Honestly when this thing is up and running all this hate over what was constructed first is going to sound so stupid.

When we're all in nursing homes or dead? :haha:

^ Exhibit A

Delete.

If they can convincingly secure funding for the first phase and build it to a high standard (travel time of 3 hr 30 min or less), then I think that it will be a good thing.

That is one huge IF.
CHSR authority was tasked to make HSR in California a reality, both politically and financially. You are waiting on Phase 1 results, I am waiting on IOS results, the scaled down Phase 1. The score so far, zero out of two.

Money is the problem and the CHSRA has mismanaged this project and over promised most every step of the way. Politicians lack spines, that has been true since the dawn of time. Politicians watch polls and know that the (tax paying) public are growing weary over the lack of progress and the lack of private investment, while projected cost estimates have risen.

The need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and the passage of the infrastructure bill by Congress, presents California rail advocates and politicians with an opportunity to put this project back on track. But the CHSR Authority doesn’t exactly inspire confidence that money and political support alone will be enough.

Prop 1a in 2008 authorized the state to sell bonds in a fixed dollar amount - about one-third of what was estimated to be needed at the time to build Phase 1. Post-2008 inflation has more than doubled the cost of finishing Phase 1.

Federal dollars were always going to be needed to achieve an IOS, let alone complete Phase 1, even before the inflation. Some federal money came to the authority thanks to the Obama-era stimulus (plus stimulus sent to Ohio and Wisconsin that was rejected by Tea Party governors and redirected to California) and state cap & trade.

You guys are falling for the Tea Party's trap. Over and over again, they starve in-progress rail and transit projects then gloat to their followers that "government is incompetent". If Hillary Clinton had won in 2016, there would have been no Elaine Chow and her Caltrain stunt, and CAHSR almost certainly would have received a significant infusion of federal cash.

Let's do the math of your reply, so everyone can see what happens when a project is underfunded.
Prop 1a in 2008 at that time pays 33% of Phase 1
Inflation since then has more than doubled the cost of Phase 1
Therefore Prop 1a actually only pays 16% of Phase 1.

Where did CHSR think the other 67%, now 84%, was going to come from?
How many transit projects in the last 50 years, in both Democrat and Republican Administrations and Congress, has Uncle Sam paid 70%, 80%, 90%, or 100% of a transit project? ZERO!

CHSR has been so underfunded by the State of California they are hard presses to fund just the IOS, about half the route of Phase 1.

Even NY and NJ will have to fund 50% of the new Gateway tunnels under the Hudson River. Why did CHSR think they could get away with less?

The Honolulu Rail project is now estimated to cost far more than $10 Billion, yet Uncle Sam is only contributing less than $2 Billion, less than 20%. Most transit agencies expect to receive 50% at most from Uncle Sam, but not CHSR.

Stop kidding yourself, Republicans at the Federal level have not underfunded CHSR, Democrat Administrations and Congress have, in addition to the Democrat Administrations and Legislatures in California.

Note, I am not suggesting many Republicans have ever supported the CHSR politically or financially, I am suggesting that Democrats have supported CHSR politically, although always in an underfunded state - i.e. not fully financed.

Which is worse, not promising a pie in the sky project or promising an unfinished and unusable pie in the sky project?

electricron:
Jajajajajajajajajajajajajajajajajajajajajaja! Surely you are joking. The Trump mafia regime pulled nearly $1B of funding for high-speed rail from California.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/trans...-rail-project/

Trump and Republicans in Congress also tried to cut funding for Amtrak.

"The proposal would cut Amtrak funds in fiscal 2021 by more than 50% over 2020 levels. It could cut funds to the congested northeast corridor from $700 million to $325 million and cut long-distance train funds from $1.3 billion to $611 million, then phase out support for Amtrak’s long-distance trains."

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-u...-idUSKBN20429Q

And here is more:

"Congressional Republicans this week are trying to drive another spike, or two, into the heart of California’s high-speed rail program.

Daring a presidential veto, GOP lawmakers are deploying a Fiscal 2015 transportation funding bill to effectively block the federal Surface Transportation Board from issuing new permits for the California project.

Hammering home the point, House Republicans on Tuesday approved an amendment by Rep. Jeff Denham, R-Calif., that blocks any money from the $52 billion bill from going to California high-speed rail."

https://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/pol...e24768775.html

You missed my point entirely. If Obama's FRA had granted CHSR 50% of the total funding needed for Phase 1, California's 33% share from Prop1a wouyld still had been 17% short. Since neither California nor Obama did not fully fund Phase 1 when they had the power to do so, inflation has turned that 17% short into a 34% shortage from California. and even a higher % shortage from Obama. Do not blame later Presidents (either Democrat or Republican) for the underfunding from the beginning. Later funding would have been unnecessary if the CHSR project had been fully funded from the beginning.

