Poll: should California High-Speed Rail's Phase 1 be fully built?

This poll is about a passenger rail project in California, which has already finished planning and environmental review states for some segments of its proposed route, and already has received some billions of its necessary funding. Still no tracks have been laid yet, some lawsuits still have to be dealt with, and the remainder of the funding still has to be allocated.

The goal of the project is to connect major regions of the state with a new 220mph high-speed rail running on a new, dedicated right-of-way for most of the route. Southern California's Los Angeles Union Station and the Bay Area's San Francisco should be connected via the Central Valley within 2h and 40mins by the fastest nonstop service, while there is also planned to be limited-stop service only calling a major stops along the way like San Jose, Fresno and Bakersfield, and service calling at all stops, also at Gilroy or a station near Hanford in Kings County, offering very short trip times and fast connections for communities like these as well. While also including improvements to local and regional rail as part of its funding, the completed Phase 1 scheduled for 2029 would see all segments completed to offer new high-speed rail service on new high-speed track between Los Angeles and San Jose (respectively Merced), while using upgraded existing tracks for offering a one-seat rides also using the San Jose-San Francisco and Los Angeles-Anaheim segments.

More information about the project can be found on the website of the California High-Speed Rail Authority:

http://www.hsr.ca.gov

Not mentioned is that demolition has begun in Fresno, test pilings for the river crossing bridge north of Fresno have been built and tested. Also that 71 properties have been acquired, 119 are in the process of being acquired and five more have been approved by the State Lands Board.for condemnation under eminent domain.

CHRA has issued and RFP for the Palmdale to Burbank section environmental and engineering service. It has also issued an RFI for 95 train sets. Progress.

Wait, 95 sets? I know there's such a thing as planning options, but...

Assuming around 20% would be out for maintenance, protect, etc. at any one time...75 sets in use would cover about 7-8 trains in each direction per hour (assuming a 10-hour round trip to cover a longer-than-three-hour trip plus 60-90 minutes of turn time, 7.5/hr). That's a big possible order...it'd probably come to somewhere in the $5bn ballpark (if the order size kept the cost-per-set to $50m/train).

The main reason this surprises me is the likely timeframe for actually acquiring the equipment (i.e. 15-20 years). I guess I'm used to seeing this sort of thing for commuter EMUs, not HSR sets.

Edit: My best guess is that you're looking at departures every ten minutes or so all day, with something closer to every five minutes at peak periods (ten minute headways would require 6 sets/hour of round trip time, so 60; that allows about 14-16 sets for additional peak-hour trains; spread over a two-hour peak, that would throw an additional 3-4/hour in each direction, which should handle peak-ish demand pretty well).

The budget for the IOS 95 trainsets is $871M. The initial segment is to go into operation in 2022, just about seven years from now and would run from Merced to Burbank. It includes express and local trains.

The 95 is including options, which means Phase 2 and 400m long doubled trains.

$871m for 95 trainsets? I do not believe that for a second. That's $9.17m/set (compare the projected cost of the Acela IIs...or, for that matter, the cost of the Viewliner II order). Having the order involve a lot of options, on the other hand, makes sense from the standpoint of spacing the order out...but even then it feels strange having seen numerous other projects in North America play out (or looking back on previous ones); the only similar proposal I can think of is the Viewliner I fiasco.

Well, that's an easy one. Phase II should be built as well. Despite the complete mess of design at the San Francisco end, everything else has good enough designs and needed to be built about 20 years ago (so we can't afford to wait for perfection).

As more than 3 months are over now, a preliminary result of this poll (not having voted myself)

No, should not be funded, and not be built. (0 votes [0.00%])

Yes, should be funded and built. (24 votes [100.00%])