201–210 of 297 posts
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It will be much faster than flying for door-to-door downtown-to-downtown trips.
The Bay Area and Southern California are incredibly huge areas - The vast majority of travelers between the two are not going 'downtown-to-downtown'.
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Flying has lots of externalised costs - noise, pollution, requires use of fossil fuels etc.
Ever lived near a busy level crossing? Passing trains may simply make the floors shake; train horns are deafening . You don't just hear them, you feel them in the core of your body. If you building is not well soundproofed, or you have any windows open for ventilation, you have no hope of sleeping through the night. Passing airplanes are background noise, passing trains refuse to be ignored. Long/slow trains create a…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Flying has lots of externalised costs - noise, pollution, requires use of fossil fuels etc.
Ever lived near a busy level crossing? Passing trains may simply make the floors shake; train horns are deafening . You don't just hear them, you feel them in the core of your body. If you building is not well soundproofed, or you have any windows open for ventilation, you have no hope of sleeping through the night. Passing airplanes are background noise, passing trains refuse to be ignored. Long/slow trains create a…
I've lived less than 50 m from one for quite a while, and cars on the road inbetween were worse than passing high-speed trains. Freight trains or old, slow trains were another thing.
Forget high speed rail, where's the commuter trains? It seems ridiculous that in most US cities public transit is mostly non-existent. Traffic is bad in most major US cities you'd think people would be jumping for this as urbanization increases.
Probably should be spending that money on infrastructure (read: dam) maintenance.
Forget high speed rail, where's the commuter trains? It seems ridiculous that in most US cities public transit is mostly non-existent. Traffic is bad in most major US cities you'd think people would be jumping for this as urbanization increases.
Caltrain is currently running 30-year-old diesel locomotives and 30-year-old passenger carriages on many of its trains, because they have no funding to get more modern equipment or electrify the line. Minor breakdowns have been increasing for a while, with occasional major problems (like last week when they had a fire in one of the locomotives during the evening rush hour).
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Delta and Southwest both run between SF and LA nearly, if not, hourly.
Not just SFO and LAX either, you have OAK, SJC and SFO up here, and ONT, BUR, LAX, LGB, and SNA down south. There are flights between any of those combinations many many times per day, and the locations involved are often much more convenient than the HSR depots will be.
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> The cost of the line can't be justified unless it provides a viable alternative to flying between SF and LA, I have no trouble imagining that the train can compete with flying between SF and LA. Even if the train has to stop in several backwater towns along the way. The shuttle flights between SFO/SJC and LAX are completely unreliable. When I was doing the SF-LA haul regularly, I'd be delayed (delayed!) by 6+ hours…
"The shuttle flights between SFO/SJC and LAX are completely unreliable. When I was doing the SF-LA haul regularly, I'd be delayed (delayed!) by 6+ hours at least once per month." I'm curious how that happened to you - I used to fly SFO-LAX from time to time, and was surprised that they didn't even really worry about me missing my flight - they just told me to catch the next one in line. United runs 27 flights daily f…
That's just United. Southwest (and I'm pretty sure Jetblue and Virgin) has numerous flights to all airports in the greater LA area: https://www.southwest.com/thmpg/flights-from-SFO-to-LAX.html
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…
Other successful high-speed rail systems (France's TGV, for example) also have dedicated rights-of-way, not shared with older equipment, and rail physically built to different standards (specially welded). You really don't want genuinely high-speed trains (300 km/h) running on the same tracks as anything slower, in normal operation. And if you try to build a high-speed system on earlier rights-of-way, you get somethi…
All track with passenger rail on it should be welded, so not sure what your point is. Also, every passenger rail should ideally be electrified; more freight trains should be electrified as well.
Yes high speed track is built to much tighter tolerances, but high speed trains can go on lower class tracks with slower speed. Plenty of ICE trains in Germany run on 160 km/h track. Extreme examples include TGVs being pulled by diesel trains to reach beach resorts.