California High Speed Rail has not Failed and RealLifeLore is wrong 

Hello. Just wanted to drop in here to, first of all, thank you for making this video. A lot of non-facts and misinformation slipped through the cracks of my usual fact-checking process for my video on this subject, and I've been incredibly embarrassed over it. It didn't come close to matching my standards of quality, and that's why, ultimately, I've made the decision to take my video down permanently, and I'm working on a follow-up video to go over all of the errors that you, and many others have brought up since it went live. This subject deserved closer attention from my own eyes, and I apologize for ever having it released in the condition that it was in. Cheers, Joseph

The BART point was actually hilarious, like saying why doesn’t crossrail in london just run on existing underground lines 🙄

"The cost has ballooned to 100 billion due to cost increases" "10 people died in the Bronx last night due to a fire that killed 10 people in the Bronx last night during a fire"

"If there's one group of people that know way more than you do, it's train people." As a train people, this cracked me up

It’s stuff like this that makes me realize how many people have a fundamental misunderstanding of how public transportation works.

typical non-foamers always think that a "track upgrade" just means grabbing a magic wand from the TpF2 UI menu and in one touch it upgrades the tracks to 350 km/h without change in alignment, grade crossings, tunnels, etc.

This is the only CA HSR video i've found that actually mentions how mountains are the reason the route goes through the central valley and is so curvy. It should be relatively obvious but I'm still glad there's at least one video that explains this feature. Great video in general too.

I am flabbergasted they said that diverting only 13 minutes to enfranchise a small city is a bad thing.

I’m always disappointed when people want to bypass the central valley’s cities. That region of California is growing and most auto dependent section of the state as well as home to another 5 million Californians. Clearly there’s necessity to build in “nowhere” when nowhere starts becoming somewhere.

I was one of the consultants for this project in the early stages. My responsibilities was organizing the documentation around the project for the inevitable lawsuits and public disclosure. I hate the 'all the lawsuits' issue brought up by critics. As one of the PM's told me: "You can guarantee lawsuits on a project of this scale, it's just a part of doing business." And yeah, take it from a consultant.... consultants are the biggest factor to government projects costing so much.

I live in South Korea. The train lines and the metro systems are always expanding here. Often things go over budget and/or projected dates but, once they're completed they generate some measure of pride on top of increasing conveniences, reducing traffic, etc. People only ever get mad before and during but, rarely after.

you know this video gonna slap when RealLifeLore is in the comments apologising and admitting the error

Also regarding the Palmdale station: RealLifeLore dismisses Palmdale as only being a city with 150,000 people however nearby is the city of Lancaster with a similar population. So it makes a lot of sense to have a HSR station serving an area of over 300,000 people, and HSR would complement existing commuter rail service. That number is also probably expected to grow as cities like Palmdale, Lancaster, and Santa Clarita have grown in population over the past ten years while cities closer to the core of Los Angeles have declined in population due to how expensive housing has become.

The reason he got so many things wrong is because he didn't compare anything to a Toyota Corolla.

The funny part about the Surfliner issue is they just closed the line *again* because the hillside wanted to be friends with the ocean

Reminds me of a video someone made where he outright said "Why doesn't Brazil just become a superpower already." Well, you have impenetrable rainforest on one side of the mountains, and a thin strip of arable land on the other. The mountains. You can't, you just, agh it bothered me so bad.

Funny how Mustard's video on Shinkansen itself has already answered most of these "technical" problems, the Japanese's choice of digging new routes, abandoning old slower tracks with different gauges, over-budget problems, etc. High-speed rail is a different kind of transport and should not be compared to rails like commuter rails. And the economical benefits are simply too great to be ignored in the coming decades.

Missed the part where RealLifeLore just forgets that express trains exist and thinks that CalHSR has to stop at every single station along the route every single time.

Fun fact, when the new high speed connection between Berlin and Munich was completed in 2017, the number of customers for that route doubled over the next year. It's a project that was quite comparable in nature to CHSR.