My point is that CHSR has never been fully funded by either California or USA.
The plan that future Administrations and Congress will continue to fund a capital project years later is a recipe for failure.

202, you're not going to change the guys mind so you just made your fingers tired for nothing. Finding mindboggling anti-rail and hsr right wing misinformation is like shooting fish in a barrel.

Electricon, you're missing the forest for the trees. The general truth that Democrats are for the most part for federal rail and hsr funding and investment and that Republicans for the most part are not should be self-evident.

Really, how much of the $66 Billion Amtrak will be getting in the Bipartisan Bill will actually go to HSR (greater than 150 mph trains)?
If they are so in favor of real HSR, where are the 200 mph plus speed trains in any of their plans?
ZERO is still ZERO!

Here's a truth that can not be debated, if all $66 Billion was given the CHSR, it still would not be enough top finish Phase 1, or even start Phase 2.
Of course, Amtrak will instead invest almost all of it on the NEC and on other rail corridors east of the Appalachians. And we are only talking about new trains with maximum speeds of just 165 mph.

So $2 billion is "a rounding error on the overall cost of the network" but...

"The Trump mafia regime pulled nearly $1B of funding for high-speed rail from California." <-- This is being cited as the Feds underfunding CAHSR? Half of a 'rounding error'?

Look, it's no secret Republicans largely have it out for rail projects. But I don't think that's the problem here in CA.

I'm very much in favor of passenger rail, and I absolutely support high speed rail in California. But I really disagree with many aspects of this project, and I find the lack of progress after so many years of work to be really troubling. The longer we go with minimal results to show for the work, the more people are going to become frustrated with the project and convinced it's not worth it. It just should not be this hard to get the initial operating segment built in the damn central valley. With the setbacks, delays, and cost overuns the project has already experienced in this 'easy' part of the routing, who would have confidence that the CAHSRA can deliver on-time and on-budget for the more challenging segments like getting into SF and LA?

And that $1 Billion has since been restored, and the Federal program being used as the source of the money was from Housing and Urban Development - not the Department of Transportation.

How many houses will HUD build on the CHSR corridor? ZERO?
Could California use the $Billion from HUD better on public housing right now with its homeless population crisis today than on CHSR?

Because Democrats dont have a strong majority - they barely have a majority at all and have members of the party with politics out of step with where the moment is. Dont you think if Democrats controlled the majority of state governorships and legislatures and held 2/3 of the Senate and a large House majority the infrastructure bill probably wouldnt have been twice the size? A multi-hundred billion dollar standalone rail investment act years ago? This goes back forty years. If the country had taken a different political path, the Democratic party wouldnt have spent twenty years being dragged to the right by the Reagan era voter... We would have gotten a Gore administration addressing climate change twenty years earlier... Strong Democratic leadership would have prioritized and passed a smogesbord of transit, rail, alt transportation, complete streets...the list would go on and on. You dont think the Obama administration would have liked to do more in those 8 years? Thanks to the effectiveness of the hateful right wing propaganda machine and the "wisdom" of the voters, the Republicans spent 7 years of 8 spinning tales of his "foreignness" and his "dangerous socialist policies" and obstructing virtually everything Dems and his administration wanted to accomplish. Then they turn around and push that fucktard as their standard bearer on a platform that the Democrats cant get anything done. Sound familiar?... Because they're hoping to use the same playbook to take back power for the sake of taking back power next year. How do you suppose rail, hsr and transit funding will fare then?

Federal funding and more state funding.

The original UMTA of 1964 established a 80/20 federal/local matching formula. Between the 1964 and 1970 acts, the federal government paid 80% of the construction cost of the Washington Metro, Miami Metrorail, Baltimore Subway, Baltimore light rail, Buffalo light rail subway, and various NYC subway improvements, including the Second Ave. subway sections that were abandoned in the late 1970s.

Yeah do the math on how cheaply they're getting roughly half of Phase 1 built - for less than the purple line expansion in Los Angeles.

Chris Christie scuttled that project 10 years ago after $250 million had been spent. Why? He's the same guy who put barrels out on the George Washington Bridge as political payback.

Refer to my first response - California has tons of money rolling in to fund more construction without any help from the feds. Unfortunately, Gov. Newsom chickened out two years ago since he smelled a recall challenge coming on.


