California HSR

GDRRiley said:

The cheaper way would have been the 90s plan to run at 110mph down the coast.

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On what right of way and to where? Little confused on this.

crescent-zephyr said:

On what right of way and to where? Little confused on this.

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SP coast line which may have gotten bought by the state, SF/Oakland to LA and eventually to SD.
Lots of realignment work along with likely ITCS would have been used.

So the existing Coast Starlight route?

crescent-zephyr said:

So the existing Coast Starlight route?

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Yes

GDRRiley said:

SP coast line which may have gotten bought by the state, SF/Oakland to LA and eventually to SD.
Lots of realignment work along with likely ITCS would have been used.

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Would SP have been willing to sell for a reasonable and fair price?

GDRRiley said:

Yes

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Well that's at about 11 hours for the Starlight with an average speed around 40 mph.
Could they actually get the average speed on that route up to 80?

cirdan said:

Would SP have been willing to sell for a reasonable and fair price?

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SP had offered it up, thats how LA metro and VCTC bought their segments

crescent-zephyr said:

Well that's at about 11 hours for the Starlight with an average speed around 40 mph.
Could they actually get the average speed on that route up to 80?

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Focusing on just the SJ-LA segment this is estimating 8.5 hours vs the 10-11 it takes now. Alt 5 (likely at 90mph) or alt 7 were probably most likely given the state was investing in California and later Surfliner cars. 7.5 hours would be ~50mph.

cirdan said:

Would SP have been willing to sell for a reasonable and fair price?

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Highly unlikely. The experience of dealing with SP then UP was a significant factor in choosing that the HSR parallel the BNSF where practical, despite the ex SP route being in general straighter and better serving the city centers.

Something that most people have probably missed is this recent planning document for the Merced station that includes the proposed timetables for the San Joaquins/ACE connecting trains: https://cdn.sjjpa.com/wp-content/uploads/20240716202402/App2.0-3_MITC-Ridership-Memo.pdf

The High Speed Rail Alliance published another A-grade video, this one covering CAHSR, called The Need for a National Railway Program. Despite the title, the heart of it is about CAHSR, from the vantage of the Transit Costs Project at NYU. The interview is with Eric Goldwyn, who points out two examples of problems with how we plan and pay for passenger rail in the U.S.

• The planning and environmental report became a Christmas tree for unrelated infrastructure. The goal of the planners was to get approvals, not keep costs down, he says. The example is a grade-separation bridge not only for CASHR, but also for the nearby freight railroad. A worthy cause, but who pays is the problem. We have a lot of infrastructure that needs work!
• The environmental planning cultural mandate caused several revisions moving CAHSR further and further away from a park and monument. But the freight railroad was always closer to the site. Again, getting the approval was the goal, not costs or engineering or common sense.

The Transit Costs Project often talks about having expertise in the government administration, and maintaining it through a steady pipeline of projects. Most planning documents seem to be written by consultants. Administrative expertise seems like a double-edged sword, though, when it's less than expert. NYC has plenty of both expertise and projects, but TCP points out (not in this video) that the transit authority routinely hires a consultant to get around a bureaucratic slowdown due to rules or resistance. Most of all TCP argues for transparency, because no one knows what is going on in those agencies.

Another example of questionable expertise was way back when Sacramento government workers were trading against Enron in the newly liberalized electricity market, leading to volatile costs and blackouts. A consultant could have done better there! Or, Enron was the consultant, in a sense. It made out like a bandit, and then collapsed for other reasons. I guess Sacramento ended up fixing the problem, though.

The land acquisition for CAHSR was probably not aggressive enough, leading to many cases in local courts. All these rules do have a reason, though. When Shenandoah National Park was created, the state political machine consolidated cases by county and dispossessed many people unfairly, and closed their roads permanently. It was a scandal at the time, then forgotten for fifty years, except by local lore, but now is written about in books. Including one you can buy at the park bookstore. (One of the widely reported news stories at the time had an old man in overalls watching the park service burn down his house so he wouldn't keep going back.)

TCP also points out similar costs problems to the U.S. in Canada, the UK, Hong Kong and Singapore, all with a more or less English system, as opposed to the strong administrative state in France and Spain. The latter system is Napoleonic in origin, as would be Mexico's, but TCP doesn't get into ancient history.