I think it's because in the U.S absolutely anyone can tie up this stuff in the court systems for years. There are a lot of environmentalists who have been working overtime to stop this thing. For example: https://sacramento.cbslocal.com/2018/10/24/high-speed-rail-l... . There are seven environmental lawsuits against this thing. How much do you think the legal bills are? There will likely be many more.
Edit: There are a couple of regularly glitchy things about how American government works. They are:
#1 : Public Employees Unions who negotiate with themselves for sweet pension deals.
#2 : Suits against various government agencies by individuals that wind up being paid for by taxpayers. For example, school districts getting sued for something a janitor did and then taxpayers having to pay for it as if they were a private business and the taxpayer is the owner.
#3 : Environmental lawsuits to stop government infrastructure projects.
Are these environmental lawsuits really about protecting the environment (fighting climate change) or are they NIMBY lawsuits taking advantage of environmental laws/ordinances? In general, I would expect environmentalists to be among the major proponents of high speed rail, with the goal of getting more cars off the freeways.
This calls to mind the Faculty of Environment at my university, whose primary focus is on the urban planning degree program. Urban planning as a rule seems to be all about politics, stakeholders, and NIMBYism; not so much about fighting climate change.
> as if they were a private business and the taxpayer is the owner.
Theoretically that's the case. Practically, the taxpayer ends up owning the downsides, and the government nomenklatura ends up owning the upsides. If you have stock in the company that does that, you can sell. If you have government like that, you can vote for another government, but somehow people never do.
The California HSR has a lot of problems not matched in Taiwan.
Firstly, once you get from San Jose to Bakersfield, then what? We don't have good public transit in LA, much less to Bakersfield. But even if the train went all the way to Union Station in Los Angeles, you'd still need to rent a car to get anywhere useful, or take Uber/Lyft. And same thing on the other end. What happens when you get to San Jose? You still need a car or another slow train.
If you want to get from San Francisco to Disneyland via HSR, the entire trip would probably take you about six hours with all the train changes and car rides and waiting. You could do the drive in six hours too and then have your car at the other end.
Even today, if I want to visit my parents in the suburbs of LA coming from the suburbs of San Jose, I can make the drive in five hours, or spend five hours getting there by plane, assuming someone picks me up at the other end. The only reason I fly is if I happen to be going somewhere right near the airport or it will be rush hour at one end or another when I arrive because I don't have scheduling flexibility.
Secondly, the original proposal was to build Stockton to Fresno first. That would be the least used section of the line. Not a lot of people move between Stockton and Fresno. The train would be bankrupt before it ever got to phase two. At least they finally changed their mind on that, but not for a much better route.
To be remotely viable, they need to build the most trafficked parts first -- San Jose to Stockton and Bakersfield to Los Angeles. But even those lines would still suffer from problem one unless/until the local transit was vastly improved.
I would love to see a viable HSR in California, but the current proposal is not that.
Let's build up our local transit first in LA and the Bay Area so that when we connect them with a high speed rail, the rail is actually useful.
This argument just doesn't make sense. You can make the exact point about airports as well.
What's the point of an airport? It is hard to get there, you have to rent a car, parking is expensive, too much trafic, busses are not that often... etc... etc..
Build the train, and have stations close to downtown, while local government can start/extend local transportation as well.
Ideally you have both local and inter-urban rail at the same time, but if you don't, then you have to start somewhere. It is harder to build a major station, then several small tram station. Start with the harder part, and let the local government fill out the smaller parts.
The beauty of the train, that it can get very close to downtown, or even in the center of it with minimal disruption (if built underground).
You just can't do that with an airport.
We don't have good public transit in LA, much less to Bakersfield. But even if the train went all the way to Union Station in Los Angeles, you'd still need to rent a car to get anywhere useful, or take Uber/Lyft. And same thing on the other end.
Could that not be a chicken and egg issue? There's no reason to build bus lines to a nonexistent train station. And without the attractive high-speed train option, who's going to take these buses in meantime? Sounds like the train could be a catalyst.
There really is no reason picking up a rental needs to be as time consuming as it is (could be dropped off like an Uber near to the station) and I’m amazed there isn’t a version of Uber that combines short hops from public transport somewhere timed for when the train arrives. These problems are actually opportunities in my opinion, I’m surprised Uber isn’t onto them...
HSR failed in California largely because building effective mass transit is a secondary goal. If you look at the route, and how the process unfolded, the focus was mostly on who was going to get paid, and helping out political friends. In the US, large transit projects are mostly about pork barrel politics and spending, and if something actually usable comes out of it, then that was a great but secondary effect. If you look at how other countries build transit, politics is more subdued and the goal is to actually build a functional system. Republicans block most transit projects as it is antithetical to their political views, and the Democrats uses it as a social spending policy and political handouts largely ignoring the needs of an actual transit system.