Public projects always goes over budget, because the numbers who get called at the start are mostly the absolut minimum who only could be realised when nothing goes wrong. 15:00 when you take Italy as example, the highspeed railnetwork killed the own airline. Because inland flights where not necessary anymore for people.

What a lot of critics don't know is, 30 years ago California already had an advanced proposal for high speed rail up the San Diego coast, close to the current line, and the lawsuits and NIMBY-ism were overwhelming to the point it was all shit canned. My father was one of the senior engineers on the original BART system and later served as Executive Engineer, overseeing construction of 3/4 of the system’s rail line. I worked as a lowly laborer, laying and affixing that same 52 miles of rail; both directions. I choked on my beer the moment I heard someone suggest combining the long distance line with BART. I know dozens of reasons why that wouldn't work. Although a shared transfer station would be a great idea.

The "skip Palmdale and go through the Tehachapi Pass" idea is even more bone-headed once you realize it's actually a good idea! Such a good idea, in fact, that the freight railroads already built a line there over a hundred years ago, and very rarely let passenger trains through it these days, since it's already at capacity with just the freight traffic... Also, I have to laugh at RLL saying Palmdale was "only" 150,000 people (metro area of half a million). Hardly worth building transit infrastructure for! /s

“Anyone from the Bay Area knows what the problem is here…” Haha yup! One thing I think would help a lot of the RU-vid fails I see is just talking to a local expert first. That alone would prevent so many erroneous claims.

However annoying it is that American construction is so expensive and wasteful, the bottom line is that this train will connect 40 million people in a place with the worlds 6th largest economy. It should work out pretty well in the long run.

Californian here: One major change the plastic bag and straw laws did do was reduce rubbish, at least throughout the Bay Area. They used to litter every drain and parking lot. They took effort to pick up, and thus often were left to accumulate when other things were cleaned. So it was partly to boost taxes, that is true, but I can say walking around without drifting bags everywhere has been welcome.

An additional thing I have to say about the going to "nowhere" cities like Palmdale, is a lot of these places will experience serious growth once they're better connected to the job markets of the Bay Area and LA. Palmdale is already a bedroom community for LA due to housing prices...with a 3 hour drive. That time will literally be cut in half by HSR.

Cries in "trying to reverse engineer 20th-century infrastructure because all of our institutional knowledge is lost, and even relatively routine work is horrendously expensive".

About the San Diego segment: The HSR segment to SD goes through San Bernardino which makes sense as San Bernardino to Los Angeles is the most popular Metrolink line. This route passes through Escondido, a large suburb of San Diego, which is only served by light rail to Oceanside and BRT to Downtown. HSR could cut commuting times (and by extension rush hour traffic) by a lot. Plus, the Inland Empire would have a good chance to densify as well as link Ontario airport.

Side note on Caltrain: Yes, it is great that they electrified the route and bought modern trains to serve the line, but they had to get weird special trains with doors with two different heights because there are multiple platform heights along the route. Apparently the solution is to adapt the trains, not the platforms.

As a Californian, I’m still sad. Maybe California is shooting for something truly special but I just want my high speed train. I hate having to drive everywhere. This project has been in progress my entire life, so I’m still a little sad. Hopefully I’m still here when it’s finished.

I lived in the Bay Area for many years and I always chose BART or Caltrain to move around. My father was a civil engineer. I once blurted that roads should be more direct. He looked at me and said, "do you know how much money, time, and resources are needed to drill a tunnel into a mountain?" He explained to me just briefly all the effort and all the types of things to do including ecological and geological studies, calculations, planning, etc., is impressive. And that was brief. I was schooled and I'm grateful. I hope they can finish that project. Will help a lot.

16:40 "California high speed rail had a lot of fundamental issues when it started, but they're on the right track" Nice pun there

"Your ability to put stock videos over a script does not mean I have to take you seriously." One of the driest burns I've seen on this site oof! Great video as usual.

