It's great, but it took more than 20 years to get here due to environmental reviews and shaky funding. ...and this was just re-fitting an existing, relatively short stretch of track!
We (as Californians) have GOT to do better than this! There are huge infrastructure projects that we need to undertake in the coming years. We have got to cut the red tape and properly fund projects.
How do Californians in 2025 feel about the California High-Speed Rail?
A similar project [1] is underway in Canada, but I worry sometimes it'll fall prey to the same administrative bog that the CHSR did. It'll be managed by a new Crown corp, VIA HFR, and from my understanding they're still taking engineering bids. I expect it'll be a while before shovels hit the ground.
A cheap, fast, and reliable rail from Toronto to Montreal would be a dream come true for a lot of Canadians. Any ideas on how best to make it a reality?
I think high-speed rail between SF and LA is a great idea, and it’s difficult to understand how much of its cost is avoidable excess when the only solution proposed by critics is to shut down the project entirely.
Other than going down to the assembly and yelling what do you propose? We could call the representatives, recall the representatives, create a ballot measure, or vote differently next time.
Stop re-electing the same people. I vote for someone different in my state’s partisan primaries, because I believe high turnover of elected representatives is beneficial. I may still vote for the incumbent in the general election, but never in the primary.
* A California Driver's License or Identification Card does not completely demonstrate one's right to vote, it only demonstrates residency. Neither does a Social Security Number, it only demonstrates taxes being levied. You must be a US citizen to vote, but anyone can get any or all of the three mentioned pieces of identification without US citizenship.
* Signature verification is of questionable efficacy at best. Most of us here likely agree that signing the back of your credit card in this day and age is hardly secure, why is that different in elections? Recounts also don't matter, because at that point the ballot is separated from the voter (ballots do not have identifying information); recounts cannot remove illegal ballots.
* California explicitly refuses asking the hypothetical voter to demonstrate their eligibility; see the cited law again.
* The claim that asking for voters to demonstrate their eligibility is disenfranchisment is, as someone who cares about free and fair elections, patented bullshit.
* Last is my anecdote, which I doubt needs repeating. I have no trust in Californian election integrity because California does nothing to convince me so.
I can walk into the polls, ask for a ballot and get one, and then fill it in and deposit it, all without anyone so much as asking who [...] I am.
Source for this claim? They have asked my name every time I have voted in person.
Social Security Number [...] only demonstrates taxes being levied.
Another unsourced claim. The state can, and likely does, check whether the SSN belongs to a citizen or not. Same with state ID, they know whether the ID was issued to a citizen or noncitizen.
Nope. It is literally illegal[1] to ask for identification in California.
In fairness it was ambiguous[2] before, but in practice California has never asked for identification and this was made clear and official policy from the 2024 elections (note: I am not aware if there are any lawsuits that have blocked enforcement of this law, I no longer reside in CA and do not keep close track of their goings-on).
And before anyone says "But registering to vote requires identification!": Yes, you're correct, but remember that asking for a voter's identity is illegal. No one can confirm whether a "voter" is actually a voter, it is illegal to check. Registering to vote is irrelevant.
My personal experiences voting in California also never involved being asked for identification, that includes "name and address". Never. None. I went in and voted, nobody cared whether I could because they didn't or couldn't.
For the record: I'm an American citizen (born and raised, not that that's relevant), I am registered to vote, I am proud to vote, and I am happy to present to any law enforcement or election official my state Driver's License to prove my residency and my US Passport to prove my citizenship upon demand. I question the narrative that any part of any of this is controversial for ensuring the sanctity of the right to vote and holding free and fair elections.
I didn't ask about ID check. You make it sound like the process involves just walking in and asking for a ballot. I actually don't recall the detail from this cycle as to whether I was asked for ID. They did check out whether I was on the list and had already checked in. So they did look whether my name and address was registered to vote.
In my case there was no such identification process whatsoever. I went in, asked for a ballot, got a ballot no questions asked, filled it in, and dropped it in a box monitored by a few poll workers.
I actually asked them the first time I voted if they weren't going to ask me who I am because I found it bizarre, and I still remember getting a simple and quick "No.".
So I really don't know what to tell you, I can only relate what I experienced. I have no confidence that California's elections are worth a damn because I have nothing to support such an assertion.
That's the theory and in most other states I would agree, but this is California. The priority is in getting votes period, not getting voters.
Once a ballot gets past the initial verification stage, ballots are separated from the voter and it becomes impossible to link them back again (ballots have no identifiers on them). Given California's priorities, I have no confidence in the integrity of their ballot verification. While I did still vote when I was in California, I was aware I was likely just wasting my time and that the act of voting had symbolic meaning but no practical value.
