Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

High-speed rail taking shape even as opponents seek to kill it

sfchronicle.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 297 posts

Re: High-speed rail taking shape even as opponents seek to kill it

#111

Post by slacka »

erentz wrote: post #4
valuearb wrote: post #3

$64B just in startup costs, for a slower trip than flying. Why this infatuation with a technology that hasn't been leading edge since the 1800s?

Have you ever ridden a train in Europe or Japan? They are far and away the most comfortable way to travel any distance under 500 miles.

Europe or Japan were nice, but China was amazing. No pre-paid ticket, no planning just show up at the Shenzen train station the morning, arrive in Beijing in the evening on the other size of the country.[1]

Imagine freedom, the innovation, the improvement in quality of life if we could hop on a train in the morning NYC and arrive in SF at night for ~$100. I found the trains so much more comfortable than even flying first class. Seeing the countryside fly by at 350km/hr is worth the price alone. Americans have no idea what they're missing.

http://www.beijingchina.net.cn/transportation/train/train-fr...

Re: High-speed rail taking shape even as opponents seek to kill it

#112

Post by desdiv »

privong wrote: post #42
CalChris wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> a repeat of the BART mistake. Probably a different mistake but BART uses 5'6" rail gauge. Standard US rail gauge is 4'8.5". This means that every railcar, every everything, has to be custom made with no economies of scale. No one can remember why they did this.

> BART uses 5'6" rail gauge. Standard US rail gauge is 4'8.5". Interesting. When I saw this, I wondered if it was to match another standard gauge that was judged to be superior. But, looking at the list of rail gauges on wikipedia[0], 5'6" is the gauge for railways in India ("Indian broad gauge" to be specific). The initial BART rolling stock seems to have been build by Rohr, Inc.[1], which is based in California. So…

>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rohr,_Inc. (you'll need manually add the period to the end of the URL, because of how HN converts this into a link)

FYI, the URL encoding for "." is "%2E", so replacing period with %2E works: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rohr,_Inc%2E

Re: High-speed rail taking shape even as opponents seek to kill it

#113

Post by toomuchtodo »

ghaff wrote: post #104
toomuchtodo wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there any reason Heathrow couldn't be moved out to the suburbs where expansion could take place to allow London to continue to be a worldwide travel hub, but then use high speed rail to connect with London proper?

Not sure what you're saying. Heathrow is sorta in the suburbs already--about an hour tube ride--but you can get from Heathrow to Paddington in about 15 minutes by Heathrow Express (which may or may not be a good value) with another rail project underway. Certainly Heathrow isn't going to be picked up and moved.

I must've remembered it being closer to London than it really is, sorry about that!

Re: High-speed rail taking shape even as opponents seek to kill it

#114

Post by scythe »

datahack wrote: post #106

If I had known that they were going to run this through the Central Valley instead of down the coast where it belongs I never would have voted for it. It should have gone straight from la to Oakland or emeryville, turned and gone straight to Sacramento. Instead we have a convoluted mess of rail connections that take people places they don't even want to go (no offense to Bakersfield buts it's hardly a holiday destina…

Nah, the coast is too expensive; you have to go over a bunch of hills and deal with steep terrain and thick forests. The correct option is to go for the cheapest land available, which any private company (not sure this kind of thing should be privatized but it's a useful comparison imo) would have obviously gone for. That would be just west of I-5, up the eastern edge of the Central Valley. Throw in a few improvements to the E-W roads between [Modesto/Bakersfield/Santa Cruz/etc] and the train corridor (which can be put off a few years to raise money) and you end up with nearly the same level of service to those areas anyway. But because it's political and activists want train service to their towns because [ideology] or just for the property values, we get cost overruns while delaying the big prize: service from SF to LA.

Re: High-speed rail taking shape even as opponents seek to kill it

#115

Post by ghaff »

hkmurakami wrote: post #110
jimrandomh wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are also much, much cheaper per mile. Something is wrong with construction in the US that makes rail lines dramatically more expensive here.

Not really. Tokyo-Osaka is going to be a bit under $200 whichever way you might choose. Maybe rail is $30 cheaper but it's a 15% difference rather than say 50%+.

The Shinkansen is great but it's fairly expensive unless you buy a visitor rail pass overseas.

That's a pretty common pattern (except for maybe China). HSR may be a nice option but it not infrequently costs more than flying.

