"Horrible mistakes" on high-speed rail project

Photo: Gary Coronado

From today's LA Times:

A series of errors by contractors and consultants on the California bullet train venture caused support cables to fail on a massive bridge, triggering an order to stop work that further delayed a project already years behind schedule, the Los Angeles Times has learned.

The bridge is longer than two football fields and is needed to shuttle vehicles over the future bullet train right of way and existing BNSF freight tracks in Madera County.

Authorities have yet to finalize a plan to repair the bridge. Late last year, crews installed temporary steel supports to prevent it from collapsing.

Hundreds of pages of documents obtained by The Times under a public records request show the steel supports snapped as a result of neglect, work damage, miscommunications and possible design problems.

“It is a horrible sequence of mistakes,” said Robert Bea, emeritus professor of civil engineering at UC Berkeley and co-founder of its Center for Catastrophic Risk Management.

The bridge is part of a 31-mile stretch of construction under contract to Tutor Perini Corp., a major construction firm based in Sylmar. The company declined to answer a series of written questions or to make a statement.

The bridge is part of Gov. Gavin Newsom’s plan for a 171-mile, $20.4-billion bullet train operation from Merced to Bakersfield.

The bridge work began in 2016 and was supposed to be completed in 12 months. Relocation of underground utilities became a problem, as there were schedule glitches, according rail authority and Madera County officials. 

Months turned into years, during which thousands of residents were forced to take long detours around the site...

See also Kamala Harris and high-speed rail.

Scott Wiener still supports the dumb project.

Taking the "Rapid" out of Bus Rapid Transit

Randal O'Toole critiques the new East Bay BRT:

...speed advantages, however, are offset by AC Transit’s spacing of bus stops. As transit expert Thomas Rubin points out, classical BRT lines have stations about a mile apart, so a 9.5-mile-long line like this one would have around 10 stations. Instead, this one has 34 stations, meaning they are spaced about 0.3 miles apart. 

As a result, buses are scheduled to go an average speed of just 13.3 miles per hour. If I had signal priority, I could bicycle this route faster than that..

No one is going to want to take this bus the entire distance anyway because the BART system already serves both downtown Oakland and San Leandro. With three stops in between (at least one of which is just a block way from International Boulevard), BART takes 17 minutes to do the same trip that the BRT will do in 43 minutes...

Aside from the slow speeds, it’s absurd to dedicate an entire lane of traffic (plus more street space for stations) for a bus that’s going to operate just six times an hour. 

If every seat is filled and there are 20 people standing on every bus, each BRT lane would move just 480 people per hour past any given point, far less than the lanes were capable of moving when open to automobiles. Of course, the buses will rarely be that full and will almost certainly average fewer than 20 passengers.

A little over half the cost of this bus-slow transit line was paid by the federal government. Ironically, $16.5 million of this comes from the “Congestion Mitigation/Air Quality” fund, too much of which is spent on projects like this one that make congestion worse.

Almost a third of the cost, or $73.3 million, is paid for out of San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge tolls, meaning auto drivers are paying to make their streets more congested. Of course, transit advocates believe that is the way it should be; after all, transit riders should never be asked to pay the full cost of their transportation.

The middle of a pandemic is an inauspicious time to start a new transit line. But then this transit line never made any sense anyway, so what does it matter?

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