Election integrity is achieved by vetting elections in ways that are immediately obvious and verifiable by the voters, California unfortunately has none of that as a legal policy of the state.
Just because you don't understand the vetting doesn't mean it is not effective. Did you reach out to the CA Secretary of State's office regarding your concerns? If you communicated respectfully, I'm sure they would happily provide some reading materials.
People want infrastructure and then when it gets built, they say it’s too expensive and takes too long. Valid criticisms but many throw the baby out with the bathwater.
Rail for people is hard to get profitable without pretty high cost (or permanent subsidies).
Look at Switzerland - this is the land of trains, all reachable cities and villages have main train station at their heart, use is frequent, and its part of national pride (precision, coverage, cleanliness etc.). Yet prices are brutal, sure if you live here you can often afford it but it still hurts. The price keeps rising.
And I still use our family car for anything else but commuting to work (and even for that sometimes). Morning trains packed like sardines, in reality there are frequent (usually small though) delays which cascade. Car for 4 is significantly cheaper - I'd say 4x for full tickets, less with half/card but then thats 200 bucks a year on its own per head.
Whatever problems you are facing, I doubt that in US rail will solve all of them. Happy to be wrong here of course. I see rather some AI vans/minibuses ondemand hailing and sharing as way more effective and cheap solution. Small bus full of people has minimal env impact and can provide door-to-door transport.
I meant that it takes a long time to build and costs too much to build. But like another commenter said, externalities and the implicit subsidies that other modes of transportation get make it a difficult comparison.
Cleaner forms of transportation should be subsidized. The fact that it costs me $8 to cross the Bay Bridge into SF but costs $10+ round trip on BART is a shame. Especially when you have two or three people in the car.
I’m getting more and more convinced that this is a main problem all over the West. In Germany, a business owner called Marco Scheel is becoming more and more popular by being very outspoken about how bureaucracy is hindering him. His company is called Nordwolle by the way. They make clothing out of sheep wool. They spend a lot of effort finding the right type of wool so they don’t need chemicals to paint it.
One major example which Marco first became popular with was that he owned a barn but wasn’t allowed to use it for the factory since it was a farm on paper. The government told him to move to a designated factory area. He argued that it made no sense since he was living in a very remote area, and the barn was of high quality. What else should he do with the barn? Why would he need to build something new somewhere else? The barn was there already and stood already for hundreds of years.
His most popular quote is something along the lines of “we can’t all sit with a Chai latte and a MacBook in a coworking space in Berlin and make the 5th dating app. We need some people who do that but not everyone. Some people need to make things with their hands! And for that I need space! I don’t need glass fibre. I need space!”
I associate this attitude with criticism of Wikipedia and narcissism. I don't think it's a coincidence that it's often around editing things they are related to that this comes up.
I tried to do something and they stopped me. This is wrong, I should be able to do this and write my own story.
Which is a perfectly normal feeling. But if you end up saying that loudly in public without ever thinking, well what if the rule of "let this person do whatever they want" applied to people other than yourself, then that seems to indicate some lack of a wider view.
> ... well what if the rule of "let this person do whatever they want" applied to people other than yourself, then that seems to indicate some lack of a wider view.
It sounds like Mr. Scheel is applying exactly that view. The idea is everyone should be able to use their remote farm shed for industrial purposes. Indeed, most of the intellectual foundation of the pro-freedom view is precisely that when you take a wider view freedom is generally better for everyone than authoritarianism right up until it becomes a threat to personal safety (even then, pushing the dial a little further towards freedom generally gets better results). If people can't do what they want, then how are things supposed to get done? If we're all doing things in ways that are believed to be impractical then it is going to waste an unreasonable amount of resources and be stupid.
> I associate this attitude with criticism of Wikipedia and narcissism.
I never said anything about Wikipedia. For the record, I'm a big fan of Wikipedia and I'm skeptical about the new US government.
Please don't assume that because someone holds opinion X that they also hold opinion Y. With the current levels of polarization, it's probably a fair assumption to make, but I think we all as individuals have a responsibility to counter that.
I brought up Wikipedia because it's something I'm interested in.
And it's an example of somewhere I'd seen this exact argument against rules/regulation regularly made on HN stories and the comments on them in what I thought was a mostly non-political context.
