Re: PART chugs along Yep, stupid woman, what does she know about build "real" HSR, right?
Author: Taxpayer / fool
Date: 03-20-2023 - 05:32

I haven’t figured out yet who can be blamed for the inflated cost of CAHSR. Was it mostly the political process that made costs go up? Or can planners, project managers, and engineering consultants take blame too. This project makes me wonder if there’s an inability to execute major projects in the country.


I attended my first CAHSRA meeting in 1996 for a colleague assigned to the project, as the backup "rail guy".

I had been involved with monitoring "Project California" which was a "public/private" "partnerhsip" intiative under Pete Wilson, which was going to use CA's technology edge to develop "world class transportation systemss". The scheme looked at HSR and MagLev as "technologies" which would make CA "world class". No real thought went into what our travel patterns were, and how these "technologies" would me those real "needs", or what it would "cost" us. Only that the "technology" was really cool, and that it went "super" fast, so we could be "just like" China or Germany....

This became a political project, with competing visions for HSR and MagLev were competing... The political stupididy was so great, and the lack of knowledge about any of these "high level" "big picture" "visionary" "leaders", that at one meeeting I was at, an agency head in Southern California even blurted out the sheer nonsense, to a room full of folks with real engineering degrees, that since MagLev "levitated" the structures would be less costly to build in earthquake country.... I looked down at my feet in embarrassment, as this idiot thought that somehow "MagLev" had "repealed the law of gravity".....

The CA legislation, in it's infinite wisdom, and the internal lobbying of an army of A and E firms, chose HSR, Mehdi Morshed and the Board were selected, and part of that army of A and E firms was hired to "manage" the HSR...

This HSR project would not use a bureaucratic model with public employee's working for the publlic... The CAHSRA would use a new model where they would hire private project management for a fee based on the "percentage" of the work to be managed... And after that, and ever since, this fatally flawed planning, review, design, and construction of the project, became to paraphrase Abe Lincoln: "Government of the contractor, by the contractor, and for the contractor...." became the governance structure behind the CAHSRA.

The only real criteria was that the CAHSRA must be super fast, and-only the fastest in the world would do for "modern" "cutting edge" CA, right?. It must be as fast as the fastest Chinese or German system, so CA can be "just like a modern country"...

Did any of this meet our observed travel demands in CA... Who cares... Just "build it and they will come", and with the hookers the contractors could afford, from these bloated costs and cost overruns, they can party in style...

This "government by the contractor" model, of course lead to the resultant bloated incompetent planning, the incompetent fake "user needs" analysis and subsequent questionable environmental review, and of course, resuled in the bloated gold plated "cost is no object" fiasco we have today, by simply lying to the public, to the legislature, to five Governors of both Parties, about the purported benifits an the ever expanding "cost is no object" design costs. Since, when you are being paid on a model that is based on a percentage of the work to be managed, there was no reality check on either real benefits, or the real costs, nor any real incentive to tell the truth to anyone.

Add to that the need to serve the Valley (where there is a very real rail potential and demonstrated rail demand which could be served by a much more "cost effective" lower maximum speed HSR variant), and the added mileage of bloated gold plated structures that could be justified, just made the management fees higher on the ever expanding costs...

Then you lie to the voters, and you lie to the FRA, and you get Boxer and Feinstein to write you a Federal share with no checks and balances for project planninng or proper alternatives analsysis as we are required to do in determining "needs" and "cost effeciveness" for transit and highway projects.

Then, you start construction, with incomplete plans, no ROW acquistion or condemnation done, no cost controls, open ended management contracts, and the change order "racket" of "low bid" construction contracts that put all onus for readiness and design on the incompetent management model, and collect double or triple the profits on the added costs ( for thecost overruns) resulting from this flawed incompetent CAHSRA project management model.

That is how you get to where we are today with the announcement, that 10 years int o the first segment, that it is so bloated, and so much has been wasted so far, that it is still 10 billion dollars short for the first 171 miles mostly in "flat" rural construction conditions, that with this latest 10 billion dollar cost overrun is now up to 35 billion dollars...

By comparison Brightline's privately financed "for profit" properly plannned project is finishing testing of 170 miles of more affordable HSR in Florida built for just over 3 billion dollars, which started most detailed design work as late as 2016, and will be operating by this fall....