What’s the cost of bullet train safety?
Late, safety-focused changes to California bullet train plan lead to cost increases
LOS ANGELES — Engineers on California’s highspeed rail project have worried for nine years about the sort of train wreck that occurred in New York last October.
Six hundred rail passengers were rolling across Long Island at 50 mph on a Saturday night when a maintenance train on a parallel track derailed and sideswiped their commuter train, injuring 33 and leaving others wandering in the dark through twisted wreckage.
Although construction on California’s project is already underway, designers are still sorting out safety’s place in a delicate balance that also requires staying on budget and getting passengers from Los Angeles to San Francisco on time. One safety concern playing out at the moment stems from the fact that the bullet trains will run at 220 mph in some places, alongside lines carrying everything from toxic chemicals to military tanks.
Everyone agrees barriers are needed to keep debris from derailed freight trains from smashing into the fast-moving passenger cars. But for years freight train operators and the California High-Speed Rail Authority could not agree on their exact design.
They finally reached an agreement last year. And only then did the contractor for the 31 miles of track in and around Fresno put a price tag on the work: an additional $140 million.
At least some experts see that bump in the bill as a worrisome harbinger.
Cost increases, after all, have dogged the bullet train for years, and new jumps in price may start surfacing as the complex engineering needed for passenger safety comes into clearer focus.
Aside from the debris barriers, the range of safety issues includes how bullet trains will operate in dense urban environments where they cross highways, how to contend with the possibility of fires and other mishaps in the long tunnels they’ll pass through, and the type of brakes necessary to slow them on steep grades.
In creating any public transportation system, designers must balance such considerations against cost and performance. But California’s high-speed rail planners have little freedom to negotiate such trade-offs, because state law dictates that its bullet trains need to get passengers from downtown L.A. to downtown San Francisco in no more than 2 hours and 40 minutes.
“I would never expect the rail authority to sacrifice safety to save money,” said Louis Thompson, the chairman of a state-appointed peer review panel for the project and a former executive at the Federal Railroad Administration. So it’s “entirely possible,” he said, that new safety problems or ones that emerge as more serious than first thought will drive up the cost.
“Safety is a top priority of the California High-Speed Rail Authority,” rail authority spokeswoman Lisa Marie Alley said. “We continue to work with our partners to ensure that we are designing and building a system that is safe and secure.”
Almost certainly, the rail agency will confront new and difficult trade-offs between cost, performance and safety.
The authority decided, for example, to share track from San Jose to San Francisco with the Caltrain commuter service, instead of building its own track on an elevated viaduct through Silicon Valley. That saved about $30 billion.
That means crossing 42 highways, a safety risk that planners would address by installing elaborate gates to fully block the intersections, where about 13 fatal collisions between standard-speed trains and motor vehicles already occur every year.
It also means slowing the trains to a proposed 110 mph, half the speed the train will be moving through parts of the Central Valley. That speed is still far faster than most U.S. passenger trains operate in such dense urban settings, experts said.
But some question whether even 110 mph is realistic.
“In a dense urban environment, you are not going to go 110 mph,” said Grady Cothen, an attorney and former chief of safety regulation at the Federal Railroad Administration. “If you eliminate the possibility of dedicated track, then you are certainly knocking down the maximum speed and increasing the trip time.”
The alternative is to separate the highway crossings with bridges or tunnels, an effort that could cost additional billions.
If the trains go slower than 110 mph, the project could well fall short of the overall trip times that legislators built into the project’s requirements and supporters used to sell it to the public. The same dilemma will confront the rail authority as it fine-tunes how trains will move from Burbank to Anaheim, where they will probably share track with Metrolink.
Alley, the rail authority spokeswoman, said the routes will have features “to achieve the highest safety and comply with federal standards.”
But Steven Ditmeyer, a rail safety consultant and former research chief at the Federal Railroad Administration, accused legislators of hobbling the professionals who are best equipped to find the right balance of cost, safety and performance.
“There are many, many trade-offs that have to be made,” he said. “And somebody in the Legislature didn’t want the engineers making those trade-offs.”