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From the New York Times:
How California’s Bullet Train Went Off the Rails
America’s first experiment with high-speed rail has become a multi-billion-dollar nightmare. Political compromises created a project so expensive that almost no one knows how it can be built as originally envisioned.
By Ralph Vartabedian
Oct. 9, 2022
Updated 1:37 p.m. ETLOS ANGELES — Building the nation’s first bullet train, which would connect Los Angeles and San Francisco, was always going to be a formidable technical challenge, pushing through the steep mountains and treacherous seismic faults of Southern California with a series of long tunnels and towering viaducts.
But the design for the nation’s most ambitious infrastructure project was never based on the easiest or most direct route. Instead, the train’s path out of Los Angeles was diverted across a second mountain range to the rapidly growing suburbs of the Mojave Desert — a route whose most salient advantage appeared to be that it ran through the district of a powerful Los Angeles county supervisor.
The dogleg through the desert was only one of several times over the years when the project fell victim to political forces that have added billions of dollars in costs and called into question whether the project can ever be finished.
Now, as the nation embarks on a historic, $1 trillion infrastructure building spree, the tortured effort to build the country’s first high-speed rail system is a case study in how ambitious public works projects can become perilously encumbered by political compromise, unrealistic cost estimates, flawed engineering and a determination to persist on projects that have become, like the crippled financial institutions of 2008, too big to fail.
The article’s thesis is that the original 2008 plan to connect San Francisco and Los Angeles was fine, but political wheedling by [more Republican] politicians in between SF and LA asking the high speed rail serve them as well is what has doomed it.
My view instead is the fatal flaws were always there: they weren’t these minor political wranglings focused upon in the article, but instead are inherent to California’s political culture going back to the transition from Governor Pat Brown’s can-do build build build terms in the early 1960s and his son Jerry Brown’s “Era of Limits” environmentalist terms in the 1970s.
The idea of building a monster train to roar through the San Francisco Bay Area, the richest, smartest, most Not-In-My-Back-Yard place in the country, was never plausible. It’s proving very difficult to get the approvals in the Central Valley, so how’s that going to go in the San Francisco Bay Area when they finally get around to that?
Best line, about a French company with experience building high-speed rail that tried to get a California contract:
“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.”
English
Arabic
Chinese (Simplified)
Dutch
French
German
Hebrew
Hindi
Italian
Japanese
Korean
Persian
Polish
Portuguese
Russian
Spanish
Swedish
Turkish
Vietnamese
This should be easy to fix. Just build some sailing ships and bring over some Chinese laborers.
That’s California style communism at work. Or not work.
But the important thing is billions will be spent, extracted via taxes, and hundreds will have jobs, mostly consulting and figuring out how “equity” can be achieved.
In the meantime Elon Musk can have his underground tunnel system reach all the way into the Bay Area. Of course he will have to contend with the all powerful Gopher Lobby. Don’t laugh.
The Eco comrades are all about the gophers. “Gophers need love too…”
So he’ll have to tunnel a bit deeper. More costly, but who’s counting?
OT but in Steve’s home town:
L.A. City Council members apologize for offensive remarks heard in leaked audio
Two members of the Los Angeles City Council released apology statements Sunday after a report published by the Los Angeles Times included transcribed leaked audio of offensive and racist remarks that were made during a private meeting. A third council member claimed to have no recollection of the conversation.
In the leaked audio, which was summarized by the Times but was originally posted to Reddit and remains readily available on social media, Council President Nury Martinez can be heard making derisive and racist comments about the child of Mike Bonin, the council member representing the 11th District.
Bonin, who is white, has an adopted son who is Black. In the leaked audio, Martinez can be heard describing Bonin’s son as “ese changuito,” or that little monkey, according to the Times. At one point, Martinez also refers to Bonin as a “little bitch.”
The comments were made during a discussion regarding Bonin and his son participating in a Martin Luther King Jr. parade several years ago. Bonin and his son were on a float with other members of the Los Angeles political scene, and Martinez apparently was dissatisfied with the boy’s behavior, saying he nearly tipped the float over. She can also be heard accusing Bonin of raising the child like a “little white kid.”
More here:
https://www.kron4.com/news/l-a-city-councilmembers-apologize-for-offensive-remarks-heard-in-leaked-audio/
These Hispanic councilmembers somehow didn’t get the message that black people are fellow People of Color who are natural allies against evil whitey.
Is this some kind of "ripening over time" phenomenon? If so, how long does it take? 400 years? Less?
Inquiring minds want to know.
I have a friend who has done real estate development in Philly and in Casablanca, Morocco. He says Morocco is much better because you can at least give the proper “gift” to the inspector to get him to look at your building plans and give them his stamp of approval – everyone know how much is the appropriate amount (which is not an unreasonable amount), how to deliver it and so on. Money is the grease which makes the wheels of the bureaucracy turn. In Philly you send in your application and it just sits on someone’s desk for months and months and there’s nothing you can do about the rusty machinery of government.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0TYq9RjdYYU
Used to be the same in Chicago and the collar suburbs too. I've mentioned this story before. My late father related a story of trying to get a building permit to add an addition to the house he, my mother, and our growing family were living in. We lived in Cicero, IL at the time and my father was complaining to my grandfather that he submitted the permit request and heard nothing back for weeks.
My grandfather laughed and told him the Chief Inspector liked to knock off work after lunch and play the horses at Sportsman's Park. He advised my father to set up a meeting with the inspector, put the request in a copy of the Daily Racing form and add a $50 or a C-note.
My father did and BOOM! The permit was granted within a day or two.Replies: @Steve Sailer
Yep, America is just not a can-do country anymore, as in the elder Brown’s day. NIMBY is part of it, land prices another, but it’s the regulatory state in general in this country most. (The outsourcing of manufacturing was not just for cheap labor, but also for the ability to get stuff done.)
In China, this route would have taken a year or two and been just one out of a couple of dozen lines like that… with just as much corruption, albeit of a different kind. Sure a train there may go off the rails occasionally … at high speed … China is THE can-do country, at this point. I have been amazed at the infrastructure, even in a remote province, seeing it first-hand.
(I never got to ride the high-speed rail there. I doubt I’ll be back though.)
PS: The SCNF quote was pretty good, funny (and sad) cause it’s true.
I'm sure China can muster the will and resources to build far more miles of high-speed rail than Europe and the US... but I'm still not quite convinced of their quality control. :shrug:
Al-Boraq: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casablanca%E2%80%93Tangier_high-speed_rail_line
I hope to God it’s California’s $1 trillion infrastructure building spree.
Why should the rest of the country pay?
The final sentence has no mention of a main driver -corruption. Kunstler summarized the problem across the whole country succinctly
https://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/november-surprise/
Wouldn’t they do better linking LA and Las Vegas?
Yes. IMO, anyplace you can justify an interstate highway you can justify a high-speed train. There should be high-speed trains running alongside every interstate in this country.* Unfortunately, as other posters have noted, America is no longer a can-do country.
*Except for between LA and Phoenix because fuck off, Arizona is full.Replies: @Anonymous
I think its a case of California taking on the characteristics of a corrupt latin American country due to taking on an enormous number of mexicans and other south americans. Even if the general peon hee-span-niks would have zero say in anything like a bullet rain project in the first place, the bureaucracy and management inexplicably but surely starts functioning the way you would expect Paraguay or Colombia to be.
That’s why the places in Latin America in particular always get the ‘developing country’ category.
Its because they always have big big plans, developmentally and otherwise, and so the world index tells them continuously they’re a rising star/up and comer/ etc. But they just never quite pan out to fruition- like this project. And the money always disappears too…
Seriously, did anyone with a greater than room temperature IQ think this project was ever going to be completed in a way that remotely resembled the original concept? It was always a pie-in-the-sky scam: lots of taxpayer money funneled to cronies of the state bureaucracy, without a realistic plan and no accountability.
I was a California taxpayer when this boondoggle was begun… I’m quite happy I’m not a CA taxpayer anymore.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/nasas-artemis-delays-fuel-controversy-over-rocket-design/Replies: @Jack D
Good ol’ NYT, ten-plus years late to the story. Every technically-savvy person who looked at the original project proposals realized, “this can’t work.” I recall doing a back-of-the-envelope estimate that an LA-to-SF ticket would have a break-even cost of about $1,500. Best-case, e.g. every seat taken on every train, no budget overruns, no delays, negligible interest expense on capex.
… And here we are, green dreams ruined, green pockets lined, Times subscribers dismayed. How predictable.
https://www.unz.com/isteve/californias-high-speed-rail-as-bait-and-switch-scam/#comment-2438951
I’ve ridden the TGV (between Paris and London); it really does travel at 300km/hr (verified by my handheld GPS back in 2006), and it’s far smoother than NYC/DC Amtrak.
I’m sure China can muster the will and resources to build far more miles of high-speed rail than Europe and the US… but I’m still not quite convinced of their quality control. :shrug:
The best high speed railway was the one Mrs Thatcher didn’t fund: she let the French pay for the Channel Tunnel and the high speed line from Paris to the coast. The trip from the English coast to London had little spent on it – just a new platform at Waterloo (!!!) I think.
A later Prime Minister caved and spent a fortune building a high spreed line (HS1) from the coast to St Pancras. Now an even dafter affair is afoot: HS2 which will run from somewhere near Birmingham to somewhere in North West London. You’ll have to change trains to get into central London. I hope the stupid bloody idea is abandoned.
I’ve travelled on the Eurostar train to Paris – rather good. Also on the Shuttle that takes your car across to France. It was fine but I wouldn’t fancy it in the age of self-igniting EVs.
This has to the best phrase because it’s a more concentrated dose of stupidity:
“pushing through the steep mountains and treacherous seismic faults of Southern California with a series of long tunnels and towering viaducts.”
When something big quake comes — maybe not The Big One but leading up to it I suppose — what will happen? If the train is actually there when The Big One does come, what a nightmare. The disaster movie sort of writes itself but will Hollywood still be there to make it?
We do not talk about The Big One anymore but that doesn’t mean it is not coming.
Japan, which is as seismically active as California, has been operating Shinkansen from 1964. They have had a lot of earthquakes in 60 years. Total number of fatalities from Shinkansen crashes: 0. Yes, this is from 1964 based technology. No computer chips.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_Ch%C5%ABetsu_earthquake#DamageReplies: @notsaying, @Alfa158
Chicago has the Jane Byrne Interchange.
The idea of high-speed rail between major wealth centers was doomed to fail from the start, much like every attempt to build a subway on the Upper East Side of Manhattan mysteriously fails due to the “budget overrun” and “unexpected construction problems.”
The rich know how to stall a program out until it dies.
Note how there is no easy way for a normal person to take a vacation to Martha’s Vineyard…or the Hamptons…or Beverly Hills…or Aspen, Co…..especially when it comes to transportation.
The places that are hard for you to get to? That’s where the Deep State power brokers live.
How else would the maids and waiters get to work?
We’re getting to the point where places like Morocco are more worthy anyway.
Between 50 and 100 years ago, America was riding high. Very high indeed. So high that it’s a long way down.
A very long way down.
https://preview.redd.it/6n0nw1rmgsh11.jpg?auto=webp&s=4bff8c98faed5215b8a6cf92b059d8d3882d71b1Replies: @YetAnotherAnon
It’s almost like government is inherently wasteful and stupid in everything it does because it lacks proper incentives.
But the California crazy train has taken generic government stupidity to a whole new level. Even in its ideal conception, the stupid thing was going to cost more than flying and take longer than driving. Greyhound bus service is a more efficient alternative.
The funny thing is that for 15 years everyone has known how stupid it is and yet it keeps moving forward like some money-sucking zombie. Straight-up corruption is the only conceivable explanation.
All in a pointless effort to make the planet cooler when a warmer planet actually brings far more benefits to humanity. During The Roman Climate Optimum humans thrived, yet the Earth was 2 degrees warmer than today. It would take another century of warming to reach these optimum levels. But our planet has not been warming for 24 years now. The 3 hottest years on record for the US all took place prior to 1945 (according to NASA).
Another explanation is that it is pure virtual signaling symbolism. The important thing is to demonstrate you are a good person by spending money on trains. That the train will never be financially viable or perhaps operate at all is besides the point.
Why should non-LA/non-Frisco politicians support this? To get their votes you’d have to spend three times the projected cost of the bullet train on unrelated goodies for the rest of the state.
SNCF – France is incredibly top down, NIMBYsm doesn’t exist.
but for high speed rail you just have to look at China. Incredible.
If you don’t know that China has already surpassed US in all major respects remember that China (last year) had 25,000 miles of high speed rail.
US has none.
And yet France has preserved much of its countryside, its farms, its 'inefficient producers' and even its 300+ variety of cheeses.
US has none."
I don't think miles of high speed rail is important.
I did and it was much nicer than anything we have here. Normal cruising speed is 300 kph (186 mph) and the ride is perfectly smooth. The rails are mostly elevated and with no grade crossings or sharp curves so you just zip along at 300 kph (max speed 350kph but they usually do 300). Compared to a plane, the train is much more roomy – they don’t have you packed in like a sardine.
OTOH, airliners cruise at 520 mph or almost triple the speed. You make up time by the fact that the train goes from city center to city center and slightly faster check in time. but for longer distances the greater speed of a plane weighs or almost outweighs the advantages of the train – e.g Shanghai to Beijing – 2.5 hrs air, 4.5 hrs train (1100 km/ 700 mi).
