This high-speed rail project is a warning for the US
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- Опубликовано: 16 май 2024
- California's "train to nowhere" shows the challenges ahead.
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In 2008, voters in California passed Proposition 1A, giving the state the go-ahead to build a high-speed rail line. In theory, it was a great idea. The train would whisk passengers between San Francisco and Los Angeles in less than 3 hours. Eventually it would also link San Diego and Sacramento. It was estimated that it would take until 2020 to complete.
But now it’s 2022, and so far California’s high-speed rail line is just a few concrete bridges and viaducts strewn across the rural Central Valley. Much of the plan had to be changed, redesigned, or even abandoned all together. Now the project is decades late and way over budget. And that isn’t just California’s problem. Because among the many factors that plagued the project, several are baked into the power structure of the US itself.
Watch the video above to understand just how difficult the US makes it to build infrastructure like California’s high-speed rail line.
Chapters:
California’s plan: 00:00
Local control: 1:48
Federal funding: 3:45
Lawsuits: 5:09
The experience gap: 6:37
Further reading and sources:
You can find more of Ethan Elkind’s high-speed rail research and analysis here:
www.ethanelkind.com/category/...
And we highly recommend reading Ralph Vartabedian and Tim Sheehan’s reporting to learn more about how this project has affected communities on the ground:
www.latimes.com/california/st...
www.fresnobee.com/news/local/...
The California-High Speed Rail Authority’s 2022 business plan was a key source for mapping the routes in this video:
hsr.ca.gov/wp-content/uploads...
Older business plans, like this one from 2005, helped us understand which alternate routes were being considered before the 2008 vote:
hsr.ca.gov/wp-content/uploads...
This is the 2015 CEQA lawsuit report we refer to in the video:
issuu.com/hollandknight/docs/...
Overall infrastructure spending in the US is an important part of this story, and the Peter G. Peterson Foundation had a lot of helpful resources. The video uses data from this report in charts on state and federal spending: www.pgpf.org/blog/2020/06/sta...
Exactly how much the federal government ended up spending on this project and when can be hard to pin down, but funding agreement documents like the ones below are publicly available and very useful:
hsr.ca.gov/wp-content/uploads...
hsr.ca.gov/wp-content/uploads...
We also found this funding timeline from the Eno Center for Transportation extremely helpful in understanding the funding and cost projections related to CAHSR:
www.enotrans.org/article/time...
A key part of this story is understanding how far behind its peers the US is in building high-speed rail. This fact sheet on global HSR from the Environmental and Energy Study Institute offers valuable insights on that:
www.eesi.org/papers/view/fact...
And this 2013 report from the California Rail Foundation helped us understand some of the political compromises made in the planning of this project: calrailfoundation.org/HSR_file...
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Thanks for watching. This week on the channel has been all about power in the US - who has power, how they wield it, and what it explains about how this country works. Check out the other videos in the series here: ruclips.net/p/PLJ8cMiYb3G5d6JhWSEt8ybDrwMEUfJJq0
This project never made sense. Around SF you have three Airports, SFO, SJ, Oakland. In LA, you have LAX, Burbank, etc. Fares are so (were) cheap, a train can't compete. Further, once you arrive, you need to have access to local transportation to get you to your destination. I once lived around Sacramento and had a project in Bakersfield. There would have been Amtrak, but there was neither a cost nor time saving nor convenient schedule. I also had a Project at Universal. It is impossible to beat a flight from SFM to Burbank with a high speed train.
That project never made any sense.
To everyone reading, please don't take Vox's account on "how this country works" at face value. Watch other videos on these subjects for a little balance. Vox is completely in bed with the Democrat party and the far left in the US.
What is a solution? Thank you for showcasing the problems but it’s just screaming into the wind if you don’t offer any solutions. The discussion to fix something has to start with a statement of the problem and a solution proposal, imo.
@@acastsaca the solution is to reform CEQA to make it harder for NIMBYs to use and also to empower regional authorities to streamline projects.
EDIT: also to have the federal government’s allocation process change to fund projects on a long time horizon. Idk how to tangibly implement this tho
You shouldn't have laid off Jenna from Polygon
The problem isn't HSR, the problem is politicians who think transportation money should instead be used to widen highways and build toll roads and freeways.
Because automakers donate to their campaigns.
We should build both
@@skyethehusky2583 Automakers don't want high-speed rail in the US. It would cut into "their" market.
I wouldn't be surprised if some of those politicians had stocks in car manufacturers or road construction, and received money directly from both regularly.
Automakers donate tons of money to politicians to make sure it doesn't happen. Another reason why money shouldn't be in politics
As a German with a functioning high-speed train connection through the whole country it is just astonishing how incapable the US is.
Instead of worrying about how incapable the US is, how about you worry about Germany funding Russia, and its dependance on Russian oil.
u can blame the local governments not the federal
There aren't many routes that make sense for trains in the US. Most Americans would rather save time and fly anyway.
In Poland, the train connections can be a little funky but we are still investing in better railroads and faster trains year by year and I don't imagine not having a way to travel since I became a car owner only recently. I could travel by train to middle school, to my then girlfriend and now wife's place from both my hometown and school location, and for some vacations. Americans should get a grip and make sure this goes throught.
We managed to do it even in Spain.
A train "to nowhere" was how the trains going to now Brooklyn and Queens (NewYork) were called back then, a few years later Brooklyn and Queens became huge boroughs with millions of residents, thanks to the trains
Thats the whole point, if you build a rail network, it will get used and people start to live near its stations, so the returns are good and not just money either.
Literally build it and they will come. This video is not the best on the subject
uh, the distance is quite a bit shorter.
Brooklyn and Queens were already big when compared to Manhattan. Connecting two large population areas that are near, is different than when they are far.
@@richardjames6947 When those rail lines were built, Brooklyn and Queens were "nowhere". CAHSR is literally building in the areas where the entire population of the state is located. The system will connect 9 of the 10 largest cities in the state. What the trolls call the "nowhere" part of the system is actually home to 6.5 million people concentrated almost entirely in five metro areas that all have a stop on the line!
Only someone who is not from California could ever believe that Fresno and Bakersfield are "nowhere". They have 1 million people each in their respective metros. This is asinine!
The fact people call those trains to nowhere tells you how little people understand city planning. Everywhere governments in the world build rail roads to nowhere. But then they start building commercial/residential building around those areas. That's how you develop public transportation. It's called city planning.
In the US, "planning" your cities is considered COMMUNISM. China is able to build hundreds brand new cities from the ground up and connect them with subways inside the city and high-speed rail between the cities.
Bruh. Americans don’t want planing or anything….unless the oligarchy/the owners and masters want it and allow the plebs to want and do it.
Exactly. For example, it was only after railroads come to L.A. that it went from a small pueblo to a city. If that hadn't happen who knows where L.A. would be now.
The majority of the train line goes through farmland. It already has caused severe damage in the current construction line. Building cities will only further damage California's farmland and environment.
@@rfhirsch The amount of farmland affected by the actual HSR line is minimal compared to all the farmland that currently exists. It has not caused severe damage. CA HSR has gone to great effort to minimize the affect of the line to farmers and residents. It's one of the reasons it's taken so long to build. And, in the aggregate, it will be better for the environment because it will take polluting cars off the road and older diesel trains that currently run between LA and SF.
They won't be building new cities. The cities that currently exist will finally get more economic development due to the HSR coming through their town. These cities in the Central Valley have long been ignored in that aspect and have struggled for decades. It has long been one of the poorest areas in the state.
US: Builds roads in every square inch of space they can find, in every direction. No opposition.
Also US: Tries to build a railroad in a very specific path. Massive opposition. Claims of environment destruction.
There was actually a lot of opposition to thruways, but since it was the 50s and 60s, the government just steamrolled over it. (no pun intended)
@@A350flyernyc My city is in the process of building a new ring highway, they've faced opposition but still ended up bulldozing neighborhoods.
Well companies can't sell you a big shiny new train every few years can they? Hold on, Ford is coming with a surprise briefcase full of something great!
It's simple, it's about 💰, they make more by making the people buy fuel. Busses, trains, planes ect..true make billions, but just a drop compared to fuel. You can control the market with fuel, fuel has power attached to it.
Chesire Cat, the correct route here was down the median of I-5. It has an 80 foot wide median for 80% of the length, and the length is a lot shorter than the highway 99 route, straighter than the 99 route, and has no towns in between Tracy (its closest approach to San Francisco Bay Area) and Los Angeles.
Even if they went with that, wheel on rail is really too slow.
The plane ride only takes an hour, so if you're trying to lower the amount of traffic on that, your train should be able to do it in less than 2 hours.
The measure we voted on had it taking 2 hours 40 minutes, but in their last Business Plan, if you add up all the segment times you get over 3 hours, and if you use a realistic time for San Francisco to San Jose you get 3 hours 35 minutes.
None of this does anything to mitigate traffic on a flight that only takes 45-60 minutes.
The measure passed but I am very proud that I am a centrist Democrat who voted no. Everything that I thought was going to go wrong has gone wrong.
It's rather incredible that bus lanes are considered large transformative infrastructure projects. It's really shocking that they aren't already in place
They don't even have consistent footpaths in many places.
@@Snoop_Dugg very true and very absurd.
Most city were not built with the width to add extra lanes. Its not just paving a new lane and moving the sidewalk, you likely have to move light posts, signs, telephone poles, demolish a few buildings, change traffic patterns and signals. So when you start to look at the entire project, yah it's a large project
@@TheJttv In the parts of Europe where they've done it they've replaced a lane, not added another. If you're building a lane you might aswell build a metro line for the lower running costs.
It involves redesigning the signals, painting the line and adding cameras for enforcement. Only really the last part is expensive from a capital expenditure perspective.
@@camdened123456 in europe they dont sue projects like americans do...... just approval would likely cost millions in legal fees amd waste years
So by going through Palmdale it made the train journey from SF to LA 55% faster than the car journey instead of 60% faster but avoids the mountains, services the cities in the valley, and could provide a potential node to build off of to go to Las Vegas... seems like a decent trade off? The train journey will still be way more desirable than the car which is a win for travelers and the climate.
oh yeah its so nice being able to just hop on a train and take a nap or read a book or whatever
Yeah, even if the hypothetical time on an express train from SF to LA goes beyond the initial 3 hour estimate, it's still faster, easier and more convenient than driving. I voted for this 14 years ago and even with the setbacks, we need to establish fast and sustainable transportation more than ever.
" seems like a decent trade of"
Not at 100 billion dollars.
Not when there's a direct flight that only takes one hour
@@neutrino78x car and plane trips don't reduce carbon emissions
@@steveyoung3748
"car and plane trips don't reduce carbon emissions"
I suppose not, but zero emission cars are already available and planes don't emit that much. It's the same as driving a car that gets over 100 MPG.
from wikipedia "Fuel economy in aircraft"
Aircraft: Boeing 737 MAX-9
First Flown: 2017
Passenger: 180
FUEL EFFICIENCY PER SEAT: 2.02 L/100 km (116 mpg‑US)
It makes a lot more sense to develop lower emission aircraft than it does to spend 100 billion building something that goes half the speed.