It's not pie-in-the-sky. California has banked $20 billion surpluses for several years in a row. It's in an outstanding financial position. It could easily sell bonds to fund completion of Phase 1 but they had to outlive the recall threat and are waiting to get as much federal money as they can.

I posted something else, but I'll stick with local issues from now on.

Is Newsom a Democrat or Republican? Democrat, I rest my case you can not blame all under financing on Republicans.

If they could have, why have they not already sold those bonds so as to finish the IOS or more of Phase 1? Do not sell the bonds = do not have that money to spend on construction now, these delays cause the need to spend more later because of inflation. Looks like Democrats really wish CHSR to fail due to lack of cash because inflation is stealing money from the project.

The truth is that many legislators, lets suggest maybe a majority of them right now, would rather spend that cash on something else. There is no other valid reason to not sell those bonds and spend them now!

California has the stupid governor recall thing (it's much harder to trigger in most other states) so all governors are forced to walk on eggshells. Arnold Schwarzenegger - someone with zero political experience - managed to unseat Gray Davis 15~ years ago using this ridiculous backdoor mechanism.

Also, the 80/20 federal/local match for transit projects established in 1964 was undone by Reagan in the early 1980s. It's been 50/50 ever since.

They still have billions in the bank. They don't need to sell bonds until the unbuilt sections are fully designed and out to bid. In fact they're probably not allowed to do so under law.

The current and upcoming surpluses are so gigantic that they could pay cash for the entire remainder of Phase 1. Instead, they're spending it on checks, half which are just going to end up buying bitcoin and meme stocks: https://www.gov.ca.gov/2021/07/12/ca...nt-challenges/

Water resilience and drought response: Climate change is making droughts more common and more severe. The Governor’s Plan invests $5.1 billion over four years in drought support, water supply and natural habitat restoration projects around the state to build climate resilience in the face of more extreme cycles of wet and dry.

Working to build a 22nd century electric grid: The Administration continues work with the Legislature to build a cleaner, more resilient and reliable 22nd century electric grid amid record-breaking temperatures driven by climate change.

Expanding broadband access: It’s time to stop talking about closing the digital divide and finally do it. Through a $6 billion investment, more Californians will be able to access broadband coverage through the construction of an open access middle mile and last mile projects that connect unserved households in remote areas to the middle mile.

In addition, the Administration continues work with the Legislature to advance investments to build a modernized and sustainable transportation system, including funding for the state’s public transportation system and high-speed rail.

The budget and related budget-implementing legislation signed by the Governor today include:

AB 141 by the Committee on Budget – Budget Act of 2021: Department of Cannabis Control: licensure: safety and quality assurance.
SB 129 by Senator Nancy Skinner (D-Berkeley) – Budget Act of 2021. A line-item veto can be found here.
SB 139 by the Committee on Budget and Fiscal Review – Golden State Stimulus II: Golden State Stimulus.
SB 146 by the Committee on Budget and Fiscal Review – Correctional facilities.
SB 151 by the Committee on Budget and Fiscal Review – Economic development.
SB 158 by the Committee on Budget and Fiscal Review – Hazardous waste.


###

Spending the surpluses on all other pressing needs is what governments do. I have never ever seen any government spend all their money on just one thing.
Continuing to work with the Legislature for more funding for public transportation and CHSR means they were not included in this years budget.
Maybe the Governor is hoping for a special allocation of funding for special programs outside of the normal budget? :???:
Or waiting until next year to include these projects in to the normal budget?

The federal transportation bills should but do not follow regular cycles. This applies to highways, which have received the vast majority of federal aid over the past 100 years, in addition to transit and intercity rail. This is what makes it all so difficult from any state's perspective - they have to wait on the hope that they get a federal match, but they don't know when they're going to be able to apply, because when and what is offered is completely unpredictable. Then they don't know how much they're going to get awarded. Then there is the threat of a Tea Party claw back - i.e. the incoming Republican governors rejecting Obama's stimulus funds, or simply an obnoxious stall, like Elaine Chow's Caltrain stunt.

In my city, the incoming Tea Party Mayor wasted several TIGER grant applications in the mid-2010s on favors for donors. These were applications for items that the TIGER grants didn't award grants for. It would be like thinking you could take a football scholarship to one college and using it to buy a house. It doesn't work like that. But instead of applying to a transit grant with a transit project, he'd do stuff like apply for a parking garage next to a donor's suburban office building. Crap that wasn't even inside the city limits.

This is what politics is. This is how you win office and keep office - you gain new donors by doing crazy futile stuff for current donors.

