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Reports of the death of California High-Speed Rail have been greatly exaggerated

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Re: Reports of the death of California High-Speed Rail have been greatly exaggerated

#111

Post by aaronbrethorst »

queenkjuul wrote: post #90
aaronbrethorst wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve heard so many business guys running startups say the same thing about their brilliant idea. Once the plan is in place you just do daily standups and your engineers poop out perfect features at the rate of 1 ticket/day.

The whole point of building the grade separated guideway is to make the track maintenance (and installation) as predictable and reliable as possible. Once the guideway is there, laying the track really is the easy part. Hundreds of tons of concrete is no longer a "brilliant idea," it's physical infrastructure designed for the purpose of installing rails.

Too bad CHSR, as described by CHSR, wouldn't entirely be grade separated. https://hsr.ca.gov/about/safety/grade-separation/

Re: Reports of the death of California High-Speed Rail have been greatly exaggerated

#112

Post by gruez »

GeekyBear wrote: post #107
gruez wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>and extremely unpopular Who's shedding a tear for some farmer getting paid above market rates (presumably) for their land? California is probably the last place I'd expect people to think using eminent domain in this case is a slipper slope to communism or whatever.

Eventually you will have to build out the rail line in densely populated areas (especially near San Francisco and LA). High speed rail requires that you to avoid unnecessary curves. At that point, you're going to have to start using imminent domain. Putting it off until after you have billions of dollars in sunk costs in the Central Valley doesn't change that.

>Eventually you will have to build out the rail line in densely populated areas (especially near San Francisco and LA). High speed rail requires that you to avoid unnecessary curves.

why can't you have it run slowly in built up areas? As another commenter mentioned that's how it works in France.

Re: Reports of the death of California High-Speed Rail have been greatly exaggerated

#113

Post by ianburrell »

dekhn wrote: post #91

I simply cannot see HSR sharing track with Caltrain between San Jose and SF working at all. There are only two tracks (North and South) and there is no room to build more. So it would seem that no high speed rail could go faster than caltrain on that segment and could not achieve the target travel time. What I wish- although it may not be feasible- was a straight shot from Burbank to San Jose- as a single tunnel.

It is an advantage that HSR uses Caltrain track to get to SF. It would be super expensive to build a separate high speed line, and it wouldn't be worth the time savings. Caltrain should spend money grade separating the whole line, adding passing lines where possible, and increasing the speed to 125mph or 150mph since it would be good for Caltrain service. At 125mph, HSR (250mph) would save 10 minutes, and 150mph would save 6 minutes.

Re: Reports of the death of California High-Speed Rail have been greatly exaggerated

#114

Post by queenkjuul »

aaronbrethorst wrote: post #111
queenkjuul wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The whole point of building the grade separated guideway is to make the track maintenance (and installation) as predictable and reliable as possible. Once the guideway is there, laying the track really is the easy part. Hundreds of tons of concrete is no longer a "brilliant idea," it's physical infrastructure designed for the purpose of installing rails.

Too bad CHSR, as described by CHSR, wouldn't entirely be grade separated. https://hsr.ca.gov/about/safety/grade-separation/

That won't stop them from laying hundreds of miles of rail at 1km/day

Re: Reports of the death of California High-Speed Rail have been greatly exaggerated

#115

Post by TimTheTinker »

queenkjuul wrote: post #110
TimTheTinker wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

edited my comment already before I saw your response. Yes, I agree.

Well sure, Adams in particular maybe not, but for him to warn about this hypothetical scenario while it was ostensibly unfolding in front of his eyes is still something i can find a bit ridiculous.

> for him to warn about this hypothetical scenario while it was ostensibly unfolding in front of his eyes

Well why wouldn't he? See something, say something.

I'm sure he saw direct reasons to be worried about people becoming ungovernably immoral, and I bet slavery was one of those reasons -- after all, he did believe it to be a colossal evil.