Even with maglev you can't replace this flight, really, since there's room to go directly from San Jose nor SF. There's geographic limitations here, there's a reason we fly.
But going down I-5 makes things a lot faster. From Tracy (the closest I-5 gets to the Bay Area) you have 240 miles of unobstructed high speed right of way right down I-5, so that's 1.38 hours at 173 mph (it's actually over two hours because you had to get to Tracy from SF/SJ). If you're using wheel on rail you would have to go a little slower through various tunnels in "the grapevine", then you're going downhill (these things apply to the 99 route through Techachapi Pass also, you have to dig many tunnels there too, just like they did in the 1870s), but once you clear that area you can go a little faster.
So I think you can do it in under 2 hrs 40 min with wheel on rail if you go down I-5 but just barely. It would be better to maglev down I-5, then you'd EASILY do it in 2 hours. 300 mph average, that's 48 minutes to cover the 240 mile straight run. But that would probably be more expensive, and we've seen how little respect is given to The People's Money by CAHSRA.
As currently planned it would be about four hours. Each of these segments takes about an hour: SF to SJ, SJ to Merced (this one they made a big mistake on too, instead of using existing right of way to go SJ to Tracy, which is only about 70 miles, they want to go 116 miles including a lot of tunneling, under highway 152), Merced to Bakersfield, then you still have 156 miles from Bakersfield to LA Union Station.
There's a good PDF written by a rail professional about this, if you Google "A Rail Professional Speaks Out on the HSRA Plan", click on the first link, then find that phrase in the web page it takes you to and you can get the article. He says the same things many of us have been saying about CAHSR for years. I wish I could link but RUclips will eat my comment if I do.
Bottom line, four hours doesn't replace a one hour flight and therefore it isn't worth it to spend 100 billion on it. There's existing track from SF to SJ down to San Diego, it avoids the mountains by going west along the coast (it was also built in the 1800s originally). They're working on making that trip faster as we speak, using existing budgets. It would also take about four hours, but can be done with far less money.
Good Video but I do want to point out a few things about the route selection arguments. In the Bay Area, the current route through Gilroy was selected because of a few reasons. 1) The current route benefits San Jose, which actually has larger population than San Francisco. A lot of people commute to the Silicon Valley from those Central Valley cities every day. 2) If we choose the more northern approach by-passing San Jose, we'd need to build a new bridge or tunnel across the San Francisco Bay which will be extremely expensive. 3) The current route share the tracks with the electrified CalTrain system which further bring down the cost. For the "detour" thru Palmdale, I think the main reason is avoid the steep mountainous areas along I-5. Additional benefits are serving commuters travelling from Palmdale to LA to work and connection to the proposed highspeed rail to Las Vegas. In summary, I think the current route selection is not totally about gaining support and votes from the local governments. They are trying build a system that serves multiple purposes, not just connecting SF and LA in the shortest possible way. This decision may or may not be a good one but since the decision has already been made, it is too late to change and let's just finish it
Usually, new routes provide fast efficient ways to work and other things. People move to be near the new route, so more house building, that increases the return on investment.
I agree with you but I would add that the routes with the highest benefit and potential for making self sustaining systems should be built first.
Once they are in place and proven, build the less valuable routes.
@@barrywilliams991 I agree with you totally. However this Merced to Bakersfield section is already in construction and we can't just leave it incomplete and start building somewhere else
Alan Fisher pointed this out in his video on California HSR, but the project is actually making progress. And the countries that did do it -- France, Japan, China -- had to contend with ballooning budgets and setbacks. No one remembers them as being disasters because, once they're done, folks love them and they enjoy wide use.
I was gonna say...I saw a much more reputable channel post this same thing (Alan Fisher) critiquing another video (RealLifeLore) in high detail. Vox is missing the bigger picture for a quick buck.
Agree. Vox is just dogpiling on the California HSR for clicks.
I'm French and we still get major delays, setbacks, ballooning budgets, etc.
Every time, it's the same shitstorm.
Every time, everyone is happy when the line is opened and the money starts to flow. It's like everyone wants the positive impact but don't want to deal with the difficulties.
But in the US, the obstacles are much, MUCH bigger, such as the colossal lobbying efforts against high-speed rail by Big Oil, automakers and airlines.
Did not do too much fact-checking, only some quick googling, but the projected costs per km still seem to be so incomparable. Initial Shinkansen and TGV seems to have cost around $30 million / km (adjusted for inflation), and even the more modern tracks through the Alps seem to cost around $100 million / km.
By the time the US actually has its own high-speed rail, countries like Japan and China would probably have moved on to other tech like teleportation.
Precisely!
I don’t think China is a good example to look up to for HSR. The state-owned HSR company is $900B in debt because the government kept constructing lines with no regard to passenger numbers or viability. I’d rather this than what happened to China.
What a low information remark. Firstly, Japan is only able to afford bullet trains because the money that would otherwise go to military spending goes to domestic infrastructure instead. That’s thanks to the fact that the U.S. is the defacto military of Japan. Same goes for countries in Europe like Germany. Secondly, China is no example or model for HSR, they’re not built for passenger demand but instead for posturing, that’s why a majority of their lines are in debt. Educate yourself a bit on this topic.
@@Kevbot6000 Public Infrastructure need not earn profit to be successful. If it increases the economic activity in your country, the state can operate it using the surge in the tax revenue.
@@Kevbot6000 how much profit does the US Interstate System make? China views HSR the exact same as they do highways, as public utilities whose purpose are in spuring economic growth and increasing connectivity instead of caring about profits or losses. China intentionally builds far more infrastructure than they need now because they're building decades into the future right now, when construction costs are still low so they'll only have to spend on maintenance in the future.
US Government
Trillions of $ for building HSR: "Noooo, that's wasting alot of money."
Trillions of $ for wars and military budgets: "OH YES YES!"
Over 6 trillion for 3 stimulus packages
China has built more miles of high‐speed rail than any other country and has gone more into debt doing it. At the end of 2019, China’s state railway had nearly $850 billion worth of debt, and most of its high‐speed rail lines aren’t covering their operating costs, much less their capital costs. As a result, China is slowing the rate at which it is constructing new lines
France’s state‐owned railroad has piled up debts of more than $50 billion and has been repeatedly bailed out by the government.
Spain has built its high‐speed rail system with an availability‐payment public‐private partnership. Officially, the private partner has gone into debt by $18.5 billion.
You don't like facing reality, which is that bad actors around the world will make the world increasingly hellish to live in. They must be fought. Your failure to grasp this is the disconnect.
when this plan was announced I was barely entering middle school. I heard about when I was in high school and was excited to see the high speed rail like the ones in Japan take me from San Francisco down to LA at anytime. It's so unfortunate. I'm now 25 :\
True Americans have profound passion for luxury cars. You must be an immigrant. HSR is only needed in third world countries like mine, where majority of the people can't afford a car and has no other option other than mass transit. You people are gonna have hyperloop very soon and many other such things, so no need for HSR.
Notice how VOX didn't talk to a civil engineer here. If you look at a geographical map, it's painfully obvious why the Central Valley section was chosen: to reduce tunneling and shoring requirements along the coast.
The US has high construction costs because we have some of the best worker safety practices/laws and highest wages for skilled labor. That's the main reason this project increased cost (not schedule), not because of realignment.
Also, building a rail line with zero concern for intermediate cities is a recipe for disaster. There is a reason the Tohoku and Tokadio Shinkansen lines are so well used: because of the intermediate cities on each line. The Tohoku Shinkansen does not just serve Tokyo and Hakodate, it serves Sendai, Morioka, Fukushima, Koriyama, Utsunomiya, Hachinohe, and dozens of other smaller cities, plus connections to Yamagata, Hakodate, and Akita.
Same goes for the Tokaido Shinkansen. The line does not exist to serve just Tokyo and Osaka, but it serves Nagoya, Yokohama, Kyoto, Shizuoka, Odawara, Hamamatsu, Okazaki, and a bunch of other smaller cities.
The same is happening with California HSR: adding an additional 30 minutes to an already ridiculously fast trip if it means you can serve San Jose, Bakersfield, Fresno, Tulare/Visala, Madera, Bakersfield, Palmdale, and the cities in the greater LA area makes economic sense. Not everyone is traveling between city centre LA to City Centre San Francisco. The proposed alignment also allows the future project to better serve Sacramento and San Diego, which also are significant population centers that have a lot of traffic between LA and San Francisco.
Looks like the whole video was made by Vox to bash the federalism, local governments and decentralization, and promote an idea of how centralization is "better" because it allows to implement gigantic projects without much consideration to small details, smoothly running over small people and communities without much resistance, like USSR or China did.
Great take!
It's a bit more like the German ICE Philosophy of connecting the big with medium and important smaller cities to broaden the positive impact of a high speed rail line at the expense of thravel time instead of the french model focused on connecting mainly the biggest cities and being competitive to air travel
Love this comment! This is a trash video IMO that is only spreading bad publicity and misinformation about a much needed alternative form of transit in California.
No form of transit is needed *regardless of cost* and *regardless of whether it's competitive*. Remember, the original goal was to lure people away from air travel. That means you need to get from L.A. to S.F. in about 3 hours. Nobody on a business trip is going to want to stop off in Merced just to shop around.
I wanna add that people always forget that building HSR in France or Japan wasn't easy either. Costs skyrocketed too and people were skeptical of the project overall. But now that we have it, nobody thinks about the difficulties anymore... except when we have to build a new HSR line.
Exactly! Which is why CAHSR is so important. Seeing it and experiencing it in America will grow American support for high speed rail throughout the country
Yup. Same even for much smaller scale projects:
When Amsterdam got a new metroline running straight through the center there were (decade) long delays, it went way over budget, there were even some houses damaged due to construction mistakes. Everyone yelled "it's a total disaster!" for as long as it was under construction. As soon as it was finished, the vast majority of citizens started to praise it and call for more metro line extensions.
Good point. Here in the UK there is massive controversy regarding HS2
Facts, in the end, the pros outweigh the cons.
Lol, that is what happening here in Indonesia HSR project (jakarta - bandung, 140km). Cost doubled, china debt trap, oppositions party riding the wave, blaming partnership scheme (b2b, b2g), and then blaming why choose china rather than japan ( japan has done the survey, financing scheme, and proposal long time before china offering)
Lot of controversy, hope it ended well
Vox needs to redo this video. They make the “bad route” argument which is invalid. Cities like Fresno, Bakersfield, and Palmdale all have huge populations. Avoiding those cities wouldn’t make any sense. Also the Pacheco pass route in the Bay Area made no sense as it would mean that San Francisco and San Jose would have to split the trains 50/50 resulting in significantly less frequent service and lower ridership.
