What a mess and an embarrassment. So the estimate is now $135 billion for the whole project? And complete by when...2060? If this project was supposed to provide an example of the viability of HSR in the US, I'd say it's failing spectacularly. I highly doubt we'll ever see more than the CV line. $35 billion to connect f***ing Merced to Bakersfield...what a joke.

What state do you live in, again?

CAHSR will eventually run between the Bay Area and Southern California if Washington remains cooperative. That said, I don't expect service expansions to Sacramento and San Diego. In such a scenario, existing rail lines to those cities could be upgraded to faster rail, if not truly high-speed rail.

Meanwhile, the private Brightline high-speed railroad (publicly funded, of course) between Southern California and Las Vegas will be an example of the viability of HSR in the US. It will almost certainly be the first in the nation.

We were going to have to wait a very long time for those anyway. That said, when they do happen I fully expect them to be fully compatible expansions of the then fully operational Phase 1.

Confidence is what is sorely lacking in this country.

Amtrak should take over all Brightline operations.

Given that they recived billions in loans and grants Amtrak should take over...but I feel like Amtrak would then be stuck with 2 terminals that preclude proper expansions. Las Vegas station should have been along the UP tracks in Downtown not the outskirts.. RC is an even bigger hurdle to connect to LAU.

From what I understand the Rancho station is just the phase 1 terminal for the Brightline Vegas route and the end game is for Brightline and CAHSR to collaboratively build the LA Union Station-Rancho leg of CAHSR and have Brightline trains run from Union Station. Or at least for some of Brightline's money being put towards the Union Station-Rancho leg of the route.

If I’m understanding correctly, I don’t agree that the government* should operate the vehicles because it invested in the infrastructure. Too many examples where that doesn’t happen from airports to private vehicles. However it would make sense that there be competition to operate the equipment. It does seem unusual to make the infrastructure available to only a single private company.

I think that there’s a good chance that at least the part of CAHSR that connects LAUS to Rancho Cucamonga could happen if they’re able to start just that phase. They’ll likely have to take away freeway lanes or homes, or maybe both to do it.

*Amtrak isn’t technically a government company and would likely be a downgrade from Brightline.

The Brightline line as currently planned between "LA" and "Las Vegas" might technically be the nation's first HSR line, but it's going to be small-time by any global standard and as compared to CAHSR.

It's amazing how CAHSR's IOS ending many miles north of LA is a "failure" but Brightline gets a pass for the same transgression. Similarly, CAHSR won't be high speed or fully grade separated in its approach to San Francisco, but Brightline won't even attempt to reach DT Las Vegas.

Brightline is proposed to stop right off the Vegas strip, so I don't know what you're talking about. On the other end, Brightline will be stopping in Rancho Cucamonga. While it's obviously not as good as it coming to DTLA (which I believe it eventually will) at least RC is in the metro area and is currently served by commuter rail. Bakersfield is nowhere close to Los Angeles, not in the metro area, and is not connected to LA by passenger rail at all. Pretty big difference!

I live in California, and have been a big supporter of CAHSR since it was announced. I'm incredibly disheartened by the pace of construction, massive cost increases, and the horrible mismanagement of this project. The CAHSR CEO even said "I hope we have the wherewithal to do San Francisco to LA in 3 hours" after completing the initial segment. Hoping to get the project done, with $100+ billion more added, at this stage is really shitty to hear.

How about you? Any thoughts? What state do you live in? :rolleyes:

edale, I understand your frustration. The timeline and process has been aggravating and disappointing. It is very important to stay positive though and not get too down over this. The future could just as easily see an acceleration of progress and significant federal dollars that will enable the beginning of serious work beyond IOS. I do ask you please site that quote by Kelly... I find that very surprising he would say those exact words.

Here's the video and the transcript of the March 12 California Senate Transportation Committee Meeting:

https://www.senate.ca.gov/media/sena...20240312/video
https://vod.senate.ca.gov/videos/202...nsprtation.vtt

The quote is from the video included with this article: https://www.kcra.com/article/califor...geles/60181448

I am still supportive of the project and don't want it cancelled or anything, but I am very frustrated and I think several critical errors have been made so far that seriously jeopardize the likelihood that this project ever sees full completion in my lifetime.