5:28 "...rather than utilizing the already built BART system." This made me facepalm immediately. I take BART every single day, it is an urban subway system. _SUBWAY_ system. Up and down above and below ground. RealLifeLore tipped his hand, you would have to know nothing at all about the SF Bay Area to think you can start combining BART with any other trains at all

"Costs overruns" "100 Billion dollars" *Doesn't the Pentagon have a 768 Trillion dollar budget?*

FYI the European high-speed rail map at 7:50 has some mistakes, or is at least a decade out of date. The Barcelona-Figueres line was completed in 2013 and has now carried 13 million passengers.

From Europe I can only tell you, to build that as soon as possible. The longer it takes, the more expensive it will become. The sooner you have more experience for the implementation of the following lines. The United States lost the opportunity of the high-speed train, and if today a country decides to buy material and management, it will go for European companies. Experience in that industry is everything. Germans, Spanish, Italians and French are already developing the next generation of trains.

Yeah anyone who lives in California knew every single thing you were going to say haha. If you live here, you get it. I will 100% take a high speed train from LA to SF Bay Area. Having to fly is annoying and I don't want to do that drive. I LOVE taking the Surfliner to San Diego!

Also please note- routing the high-speed rail through Palmdale, provides potential passengers who chose to avoid the congestion at LAX could realistically consider arriving and departing through the underutilized Palmdale airport. This would be beneficial for those whose destination is not the west side of Los Angeles! This also provides valuable revenue for the ‘small city of Palmdale’.

I am 49 years old. Every single time a massive public works project takes place there is the same chorus of "it's failed, it's not worth it, it's a waste of money!". If the general population had their way, we wouldn't even have an Interstate Highway system.

I would've started LA to SD at first, but now that we're already this deep in, just finish SF to LA and the rest of the network will build itself.

As someone who grew up in the bay area and used to live in LA, I have had a somewhat doomer-ish outlook on the high speed rail. Every news article or report seems to detail just how colossal the failure is on the project. You are legitimately the first person in a decade that has given me hope this rail will actually happen and it makes me happy. The vast majority of Californians want to see this thing happen. The drive from SF-LA sucks (I have done it many times). You waste an entire day traveling between two major hubs of industry. Considering these two metro areas are some of the richest in the nation (and the world) it is a complete no brainer to build this rail. Nowhere else in the US needs a high speed rail more than California. The current LA-SF rail line takes between 8-16 hours! Yeah, it is slower than driving. This rail would bring the US infrastructure into the 21st century and will also better integrate the state as a whole.

“If there’s one group of people that know way more than you, it’s train people” this is the most accurate damn thing I have ever seen

God I want trains in the US so bad. Long comment incoming but it's just my personal experience with trains. It has a happy ending. I go to school in a typical midwestern college town about two hours away from St. Louis where I grew up. Driving along the interstate between those two places can sometimes be a real pain in the ass. There's an Amtrak station about 30 minutes away on the highway from that college town and the train will take me in two hours to another station which is about a 15 minute drive through the StL suburbs from my parent's house. I've taken that train a handful of times. I won't lie and say it's practical to take it every time I want to visit my parents. It's inconvenient to find someone to drive me to the station. Amtrak has a reputation for not being on time anywhere except the NEC. As far as luxury or speed goes, Amtrak isn't even _comparable_ to Europe or Japan, and I probably spend more money for a round trip ticket than I would on the amount of gas it takes to drive two hours on the interstate. Despite *ALL OF THOSE THINGS,* taking the train every once in a while is still a *_really_* nice change of pace. There's plenty of leg room, you can get up and walk around whenever you want, the train usually moves along at highway speeds, the ride is usually very smooth, there's nice scenery, two hours on a train seems to go by faster than two hours driving on the highway, and honestly, other people on a train are usually much more pleasant than other people on the highway or on a flight. For riding the train to still so have many positives despite how crappy passenger rail is in the US right now, I think really says a lot about the potential of rail to improve peoples' lives, not just the climate. And the thing that makes this a little harder to bear is the fact that decades ago, there used to be a train that would take you almost directly from the station in my college town to a station literally a five minute walking distance from where I grew up. Both stations are still there. All the track is still there, but passenger service on that route ended in the 1950's almost 70 years ago. God that would have been so convenient. So nice. To walk downtown, get on a train, relax for two hours and enjoy the scenery, then get off and walk five minutes through quiet, residential neighborhood to get home.