Bad route argument is literally valid when it keeps adding time and the "huge population" cities you describe are only a fraction of the total population. You are calling 500,000 population "huge" when it's out of 18 million for bay area and Los Angeles county, so what stops me from finding cities with 50,000 population and calling them "huge" with same proportions you just used and saying it should stop there as well? It's just funny that they're picking the absolute worst portion as the beginning of the project, it solves none of the initial problem.
@@sergeybrin1963 18 million is a arbitrary amount. You have to take into account that the Bay Area has 4 stations alone and the LA area has 5. That’s 9 stations for 18 million people or 1 station for 2 million. Which makes a station for a city of 500k make sense. Also a large amount of people are predicted to use the intermediate stations to get to the big cities. Also picking the central velley segment makes a lot of sense. If they didn’t start in the middle they would have to work from the ends which isn’t practical because it goes through 3 mountain ranges which would give it the highest cost per mile and the least jobs.
@@sergeybrin1963 Nope. 6.5 million people live in the Central Valley. Fresno and Bakersfield have about 1 million population in their respective metros. Your argument makes zero sense. Million population metros are definitely large enough to sustain a single HSR line! HSR lines have been built for considerably smaller populations and with stops in much smaller cities.
Plus, you are disregarding that the existing Merced to Bakersfield section will be connected to the Bay Area and Sacramento from day one via a cross-platform transfer to local rail in Merced.
I'm not even going to mention that the 5th most popular rail line in the country already runs on the same route and will act as a feeder to CAHSR.
This argument can only be put forward by someone who chronically underestimates the sheer size of California. Even our midsize cities are very large by US standards. People are perpetually surprised that SF is only 850k population while San Jose is over 1 million. It just doesn't line up with the cultural preconceptions people have about the state.
I agree. Germany also has high-speed trains taking small detours to use existing slower tracks or even stopping at smaller cities. You can still create what DB calls sprinters: express trains that don't stop everywhere, connecting major city centers at frequent travel times.
Im from London UK. I cant imagine not having high speed rail here. Its absolutely essential. It makes me wonder how anything is ever built over there.
It's a slap in the face when California comparatively gives more to the federal budget than any other state, but can't get that same funds back to support much needed infrastructure 😑
cause they like cars unlike other countries who are into practicality which usually means less cars on the road
Its a L state. Too much homeless, too expensive, radical left. Obviously dont deserve that much funding
lack of federal funding is a blip in the hot mess that this rail line is. Even if the government gave it 100b it still probably wouldn't get anywhere
@@anonymousman9824 one reason why america can't progress
@@togepreee China can do that and just about any first world country so I don't see your point here
As a Californian this is sad because this project is SO NEEDED, travel between Los Angeles and the Bay is huge and long
I hope your HSR project will be completed soon and will be able to have the service of High Speed Rail.
Amazing how Europe and Asia can do it.
No, high speed railways are not needed. If you want to travel fast use aeroplanes.
@@yashagrawal88 Planes are slower on sub 500 mile distances. You can't avoid the airports if you need to fly and airports are major time sinks. On a sub-500 mile journey the train will always be faster than a plane + TSA and waiting time!
This calculation was done a million times. Flying is just not worth the hassle if you're going to the next metro area over. That's why HSR is positively destroying the airlines on those sub-500 mile distances. Who would want to spend 2 hours at the airport and load into a flying tin can for an hour with crying baby monsters if the entire journey can be done faster on a comfortable HSR train? It just doesn't make any sense.
@@TohaBgood2 The pursuit of speed is harmful. If one does not want to travel by aeroplanes, they can use trains or buses.
More people that don't understand anything about infrastructure failing to see the wonders of California HSR. Going through Palmdale means it actually goes through civilization, not the middle of nowhere like I-5, and through flatter terrain, meaning its a heck of a lot cheaper to build there.
California has the worst topography for HSR, but after it is complete from LA to SF people will love it and avoid so much pollution to make it cost effective compared to carbon capture.
if you think california has the worst topography for HSR, think again every few minutes the shinkansen goes through tunnels, splitting mountains.
@@khoirulanam9141 shut up. America is the best.
ROFL what. Japan is incredibly mountainous and they got trains running through the place. Get out.
The Chuo Shinkansen bullet train project in Japan will be 90% in tunnels in the initial segment between Tokyo and Nagoya.
That is plain wrong. CA has Sacramento valley, literally all of japan is mountains, and China is also mostly mountains and narrow gorges. You must be a California progressive. Stick to making your cities unlivable.
This is the first time I’ve heard of people actually being against trains as a principle. Wow.
welcome to USA ahhh help us
Welcome to this corner of RUclips, Not Just Bikes, City beautiful, Adam Something, Alan Fisher and others criticize this sentiment (and similar sentiments) all the time.
Edit, though being that I'm around these parts so often, I often wonder if the prevalence of this sentiment is overblown. Though the voices against better trains are loud, I don't think they actually represent a large part of the population. I'm also not sure that they oppose trains, buses, etc. in principle, they just don't want to spend gov't money on things that most people don't use (yet). They also probably don't know or don't agree with the arguments that public transport is better than traffic congestion.
@TNerd Is the existing line in the central valley owned by and shared with the freight companies (meaning that passenger trains have to pause and give way to freight trains) or is it owned by and exclusively services Amtrak? Does the existing line have any crossings with roads (even one might be too many), or does it bypass all other transit infrastructure? Are there any sharp turns, or are all turns gradual and smooth?
I don't know the answer to any of those questions, since I've only used Amtrak in SoCal, which is why I'm asking (this isn't just a "rhetorical question"). However, I bring it up partly because, if the answer to any of these is "the former and not the latter," then that is a deal-breaker for high-speed rail. This is a big challenge for new projects in the US (especially the first one) and is part of the reason why new high speed rail routes typically need brand-new rails.
Now of course, "upgrading the existing line" doesn't necessarily mean turning it into high-speed rail. Of course, part of the whole point of this project is to get people off the roads and on board something more efficient. They might've done it this way because high-speed rail is more likely to do that than slightly-but-significantly-better rail.
Like I've said, I haven't been on the rails in the Central Valley, so I'm not sure what needs to be improved, but these things are generally true about high-speed rail, so I thought I'd bring it up.
@@chromebomb Yes, but also no. It true that our country's *passenger* rail is abysmal, and this is made worse by those who stand in the way of making it any better. However, our *freight* train service is awesome - even compared to Europe. Of course, since most of us Americans on the Internet are passengers and don't work in logistics or have any regular, personal contact with freight train operators, when we think of "trains" we only think of "passenger trains."
@TNerd Thanks for the info. This sounds like something I should look into more.
This was a pretty good deconstruction of the problems California HSR has faced though I wish you guys had re-emphasized the importance and value of these projects a little more instead of just highlighting the issues.
Same here. A lot of Americans just don’t get the critical importance of rail transit
Wait until you watch the Alan Fisher video about CAHSR.
@@ianhomerpura8937 that's the only reason I'm here XD
@@piccolo917 same lol
Corruption
As both a socal and norcal Californian myself, I'm so appreciative of all the supporters and people pointing out that all the big rail projects we know now had the same struggles and the same doubters. Go CHSR!
Another Californian who is blissfully unaware of the numbers. Other big rail projects did NOT have costs go through the roof the way CA HSR did. And that's the point: CA can't and won't accomplish this even within the order of magnitude it should. If your state spends the money, forget upgrading the electric grid or water infrastructure for about 50 years.
@@someotherdude Another non-Californian who has no clue how much money the state makes lol. Go CHSR!! :)
@@someotherdude Bro think the state with an economy the same size as the entire United Kingdom doesn't have the money for more than one big project LOL
@@sonozaki0000 and Pinga: Here you have it, folks! A couple of Californians who think 'CA has the money' when they don't, and they haven't spent what they have wisely either. The original people who got the project going have completely bailed out, admitting it's been a failure. Don't know if you're aware of that.
It's also out in the open and said many times that PG&E can't afford to fix even a fraction of what needs fixing. Your state is dysfunctional and is heading towards half a million people leaving per year.
@@someotherdude Please, I can only laugh so hard. You sound like one of the billion non-West coast cartoon caricatures that uses "California" as a stand-in for whatever current government concept they don't like. Everything you've said is wholesale Daily Mail-style word-twisting of a larger, fuller conversation that does not back up what you're claiming it does.
You'd probably hear somebody say "Taking the rail is better, my car had an engine failure today" and take it as "[...]RAIL[...]IS[...]FAILURE".
California:
1. the people vote to have a high-speed train
2. every local gov has to agree to its path
3. the federal gov has to agree to the funding
4. the project has to fight all the lawsuits
5. they need to find engineers with actual experience
6. after 14 years of delays, maybe it's built after a few more decades
Asia and Europe:
1. the people vote to have a high-speed train
2. it's built
(I'm from California but have spent the last decade in Korea and Japan.)
As an Asian, yes
That's nonsense. All the systems in Asia and Europe took decades to even start building, let alone built. Japan started building the Shinkansen in the 1930s and only finished in the 60s after multiple delays and budget overruns! The last part of the project in the 60s was 2x over budget and barely made it before the olympics.
China started planning for their HSR network after "dear leader" visited Japan in 1979. They spent decades planning and upgrading their rail network for HSR. And they are now $2 trillion in debt on a bankrupt HSR system that keeps racking up more and more debt.
In Europe it took decades to plan and build their systems. There are some lines in Spain that started construction before CAHSR and are now more delayed and more over budget than CAHSR, despite the fact that they are shorter. France is a perpetual mess of delays and cost overruns. They have HSR lines planned since the 90s that are technically in development where they aren't even done with the planning phase, let alone moving a single shovel of dirt.
This is pure mythology. Everyone always likes to forget how complicated these projects were when they were actually being built. Now everyone loves them. But look at the criticism they were receiving while they were being built!
@@TohaBgood2Japan started construction of the shinkansen in 1959 and ended in 1964, were did you get "1930s" from?
Altho,corrupt politicians and budget problems,let alone slow process of paperwork would eventually delay a project for about 1 year or more before it's even built
@@TohaBgood2 china has built 6000km of functional rail since 2012
In Germany, also a federal state, projects of over-regional importance OVERRIDE the local government in being the main planning authority. High-Speed-Rail, Railroads, Highways/roads or also select kinds or other infrastructure. When this happens, other planning and participation procedures take place other than if the local authorities would do it
Which actually makes sense. Unlike the system in the US
Oh but you can't do that in the US, because individualism is disguised as freedom.
Local governments should never be more powerful than the federal government. What's the point of a federal government if the local one has all the power?
It does in the United States too but it all comes down to money. There's a reason why the Interstate Highway Project in the 1950s didn't have as many hurdles as this. Eminent domain wasn't used to the extent it would be used today, which entitles the federal government to compensate for the forced takeover of land.
The United States could absolutely have a High Speed Rail project if it gathers the money, the popular vote and the resources to do so, but just like the Interstate Highway Project, the government ran into hurdles near urban areas and seeing how California is super expensive and these high-speed rail lines are planned to be built near urban centers, it looks like this project will have more hurdles than not.