Hmm, he seems to be emphasizing the time aspect more than whether the actual SF-LA route will see completion. Which is odd since the Measure language has a legal requirement of 2:40 station to station which the entirety of all engineering and specifications for the entire program is based off of.

A lot of this has to do to the lawsuits that were intended to derail or stall the project, and it sure looks like it working in the minds of Californians. As long as construction is continuous, then it's ok and they have already started testing trains on the Caltrain part. Costs are going to rise with everything else and there's no way a contractor is gonna be paid in 2008 or 2018 money for something being built last year.

None of the mistakes have really been explained and a lot of it can be answered just by looking at the initial bond (like the speed complaints). I'd like to know about the mismanagement, specifically since it's an entire Authority.

Yup, and that includes the "not HSR!" travel time that was part of the OG proposition.

Who cares at this point.

The supporters would still support it if it were 10 trillion, they don't care.

Even though this money could have been used in a MASSIVE way to build bikeways and improve local transit throughout California.

But no, they are getting a massively overbudget rail line that competes with the airlines (aka most poor people won't use it).

It is going to break your mind when you find out that California can build more than 1 thing at a time, and in fact does that constantly.

Like if you even taken a second to think before typing that you never would have. California is constantly improving local transit, and while it has its shortcomings, has come a long way from even the 1990s

CA suburbs, cities and towns have bike lanes on the streets...even the worst offending suburban areas will have bike lanes on some streets.
:shrug: non-Californians still furious at us; don't worry about state funds, just federal funding for it. That allows us to be equally furious at any projects within a state somebody is posting from, especially if it is using federal funds.

To be clear, I am still in full support of this project despite its cost overruns and delays. But yes, I understand the frustrations as well. In a perfect world, all segments would be under construction at once, meeting deadlines, and without going over budget.

I also agree that the end cities that this project will be connecting in the first phase at least (ie SF and LA) are already making local transit improvements as well, although again, it would be nice if they could happen faster and within original budget. The Transbay Downtown Rail Extension is on the FTA list of FY 2025 transit grants with $500 million. And as TWAK alluded to, Caltrain electrification is part of the project as well.

I guess I'm seeing a disconnect between the claim that you're a "big supporter" of a project that you called "a mess and an embarrassment" that is "failing spectacularly," especially when you "highly doubt we'll ever see more than the CV line."

I mean, I get the frustration. I get the desire to see more progress faster and cheaper. But I don't get why you would be a big supporter of anything like what you describe above. If decades of work costing tens of billions of dollars only gets us a Central Valley route, I won't be a supporter at all. Luckily, I still expect CAHSR to eventually link the Bay Area and Southern California, where I currently live.

The station is going to be 5-6 miles south of downtown. That means it isn't serving the public purpose that CAHSR is, which is spending a ton of money building its stations in not just the downtowns of its major cities but also its minor ones. CAHSR will interchange directly with local public transportation in many places.





Brightline will be "HSR" in name but won't travel quickly in it's slow-ass approach to a random spot 35 miles west of DTLA.

The voter-approved Proposition 1A set up California HSR for failure. The circuitous routing through the Antelope Valley and along Highway 99; the ambitious requirement of a 2:40 run time from LA to SF; the stipulation that the Ca HSR would need to operate without public subsidy; the unrealistically low estimated completion cost of $30 billion or so--all these conflicting and unrealistic requirements and promises set the stage for inevitable disappointment. It wasn't long after Prop. 1A passed that new estimates doubled the expected construction costs. And the promises of private investor funding--to pay costs beyond the modest $10 billion that 1A authorized--never panned out. No shock there.

But construction of Ca HSR hasn't failed spectacularly. It's done pretty well with the resources allocated to it. What can you expect for $10 billion dollars, plus a pitiful annual allocation from the state cap-and-trade fund, plus the very infrequent gift of federal funds? It's not going to build the system overnight. And since the state has been so stingy releasing funds, construction progress has by necessity been slow, which results in overruns due to inflation. The only major construction misstep I've heard about was the authority's failure to complete land acquisitions before it awarded construction contracts. Partly this was due to the need to make the project eligible for the Obama stimulus grants that were supposed to favor shovel-ready projects. That added some costs, but probably minor ones in the bigger scheme of things.