Thank you for responding to Real Life Lore's video!!! Totally correct that the project is not perfect, but it's an important step for HSR in America. One of the biggest issues with America right now is that we get the sticker shock and can't see long term benefits of a project like this. Also, lol BART 😂😂😘

5:25 Uh, what? Dude...my train was held at Daly City station this morning for someone "being on the track". Point is, BART runs through residential areas AND it took us like 10 years to even get the APPROVAL to extend it to SJ (and it's not even done yet!). Thank you Alan Fisher for pointing out how unsuitable BART lines would be for running HS rail on. One of those trains could come of the track in the up hill climb coming from Colma into Daly City, launch itself through the air and land in GGP

There is no good reason why the wealthiest country in the world has such poor public transport. The US has the population density to support an extensive electrified rail network, but every time a proposal is made the nay-sayers come out in droves.

As a lifelong Cali resident and a strong advocate for better public transit in general, I'm so happy you've discussed everything here! People seem to think HSR makes in cost and route no sense or they seem to latch onto the idea that the costs are due only to lawsuits, but don't factor in contractors or the geographical aspects that make routing difficult. California's not one giant beach where life is easy and I've travelled between LA and the Central Valley many times via car and I would love nothing more than to make my travel easier AND for more local governments along the way to thrive because of it.

The contractor issue is the real core of every major California transit project that usually just gets blamed on "California bad". San Francisco's Central Subway delays are terrible because of the contractor. It's the same formula: get the contract on a low bid, then push a bunch of added expenses until the total cost is more than if the state just did it themselves. Also targeting drivers is totally the right way to go. It's a long 6 hour drive and that's not counting getting through LA during peak hours which can add a couple more hours alone. Flying is relatively cheap and only about an hour flight time so it would be a harder sell against that.

Living in Palmdale, it's a miracle to have progress like a high speed rail line. Many people here commute to the valley and downtown LA so it will impact the area tremendously.

As someone from Switzerland it is surprising to see any non electric trains, that is just something we never see.

I think what's less important than the high cost of CAHSR is that the cost of not doing it is far higher. Every alternative to expand throughput between California regions, whether it's expanding highways or airports, is not only more expensive in terms of program dollars, it's also starkly incompatible with any vision of climate change mitigation, and will cause untold billions in negative externalities.

Imagine California trying to break the airlines monopoly on travel...while other states do NOTHING about it. Also driving on the i5 is a bitch to/from socal/NorCal

I really want California’s high speed rail to succeed. It is something that makes a lot of sense, and seeing the setbacks has been frustrating

People hate way too much on California. I don’t know how people would hate it if they have ever lived there or even visited . Ya there are some shity parts but it so big, the diversity of the state is insane.

Public Transit might be expensive to introduce, but fully implemented will save so much money as turns out two pieces of metal next to each other is cheaper than a 10 lane highway (that needs to basically be remade from scratch every 20 years)

As someone who lives in LA, it’s been a wild ride these last couple of months to read headlines like “we’re still building High speed rail!”, “Oh and we’ll probably connect Vegas to LA!”. Honestly, since I have relatives up in the SF area I’m so excited to be able to visit them with low emissions and easily via HSR. LET’S FREAKING BUILD IT ALREADY!!!!!!

As someone from the Bay Area, I want to thank you for setting the record straight on this one. I did watch the other guy’s video and the second he started talking about the “existing BART” rails, I closed my laptop and went to get a beer…like SERIOUSLY?!? Anyway, thanks for giving our state some credit and hope this project serves as an inspiration once it’s finally completed.

as someone who grew up in the bay area, i will never use public transport in california, they are absolutely nasty, bart is a perfect example.truly is a waste of time and money.