Great idea to build a rail, but add the hurdles together mixed with the "Individual States of America" mentality, this project is doomed.
Last time the US government overrode local government to built a mega project, they absolutely destroyed the country with the interstate highway system, ruining walkable cities, and flattening African American neighborhoods
This is a good video overall, but there are a few problems with it. California HSR chose to stop at Palmdale because of the topography of the area, and to avoid extremely expensive tunneling. The route chosen in the Bay Area was also chosen (I believe) to bring electrification to Caltrain, as well as avoiding mountains, like in Palmdale. This project is helping existing rail networks become more modern, and is also creating lots of jobs. There are some systemic problems with how infrastructure is built in the US though, and before we make any changes, we’ll trail behind the rest of the developed world when it comes to financially and environmentally sustainable mass transit.
It’s my understanding also that the electrification of Caltrain is going pretty smooth. One question: is the line being electrified the same as the one HSR will travel on top of?
Underrated comment
@@pizzajona Yes CAHSR will use Caltrain tracks into San Francisco.
It also links ups with the high speed rail going to Vegas
@@packr72 so a large portion is essentially already built and in the process of being high-speed certified? That seems pretty good
I always thought it was strange that they build the Central Valley sections first. It feels more intuitive to start with a San Diego to LA section because it is much shorter, therefore reducing costs and connects two already large population centers. It would be like a proof of concept and help gain support to finish the rest of the line. But I’m not a civil engineer, so maybe I’m wrong.
You are not wrong. The main challenge when building HSR is not technical. It is getting political and civic support. Build a successful first line anywhere and other regions will want the same.
This video is very light on the incompetent management and cost overruns for this project which is the real reason of the high cost and delays.
I used to live in Bakersfield up until a year ago and I never met a single person who actually wanted to have this train to nowhere.
Politicians wondering why we need trains? It seems like they are too rich to own private jets and personal cars and forget their citizens who travel by trains every day.
Or they just call it communism
Republicans are owned by big oil
Barely anyone travels by trains in the United States because their railroad system is horrible compared to European and Asian countries and so is their other forms of public transportation. The entire country is laid out in such a way that you need a car to get anywhere so it's not unreasonable to expect people to own a car.
@@frankthetankricard that because the rail are commercialize and that the same problem with roads is that no one want to be left behind on these projects
@@frankthetankricard Could you explain what you mean by "horrible railroad systems"? If you were referring to the railroad management, then definitely yes.
As someone who watches the high speed rail be built everyday on a commute from Reedley to Fresno, there is progress being made. It is evident around the valley. The Central Valley has been forgotten by CA and the rest of the country for too long! There are millions of people who live, work, and produce food (that you eat) throughout the valley. These people have family in Nor and SoCal. "A faster route" that services no one makes no sense. I have a lot of respect for Vox videos and trust them for meaningful analysis. This video doesn't garner that respect from me. It just misrepresents the project and fosters doubt and hopelessness. :(
What if it was like our freeways where there were 2 routes? One slower route to connect the Central Valley cities and a 2nd one to bypass them. I understand the importance of Central Valley communities being connected to LA and the Bay, but those trying to move directly between the 2 cities don’t need all the deviations and should have a direct route.
Now go further south, into Tulare and Kings county... The new HSR is supposed to cross over highway 43 *four* times on giant concrete structures.
So far they have only started ONE bridge. And when I say started, they been working on the foundation and columns for over a year. And they need 3 more of those?! 😂
This project will never be finished before the next recession/depression. And then construction money is going to dry up.
Worked there drilling, takes a long time to do certain task .. the drilling part is what takes the longest
@@derek20la never that simple, So much politics in construction.. if there’s certain birds nesting we can’t work in the area.. certain plant .. forget about it .. we had to wait on a project for 6 months due to bats
Thank you! I've been seeing so much negative press about the HSR in Vox and The Guardian without having the local knowledge to understand the reasons for why they're integrating stops in the Central Valley. Yes, having an express train from SF to LA would be a huge win, but connecting those stops makes this for everyone in California that don't live in major coastal cities. Vox has a larger budget for nice graphics, but Alan Fischer did a far better breakdown of why they chose the routes they did with just a Patreon account.
The project was "rerouted" from the I-5 corridor to the CASR-99 corridor because the 5 is desolate compared to the 99. If it went straight from Los Angeles and San Francisco, you'd be passing significant populations.
Palmdale/Lancaster - 300k
Bakersfield - 350k
Fresno - 550k
You would be passing over a million people if you just went up the 5! The only sizable city along the 5 is Los Banos, with a mere 40k
Palmdale and Lancaster Metro is actually 500K. The City of Palmdale is 169K and Lancaster is 171K as of 2020. I live in in the Antelope Valley, we are booming.
it is so painfully obvious whenever i see videos like this that the people making these videos know nothing about california
how is having a longer route with stops in more cities a "compromise"? This is for all Californians not just those on either end.
Exactly!
They don't care about the 15 people from the middle of nowhere, especially if it slows down the train. The whole point of high speed rail is that it's faster and cheaper than cars. Eliminating the need for them and connecting major cities with thousands of daily passengers.
@@POUNDCAKEMMM With "middle of nowhere" I assume you're implying the current Route 99 alignment even though the I-5 alignment is less populated than the Route 99 one. For that matter, Fresno is around 500k and other commentors noted that there are quite a bit of commuters between Fresno and the Bay Area so the only valid criticism on your part is slowing the whole route down, the rest is doing exactly what HSR is supposed to do in your opinion.
@@MarioFanGamer659and yet the only regular flights from Fresno within California (data from Flightradar24) are three a day to San Francisco, three a day to San Diego and two a day to LA, all served with 80-seat regional jets. That's just 640 seats a day, one or two trains. And the first stage of the project will not even reach either of these cities, meaning the demand will be even lower.
My 'Automobile Industry Lobbyists' detector is ticking like mad through the whole video
Hahaha was thinking the exact same thing
...and your "Airline Industry Lobbyists" detector isn't?
Yeah, all I could hear was "Mmmmm... fossil fuel dependency."
the analysis here is just totally wrong, these rail projects should be heavily supported because they are some of the easiest ways to put a dent in emissions, these costs are wayyy cheaper than resiliency later
You don't have to be genious to see this would literally pay for itself in no-time.
@@Rialagma Which for large parts of the Right would be the very problem. A profitable PUBLIC project? We can't have that, it defies everything we hold sacred!
For some GOPsters public transport by itself is pure communism.
Exactly. The more you pay now the less you pay later
How are people Going to get to the high speed stations ? No cities even have a decent public metro structures
True but the US political system is heavily lobbied (read bribed) by Big Oil companies. Building highways (requiring asphalt from oil) and drive cars/trucks that use gasoline would thus increase oil companies' wallets. Rail projects does not increase oil revenue (rather decrease it) and so the US basically lack any incentive to support rail projects.
I’m conservative, and honestly support mass transit because it will help the economy and yes environment (I know shocker) I just believe the government is too corrupt to literally get anything done
If they can manage to build new roadways, they can manage to build railways. Civil engineer here.
There are many conservative arguments in favor of public transit. The writings of Paul Weyrich and William Lind on the subject are quite interesting
The problem is people like this who judge projects before they've had a chance to succeed or fail. People said these same things about Japanese High Speed, but no one says them now.
California can pay for their own mistakes imo
" People said these same things about Japanese High Speed,"
Japan is much higher population density, cities much closer together.
And, again, we already have a high speed connection from SF to LA that goes a lot faster than this train, it only takes 1 hour. (jet aircraft.) This train would take 4 hours as currently planned. These sections all take one hour: SF-SJ, SJ-Merced, Merced-Bakersfield. Then you have to go Bakersfield to LA which is at least one hour.
If it's going to take decades to complete, then we're not even going to have a chance to judge it.
The Palmdale routing actually goes through Palmdale because of elevation and mountains. It may add distance but it’s much cheaper than building over/through mountains. It also makes sense to connect as many cities as possible when building such a state/wide infrastructure.
"he Palmdale routing actually goes through Palmdale because of elevation and mountains. It may add distance but it’s much cheaper than building over/through mountains"
THE PALMDALE ROUTE REQUIRES TUNNELING THROUGH A MOUNTAIN AS WELL. THE ONLY WAY TO AVOID THAT IS THE COASTAL ROUTE. THERE TWO HIGHWAYS IN THE CENTRAL VALLEY I-5 AND 99. BOTH REQUIRE TUNNELING. I-5 REQUIRES LESS AND IS STRAIGHTER AND SHORTER WITH FEWER TOWNS.
I don’t remember any tunnels on I-5 because it just climbs over the mountains
as long as they have a stop in LA, that would be good! i saw somewhere the HSR they are planning for LA-LV stops at palmdale... hopes thats not true... who is gonna drive to palmdale and take a train to vegas or vice versa.
@@electrictroy2010
"I don’t remember any tunnels on I-5 because it just climbs over the mountains"
Correct, because cars can take a higher "grade" than trains. A maglev train would have no problem climbing up that hill. Maglev can take up to 10% grade. But wheel on rail needs a tunnel because it can't take more than like 3% grade and they prefer lower than that.
Unfortunately, I-5 is the only truly high speed route, because it's nice and straight, and there's no towns that make you slow down. On I-5, basically you have 240 miles of median where you can go the fastest speed your train is capable of going. So you could go about 220 with the trainset they want to use for CAHSR. So basically 1 hr 6 minutes for that stretch. Or with maglev at 300 mph, 48 minutes.
As opposed to the 99 route, the Merced to Bakersfield stretch they say it would be 81 minutes if they took all stops or 56 minutes if they expressed through. Which means about 160 for express and 130 for taking all stops.
They will have to slow down coming out of the tunnel in both cases, I-5 and 99, because you don't want to go top speed on wheel on rail going downhill, as it's hard to stop. Maglev can go faster downhill because it uses a different principle (it's propelled by magnetic fields so just reverse the polarity) but not wheel on rail.
You're looking at about five years to dig all the tunnels in both cases (I-5 and 99) but at least with I-5 you can go a lot faster.
Just google "A Rail Professional Speaks Out on the HSRA Plan", click on the California Rail Foundation Link, scroll down until you see that same phrase and click on the link there. It's a PDF that explains all this with maps. :)
But you know I was looking at the Business Plan a few days ago and I noticed, they also want to dig a lot of tunnels Palmdale to Burbank, in an effort to get a more direct route than Metrolink. So look for that to be another five years right there. In addition to the tunneling under 152 they want to do from San Jose to Merced, that's another five years minimum. The 152 tunnels and the 99 tunnels are a total of probably 40 billion, then the Palmdale to Burbank ones are another 20 billion so now you're up to 60 billion, and I guess they get to 100 billion based on all the non-tunnel work that has to be done.
Complete waste of money because we have existing track going all the way down the state along the coast that we could enhance to similar speed (CAHSR is only going to average 100 mph over the whole system) for far less money.