The great advantage of the train comes at shorter distances. Beijing/Tianjin is 85 miles – about the same distance as NY-Philly and is 0:30 on the bullet train vs. 1:06 on our best Amtrak train. If Philly was 30 min from NY this would change the whole economics of the Philly and NY real estate market – you can buy an apt. on Rittenhouse Square for a fraction of what one costs in Brooklyn Heights and the travel time to midtown NY would be about the same. You could have dinner and see a show in NY and be back in Philly in time for bedtime. The economic impact would be HUGE. But no one is even talking about building this line. Meanwhile, the Chinese have maxxed out capacity on Beijing-Tianjin and are now building a 2nd parallel line.
Now, forgetting this boondoggle in California for a bit, Steve here wrote about this whole thing 4 years ago, and his point about the downtown railway terminals vs airports included the ghetto factor. In other words, in China people CAN live downtown safely, so they do. Then, also, the cities are more intensely packed, maybe with the exception of equal with NYC.
That makes a big difference. As you say, and Steve brought up then, if you can go from city center to city center, anyone pretty close to there - lots of people in China but not in America - will save a couple of hours over both ends over the airlines, with driving and parking. Once you get to half-way across America, the flying will beat out the high-speed rail travel.
Finally, there's the layout of the countries. China has lots of big cities in a real 2-D pattern, while America has only the linear Washington through Boston and San Diego to Seattle (but the latter doesn't have but 5 big cities on the whole line, well none of them big compared to Chinese ones).
That all said, Peak Stupidity summarized what I just wrote in the post Trains in the Orient vs. America. It's got a few back-o-the-envelope calculations on relative travel times.
China is more made for high speed train service (as opposed to air travel) than America is.
Yeah. We rode bullet trains all over Japan. For the finale, we caught one from some burg on the northwest coast of Honshu to the airport in northern Kyushu; leave late morning for an afternoon flight.
My wife couldn't believe it. She was sure this wasn't going to work.Replies: @epebble
It's a crime there is no high-speed train system between Boston and DC. This is the most densely populated part of the U.S. where high-speed rail economics makes sense.
I am always sad when I ride high-speed rail in other parts of the world. On the other hand, those systems overseas aren't run by and for low IQ demographics. Anybody who has ridden the metro system in DC would shudder at the thought of a high-speed rail system run by similar people.
I mean, AMTRAK is all excited, because it's increasing the speed of its so-called high-speed train to 150 MPH on a 16-mile segment in NJ at a whopping price of nearly half a billion dollars. Ugh.Replies: @Moses
"pushing through the steep mountains and treacherous seismic faults of Southern California with a series of long tunnels and towering viaducts."
When something big quake comes -- maybe not The Big One but leading up to it I suppose -- what will happen? If the train is actually there when The Big One does come, what a nightmare. The disaster movie sort of writes itself but will Hollywood still be there to make it?
We do not talk about The Big One anymore but that doesn't mean it is not coming.Replies: @epebble, @Anon
what will happen?
Japan, which is as seismically active as California, has been operating Shinkansen from 1964. They have had a lot of earthquakes in 60 years. Total number of fatalities from Shinkansen crashes: 0. Yes, this is from 1964 based technology. No computer chips.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_Ch%C5%ABetsu_earthquake#Damage
But how about the California train operating at high speed in a series of long tunnels and on multiple "towering viaducts"? With these additional challenges, could this proposed California train come through in the same way the Japanese one did?
It just seems so unlikely to me but what do I know.Replies: @epebble
What I found to be the coolest thing about the Japanese system is that the trains routinely run at speed through small intermediate stations. It’s fun to stand on an open platform in one of those stations when a train zips in like a cruise missile, zooms past you in a blast of wind, and vanishes down the track, all within a few seconds. It’s like being in a live action Roadrunner cartoon.Replies: @Jack D
I’m sure you clucks will blame the failure on socialism.
However, all, not some, all, major first world countries have excellent operational bullet trains, and excellent train systems in general, for decades and decades now.
Including China, dummesels. And France. And Spain and Germany and Italy. And Japan.
So somehow, I don’t think the problem is “socialism.”
So you don't think the US is a major first world country? A little bias there maybe.
The entire HSR concept is a utopian pipe dream. Government bureaucrats love it because it allows them to get rich bleeding the budget dry while pitching the “environmentally friendly” angle to the gullible masses. And hey, if it ever does get completed, then it gives the G even more control over the movement of people.
There is no cost competitive way to transport people by rail. But that’s not the point of all this. Nothing about the concept was ever about the benefit of regular people.
https://www.connexionfrance.com/article/French-news/French-high-speed-trains-TGV-celebrate-40th-anniversary-with-new-model-to-be-unveiled.
The Covid pandemic has caused a reduction in long-distance business travel, and the once profitable TGV network began to lose money for SNCF.
Some doubt that the introduction of new lines will help the situation.
“Economically, it does not make sense to create these new lines as there will not necessarily be enough customers to make money,” said Arnaud Aymé, specialist transport advisor in the consultancy firm Sia.
“Even the Paris to Bordeaux line which opened in 2017 and which shortens the journey to two hours is not profitable.”
“No one will travel from Paris to Marseille for a staff meeting anymore,” said Alain Krakovitch, director of Voyages SNCF.
In the wake of COVID, businesses in many large cities have been moving out of expensive city centre sites for suburban or exurban sites. New York is a case in point. More and more people will work from home in future.
I expect that within 10 years many HSR lines in places like France and Spain will be mothballed, probably a lot sooner than that. Since January of this year wholesale electricity prices have gone up 5X or more. The era of cheap electricity for electrified rail is over.
monster train to roar through
But the California crazy train has taken generic government stupidity to a whole new level. Even in its ideal conception, the stupid thing was going to cost more than flying and take longer than driving. Greyhound bus service is a more efficient alternative.
The funny thing is that for 15 years everyone has known how stupid it is and yet it keeps moving forward like some money-sucking zombie. Straight-up corruption is the only conceivable explanation.Replies: @Hernan Pizzaro del Blanco, @James B. Shearer
Even more stupid and costly has been our energy policy…shuttering nuclear power plants, banning drilling, wasting billions on costly windmills, $250 billion to subsidize electric vehicles, forcing Americans to put ethanol fuel in their gasoline, etc..
All in a pointless effort to make the planet cooler when a warmer planet actually brings far more benefits to humanity. During The Roman Climate Optimum humans thrived, yet the Earth was 2 degrees warmer than today. It would take another century of warming to reach these optimum levels. But our planet has not been warming for 24 years now. The 3 hottest years on record for the US all took place prior to 1945 (according to NASA).
Be careful what you wish for!
Wouldn’t all but the first and last couple of miles be in New Jersey? Heck, build two terminals in Jersey, with separate shuttles to downtown Philly and Manhattan. The feds needn’t be in on it at all, whether with funding or regulation. It would be the 21st-century Erie Canal, an entirely in-state deal.
Great line about Morocco, but why omit the real kicker in the very next paragraph??
(Quoting it from memory of reading the article this morning…)
And speaking of rich, smart liberals, how about the latest Hanania about how basically things will continue as they are for the foreseeable future, because what’s the alternative?
https://richardhanania.substack.com/p/the-year-of-fukuyama
(Including a reference to the ongoing human capital problem of the right, vis a vis the left’s endless supply of smart college grads…)
Huh? Just now? Nearby Mauritania is home to some of the world’s longest trains, almost two miles in length.
The iron trains of Mauritania
However, speed is not their long suit:
Who wants to go from LA to SF? One town is glitz and glamour,and one is high tech and full of Hindus. Maybe the homeless?😮
The San Francisco bay area has a subway system (BART) that does not even reach the largest city in the area (San Jose).
First thing I said from the get-go is…
1. Diversity kills the high speed train. Too many factional tribes, non-law abiding idiots, and general nut-cases to allow a train traveling an average of 220 mph to be safe. An angry Muslim, or sleeping bum, is plenty enough to cause, if not a full derailment, certainly enough of a problem so that my ass gets kicked.
2. The San Andreas Fault, and all her underground tributorial faults. Would I really like to have been on a train going 220 mph when the last big one hit? How about the next bigger one? If that train manages to derail at 220 mph, it’s not about fractured ribs, broken arm, etc. it’s about being being rapidly deconstructed, with the prejudice high g-force currently enjoys.
3. Is providing a cheap and fast way for the great people of Oakland, and surrounding northern ghettos, to get to Southern California… a good thing?
This “project” was just another bizarre liberal fantasy funded without a complete plan. They all end the same way.
You can confidently bet your life it’ll always be a ridiculous fiasco.
https://www.aljazeera.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/97627103a53344a1ad1e900e25bf4325_8.jpegHowever, speed is not their long suit:
https://www.aljazeera.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/91c69fd3b80d4c84b945b86c474ba503_8.jpegReplies: @Jack D
They meant a high speed rail system – up to 300 kph. Morocco has had trains for at least a century but this was a new high speed TGV type passenger rail system – the kind that we don’t have in America.
Graham Nash said so in 1969, although Iggy Pop disagrees.
https://richardhanania.substack.com/p/the-year-of-fukuyama
(Including a reference to the ongoing human capital problem of the right, vis a vis the left's endless supply of smart college grads...)Replies: @Eric Novak
His assessment of Russia is typical drivel. Yawn.
Ed McMahon used to make this commute while The Tonight Show was taped in New York. When it moved to LA Ed dumped his family to follow Johnny.
I don’t think you truly appreciate how densely built New Jersey currently is.
Hong Kong 17,582
Taiwan 1,707
Netherlands 1,346
South Korea 1,340
New Jersey 1,277
You only need at most 200' right of way for a double-track system. That's just over 2,000 acres for 90 miles, or 0.04% of the Garden State's land area.
China, too. Mostly because China has always been so poor and authoritarian that if they needed to build through a certain neighborhood or across a piece of land, they just did it.
Not to mention that people don't "own" property in the same way in China as they do in the west. Eminent domain doesn't work the same way in the United States and one party can (and often does) usually hold up projects for long periods of time due to the constitutional protections we have.
California's geography combined with American politics makes LAX to SFO probably the absolute worst place in the country to try something like this.Replies: @Steve Sailer, @Achmed E. Newman
It seems to me that the (hidden/not so hidden) purpose of a rapid train connection between the population center and the political center is so that California can fuck-up faster and with more style. It is almost as if the collective good intentions highway wasn’t fast enough; California demands a high speed handbasket. Because progress.
I’m glad it was a good ride, Jack. I did ride the Shanghai airport (PVG) to downtown Shanghai monorail a few times. That thing goes almost 300 mph! It’s elevated too, and stuff really whizzes by! It’s kind of a showpiece more than anything, though. (It was cheap and not very packed, so I don’t think it pays for itself.)
Now, forgetting this boondoggle in California for a bit, Steve here wrote about this whole thing 4 years ago, and his point about the downtown railway terminals vs airports included the ghetto factor. In other words, in China people CAN live downtown safely, so they do. Then, also, the cities are more intensely packed, maybe with the exception of equal with NYC.
That makes a big difference. As you say, and Steve brought up then, if you can go from city center to city center, anyone pretty close to there – lots of people in China but not in America – will save a couple of hours over both ends over the airlines, with driving and parking. Once you get to half-way across America, the flying will beat out the high-speed rail travel.
Finally, there’s the layout of the countries. China has lots of big cities in a real 2-D pattern, while America has only the linear Washington through Boston and San Diego to Seattle (but the latter doesn’t have but 5 big cities on the whole line, well none of them big compared to Chinese ones).
That all said, Peak Stupidity summarized what I just wrote in the post Trains in the Orient vs. America. It’s got a few back-o-the-envelope calculations on relative travel times.
China is more made for high speed train service (as opposed to air travel) than America is.
Agreed, the real value to high speed rail is regional commuting. Traffic bottlenecks in California are in regional commuting not driving the I-5 corridor through the San Joaquin Valley.
Meanwhile… trains are operating again on the Kerch Bridge to Crimea.
Steve- thanks for this post.
I think you can trace the failure of High Speed Rail (HSR) in the US in a series of books written by Joe Vranich from the late 80s/early 90s to the mid-2000s.
Basically: optimism to pessimism. In the late 80s/early 90s, there seemed to be a ton of interest in HSR, with pilot studies and pretty expansive regional planning around what an HSR system might look like.
Very little of that came to fruition—only crazy CA
and it has been a total mess. CA: Perhaps a case study of what not to do and how not to build an HSR system.
I suspect HSR will be hard to make work in the US:
-Relatively low population density outside the Northeast Corridor, which is currently the only profitable part of the Amtrak system.
-Fairly inexpensive gasoline to fuel a regional trip. It is just cheaper and easier to hop in your car and not be dependent on a timetable if you have a business meeting that is 200-250 miles away. I will routinely do that for business in Dallas or San Antonio or Austin and do it all same day.
-Regional flights that are actually not too bad. I don’t do a ton of regional flights, but when I have they seemed to have worked well.
-If you are really cash crunched: take the bus. On a lark,
my wife and I took the bus from Boston to NYC for a long weekend back in 2015. It was very inexpensive (I think it was $100 total for both of us, total) reasonably comfortable and had free wifi so could work all the way.
–
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fung_Wah_Bus_TransportationReplies: @guest007, @BosTex
I lived in France for a number of years, and they really are good at building and running high-speed trains — the quote form the SNCF guy is (sadly) very funny.
Most people in the US think of the French as being all about perfume, cheese and buggery, but they actually are really good at large-scale engineering. I worked with a number of the big engineering-oriented companies there (though not in transport), and they were much more willing to take on technical risk than most comparable US companies. It was also surprising — to me anyway — how rigorous our kids’ math classes were and that most senior government officials have engineering rather than law degrees.
