The monumental task of building California’s bullet train will require punching 36 miles of tunnels through the geologically complex mountains north of Los Angeles. Crews will have to cross the tectonic boundary that separates the North American and Pacific plates, boring through a jumble of fractured rock formations and a maze of earthquake faults, some of which are not mapped…
State officials say the tunnels will be finished by 2022…“It doesn’t strike me as realistic,” said James Monsees, one of the world’s top tunneling experts and an author of the federal manual on highway tunneling. “Faults are notorious for causing trouble.”…
The bullet train will require about 20 miles of tunnels under the San Gabriel Mountains between Burbank and Palmdale, involving either a single tunnel of 13.8 miles or a series of shorter tunnels. As many as 16 additional miles of tunnels would stretch under the Tehachapi Mountains from Palmdale to Bakersfield. The state will probably opt for twin bores — one for each of two parallel tracks. That means as many as 72 miles of tunneling before 2022…
“No way,” said Leon Silver, a Caltech geologist and a leading expert on the San Gabriel Mountains. “The range is far more complex than anything those people know.” Herbert Einstein, an MIT civil engineer and another of the nation’s top tunneling experts, said, “I don’t think it is possible.”
“Having looked at a number of these long tunnels, [the California] plan is aggressive,” said Einstein, who has consulted on a 35-mile-long tunnel under the Swiss Alps. “From a civil engineering perspective it is very, very ambitious — to put it mildly.”
People are confused. The purpose of the decades long California High Speed Rail project isn’t so much to create a railway. It’s mostly to extract billions, or tens of billions of CA government and Federal government funds to provide many jobs (well paying jobs) to various favored groups, lots of lawyers, environmentalists, and groups that do all sorts of studies. And they will continue to study things until the money runs out. A possible side-effect of the whole thing might eventually be a railway, but that is in no way assured to actually happen.
Sort of like Lockheed “developing” a new airplane?
I was wondering, so I looked it up. The contract for the Boeing “Starliner” was let in 2010. First manned flight was supposed to be in 2017. Finally got off the ground, unmanned, in 2019, and failed. A second unmanned test flight was completed in 2022. First manned flight 2024. Capsule not fit to fly, leaving the crew stuck in the ISS.
Very similar. Except for with military contracting the main purpose is to provide nice well-paying jobs to ex-government folks and ex-military folks. And often those folks are already collecting a pension from government. And sometimes there is a side-effect of a new military device, but also not always assured that it happens.
And to the north in addition to the San Gabriel mountains This article is from seven years ago. The cost figures have gone up quite a bit since then, and the IOS (initial operating segment) is only in the Central Valley and no longer includes San Jose.
Some of the world’s top tunnel experts put the cost of the tunnel at anywhere from $5.6 billion to $14.4 billion, reflecting the high cost of boring through tricky geology and seismically active areas…
The Gilroy-to-Chowchilla route also requires a 1.5-mile tunnel just east of Gilroy, itself a major infrastructure project…But if construction costs grow and exhaust the project’s budget, it could jeopardize plans for building the initial operating segment from San Jose to the Central Valley.
State officials acknowledge that unless they demonstrate a financially successful starter system, private investors will not commit money to help build the rest of the line to Los Angeles. At best, the rail authority’s existing funds are stretched thin. It has $21 billion to build the starter system.
Maybe, weird/clever more efficient tunneling techniques could, if developable and developed, cut costs of construction significantly. (E.g., extremely hot infra-red lasers softening enough stuff to make it “enough easier’ to dislodge boulders and rocks?) But even then earthquakes would likely sufficient damage high speed track alignment so as to cause real delays, with an occasional monster causing massive shifts and breaks.
I think it would be much better for California to make use of the already “sunk” huge investment in on the surface Interstate 5 to at least experiment with constructing very high speed median lanes restricted to mutually communicating and cooperating algorithmically controlled private vehicles. Cooperating vehicles could safely join into very energy efficient (much less energy loss to wind resistance) very high speed tightly spaced “trains” of vehicles.
Having traveled all over EUland over the last two decades as the high speed rail network has been extended, I say in most places rail will displace these autonomous driving fantasies.
Rail is safer, more efficient, and far more comfortable a ride. In more and more of Europe private auto ownership is no longer necessary to daily life, replaced by inter-city super rail, frequent regional rail, bicycling, and walking on car banished streets.
We shall see, if we live long enough and neither species wide social media political neuroses nor WWIII do us in.
