Posted on 04/11/2021 4:52:34 AM PDT by Tolerance Sucks Rocks
A major construction team on the California bullet train project notified the state rail authority this month that it will not complete a 65-mile section of the future route in Kings County until at least April 14, 2025 — nearly two years after the date that the state included in a business plan adopted Thursday.
The additional delay could again boost costs and jeopardize the state’s funding plan to complete a partial operating system between Bakersfield and Merced by 2030. The project’s rising price tag has forced the state to repeatedly scale it back and delay indefinitely a goal to have the train running from Los Angeles to San Francisco — at speeds up to 220 miles per hour — by 2020.
The notification of the new delay came in a letter dated March 9 to the California High-Speed Rail Authority. A construction team led by the Spanish firm Dragados described a chaotic system for projecting future construction progress because of state delays in securing land for construction.
The Times obtained a copy of the letter, which complained that the rail authority’s failure to accurately predict land acquisition has tangled construction schedules and caused fitful conditions along the route.
Dragados said it has had to hire workers as land becomes available and then lay them off as it awaits new parcels. It said that “trepidation” among subcontractors and suppliers is resulting in higher risk that must be priced into bids for work. “Therefore, the impact of providing a schedule which includes incorrect right of way dates will only exacerbate these impacts,” the letter said.
(Excerpt) Read more at latimes.com ...
Just an odd question....are people in Merced that desperate to go over to Bakersfield?
Railhenge continues on.
PING!
I dunno. I haven’t been to California since 2014.
This is a giant boondoggle which is trying to suck out more money that could be spent much better elsewhere.
Good Q! And how many and how often? And the daily schedule, is it once a day each way. And when you get there, how do you get around?
So many questions, raised years ago, that went without answers.
This particular train and any other High Speed Rail projects that get started are destined to be gigantic failures should they ever get completed....
I wouldn’t put it past liberals in California, but the only way these trains work financially is to stop people from driving or make flying so expensive so that train travel is the only viable option....
If you want to travel between LA and SFO, I would imagine a plane leaves every 20-30 minutes in both directions and takes a little over an hour to arrive.
Take a high speed train and stop 10-15 times between the two cities and it will take a few hours and not have anywhere near the number of departures.....
Democrats:
As much as boondoggle this project is, it also illustrate the problems of building anything in America.
Securing land for any large projects, like freeways and railroads, (mines, large factories, developments) is almost impossible. Bureaucratic nightmare, all kind of lawsuits, need for all kind of permits, approvals and studies, archeological, environmental etc. Deep state and lawyers, luddites at their best!
Obama, Trump and Bidet infrastructure projects run into this wall of bureaucracy, and there is no solution on sight.
AZ just build a short bypass of the Phoenix downtown.
Took about 2 years to build, but like 30 years of lawsuits and permits to get to it.
We just tied ourselves to knots, by getting the lawyers dominate our building projects.
Where is Willie Green?
Maybe they should just get Elon to use his Boring tools and build tunnels.
Probably would be safer anyway.
A few years ago I had to go between Detroit and Baltimore every couple weeks.
It was a 90 minute flight, 9-10 hour drive, 17 hours by Amtrak or 22 hours by Greyhound.
The reason was that I had to take a new job and it took several months to sell the house. I drove home every couple weekends to see my wife and kids.
We didn’t really have any money to speak of so driving was the way to go.
It has been quite a few years since I’ve been to Merced. I figured their demogrphics was like the rest of the small towns in California....99% hispanic.
“This is a giant boondoggle which is trying to suck out more money that could be spent much better elsewhere.”
Go in different politicians’/cronie’s pockets most likely.
I am a tiny turd caught in the middle of this shit-storm. My startup company does some specialized engineering work on foundations and we’ve snagged work for many of the viaduct structures on this project. I have conflicting emotions. On the one hand, if not for the CAHSR contracts, COVID may have sunk my firm. On the other hand, as a private citizen and taxpayer, the project horrifies me. It will most likely go straight from construction to a rails-to-trails conversion, and become the most expensive bicycle path in human history.
Let’s say with High Speed Rail, the time goes from 17 hours to 8.5 hours halving the time between the two cities...
The High Speed Train is still going to stop multiple time and may not be direct, meaning you may have to travel to a hub train station to then take a another train to your final destination....
Either way it’s still going to be slower than air travel and not as convenient it most cases...
The only way around that is to subsidize high speed rail travel lowering it’s cost while simultaneously raising the cost of air and automobile travel....
If gasoline is $10/gallon or more, which it surely will be if we continue down this “Green New Deal” path of insanity....or you have an EV that needs to be charged every 300 miles maybe technology makes that irrelevant..
Thru taxes and other means what happens when the $200 airline ticket goes to $1000 or more but the high speed rail ticket goes to $100 or perhaps $200.....
Government intervention is the only way to make high speed rail work, IMO....and at that point the service will be worth taking.....
We all need to think more clearly about these issues..and stop accepting “their” terms of the argument.
This issues is all about the corruption and greed of its proponents. They each could care less whether by the time they “get theirs” there exists a functional right of way with paying passengers...and in fact from the standpoint of proponents, the last thing any of them want is a completion of the project..ever..
It seems a little odd that a private concern can build high speed rail in Florida between Orlando and West Palm Beach in as little as 3 years but California and the feds cant even get high speed rail between Bakersfield and Merced in a decade. The rail line in Florida runs though a very population dense area and the California line runs through mainly farm land. It almost seems as though California doesn’t really want to finish construction. I wonder why that is? /s
“...are people in Merced that desperate to go over to Bakersfield?”
The politicians have known since day one that the train is not needed, not wanted and a political impossibility. As in most government projects, the project itself is not the point. Having control of the money is the point. So, they chose to build the first leg in an area where they thought they could force compliance. Knowing full well that they would never be able to run the train into large cities as the access corridor would be fought by inches and that fight would cost far more than the train. Again, it’s about money, not transportation.
The city of Tallahassee bus ridership was counted in the low dozens. Buses ran all over the city with one or two passengers and this was easily observable by everyone. Complaints were made. The city bought all new buses with one-way glass. Passengers, if there were any, could see out, but no one outside could see in. The bus service has run at a substantial deficit forever. But providing bus service is not the point. Having the budget and spending it is the point. The city bragged that they were the first to introduce kneeling busses. (They were all soon out of service.) Then, they bragged they owned the very first electric busses. (They spent so much time being maintained and charged, they are now all out of service.) Money, or, perhaps politics...not service.
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