Quote:
Originally Posted by Bikemike
How exactly is it accurate to state that Texas is the future of HSR in America? And How is California HSR's fate similar to Florida's?
CAHSR is already partially funded to $6B and committed to the ground, which is already saying much more than that of Texas, and the first 100 miles is being built as we speak (albeit the easiest 100 miles as it goes through the pancake-flat Central Valley). Preparations are currently being made for the construction of viaducts in Madera County. Does Texas HSR have a single shovel in the ground yet?
Also, as with Texas, California's HSR has not ruled out private bidding from Japan or Europe contributing to the remainder of its funding. If anything CAHSR's far larger ridership would be a more reliable guarantor of large international financiers and preliminary results bear this out with robust expressions of interest from many potential investors or future legs and trainset/equipment acquisition.
I think it's great that Texas also has a consortium eager to bring this technology to the states, but let's at least be accurate about what we're saying.
|
Quote:
Originally Posted by Eightball
basics. i don't see why this is so hard for people to grasp
|
It is unknowable as-of-yet, but Texas could prove to be the future of American high-speed rail due to several reasons:
1. It maintains a focus on market based high-speed rail with an alignment averse to grandiose civil engineering works, and featuring extensive input from private operators.
2. It will be a terrific, though extreme, model of a public-private partnership.
3. It will be the nation's only high-speed rail corridor, and the first passenger service faster than 110mph outside of the NEC (since the 1930s).
4. It will usefully connect two major American cities in a conservative state that is totally unacquainted with world-class rail services.
5. It will be a high-quality example of successful project management and leadership over a large, complex, multi-jurisdictional rail project.
California may have secured a significant amount of money, but the sum is nowhere near enough to connect Los Angeles to San Francisco. Additionally, the political nature of California's alignment ensures that its costs will either be very pricey (as is the case of the central Bakersfield aerial works and the mainline detour through suburban Palmdale), or prohibitively expensive (as is the case with the disastrous Tehachapi alignment, whose tunnel and viaduct riddled routing has no high-speed rail equal anywhere in the world). Truly, California currently has no control over its project's costs.
Plus, with famously bad alignment issues at San Francisco Transbay, the enormously complicated track-sharing in the Caltrain corridor due to poor route planning (namely the selection of Pacheco Pass over Altamont Pass), and the bitter political fights up and down the corridor with a planning authority that has been beleaguered for years with justified complaints of bullying, zero transparency and incompetent leadership, California is hardly the stable project $10 billion would suggest it being.
California, unfortunately, has a project run exclusively by the government and for-profit civil engineering firms that tries to do too much. The state should have simply accepted SNCF's role, routing, and funding and built the I-5 parallel alignment, as it requested.
Texas High-Speed Rail could be the future of American railroading by virtue of being first. It just needs to be designed intelligently.
So far, all indicators are good.