I was thinking about the United States rather than Europe (where, I believe, there are over 250 million passenger cars). I’m not sure on what timescale autonomous vehicles will become common, but let’s say within a decade or two. On that timescale, I don’t see the country switching to widespread inter-city super rail, frequent regional rail, cycling and car-less streets.
Thus, California is likely to see self-driving autos (both owned and as a service) diminish ridership on the high-speed rail system. That, of course, assumes that the SF to LA rail system gets completed in the next 10-20 years.
I would be amazed to see that happen, and not because I expect to die before reaching 93. Los Angeles to Las Vegas is almost certainm and to Phoenix highly probable.
I think CA should take the section that is mostly built, from Medera to the north and Bakersfield to the south and declare the project complete. Then spend $20B making Medera and Bakersfield “destination cities” that will shift some population from the overcrowded, overpriced coast to the underdeveloped and more affordable Central Valley. Put in UC campuses in both cities with a medical school and high-tech center. Give massive tax breaks to shift companies from the Silicon Valley to Madera and Bakersfield. Construct the equivalent of Levittowns to generate affordable housing to young families.
That’s how cities were built in the old days, around railroad stations and ports. In contrast, building tunnels through mountains in an area prone to big earthquakes seems like a really bad idea to me. We should learn to work in harmony with the geography rather than trying to conquer it.
I think that’s incorrect. Rail is more efficient in some contexts, but not all contexts - which is why Europe is steadily and consistently become more motorized over time, not less. See below link.
Rail can be very efficient traveling without cargo between two or more dense areas that are themselves well-provided with local mass transit options. Cars, though, are vastly more efficient in other contexts - travelling between suburban areas or with more cargo that can easily be carried by hand.
There are some uses where rail is superior - moving very large numbers of people into dense urban cores in a narrow time frame. There are other uses where cars are superior - providing faster travel times and greater access in more suburban development areas outside of UBD’s and peak times.
Europe has older, denser, and closer-together cities than the U.S. - so rail works better there than it ever can here, outside of and always excepting the older and more densely populated Northeast Corridor. Which is why we have trivial use of rail transit outside of that area, with few exceptions. As our population shifts out of that old pattern of development, we’ll probably see many more people in the U.S. living in more auto-oriented places even than we do today - and autonomy will only hasten that. But if autonomy makes it easier to get around even an auto-centric city without your own personal car, then you might see intercity rail use pick-up for those distances where flying doesn’t work.
What one might conclude is that Europeans are becoming more mobile and therefore need more of all forms of transportation.
If autonomous and inexpensive robotaxi networks complement or even replace local mass transit, this could be a boon for rail. A cheap method that will take one from rail station to final destination and all places in between should be competitive with cars, particularly in locations where parking is scarce/expensive.
I think so. It’s certainly become more motorized. It’s also become more “train”-ized. Both modes are thriving (both the number of cars per 1,000 and passenger miles have increased about the same amount since 2004). Europe isn’t becoming less motorized.
Robotaxis are cars - they don’t compete with cars, in terms of transportation systems. They might have different ownership structures and usage patterns - but in terms of their physical characteristics, they’re “low density” transportation. They take up a lot of physical volume per passenger, as opposed to buses or trains.
Some people have the notion that autonomy might eliminate transit systems altogether, the thinking being that if everyone has access to a much cheaper form of private passenger car that they will no longer want to/need to take the bus or a subway. Most urban planners push back on this for reasons of geography - urban centers (especially downtown urban business districts) are simply too dense and too space constrained to fit the number of cars necessary to move all those people in and out during the peaks.
In the very long term, it might still happen - there’s a line of thinking that in the very long term, advances in communication and transportation will vitiate demand for the high-density urban cores altogether, and all our cities will eventually be maximized for autos. Not sure that’s going to happen. But you can’t have cities like NYC or London or Paris without local mass transit.
Autonomous vehicles would be better than idiot humans driving cars. Communicating cooperating vehicles could be immensely better, as they would eliminate the need for most traffic signals and allow much close traffic safely moving at higher speeds.
Providing a backbone of very high speed trains in tunnels connecting major destinations kicks the benefits up another notch.
Robotaxis compete with personal use cars. I’m guessing that a city where passenger transportation is limited to robotaxis would have significantly less congestion than one based on personal use cars. Robotaxis continuously picking up and dropping off are more efficient at moving people than personal use cars that have to find parking to complete each trip.