So I'm not sure I understand your point.

Re: Reports of the death of California High-Speed Rail have been greatly exaggerated

#116

Post by aaronbrethorst »

regentbowerbird wrote: post #57
aaronbrethorst wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve heard so many business guys running startups say the same thing about their brilliant idea. Once the plan is in place you just do daily standups and your engineers poop out perfect features at the rate of 1 ticket/day.

Alright, but one of the central findings of software engineering of the 80s is that software engineering cannot be driven rigidly, unlike other engineering fields.. Such as railways. Think about it, rail is an eminently standardized piece of infrastructure that has existed for more than a century and millions of kilometers have been laid out. Don't you think _some_ effort has gone into automating the process and maki…

Don't you think _some_ effort has gone into automating the process and making it predictable? Here is a (french) example

This really underscores Klein and Thompson's argument: this infrastructure sclerosis seems to be a uniquely American problem.

This review of Klein and Thompson's book sums it up pretty well:

Adding a kilometre of subway track in the United States now costs twice what it does in Japan or Canada, and six times what it does in Portugal; in the past fifty years, the inflation-adjusted cost of a mile of interstate highway has tripled

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/03/10/abundance-ezra...

Re: Reports of the death of California High-Speed Rail have been greatly exaggerated

#117

Post by Bukhmanizer »

epicureanideal wrote: post #35
prpl wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We could actually just pay more money to public governmental employees, allow them to build careers (and raise families), and stop contracting out everything. This would also increase competition for such roles. How we got here is ultimately, especially for CA, land and legal cost, cost of living, and public employee salary relative to private salaries. That’s endemic to major metro areas in the US, with some small e…

> We could actually just pay more money to public governmental employees When their pensions are taken into account, government employees are ridiculously overcompensated already. They’re basically minor nobility at this point.

This is an absurd statement.

Re: Reports of the death of California High-Speed Rail have been greatly exaggerated

#118

Post by nineplay »

rsync wrote: post #72
legitster wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately there simply isn't enough demand between SF and LA alone to justify the insanely long stretches of a direct rail project. A better way would have been to build it out from the city into the suburbs first as a commuter rail project. There isn't a ton of intercity demand for this rail, but there is tons of traffic in and out of each singular city to justify even medium speed rail.

"Unfortunately there simply isn't enough demand between SF and LA alone to justify the insanely long stretches of a direct rail project." I will stipulate that that is correct at this very moment . However, it is my contention that a truly high speed rail link (sub two hour) between SF and LA would have manufactured demand as an entirely new set of trips, activities and lifestyles would have been enabled by the abili…

I'm not convinced. The train is not competing with driving to SF, the train is competing with flying to SF. LAX -> SFO is 1.25 hours. There's time to the airport, time to check in, time through security of course, but there's going to be similar issues at the train station so the customer has to be convinced that the train is a time savings.

Plus, of course, SWA has 4 direct flights to SFO, 6 to Oakland, 4 to San Jose. If you miss your flight you get on the next one. It is going to be really hard for a high speed train to complete with that.

Re: Reports of the death of California High-Speed Rail have been greatly exaggerated

#119

Post by nineplay »

rayiner wrote: post #105
andbberger wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

there absolutely is, SF-LA is an ideal city pair

Do people actually travel between SF and LA? It makes sense in the east coast: traveling from the seat of government in DC to the seat of finance in NYC. But does california have that dynamic?

Yes but they take Southwest Airlines which is already really convenient.

Re: Reports of the death of California High-Speed Rail have been greatly exaggerated

#120

Post by andbberger »

rayiner wrote: post #105
andbberger wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

there absolutely is, SF-LA is an ideal city pair

Do people actually travel between SF and LA? It makes sense in the east coast: traveling from the seat of government in DC to the seat of finance in NYC. But does california have that dynamic?

there are a ton of nonstop flights between SFO and LAX so i'm going with yes
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