In my causal observation, however, they have several huge structural advantages when it comes to high-speed trains. (1) Goldilocks distances between most major cities — long enough for the speed to make a huge difference, but not so long that it’s just much faster to fly. (2) Dense-packed cities with lots of rural land between them and limited suburban sprawl around them. And (3) a much more autocratic government that would basically just say “tough s__” to people who complained about their land being condemned for the rights of way.
Great one.
The respective litigation cultures probably have a lot to do with it.
Given that it was planned to end in an apricot orchard outside of Fresno from the start, it’s questionable if it was ever on the rails.
Wasn’t it always no more than a singularly expensive act of virtue-signalling?
‘…You could have dinner and see a show in NY and be back in Philly in time for bedtime…’
Yeah. We rode bullet trains all over Japan. For the finale, we caught one from some burg on the northwest coast of Honshu to the airport in northern Kyushu; leave late morning for an afternoon flight.
My wife couldn’t believe it. She was sure this wasn’t going to work.
600 miles of commuting daily, working 6 hours and not tired at all. Imagine that.
But the California crazy train has taken generic government stupidity to a whole new level. Even in its ideal conception, the stupid thing was going to cost more than flying and take longer than driving. Greyhound bus service is a more efficient alternative.
The funny thing is that for 15 years everyone has known how stupid it is and yet it keeps moving forward like some money-sucking zombie. Straight-up corruption is the only conceivable explanation.Replies: @Hernan Pizzaro del Blanco, @James B. Shearer
The funny thing is that for 15 years everyone has known how stupid it is and yet it keeps moving forward like some money-sucking zombie. Straight-up corruption is the only conceivable explanation.”
Another explanation is that it is pure virtual signaling symbolism. The important thing is to demonstrate you are a good person by spending money on trains. That the train will never be financially viable or perhaps operate at all is besides the point.
If you have never seen what a “Bento Box” meal looks like on the Japanese bullet train, it is worth doing a Google image search. It’s funny to think that if somehow the California bullet train is ever built, a surly attendant at the AmCafe will be handing you a limp, microwaved cheeseburger in plastic wrap.
Works the same way in most Caribbean Islands as well.
It wouldn’t be just NY and Philly, it would be for the entire ACELA corridor.
It’s a crime there is no high-speed train system between Boston and DC. This is the most densely populated part of the U.S. where high-speed rail economics makes sense.
I am always sad when I ride high-speed rail in other parts of the world. On the other hand, those systems overseas aren’t run by and for low IQ demographics. Anybody who has ridden the metro system in DC would shudder at the thought of a high-speed rail system run by similar people.
I mean, AMTRAK is all excited, because it’s increasing the speed of its so-called high-speed train to 150 MPH on a 16-mile segment in NJ at a whopping price of nearly half a billion dollars. Ugh.
For those of you who haven’t experienced the pleasure of riding Metro imagine a Black-run subway neteork managed as a Black patronage system. Efficiency and cleanliness are not a priority to say the least.
And speaking of comparing foreign infrastructure to domestic, had the jarring experience flying from Tokyo to Chicago with my kids. After exiting customs kids had to use the toilet. We entered by passing a smelly wino sitting on an airport bench. Floor covered in water. Utterly filthy. My daughter refused to go. Felt like third world. Embarrassing.Replies: @Reg Cæsar, @BosTex, @The Last Real Calvinist
High speed rail also has the public transportation problem; they’re for other people, not the person enthusiastic about it.
Packed foods in general are much higher quality in Japan and South Korea than in the U.S. as is, obviously, service. But whaddaya gonna do? Having 80 or below IQ people doing service jobs (vs., say, 100) has its implications. There is something to be said for optimizing for quality instead of the lowest cost, even if the former leads to lower GDP in comparison.
For your dining pleasure, some of our creative ideas:
https://www.amazon.com/Chef-Minute-Meals-Self-Heating-Backpack/dp/B00M1CLTQY/ref=sr_1_4
https://www.amazon.com/Chef-Minute-Meals-Spaghetti-Meatballs/dp/B00M1CLTGY/ref=sr_1_13
OT
Steve, I nominate for your consideration for a future book review the autobiography of Svante Pääbo:
https://geneticliteracyproject.org/2022/10/05/sexy-science-neanderthals-svante-paabo-and-the-story-of-how-lust-shaped-modern-humans/
Population per square mile:
Hong Kong 17,582
Taiwan 1,707
Netherlands 1,346
South Korea 1,340
New Jersey 1,277
You only need at most 200′ right of way for a double-track system. That’s just over 2,000 acres for 90 miles, or 0.04% of the Garden State’s land area.
Hey, don’t pooh-pooh American inventiveness that created Twinkie, the indestructible food that can withstand nuclear Armageddon (supposedly).
For your dining pleasure, some of our creative ideas:
OT
Buried in a City Journal piece about how the health risks of sodium in food is grossly exaggerate is a description of a federal law that allows citizens to challenge and demand corrections of data that the feds release:
I wonder if anything could be gained by filing RFCs under the IQA relating to crime data and other racially sensitive information that the feds release or selectively don’t release?
Yeah. We rode bullet trains all over Japan. For the finale, we caught one from some burg on the northwest coast of Honshu to the airport in northern Kyushu; leave late morning for an afternoon flight.
My wife couldn't believe it. She was sure this wasn't going to work.Replies: @epebble
I was working for a few weeks in Japan in 1999 that required me to travel (early days of cellular technology development). I stayed in a Hotel in Tokyo. Woke up in the morning, took a 7 a.m. Shinkansen to Kyoto, Nagoya or Osaka, worked from 10 a.m. till 4 p.m. and was back in my hotel by 7 p.m. And I was not tired. At all.
600 miles of commuting daily, working 6 hours and not tired at all. Imagine that.
They’ll corner the market in fertilizer pretty soon, if they haven’t already. And someone has to feed the rest of the continent, as well as that other to the north.
Back in Ukraine, a disturbing escalation, as the Ukrainians are taking a leaf out of the Russian playbook and destroying their energy infrastructure to make Russia look bad!Undaunted, Russia continues to shell the nuclear plant it controls, is connected to the Donbass grid, and has troops all round, and the IAEA pretends it doesn't know who's doing it.https://twitter.com/iaeaorg/status/1579179390977466368
The Desalination plant at Carlsbad cost about $1 billion. Could have built 105 of those instead of that fu#&ing train.
Twenty years ago, voters in Miami-Dade County approved a half-penny sales tax whose proceeds allegedly would be used to fund a massive expansion of the elevated Metrorail.
To date, only a short spur to the airport has been built.
The airport Metrorail station is part of the federally-funded Intermodal Center complex. The IC was supposed to have an Amtrak station, but due to a design error the platforms were built too short to accommodate Amtrak trains. So that’s yet another screw-up.
In the southern portion of the county, an existing grade-level two-lane busway is being converted into “Bus Rapid Transit” that supposedly will be roughly as efficient as grade-level rail. (Again, we’ve been paying for elevated rail since 2002.)
This busway runs directly parallel to U.S. 1, a six-lane thoroughfare that is highly congested even during non-peak hours. Many major roads intersect U.S. 1.
If my information is correct, the BRT plan calls for “signal preemption,” meaning that intersections will be transformed into railway-style “bus crossings” and cars will be physically prevented from crossing the busway every time a bus goes by.
Unless the traffic engineers can figure out a way to time the red lights correctly, this is going to be an epic disaster.
U.S. 1 (affectionately known as Useless 1) is already a gridlocked nightmare. The busway runs along the west side of the highway, with only a narrow gap between the two roads in many places. Imagine the chaos that will result when, for example, northbound cars have a green light to turn left from the highway, but are forced to stop in front of the southbound lanes because the barriers are going down to allow a bus to pass.
Incidentally, when the Busway opened in 1997, sensors were installed to coordinate the traffic signals to try to ensure that buses would always have priority. But too many drivers tried to run the red lights. There were dozens of crashes in the span of several months. So the sensors were deactivated.
In 2002, the pitch for the sales tax was that it would allow the county to fulfill the promises made to the voters in 1972, when the seed funding for the mass-transit system was approved as part of the massive “Decade of Progress” bond initiative. So that’s fifty years of bullshit.
but for high speed rail you just have to look at China. Incredible.
If you don't know that China has already surpassed US in all major respects remember that China (last year) had 25,000 miles of high speed rail.
US has none.Replies: @stari_momak, @James B. Shearer
“SNCF – France is incredibly top down, NIMBYsm doesn’t exist”
And yet France has preserved much of its countryside, its farms, its ‘inefficient producers’ and even its 300+ variety of cheeses.
Yep. The authorizing ballot proposition (which I voted against) said it would cost $10 billion and estimated the average Californian would ride the thing about ten times a year.
but for high speed rail you just have to look at China. Incredible.
If you don't know that China has already surpassed US in all major respects remember that China (last year) had 25,000 miles of high speed rail.
US has none.Replies: @stari_momak, @James B. Shearer
“If you don’t know that China has already surpassed US in all major respects remember that China (last year) had 25,000 miles of high speed rail.
US has none.”
I don’t think miles of high speed rail is important.
They can’t even keep the Amtrak and the Metrolink running between Irvine and Oceanside. What makes you think they’ve laid 1 mile of rail in the past 10 years?
We truly live in clown world.
https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/communities/north-county/oceanside/story/2022-09-30/metrolink-amtrak-suspend-train-service-to-oceanside
However, all, not some, all, major first world countries have excellent operational bullet trains, and excellent train systems in general, for decades and decades now.
Including China, dummesels. And France. And Spain and Germany and Italy. And Japan.
So somehow, I don't think the problem is "socialism."Replies: @James B. Shearer, @wj, @John Pepple
However, all, not some, all, major first world countries have excellent operational bullet trains ..”
So you don’t think the US is a major first world country? A little bias there maybe.
I mean, did anybody ever think this was ever going to be a thing? It just looked like a goat-f*ck from the beginning, like NO ONE ever thought this would be a real thing.
This boondoggle just tells you everything about California, about the federal government, and about our country–it’s no longer working to succeed, only to enrich a small group of people. It’s like Mark Steyn say, at a certain point, a society is just too stupid to continue to live.
LA, largest city metro area in the state has many commercial centers that are nowhere near downtown. So why take a train to downtown and then have to take an UBER to Time Warner Center Woodland Hills Culver City Santa Monica Beverly Hills Glendale Pasadena east LA light industry the many commercial centers in the Valley and scattered all over the metro area?
San Francisco the train station isn’t even in San Francisco it’s in gawd awful Oakland. There’s no room to build a train station in downtown San Francisco. Plus San Mateo County Santa Clara County and South Bay is mountainous and full of state parks old redwoods and all sorts of endangered worms and weeds. Plus Silicon Valley is built up and madly expanding in every direction.
Lots of businesses abandoned Sacramento for the suburbs. Because Sacramento is a high crime town full of the criminal black children and grandchildren spawn of the generations of affirmative action black government workers.
The only business visitors to Sacramento itself would be those lobbying for state government hand outs.
In 1990s were tough on crime tough in welfare. Downtown revitalization and residential gentrification was planned. But by the time Obama was elected the democrats went back to catering to black and brown criminals. After the Fentanyl Floyd riots I doubt downtowns will be revitalized.
It’s almost as though some powerful organization is fulfilling a 100 year plan to completely destroy the United States.
The thing about America and in particular California, is that the very rich make their own laws and prefer to be unreachable. So things that apply to poorer regions won’t apply to them. They’ll mandate “affordable living” Section-8 scum to the middle class, but not their own neighbourhood, where they will invent some kind of environmental concern or something. They will have all kinds of awful transport system for the poor, but they won’t have any speed rail anywhere near them that could bring the riffraff. They’ll support immigration all over, but if any brown people except Obama lands on Martha’s Vineyard, the National Guard will remove them in 24 hours.
That said, the project wouldn’t work anyway, trains are not popular in America, even if they work pretty well in Europe and extremely well in China and Japan.
There isn’t much organic demand. Air is faster. No one starts an ends in a city center. Commute to a central city rail station, park, and then rent a car at the other end?
I would suggest building out freight rail between the cities and banning trucks from I-5. As a talking point. Or how about high speed bus?
And wouldn’t high speed rail have TSA? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastern_Air_Lines_Shuttle
In So Cal, HSR is a solution searching for a problem.
Stay in the left fast lane and go 95 miles an hour for hundreds of miles. And the locals doing 105 right in your tail. And no highway patrol. Because the locals have to travel long distances on a daily basis
When there’s a forest fire Tule fog or monsoon rains I like to travel in the slow right lane even though it’s slow. Get behind a big truck and I feel a lot safer than in the fast lane.
Japan, which is as seismically active as California, has been operating Shinkansen from 1964. They have had a lot of earthquakes in 60 years. Total number of fatalities from Shinkansen crashes: 0. Yes, this is from 1964 based technology. No computer chips.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_Ch%C5%ABetsu_earthquake#DamageReplies: @notsaying, @Alfa158
OK, so you can run a train where there are lots of earthquakes and not have anybody die or have significant injuries when something finally comes close.
But how about the California train operating at high speed in a series of long tunnels and on multiple “towering viaducts”? With these additional challenges, could this proposed California train come through in the same way the Japanese one did?
It just seems so unlikely to me but what do I know.
Who could have seen this coming? Wow what a crazy curveball.
It's a crime there is no high-speed train system between Boston and DC. This is the most densely populated part of the U.S. where high-speed rail economics makes sense.
I am always sad when I ride high-speed rail in other parts of the world. On the other hand, those systems overseas aren't run by and for low IQ demographics. Anybody who has ridden the metro system in DC would shudder at the thought of a high-speed rail system run by similar people.