Feds block billions of public transit money for California
 

https://www.yahoo.com/news/feds-bloc...193917145.html
"Associated Press
Thu, November 11, 2021, 1:39 PM
SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP) — The federal government says California is ineligible for about $12 billion in public transit funding because of a long-running dispute over changes to the state's public pension law that the Biden administration recently determined are improper.
The Sacramento Bee reports the U.S. Department of Labor recently determined those changes were improper because they were imposed by law instead of collectively bargained with public employee unions.
The federal government's latest decision means the state would be ineligible for about $9.5 billion in money set aside for California public transit agencies in the infrastructure bill Congress approved last week. California would also forfeit about $2.5 billion in grants for public transit that were part of the most recent federal coronavirus relief legislation."

Try placing the blame of this fiasco onto Republicans, I dare you!

Give them a chance, Unions will mess everything up in the name of fairness.

Hey, CHSR, do you still believe Biden is going to send you $12 Billion with no strings attached?

Nothing in that article suggests they wont find a solution that will allow the state to receive the federal funds. Also I'm not sure how you could read that and say its the fault of unions. The Labor Dept objection to the pension law is that it does not fairly award the unions collective bargaining rights. So its the legislatures hasty pension bill thats caused this mess. But hey lets blame everything on the unions, thats what conservatives do best.

Kind of a mixed bag from Vartabedian. Not as bad faith as usual. More of a focus on funding breakdown from the BIB:


Biden infrastructure funds will help state bullet train, but not as much as boosters hoped

BY RALPH VARTABEDIAN
NOV. 11, 2021 5 AM PM

The infrastructure bill that President Biden plans to sign Monday contains a historic amount of new funding for passenger rail service and aims to remake its role in American transportation, but any boost for the nation’s bullet train ambitions will be limited at best.

Exactly how much money will reach various rail projects — including the financially challenged California bullet train — is still an unknown and will depend on how the complex law is administered and developed into grant programs.

Hopes for a $100-billion national high-speed rail program, a goal backed by former secretaries of transportation, labor unions, major engineering firms and rail advocates, were dashed by the bipartisan infrastructure bill. Most of the money for rail systems will go to Amtrak’s service on the East Coast, various long-distance Amtrak routes and freight rail systems.

Rest of story

The reason this comes up actually is because the Amalgamated Transit Union files objections to federal grant awards to transit agencies, and that’s what triggers the DOL review. See the Sac Bee article.

https://www.sacbee.com/news/politics...id=-1997988967

Anyway, this came up during the Obama administration, and California was able to solve it by temporarily exempting transit workers from the pension reform law. This didn’t come up during the Trump administration since the Trump Department of Labor doesn’t side with unions.

https://twitter.com/numble/status/14...729312773?s=21

I don’t think this rule affects CAHSR anyway, because this is regarding funding from the FTA, and CAHSR is funded through the FRA. The rule is for a bunch of FTA programs.

The rule is 5333(b):
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/49/5333
Here are all those programs covered—CAHSR doesn’t seem to be funded by any of these.
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/t...III/chapter-53

The amount of irrelevant information in this thread is annoying. Can we discuss the California high speed rail project instead of all this irrelevant politics?

^Thanks for your opinion.

If you don't think politics are relevant to CHSR you must have your head in the sand buddy. I have a fairly low tolerance with anyone telling others they shouldn't discuss something as central and pivotal as politics, doubly so from a Canadian.

No, Canadians are good people, even if they have funny accents, eh!

You're absolutely right. Public funding is critical to this important investment, so politics is inseparable from the California high speed rail project.

Some states hate us and will stop and nothing to try and.....derail our projects.

Edit

It's not just other states, the fools are right in the routes backyard. Look at that craven empty suit dipshit from Bakersfield that wants to be the next Speaker. Him and other CV Republicans have been rooting for this to fail for years... "Team Boondoggle" and all the culture war horseshit. I wish it was unimaginable.

I went back a few pages looking for the guy who posted glowingly about England's HS2. Well now it's been cut back:
https://www.cnn.com/travel/article/b...cut/index.html

"Scrapped"

All this means is that the UK is in the economic nadir of their self inflicted Brexit buyers remorse and the scaling back of HS2 is being done for political reasons. It will just get added back down the road, it will just come online 5-10 years later than originally planned.

Biden's just-announced extension of the federal student loan waiver will bring the total cost the treasury to $110 billion, so far, far more than the worst-case budget for completion of CAHSR Phase 1:

"Forbearance cost the government about $95 billion since the Treasury hasn’t received a reprieve on its debt to fund the loans. The Administration’s latest extension will bring the taxpayer tab to $110 billion, most of which hasn’t been appropriated by Congress."