Basically, US politics just doesn't care to build things properly because the incentives are totally off.
I think any talk about HSRs in the US should be able to explain US highways. American highway system is arguably one of the best in the world - it's also a gigantic government project, and it's constantly being extended.
So how come America, with its proven track record of great highways, is totally impotent with high speed rails? The answer can't be just "American government doesn't work" or "the country is too big." Irrational mistrust against railways?
> American highway system is arguably one of the best in the world
No, I'd say the German Autobahn system is the best in the world, followed by France (expensive) then UK, before USA.
USA is good because they tend to go to central cities, where European motorways deliver to a ring road. You can commute to work on a US motorway, but between cities they aren't special.
Lobbying is another problem. For example, the Koch brothers have been involved in lobbying against (and placing public advertisements against) local public transportation improvements in a number of cities because it will hurt their oil industry companies and investments.
1. The highways are such good competition that they make the already-dubious capital and operating cost picture of passenger rail even worse.
2. The US has the best freight and logistics rail system in the world. Existing rail right of way favors freight uses at the expense of passenger trains, which makes the passenger trains even less palatable. This is a feedback loop, where in turn rail ridership is low and gets even less resource share.
It’s because we already have highways and our car culture is hard to change. Highways were also originally built for national defense with the economic benefits as a secondary force. Defense projects traditionally get tons of funding in the US.
Convincing a generation that witnessed two world wars to back a massive defense project wasn’t difficult.
That's a nonsequitur. The California coast is pretty dense, the rest of the state has large amounts of empty space and national parks. Nobody would build a high-speed rail through Yosemite or Death Valley.
The total area of the state isn't too relevant, since California isn't exactly proposing to build HSR to Eureka or Redding.
It's true that California's project is larger-scale, but by 2x: Taiwan has a single 200-mile HSR line, and California is trying to build a single 400-mile line.
Most of Taiwan is fairly mountainous and empty. Most of the population is in a few cities (Kaohsiung
Taichung
Tainan
Taipei
Taoyuan). It's enough to connect them with high-speed trains, and that's what happened.
Side observation, non-related but was brought up in the article:
"Taiwan is a far poorer place than California — with median household income just one-fourth of ours — but still it managed to afford high-speed rail."
The author seems to be ignorant of some context when describing Taiwan in this way -- I learned recently that wages in Taiwan were artificially and structurally depressed in order to enable a competitive export economy. Taiwan is actually not a palpably poorer place except maybe in an absolute dollar sense. Taipei has top notch infrastructure, superior to every large U.S. city in my view (I've visited and seen for myself) The highways are beautiful. They don't skimp on infra spend.
Notwithstanding the fact that median household income is rarely good indication of how "poor" a place is, especially when comparing across countries because of local cost of living assumptions.
If we compare poverty rates, Taiwan's is 1.78% whereas California's is 18.2%.
Taiwan's GDP per capita (PPP) -- not household income -- was $53k in 2018. California's was $66k in 2016. Not that different.
Looks like the author was trying to use a bit of rhetorical sleight of hand there to make his point.
1. It resulted from the era of rapid economic growth.
2. East Asian countries generally value the greater good for all more.
3. There was no stereotype against train travel, and having HSRs was generally considered as a national pride.
Nowadays, it's also difficult to do any large scale infrastructure project in Taiwan, because the economy stagnates and the two-party political system is kinda gridlocked .
The real issue is that gas is too cheap in the US. Everywhere else, except oil rich middle east, gas is expensive enough to discourage people from driving everywhere. They end up taking public transport. In US driving almost always comes out cheaper unless the distance is too great to be convenient to drive.
Simply put, even if all the environmental / lobbying / no-car-at-the-destination issues were resolved, the distances of California (and population densities) would still make it economically challenging to have HSR a slam dunk compared to flying.
HSR breaks even with flying at about _200-300 miles_ journey. That is, if the planned journey is within that range, for similar pricing, people will choose 50-50 rail over flying (in aggregate, in Europe, Asia). New York to Washington/Boston distances. Greater than that, flying has the advantage. (People will incrementally choose flying the longer the distance). This takes into account typical traffic, getting to the airport, check-in, all that stuff.
San Francisco to Los Angeles is 380 miles. Add to that the destination rental car issues, etc. And we haven't even talked pricing yet.
Even if you got that all out of the way, flying is still often better than rail. Even on Tokyo-Osaka route, one of the pinnacles of HSR, there are almost comparable flights serving the route as shinkansen.