I mean, AMTRAK is all excited, because it's increasing the speed of its so-called high-speed train to 150 MPH on a 16-mile segment in NJ at a whopping price of nearly half a billion dollars. Ugh.Replies: @Moses
Lol yes. I rode Metro daily in the 90s. They couldn’t keep elevators running then either. Shudder to imagine it now.
For those of you who haven’t experienced the pleasure of riding Metro imagine a Black-run subway neteork managed as a Black patronage system. Efficiency and cleanliness are not a priority to say the least.
And speaking of comparing foreign infrastructure to domestic, had the jarring experience flying from Tokyo to Chicago with my kids. After exiting customs kids had to use the toilet. We entered by passing a smelly wino sitting on an airport bench. Floor covered in water. Utterly filthy. My daughter refused to go. Felt like third world. Embarrassing.
Elevators mostly work reliably everywhere on the planet except our public transit systems in major American cities.
There: we can’t get it to work. No way.
I remember my wife and I managing the escalator /stairs with a baby carriage. Argh.
If you are in a wheelchair: it is the 19th century for you!Replies: @Moses
California…………………………..where the future goes to die.
This “building spree” includes destroying infrastructure, at least that infrastructure which has proved to be racist:
https://www.msnbc.com/the-reidout/reidout-blog/interstate-375-detroit-racist-infrastructure-rcna47912
“Slighting”…………it’s an old term that has become relevant once more:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slighting
Yeah, that’s why Japan never built high-speed rail…………….because it’s prone to earthquakes.
Seriously, Japan has corruption as well. I’m sure officials in Japan get bribes too. But at least graft in Japan works. Stuff gets built. The Shinkansen has millions of passenger-miles logged since 1964, and I believe not a single fatality.
California…………..all the graft, none of the results.
There is no cost competitive way to transport people by rail. But that's not the point of all this. Nothing about the concept was ever about the benefit of regular people.Replies: @Verymuchalive, @Jim Don Bob
All of these HSR projects have been built with massive government subsidies taken from ordinary taxpayers. Even the fares are usually subsidized by the state. The railways may declare profits, but they are operating profits only and include state subsidies on fares.
The regular users of these services are business class and other upper-middle professional types. Ordinary people rarely use them. Even business users will decline long term, as this article on the French TGV admits.
https://www.connexionfrance.com/article/French-news/French-high-speed-trains-TGV-celebrate-40th-anniversary-with-new-model-to-be-unveiled
.
The Covid pandemic has caused a reduction in long-distance business travel, and the once profitable TGV network began to lose money for SNCF.
Some doubt that the introduction of new lines will help the situation.
“Economically, it does not make sense to create these new lines as there will not necessarily be enough customers to make money,” said Arnaud Aymé, specialist transport advisor in the consultancy firm Sia.
“Even the Paris to Bordeaux line which opened in 2017 and which shortens the journey to two hours is not profitable.”
“No one will travel from Paris to Marseille for a staff meeting anymore,” said Alain Krakovitch, director of Voyages SNCF.
In the wake of COVID, businesses in many large cities have been moving out of expensive city centre sites for suburban or exurban sites. New York is a case in point. More and more people will work from home in future.
I expect that within 10 years many HSR lines in places like France and Spain will be mothballed, probably a lot sooner than that. Since January of this year wholesale electricity prices have gone up 5X or more. The era of cheap electricity for electrified rail is over.
Where did the money go? Who got rich?
https://preview.redd.it/6n0nw1rmgsh11.jpg?auto=webp&s=4bff8c98faed5215b8a6cf92b059d8d3882d71b1Replies: @YetAnotherAnon
“They’ll corner the market in fertilizer pretty soon”
Only one type, phosphorus – there are huge phosphate deposits, IIRC mostly in the disputed Western Sahara.
https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/morocco-gold-rush-fertilisers-war-ukraine
You also need nitrogen, European supplies of which are vanishing fast because manufacture of ammonium nitrate needs lots of gas, and potassium (usually mined as “potash”), the largest UK producer of which is … Israeli!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boulby_Mine
Interesting place with a neutrino observatory deep inside.
Back in Ukraine, a disturbing escalation, as the Ukrainians are taking a leaf out of the Russian playbook and destroying their energy infrastructure to make Russia look bad!
Undaunted, Russia continues to shell the nuclear plant it controls, is connected to the Donbass grid, and has troops all round, and the IAEA pretends it doesn’t know who’s doing it.
A private company, Brightline, is talking about building a 200 mph electric train to Las Vegas to Rancho Cucamonga, the last eastern stop of the commuter rail in SoCal that runs to downtown LA’s Union Station. There’s a lot of Biden infrastructure stimulus money out there.
Between L.A. and L.V. there might be a lot of solar power generated in the future.
Two details that seemed to have been overlooked during its planning:
1. Birds that fly too close to the tower-mounted reflectors run the risk of being incinerated in mid-flight. By some estimates, as many as 20 birds a day are lost.
2. Pilots flying out of LAS complain about the almost blinding reflection off the mirrors. For some reason they think that visibility out the windscreen is important.
More news, Bernanke gets the Swedish Reichsbank prize for his discovery of fiat dollarzzllolzz.
In the immortal words of GBFM (“Professional Women’s Ode”)
One reason why France and (especially) Japan have high speed rail systems is because those countries were absolutely destroyed by World War II and rail and transportation networks were rebuilt from scratch. In other words, they were able to build in straight lines because the war cleared out most of the obstacles that had been there previously.
China, too. Mostly because China has always been so poor and authoritarian that if they needed to build through a certain neighborhood or across a piece of land, they just did it.
Not to mention that people don’t “own” property in the same way in China as they do in the west. Eminent domain doesn’t work the same way in the United States and one party can (and often does) usually hold up projects for long periods of time due to the constitutional protections we have.
California’s geography combined with American politics makes LAX to SFO probably the absolute worst place in the country to try something like this.
As for geography, I gotta say, with the terrain that the Chinese civil engineers have to deal with, I'm extremely impressed. A whole lot of China is mountainous. The mountains in some of these places are not the W. Virginia rounded off hills either - they are jagged and hairy like the terrain you seen in Vietnam movies.
In one such a province, a road that used to be a gnarly barely 2-lane 10 hour ride became a US-4-lane-hwy-style (not limited access though) road providing a 4 hour ride, about 15 years back. 10 years after that, it was down to an hour 45, with about 20 1/2 mile to mile tunnels and many long high-up bridges from ridge to ridge. It was very damned impressive, especially considering that this was no showplace, like a road from Peking to Tianjin or something.
What happens when the next Big One happens in China? I hope they've designed for it, but...Replies: @Jack D
Well, for starters, has he tried to grease said machinery?
China, too. Mostly because China has always been so poor and authoritarian that if they needed to build through a certain neighborhood or across a piece of land, they just did it.
Not to mention that people don't "own" property in the same way in China as they do in the west. Eminent domain doesn't work the same way in the United States and one party can (and often does) usually hold up projects for long periods of time due to the constitutional protections we have.
California's geography combined with American politics makes LAX to SFO probably the absolute worst place in the country to try something like this.Replies: @Steve Sailer, @Achmed E. Newman
China has “nail buildings” that stubbornly defy development.
https://www.businessinsider.com/what-are-chinese-nail-houses-2016-8#the-owner-of-this-six-floor-villa-refused-to-accept-the-compensation-offered-by-the-developer-who-plans-to-build-a-financial-center-on-the-site-1
I don’t pretend to understand Chinese vs. American property law. My impression is Californians can generally resist changes longer.
I think you can trace the failure of High Speed Rail (HSR) in the US in a series of books written by Joe Vranich from the late 80s/early 90s to the mid-2000s.
Basically: optimism to pessimism. In the late 80s/early 90s, there seemed to be a ton of interest in HSR, with pilot studies and pretty expansive regional planning around what an HSR system might look like.
Very little of that came to fruition—only crazy CA
and it has been a total mess. CA: Perhaps a case study of what not to do and how not to build an HSR system.
I suspect HSR will be hard to make work in the US:
-Relatively low population density outside the Northeast Corridor, which is currently the only profitable part of the Amtrak system.
-Fairly inexpensive gasoline to fuel a regional trip. It is just cheaper and easier to hop in your car and not be dependent on a timetable if you have a business meeting that is 200-250 miles away. I will routinely do that for business in Dallas or San Antonio or Austin and do it all same day.
-Regional flights that are actually not too bad. I don’t do a ton of regional flights, but when I have they seemed to have worked well.
-If you are really cash crunched: take the bus. On a lark,
my wife and I took the bus from Boston to NYC for a long weekend back in 2015. It was very inexpensive (I think it was $100 total for both of us, total) reasonably comfortable and had free wifi so could work all the way.
-Replies: @Brutusale
Back in the Aughts when NYC was worth visiting, the girlfriend and I would occasionally take the Fung Wah bus out of Chinatown. It was $10 American for the one-way trip. You had to be a bit fatalistic, though, as the buses were driven by crazy little Chinese dudes with a death wish.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fung_Wah_Bus_Transportation
Seemed to be mostly college kids/younger folks. I seem to recall there were no blacks on the bus, either down or back.
No station in NYC, unlike Boston. I can’t recall the drop off, but think it was mid town, since we stayed in lower Manhattan. The pickup was at Jacob Javitz.
Good times! I cannot believe that was 7 years ago. I remember dropping our car at Quincy Adams. My wife said something like: “will the car be ok sitting here for the long weekend?”
Me: “yes, it will be fine! Let’s get moving!”
Nice
For those of you who haven’t experienced the pleasure of riding Metro imagine a Black-run subway neteork managed as a Black patronage system. Efficiency and cleanliness are not a priority to say the least.
And speaking of comparing foreign infrastructure to domestic, had the jarring experience flying from Tokyo to Chicago with my kids. After exiting customs kids had to use the toilet. We entered by passing a smelly wino sitting on an airport bench. Floor covered in water. Utterly filthy. My daughter refused to go. Felt like third world. Embarrassing.Replies: @Reg Cæsar, @BosTex, @The Last Real Calvinist
I pulled out a covered drink on a Metro platform about 20 years ago, something quite legal in my city. A black man in a business suit sharply corrected me, and mumbled some implications about people too stupid to know the oh-so-obvious rules. As if I were some hick, and not a visitor from a (then-) more civilized city, with more relaxed (yet still obeyed) rules.
I came away thinking I was in some egg-carton-shaped totalitarian nightmare. Well, you can’t make an omelet without…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fung_Wah_Bus_TransportationReplies: @guest007, @BosTex
The problem with the Chinatown buses is that it appeals to a limit number of Americans and eventually ends in a scandal.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fung_Wah_Bus_TransportationReplies: @guest007, @BosTex
We splurged and took Megabus.
Seemed to be mostly college kids/younger folks. I seem to recall there were no blacks on the bus, either down or back.
No station in NYC, unlike Boston. I can’t recall the drop off, but think it was mid town, since we stayed in lower Manhattan. The pickup was at Jacob Javitz.
Good times! I cannot believe that was 7 years ago. I remember dropping our car at Quincy Adams. My wife said something like: “will the car be ok sitting here for the long weekend?”
Me: “yes, it will be fine! Let’s get moving!”
However, all, not some, all, major first world countries have excellent operational bullet trains, and excellent train systems in general, for decades and decades now.
Including China, dummesels. And France. And Spain and Germany and Italy. And Japan.
So somehow, I don't think the problem is "socialism."Replies: @James B. Shearer, @wj, @John Pepple
Japan, Spain and Germany are socialist? BMW is now owned by the German government?
There is no cost competitive way to transport people by rail. But that's not the point of all this. Nothing about the concept was ever about the benefit of regular people.Replies: @Verymuchalive, @Jim Don Bob
Bingo!
I was just about to write that in reply too. I doubt it’s the same guy, but one of them was fending off the cops with fireworks shot out of a pipe. When his “ammo” ran out the “eviction team” tried to arrest him, but the local cops stopped them and let the guy stay on his land. Here, after the fireworks, you’d be in a dungeon in Washington FS on Terrorism charges.
I compared this case to the egregious and unConstitutional Kelo v New London decision in the Peak Stupidity post Fireworks from China. (Do you know what happened in the end in the latter? The lady lost her house and land, and then Pfizer – yes, that Pfizer – never used the property anyway, and it was vacant land!)
I have written a lot about the bad of Mao era and now modern Xi-Orwellian China, but I’ll give them this. I’m going by 15 to 5 years back, mind you, but in some ways they are more free than Americans.
“He says Morocco is much better because you can at least give the proper “gift” to the inspector to get him to look at your building plans and give them his stamp of approval – everyone know how much is the appropriate amount (which is not an unreasonable amount), how to deliver it and so on. Money is the grease which makes the wheels of the bureaucracy turn.”
Used to be the same in Chicago and the collar suburbs too. I’ve mentioned this story before. My late father related a story of trying to get a building permit to add an addition to the house he, my mother, and our growing family were living in. We lived in Cicero, IL at the time and my father was complaining to my grandfather that he submitted the permit request and heard nothing back for weeks.
My grandfather laughed and told him the Chief Inspector liked to knock off work after lunch and play the horses at Sportsman’s Park. He advised my father to set up a meeting with the inspector, put the request in a copy of the Daily Racing form and add a $50 or a C-note.
My father did and BOOM! The permit was granted within a day or two.
China, too. Mostly because China has always been so poor and authoritarian that if they needed to build through a certain neighborhood or across a piece of land, they just did it.
