And for spending money that California doesn’t have…
Health care for California’s undocumented immigrants gains support amid budget crunch https://www.politico.com/news/2025/08/22/poll-health-care-undocumented-immigrants-00519254 29% of respondents said they believe the state should continue to provide subsidized health care through its Medi-Cal program to undocumented immigrants, even if doing so comes at the expense of other programs. That marks an increase from the 21% of voters who supported the idea in an April poll…
The resulting growth of the Medi-Cal population has contributed to huge cost increases for the program…forcing the state to spend more than $6 billion more to keep the program solvent.
Support for a canal bridging the divide between the Hudson River and Lake Erie was derided by the knowledgeable but supported by the people of the time, because they knew better. Derided by opponents as Clinton’s Folly, the canal had the support of over 100,000 petitioners in the early 18th century. Eventually, after 50 years of bickering about costs and rights of way the canal was completed, and it led to astonishing drops in prices along the East Coast for foods from the Midwest, and provided a way for Easterners to travel to the inner territories and start farms. The prices for wheat and corn, for example, fell by 90% within a year.
Maybe the people of LA and San Francisco specifically, and Californians in general know more than, well, you.
Hoover Dam, the TVA, the Transcontinental Railroad, subways, heck even the creation of paved roads was controversial for years - until suddenly it wasn’t and all became part of the fabric of America. There’s a lesson there, but it’s a hard one to learn when you are determined not to.
Maybe. On the other hand the Erie Canal made dramatic decrease in the transit time and cost between the Midwest and New York City. The improvement with the SF to LA train? Meh. And by the time the line is finished – if it’s finished, there are serious problems with tunneling through the San Gabriel Mountains – self-driving cars (owned or as a serve) may well have made it redundant.
All of the work and all of the cost overruns so far have been in the flat Central Valley. Speaking of tunnels, from 10 years ago…
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.”
More on the tunneling (without any mention of increased costs):
A 2012 report by Parsons Brinckerhoff, obtained by The Times, warned the rail authority that the “seismotectonic complexity … may be unprecedented” and that the rail route would be crossing faults classified as “hazardous.”…
In good rock, such as limestone or chalk, TBMs [tunnel boring machines] can advance 100 to 200 feet a day. But in fractured mixed rock through fault zones, the advance rates can slow to 10 to 20 feet a day, Einstein of MIT said. Einstein’s estimate is endorsed by other engineers, including one who has worked closely on the bullet train project and told The Times that 10 feet a day is the likely rate of advance.
My goodness, you sound like Oliver Wendall Douglas giving his speech about “The American Farmer.” I’ll admit, perhaps, “the people” of SF and LA might have a better feel for the project than DrBob but that’s all. As far as being knowledgeable or having any special insight into its viability? That is nothing but conjecture. A gamble. They “Know” no such thing. I don’t follow CA that much. Are there any opponents of this rail thing? At what point should we listen to experts, technicians, and others with knowledge even tho “the people” have a different position?
This rail thing and especially the illegal’s health care are not chopped liver. It appears The People are succumbing to their vanity.
“…just 21% of Democrats said it’s time to pull the plug…But that doesn’t mean liberal Californians believe it’s any more likely that they’ll be able to ride from Southern California to San Francisco in their lifetime.”
“38% of Democrats said their support is contingent on the project keeping to its current budget.” [LOL]
“Democratic voters’ continued support for state funding could bolster their argument as negotiations over how to divvy up revenue generated by cap-and-trade auctions heat up with less than a month before the end of the legislative session.”
“Those are signs that even without federal help, high-speed rail isn’t going anywhere in the short term.”
“…a project that was originally slated for completion by 2020, and is now expected to open its initial line connecting Bakersfield to Merced in 2033, with no projected date for final completion.”
FWIW, construction of the Erie Canal began in 1817 and was finished in 1825 (200 years ago) – a total of eight years. The California high speed rail project was also supposed to take about eight years. LOL
Wall or no wall, the US has regained control of its souther border. Nothing similar can be said for the California high speed rail project "with no projected date for final completion .”
One of my favorites from following this boondoggle for many years:
How California’s Bullet Train Went Off the Rails https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/09/us/california-high-speed-rail-politics.html The state was warned repeatedly that its plans were too complex. SNCF, the French national railroad, was among bullet train operators from Europe and Japan that came to California in the early 2000s with hopes of getting a contract to help develop the system.
The company’s recommendations for a direct route out of Los Angeles and a focus on moving people between Los Angeles and San Francisco were cast aside, said Dan McNamara, a career project manager for SNCF. The company pulled out in 2011.
“There were so many things that went wrong,” Mr. McNamara said. “SNCF was very angry. They told the state they were leaving for North Africa, which was less politically dysfunctional. They went to Morocco and helped them build a rail system.”
I understand the benefits of the canal (and was just at an Erie Canal museum yesterday) but, Goofy, what do you see as the amazing benefits of the California bullet train a decade or two from now (if it ever gets finished)?
Despite the larger-than-life challenges, there are a few social issues that keep our state pounding away at this dream. Traffic is one of them. Californians clog their freeways up and down the state at nearly all hours. We subsidize highways to the tune of $32 billion a year, only to sit on them stewing. But we still love our cars, so would travelers give them up when going up and down the state? Apparently yes. In a recent survey, 54% of Californians still believe high-speed rail is worthwhile — suggesting that they would rather take a three-hour train trip than spend six to eight hours driving from San Francisco to Los Angeles. Besides the time savings for residents, it would cost roughly twice as much in new highway construction to provide the equivalent trip volume provided by high-speed rail, making it a financial win as well.
