” not a single foot of track has been laid.”
This is the GOOD news. It means there may be hope for stopping this most stupid of stupidicisms.
Mark my words: Texas will complete its high speed rail line from Dallas to Houston, all with private funding, before California even starts testing.
Project costs for this one, 119 mile stretch of track through the relatively empty Central Valley have topped $69 billion …That is $580 million per mile. $110K per foot. You have done well, Darth Moonbeam.
FOLLOW THE $$$$$!!!LA to Vegas makes far more sense to me anyway than the LA to SF route. What the heck is the need to go through the central Valley?
On the other hand, if you went to Vegas first and preserved the Central Valley route you would be half way or more to the valley and have a sense of how it would work with a paying route to Vegas first.
The whole project should be OBE anyway with the tube project that promises what, 700mph. CA has more money than good sense except in this case their dreams are mythical reality before the money has been appropriated from the people.
“Project costs for this one, 119 mile stretch of track through the relatively empty Central Valley have topped $69 billion, with only a fraction of those funds appropriated. The high speed rail authority has only purchased half the land necessary to complete the first leg “
I mean, this is an exercise in imagining large numbers. For those who do not know, the Central Valley of CA is not Los Angeles or San Francisco. It is more like Kansas. It is for the most part vast farmland, good farmland, as long as there is water for irrigation...which is no certainty. But it is empty land, 97% of it.
So, never mind that ALL projects in CA are required to underestimate their build costs by at least 60%....
This 119 miles is far and away the easiest segment of this project to acquire land for and build. The segment over the Teton pass north of LA being costlier and the segments within and thru LA or SF metro being astronomically freaking more expensive to acquire ROW and build (Central Valley segment should require some bridges for sure, but nothing like the bridge & tunnel engineering that will be required in more urban areas.
So if this 119 mile segment is $69 billion @ roughly 30% of the total line length then the whole thing will be 10/3rds that, or $230 billion and that is perforce underestimated by 60%, then the whole project cost can be estimated at 10/4 * $230 billion or $575 billion. Except I am not accounting for the higher cost of buying ROW in SF and LA over the cheapest land in CA other than the desert.
Anyone who thinks this is not a trillon dollar project, Jerry, is a flaming idiot.
Most likely they found some endangered species of the spiked nosed Californian horn beetle.
The folks who pushed this are most of the same folks who didn’t want to open up drilling in 2008 because it would take ten years to get the oil.
Oh NOOOOOOOOOOOOEZ
WWSFNND ???
What will San Fran Nan Nan do ???
And another salty tear falls into Willie Green’s beer.
We need to spend that sickening amount of money on water for the state. No one will ride that stupid train; it won’t be a high speed train; it won’t go between L.A. And San Francisco; this Browndoggle has to be stopped.
Don’t celebrate so fast. The state of California has been scheming to move the money from High Speed Rail to the Delta Tunnels Water Project.
They’re still going to blow the money but on a completely different wasteful project.
http://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-bullet-fight-suspended-20160326-story.html
“California’s bullet train dodged a major threat Friday as critics delayed a proposed ballot measure that would have taken $8 billion in high-speed rail bonds and reallocated them for water projects.”
They put the ballot measure on hold because the figured out how to do the same thing without a vote.
In 2009, newly minted President Obama came to give Florida a GREAT gift, approximately $2.40 billion to construct the Tampa to Orlando high-speed rail line with an anticipated cost of $2.65 billion. Why was Florida so lucky? Because there had been a 10+ year previous effort that had setup right-of-ways and gotten a degree of public acceptance.
By 2011, when new Governor Scott ran on a platform to cancel the project and then did so and then withstood a legal challenge about his authority to do so, the cost factor versus the expected revenues was already severely under question. While various city and other ‘interested parties’ were convinced that they could shield the taxpayers from cost over-runs, articles like this show that this was a pipe-dream like many others from the opium dens of government projects!
I would like to point out that the exact same people who believe high speed rail is feasible seem to believe that the concept of a much simpler project, a border wall, if darned near impossible.
“The Simpsons” monorail episode covered this ground pretty thoroughly.
69 Billion dollars could have bought Southwest airlines a lot of airliners.
Add a THIRD LANE to I-5 for a billion or so (if that) and call it a day.