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

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

#261

Post by [deleted] »

wapz wrote: post #232
pm24601 wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suppose if you regard sitting in a seat not being able to move as comfortable. But before you get too relaxed in that glorious possible future: 1) high speed trains exist and proven - no new science or engineering to figure out 2) autonomous cars are constrained by the realities of space to put the vehicles. Too many vehicles, autonomous or otherwise = congestion and slow travel. 3) At 6 hours, this is nearly twice…

I really like high speed trains but have you paid for them? They are great for business where you need to go somewhere and come back, but for a family of 4 they are extremely expensive. From Tokyo to Osaka ~350 miles, it's about $130 per person each way on the Shinkansen. For 4 of us (2 adults, a child, and a free toddler), it would be ~$650 for round trip tickets.

[deleted]

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

#262

Post by mikeash »

tdhoot wrote: post #223
DrScump wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

According to this, the law is not enforced: http://www.sfgate.com/opinion/article/Amtrak-has-priority-ov...

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

#263

Post by mikeash »

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.

For an American example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronald_Reagan_Washington_Natio...

It currently serves as many passengers each year as the vastly larger Washington Dulles airport. It's quite the anomaly due to being in the capital. Despite many security and noise concerns, it all the Congress-folk love using it to get home, so it enjoys a great deal of political protection.

I don't think there's any hope of building new airports anywhere near city centers now. Some that already exist may hang on, but the security and noise concerns would easily NIMBY any new construction, not to mention the absurd expense of buying the land.

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

#264

Post by pm24601 »

tdhoot wrote: post #223
DrScump wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

You clearly have never taken Amtrak over distances. I have taken Amtrak numerous times Emeryville - Denver.

The reality is:

1. if the siding is only 1km long - the Amtrak train is taking the siding as the freight train will not fit on it.

2. if the dispatcher decides the freight train goes ahead of Amtrak -- there is no lawyer around to argue the point.

3. if there is a long section of single tracking, with freight backed up the opposite direction, the dispatcher allows the all the same direction freights to move. ( 2+ hour delays when that happens )

4. If there is enough of a delay and a freight train crew in front goes outlaw - then that train stops until a replacement crew is brought in... which usually results in the Amtrak crew going outlaw as well.

It has gotten a lot, lot better and the scenery is beautiful - but please don't kid yourself about the realities on the ground. Amtrak has to stay in the good graces of the railroad companies especially with a hostile congress.

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

#265

Post by rhino369 »

milesrout wrote: post #140
shiny wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>some good farmland, which CA has some of the best of in the world. Is that a joke? California is a terrible place to be farming. Farming in California is only viable because farmers are allowed unfettered access to water, depriving it from residents (who are told they should turn off the water in the shower while farmers are pouring untold millions of gallons on crops that could be grown somewhere actually suited to…

The problem isn't that farming occurs, it's that some stupid crops are grown in California--like alfalfa. It uses a ton of water and it's not very profitable.

But the state can grow a lot of crops that are worth the water usage.

All that is needed is to price water with a market mechanism rather than first come, first serve free water.

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

#266

Post by fulafel »

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?

Due to climate change air travel will have to be drastically reduced (or we get problems that make California transport irrelevant).

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

#267

Post by pm24601 »

Gibbon1 wrote: post #83
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?

My understanding and part of why I support the high speed rail project is this. Airports in California coastal cities are near max capacity. And expansion is either very expensive[1] or near impossible. And would face even more community objections than the high speed rail project. So the airlines likely wouldn't try to compete with high speed rail. Instead they would try to attract more national and international tr…

SFO back in early 2000 was trying for a runway repositioning that was priced at $3.5 billion (http://www.loe.org/shows/segments.html?programID=00-P13-0002...) . Mind you this was just for repositioning runways. Not increasing fair weather capacity.

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

#268

Post by rhino369 »

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 on earth is infrastructure so expensive in the US?

Infrastructure always is, but in the USA it's worse than normal. Nobody is entirely sure why.

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

#269

Post by rhino369 »

tehabe wrote: post #9
thmsths wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And the fastest if you take into consideration the fact that you can come to the train station less than 30 minutes in advance just hop in the train and travel downtown to downtown.

30 minutes in advance for a train? Sometimes I arrive a minutes in advance and just enter the train before it is continuing its journey. Happens when my connecting train had a delay.

That works when it's a commuter train, but you can't plan on just showing up minutes before a high-speed train that assigns seats. Because you can't just hop on the next one.

That's most of the reason why you can't just show up at the gate of your airplane 5 minutes before they shut the doors.

Security is the only big difference. You gotta plan on it possibly taking 30 minutes.

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

#270

Post by saosebastiao »

scythe wrote: post #184
acchow wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

The inner areas will be more likely to want transit to the endpoints than to each other. Of course having only two stops wouldn't pay for the train but it's probably easier to drive from Bakersfield to Fresno eg and you need a car both places whereas going to LA/SF without a car doesn't present a hassle. If you look at page 43 here on the ridership projections: http://www.hsr.ca.gov/docs/about/business_plans/2016_Bus…

I don't quite get how you're coming to 2/3 of revenue between MTC and SCAG regions (Its not adding up to that for me). It also isn't very clear: MTC has a projection for ridership to SCAG, but SCAG doesn't have projections for ridership to MTC but they do for the SJV?

I'm also not sure where this newer forecast model came from, but it seems highly subject to politicized biases: they basically asked individual regions to forecast their ridership and revenue to other regions, and then added it all up.

The original forecasts [0] were built off of SNCF forecast modeling expertise, which is one of the best in the world and also from a country with very similar geodemographic characteristics as California. For just the subsegment of LA-SF, less than 50% of revenue is between SF and LA, and the ridership between SF-SJV and LA-SJV adds up to approximately the same amount as LA-SF. In other words, going through the valley doubles revenue potential.

This isn't a new phenomenon. It has been noted by and (if necessary) relearned by railroad capitalists going all the way back to the foundation of railroads. For an example, read chapters 16-20 of this economic history of Railway Mania [1]. Railway demand between termini has almost always been overforecasted by railroad capitalists, and they either figure it out and start serving intermediate destinations or they go bankrupt. If they build the line from the very beginning by bypassing intermediate population centers, their overestimates of ridership will doom them to a fate they can't recover from, barring major track realignment.

A background in Operations Research gives me a professional social network of people across pretty much every industry, all of whom understand some of the hardest business and technical problems of their industry. Some of my contacts work on schedule optimization in Germany and Spain. One of the quotes that constantly gets spouted in their conferences is that HSR is politically successful because of its top speed, but it is commercially successful because of the first derivative of its speed. Top speed gets votes, but the ability to start and stop very quickly allows them to obtain very significant ridership boosts with very little degradation in average speed. This is a very distinct competitive advantage...they can do something that no airline could ever do. Between major termini, there will always be some form of competition with airlines, but intermediate stations will always be a veritable monopoly for rail.

[0] http://www.hsr.ca.gov/docs/about/ridership/ridership_revenue...

[1] http://www.dtc.umn.edu/~odlyzko/doc/hallucinations.pdf

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