I know we all wish for high speed rail as a demonstration of our technological prowess. But in recent years even I've soured on it for California, given how incompetent we seem to be on top of rail's structural disadvantage in the state. The money would bring far more benefits if spent elsewhere to solve our traffic, commute, suburban issues.
The route chosen for CA high speed rail guaranteed failure. SF out to the Central Valley and then in to LA meant a really expensive project which would result in a slow train. This single route through everywhere was necessary for political, particularly Congressional, backing. I'm glad Gavin Newsom cancelled it and I still want HSR. They should start with SLO to San Diego and then a Central Valley line. Finally, connect SFO (yup, San Francisco International Airport) to SLO.
It's not just California, it's every state and every city in the US. People have an aversion to public works projects often crying about taxes or how the service is useless or not good enough. We have a political system where one major party (out of two) decries any public spending that might help people who aren't millionaires/billionaires/corporations.
Is it any wonder when you have evil groups of people spending hundreds of millions of dollars to tell people that they should vote against their interests?
Fund rail like we do highways. Establish an agency to incrementally purchase ROW or track rights and incrementally upgrade services. And to tie all these services together into a cohesive network.
This would mean first all the lines in NoCal and separately SoCal would reach speeds of 120mph, electrified, with regular high quality service. That first supports the massive need for transit within these separate mega regions. You’d have a fast enough train from Sacramento to San Jose. Or from San Diego to LA. So on. This already provides good economic benefits.
Second, starting a rail renaissance this way around means you have laid out everything you need to get support for the 180+ mph HSR line that would later link these two networks into one statewide network.
At that point you would not only have support from the public because it’s obvious what the benefits will be, but you also have all the construction and project management experience built up over the years of buying/fixing/upgrading lines in these northern and southern networks.
And instead of this inside out (outside in?), stand-alone plan we had with CAHSR. You now all the way through are making peoples lives better AS YOU GO with your capital investments.
The Central Valley construction right now for example is ridiculous as everyone knows. (We know it was done because there was federal money for it, but still.)
Imagine instead that same capital expenditure had gone to making the Sacramento to San Jose Capitol Corridor route a high quality electrified 120mph line? It would’ve had immediate economic benefits and people would ride the trains and be like holy shit give me more of this now!!
As an outsider from Europe: what I see that americans hate any publicly funded projects. "If it doesn't benefit me why should I pay taxes for that?" See the whole healthcare system. "I'm healthy, never sick why should I pay the cancer treatment of those who are obese and smoke all the time?" That's totally different in Europe. Not just in the nordic countries but generally everywhere. So the same applies for public transport and such as well. Also add on the top of that the lowest gas prices in the western world https://www.globalpetrolprices.com/gasoline_prices/
> As an outsider from Europe: what I see that americans hate any publicly funded projects. [...]
America has become a rat-ship. It is filled with folks that have amazing ideas of how to spend other people's money. Don't be disdainful when the people whose money you have pissed away start getting upset at "grand ideas". We see it as more of the same mostly: corruption, shitty-quality infrastructure, and handouts ("jobs" programs). Rarely do these "grand ideas" translate into real benefits over the long term.
Answer: cars and highways. It's really hard to spend a lot of money replacing something that already works, even if it works really, really badly. High speed rail will only happen with a federal mandate.
>While California established an underfinanced government authority to lead the project, Taiwan’s biggest businesses came together to create a private corporation.
I used to be more in favor of CA HSR, but I read an argument that said cities are congested, rural I-5 isn't, so we'd be better off building a second BART tunnel and electrifying Caltrain.
[+] [-] narrator|6 years ago|reply
Edit: There are a couple of regularly glitchy things about how American government works. They are:
#1 : Public Employees Unions who negotiate with themselves for sweet pension deals.
#2 : Suits against various government agencies by individuals that wind up being paid for by taxpayers. For example, school districts getting sued for something a janitor did and then taxpayers having to pay for it as if they were a private business and the taxpayer is the owner.
#3 : Environmental lawsuits to stop government infrastructure projects.
[+] [-] chongli|6 years ago|reply
This calls to mind the Faculty of Environment at my university, whose primary focus is on the urban planning degree program. Urban planning as a rule seems to be all about politics, stakeholders, and NIMBYism; not so much about fighting climate change.
[+] [-] atomi|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] smsm42|6 years ago|reply
Theoretically that's the case. Practically, the taxpayer ends up owning the downsides, and the government nomenklatura ends up owning the upsides. If you have stock in the company that does that, you can sell. If you have government like that, you can vote for another government, but somehow people never do.