And of course most people fly between SF to LA and a 4 hour train isn't going to compete with a 1 hour flight.
@@neutrino78x the costal route also requires tunnels as the trains would have to go through many mountains between LA and the Salinas river. Also the I5 route has the same amount of tunneling but would require longer tunnels which is more expensive than multiple shorter ones.
It’s extremely frustrating how “car-centric” the USA is. As the premier World Superpower, its citizens should NOT NEED a car in order to survive and do daily, basic functions (go to work, go to school, go shopping, etc). This obsession with vehicles and unnecessary restrictions on public transportation severely limits the ability of those with low socioeconomic standing to progress because they cannot afford a private vehicle. We need leaders and policies who are not beholden to car companies and oil / gas corporation and who actually have THE PEOPLE’s needs at heart when making decisions.
I wish the HSR would have carraiges for cars, like those in germany does tho.
Would be insanely practical if there was those carraiges.
Lowkey would also be sick if the entirety of the west coast including Seattle and Vancouver were linked up with Cali.
Im Canadian, and my province and the federal gov prolly would be down to throw money at it.
Not Just Bikes.
It's one of the reasons why the US was never on my list of places to move to, even though I get offers from all around the world. I am currently in Japan, low wages sure, but I can literally ride my bike to a train station, get on a train and ride off the train in a totally different part of the country. I love that freedom. It's rather ironic that I will never live in the home of freedom because America is so oppressive and restrictive.
Corporation Lobbyist are killing American. Buying politicians to keep the American public enslaved. Criminal.
Citizens that live in a city might not need a car, but if you are rural, then for sure you need a car.
I'm starting to think conservatism in the US is all about saying no to anything that makes life easier.
And if you continue to get your news and analysis from Vox, you’ll keep on thinking that.
@@doverbeachcomber But Fox is ok?
Democrat states should secede and solve the problem.
@@doverbeachcomber it’s not just vox this info is literally everywhere. You have to be braindead to think US public transportation is not bad.
The main problem with getting the CAHSR built sooner is the lack of Federal Funds. Almost all other countries in the world who have HSR have a significant amount of funding from their national governments. That difference is why the USA has no HSR.
BTW, the compromise to serve smaller cities in the Central Valley was a positive one on numerous levels. Historically, the CV has been ignored when it comes to both infrastructure and development. Having the CAHSR go through cities like Merced, Fresno, San Jose, etc. will result in a flourishing of those cities. That's a good thing.
Also to mention that Baskerfeild and Fresno both have a population above 500k and are rapidly growing, not a big a LA or the bay area. But they are not small
1:35 That's not entirely correct. Yes, obviously the higher density around stations and the more destinations (leisure, work, attractions, etc.) around stations, the better. But if you have local robust public transit that is integrated with the high speed long distance train network, you can increase the amount of passengers immensely as well, without them living very close to the station. Problem is America has neither good local or good long distance public transport. You really need to have both.
Exactly 💯
This. No point building HSR if people can't get to the stations easily. And equally, no point building HSR which has to double as a metro system by stopping every few miles, at that point, it isn't HSR any more.
A better compromise for the Palmdale issue would have been to bundle in some sort of metro line, linking palmdale to downtown LA, and therefore the HSR station.
@@zaphod4245 And the thing is they kinda already have with the Metrolink regional train I still think Palmdale is a notable stop, I mean its a huge city even if most of it is suburban sprawl. But the Metrolink regional train as it is now is a really poor service that isn't practical. For comparison a route like it in Europe would probably be akin to whats called an "S train" here. Such systems operate in several cities big and small from Berlin, Paris, Stockholm, and Copenhagen, to smaller ones like Leipzig, Dresden and Rostock. And these trains usually run every 5-20 minutes all day as highly frequent local trains connecting suburbs and exurbs with downtowns and continuing through to the other side like a Metro. But because of poor political will and because of all the railroads being owned by private conglomorates like BNSF, Union Pacific, and CSX rather than a state or federal agency, it means they're blocked by the greedy corporations from even using the train tracks if it means even the slightest inconvenience to the freight railroad.
Yes and one needs to be done before the other somethings gotta give.
I mean there is commuter rail service in these metro, but they have to upgraded and that’s the plan. The problem is instead of upgrading the lines over time using incremental improvements, the state chose to build everything up front.
This is what is causing all the backlash.
Waiting for Alan Fisher video analysis. Edit- That faster route I believe is rather rocky and therefore would have cost billions more (involve tunneling) and going through the central valley I've heard is to help those communities economically as well as connect two major cities. I'm no train expect
I know alan fisher did a response video about other cc's video about this, but in vox's video they are more focused on the political obstacles regarding this HSR project and vox still said that HSR is a good idea
The faster route is much cheaper, high speed trains can climb much steeper gradient.
The amount of people using the train in the central valley will be upsettingly low, 99 percent of people will travel between La and SF.
This video didnt make that mistake. One of the original proposed routes would have followed I-5 which would have been cheaper and made acquiring right of way in the Central Valley much easier. However that route would have bypassed all of the cities in the valley which means it would have been much less useful to those communities.
I think the current alignment servers the most people, especially in less prosperous communities but it did greatly increase the number of right of way acquisitions required and the number of people that could be negatively affected and would therefore fight against it either politically and/or with lawsuits.
@@cmbakerxx The number of passengers in the central valley will be extremely low either way.
@@dudu5423 show me one high speed train that climbs a steep gradient
1. To get from Burbank to Palmdale will require around 35 miles of tunnel. The more direct I5 route would have added about 2 more miles of tunnel.
2. The lore of old-time steam railroads clouded the route design. The Tehachapi route used by freight (freight ONLY, no passenger trains allowed) from Bakersfield to LA is so circuitous, long trains actually/famously pass over themselves on a corkscrew section of track.
Why does everyone hate Palmdale? I'm a native of the area and frankly the cities have needed something like that for decades.
@@avengeddisciple
"Why does everyone hate Palmdale? I'm a native of the area and frankly the cities have needed something like that for decades."
Well, for one, there's already a train that goes from there to LA. It's a metrolink train.
@@avengeddisciple Well it’s not just Palmdale with the hate. Apparently there’s also some hate for the San Joaquin Valley alignment as well, and I’m talking about directly serving it’s major popular areas and much of the areas 4 millions residents.
@@neutrino78x that's not a reason to skip out on building the high speed rail through an area with over 300,000 residents.
By the time the CA HSR is finished with extra stops & detours, the LA to SF trip will be almost 4 hours. That’s too slow to convince customers to skip the plane (which is 1.5 hours). Which means the train will be mostly empty (like the current Antrak train LA to SF),
After residing the high speed rails in Korea, I can’t believe a country as big as the US hasn’t adopted it. It would make small cities so much more accessible, helping alleviate overpopulation, housing crisis, as well as make jobs more accessible. It would boost smaller cities and help with carbon pollution. It just makes sense
You have it backwards. It's a lot easier in a small country like South Korea.
We're talking about something 611 km long. That's not trivial.
And the agency executing the policy made a lot of mistakes, which made it far, far too expensive. We can't pay for the whole thing as a state, and the Federal Government doesn't want to be associated with our failed project.
HSR needs two things to be successful (and worth a huge amount of spending):
- high population density
-short distance between population centers
South Korea has both of those things, USA has neither. Same situation in Canada and Australia. None of our three countries have a true HSR system and certainly not a nationwide one, and there's no reason to expect we ever will.
Jet aircraft are a lot faster, and don't require you to build stuff between A and B.
It's not like most people drive from SF to LA right now. Most of us just hop on Southwest Airlines and fly there in about an hour. This train would take at least three hours, probably more like four.
Just because something sounds like it would be better doesn’t mean it’ll be built. Brightline (the private rail passenger company) added service in Florida. In one of the port cities (that would seem to be a no-brainer to build a station in), the local citizens voted against having a station constructed because having the train stop there would cut out business for the local taxi and Über drivers. So the train will just pass right on through now without stopping. 🤦♂️
@@neutrino78xjets are bad for the environment and inefficient at moving lots of people. HSR makes sense, but oil oligarchs rule america
No one mentions how Japan's HSR doubled their initial budget and also had setbacks - but everyone mentions how immaculate the transit system is. Vox should have wrapped this up more positively that at least it's a project that's being worked on AND achieving goals. This is an absolutely necessary infrastructure project to address the climate catastrophe that we are experiencing right now.
what setback? japanese set a goal of opening shinkansen before their 1964 olympic, and they built it in time for that.
I see this as a story of perseverance. The end of the video wanted to make _me_ give up, and I don't even have a horse in this race. Good for them. I hope that small corridor is wildly lucrative, and they can self-fund expansions to meet and exceed their original goals.
Dude initial budget was 9bil vs now 113bil
@@DSIM93 wasnt it 33 billion?
The japanese system didn't just connect 2 parking lots though....
sounds like you guys could have framed this as "the failure of the US political system" instead of tearing down HSR, which like this video states, is an objectively good project - and will eventually be remembered as such
if California HSR is a warning, then what is the lesson? Don't try to do things that are good because Republicans exist?
@@SilhouetteLifter ikr?? Why do republicans always try and halt the progress of the country?
As someone who lives in a non-democracy where I don’t have a choice if the government decides to build a railroad through my room, I wouldn’t call it ‘fair’ for the state government here to bypass all the concerns of the people affected by this line. It’s not just about politicians holding up a project.
@@AttaBek1422 Their concerns should be thrown out and ignored. Progress is more important
@@AttaBek1422 a lot of those “concerns” arent real
It's not just a US problem to build efficient high speed rail. Here in the UK the current estimate to build High Speed 2 line between London and Birmingham is now sitting at over £100Bn, almost 3x the original estimate. The project is marred with issues and they've cut back on the route. B1M RUclips channel recently made a very good video on it.
Flying is better dude. All we have to do is work on making it more green. UK is spending a lot of money on H2 fuel cells and H2 burning engines. That makes more sense. 🙂
Britain and California are about the same size (not counting northern ireland). But Britain has a lot more population DENSITY, about 10x that of the USA. If it makes sense in either country it's Britain. But it sounds like your project is going out of control just like hours.
Why not just upgrade the existing line for higher speed? I forget what you call it, West Main Line I think or something like that? Surely that can be upgraded a little bit to higher maximum speed and have Ultra Express Trains that only stop in London, Manchester, and Edinburgh. That's called Higher Speed Rail, MUCH cheaper. 🙂
@@neutrino78x the problem is that even if you can make planes run on magic eco fuel, airports take up a lot of space, don’t serve the city centres, make loads of noise and don’t benefit any of the towns along the route.
As for your other point, the current west coast route’s main problem is capacity, as the tracks are forced to share freight, local and express trains. Building a high speed line isn’t just about making journeys faster for the big cities, it also benefits people who aren’t directly served, as the current fast trains that use the local tracks will be out of the way, meaning more room for local services.
