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

221–230 of 297 posts

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

#221

Post by briandear »

slacka wrote: post #111
erentz wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 f…

As a tourist, that trip can be nice, but burning and entire day to travel for business?

Imagine the improvement in quality of life if we could get on a supersonic airplane and be in NYC from SFO in two hours.

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

#222

Post by briandear »

crazy2be wrote: post #135
_red wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For short distances high-speed rail can be a good option, particularly in connecting neighboring cities (LA-SF, etc). The problems with all these projects are cost: Simple back of envelope calculations show it to be (a) dubious, or (b) possibly criminal (ie. standard taxpayer ripoff to cronies). $64B - do the quick math on that. Figure a 30 year return on investment earning 4% per year: $2.2B payback per year + opera…

Well, a flight from SFO to LAX is $70 if you book at least a couple weeks in advance. If you assume parity for the ticket price, you need to sell an average of 100,000 tickers/day. With 100 passengers per car and 10 cars per train, you would need 100 trains/day, full, in order to make the math work. I agree that seems pretty dubious. Why on earth is infrastructure so expensive in the US?

Why is an apartment so expensive in SF? Why is an acre of land in Napa or Malibu so expensive?

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

#223

Post by tdhoot »

DrScump wrote: post #66
_red wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That assumption is: plane with current on-time arrival percentage vs train with mythical 100% on-time arrival. There are a whole host of additional problems that affect rail travel that you never have to think about with air-travel. Currently, Amtrak OTA is 80% - so that means 1/5 of your trips will experience a delay of some sort.

Where right-of-way is shared with freight, freight has priority.

This is patently false - Amtrak has the right of way by law.

https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/49/24308

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

#224

Post by belorn »

txdv wrote: post #199
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…

In germany they have a similar problem, if you want to build a train rail through some unimportant backwaters, these backwaters will want you to make a stop in their little cities.

There is a relative easy solution to that problem, one that I suspect has happened quite a few times in history. The budget to staff and maintain the stop is put on the local budget of the backwater, and sooner or later a local politician will want to reclaim those costs.

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

#225

Post by briandear »

ghaff wrote: post #136
erentz wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It depends on the routing especially as you get to traveling over borders in Europe. It does seem to be steadily improving though. Just a few years ago, I was going from Dusseldorf to Paris and I was rather surprised that train really wasn't a very good option. Today, as I go to whip that out as a counterexample, I see that Thalys would make a whole lot of sense vs. flying for me (though I don't know how door-to-door…

The Marseille/Avignon area to Geneva, Frankfurt or pretty much anywhere in Germany is surprisingly frustrating. I can fly from Marseille to Frankfurt in barely an hour -- a train ends up eating most of the day.

The only time I take the train over flying in Europe is typically Avignon-Paris. Everywhere closer and it's faster to drive, anywhere further and it's faster to fly.

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

#226

Post by stuaxo »

jzwinck wrote: post #81
TYPE_FASTER wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One advantage of rail is you can put a station in the middle of a metro area, removing travel time to the airport.

You can sometimes put an airport in the middle of a metro area as well: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_City_Airport London presently needs more runways and one of the serious proposals (now declined) was to build them in the Thames like the above.

London city airport is a tiny airport, it would be terrible if this was a decent size.

It's bad enough having Heathrow where it is, with all the planes over London.

One good thing about the "Boris" island idea was that planes wouldn't have had to fly over London itself, which would have probably helped noise and pollution.

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

#227

Post by TeMPOraL »

txdv wrote: post #199
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…

In germany they have a similar problem, if you want to build a train rail through some unimportant backwaters, these backwaters will want you to make a stop in their little cities.

Sometimes the rail can reinvigorate those backwaters. Case in point: Montabaur, Germany.

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

#228

Post by mmanfrin »

shiny wrote: post #127
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…

Another potential concern is that it runs through some good farmland, which CA has some of the best of in the world. I would love to have an HSR along the coast however. When I was in Taiwan it was amazing being able to get to the bottom of the island in a couple hours.

The amount of space railway needs is infinitesimally small compared the amount of arable land we have. This is not a concern.

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

#229

Post by OxO4 »

ghaff wrote: post #124
dclowd9901 wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Leaving aside excessive and largely ineffective security screening for flights in the US (and pretty much everywhere else), a lot of European high speed trains absolutely have metal detectors, luggage inspection, and document inspection. As do many buildings. It doesn't take long to go through most of the time but then going through Pre-Check probably averages me 10 minutes. But I do leave a good buffer. It's probabl…

As a European, I've never seen high speed trains that require metal detectors and/or luggage inspection. Which country was that?

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

#230

Post by lhopki01 »

twoodfin wrote: post #105
setpatchaddress wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Taxpayers subsidize all successful transit. True of cars, true of rail.

The subsidies are qualitatively different: If roads had to be paid for entirely from user fees in the form of gas or mileage taxes, they could be for effective rates not much higher than fuel prices of a few years ago. Capital and maintenance. If you tried to charge passengers adequately to fund rail, the system would go into a death spiral, absent radical changes in consumer preferences.

Europe has significantly higher taxes on fuel yet still needs to subsidise roads from general taxes so I think if roads were properly funded it would be higher than fuel prices a few years ago.

Also if both rail and roads were funded only by users then rail would be the more attractive option.

Post reply on HN