[+] [-] webninja|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jedberg|6 years ago|reply
Firstly, once you get from San Jose to Bakersfield, then what? We don't have good public transit in LA, much less to Bakersfield. But even if the train went all the way to Union Station in Los Angeles, you'd still need to rent a car to get anywhere useful, or take Uber/Lyft. And same thing on the other end. What happens when you get to San Jose? You still need a car or another slow train.
If you want to get from San Francisco to Disneyland via HSR, the entire trip would probably take you about six hours with all the train changes and car rides and waiting. You could do the drive in six hours too and then have your car at the other end.
Even today, if I want to visit my parents in the suburbs of LA coming from the suburbs of San Jose, I can make the drive in five hours, or spend five hours getting there by plane, assuming someone picks me up at the other end. The only reason I fly is if I happen to be going somewhere right near the airport or it will be rush hour at one end or another when I arrive because I don't have scheduling flexibility.
Secondly, the original proposal was to build Stockton to Fresno first. That would be the least used section of the line. Not a lot of people move between Stockton and Fresno. The train would be bankrupt before it ever got to phase two. At least they finally changed their mind on that, but not for a much better route.
To be remotely viable, they need to build the most trafficked parts first -- San Jose to Stockton and Bakersfield to Los Angeles. But even those lines would still suffer from problem one unless/until the local transit was vastly improved.
I would love to see a viable HSR in California, but the current proposal is not that.
Let's build up our local transit first in LA and the Bay Area so that when we connect them with a high speed rail, the rail is actually useful.
[+] [-] ardit33|6 years ago|reply
What's the point of an airport? It is hard to get there, you have to rent a car, parking is expensive, too much trafic, busses are not that often... etc... etc..
Build the train, and have stations close to downtown, while local government can start/extend local transportation as well.
Ideally you have both local and inter-urban rail at the same time, but if you don't, then you have to start somewhere. It is harder to build a major station, then several small tram station. Start with the harder part, and let the local government fill out the smaller parts.
The beauty of the train, that it can get very close to downtown, or even in the center of it with minimal disruption (if built underground). You just can't do that with an airport.
[+] [-] jseliger|6 years ago|reply
Have you used LA rail recently? It's a lot more functional than it used to be: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Los_Angeles_Metro_Rail although it still has a ways to go.
[+] [-] toastal|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] acollins1331|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] andy_ppp|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jorblumesea|6 years ago|reply
Basically, US politics just doesn't care to build things properly because the incentives are totally off.
Vox has a pretty good breakdown: https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/2/15/18224717/c...
[+] [-] yongjik|6 years ago|reply
So how come America, with its proven track record of great highways, is totally impotent with high speed rails? The answer can't be just "American government doesn't work" or "the country is too big." Irrational mistrust against railways?
[+] [-] rb808|6 years ago|reply
No, I'd say the German Autobahn system is the best in the world, followed by France (expensive) then UK, before USA.
USA is good because they tend to go to central cities, where European motorways deliver to a ring road. You can commute to work on a US motorway, but between cities they aren't special.
[+] [-] bonestamp2|6 years ago|reply
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/19/climate/koch-brothers-pub...
[+] [-] mlyle|6 years ago|reply
2. The US has the best freight and logistics rail system in the world. Existing rail right of way favors freight uses at the expense of passenger trains, which makes the passenger trains even less palatable. This is a feedback loop, where in turn rail ridership is low and gets even less resource share.
[+] [-] almost_usual|6 years ago|reply
Convincing a generation that witnessed two world wars to back a massive defense project wasn’t difficult.
[+] [-] all2|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aodin|6 years ago|reply
* Taiwan, area 36,197 km^2, population density 651 / km^2 [1]
* California, area 403,932 km^2, population density 97 / km^2 [2]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Taiwan
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_states_and_territories...
[+] [-] diego|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] _delirium|6 years ago|reply
It's true that California's project is larger-scale, but by 2x: Taiwan has a single 200-mile HSR line, and California is trying to build a single 400-mile line.
[+] [-] Loq|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wenc|6 years ago|reply
"Taiwan is a far poorer place than California — with median household income just one-fourth of ours — but still it managed to afford high-speed rail."
The author seems to be ignorant of some context when describing Taiwan in this way -- I learned recently that wages in Taiwan were artificially and structurally depressed in order to enable a competitive export economy. Taiwan is actually not a palpably poorer place except maybe in an absolute dollar sense. Taipei has top notch infrastructure, superior to every large U.S. city in my view (I've visited and seen for myself) The highways are beautiful. They don't skimp on infra spend.
Notwithstanding the fact that median household income is rarely good indication of how "poor" a place is, especially when comparing across countries because of local cost of living assumptions.