Also, even if they did decide to upgrade the current tracks, there’s very little they could do. The lines are largely 4 tracks wide already, with bridges, tunnels and stations designed to fit them, and it would be very hard to upgrade the maximum speeds due to the number of corners on the route - we went to the extent of buying special trains that tilt to allow trains to run at 125mph.
@@jakegtr
"airports take up a lot of space"
This is a problem in Europe not North America and Australia. We have shitloads of space over here. You have to accept that we don't have the same geography as Europe and Asia, and the same solutions won't work in both places.
"don’t serve the city centres,"
Every heard of public transit or roads? Anyway the airport in San Jose (largest city in Silicon Valley) is right downtown. We have a height limitation on buildings downtown as a result. From 1st and Santa Clara you can get to the airport terminal in 20 minutes on public transit (or like 10 minutes driving). Same with SFO to downtown SF, BART will get you there in 30 minutes. And downtown LA and Burbank airport. The train gets you there in 30 minutes.
Like I said, it's an issue in Europe but things are different in North America and Australia, at least here on the west coast.
"make loads of noise"
The new electric ones don't. You can barely hear them overhead. Pretty soon the only planes you will hear when passing overhead are ones that go longer distances, greater than 800 miles (1287 km). The short distance ones will be virtually silent.
"don’t benefit any of the towns along the route. "
In the USA you generally don't have intermediate stops. Our density is along the coasts. If you're going from SF to LA, there's no intermediate stop there. There's like five people who live in the Central Valley, all far right wing people who voted for Donald Trump. Of course, they decided to put the first leg of the HSR in that area, instead of going down I-5 like a normal person would, so they blew the budget for it and now the project is over. (It will be completed Merced to Bakersfield. But that's it.)
If you're traveling from LA to NYC, which is something a lot of people do -- its one of the busiest air corridors in the world, our equivalent of Paris to London -- you don't stop in Kansas or Utah to pick up passengers.
If our dense cities were 200 miles (321 km) apart like in Europe, we probably would use HSR as much as you do. But they're not. Therefore HSR is irrelevant here. Deal with it.
" Building a high speed line isn’t just about making journeys faster for the big cities, "
But it doesn't even do that. SF to LA is much faster on a jet aircraft. Three or four times faster. For the same price. Do you understand, currently we can get there in ONE HOUR????????? The proposed train would have taken 3-4 hours (probably closer to 4).
The project is a failure, that's reality. But it's not a failure of the USA or California, as we already have a means of high speed travel throughout the state. Fresno also has an airport and you can get to SF or LA from there in less than an hour. (Fresno is in that Merced to Bakersfield area.)
It’s fixing to be the worlds largest skateboard ramp
It's not just about "What can a train do for ME", it's also about what trains do for the state/country as a whole.
Maybe an airline is faster, point-to-point, but a train decreases travel time from intermediate stops, enabling workers to live outside of expensive metropolitan areas. This affects the housing market positively, it breathes life into suburban and rural economies. Maybe a car is cheaper or even faster on some parts, but trains enable you to relax or work while traveling, and decrease traffic jams on highways for those who have no other option than to use a car.
Trains also increase accessibility to those who are unable to drive or afford a vehicle. I support HSR but before HSR is complete we need to have densification of some of these areas.
@@Blaze6432 Exactly. I live in The Netherlands, and have lived over 3 decades without a car now, because we have a pretty good train network.
@@odw32 i agree with you ... good train network is readily accessible to us because moving to the airport that usually lies outside the city is quite expensive and time consuming while for a railway station it is kinda manageable
Work-at-home may eventually make this project irrelevant. Covid-driven work at home accelerated the shift. Perhaps this project should be dropped entirely.
White flight sustainer, in other words.
I'm no expert but the US politics system really needs a re-evaluation because it's very inefficient
It's a system that values the rich more than the poor. We used to have lots of public transports. However, they don't make much money while car companies do. Car companies gradually lobbied our government into getting rid of most public transport and changing our roads and city layouts into forcing people to buy cars.
well said
but.. but.. muh aMeNdMenT$ 😭😭 muh frEed0m 😭😭😭
I think the “american experiment” has reached its end. It needs to wound up, and begun with new parameters acknowledging progress in the field over the last 250years. Proportional representation, imperfect bicameralism, multi party systems, depoliticised boring courts, a legally impartial civil service, public funding of ejections, overall a rewritten constitution with current best practice.
It won't be long now.
It astounds me the lack of geographic awareness that some Europeans have about the size and scope of California when comparing their own country.
I wanted to add something you said about Palmdale. It’s goes through Palmdale because the future train to Las Vegas starts at Palmdale.
Thank you! Also Palmdale/Lancaster Metro is 500K and growing fast! We can't be ignored.
The complaint about the HSR alignment through Palmdale ignores topography. Trying to follow the I-5 corridor through the Grapevine would have required extensive tunneling. The planned alignment through Bakersfield-Palmdale and then into Los Angeles mostly follows the alignment of a current rail corridor with changes to accommodate HSR. There is a reason that right now if you take Amtrak from Los Angeles to Sacramento that part of your journey is by bus.
The proposed alignment through Palmdale (not yet entirely pinned down) will require extensive tunneling through both the Tehachapi and San Gabriel Mountains, and both those ranges are riddled with earthquake faults. Going through the Grapevine area would also involve some tunneling, and you can't get to LA without dealing with the San Andreas Fault, but tunneling experts have called the current routing extremely challenging. The current freight routing through the mountains involves a circuitous route that would be totally infeasible for HSR due to the line's curvature - as well as being very long and slow. (See articles in L.A. Times by Ralph Vartabedian for details.) The French National Rail (SCNF) had been interested building AND FINANCING an I-5 route, but no private partner has shown interest in putting money into the current route. (Deutsche Bahn is now a consultant for CHSRA, but it's getting paid rather than paying, and its analysis shows the current route losing about $5M a year due to low ridership.) The line's feasibility was destroyed back in 1998 when the Palmdale routing was pushed through by Central Valley politicians.
@@stuartflashman618 Nobody lives along the I-5 route. That's why its terrible.
@@vinniezcenzo Travel between the Bay Area and LA alone is enough to justify the project. Central Valley cities can be served from spurs connecting to the I-5 mainline
@@michaelzedd6492 A Grapevine tunnel is not a viable alignment. It's more expensive than the entire route plus the extensions! The only "cheap" way over the mountains is through Palmdale.
If you're already on the eastern side of the Central Valley when you emerge from the southern mountain crossing the 99 is the shortest, fastest, and cheapest route! That's precisely why it was chosen. All the experts said so!
@@TohaBgood2 I've seen the reports. The tunneling isn't as bad as it was once thought. You don't build on the grapevine, but the next pass to the east. There's old engineering plans for a freight line with an actually doable route. You still have to add engines near Bakersfield but that doens't take that long.
Framing connecting The valley cities to this project as a compromise is disengenious. A faster train that just connects LA and San Francisco with very few stops is valuable, but a slower train that connects a dozen locations to a dozen other places in California is also valuable. It’s not a compromise. It’s just a different focus
Anyone who thinks a 1 hour flight from LAX to SFO only takes one hour has never been to LAX. If the train ride is less than 5 hours from station to station, it would be a time saver over flying.
Why didn't they just build it right down the center of I-5 since it could be elevated? No land costs as they already have the land.
Are you serious Vox? The reason they went though the valley is to avoid the mountains. To make it cheaper. How you missed this is beyond me.
@tom shuo It will take a Herculean effort to change Americas mass dependency on cars. But areas like California can at least try, because even if its sprawl, at least it’s dense sprawl.
Correction: you meant "to make it "cheaper"."
not just that, but to also serve all of the population centers in the central valley. It's unironically a coastal elitist attitude to frame these smaller cities as annoying gnats that are selfishly trying to make the line slower and more expensive so it can serve them. The project is California HSR, not just SF and LA
The Central Valley has a population of, like, 6.5 Million. Most of which travel to SF and LA as well as each other pretty regularly.
In addition to that, the route avoids the mountains and national forests. So yeah, it’s not perfectly straight.
Not sure why almost every video I see about CHSR, they treat the Central Valley like a dead zone.
I don't even live in California (I live in Baltimore, MD) but I know that the majority of the revenue and ridership is coming from those cities. SF-to-LA travelers are gonna hop on the plane; Merced or Bakersfield are taking the train to either or...
@@MarloSoBalJr Why would LA to SF take a plane? It's still going to be faster in the train, once you factor in the security wait times and everything associated with plane travel.
"In addition to that, the route avoids the mountains"
Nope. both I-5 and 99 require you to cross the mountains. To avoid the mountains you have to use the coastal route, the one that already has train tracks there (just upgrade existing). It would be a four hour ride, but then so would CAHSR as currently planned. It would be a LOT cheaper to just do that (just upgrading existing). The upgrade is already underway, with existing funds, actually.
But the CAHSR is going to be just as slow but cost 100x more. Needs to be cancelled, or at least changed to go down I-5.
@@jamalgibson8139
"Why would LA to SF take a plane?"
Because it's only one hour.
"Is still going to be faster in the train, once you factor in the security wait times and everything associated with plane travel."
Nope. factor in all that and you're looking at two hours vs 4 hours for the train. (but most of that doesn't apply because you have to travel to both the train station and the airport and security is only five minutes. But if you want me to be nice and count the plane as two hours, it's still twice the speed of the train.)
@@neutrino78x I'm not sure where you are getting four hours from; the travel time is expected to be under three. Plus, the train brings you right into downtown, whereas the airport is 45 minutes away from the city. Now, maybe your destination is closer to the airport than to downtown, at which point, fair enough, but for those traveling downtown to downtown, this will be faster.
Also, LAX is one of the busiest airports in the country, so good luck with your flight not getting canceled, or delayed. Finally, rail travel is so much more comfortable than air travel that once you take the train you're never going to want to fly that route again.
I love vox, their videos are incredibly informative but it's so upsetting to continue to see California HSR painted in this picture. The authority has been very careful and smart with their planning. The video should have praised the HSR authority and enforced the point more that it's not the authority's fault but the federal-local and state government that is failing it. It's already bad enough that Americans just simply don't believe in trains as a viable means of transit and painting HSR in any negative light at all just stipulates the idea even further. Go California HSR and hopefully enough people in congress realize that funding mass infrastructure projects like we did for the 50's highway act is something more important to fight about than silly wedge issues all the time.
The perfect high-speed rail project would be a New York - Los Angeles line for the future greatest rail trip of our time. 😁
China can build that within 5 years.
Discussing California High Speed Rail and railways in general requires nuance that this video lacks. I recommend looking for Alan Fisher's "California High Speed Rail has not Failed and RealLifeLore is wrong". He gives a solid breakdown of a very similar video from RealLifeLore, giving a bunch of nuance and thoughts that are missing here, like the state's geography and how hard it is for a country that doesn't build HSR to finally start doing it.
What? USA is not #1?! Isn't this some kind of heresy punishable by flogging in the Murikkka?