What has the state spent so far on the IOS? Certainly less than $20 billion. To put this in perspective, Caltrans spent $1.5 billion just to add a single northbound lane for 10 miles of the northbound San Diego Freeway in LA. Orange County spent over $2 billion to add 2 lanes to each side of the same freeway between Long Beach and Costa Mesa. Any congestion relief provided by those additional freeway lanes will have evaporated long before the IOS of Ca HSR opens for service.

It's also incredibly important to remember that the multi-year financing of this thing in one of the wealthiest economies on earth is the equivalent of a handful of tech corp margin calls.

California's YEARLY state budget is a quarter of trillion dollars. Plus the feds will ultimately wind up paying a significant portion of the cost.

The proposition limiting how funds can be raised was incredibly dumb (they had to since CA was even more anti-tax back then), but going along 99 instead of another route is great because it serves a lot of people (6 million +) along the route. Ridership will be a lot higher if it goes along populated corridors and I can't really speak on the So Cal route since I know more about the project for nor cal.

My county doesn't even have a regular rail line but I still like the project, because trains are cool and that means no spending limits!

The existing Amtrak San Joaquins parallel SH99, and what is its' average daily ridership? It even reaches San Jose with a one seat ride, which the initial operating segment will not do.
Per Wiki, the yearly ridership was 847,364 (FY23).
Some math follows: 847,364 / 365 = 2,321.5
Wiki also reports just 14 trains a day.
More math follows:
2321/5 / 14 = 165.8 riders per train.

What does that mean though, that the CV will not use HSR?
There's no service to compare the I-5 route with because there's basically nothing after the Stockton metro.

It's the 7th busiest Amtrak route in the US. By American standards, it has plenty of riders. And for the record, the 6th busiest Amtrak route (Capitol Corridor) also serves the Central Valley.

The reason ridership is relatively low compared to better systems, is because it's a passenger train, in America, outside of the northeast corridor. It not only has to share rail with freight, but it's also not had the investment/improvements that say, Acela has. If rail transit is improved, more riders will follow.

There is no indication that there are votes in the California legislature to allocate funding to this project. Before this year's deficit, there were 2 years of surpluses and $0 of these surpluses were spent on this project. The next transportation focus for the legislature will be to somehow find a stable source of funding to provide operating dollars to the state's ailing transit agencies.

The Bipartisan Infrastructure Law does not have the funding needed for the non-CV portion of this project. The authority is hoping that they can get more funding from that law to complete the Central Valley portion. I don't expect the next presidential term to focus on more infrastructure funding (and we don't see that in their campaign platforms either). If Biden wins, I think the focus will be on social services, child care, housing and perhaps immigration.

It's been a while since I read the proposition, but there are restrictions to how HSR is funded. Can the legislature even transfer funds or use a surplus for it? There's also rules for how much the state has to give back to taxpayers if there is a surplus.

It obviously can. It is mostly funded from CA's cap-and-trade which was not in existence during Prop 1A and the legislature has not changed Brown's allocation of 25% of it to high-speed rail. CAHSR's semi-annual business plans always asks the legislature for funding as well:
Another thing indicating lack of support is that the legislature passed SB1 in 2017 to raise a lot of taxes for transportation funding, and $0 of that went to the high-speed rail project.

The impression the IOS will make will change all that.

Yeah, the route along 99 does hit the Central Valley population centers, which is a good thing. The downside is that that route is less direct than a route along I-5 would have been. That means more track mileage. To make up the extra miles, Ca HSR has to support higher operating speeds to meet the end to end trip requirement of 2:40. So that means more tunnelling, longer viaducts, even less tolerance for curves. Plus the Highway 99 route often runs along the existing BNSF mainline, which has added construction costs for things like long cantilevers to get HSR from one side of the freight tracks over to the other. The lengthy deviation through the Antelope Valley, however, is even worse. The AV only has about a quarter million people. That deviation was due to a political deal between an LA County Supervisor and a member of the Ca HSR Authority.

The San Andreas fault also had a lot to do with it.

Have you ever been to Las Vegas?

Downtown has but a fraction of the attractions and hotel rooms located on the Strip. Also, downtown attracts the less affluent--which matters in this discussion because Brighline tickets will be quite expensive relative to driving the family to and from town.