Hello Alan, thank you for this wonderful update - and a salute to RealLifeLore for his honest response (I was still keen to see the original video, though). I live in the West of Germany but happen to be in the Bay Area every year a round January for an annual conference - so at least once a year. I don't have a car and in fact our area is so densely populated, I never felt the urge to buy one. Just a few comments: 1. European rail system analysts state that speeds above 187 mph (300 km/h) don't really pay off for the traveller in time savings when stops are less than 180 miles apart. This is why our high speed rail network is designed for 250 to 320 km/h, although anything above 250 km/h is only used for reducing delays (which, under current German Rail conditions is useless to try, but that is another story). 2. Good rail service costs money. It is illusionary IMHO to ascertain to a 100% that high speed rail for passenger travel can be profitable. I am not saying it is impossible, but most European governments do accept that rail infrastructure is a part of their citizens' needs that need to be catered for. I do wish the Californian High Speed RaIl project every bit of success though, because I am 100% confident it'll transfer thousands of car journeys onto the train. Once the offer is there, and it is attractive in terms of comfort, ease of use and time saved, people will use it. 3. BTW, the Alps in Europe are no longer a bar for high speed trains. The Gotthard Base Tunnel in Switzerland allows crossing the Alps over 53km length a track speed of 250 km/h. The Brenner Base Tunnel in Austria will follow during the next decade (57km) - also at 250km/h. 4. Blimey, I have been to SF so often - but I never noticed BART was running on "Spanish" Broad Gauge! Thank you for putting me in the picture...

“Tunneling is expensive” very true, in Pittsburgh it cost a billion just to run the trolley under one of the rivers. No high speed for us probably 😞

I only lived in the Bay Area for two years and I was so confused by RLL's BART reference. I assumed he meant we could take the BART to get to the HSR because the BART is something completely different than HSR. But if he truly meant that the BART infrastructure could be utilized to lower the cost, well then that's just ridiculously wrong. The BART is so different that it would probably cost MORE to replace and redo it. Plus with the multiple lines and routes, we're getting into cars sharing a bike path type of talk.

the thing about "rail related" transportation is that it's a high investment cost but the payoff (if it is built well) is worth it, a lot of people take a look at the investment cost without seeing the long term goal and got scared

Thank you for this video. I wanted to add that his estimate of Palmdales population is misleading as it relates to this subject. Palmdale has a population of around 150,000. But Lancaster is right next to Palmdale also with a population of around 150,000. Them if you add Little Rock and the unincorporated areas, that station would have around a 350,000 population base.

It feels like an almost universal thing that people always oppose all of the actually good infrastructure projects while never giving a second thought to the terrible ones like high way expansions. Even here in Denmark people were being idiots about the tram in Århus and were acting like the one year delay was some kind of terrible disaster, yet now that it's here it's been a massive success and always has plenty of riders.

I live in Los Angeles and I can't wait for this train system to be built. Just the thought of being able to take a relaxing train from LA to San Francisco instead of driving gets me so excited.

It's ludicrous to me that the United States, one of the pioneers of continental railroads with one of the best national rail networks in the world by the early 20th century, fumbled the bag so hard. Ever since the end of World War II and the explosion of the addiction to car-centric urban design, America is entire generations behind Europe, China & Japan in High Speed Rail and yet there are SO many places in the US perfectly suited for HSR in terms of geography, population and economic viability like the Northeast Corridor and Los Angeles to San Francisco. The HSR picture in America is improving, but by God it's far behind where it should be.

I also like how at 9:00 RLL says to just upgrade the surf liner only totally ignoring the 4 million people that live inland that could benefit from public transportation

The "whole new rail line between San Diego and LA" take was so baffling, having paid attention to local news for so long and hearing not only how the coastal tracks are being threatened but cities along that line like Del Mar are burying their heads in the sand regarding coastal erosion.

