California High-Speed Rail

Here is my reaction a letter to a letter from a friend bemoaning the cutbacks to the high-speed rail project in California...

Regarding California's high-speed rail (HSR), for years I've been reading lib/Dem blogs that were skewering the HSR project, in spite of being a Dem initiative.  I think the problem is that the plan was faulty.   Here's some commentary from 2008: 

Stops are death to a high-speed system...

This design breaks all three rules laid down by the French. First, instead of building the line on cheap rural land, the designers will run it through the heart of Modesto, Merced, Fresno, and Bakersfield - the urban areas, with the most expensive land in the San Joaquin Valley.

Second, instead of building the line where few overpasses are needed, the designers will run it through the most heavily developed area in the valley, with numerous cross-streets, each one of which has to be bridged.

Then there is the noise. The environmental impact report for this project blandly states that train noise will be "low" or "moderate" in the valley communities. But a 225-mph train going through the heart of the most heavily populated areas in the valley is sure to upset and annoy thousands of persons per trip. There will be 96 trips per day.

A passenger standing on the Merced platform, waiting for a local train, will be 23 feet away from the high-speed train as it comes through at 225 mph. In this case, it will not be a question of noise, but of whether the passenger will be blown off the platform.

There are some commonalities with other recent high speed transportation failures.  Noise limited the now defunct Concorde SST to flights over the ocean.  Maglev trains never caught on in part due to noise:

At more than 300km/h, a lot of energy is spent to overcome the air drag of the trains themselves. Issues also become noise, and the required straightness of the infrastructure. And the issue that with stops, decreasing travel time by increasing maximum speeds becomes marginal. Overall, speeds above 300km/h tend to become uneconomical, no matter the propulsion system.

Meanwhile, cost estimates for California's high-speed rail ballooned and the completion date was pushed back:

The California high-speed rail project has often been derided as a boondoggle, and with good reason. After narrowly winning a statewide vote in 2008 with low-balled cost estimates and exceedingly optimistic — some would say deceitful and fraudulent — assumptions, and not releasing the business plan until after the election, the proposal was quickly changed when reality set in and for years has borne little resemblance to the system promised to voters...  Cost estimates quickly ballooned from $40 billion or $45 billion to $98.5 billion, then down to $68.4 billion after abandoning end-to-end dedicated high-speed tracks in favor of sharing rails with freight and local trains at both ends of the system, thereby making a trip between Los Angeles and San Francisco in the mandated 2 hours and 40 minutes virtually impossible. The San Diego and Sacramento segments were soon placed on the back burner, despite promising voters there that they would have high-speed train service. Current cost estimates (2019) are around $79 billion, and the completion date has been pushed back by about a decade.

Estimates of the project’s ridership, which is critical to its viability, particularly since operating subsidies are prohibited, have dropped from as high as 117 million passengers a year to 36 million. That would still be more than the entire Amtrak system, which covers more than 500 destinations in 46 states and serves fewer than 32 million passengers per year. Amtrak’s high-speed Acela Express service, which serves a larger, denser market than the planned California system — including Boston, New York City and Washington, D.C. — has an annual ridership of just 3.4 million.

Even Gov. Gavin Newsom realized the hopelessness of the project when he used his State of the State address in February to “level about high-speed rail.”

“[L]et’s be real,” he said. “The project, as currently planned, would cost too much and take too long.”

There have been a number of failed/failing efforts to economically increase transportation speeds in our lifetimes, including the SST, maglev trains, and loops/hyperloops.