Not to mention that people don't "own" property in the same way in China as they do in the west. Eminent domain doesn't work the same way in the United States and one party can (and often does) usually hold up projects for long periods of time due to the constitutional protections we have.
California's geography combined with American politics makes LAX to SFO probably the absolute worst place in the country to try something like this.Replies: @Steve Sailer, @Achmed E. Newman
JR, yeah, there’s some deal where you only own the property you bought for 70 years. It reverts back to some branch of government after that. Additionally, the outside of houses, even detached ones, are not taken care of well, because everything on the outside is government responsibility too – it’s kind of weird, but some housing looks shoddy when it’s beautiful inside.
As for geography, I gotta say, with the terrain that the Chinese civil engineers have to deal with, I’m extremely impressed. A whole lot of China is mountainous. The mountains in some of these places are not the W. Virginia rounded off hills either – they are jagged and hairy like the terrain you seen in Vietnam movies.
In one such a province, a road that used to be a gnarly barely 2-lane 10 hour ride became a US-4-lane-hwy-style (not limited access though) road providing a 4 hour ride, about 15 years back. 10 years after that, it was down to an hour 45, with about 20 1/2 mile to mile tunnels and many long high-up bridges from ridge to ridge. It was very damned impressive, especially considering that this was no showplace, like a road from Peking to Tianjin or something.
What happens when the next Big One happens in China? I hope they’ve designed for it, but…
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/86/China_National_Expressway_Network_light.svg
Any earthquake (even a Big One) is bound to be localized. Will a few of those bridges fall down? Will maybe a few people get squashed like bugs when the tunnels collapse? Sure and then the Chinese will put them right back up. The convenience and economic benefits of having these expressways far outweighs the risk of a few people getting killed once every 70 years. Back in the old days, buses would go off of the hairpin turns of the old mountain roads every day.
Meanwhile we in the West will never get anything done while we "study" the ideal earthquake proof route for a highway and "work on" designing earthquake proof bridges and so on forever. Paralysis by analysis.Replies: @Achmed E. Newman
However, all, not some, all, major first world countries have excellent operational bullet trains, and excellent train systems in general, for decades and decades now.
Including China, dummesels. And France. And Spain and Germany and Italy. And Japan.
So somehow, I don't think the problem is "socialism."Replies: @James B. Shearer, @wj, @John Pepple
No, I’m not going to blame socialism. Socialism is the old left, and both the right and the old left could build things. It’s the new left that can’t build things, and our culture (especially California) is now dominated by the new left. The new left’s talent is not in building things, but destroying them. In my home town of Minneapolis, rioters destroyed a building that was being built for “affordable housing.” Moreover, no one seemed too upset about it, either. I can’t imagine that happening in a purely socialist society.
For those of you who haven’t experienced the pleasure of riding Metro imagine a Black-run subway neteork managed as a Black patronage system. Efficiency and cleanliness are not a priority to say the least.
And speaking of comparing foreign infrastructure to domestic, had the jarring experience flying from Tokyo to Chicago with my kids. After exiting customs kids had to use the toilet. We entered by passing a smelly wino sitting on an airport bench. Floor covered in water. Utterly filthy. My daughter refused to go. Felt like third world. Embarrassing.Replies: @Reg Cæsar, @BosTex, @The Last Real Calvinist
Moses- the elevators are always out of order in Boston train stations, as well.
Elevators mostly work reliably everywhere on the planet except our public transit systems in major American cities.
There: we can’t get it to work. No way.
I remember my wife and I managing the escalator /stairs with a baby carriage. Argh.
If you are in a wheelchair: it is the 19th century for you!
The California high speed rail project was a plot element in series 2 of “True Detective” released in 2015 so written at least a year before that. It was a convoluted plot line but I think the basic scam was that local government officials hired some gangsters to salt the earth with toxic chemicals in certain strategic locations along the proposed rail corridor. The land gets surveyed, the contamination causes the land’s value to plummet, certain shell companies or connected individuals buy the land just before the rail project is approved.
It was an interesting illegal scam, probably worth a lengthy prison sentence if it was ever discovered. Blatantly burning hundreds of billions of dollars in legal and miscellaneous consultancy fees is not illegal, it’s actually mandatory, no one will ever be punished for it let alone imprisoned.
Those True Detectives gangsters were small time chumps.
So “almost no one”.
Who are the sagacious few? Inquiring minds demand names!
Not gonna lie, that’s interesting and mostly contrary to what I would think… but I also suspect you are correct that those buildings eventually get removed much sooner than they would in the United States and are mostly exceptions to the overall rule.
L.A. City Council members apologize for offensive remarks heard in leaked audio
Two members of the Los Angeles City Council released apology statements Sunday after a report published by the Los Angeles Times included transcribed leaked audio of offensive and racist remarks that were made during a private meeting. A third council member claimed to have no recollection of the conversation.
In the leaked audio, which was summarized by the Times but was originally posted to Reddit and remains readily available on social media, Council President Nury Martinez can be heard making derisive and racist comments about the child of Mike Bonin, the council member representing the 11th District.
Bonin, who is white, has an adopted son who is Black. In the leaked audio, Martinez can be heard describing Bonin’s son as “ese changuito,” or that little monkey, according to the Times. At one point, Martinez also refers to Bonin as a “little bitch.”
The comments were made during a discussion regarding Bonin and his son participating in a Martin Luther King Jr. parade several years ago. Bonin and his son were on a float with other members of the Los Angeles political scene, and Martinez apparently was dissatisfied with the boy’s behavior, saying he nearly tipped the float over. She can also be heard accusing Bonin of raising the child like a “little white kid.”
More here:
https://www.kron4.com/news/l-a-city-councilmembers-apologize-for-offensive-remarks-heard-in-leaked-audio/
These Hispanic councilmembers somehow didn't get the message that black people are fellow People of Color who are natural allies against evil whitey.Replies: @turtle
Someone please explain to me how descendants and co-ethnics of Los Conquistadores became Oppressed People of Color.
Is this some kind of “ripening over time” phenomenon? If so, how long does it take? 400 years? Less?
Inquiring minds want to know.
The CA HSR project made a little better sense when the Tejon Pass housing/business park development was still viable. In the U.S., it is a money-laundering scheme. Politicians trade Federal/State/County/City money as subsidies for political contributions from EPC firms. HSR is a money-loser everywhere in the world, except one line in Japan and one line in France.
Right now in Sacramento, there is an office building filled with engineers and administrators, re-re-redesigning the route, and re-re-reacquiring right-of-way and permits. They call it, ‘getting ready to get ready.’
But how about the California train operating at high speed in a series of long tunnels and on multiple "towering viaducts"? With these additional challenges, could this proposed California train come through in the same way the Japanese one did?
It just seems so unlikely to me but what do I know.Replies: @epebble
It will work fine if they just copy Shinkansen design exactly or go for the new MagLev technology. Problem is, it has to be built by Japanese engineers. Otherwise, it will go the way of Oldsmobile, Pontiac, Saturn ….
I remember that when the project was first starting some analysts speculated that there was never any intention to actually finish it and it was just a giant slush fund payoff for interested groups. The topography of California and inadequate size of the potential ridership would never make it economically feasible. The beneficiaries would be the transit systems in the Bay Area and Los Angeles who would be getting funding for their money losing existing systems. In addition politically favored groups such as environmental and ethnic lobbies, engineering firms, lawyers, bureaucrats, environmental activists, consultants, public relations flacks etc, could feed from the tough for decades without ever finishing the whole project.
The last news I saw was an announcement that the 12 mile downtown Los Angeles to Burbank section is projected to open in 2033 with a $26 dollar one way fare.
Japan, which is as seismically active as California, has been operating Shinkansen from 1964. They have had a lot of earthquakes in 60 years. Total number of fatalities from Shinkansen crashes: 0. Yes, this is from 1964 based technology. No computer chips.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_Ch%C5%ABetsu_earthquake#DamageReplies: @notsaying, @Alfa158
Also the Shinkansen runs through the densely populated areas of Japan which are all along the coast and therefore basically flat. There are no long grades, tunnels or bridges it has to cross.
What I found to be the coolest thing about the Japanese system is that the trains routinely run at speed through small intermediate stations. It’s fun to stand on an open platform in one of those stations when a train zips in like a cruise missile, zooms past you in a blast of wind, and vanishes down the track, all within a few seconds. It’s like being in a live action Roadrunner cartoon.
As for geography, I gotta say, with the terrain that the Chinese civil engineers have to deal with, I'm extremely impressed. A whole lot of China is mountainous. The mountains in some of these places are not the W. Virginia rounded off hills either - they are jagged and hairy like the terrain you seen in Vietnam movies.
In one such a province, a road that used to be a gnarly barely 2-lane 10 hour ride became a US-4-lane-hwy-style (not limited access though) road providing a 4 hour ride, about 15 years back. 10 years after that, it was down to an hour 45, with about 20 1/2 mile to mile tunnels and many long high-up bridges from ridge to ridge. It was very damned impressive, especially considering that this was no showplace, like a road from Peking to Tianjin or something.
What happens when the next Big One happens in China? I hope they've designed for it, but...Replies: @Jack D
The Chinese have built 104,000 miles of expressway:
Any earthquake (even a Big One) is bound to be localized. Will a few of those bridges fall down? Will maybe a few people get squashed like bugs when the tunnels collapse? Sure and then the Chinese will put them right back up. The convenience and economic benefits of having these expressways far outweighs the risk of a few people getting killed once every 70 years. Back in the old days, buses would go off of the hairpin turns of the old mountain roads every day.
Meanwhile we in the West will never get anything done while we “study” the ideal earthquake proof route for a highway and “work on” designing earthquake proof bridges and so on forever. Paralysis by analysis.
What I found to be the coolest thing about the Japanese system is that the trains routinely run at speed through small intermediate stations. It’s fun to stand on an open platform in one of those stations when a train zips in like a cruise missile, zooms past you in a blast of wind, and vanishes down the track, all within a few seconds. It’s like being in a live action Roadrunner cartoon.Replies: @Jack D
Not true. First of all there is the Seikan Tunnel which runs 33.5 miles under the sea to connect Honshu with Hokkaido . Then there is the Iwate-Ichinohe underground tunnel which runs 15 miles under hilly terrain.
These are the longest ones but there are many such tunnels. There is only a narrow coastal strip that is flat in Japan. Most of the rest of the country is hilly or mountainous and it’s impossible to route all the railroads only along the coast. Even on the heavily travelled Tokyo-Osaka corridor there are many tunnels and viaducts. The entire line is grade separated and runs elevated for long stretches – you can’t have stalled dump trucks sitting on a 200 mph railroad and in the densely developed coastal strip the only practical way to route the railroad was OVER the enormous number of existing streets, highways, roads, train lines, rivers, etc.
Actually it does now, on the northeastern outskirts. Berryessa Station. An expensive, geologically complicated extension to downtown San Jose has been proposed, maybe funded at least in part, but the future of that is unclear.
Rail passengers rarely ride a long distance route from one end point to the other. Most ride between two intermediate points, and HSR from SF to LA doesn’t address this need.
What they should do is “higher speed” rail, i.e. conventional trains running on upgraded right of way that allows speeds of 125-150 MPH. The San Joaquin Valley is mostly flat, and would be suitable for this kind of rail. If travel times between Bakersfield and Oakland could be brough down to 3 hours or thereabouts, it becomes competitive with driving, which typically takes 4 hours plus.
There is still the issue of how to get over/under/around the Tehachapi Mountains. I think the current routing (which has been freight only since 1971) still makes the most sense because it allows the Antelope Valley to be served, along with the Santa Clarita Valley. The current owner of the tracks, Union Pacific, would probably need to be paid off to add track capacity and straighten some of the alignment, but it’s doable and if travel time from LA to Bakersfield could be reduced to 3 hours, then you have a service that is, in theory at least, attractive.
Just my two cents.
Scam, all of it.
The economic and cultural impact would be negative, driving up regional housing costs, consolidating entertainment and recreation into major city centers, and spreading city slickers into local communities.
“in the densely developed coastal strip the only practical way to route the railroad was OVER the enormous number of existing streets, highways, roads, train lines, rivers, etc.”
In Melbourne the commuter lines along the coast, not at all speedy, dip under the roads every few hundred yards so that traffic doesn’t have to keep stopping at level crossings. Must cost a fortune to retrofit and you couldn’t do it with heavy freight but it works with electric commuter trains.
They were originally built alongside the roads and as Melbourne got more built-up and commuter trains more frequent they started putting the dips in.
The lines are maybe 20-30 miles max – they don’t go anywhere but the suburbs.
Wouldn’t they do better linking LA and Las Vegas?
Yes. IMO, anyplace you can justify an interstate highway you can justify a high-speed train. There should be high-speed trains running alongside every interstate in this country.* Unfortunately, as other posters have noted, America is no longer a can-do country.
*Except for between LA and Phoenix because fuck off, Arizona is full.
Yup.
https://www.unz.com/isteve/californias-high-speed-rail-as-bait-and-switch-scam/#comment-2438951
I see leaked racist comments are hilariously blowing up the LA City Council
https://www.nbclosangeles.com/news/local/la-city-council-president-nury-martinez-resigns-leaked-audio-racist-slurs/3003509/
an impossible project, even 50 years ago when the capable men of europe built everything in America with nobody interfering. was there anybody who knows anything about building anything who did NOT realize this thing would never, ever get built? under IDEAL conditions, it couldn’t be built.
for starters, passenger rail doesn’t work in America. this would have been the biggest money losing project in the history of the United States, if you don’t count the 100 year long effort to elevate africans into first world country type citizens.
and that’s before taking into account the fully dysfunctional state of modern California. i chuckle with amusement at the usual collection of (names) involved in the highest level of the project. when have (those guys) ever built ANY big project of value? never, that’s when. they wait for other people to build big, important stuff, then they show up later. indeed (those guys) showing up and taking over the leadership and decision making roles in the country coincided perfectly with the sudden inability of America to build or do anything.
like any other country, America takes on the character of it’s current leadership. it used to be constructive. today it is extractive and destructive.