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-for...=hp_opin_pos_1

I posted this because people don't really seem to have a grasp on how much money there is in California, let alone the whole of the United States, and how the country has the capability to literally print the money to build a high quality passenger rail network without stressing the federal budget in the least.

Exactly right. The debt, inflation, etc.. didn't even seem to be of the slightest concern with the recent $800B defense bill for next year. We can easily afford this but we don't make modern, efficient, transportation a priority.

"Defense" has made a lot of huge purchasing mistakes since the downsizing in the 1990s. It's really one after another. The new ships and aircraft are so complicated that the programs are cancelled after just a few are built since some newer technology appears that promises to make them redundant.

Meanwhile, a lot of what I remember being in the Air Force back in the 1980s is...still going. B-1, B-52, F-15, F-16, etc.

The true-ist truth that ever was.

Anything is possible if you are willing to throw money at it. But that does not mean everything should have money thrown at it.
First off, DOD budget is entirely funded by the Federal government and CHSR is funded by both the Federal and State governments. Were talking about apples and oranges here, just on funding.
Now, just for the sake of even distribution of Federal Transportation funding to all the different states, plus a few territories, How much more the USDOT budget would have to be to have the Federal government fund the rest of the CHSR project.
The present DOT budget is $86 Billion
https://www.naco.org/blog/fy-2020-us...iations-motion
California gets around 18%. That means the rest of the nation's share is around 82%
15.5 / 86 x 100 = 18.023
The 2020-21 Budget: Transportation
Specifically, the budget includes $15.5 billion for the California Department of Transportation
The 2021-22 Spending Plan: Transportation
The 2021‑22 budget provides $31.7 billion for the California Department of Transportation
The new Administration has doubled the amount of funding budgeted for USDOT.

Let's assume the remaining portions of CHSR is funded over a 10 year span. With $70 Billion more needed to fund it, that would be a simple $7 Billion more per year going to California just for CHSR.
Remember, California's share is 18%. The rest of the country's share is 82%.
82% /18% = 4.555.
4.555 x $7 Billion / year = 31.885 / year.
31.885 + 7 = 38.885 Billion per year increase just to maintain funding levels half way equivalent between the various states within the USDOT budget.

It's easy to suggest all that is needed to build CHSR with Federal funding alone as a $7 Billion per year budget line item, but the political reality to find that $7 Billion for California is to take a $39 Billion per year budget item hit.

Nearly all government capital bonds are 30-year. The bonds are sold when each construction contract commences, meaning the total sum is staggered, and each bond sale pays a different interest rate.

California High-Speed Rail Authority meets federal grant requirement

By Pete Menting
23ABC
Jan. 6, 2022

"The California High-Speed Rail Authority announced it has fully met its state funding match requirements for federal dollars one year ahead of schedule.

The Federal Railroad Administration required the Authority to match the expenditure of federal funds with state funds for qualified expenses by December 2022..."

https://www.turnto23.com/news/state/...nt-requirement

^It sure would be nice if that article included a dollar figure along with plans for how the sum is expected to be spent. You know, basic newswriting.

Agreed, an article more than two sentences long would have been useful.

It's super complicated, just look up "tapered match". I wouldn't expect reporters to figure out all the finer points of this.

Long story short, California got $2.5bn of Federal money from ARRA (the 2009 stimulus) and they had to put up matching funds from state/local sources. In 2017, the Federal money was all used up but California had yet to finish the matching funds so the Feds set a deadline of 2022. Looks like they met the requirement, so they should be in good standing to receive further grants from the new infrastructure bill.

Governor Newsom's 2022 - 2023 budget proposes spending at least $4.2B in state money on high-speed rail.

"The Budget includes an additional $9.1 billion ($4.9 billion General Fund and $4.2 billion Proposition 1A bond funds) to support the continued development of a first-in-the-nation, electrified high-speed rail system in California, regional transit and rail projects, bicycle and pedestrian projects, and climate adaptation projects, with a particular focus on aligning the state's transportation system with its climate goals."

https://www.ebudget.ca.gov/FullBudgetSummary.pdf

How much money has been spent on this insanely expensive airline route?


I ask because let's see what could have been spent on other transportation objectives in the state if it were not for this horrible project.

About $8 billion. The full system build-out will have 24 stations, meaning there will be over 500 origin/destination combinations. So thousands of flights per hour to deliver the same service, assuming that an airstrip could be built immediately adjacent to each station.




Whatever the plan is, critics always have another plan.

You lost my man

Beautiful