"Build HSR on BART ROW"🤡

What a great point you made about how our infrastructural developments in the US often go slower because we don't do it enough to keep a really solid working knowledge. I used to find places where construction is always going on to be annoying as a passerby, but nowadays i am happy and proud to see a city that is constantly building and expanding its infrastructure.

The moment he mentioned that electric cars cannot save us and public transportation is the future, I immediately subscribed ❤️

This is exactly why I skipped real life lores video; He didn't even pretend to know what he was talking about.

If there's one thing we should've learned from the pandemic and ongoing post-pandemic shortages, it's that building redundancy into systems and avoiding single points of failure is how you get to resiliency.

There's a lot of political motivation when "underestimating " a budget for something like this. To get votes and start, they lowball the budget, even though people involved know it will likely double or triple that amount. Later, when it needs more funding, there is that "well, we already started and spent all this money. We can't just let it go to waste." And you are absolutely right, people will grumble about the huge $$$ now, but when completed, people will forget about that and just enjoy the benefits.

you can go from paris to marseille in 3hours. its over 700 kilometers. NO ONE is driving the 8 hours by car. no one.

My only gripe with it, really, is the stipulation that it has to be self-funding. I feel like all the new infrastructure is going to poorly maintained because they want this to be for-profit, not for our benefit

Thank you for putting the "other video" straight, as a N Californian we all know that BART runs on its own size rail, and since I live next to Caltrain track I have seen the progress on upgrade!

Ngl the USA should have just baught some X2's of off sweden back in 1994

Not really sure why you’re knocking Brightline’s service lol we Floridians don’t need or care to have an absorbently more expensive train that goes that fast in the first place. We’re perfectly happy with the traditional to somewhat faster, trains in the hundred mile per hour neighborhood lol that’s plenty high speed enough for our purposes.. thanks

I'm not a train person but I can relate. Real Life Lore in specific seems to have a problem with not doing enough research and making blatantly wrong statements as if they're facts, and proceeding to think that pinning a comment is going to magically cause people to suddenly not spread the misinformation he just told them all.

I totally agree with the evaluation of the situation. As a Californian myself, like it or not, living in traffic is a nightmare here. I do see the potential in having finally something that can help us improve our travel options. Hope it works out. The first Shinkansen bullet train and its finances original story are glanced at a bit in a channel name Mustard - The Shinkansen Story. (If any are interested)

30 billion proposed budget.... 120 Billion proposed budget currently. It's a massive failure. You wanting it doesn't mean it's not a failure. It is a failure

Now, another thing to say, Indeed there is a lot of sensible information, but for the Caltrain line, the trains will have to stay at Caltrain speeds

My issue with real life lore is that they do this shit with EVERYTHING. His videos seem educational, until you realize you're actually super familiar with the topic.

As a resident of California, right on the high speed rail corridor (Fresno), I thank you for your kind words about the project. I think high speed rail is the most promising thing we have right now to diminish auto and plane use. The U. S. had better rail service in the 1930's and 40's, with many interurban lines connecting many cities. Los Angeles is so sprawling because it was built around its interurban lines. Then General Motors, and, I think, the oil companies, got the bright idea of buying up all the trolley and interurban lines and shutting them down, to encourage the sale of petroleum consuming vehicles, and passenger rail service went to hell. The neighborhood I grew up in, in N.Y.C., had a cable car trolley system, which was shut down as I was growing up in the 1940's, replaced by diesel buses. I remember as a kid thinking how smelly they were, and really missed the trolleys.

I really, really want to see your video on how to reduce these infrastructure cost overruns. I hope you’re working on it!