Presumably, someone has already pointed this out, but the central problem is all but insurmountable; you need a car at either end.
Detrain in Tokyo, and you’re at the center of an attractive and efficient urban transit system that can whisk you to wherever you want to go; we never missed not having a car when we were in Japan, and anyway, half the time there was no place to park it.
Detrain at Union Station in Los Angeles and where are you — say, with respect to Disneyland, or Santa Monica, or Steve’s house?
Ditto for the other end. I’m in downtown San Francisco…and?
What mass transit there is obscure, slow, and often doesn’t access where you would want to go at all. Worse, it’s often infested with vagrants and criminal blacks. My daughter won’t ride it, and I wouldn’t encourage her to.
So until we’ve rebuilt the whole damned country and solved our social problems while we’re at it, the high speed rail becomes if not quite pointless, of questionable utility.
Is the Bay area smarter than the Boston area?
When we drove through the newly opened https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tokyo_Bay_Aqua-Line in 1999, then new GPS in our rental car had not been updated and was constantly shrieking that we are drowning in sea and our driver did not know how to silence it.
This is not the only pie-in-the-sky scam. You want a real one?
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/nasas-artemis-delays-fuel-controversy-over-rocket-design/
I sort of halfways agree with you, but in my clapped-out Rust Belt area there’s still precision metal-working, specialty steel-making, and other evidence of people exercising fairly high-end skills (at least in my opinion). The down side is that their numbers are pretty small, and they work amid a landscape of corrupt governments and dejected, worn-out people. It’s almost like two Americas, or two types of Americans, the legacy go-getters and the burn-outs.
What they should do is "higher speed" rail, i.e. conventional trains running on upgraded right of way that allows speeds of 125-150 MPH. The San Joaquin Valley is mostly flat, and would be suitable for this kind of rail. If travel times between Bakersfield and Oakland could be brough down to 3 hours or thereabouts, it becomes competitive with driving, which typically takes 4 hours plus.
There is still the issue of how to get over/under/around the Tehachapi Mountains. I think the current routing (which has been freight only since 1971) still makes the most sense because it allows the Antelope Valley to be served, along with the Santa Clarita Valley. The current owner of the tracks, Union Pacific, would probably need to be paid off to add track capacity and straighten some of the alignment, but it's doable and if travel time from LA to Bakersfield could be reduced to 3 hours, then you have a service that is, in theory at least, attractive.
Just my two cents.Replies: @Graveldips
IIRC, Amtrak sends (sent?) you by bus from LA to Bakersfield in about two hours, and put you on the train there. The whole Tehachapi grade, loop and all, was avoided, as well as an ugly mile long tunnel at Sylmar with a 25mph speed limit. The whole LA/Bakersfield route was built in the 1870s, so the curves can be very tight, with correspondingly low speeds. And you can’t straighten the curves without increasing the grade, thereby forcing the trains to go slower.
Scam, all of it.
Where do you think those “city slickers” are from, originally? How many “New Yorkers” have New York accents? You have to go to Miami or LA to hear those.
Then tell us, what is the way to San Jose?
Just as with the Smollett hoax, every sane person knew on Day One that the California project was a hoax. The people who promoted it anyway profited by it, and will be unscathed by its failure, suggesting that perhaps they are the sanest among us.
There already is: at Ivanpah, which is on the CA-NV state line.
Two details that seemed to have been overlooked during its planning:
1. Birds that fly too close to the tower-mounted reflectors run the risk of being incinerated in mid-flight. By some estimates, as many as 20 birds a day are lost.
2. Pilots flying out of LAS complain about the almost blinding reflection off the mirrors. For some reason they think that visibility out the windscreen is important.
Detrain in Tokyo, and you're at the center of an attractive and efficient urban transit system that can whisk you to wherever you want to go; we never missed not having a car when we were in Japan, and anyway, half the time there was no place to park it.
Detrain at Union Station in Los Angeles and where are you -- say, with respect to Disneyland, or Santa Monica, or Steve's house?
Ditto for the other end. I'm in downtown San Francisco...and?
What mass transit there is obscure, slow, and often doesn't access where you would want to go at all. Worse, it's often infested with vagrants and criminal blacks. My daughter won't ride it, and I wouldn't encourage her to.
So until we've rebuilt the whole damned country and solved our social problems while we're at it, the high speed rail becomes if not quite pointless, of questionable utility.Replies: @Steve Sailer
Acela can deliver you to Penn Station around 34th Street in Manhattan, in between Wall Street and Midtown, with easy subway and cab connections. Or to Union Station in D.C. four blocks north of the Capitol.
It’s good for people with, say, legal jobs who need to see other lawyers in big buildings .
Los Angeles has Union Station in the northeast corner of downtown, which does connect to the slowly growing subway and above ground rail system. (They are talking about putting in a ski resort-style gondola ride up the hill to Dodger Stadium, which sounds like a fun way to go to a Dodger game. My guess is that in the second half of this century, they’ll build a four story parking garage on Dodger Stadium’s vast parking lot on top of a hill overlook downtown, and use the other 75% of the parking lot to build a New Improved Downtown that can be defended from the social decay.)
Within about five years the subway should finally be able to get you from downtown west to Beverly Hills, Century City, and UCLA.
! They were building that subway when I lived in LA.
That was forty years ago. It still can't get you from downtown to Century City?
Man, those third world countries. What a joke...Replies: @Steve Sailer
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/86/China_National_Expressway_Network_light.svg
Any earthquake (even a Big One) is bound to be localized. Will a few of those bridges fall down? Will maybe a few people get squashed like bugs when the tunnels collapse? Sure and then the Chinese will put them right back up. The convenience and economic benefits of having these expressways far outweighs the risk of a few people getting killed once every 70 years. Back in the old days, buses would go off of the hairpin turns of the old mountain roads every day.
Meanwhile we in the West will never get anything done while we "study" the ideal earthquake proof route for a highway and "work on" designing earthquake proof bridges and so on forever. Paralysis by analysis.Replies: @Achmed E. Newman
Speaking of that, Jack, even on good roads, accidents happen, and in a country of 1.4 billion often not-very-law-abiding drivers, something like that is not usually the makings of a national uproar.
However, as Peak Stupidity reported recently in “Thrown under the bus on the road to Covid~Zero“, next of kin really get pissed when their dead relatives were forced onto a bus taking them out of their city (Guiyang) to a quarantine camp due to some asshole who tested positive. I kid you not, that Covid~Zero stupidity they’ve got going on over there beats American stupidity all to hell.
That story was trending, or whatever the Chinese word for that it, on Telegram. Then, it was suddenly not trending anymore. That’s the bad.
The line about Morocco is right though: this kind of project presupposes unapologetic centralization. (It’s probably also a factor that Morocco pretty much has one kind of landscape and California has every different type except tundra.) The truly iStevey “tragic kingdom” money quote would be to ask if any Californian politician involved with the project actually intended to build a real train line.
I think eminent domain disputes in China can get pretty violent. I read ten years ago about 800 peasants battling with clubs 250 bandits hired by a golf course developer/mayor to kick the farmers off their land.
Used to be the same in Chicago and the collar suburbs too. I've mentioned this story before. My late father related a story of trying to get a building permit to add an addition to the house he, my mother, and our growing family were living in. We lived in Cicero, IL at the time and my father was complaining to my grandfather that he submitted the permit request and heard nothing back for weeks.
My grandfather laughed and told him the Chief Inspector liked to knock off work after lunch and play the horses at Sportsman's Park. He advised my father to set up a meeting with the inspector, put the request in a copy of the Daily Racing form and add a $50 or a C-note.
My father did and BOOM! The permit was granted within a day or two.Replies: @Steve Sailer
After WWII, no new skyscrapers were being built in Chicago’s Loop because every government official was freelancing at shaking down developers for their own individual bribes. No developer knew what the total bribe sum was to budget. The first Mayor Daley came in after a decade of stagnation and set up a system where his bagman would collect from the developer the total amount of the bribe and then allocate to each player his share. So businesses could budget with confidence. A vast building boom ensued.
https://i.imgur.com/aLfIvmV.jpeg
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T05soR6iKQQ
‘Within about five years the subway should finally be able to get you from downtown west to Beverly Hills, Century City, and UCLA.’
! They were building that subway when I lived in LA.
That was forty years ago. It still can’t get you from downtown to Century City?
Man, those third world countries. What a joke…
For those of you who haven’t experienced the pleasure of riding Metro imagine a Black-run subway neteork managed as a Black patronage system. Efficiency and cleanliness are not a priority to say the least.
And speaking of comparing foreign infrastructure to domestic, had the jarring experience flying from Tokyo to Chicago with my kids. After exiting customs kids had to use the toilet. We entered by passing a smelly wino sitting on an airport bench. Floor covered in water. Utterly filthy. My daughter refused to go. Felt like third world. Embarrassing.Replies: @Reg Cæsar, @BosTex, @The Last Real Calvinist
Indeed.
Mrs C and I just made a trip back to my ancestral village in Iowa, and flew in and out of O’Hare, coming from Hong Kong. We couldn’t get direct flights (blame it on HK’s now-crumbling but still insane covid regime), so on the way over we flew via Tokyo Narita, and on the way back through Seoul Incheon. The former is a nice airport, after some very helpful renovations, but Incheon is like Planet FutureWorld compared to O’Hare’s cramped, shabby Terminal 5.
On our way over the the USA, going through immigration in O’Hare Terminal 5 was pathetic: long, long queues, with no separate provisions for US citizens. Everybody goes in one big, jumbled, diverse line — all happy together! No passport scanning kiosks were open, no fingerprint or facial recognition tech in operation to speed things along — just good old-fashioned lining up for 40 minutes to deal eventually with a bad-tempered immigration agent doing the passport scanning old-school. Even the UK is now better than the USA in this aspect; Daughter C is in university in the UK, and reported that when she arrived at Heathrow last month, she literally did not have to stop walking as she passed through immigration, because as a US passport holder she qualified for fast tracking via facial recognition.
On our way home, our flight from O’Hare was scheduled to leave just after noon. We had arrived early, in case our HK destination with its covid documentation delayed us. It didn’t, so we had plenty of time after TSA. We looked around Terminal 5 — this was at 10:00 am, on a busy day — and there was exactly one food outlet open: Dunkin’ Donuts. We saw that a couple of other places were scheduled to open at 11:00, but they didn’t. Mrs C saw a guy cooking food at one of them, so went over to enquire. It turned out they would have opened on time, except their cashier, who was supposed to start work at 11:00 for opening, was nowhere to be found. By the time said worker appeared, we had to go to our gate. Third world service would likely have been better in this context.
It is embarassing.
I watch the east Asians in US airports sometimes. They’re usually not the most visually demonstrative people in such settings, but you can be sure they’re not failing to notice how run-down and inadequate much of the USA’s service sector (and broader infrastructure) has become.
TV is, in part, they show a mono-racial world with no schwartzes. Ppl find it refreshing, a break from the grinding emotional labor that is part and parcel of diversity.
The old white guy who finally processed our passport just shook his head when we got to him, and he heard her shout out in the background at the people who were in line behind us. He gave us back our passports with the customary "welcome home." A nice little bit of courtesy from an earlier, more civilized time in America.
It crosses my mind that that’s more or less exactly what Vladimir Putin did for Russia’s economy. He brought order and predictability to the corruption when he came into office in 1999, after a decade of economic chaos which caused a collapse in the GDP. Massive growth ensued in the fifteen years that followed. There were corrupt officials and oligarchs left after he cleaned house, but they were his corrupt officials and oligarch.
Early 1950s movie filmed in Chicago.
“Perfume cheese and buggery” hahaha.
Great one.
It needs a name change!
! They were building that subway when I lived in LA.
That was forty years ago. It still can't get you from downtown to Century City?
Man, those third world countries. What a joke...Replies: @Steve Sailer
Congressman Waxman (D-Beverly Hills) blocked the L.A. Subway from being built through Beverly Hills in 1986.
It’s why there there is no Orange Line M street Metro stop which would have fallen between Rosslyn and Foggy Bottom.
It makes getting to Gtown a real hassle. I think that’s the idea.
Yes. IMO, anyplace you can justify an interstate highway you can justify a high-speed train. There should be high-speed trains running alongside every interstate in this country.* Unfortunately, as other posters have noted, America is no longer a can-do country.
*Except for between LA and Phoenix because fuck off, Arizona is full.Replies: @Anonymous
Your concern for Phoenix should be generalizable to any location that would be connected by high speed rail. No one in this thread seems to appreciate the costs.
We rode that high speed train in Morocco last summer, it was very fine. Center to center. Like in Europe and Japan (but not China!) the conventional rail was always there, it doesn’t save much time to have the last few miles at lower speed.
Egypt is now also getting high speed rail, they signed a huge contract with Siemens.
People need to go to Japan… the trains there are so silent that they have almost no negative impact whatsoever. On the other side of the scale from motorbikes and trucks without mufflers.
And what are the economic and social costs? And why should the public have to pay for it? And why is it necessary in the age of the telephone and Zoom?