If we compare poverty rates, Taiwan's is 1.78% whereas California's is 18.2%.
Taiwan's GDP per capita (PPP) -- not household income -- was $53k in 2018. California's was $66k in 2016. Not that different.
Looks like the author was trying to use a bit of rhetorical sleight of hand there to make his point.
[+] [-] zachguo|6 years ago|reply
2. East Asian countries generally value the greater good for all more.
3. There was no stereotype against train travel, and having HSRs was generally considered as a national pride.
Nowadays, it's also difficult to do any large scale infrastructure project in Taiwan, because the economy stagnates and the two-party political system is kinda gridlocked .
[+] [-] monster_group|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] supernova87a|6 years ago|reply
HSR breaks even with flying at about _200-300 miles_ journey. That is, if the planned journey is within that range, for similar pricing, people will choose 50-50 rail over flying (in aggregate, in Europe, Asia). New York to Washington/Boston distances. Greater than that, flying has the advantage. (People will incrementally choose flying the longer the distance). This takes into account typical traffic, getting to the airport, check-in, all that stuff.
San Francisco to Los Angeles is 380 miles. Add to that the destination rental car issues, etc. And we haven't even talked pricing yet.
Even if you got that all out of the way, flying is still often better than rail. Even on Tokyo-Osaka route, one of the pinnacles of HSR, there are almost comparable flights serving the route as shinkansen.
I know we all wish for high speed rail as a demonstration of our technological prowess. But in recent years even I've soured on it for California, given how incompetent we seem to be on top of rail's structural disadvantage in the state. The money would bring far more benefits if spent elsewhere to solve our traffic, commute, suburban issues.
[+] [-] shalmanese|6 years ago|reply
Madrid - Barcelona is basically the same distance as SF - LA and used to be the busiest air route in the world and is now 63% rail since the 2.5 hr HSR got built. https://www.globalrailwayreview.com/news/66620/barcelona-mad...
While there are still flights from Tokyo to Osaka, it is now 85% rail market share. https://www.railway-technology.com/features/faster-flying-hi...
[+] [-] Gibbon1|6 years ago|reply
Ever priced out a runway extension project? Know how much that costs? You have no idea.
[+] [-] CalChris|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Gibbon1|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jkw|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] throwawaytoday5|6 years ago|reply
Is it any wonder when you have evil groups of people spending hundreds of millions of dollars to tell people that they should vote against their interests?
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/19/climate/koch-brothers-pub...
[+] [-] pretendscholar|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] setpatchaddress|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] malandrew|6 years ago|reply
California is terrible at managing.
[+] [-] erentz|6 years ago|reply
This would mean first all the lines in NoCal and separately SoCal would reach speeds of 120mph, electrified, with regular high quality service. That first supports the massive need for transit within these separate mega regions. You’d have a fast enough train from Sacramento to San Jose. Or from San Diego to LA. So on. This already provides good economic benefits.
Second, starting a rail renaissance this way around means you have laid out everything you need to get support for the 180+ mph HSR line that would later link these two networks into one statewide network.
At that point you would not only have support from the public because it’s obvious what the benefits will be, but you also have all the construction and project management experience built up over the years of buying/fixing/upgrading lines in these northern and southern networks.
And instead of this inside out (outside in?), stand-alone plan we had with CAHSR. You now all the way through are making peoples lives better AS YOU GO with your capital investments.
The Central Valley construction right now for example is ridiculous as everyone knows. (We know it was done because there was federal money for it, but still.)
Imagine instead that same capital expenditure had gone to making the Sacramento to San Jose Capitol Corridor route a high quality electrified 120mph line? It would’ve had immediate economic benefits and people would ride the trains and be like holy shit give me more of this now!!
[+] [-] haunter|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] SamReidHughes|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] GhettoMaestro|6 years ago|reply
America has become a rat-ship. It is filled with folks that have amazing ideas of how to spend other people's money. Don't be disdainful when the people whose money you have pissed away start getting upset at "grand ideas". We see it as more of the same mostly: corruption, shitty-quality infrastructure, and handouts ("jobs" programs). Rarely do these "grand ideas" translate into real benefits over the long term.
[+] [-] unknown|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] ksbakan|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] larrysalibra|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] perspective1|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Merrill|6 years ago|reply
http://www.twba.org.tw/en/Report.htm
https://www.americanbar.org/news/abanews/aba-news-archives/2...
[+] [-] justinzollars|6 years ago|reply
>While California established an underfinanced government authority to lead the project, Taiwan’s biggest businesses came together to create a private corporation.
It should be private.
[+] [-] dehrmann|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Gibbon1|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]