The ever-precise and forward-thinking board of the California High Speed Rail Authority has decided that it is a good idea to build 30 miles of tunnels to connect Burbank to Palmdale.
The purely political zigzag to include Palmdale in the Los Angeles-San Francisco high-speed rail system (votes in the Antelope Valley) is about 38 miles long, and earlier this week the committee approved an environmental impact report that calls for an 8-mile above-ground and 30-mile underground route to make the connection.
According to the authority, the cost of completing the route will be around $28 billion. By comparison, that’s about 80% of the originally promised cost for the entire system connecting San Diego, LA, SF and Sacramento.
It is worth noting that news outlets originally reported the cost as $22.6 billion, but the agency clarified on Thursday that these were 2018 dollars and the actual cost is now about $28 billion.
The plan approved by voters envisaged the construction of a network approximately 1,350 kilometers long for about 33 billion dollars.
Admittedly, at a cost of about $736 million per mile, the cost estimate is not technically impossible when one considers the costs of other recent huge tunnel projects.
Of course, this ignores the fact that the entire project was plagued by massive cost overruns and delays lasting more than decades. If the financial forecasts made so far by high-speed rail experts are anything to go by, the project could easily end up costing three or even more than double the originally planned cost of the entire system.
The high-speed rail people say the whole journey to Burdale or Palmbank (or whatever the line will be called) will take about 17 minutes, which equates to a speed of around 120 miles per hour, although they claim that at least part of the line will reach “up to 220 miles per hour”.
HSR Authority CEO Brian Kelly said the 17-minute journey would be “more than twice as fast as driving” and that with the route approved, the link would be closer to being “ready for construction” … “as soon as funding becomes available.”
“This is a transformative project for the entire state of California and today’s approval is a major milestone in connecting San Francisco to Los Angeles in less than three hours,” Kelly said. “It’s also a game-changer for Los Angeles County, connecting Palmdale to Burbank in a way that was never possible before.”
The chosen route runs partly along State Route 14. It will be a grade-separated, all-high-speed rail system, and trains will run underground through the community of Acton and large portions of the Angeles National Forest and San Gabriel Mountains National Monument.
If the tunnel system were completed (I know, but I have to say this just in case – it’s like, “What would you do if you won the lottery?”), it would be one of the longest in the world, making it one of the largest and most serious engineering projects in decades. By comparison, the tunnel under the English Channel – the Chunnel – which connects France and Great Britain is only about 34 kilometers long. In fact, the entire journey from Paris to London, not just the Chunnel section, takes about two hours.
The timeline for the project is unknown, as it seems to depend on finding the money to build it – and the high-speed rail people are the ones doing that – a fair prediction could be: “Second star on the right and then straight ahead until morning.”
You know – Neverland.