The first high speed train built in China was by the Japanese during the Manchukuo era, Asia Express Ajia-gō アジア号,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-speed_rail_in_China#Precursor
Deng Xiaoping rode on the Shinkansen in 1978, and was deeply impressed.
There was no talk then about wartime history, instead the slogan was “neighbours separated by merely a narrow strip of water” 一衣帶水 yīyīdàishuǐ
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/一衣帶水
Transportation infrastructure is almost always subsidized by taxpayers. E.g., California has almost no toll roads. What kind of infrastructure to subsidize is a big part of what politics is about. If California could do it for a reasonable price, I’d like to have high speed rail. But since 2008 I’ve figured California couldn’t.
But, yeah, the work from home trend might make transportation infrastructure a little less important.
That reminds me of something I was just noticing today.
Four years ago, I moved to a -- let's be frank -- dying logging town of twenty thousand-odd people. The people are about what you would expect -- for better and for worse.
But lately, I've been noticing this vaguely alien, more urban element moving in. It occurs to me these must be work-from-home types. After all, employment opportunities aside, this is a great place in a lot of ways. Virtually no serious crime, relatively cheap housing, friendly, helpful people (it can get ridiculous) and of course all the trees and rivers and bears and stuff you could want.
If you can work from anywhere and don't need trendy bars, this beats most urban hellholes hands down.
Yep.
It’s not just the physical plant — old airports, filthy bathrooms, shabby environments— it’s also the coarse, indifferent and sometimes downright rude service.
My East Asian wife was appalled at some of our service experiences whilst traveling in the USA. I was embarrassed as an American. How low our bar has fallen. I told her it wasn’t like this before.
Fruits of diversity and mass 3rd world immigration I guess.
One night we stayed in the hotel at the historic TWA terminal at JFK. Dripping with nostalgia of a bygone, more elegant — and dare I say more White — age.
It doesn’t help that US airports largely staffed by third worlders paid a pittance.
OT – My hypothesis re the popularity of Korean
TV is, in part, they show a mono-racial world with no schwartzes. Ppl find it refreshing, a break from the grinding emotional labor that is part and parcel of diversity.
Residents of tony Georgetown, DC successfully campaigned to keep Metro out of Georgetown.
It’s why there there is no Orange Line M street Metro stop which would have fallen between Rosslyn and Foggy Bottom.
It makes getting to Gtown a real hassle. I think that’s the idea.
Elevators mostly work reliably everywhere on the planet except our public transit systems in major American cities.
There: we can’t get it to work. No way.
I remember my wife and I managing the escalator /stairs with a baby carriage. Argh.
If you are in a wheelchair: it is the 19th century for you!Replies: @Moses
Broken elevators are the broken ice cream machines of the public transportation world.
In other words, a litmus test for workforce competence and creeping third-worldization of our society.
An aside – As a youth I had a summer job that required staff to break down, clean and sanitize and reassemble an ice cream machine. We all disliked it. It’s a highly technical process requiring careful steps and proper sequence.
I understand why broken machines are a leading indicator of 3rd world workforces and crumbling competence.
His boss, who was not an engineer, had been sold a computerized HVAC management system that took a lot of tweaking that took about a year, I think. Chris had confidence the bugs could be worked out. He also had skilled and experienced and well-paid electricians to help get the bugs out.
https://www.cnet.com/culture/mcdonalds-faces-900m-lawsuit-from-ice-cream-machine-repair-startup/
I can understand perfectly why Taylor doesn't want the competition* but it's unclear to me why McDonalds would be against these devices.
*very often, the market creates perverse incentives. If a manufacturer sells a defective item that can outlast the warranty period, they make MORE money the less reliable the device is. The worse the better for them. This is especially true if the manufacturer has an effective monopoly - in the case of McDonalds, Taylor has a dominant share in ice cream machines anyway and is the exclusive authorized provider to McDonald's franchises.
I just went through something similar with my Chrysler van. Chrysler built vehicles have a very expensive ($1,500!) and unreliable main fusebox. Millions of them have this same crappy part. Inside this fusebox are a bunch of relays that control things like the fuel pump but the relays are not socketed (each socket would cost another 50 cents and there are maybe 5 or 6 relays) - rather they are soldered to a circuit board that is buried inside the fusebox. Over time (usually after the warranty has expired) these relays start to go bad. It is possible to do board level repair to desolder and replace defective relays (even this costs several hundred $ if you have a 3rd party do it and of course the vehicle is out of service while your fusebox is being fixed) but dealers are not equipped to do this. Nor does Chrysler sell the circuit board as a separate part. The only thing a dealer will do for you is replace your entire $1,500 fusebox because a $5 relay is bad. (Actually to make matters worse, very often the no-start is misdiagnosed as a bad fuel pump so first they will sell you a $500 fuel pump and then when that doesn't work, they will sell you a $1,500 fusebox). What is Chrysler's incentive here? What is the dealer's? The more bad fuseboxes they make, the MORE money they make. Their maximum profitability is if this part (and every other part) breaks the day after the warranty is expired.
Now in my case, someone (needless to say, not Chrysler) figured out that you can bypass the bad fuel relay with a little plug-in patch cable that costs $8 and which any idiot can install in 5 minutes so there is a happy ending. Although you can be sure that Chrysler is not happy that these cables exist - you can't buy them from Chrysler or any Chrysler dealer.Replies: @Moses
I don’t patronize local gas stations if the little thing you flip to keep the gas flowing when you take your hand off does not work. Those things have been in use as long as I’ve been driving, they’re not some high tech gizmo. If they can’t maintain or replace something that simple, what else is substandard?
‘But, yeah, the work from home trend might make transportation infrastructure a little less important.’
That reminds me of something I was just noticing today.
Four years ago, I moved to a — let’s be frank — dying logging town of twenty thousand-odd people. The people are about what you would expect — for better and for worse.
But lately, I’ve been noticing this vaguely alien, more urban element moving in. It occurs to me these must be work-from-home types. After all, employment opportunities aside, this is a great place in a lot of ways. Virtually no serious crime, relatively cheap housing, friendly, helpful people (it can get ridiculous) and of course all the trees and rivers and bears and stuff you could want.
If you can work from anywhere and don’t need trendy bars, this beats most urban hellholes hands down.
Moses, a friend of mine, an engineer, had a catch phrase that ran something like: “Buying stuff is easy. Installing it, making it work right, maintaining it to work right over its expected service life is pretty hard, etc.”
His boss, who was not an engineer, had been sold a computerized HVAC management system that took a lot of tweaking that took about a year, I think. Chris had confidence the bugs could be worked out. He also had skilled and experienced and well-paid electricians to help get the bugs out.
Last August, I returned through JFK after an overseas trip with a few hundred people waiting to clear immigration. Immigration did have a separate line for US citizens, but the supervisor managing the situation kept letting the line for foreign visitors get priority over Americans, delaying us several minutes at a time. Judging by his accent, she was a recent immigrant herself. Perhaps it was jet lag on my part, but I could have sworn she seemed the little groan that went up from the American line every time she did that. The Piltdowns waited in line for over 45 minutes.
The old white guy who finally processed our passport just shook his head when we got to him, and he heard her shout out in the background at the people who were in line behind us. He gave us back our passports with the customary “welcome home.” A nice little bit of courtesy from an earlier, more civilized time in America.
Engineer Casey Handmer offers technical insights on the physical constraints to High-Speed Rail.
Why High Speed Rail Hasn’t Caught On, posted Oct. 11, 2022.
Two fair-use excerpts below the fold.
…
Why High Speed Rail Hasn't Caught On, posted Oct. 11, 2022.
Two fair-use excerpts below the fold....Replies: @Jack D
The real value in high speed rail is over shorter distances where air travel is impractical. The area of impracticality is enlarged given our current airport security model where you have to add two hours to your journey for the boarding process. You also have to take into account downtown to downtown travel time – a train can go to the very heart of a city where airports are usually located some distance away. So on a door to door basis, a 4 or 5 hour train trip may be equivalent to a 2 hour flight. You can see this in other countries where, for example, the Beijing-Shanghai high speed train competes successfully with air travel despite the 700 mile distance (about the same as NY-Chicago). “Successful” in mass transit does not necessarily mean profitable – passenger trains are rarely profitable businesses.
Of course the system they are building makes no sense – who the hell wants to go from Modesto to Bakersfield? This is the drunk looking for his keys under the streetlight model of infrastructure development.
The place they should really be building high speed rail is the Northeast Corridor. NY Penn Station to DC Union Station in 1 hr (with Philly 30 mins from each) would be a complete game changer. Amtrak comes close to high speed on certain short stretches (150mph here and there) but close is no cigar.
Even multinational corporation McDonalds has trouble keeping its ice cream machines in service (the quality of their workforce may have something to do with it). There was a company that created AI-powered devices that increase the reliability of ice cream machines but according to a lawsuit filed by them, McDonald’s and Taylor, the company that manufactures the chain’s ice cream machines “joined forces to drive Kytch out of the marketplace.”
https://www.cnet.com/culture/mcdonalds-faces-900m-lawsuit-from-ice-cream-machine-repair-startup/
I can understand perfectly why Taylor doesn’t want the competition* but it’s unclear to me why McDonalds would be against these devices.
*very often, the market creates perverse incentives. If a manufacturer sells a defective item that can outlast the warranty period, they make MORE money the less reliable the device is. The worse the better for them. This is especially true if the manufacturer has an effective monopoly – in the case of McDonalds, Taylor has a dominant share in ice cream machines anyway and is the exclusive authorized provider to McDonald’s franchises.
I just went through something similar with my Chrysler van. Chrysler built vehicles have a very expensive ($1,500!) and unreliable main fusebox. Millions of them have this same crappy part. Inside this fusebox are a bunch of relays that control things like the fuel pump but the relays are not socketed (each socket would cost another 50 cents and there are maybe 5 or 6 relays) – rather they are soldered to a circuit board that is buried inside the fusebox. Over time (usually after the warranty has expired) these relays start to go bad. It is possible to do board level repair to desolder and replace defective relays (even this costs several hundred $ if you have a 3rd party do it and of course the vehicle is out of service while your fusebox is being fixed) but dealers are not equipped to do this. Nor does Chrysler sell the circuit board as a separate part. The only thing a dealer will do for you is replace your entire $1,500 fusebox because a $5 relay is bad. (Actually to make matters worse, very often the no-start is misdiagnosed as a bad fuel pump so first they will sell you a $500 fuel pump and then when that doesn’t work, they will sell you a $1,500 fusebox). What is Chrysler’s incentive here? What is the dealer’s? The more bad fuseboxes they make, the MORE money they make. Their maximum profitability is if this part (and every other part) breaks the day after the warranty is expired.
Now in my case, someone (needless to say, not Chrysler) figured out that you can bypass the bad fuel relay with a little plug-in patch cable that costs $8 and which any idiot can install in 5 minutes so there is a happy ending. Although you can be sure that Chrysler is not happy that these cables exist – you can’t buy them from Chrysler or any Chrysler dealer.
Beverly Hills has numerous buses on Sunset Santa Monica Wilshire Olympic and Pico running east west. Plus several lines running north south crosstown. There’s a small section of BH north of Sunset, Bel Air that doesn’t have a bus line. But buses are within walking distance of most homes and businesses.
How else would the maids and waiters get to work?
Governors Pat and Jerry Brown were a crime family like the Pelosis and Feinstein’s husband Richard Blum. After his retirement Pat made tens of millions from Liquid Natural Gas stocks he bought while ramming LNG through the legislature. Jerry had a lot of boondoggles but the ridiculous high speed train to nowhere was his worst.
LA, largest city metro area in the state has many commercial centers that are nowhere near downtown. So why take a train to downtown and then have to take an UBER to Time Warner Center Woodland Hills Culver City Santa Monica Beverly Hills Glendale Pasadena east LA light industry the many commercial centers in the Valley and scattered all over the metro area?
San Francisco the train station isn’t even in San Francisco it’s in gawd awful Oakland. There’s no room to build a train station in downtown San Francisco. Plus San Mateo County Santa Clara County and South Bay is mountainous and full of state parks old redwoods and all sorts of endangered worms and weeds. Plus Silicon Valley is built up and madly expanding in every direction.
Lots of businesses abandoned Sacramento for the suburbs. Because Sacramento is a high crime town full of the criminal black children and grandchildren spawn of the generations of affirmative action black government workers.
The only business visitors to Sacramento itself would be those lobbying for state government hand outs.
In 1990s were tough on crime tough in welfare. Downtown revitalization and residential gentrification was planned. But by the time Obama was elected the democrats went back to catering to black and brown criminals. After the Fentanyl Floyd riots I doubt downtowns will be revitalized.
It’s almost as though some powerful organization is fulfilling a 100 year plan to completely destroy the United States.
Agriculture is California’s major industry. Always was and will be hundreds of years after Silicon Valley and the entertainment business is gone. The I 5 and the trucks are essential to California agriculture. And they stay in the right hand slow lane.
Stay in the left fast lane and go 95 miles an hour for hundreds of miles. And the locals doing 105 right in your tail. And no highway patrol. Because the locals have to travel long distances on a daily basis
When there’s a forest fire Tule fog or monsoon rains I like to travel in the slow right lane even though it’s slow. Get behind a big truck and I feel a lot safer than in the fast lane.
Hundreds of thousands of people travel between Bakersfield and Modesto every day. By cars trucks farm worker vans private planes. and the reasonable cost Amtrak train and bus system. Bakersfield and Modesto don’t have the old east coast high rise office business downtowns. Mostly spread out blue collar agriculture businesses.
https://www.cnet.com/culture/mcdonalds-faces-900m-lawsuit-from-ice-cream-machine-repair-startup/
I can understand perfectly why Taylor doesn't want the competition* but it's unclear to me why McDonalds would be against these devices.