Re: High-speed rail taking shape even as opponents seek to kill it

#116

Post by dclowd9901 »

helthanatos wrote: post #59
sand500 wrote: post #38

As I see it, the price of rail tickets will be pretty high.whats stopping the price of flights from being halved in the next couple of decades and killing this train service too?

High speed trains are much better than flights for small commutes, after the expenses are payed, it will be cheaper, it's easier to get on a train than wait hours for flights to take off. High speed rails are the future; flights are the past. Why would you not want to see this work out? Flying is quite annoying because it has constant delays, TSA, and hours of waiting in between.

You really think the TSA isn't going to want a piece of this?

Re: High-speed rail taking shape even as opponents seek to kill it

#117

Post by ern »

Groxx wrote: post #91
yellowapple wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there evidence in any direction? This really sounds like the most plausible hypothesis, to me at least.

With strange, custom-construction-requiring stuff like this, I tend to wonder how much of it would be explained by "help self/a buddy get rich". It's practically guaranteeing that there's going to be a single company supporting it for all time, which is a potentially-extremely-lucrative business deal. If that's the case, obfuscating the reasons for these decisions is a rational move .

It's a bit cynical to say this but running HSR on an incompatible network protects it against future politicians who may seek to sabotage it by merging networks.

Re: High-speed rail taking shape even as opponents seek to kill it

#118

Post by acchow »

scythe wrote: post #114
datahack wrote: post #106

If I had known that they were going to run this through the Central Valley instead of down the coast where it belongs I never would have voted for it. It should have gone straight from la to Oakland or emeryville, turned and gone straight to Sacramento. Instead we have a convoluted mess of rail connections that take people places they don't even want to go (no offense to Bakersfield buts it's hardly a holiday destina…

Nah, the coast is too expensive; you have to go over a bunch of hills and deal with steep terrain and thick forests. The correct option is to go for the cheapest land available, which any private company (not sure this kind of thing should be privatized but it's a useful comparison imo) would have obviously gone for. That would be just west of I-5, up the eastern edge of the Central Valley. Throw in a few improvement…

> while delaying the big prize: service from SF to LA.

I don't think that's the biggest deal here.

I'll refer you to this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13630341

Re: High-speed rail taking shape even as opponents seek to kill it

#119

Post by privong »

fennecfoxen wrote: post #51
privong wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> whats stopping the price of flights from being halved in the next couple of decades and killing this train service too? The construction of the high-speed rail system is/will be heavily subsidized by the government. So presumably, the government will have a vested interest in keeping the train service running and will subsidize operating costs if airlines cut prices in that manner.

> the government ... will subsidize operating costs By which you mean taxpayers will subsidize operating costs. I wonder exactly how regressive the wealth transfer from the average middle-class California taxpayer to the California weekly-commute bullet-train businessperson will be, in practice.

> By which you mean taxpayers will subsidize operating costs.

Yeah, exactly.

> I wonder exactly how regressive the wealth transfer from the average middle-class California taxpayer to the California weekly-commute bullet-train businessperson will be, in practice.

Yeah. And a lot of the funding for the rail project is already coming from Federal and State coffers (via taxpayer money or deficit spending), so this wealth transfer is already happening. There's at least $6 billion already allocated from Federal funding programs (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_High-Speed_Rail#Fin...) and the Proposition 1A required Federal Funds matching the $9.95 billion approved by bonds (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Proposition_1A_(200...). I don't know if the $6 billion in stimulus money "counts" towards the $9.95 billion in matching funds, nor do I know if the funds have been fully matched.

Re: High-speed rail taking shape even as opponents seek to kill it

#120

Post by acchow »

CalChris wrote: post #24
erentz wrote: post #6

Huge supporter of rail but sadly I believe there are a number of mistakes being made. This is a classic example of how projects like this in the US need to be monolithic, self contained, and gold plated to the hilt. The correct action would have been for CA to incrementally acquire and build railways along a number of corridors. Take the SF bay for example. There should be one agency running Caltrain, the Capitol Cor…

> a repeat of the BART mistake. Probably a different mistake but BART uses 5'6" rail gauge. Standard US rail gauge is 4'8.5". This means that every railcar, every everything, has to be custom made with no economies of scale. No one can remember why they did this.

Wtf is happening?

I want to believe that the different gauge standards is a bit like the proliferation of programming languages in software - they solve their slightly different problem space well. Is this true?

Post reply on HN