Another huge factor in the high-speed rail discussion is climate. Extreme weather events are growing worse, more frequent and more costly. More than 16,000 structures were destroyed in L.A.’s January wildfires, an astounding loss. The science of climate change is undeniably clear, and California is ground zero for the effects.
The many reasons we need a modern rail system should keep us focused as we face obstacles. Remember that the Shinkansen in Japan, the Eurostar, the TGV in France and many other high-speed systems also went substantially over budget or were delayed during construction. Ultimately, they have been heavily used, and the results have been celebrated. The costs have been amortized over decades and proved to be totally worth the effort.
In the United States, we could get past much of the financial drama for high-speed rail if we considered creating a National Infrastructure Bank, which would rebuild our crumbling infrastructure and finance transportation projects like high-speed rail without adding to the national or state-based debt load. This common-sense financial mechanism built huge amounts of our national infrastructure in the past but currently faces headwinds because of self-destructive political polarization.
Transportation causes around 30% of the greenhouse gas pollution in the United States, and it’s one of the sectors where we have many known technologies to replace our polluting ways. High-speed rail is one of them. The efficiency of converting stored energy into electric train motion is incredibly high. It’s up to four times more efficient than driving cars and nine times more efficient than flying. And as we convert the grid to ever-cleaner sources of electricity, use of grid-sourced transportation like electric trains becomes cleaner as well.
a proud Californian with family roots back to the gold rush
an engineer with lots of professional experience in transit modeling and planning
son of the founding Chair of the Southern California Rapid Transit District (which had later incarnations with different names)
an avid hiker climber explorer from age 3 to the present of both the Tehachapi and San Gabriel Mountains, climbing every named peak and many intermediaries, often in the company of Caltech geologists and seismologists
I have been convinced since near the inception of the project that from an engineering point of view it was a classic hopeless botch conceived primarily to solve political conundrums rather than infrastructural problems.
Like accepting the causes of the obesity epidemic?
I’m not qualified to comment but since very early I loved to watch construction sites. These past few years I have been “inspecting” the three additions to the Porto Metro line. If you don’t know Porto, it’s very hilly, much like San Francisco and the Douro River runs down the middle.
The Yellow line extension of just three stations, well south of the metropolitan area, took two or three years to complete.
The Rose line, just a few stations in metropolitan Porto, is close to opening but it has taken at least four years. Most impressive is the new Rubi line from Casa de Musica in Porto to Santo Ovidio in Vila Nova de Gaia across the river. The amount of earth moving is staggering, they have yet to start building the new bridge across the Douro river. Rubi has been under construction for two or three years and it’s going to take quite a few more for a line just under four miles in length. From black circle to black circle.
You are asking me to predict the future, which I’m not really good at. I can, with great clarity, predict the past, however. Let’s see how other countries and territories around the world have handled it:
So clearly it has worked in some places, all, I note, advanced economies. But there are other countries and areas where it has not, like Australia. That is likely because Australia is mostly just a shoreline around a vast desert and there isn’t enough population to make it worthwhile. In South America, the other holdout, there is high speed rail in Chile. Both Brazil and Argentina have made moves to start, but for one reason or another have not followed through.
So. There may be good reasons why the US is unable or unwilling to build any high speed rail links, but personally I would think LA to SF would be good (assumptions below*), as would Boston to NY to DC. Maybe Dallas to Houston. Maybe Miami to Orlando. Maybe not, but it seems there is the population base and wealth to support such endeavors. (Not any any price, of course, but I would think the cities of Europe, Japan, and China would face ,many of the same obstacles as we would.)
Of course this would require building for the future. At the moment it seems we are heavily investing in the past: US Steel, Intel, etc. I’m not so sure how that’s going to work out, but hey, you never know. Nostalgia is a wonderful thing. Hard to spend it, but a lot of people seem to like it.
I agree. The way the Federal Gov’t should fund these high-speed rail projects is the way Eisenhower funded the National Defense Interstate Highway System. Make it a national security project with eminent domain and no money until all the parochial roadblocks have been eliminated.
One of the best reasons is that the population density in the US is much lower than Japan, China, or Europe.
Density on the US East coast is probably high enough for one or two lines. And there might be enough traffic for a run ending in Chicago.
But LA to SF is marginal at best. LA to San Diego might work - if the right of way wasn’t so expensive. NIMBYs along that route are a problem as well. LA to Vegas might work, only because the bulk of the route is empty desert.
True for only some of the routes I mentioned. LA to SF is tough, agreed, not because there isn’t enough traffic but because of land acquisition and disruption. Likewise for Bos-NY-DC, which had/has enough traffic to support hourly air shuttles carrying thousands of people ;a day.
But surely there’s not a lot to get in the way of a Dallas to Houston route, and enough traffic to warrant. Likewise Miami to Jacksonville with stops in Orlando and Tampa/St Pete. Chicago to Cleveland → what’s in the way, Indiana corn fields? Cleveland to Pittsburgh?
Some of those runs are shorter than those in China, to and from cities that are larger.
We’ve lost the ability to do big things, partly because of the mantra of “everything government does is bad” (see: Obamacare), partly because of cost (didn’t stop the IHS or NASA), partly because we’re just not willing to push forward anymore.
The LA to SF high speed is an attempt to do that mostly funded by the State of California, with some help from the Feds. This is exactly opposite how the Interstates got built, wh bend Federal funds made up 90% of the cost. But then California is willing to try the some forward gears while the rest of the country - and this administration - seem only to have R in mind.