*very often, the market creates perverse incentives. If a manufacturer sells a defective item that can outlast the warranty period, they make MORE money the less reliable the device is. The worse the better for them. This is especially true if the manufacturer has an effective monopoly - in the case of McDonalds, Taylor has a dominant share in ice cream machines anyway and is the exclusive authorized provider to McDonald's franchises.
I just went through something similar with my Chrysler van. Chrysler built vehicles have a very expensive ($1,500!) and unreliable main fusebox. Millions of them have this same crappy part. Inside this fusebox are a bunch of relays that control things like the fuel pump but the relays are not socketed (each socket would cost another 50 cents and there are maybe 5 or 6 relays) - rather they are soldered to a circuit board that is buried inside the fusebox. Over time (usually after the warranty has expired) these relays start to go bad. It is possible to do board level repair to desolder and replace defective relays (even this costs several hundred $ if you have a 3rd party do it and of course the vehicle is out of service while your fusebox is being fixed) but dealers are not equipped to do this. Nor does Chrysler sell the circuit board as a separate part. The only thing a dealer will do for you is replace your entire $1,500 fusebox because a $5 relay is bad. (Actually to make matters worse, very often the no-start is misdiagnosed as a bad fuel pump so first they will sell you a $500 fuel pump and then when that doesn't work, they will sell you a $1,500 fusebox). What is Chrysler's incentive here? What is the dealer's? The more bad fuseboxes they make, the MORE money they make. Their maximum profitability is if this part (and every other part) breaks the day after the warranty is expired.
Now in my case, someone (needless to say, not Chrysler) figured out that you can bypass the bad fuel relay with a little plug-in patch cable that costs $8 and which any idiot can install in 5 minutes so there is a happy ending. Although you can be sure that Chrysler is not happy that these cables exist - you can't buy them from Chrysler or any Chrysler dealer.Replies: @Moses
Ice cream machines are not complex. A motor, mixing parts, cooling mechanism.
The tricky thing about them is proper operation requires daily disassembly, cleaning and re-assembly. By “disaasembly” I mean the mixing parts must be removed, cleaned, reassembled and reinstalled. The parts and container must be sanitized with a special solution, then rinsed thoroughly. Have to mix powder and water in proper ratio to get solution with right concentration.
The point is it’s not rocket engineering, but it is a mildly complex process to learn and do right. It was our least favorite closing job.
If you are lazy and don’t do the job properly the parts won’t be santitized and bacteria will grow. If don’t rinse sanitizer thoroughly that’s another problem. Both make the ice cream taste bad, may be a health hazard.
My guess is diverse McDonalds staff don’t want to bother and/or are unable to clean the machines properly every day. Easier to say “machine’s broken.”
Separately, you raise another problem which is planned breakage. Could be a part of the “ice cream machine broken” problem, but from my experience with the machines I suspect laziness and/or incompetence a much larger factor.
,they were much more willing to take on technical risk than most comparable US companies.
The respective litigation cultures probably have a lot to do with it.
I think what happens is that the machine is built to be somewhat smart (to try to make up for the uh, shortcomings of the staff) but not smart enough. The machine is smart enough to know when it has not been thru a full sanitizing cycle but not smart enough to tell you exactly what you did wrong. Instead it will display something like ” Code 1104 – please call service”. The Kytch device knew what Code 1104 meant and would be able to walk you thru the steps to fix it without having to call a technician. Of course Taylor doesn’t make any money if you fix the machine yourself so they were not pleased.
Modern cars are a lot like this as well. They have a tremendous amount of detailed self-diagnostic information that is captured inside their computers. But as a consumer all you see is the “money light” – the little icon of an engine that says “CHECK ENGINE”. Again the dealers would rather that you bring it to them to interpret the magic rune. I supposed the mfr. is also concerned that if they told you how to fix something and you ended up botching it up then you would sue them.
If you look at old car manuals (for example the Ford Model A) the manufacturers would give very detailed instructions for doing things like adjusting the ignition timing and would include things like wiring diagrams. I think they were assuming that someone who could afford a car was not a complete idiot, but also cars in those days were much simpler. The complexity of machines and the intelligence of the average consumer are headed in opposite directions.
Yes and no. They are certainly a technological society – they were always neck and neck with the rest of the modern world in any technological development, whether it was the train or the automobile or nuclear power.
But their French arrogance tends to get in the way of making a sale. And instead of blaming themselves, they blame the customer for not being smart enough to understand their greatness. You know what would be even better than witty anecdotes like the SNCF guy’s story? Actually getting the contract. Americans in particular find their style (which is generally speaking “we are smart and know what’s good for you”) grating and antithetical to the American way of thought. The Japanese fake-humble act (and yes it is an act to a certain extent) flies much better with Americans and Germans and Americans seem to naturally get along better because their modern societies are in part copied from each other. In the 19th century the former British colony of the US became Germanified in part and in the 2nd half of 20th century the Germans became Americanified.
And sometimes the French really do know what they are doing and sometimes they are just sort of a little bit off so the ” I’m an expert – don’t ask me a lot of annoying questions” approach does not always produce optimum results.
Yes, I think you are exactly right about this. As much as I loved life in France, there are big problems with the traditional French way of doing things, and "don't play well with others" is near the top of the list.
Modern cars are a lot like this as well. They have a tremendous amount of detailed self-diagnostic information that is captured inside their computers. But as a consumer all you see is the "money light" - the little icon of an engine that says "CHECK ENGINE". Again the dealers would rather that you bring it to them to interpret the magic rune. I supposed the mfr. is also concerned that if they told you how to fix something and you ended up botching it up then you would sue them.
If you look at old car manuals (for example the Ford Model A) the manufacturers would give very detailed instructions for doing things like adjusting the ignition timing and would include things like wiring diagrams. I think they were assuming that someone who could afford a car was not a complete idiot, but also cars in those days were much simpler. The complexity of machines and the intelligence of the average consumer are headed in opposite directions.Replies: @Anonymous
Does the computer contain inside itself more detailed diagnostic information, even a specific diagnosis? And can this be accessed by somebody?
Absolutely yes. At the simplest level you can get an “OBD2 scanner” bluetooth dongle on Amazon or ebay and some free software that will allow your phone to read the stored codes. These are under $10. At the other end, there are tools that a mechanic might have that cost up to $5,000 and brand specific systems at dealerships that cost even more. Often if you go to an auto parts store they will allow you to use their code scanning device for free (because they hope to sell you the parts).
For the cheap type tools what you typically get is a list of stored failure codes, for example “P0351”. If you type “P0351” and your brand of car into google, this will generally lead you in a useful direction. Very often the code will point to the failure of some specific part – e.g. the coil pack on cylinder 1. An aftermarket coil pack on Amazon might be under $10. The dealer will be glad to charge you $150 or more for the same 5 minute repair.
The more expensive devices and the dealer tools have even greater capabilities.
Literally just had the “check engine” light come on for our Buick Verano and the local auto parts place has one of these that you can borrow.
Going to google the code to see if it is a simple fix or if it has to go to the shop.Replies: @Jack D
"pushing through the steep mountains and treacherous seismic faults of Southern California with a series of long tunnels and towering viaducts."
When something big quake comes -- maybe not The Big One but leading up to it I suppose -- what will happen? If the train is actually there when The Big One does come, what a nightmare. The disaster movie sort of writes itself but will Hollywood still be there to make it?
We do not talk about The Big One anymore but that doesn't mean it is not coming.Replies: @epebble, @Anon
How does Japan do the shinkansen? They are also on the Pacific ring of fire (and earthquakes). Is Cali not the technological leader of the world? Newsom is such a turd.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/nasas-artemis-delays-fuel-controversy-over-rocket-design/Replies: @Jack D
That’s a feature, not a bug. In the past, the shuttle engines returned with each shuttle (assuming the shuttle returned) so they didn’t need to keep building new ones. (Supposedly that was the main selling feature of the shuttle – as a reusable system it was going to be much cheaper – it didn’t work out that way, but the engines did indeed get used multiple times). The SLS is going to burn up the existing stock of shuttle engines and after that they are going to need new ones which will keep the NASA contractors in key states employed.
Thanks Jack.
Literally just had the “check engine” light come on for our Buick Verano and the local auto parts place has one of these that you can borrow.
Going to google the code to see if it is a simple fix or if it has to go to the shop.
Literally just had the “check engine” light come on for our Buick Verano and the local auto parts place has one of these that you can borrow.
Going to google the code to see if it is a simple fix or if it has to go to the shop.Replies: @Jack D
You’re welcome.
I realize it is OT but post the code(s) here and I’ll let you know what I think. Sometimes a code could mean more than one thing and there are simple tricks for narrowing it down further. For example, if you suspect a bad coil pack you swap the cyl 1 coil pack w. cyl 2 – now the P0351 code should go away and you get P0352 instead. If it stays P0351 this mean that the coil is probably good but not getting power. Little tricks like this will save you from ordering unnecessary parts, but often the parts are very cheap in relation to dealer labor so if you order a $10 coil and that wasn’t it you haven’t lost much. Worst case you now have a spare.
YouTube is extremely helpful – for almost any conceivable repair there are YouTube videos. Watch a couple of videos ahead of time and even if you have never done this before you can probably follow along. I’m not suggesting that you start with a something complex but often it is just a matter of swapping a sensor or something simple like that. Consumer grade basic tools such as a socket set and a multimeter are also very cheap. Over time you will build confidence and undertake more difficult challenges. I could pay a dealer $150 for five minutes labor to change my $5 cabin filter but it just rubs me the wrong way.
Getting a P0014 warning.
Text is:
B Camshaft B1 Pos - Timing Over-advanced or System Performance.
Fwiw: she is running perfectly fine, no odd noises and very smooth and quiet, as always. The Verano is a nice little car.
2015 70k miles. Routine maintenance scheduled followed to a T. My wife’s car. She uses it daily for a 30 mile highway commute. Not much traffic, so highway speeds.Replies: @Jack D
Awesome. Thanks for the kind consult.
Getting a P0014 warning.
Text is:
B Camshaft B1 Pos – Timing Over-advanced or System Performance.
Fwiw: she is running perfectly fine, no odd noises and very smooth and quiet, as always. The Verano is a nice little car.
2015 70k miles. Routine maintenance scheduled followed to a T. My wife’s car. She uses it daily for a 30 mile highway commute. Not much traffic, so highway speeds.
P0014 is the code for the exhaust actuator but while you are in there you normally replace both. They are color coded. Save the (gray) intake actuator as a spare because it is probably still good. $27 for the pair and they are held in by 1 bolt and 1 wire connector each. I think one more bolt to get the plastic engine cover off (you also need to remove the oil cap). The dealer will not be ashamed to quote you $500 for the pair installed or $250 each for this 5 minute job.You can tell that the guys doing this job on the videos are not rocket scientists. If they can do it, you can do it.After they are installed you may need to reattach the gizmo to clear the code. It should not come back.If I am wrong you are out $27 but I think there is a 99% chance this will fix your problem.Replies: @Jack D
Getting a P0014 warning.
Text is:
B Camshaft B1 Pos - Timing Over-advanced or System Performance.
Fwiw: she is running perfectly fine, no odd noises and very smooth and quiet, as always. The Verano is a nice little car.
2015 70k miles. Routine maintenance scheduled followed to a T. My wife’s car. She uses it daily for a 30 mile highway commute. Not much traffic, so highway speeds.Replies: @Jack D
Is it the 2.4L engine?
P0014 is the code for the exhaust actuator but while you are in there you normally replace both. They are color coded. Save the (gray) intake actuator as a spare because it is probably still good.
$27 for the pair and they are held in by 1 bolt and 1 wire connector each. I think one more bolt to get the plastic engine cover off (you also need to remove the oil cap). The dealer will not be ashamed to quote you $500 for the pair installed or $250 each for this 5 minute job.
You can tell that the guys doing this job on the videos are not rocket scientists. If they can do it, you can do it.
After they are installed you may need to reattach the gizmo to clear the code. It should not come back.
If I am wrong you are out $27 but I think there is a 99% chance this will fix your problem.
P0014 is the code for the exhaust actuator but while you are in there you normally replace both. They are color coded. Save the (gray) intake actuator as a spare because it is probably still good. $27 for the pair and they are held in by 1 bolt and 1 wire connector each. I think one more bolt to get the plastic engine cover off (you also need to remove the oil cap). The dealer will not be ashamed to quote you $500 for the pair installed or $250 each for this 5 minute job.You can tell that the guys doing this job on the videos are not rocket scientists. If they can do it, you can do it.After they are installed you may need to reattach the gizmo to clear the code. It should not come back.If I am wrong you are out $27 but I think there is a 99% chance this will fix your problem.Replies: @Jack D
PS you can also clear the code afterward by disconnecting the battery for 1 minute. You might lose your saved radio stations.
If you do this, get some canned air or a blower and clean around the area of the sensors before you remove them – you are going to expose a hole leading to the innards of your engine and you don’t want to get dirt in there.
This is really a perfect example of the kind of troubleshooting you can do with OBD codes. If you want to keep a car for a long time, spending $27 vs $500 several times a year is the difference between an older car being economical and it being a money pit. Aside from being profitable in itself, dealers like it when you get sick of paying them $500 every few months and buy a new car from them instead. They are going to take your old car in trade and make money on that too.
LOL, I could tell you stories.
Yes, I think you are exactly right about this. As much as I loved life in France, there are big problems with the traditional French way of doing things, and “don’t play well with others” is near the top of the list.