> One major example which Marco first became popular with was that he owned a barn but wasn’t allowed to use it for the factory since it was a farm on paper. The government told him to move to a designated factory area. He argued that it made no sense since he was living in a very remote area, and the barn was of high quality. What else should he do with the barn? Why would he need to build something new somewhere else? The barn was there already and stood already for hundreds of years.
Of course it makes sense. Farmland is dedicated to farming and producing food/related things. It lacks connectivity, has fertile soil, prices are cheaper. If anyone can just build a factory there, they will have a negative ecological impact (interrupt animal flows, pollute in areas that are supposed to be cleaner, etc). It's the same reason why you can't farm in an industrial zone, nor can you set up a factory in the middle of the city.
Yes, it can be taken too far and abused, but absolutely 100% makes sense and must exist.
The guy's not building a gigafactory in his garden, is he?
> If anyone can just build a factory there, they will have a negative ecological impact (interrupt animal flows, pollute in areas that are supposed to be cleaner, etc).
All true of farming. FWIW as a fellow NIMBY myself, I use the excuse of 'animal flow' (in particular the flow of bats) to prevent anyone from putting anything more than a fence up within 150m of my house. It's great!
> The guy's not building a gigafactory in his garden, is he?
How could this possibly be known without a review in your opinion?
> fellow NIMBY myself
Unless you're American, things don't have to be so binary. The choice isn't between nothing gets built or anyone can just do whatever. We need a balance.
> All true of farming
I'm pretty sure birds and bees and what not prefer having plants than factories.
> You're going to end up in a position where you're telling a farmer how to manage
Funny you say that. Not only does that actually happen in pretty much all developed country, it's actually needed for a variety of reasons. There are subsidies to incentivise the "correct" crops (you don't want all farmers only doing cash crops for export, rendering your country very vulnerable to import markets to sustain itself), there are also rules/policies to rotate crops to avoid top soil erosion which could be devastating, there are rules on what types of pesticides can be used, etc etc etc etc.
> Not only does that actually happen in pretty much all developed country...
"Everyone does it" isn't much of an argument when it comes to economics, the field is littered with a long history of group-think episodes where most people do things in a way that was, in hindsight, a mistake. And being steamrollered by more economically productive societies that don't ban progress. The modern policies developed countries adopted have resulted in vast investments in China (and Asia more broadly) to dodge the regulatory states that were built.
And the rest of your comment is straightforwardly telling farmers how to farm. On average, I bet they know all that stuff better than the legislators. They're farmers! If we can't trust them to farm then putting regulators in charge isn't going to save us. That attitude of mother knowing best is still going to result in more misses than hits, even if confidently repeated a few times.
> And the rest of your comment is straightforwardly telling farmers how to farm. On average, I bet they know all that stuff better than the legislators. They're farmers
Strongly disagree. The incentives are just not the same. If farmers use pesticides which will kill all bugs and pollute nearby rivers to increase their yield a tiny bit, that's not good for everyone else. If they decide they're only going to do tobacco because it's very lucrative to export, that's not good either. If the techniques they're using are obsolete (and thus inefficient and resulting in them barely being able to survive against foreign competition) or very bad for the soil/environment.
Farmers produce food, it's one of the most critical things in a country. If things go wrong, there are famines or economical crisis (cf. Egypt, Sri Lanka in the last few years, Soviet Russia in the past century). Hell, many countries were couped to take over control over their farming sectors for commercial interests (Hawai, Central America and the Caribbean, cf. the Banana Wars).
If you have to cut red tape for certain projects, the tape probably shouldn't exist in the first place.
edit: for instance, if you have e.g. an environmental regulation that is so onerous that exemptions must be doled out for something as sensible as train electrification, then you don't have an environmental review regulation, you have a 'build nothing except what the exemptor decrees' regulation. Which is rather antithetical to the rule of law and good governance.
I'm not sure it'll work but we have one of the loudest critics of over regulation making it hard to build things setting up the Department of Government Efficiency when he's not doing iffy salutes on stage.
Their proposed approach as written in a WSJ opinion piece is quite interesting -
>Most legal edicts aren’t laws enacted by Congress but “rules and regulations” promulgated by unelected bureaucrats—tens of thousands of them each year
>...President Trump, [] can, by executive action, immediately pause the enforcement of those regulations and initiate the process for review and rescission.
>When the president nullifies thousands of such regulations, critics will allege executive overreach. In fact, it will be correcting the executive overreach of thousands of regulations promulgated by administrative fiat that were never authorized by Congress...
We (as Californians) have GOT to do better than this! There are huge infrastructure projects that we need to undertake in the coming years. We have got to cut the red tape and properly fund projects.