No, the Strip will be the primary destination of the overwhelming majority of Brightline riders. That is where all of the splashy megaprojects are located. So how would Brightline or its riders be better served bypassing the Strip entirely, only to force travelers to somehow backtrack several miles from downtown?

The planned Brightline terminal is less than a mile from the South Strip Transit Terminal, a major 24-hour transit hub just south of the airport. It would be easy for RTC to connect the Brightline station with the SSTT.

Downtown Paradise? Vegas proper really got the shaft.

The pergolas are an irrelevant expense as compared to the cosmic expense of the long tunnels.

What a silly response.

Duh. The point is what could that money have done if it were put elsewhere?

The point is that there's more money than that, and it's narrow minded to think that it can only go to one thing.

The money is being put elsewhere; California is investing more into public transit now than ever before. And that includes a lot more than just CAHSR.

I do think a comparison instead of speaking in vague terms is worthwhile, though. The State of California has provided CAHSR with $6 billion in bond funding and $6.5 billion from cap-and-trade revenue. In that timeframe, it also passed SB1 to raise gas taxes to fund roads and public transit, but individual transit projects usually only receive $100-$400m in funding from the state.

It is fine to argue about what the state budget allocations for everything should idealistically be going forward, but I think it makes sense to say that the $6.5 billion in cap-and-trade revenue allocated to CAHSR to date from past budgets would have otherwise gone to urban public transit projects (since most of the rest of the cap-and-trade revenue goes to them, and the purpose of the program is to pay for emissions reduction projects).

The Caltrain portion would count for that, unless the funds came from more than just HSR?

$600 million of the $2.44 billion Caltrain electrification project budget came from HSR bond funding, the rest came from other sources.

Resources are finite.

I would recommend to all who question California's ability to finance this project to remind themselves just how utterly enormous the economy of California is. The insinuation that California can't afford this is insulting and laughable. The politics of this project is what has held back it's full aggressive support. Once the awe of the IOS is on full display there is going to be a paradigm shift in political perception and public awareness that will fundamentally change the trajectory of Phase 1. It is my prediction you'll be hard-pressed to find many that will want to pull the plug after seeing the future with the IOS streaking across the Central Valley and departing gorgeous stations unlike anything most American's have personally seen. Fence walking politicians and even Repugs won't be able to get on board fast enough to chase public enthusiasm by throwing their full support behind aggressive completion of Phase 1.

Have some confidence.

Upon opening day of the IOS, the CAHSR Authority should also open an express service from San Francisco to San Jose with actual high speed rail trains in full livery so people can see that more has been done than just the Central Valley segment.

This could build even more support for the connection tunnels between the Bay and Central Valley segments

I know a lot of intersections along the Caltrain route have been overhauled with under- and overpasses, but are there still at-grade crossings? If so, IIRC it would limit how fast the HSR trains can run on between San Jose and San Francisco.

^Good idea

I think he just means as a promotional type thing, plus Caltrain and HSR trains won't be dramatically different speed wise up the Peninsula under the blended system - for bettter or worse.

The peninsula corridor is shared with Caltrain, that was the compromise the authority made with the Peninsula cities as the cities didn’t want complete grade separation or a completely new set of tracks exclusive to HSR.

One of the main critiques that detractors like to say about CAHSR is that California has spent X years and X dollars and “not a single track has been laid.” The idea of Opening the Peninsula corridor CAHSR with full livery the same day or earlier than the IOS; operating roughly the same service pattern as envisioned, will go along way to demonstrate that this project is more than just laying new track, its upgrading Caltrain’s entire rail infrastructure and portions of Metrolink’s

Has there been any prep done on the LA end of the initial CAHSR route? I don't recall if they've started work on the Bakersfield to Palmdale segment, Palmdale to Burbank segment, or the Burbank to Union Station segment or not. Will it be sharing tracks with the Metrolink Antelope Valley Line?

No construction on anything south of Bakersfield. Final EIR will be complete by next year for Southern California segment as the Palmdale to Burbank section will require brand new tunnels through the mountains, then will share track with Metrolink from Burbank to Anaheim. Metrolink from Union Station to Anaheim could have been electrified by now partially using CAHSR funds just like Caltrain, but they have been “dragging their feet” and toying with Hydrogen trains. They don’t want to spend money on overhead electrical systems. :uhh: