Source
r/Urbanism•
tele68

California Bullet Train Shit Show

California committed to a bullet train from San Francisco to Los Angeles many years ago.
Famously, the ensuing years yielded ridicule from one side and defense from the other.
The corruptions and crazy political games brought no bullet trains but much money spent and a couple miles of track in Fresno.

Cut to 2023: The great bullet train from LA to Las Vegas is being prepared and looks well funded!
So CA will have its bullet train. To Vegas.

Posted Dec 7, 2023, 4:19 AM UTC

15
afro-tastic•

It's really not fair to compare CAHSR to Brightline West. They're vastly different projects. CAHSR is not helped by the constant flow of cost overruns that the public is on the hook for. Which a certain group of people in the media and at large really don't like. The exact same thing happened with the Big Dig. Everyone started focusing on the costs and they just kept going up. Meanwhile, have we even gotten a final word on how much Brightline Florida was in total?

If, for whatever reason, Brightline West needs more government money down the line, I expect they'll also get blasted. And they should. Brightline West is a complex project, but it's much less complicated than CAHSR. Established ROW, very little eminent domain, mostly away from population centers.

11
tele68OP•

Bird's Eye View, I guess.
I zoomed out and thought I saw societal dysfunction.
It looks like we'll get a Vegas bullet train before we get a real bullet train?
Inferred in my post: We live in a decaying infrastructure.
Amusement, titillation, and entertainment come before progress, utility, and value.
(I am happy to be a lurker in this sub which seems to have professional expertise here.
Now I'll go back to lurking)

1
FattySnacks•

What are you even trying to say? CAHSR is currently under construction

8
UrbanPlannerholic•

Well one is running in it's complete own ROW along a freeway and the other travels through huge urban areas on shared ROW and tunneling under mountains.

2
tlcooper93•

CAHSR is a boondoggle, but the transportation hypocrisy runs deep here.

There are countless highway projects which are even more expensive, have even worse timelines, and are have even higher cost overruns.

They are merely an afterthought at the most in the media.

I-69 in Indiana costs more than CAHSR, and is a project serving an infinitely less populated area, with an inferior mode of mass transit (highway ideology in general).

In general, I’m super optimistic about BL west. But they’re super lax (no pun intended) with this LA terminus. I would rather the project take a few years longer and go all the way to LA Union Station - or at least have plans to.

We need better connectivity across a region that is strangled with traffic and having a train station no where close to downtown LA is penny wise and pound foolish. We can do both - have plans to go to LA Union, but also have a real proof of concept by 2028.

2