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Originally Posted by pesto
A more complete answer is that private companies don't ever pay because they don't see the return being there. That's what makes the public debate about this necessary. If it were a money maker, it would just need some public permits and the funding would be forthcoming.
That's why a serious audit and analysis of costs is required, along with a clear view of alternatives (electric cars, airplanes) and their costs. It will lose money; the question is how much are you willing to lose. And, of course, there are the local community issues as well.
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That's not really correct. There is plenty of precedent and evidence that HSR will make money. However, the ROI is going to be extremely long term, and HSR is going to require an extremely large amount of money to be viable, neither of which appeal to private investors. Private investors think too short term, and they are not going to risk $40 billion+.
The government has to be involved for a variety of reasons including thinking long term, the ability to factor in the many, many reasons to build HSR that aren't directly related to its immediate profitability, the ability to raise the massive sums of money required, and the ability to use government powers such as eminent domain.
I agree that there should be more private investors involved, but I believe that the primary reason they are not materializing yet has less to do with the profitability of the project and more to do with the still speculative nature of the project. You're not going to start seeing serious private money committed to this until after the EIRs are finalized, the route is finalized, and we are seriously into the specific design phase. Until then, it is too easy for the plug to get pulled before anything even happens, and it is too long before trains start running and investors see any kind of ROI.
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btw, both of the IE routes are silly. The only time-effective connection between LA and SD is via the OC. The IE routes are too long with too many stops. In effect, it's an overly long commuter line that encourages even more sprawl. Cut it off at UC Riverside.
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I tend to agree, the issue though is that it is environmentally and politically extremely difficult, if not outright impossible to build full scale HSR through OC and north SD county. Ignoring the fact that prop 1A was passed promising a route through the IE and onto SD (which is not a trivial issue, as that general design legally cannot be changed without another voter mandate), the ROW simply isn't there along much of the coastal route, and would be nearly if not completely impossible to acquire.
Have you ever ridden Amtrak or the Metrolink/Coaster along that route? There are long sections where it is single tracked, the trains run slow for environmental sensitivity reasons, and (particularly between about Oceanside and about San Juan Capistrano) there are long stretches where the ROW is limited to single track by geography (the ocean on the west and the bluffs to the east). There are significant stretches where the tracks run right along the beach and look unsustainable in a serious storm as they're built now. Add in that long portions of that ROW run through Camp Pendleton and environmentally sensitive areas and it's almost all controlled by the coast commission, and you begin to see how impossible it would be to even double track that ROW the whole way, much less add the 3rd and 4th tracks that would be necessary and get approval for high speeds.
I agree that the general route through OC makes much more sense than the IE routes, but it's too infeasible when you try to figure out the actual details. The current ROW isn't upgradeable enough, a whole new ROW is completely out of the questions given the costs of ROW acquisition through that area, Camp Pendleton and other state and federal land, etc., and prop 1A requires a route that goes through the IE.
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