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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

#151

Post by rsynnott »

legitster wrote: post #128
rsynnott wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a similar distance to Paris to Marseille, a 3 hour journey. Price for that seems to vary between 29 and 80 EUR depending on time of day. That's "get on the train, get off the train three hours later", so in practice is much faster than a 90 minute flight, which is "get to airport, go through security, walk seemingly endlessly to gate, fly, walk seemingly endlessly through baggage claim etc etc, get out of airpor…

I love trains! And I agree that they are superior in comfort and ease than flying. But the train still has to generate massive amounts of new traffic that doesn't currently exist to justify its huge costs. The TGV is something of an anomaly, and tough to compare against. It both beats all ridership estimates, and also comes in at half the price of even the Shinkansen: https://pedestrianobservations.com/2023/06/21/why…

Eh, ICE journeys of similar distance seem to be in the same general price range.

> But the train still has to generate massive amounts of new traffic that doesn't currently exist to justify its huge costs.

There are apparently about 130 SF Bay Area to LA flights daily. Let's say on average 200 person planes, at 80% occupancy, so 20,000 people. The biggest high speed trains have a capacity on the order of 1300, though those are very long trains; 800 or less is more common. Assuming an 18 hour day, that's a train every 45 minutes or so. That seems... fine? You'd also expect some traffic to the intermediate destinations, and possibly some increase in travel because, really, it is so much less bloody awful than flying (anyone who tells you otherwise has either never been on an intercity train or never been on a plane).

One weird aspect of American exceptionalism is that it is not _just_ Americans saying "we're the best"; sometimes it is Americans saying "we can't have the nice things that all other large rich countries have because [whatever]". The US can manage a high speed rail line or two.

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

#152

Post by janalsncm »

Lammy wrote: post #42

> Only if the Central Valley alignment had been selected would CAHSR actually the “train to nowhere” that critics deride it as. Can't wait to pay $400 per trip to visit all of these lovely places: https://hsr.ca.gov/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/20220427-Agend...

The ironic thing is it probably will be an (extremely expensive) boon to Merced -> Bakersfield.

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

#153

Post by mannyv »

kaonwarb wrote: post #4

There are some really good details in the article. But, to quote: > Despite more than a decade of predictions of its failure, the project has persevered — even if its completion is in limbo. I'm not sure that's much of an endorsement.

It's taken longer than WW1 and WW2 combined. Time to kill it.

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

#154

Post by legitster »

ricw wrote: post #136
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.

That’s entirely unfounded. There are more than 100 daily flights between the Bay Area and LA metro. That’s ridiculously high demand. https://simpleflying.com/san-francisco-los-angeles-flight-ma...

It's hard to know for sure, but the majority of these flights are probably going to be transfers. I've never set foot in LA but I've taken that flight several times.

Even so, there are only ~20k daily seats between the two cities. The ridership on successful high speed rail lines elsewhere in the world are measured in the hundreds of thousands per day.

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

#155

Post by ClumsyPilot »

Rebelgecko wrote: post #55
epicureanideal wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I have done the numbers for myself, and even taking pension and treating an extra week of vacation as a 1/52 pay raise, doing a software job for the government would be a huge step down for me financially. Basically gives me 0% chance of ever buying a home where I currently live

> me 0% chance of ever buying a home where I currently live

The housing crisis is the Everything Crisis. It’s destroying competence of government services, as no one ambitious will accept this fate.

It destroyed competitiveness of our industry because you can’t pay a worker less than it costs to rent.

It’s causing apathy and rise in extremist views among younger population as they realise they have no path to dignified future.

I am hoping that China does well for itself and one day we can just consider them as an example of competent and coherent governance and sort out our shit.

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

#156

Post by xnx »

rsynnott wrote: post #85
nimish wrote: post #30

I think the biggest issue with CAHSR is that Florida just did it anyway.

> Brightline's maximum operating speed is 125 mph (200 km/h) I mean, you could call it high speed rail, I suppose, but it's not really the same sort of thing.

Average speed is 68 mph

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

#157

Post by janalsncm »

legitster wrote: post #58

The reality is for every government constraint, there are even more difficult economic constraints that it has to work against. A 90-minute flight between these SF and LA can be had for ~$80 or less. A 7-hour bus ticket between these two cities is ~$50. To put it another way, the train would have to be only half-again more expensive per passenger to operate than a bus to beat a flight on price. I get it that there ar…

90 minutes in the air + 1 hour on each end at the airport.

On a train I can work the entire time with internet.

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

#158

Post by nonameiguess »

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.

I guess we'll see how I'm doing in 20 years to compare, but as of now, my dad is a former California public employee on a pension who had to move to the middle of the desert to stay within his budget, does all domestic work himself, and regularly needs to ask me for money. "Minor nobility" is a laughable characterization of his status in life.

For what it's worth, it's also quite illuminating these days to compare injury history with him. We've had a lot of the same stuff happen, but when it happens to me, he always overestimates the effect because he's still suffering from never recovering properly thanks to a lifetime of no-premium but shitty Kaiser HMO treatment that used the lowest-cost option for literally everything, whereas I had to pay for stuff but at least got the latest available surgical procedures and proper supervised rehab, so my injuries actually healed and I'm not just suffering for the rest of my life like he does.

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

#159

Post by nostrademons »

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.

Caltrain has passing tracks at Sunnyvale and Brisbane. There are joint plans with CAHSR to add 4-track segments at Millbrae, San Mateo (between Hayward Park and Hillsdale), Redwood City, and Palo Alto (California Ave).

The Millbrae tracks are part of the new station design: they are removing one of the 3 BART tracks (superfluous because BART terminates at Millbrae) and using the space to construct two dedicated HSR tracks on the inside of Caltrain, as well as a HSR platform.

The San Mateo area is relatively straightforward: Caltrain already owns the land, it is currently surface parking lots for the Hillsdale station as well as the land used for the old station (which was moved a few years ago).

Redwood City is elevating the entire Caltrain/HSR track above the city as part of their grade separation strategy. The new viaduct will be built with 4 tracks instead of 2.

The only major sticking point is Cal Ave, where there is limited space and an unfriendly city.

5-6 passing track sections should be plenty for running blended service.

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

#160

Post by danans »

rayiner wrote: post #109
cuuupid wrote: post #7

The problem with local infrastructure projects is their responsibility and execution fall to local community leaders (in this case local = state of California). These leaders are far less efficient and impactful than the federal government, a bar which is already way too low. Nearly every city in the US has had recent collisions with corruption, blatant mismanagement, ideological forces co-opting process, etc. and so…

That doesn’t make sense. California is bigger and richer than all but the largest European countries. It has some of the top universities in the world. Why shouldn’t it have a higher caliber of public official than say Denmark?

> It has some of the top universities in the world. Why shouldn’t it have a higher caliber of public official than say Denmark?

Many officials in the current administration who are wreaking havoc on the US economy went to the top universities, like Harvard, Columbia, etc. Attending those universities doesn't imply responsibility or sense of duty to public service at all.

CA does have "high caliber" public officials, but it also produces very corrupt ones. As everyone knows, CA has exported many from both categories to the national stage.

CA is not like Denmark in many ways. California has huge wealth inequality, and its economy and governance are heavily influenced by plutocrats from industries that grow via massive scaling properties, like tech, entertainment, and agriculture.

Two of those industries have a history of labor exploitation, and the other has been actively trying to snuff out the power and leverage it mistakenly gave to its workers over the past several decades.

Without a doubt, Denmark has problems also, and it has plutocrats, but its politicians hold them more accountable to the populace that CA does.

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