That Merced to Bakersfield line is characterizes as from nowhere to nowhere in How Big Projects Get Done. It’s one of the few negative examples in the book that stuck with me. It’s embarrassing.
Merced to Bakersfield is exactly right. Build it there first, figure out how to build it, fuckup where it's cheaper and gain the experience so when you have to tear up downtown LA and SF you know what the fuck you're doing and can get in, get it done right the first time, and then get out. No one wants to live in a construction zone, but it's worse when something goes wrong and the construction zone lasts 3x longer than it has to.
On the other hand, how many additional people would be served by the infrastructure if they would just be brave and take a risk on an imperfect solution rather than bickering about it for X years or decades?
This, exactly. We Americans have very little knowledge base on how to build HSR, so it's as much a workforce training and proving ground as it is a functional line.
You would think we would just hire the dutch/swiss/italians (take your pick out of europe) to come build our HSR, similar but opposite of how we destroyed their cities when they brought in our 'traffic engineers' in the 60s and 70s.
I wouldn't say there's a technical knowledge gap insomuch as there are regulatory and political issues in the cities that need more time to resolve than building a line through farm country & desert do.
I know next to nothing about this project but isn’t this a way to build a train line somewhat cost effective? Once it exists, the land around both stations will increase in utility until it’s no longer a “nowhere”. If you build downtown to downtown you have to either dig a massive, expensive tunnel or buy up a lot of high value land or both.
Perhaps it’s won’t break even for half a century but if it eventually does, it will be a success.
It's my theory partly why China has smashed out so many thousands of km of HSR and what appear to be excessively wide highways (other than prestige and a general vibe of governance=more, bigger infrastructure). In 100 years when the ossification and NIMBYism is the norm, the rail corridor land is already there. Renovating a line that already exists may not be easy, but it's easier than prizing land out plot by plot, and even in China that's a huge hassle. Plus the hard physical bits like blasting tunnels and digging cuttings is already done before labour costs succumb to spiraling cost disease.
Then again, at about $45 million per mile, it's actually not even that much more expensive that Chinese HSR: to build the current 45000km of rail at the LV-LA price would be $1.25 trillion, which isn't vastly more than the Chinese system has cost so far. In fact it's very roughly about as much as the US spends, per year, on healthcare on top of what European countries pay for the same outcomes (total annual spending: 4.2 trillion and a bit, or 12.5k per person, vs global number two, Switzerland, at 8k: about 1/3, not far from 1.25/4.2!)
Build it and they'll come? At least one end has to be somewhere people want to be, right? A line from London into the countryside makes sense. You can live in the countryside and work in London. A line from nowhere to nowhere is a chicken/egg problem. Now if one end is an Airport and another is a new community who will have jobs at the airport, that might work.
They both are university towns (UC Merced and Cal State Bakersfield); given that academics are generally positively inclined towards public transit a line could encourage collaborations, I suppose.
I agree. I can imagine tourists traveling to Merced to see the high speed rail in all its glory. Bakersfield is already a hot tourist destination because of Buck Owens and The Hag, but adding high speed rail will make it even more attractive as a “must see” attraction when visiting the golden state.
There's also a plan to connect to SF and LA eventually.
Those will be built as (if) they are funded. The only funding currently secured is the bakersfield to merced leg.
The problem is, that leg is nowhere to nowhere and is going to cost over 100B dollars. Most people take that to mean that it's incredibly unlikely that the more costly portions of the route (the ones that make it useful) will ever get built as they will be absurdly expensive.
I was just looking up the LA to SF high speed rail project because the headline sounded so wrong. It's so sad that the official website has a giant photo of their progress: a short section of clean, straight overpass over a country road, with nothing connected to either end, an island of rail infrastructure plonked down in the middle of California. Sigh.
That's the first stage of any rail project - in California they have literally build hundreds of these unconnected bridges, viaducts and embankments. Same thing with HS2 in the UK.
Connecting them all up with rails and catenary is the (relatively) cheap, quick and easy bit, and it's done at the end - it's exactly all these structures (and the stations, which will likely be the next phase) that take all the time and money.
_Presuming_ that the rest of it gets done, it likely makes a lot of sense; you get the difficult bit (starting up high speed rail construction and operation in a country, and indeed a continent, which has never done it before) out of the way in a presumably _relatively_ low-stakes section; if you're going to have teething problems, and you will, better to have them there than when you're trying to go through a mountain range.
