Train, train go away
Image from Back to the Future Part III (1990).
It's cheaper and faster to get to the Moon than to build the CA High-Speed Rail. Thomas Buckley reports on Substack.
For comparison, NASA’s Artemis program – which in phase one involves four round-trips to the moon over the next four years– costs about $93 billion. Delving back into the math, Artemis ships will travel about 1.9 million miles for a cost of about $48,690 per mile or about 77 cents an inch.
Using the questionable HSRA number of $100 billion for its phase one, the project is costing about $192 million a mile or about $3,035 dollars an inch, or about 4,000-times as much.
To reiterate: 4,000 times the distance traveled cost to go to the moon.
So, what is the big picture?
First, the project will never be completed so notionally not only is it massively over budget it is technically infinitely over timeline.
Second, the project has not only failed to hit its budgetary and timeline projections, it has failed to generate even close to the number of real jobs promised….though it has done very by its politically-connected consultants.
Third, if it continues it becomes even more difficult to build. Sneaking into downtown San Francisco, let alone going up and down and through the mountains and valleys to get to San Diego on the proposed “inland route,” (btw, it’s why the current railroad hugs the coast – it’s just to damn expensive to build inland on that route) will cost tens of billions and take decades.
Fourth, speaking of tunnels, one must get from Bakersfield to LA and that is now planned to be accomplished by spending $736 million dollars a mile to tunnel its way through the mountains and earthquake faults and down to Burbank and then to LA.
Fifth, the ridership projections in theory mean that once everything is built a full-loaded 1,000 passenger train will have to leave SF headed to LA and vice-versa every 11 minutes for 18 hours a day to hit its projections. No train anywhere does that.
Sixth, speaking of income – the authority claims the train will make money. No high-frequency passenger train outside of Singapore, Japan, a few other Asian countries (and, amazingly the London subway system) makes money when factoring in capital costs. This will not be different.
Seventh, while the project was supposed to involve private investment not a single firm has stepped up to even seriously consider dropping a dime on the system. Interestingly, private money doesn’t even make sense as investors would want an 8% return while the state could actually just borrow money at 4%.
Eighth, the system is now designing stations and tracks on land it does yet own, designs that will almost assuredly change dramatically (and cost far more) when finalized. Imagine building a home and digging a basement and then realizing it needs to built on a slab foundation – fill it in and start over.
And ninth, since the state’s power grid cannot generate the electricity needed to run the system, the Authority is planning to build its own completely renewable system on land it owns. Imagine building a solar farm that is 500 miles long and 100 feet wide.
Without the $4 billion the feds were supposed to fund, even the first phase will not be completed, leaving viaducts and rights-of-way and guideways that have already been built to stand like Henge monuments to government failure.
Of course, that might in and of itself be interesting and allow for a complete repurposing of the system as is done back east with disused railways.
It may just turn out to be a low speed trail.
Read the whole thing here.
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