@@lemonngripz making fun of american exceptionalism
Alan fisher was wrong about the Palmdale diversion, he didn’t mention the alternate faster route on the freeway
@@emailsharedbyafewpeople4105 Running parallel to a freeway, with its geometry intended for cars and trucks around 55-65mph, is not going to allow even nearly that speed for a train. If CAHSR is aiming for track speeds of 150-220mph, it needs curve radii of 2.8-5.4km, which are huge. Paralleling a freeway can make sense in some scenarios, but not if it zig-zags like Rt-14 does through the hills between Santa Clarita and Palmdale (assuming that's the road you mean)
This is exactly what I was thinking while watching this. It makes the same points that he effectively debunked well before this video was published.
Thanks for giving Alan Fisher more content!
The entire plan is the only vote I’ve ever regretted voting for.
Same here, but we were also lied to when we voted for it.
“I missed the part where that’s my problem.”
- Bully Maguire
"The US is too big for 200 mph High Speed Rail" so instead we make 70 mph highways that are always congested.
Uh, no. Instead we make AIRCRAFT because that's what we use for long distances. This is a LONG distance. 380 miles or 611 km.
I still can't believe the number one economy in the world, The US didn't have any single unit of this thing. My country, a lower middle income country Indonesia successfully built 110 km of HSR this year built by China and funded by private sector (investors by buying government bonds) and projected to be extended up to 600 km long into East Java
The automaker lobby is so powerful
They won't allow any mass transport system..
Thats the American democracy for you
Trains are meant to connect population centers, not only on each end but in between too. It wouldn't make sense to put a train line along Highway 5, which is pretty much devoid of population and would require people to drive much further to get to train stations, and if a station is in the middle of nowhere, how would passengers get to their final destinations? The Bay Area and LA aren't the only places where people live, so it would be absurd for California to build a train line intended to only serve passengers in those two regions.
Also, "following" the faster Highway 5 route over the Grapevine... that would add billions to tunnel through a massive mountain range and again avoid population centers.
Exactly! Most travellers would be going from LA to San Fransisco but there would still be tonnes of travellers on iteneraries like San Jose to Bakersfield, Merced to Los Angeles, and Fresno to San Fransisco, or even just Gilroy to Merced. Plus even with all the extra stations its not like every train will stop at every station. Even high speed railways have both local and express services a lot of the time. Heck the Shinkansen has 3 different tiers per railway. A Stopper, stopping at all high speed stations including the smallest ones like Gilroy, a semi fast that would skip the smallest stations but still serve the medium-large ones like Merced, and finally the express running non stop or only stopping at the largest most important stops on the line!
The route to Palmdale skips a lot of VERY expensive tunneling that the direct route would have required.
Exactly. The Palmdale stop actually make sense. You save more money on construction since you are driving around the mountains. Would have cost billions just to drill tunnels.
@@aprilmay1700 Yes of course you can get to highway 5 if you're driving. But if you need to go from San Jose to Fresno, Bakersfield, or anywhere in the Central Valley, and you take a train that stops near Highway 5, how do you get to your final destination? You just got off a train and do not have a car, which makes the train less efficient.
disagree, it's easy enough to run shuttle lines or busses between those centers and the I-5, which would VASTLY increase the efficiency of the line back and forth. by forcing it into all those smaller centers it has to start following slower speed limits and all the turns and stuff also limit it's speed, but having it straight shot back and forth with shuttle lines, it would be WAY more efficient for transporting more than just people, but also cargo for instance. Which would help pay for the line's cost in a huge way as well.
As a Californian, we have been wanting this for so long. Personally, I have ridden in high-speed rail in other countries, and it is incredibly fuel efficient per passenger. Most people when asked say they want a line, but all this run-up, delays, and political jostling make this project nearly impossible. I've asked around to see what I could do to help get this project back on the road, but I still don't know what I can do.
Never mind fuel efficiency. I’m from Finland and have been in California. Trains are just much less stressful than sitting in California traffic
"Personally, I have ridden in high-speed rail in other countries, and it is incredibly fuel efficient per passenger. "
Yeah but flying is very fuel efficient compared to a car also.
from wikipedia "Fuel economy in aircraft"
Aircraft: Boeing 737 MAX-9
First Flown: 2017
Passenger: 180
FUEL EFFICIENCY PER SEAT: 2.02 L/100 km (116 mpg‑US)
"Most people when asked say they want a line, "
Not for 100 billion.
There's already a direct flight that only takes an hour.
@@neutrino78x planes use tons of fuel during liftoff. Short flights like that are unefficient
@@anttikalpio4577
"planes use tons of fuel"
Not really
from wikipedia "Fuel economy in aircraft"
Aircraft: Boeing 737 MAX-9
First Flown: 2017
Passenger: 180
FUEL EFFICIENCY PER SEAT: 2.02 L/100 km (116 mpg‑US)
@@neutrino78x but planes can't have minor stops as HSR has. You can literally have several small stops on each California city from South to North, which is obviously impossible for airlines. Not to mention HSR can provide much more frequency, and each time it can carry much more passengers. With HSR, people can use it as their daily transportation (like travel from San Jose to San Francisco for work), or even from Santa Cruz to San Francisco just for daily work (the length of this route has approximately 80 miles)
I guess we're just ignoring how the potential "faster routes" this video keeps hammering on would've gone through mountainous terrain and been vastly more expensive to construct…
Mass transport is so needed in the U.S. Having used BART and CalTrain I felt they are both very good. Also, the L in Chicago, D.C. The Underground in London is wonderful because many a station is a business hub. Traveling by trains in India last week, I feel the experience is okay. In India, I read, there's no political divide and work has begun on HSR. However, the time lines I think will NOT occur as planned by 2023 that lines will operate, at least not smoothly! I guess maybe one or two years delay is likely. Once running, however, many more kilometer will be added quickly. The express trains currently only average about 40 km/h. Plans are to be able to achieve top speeds of 140 km/h.
I the midwest U.S. I don't see even local metro trains, Chicago being the exception. Mumbai, has local trains which might take 3 to 4 minutes from one train station to the next, but might take 20 to 30 minutes by any motor vehicle.
"el", short for "elevated train", not "L".
The high speed rail project in India is not doing any better than the one in the US. It is facing cost overrun and delays. It was originally planned for 2023 but has since been delayed until 2026. It is only a measly 61km.
It might be fair to mention that all the high speed trains in other countries were also delayed and over budget.
But at least they have a lot of expertise and experience building high-speed rail projects - something that we as a country sorely lack.
they ended up working though lol
I agree to, in Indonesia it also delayed due nature challange and COVID
Not anywhere near as bad as the us. Japanese HSR is about the same length and cuts through a lot of mountains and cost like 4 billion usd
Why did you not mention the geographical difficulty if the I-5 route? The route via Palmdale avoids a whole lot of mountains and ends up being cheaper because of that.
Cars are less stigmatized by the government and have a lot of funding support thanks to Big Oil. Petroleum companies have been known to lobby against any alternative transportation and energy.
Look how weird they acted with windmills after Texas froze over a year ago. Also we're talking about High-Speed Rail lines, highways are a little different.
Well, yes, but that doesn't answer my question as to why Vox didn't mention tie main reason why CAHSR is gong through Palmdale.
"The route via Palmdale avoids a whole lot of mountains "
Nope. Both I-5 and 99 require mountain crossings.
To avoid that you would have to go all the way west to the existing train tracks between LA and San Diego ("LOSSAN").
Your local control section doesn't see the full picture. The major reason they went through Palmdale is that there are mountains on the other path. just look at a geographical map of California.
3:23 By routing the trains that way you actually skip over the majority of the Sillicon Valley and the largest city in the Bay Area (San Jose). You've effectively bypassed Apple, Lockheed, Google, Netflix, Micron, Intel, Cisco, Nvidia, Ebay, etc (all Santa Clara county). Not to mention San Jose State Univerisity which is pretty much right by San Jose Diridon station which the CAHSR will use.
It is shameful that we, in US, do not have a good and reliable train system. Anyone who has experienced the service in other countries can attest the big conveniences. For example, going from FL to Chicago by train takes 1.5-2 days more than by car depending on the route used. A high-speed train could do it in a few hours and be much more comfortable than an airplane.
Another problem we have is that, High Speed rail once it gets long than 500 miles it is already quicker to take a plane by a long shot.
@@Ian58 train ticket are cheaper
@@Ian58 That must be why no country has ever built a successful High Speed Rail line more than 500 miles long, then.
If this were China we’d have it done three times already
@@Ian58 Assuming you are correct, there are other factors as convenience and comfort as well a train can offer that an airplane cannot. Thanks for the comment.
Nice try Vox.However, budget rarely matters when the ultimate outcome of HSR is overall prosperity of the region. Unfortunately for the establishment media and their masters, the HSR is on track and will be a game changer.
What about subsidence impacting the high speed rail? All I gotta say is they better turn it into something because they already constructed on prime food production lands.
One key point I'd like to make: it's *good* that the Valley cities of Fresno and Bakersfield are being given stops, as those areas can then (hopefully, I'll admit) build denser and have an incentive to start planning around transit and rail usage. But the two biggest problems for the Authority are the small land owners being able to practically Veto the project and the political jousting over it holding up funding and creating uncertainty. California *needs* a comprehensive rail system, with HSR as a "backbone" supporting other more-local lines like the San Joaquins, BART, Capitol Corridor, Pacific Surfliner, MetroLink, CalTrain, and hopefully more routes like a regular train further north from Sacramento, and expansions of local transit.
For all the want to "protect our farm/agricultural culture", people sure do want to invest in suburban sprawl and car-dependency >:(
Guarantee that they don't care about that. Farmers care a lot more about "owning the libs" that even the sustainability of their own livelihood.
hard agree. connecting itenaries between commuter rail and HSR are a big thing and should be agressivly persued
The last-mile prorblem is the biggest problem.
@@tubecraft5343 not really. Walk, street cars, or even ride share or contract a ride. The last mile problem is solved. Americans are just clueless and pwned
Your "it will take a few more decades to complete" estimate is by far the bleakest I've ever heard and frankly quite extreme. Full environmental clearance from Palmdale to downtown SF is already complete. Electrification from San Jose to SF is mostly complete. Support for completing this project isn't waning. Yes, the authority is not well structured but it's not too late to learn from previous mistakes.
Also, saying Japan and France had experienced engineers isn't true at all. Japan's first Shinkansen was ridiculed by the press just line this. Several project leaders were fired during planning and construction for delays and cost overruns.
This video is such a joke! They basically googled up a bunch of anti-rail misinformation and vomited it out in video form! What a clownshow Vox is!
"Electrification from San Jose to SF is mostly complete."
I live in the Bay Area. It's not mostly complete. Some of the wire is hung but a lot of electrical work is still to be done etc. They're saying 2023 at the earliest. btw this does not increase the speed of the train. 79 MPH will still be the speed limit.
"Full environmental clearance from Palmdale to downtown SF is already complete."
