Shocking /sarcasm
End price? Probably six billion. It’ll never transport more than 500 people a day...that will be the amusing side to the story.
Note: Estimates do not include the yearly maintenance of the rail system after it is finished.
How much could that be anyway? A couple hundred dollars per year?
How did this happen? OMG! Why, I never....
(This was predicted before the ink was dry on the original idea.)
> The original plan voters opted for in 2008 was titled the Safe, Reliable High-Speed Passenger Train Bond Act for the 21st Century. <
That’s the problem right there. It should have been called the “Safe, Reliable High-Speed Never-to-be Completed Passenger Train Bond Act for the 21st Century”.
Total scam from the very beginning.
PING!
“If the high-speed rail system averaged 10,000 passengers per day”
That’s IF. Just another union- scheme to make more money. We’ve seen this episode of the Sopranos with the esplanade..
It’s too bad someone can’t invent a way to transport people in some kind of vehicle up in the air where you can go a high speed and not require all of those rails on the ground.
I live in the Greenest, most granola city in Canada, and even then, 76% of people drive to work. Other words so called “environment loving” liberals do not believe in their own rhetoric enough to sacrifice their cars. In the end convenience over rules conscience.
California has always been at war with Eastasia.
64 Billion? A tax subsidy for the wealthy commuters?!
You could clothe, house, & provide healthcare for a lot of homeless for that price.
Why does CA hate the homeless??!
/s
Well bust my buttons. A regular speed rail, going from wayyyyy out of town of LA to wayyy out of SF, but first they have to tunnel through solid rock along a fault line.... and the first leg will be between central ca points that don’t need rail....
And there is NOTHING ELSE to spend our tax dollars on in this state.....
Even the commuter trains here are very complex, having to serve far-flung suburbs on multiple branch lines to make it all work.
I do like my commuter train though. Instead of fighting traffic, I get to open a book to read and on the way back, I can even get a beer for the ride home.
At some point, we are going to have driverless transportation using public roadways. That is probably most efficient way to go. Recently my wife and I drove from Connecticut to Florida and it took us three days. But it was much more pleasurable than taking Amtrak, which would have required multiple transfers and taking a much longer indirect route. We would have arrived tired and aggravated. Had we rented a driverless vehicle, we could have gotten there in less than a day and spent the whole time watching movies and reading books. Not to mention getting a good night sleep as the car did the driving for us.
People are going to have to get past the hurdle of getting into a driverless vehicle. I think it will happen sooner than we think. Eventually, we will have vehicles that will fly (like in science fiction) and you definitely will want those to be driverless.
I have a cunning plan.
When (if) they get this boondoggle finished, when the train is running, prohibit direct commercial flights between SF and the points along the rail route.
I should be careful, that’s just stupid enough for them to do.
Practically every transit system in the SF Bay Area is two-thirds subsidized by taxpayers; the fare box returns less than one-third of the annual operating costs. Same may be true for most transit systems in the country, but just guessing at that. They periodically hike fares, ridership drops, and taxpayers pay more to bail out transit systems. That's just operating costs, not including replacement costs of buses and train cars, nor does it include building costs.
As for high-speed rail, cheaper and quicker to fly between SF and LA (because I don't believe they'll charge less than a plane ticket). Takes about 45 to 50 minutes for actual flight time, vs more than 3 hours for the train (they promise 3 hours but it will be actually longer to transit close to SF or LA).
Y’all have to remember that California “High Speed Rail” is not about High Speed Rail or transportation at all.
It is about distributing graft to favored groups and individuals.
Yeah, duh! What government program doesn’t cost more and deliver less than promised? It’s true of every single one. Government can’t manage a 2-car funeral, let alone health care, education, transportation, or anything else. The only legitimate functions of government are the police/legal system and national defense. And it doesn’t do such a great job at those.
The high-speed rail system averaged 10,000 passengers per day it would take 203.8 years of passengers paying $86 for a ticket to break even with the current $64 billion cost estimate.
Solution is to raise prices.
$500 at least for a one way ticket
Los Angeles to San Francisco flight is about $117 by airplane.