New York). That is how it is, that is the culture whether you wanna say it or not.

So why spend all that kind of money on something people view of poor people things and when most just drive themselves?

 

[llperez22]

How many kids in Japan have a car?
You have to take into account the different culture before you feel embarrassed.

When did you go to High School?
When I went to High School, most of the cars in the parking lot were from the students. The USA's public transport is so different than most countries because so many people drive themselves. A lot of people in USA view public transport as something for poor people ( except for New York). That is how it is, that is the culture whether you wanna say it or not.

So why spend all that kind of money on something people view of poor people things and when most just drive themselves?

agreed. I hear all the time about places in europe and asia being better because everything is walking distance so they dont need cars. But I enjoy the freedom to go places. I also enjoy having actual privacy with a yard instead of the condensed apartment style living so common in other countries.

 

[NoSmilez]

How many kids in Japan have a car?
You have to take into account the different culture before you feel embarrassed.

When did you go to High School?
When I went to High School, most of the cars in the parking lot were from the students. The USA's public transport is so different than most countries because so many people drive themselves. A lot of people in USA view public transport as something for poor people ( except for New York). That is how it is, that is the culture whether you wanna say it or not.

So why spend all that kind of money on something people view of poor people things and when most just drive themselves?

You keep thinking of Japan but it really is the rest of the world. You are referring to light rail for local transportation. You are telling me the big cities in America don't need a revamp in their light rail even if you don't need it in your area. Do you drive everywhere? When do you fly?

It is also embarrassing that LA cannot be connected to SF. There is no demand?