Perhaps but just digging a tunnel from Bakersfield to Palmdale will take at least 10 years if not 20. It's a much harder tunneling project than I-5 (Tejon pass). That alone would be a 20 billion dollar project (not funded probably never will be).
Then they want to also dig a tunnel in the 116 mile stretch from San Jose to highway 99, under highway 152. That's another 20 billion dollar, 10-20 year project. (this is one of the major mistakes, they should have gone San Jose to 99 via Altamont Pass which is only 70 miles.)
I just don't understand American conservatives, why be opposed to high-speed rail? It's a proven tech. Many countries have adopted it, including such with even more difficult terrain (Japan, Switzerland in a section literally not just through but under the Alps). Do they just think the US is kind of a failed state? Are they not all about exceptionalism? And no, they can't honestly argue about it being "costly", since that same money would just go to freeway infrastructure instead.
The foundational basis of American conservatism is to blind yourself to evidence, to the current state of affairs, to how things are done in more developed countries, to any substantial realm of reality, and to the desperate pleas of those wretched souls who are essentially being held hostage by your antiquated policies and ideological beliefs, while simultaneously believing that evil hidden forces are somehow conspiring against you. American conservatism is not so different from psychopathy, really.
What?!?! the route stops in city’s where hundreds of millions of taxpayers live in the Central Valley instead of bypassing them? That’s outrageous
Yes, that makes the track as crooked as a dog's hind leg.
As one Norwegian comedian joked about with our train network. "We can’t vote and democratically choose everything. Some things just needs to be done"
If everything was up for a vote then all we get is a bunch of politicians arguing, wasted money, and upset people
@@Deady4u Switzerland beg to differ. Though their vote is directly from the people and not the politicians.
To be fair the Californians voted for the project, but the gov still failed to build it. Loll
@@Deady4u That's basically congress in a nutshell.
@@shafwandito4724 Hopefully it stays that way
A lot of things in this video are ether wrong or exaggerated. First, when the Japanese AND French started building their high speed rail lines, no one had experience building high speed rail. The modern version of high speed rail was new technology. On top of that, both countries built their rail lines in post war times with heavy damage to both countries and with governments pushed to rebuild, this lead to both countries observing a very aggressive form of eminent domain (or their local equivalent s). Today, Japan has a hard time building new lines, but since the network is extensive, they don't have to worry about building an all new line as much. Next, the route. Much of the routing is for practical reasons. Running through the small cities not only helps bring buisness and even cheaper housing options to those from San Francisco. Sending it to Palmedale allows it to use existing lines and link up to the future Brightline Las Vegas line. Also, the current path to downtown SFO uses an existing rail line that will be updated to accommodate the train. These are important points not to leave out but for some reason, everyone does. Just view some of the High Speed rails videos and this one from Railfan I believe who also discusses these points.
I don't know much about French TGV, but your description of Japanese Shinkansen including eminent domain is only applicable for the very first line (Tokaido, planned back in 1930s and open in 1963) and later lines had suffered from usual compensation issues. And yet JR---now even fully privatized---was able to push handful more Shinkansen lines, including one currently in construction (Chuo).
@@lifthras11r But they were still able to build out that first line. Also, it wasn't in the 1930's. The Bullet Train wasn't devised until after WWII, and was built using funds made available via the World Bank to help Japan rebuild after the war. The Smithsonian has a documentary on it. I am not saying the train line didn't exist prior for conventional trains, but it didn't for modern high speed trains. But it still proves my point. It's the first one that's the pain, but once the infrastructure is done, it's easier to add on. Also, I should mention, but I would have to verify, one of the JR rail lines ran chronically in the red, and went bankrupt at some point, and was reorganized. I don't recall the details beyond that, but it is worth noting.
Moving the expresses away from the mainline make the whole system far better because the space needed for the train to stop is massive .
By moving the expresses away you can can triple the amount of freight and slower local trains from so from about 7 to 21
The biggest reason we don't have HSR - we have planes and small airports within an hour's drive of nearly every small community. HSR only works between dense urban areas such as the routes shown here. But for a major US network of HSR, it would nearly always be faster and more economical to fly.
Planes are only efficient for more than 500 as we have to go through airport procedures and journey to airport twice
And what about new England that zone is densely populated compared to rest of the country
It's due to corporates that US lacks many good things
There is also an argument to be made that even though the HSR goes through the smaller cities, the terrain there is less mountainous so this actually saved costs
There are so many large cities in California that people forget the size of places like Fresno. It has a greater population in the city itself than the largest city in most of these Unites States. Therefore most of the country is "nowhere" according to some. California is the fifth largest economy in the world, behind Germany. Germany is slightly smaller than California but has twice the population.
Fresno--yikes!
There are a lot of problems with the HSR project, but actually stopping in cities in the central valley is not one of them. The central valley has quite a lot of highway and short-hop air traffic that would be replaced by HSR, and the cities there are growing quickly as the coastal areas become more expensive to live in. Bypassing it entirely would be a long-term mistake.
@Brian Yeh Nope. It just so happens that the people live in the only viable terrain for HSR in the Central Valley. Surprise-surprise, because they were originally built around rail lines! And those areas are still the best terrain to build rail of any kind, especially HSR!
There are videos on RUclips specifically discussing why this alignment was chosen. And the answer boils down to "it's the cheapest terrain to build on between SF and LA". That's it!
As a bonus 6.5 million potential passengers happen to live there concentrated in 5 large urban metros. Two of them have more than 1 million people! The other three are larger than most state capitals! But that is just a lucky bonus!
Look it up!
The proposed train route followed I-5’s route. I would not say it bypasses the communities, since it’s only 5-10 miles distance. Easily traversed from the station to downtown by taxi (or light rail)
@@electrictroy2010 Lol, what? 😂😂😂😂😂
Look, dude, this is just too funny! You can’t be serious can you? A “taxi” (is that like a cab?) is never driving you into the fields to catch a train. Who’s going to pay for the return journey?
Also, look at a map and tell me what the average distance is from the 5 to civilization! That’s a 30min-1h ride for most people. Can you imagine how much a cab like that would cost.
Also, why would you try to route along the 5 if you’re not going to tunnel under the Grapevine? What’s the point?
This is actually a good thing. The Antelope valley SHOULD be looped into the HSR route, this will go a long way towards linking areas of low cost housing with the metro cores.
Assume a 50 year system life before a major maintenance upgrade. The population of California will be upwards of 50 million people in that time, they simply won’t all fit equitably in Los Angeles and the bay areas, this necessitating a spreading out of that population load throughout the cities along the HSR route.
California has made a sound decision
Even if you adjust for inflation, the CA HSR is projected to cost far more than the Transcontinental railway (built was over 100 years ago). Of course, the CA HSR is much shorter than the Transcontinental railway. For a comparable project, Spain built an HSR for just $6 billion from Madrid to Barcelona.
It's surreal to watch the development gap between the US and the rest of the western world extend at a visible rate because the oligarchic political structures there arrest spending for the common good. It's like the decline of Rome - only this time it's happening within the span of a single generation.
And the ancient Romans had effective measures against cost overruns in building projects (Vitruv had it detailed but I think the original idea is Greek).
oligarchic political (&economic) structures benefit a few at the cost of the rest, meaning competition, cooperation and transparency is being undermined or straight out prohibited.
Where have we heard this before? Ah, here:
_"The interest of the dealers [referring to stock owners, manufacturers, and merchants.. anyone really], however, in any particular branch of trade or manufacture, is always in some respects different from, and even opposite to, that of the public. To widen the market and to narrow the competition, is always the interest of the dealers. To widen the market may frequently be agreeable enough to the interest of the public; but to narrow the competition must always be against it, and can serve only to enable the dealers, by raising their profits above what they naturally would be, to levy, for their own benefit, an absurd tax upon the rest of their fellow-citizens."_
&
_"The proposal of any new law or regulation of commerce which comes from this order, ought always to be listened to with great precaution, and ought never to be adopted till after having been long and carefully examined, not only with the most scrupulous, but with the most suspicious attention. It comes from an order of men, whose interest is never exactly the same with that of the public, who have generally an interest to deceive and even to oppress the public, and who accordingly have, upon many occasions, both deceived and oppressed it."_ Adam Smith
TL;DR: the problem are monopolists (anti-capitalist individuals) and the soceital frameworks that give them power (electoral college.. patents, licenses, tariffs, IP, copyright, etc.)
NAILED IT 👏👏💯💯
@@Segalmed An empire collapses when it overreaches and leaves itself to collapse within. Like right now, the US is very busy being a busybody in Europe, Asia, Africa and Latin America while at the homefront is decay and dilapidatiion of infrastructures, increasing poverty and wealth divide, skyhigh education and student loans, expensive medical care, and social ills like illegal drug use, murder/mass killings, 2 million penal population, homeless, BLM, etc.
That is an insanely good comparison.
One can only go through 'Manifest Destiny' for so long, then the politicians start to squabble over the spoils.
That decline period isn't as sudden as a war, but a slow decay that sees your empire crumble....
The Acceleration just means we can go through that process faster, yay us!
I don't fly Southwest anymore because of their continued protest of this rail line. I'm often forced to fly from LA to SF because driving it is unbearable.
HSR is well on its way. Looking forward to the first section being up and running.
Yea just another 2 or 3 decades and it might have a choo choo. lol.
Crossrail in London was a disaster... But we made it! I hope California does too, it is a fantastic idea.
I thought the faster route was not chosen because of the elevation difference, and thus higher costs
That's vox, and wisecrack, ina nut she'll. The video is only useful if you have prior knowledge, at which point the video isn't actually that useful, otherwise it's borderline misinformation.
@@TheNewblade1 so this is technically misinformation. Yikes
Alan Fisher made a better video explaining the delays and such. It really clears up a lot of issues and mistakes the video has.
Alan*
The reason why it went to Palmdale is because the I-5 route has lots of mountains which for high speed rail means either track that make you slow down or expensive tunneling. Also the reason why it goes through the central valley is because many commuters that go from those cities into San Fran or LA via car, taking those people out of cars to ease congestion along the I-5 was one of the reasons the idea was proposed in the first place.
It would be interesting to find out who all of these contractors are and how much they donated to get this rail system passed. Follow the money.
I'm not sure that traveling along the central valley, even if it increased time between LA and SF, is necessarily a "bad" thing -- you want to build infrastructure for the future, and having well-connected communities along the rails there will induce (preferably sustainably designed/built) development to help alleviate pressure on LA and SF which are already quite packed. A frequent service along a populated route will likely prove to be quite powerful as in integrates and ingrains itself over time.
Maybe people will be able to take a high paying job in LA and have an affordable house outside the city 😂. Maybe one day....
"even if it increased time between LA and SF, is necessarily a "bad" thing "
At 100 billion yes it is.
Considering you can fly from SF to LA in one hour already.
@@neutrino78x Planes aren't efficient or sustainable, rail is, and it's a 1 hour difference, plus a train has way more capacity than a plane