I think the biggest issue with all public transit is the single rider cost. If it costs me more money to ride the train to my destination than to drive there... Why would I take the train? Sure sometimes added parking fees can increase the overall cost of driving in but in exchange I control my own timetable. I can come and go as I please and I don't have to buy tickets, fumble with boarding passes or security, and if there is a change of plan having my car with me makes me more flexible in my ability to respond to that change. So if the cost is even close... Im not taking the train. Additionally, if I'm going with someone... a partner or a group of friends; it makes even less sense to take the train. If the cost of one person riding the train exceeds the cost of me driving my own car then why would I double, triple, or quadruple that cost when adding more bodies to the car creates only a minimal increase in overall costs for fuel? This was my issue with Metro-North when I lived in New England. As bad as the traffic could be going into NYC; and it's I'm here to tell you the tri-state has some of the worst traffic in the world and I've seen nothing even close to how bad I-95 sometimes gets now that I'm a San Diegan, it still made no sense to pay $35 a pop to ride Metro-North one way into the city when the gas costs to drive in were less than $30, tolls only added a $1, and parking was usually $10 or so for the evening (all prices are based on a bit over ten years ago when I still lived in CT). Since if I was headed into the city it was almost always because I was attending an event like a concert or something like that we immediately saved almost 50% of attendance costs by not taking the train. And that's if there was only one of us. The more of us there were the more we saved. So I fail to understand the point of trains. If it costs me the same amount to drive I will choose to drive. If I lived in CT and worked in NYC I guess I could see the value in a monthly or yearly rate since the traffic is so horrendous and buying large passes for reduced rates brings the costs even more in line. But I can only see the value of trains in that narrow purpose... As commuter rides to work. It's almost always cheaper and more convenient to drive. And yes I know trains are a better choice for the environment. But we're being realistic here and no one in their right mind is going to pay substantially more to ride the train if they can drive their car for less with more convenience. Trains need to be extremely cheap or free to make them viable and I'm not sure our capitalist society is willing to tolerate the kind of blatant socialism that comes with free or extremely cheap mass transit (sadly). Too many people think everything must make a profit and because of that trains will almost always be a bunch of expensive wasted potential.

As a construction worker the pay now save later mindset that everyone ignores drives me off the wall

It seems like RLL just looked at the “controversies” section on the Cali HSR Wikipedia page and wrote the script without doing any more research

I find the European speed map funny because he says the yellow and grey lines are the slowest and all of the UK's "High Speed Lines" are yellow lines.

i don't take anyone serious if they talk climate change without talking nuclear

I love how much 'its a massive failure' discourse boils down to saying that a government project went over budget.

As someone from Europe. I am really happy to see, that Californians also will some day get to enjoy riding high speed trains. It is worth it. Great video.

The Lancaster-Palmdale-Antelope Valley detour is because of Sacramento-Central Valley government thinking. There is presently glacial-slow FREIGHT rail over the Tehachapi route, so politicians and environmentalists figured it was a good idea for passenger rail (which doesn't exist between Bakersfield and LA presently. If you take Amtrak south from Fresno, you are put on a bus for this link.). P.S. Japan has HSR, tunnels, and earthquakes. It's not a problem.

"I think we should be giving Cali high speed rail even MORE money" Yeah, guy, do you even know where that money would be coming from? It would be coming from people in California, most of whom are nowhere near the rail and will never use it. The federal government, despite their virtue signaling, has very little interest in continuing to fund this project (their main goal is just electric cars and buses). So now we have to raise property and income taxes even more on people who live in a state with some of the highest taxes already in the nation, not to mention some of the highest costs of living. The fact that this project isn't starting off as connecting two major population centers (LA to San Diego) or (Bay area to Sacramento) is mind-bogglingly idiotic.

I live in the central valley of CA, but work remotely for a company in SoCal. WFH has seen a major increase in people moving to the Central Valley from LA and the Bay area. The High Speed Rail will be a HUGE plus for those of us here working for the SoCal and Bay companies. It will allow us to go into the office once or twice a week if need be. CA will become accessible which means over population in the Bay and SoCal can bleed into areas without much population right now. I'm stoked for what it is going to do for our state.

just wait till it's finished and the rail will be handed over to _"more efficient and economically literate"_ private owners who will bleed it dry and run it into the ground. then they'll say: "hurr-durr it failed cus trains am outdated technology gimme bailout and more 27-lane highways ples"

People say it's a waste of money but they said that to many other big projects

Same as Taiwan High speed train. Super expensive to build but then everyone love it after.