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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

#261

Post by WalterBright »

upelephants wrote: post #259
WalterBright wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Washington state decided to have light rail. But instead of using off-the-shelf rail cars, they just had to have them "custom designed" for the Pacific Northwest. Nobody was ever able to identify what about the PNW needed custom rail cars, but they sure cost a lot!

The only light rail operating in Washington State is LINK Light Rail, which Sound Transit operates using Siemens Mobility’s S700 model (although some older train sets are still used on the same tracks). Looking at the Wikipedia page for the S700, you can find these trains all over the US, including California, Arizona, Georgia, North Carolina, Minnesota, Oregon, Texas, and Virginia. They seem to be popular in Europe,…

No, I am thinking the Sound Transit light rail. I wouldn't be surprised if they canceled the "design for the PNW" cars and bought off the shelf ones.

Before it was built is when they said they would be custom cars.

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

#262

Post by timewizard »

mullingitover wrote: post #212
pj_mukh wrote: post #141

This is the most California article ever written. The author admits that if the line was run along the I-5 it probably wouldn't need all the costly grade-separation and state property issues it's now facing. It may have even finished with its original funding! But instead of immediately being able to serve the upwards of 18M people of Greater Los Angeles and 7.5M people of the Bay Area, the 1M people of the Central V…

The problem is that this should've been a federal project from the start, one of many running concurrently nationwide. Doing it nationwide would give economies of scale that wouldn't be possible with these local half-measures. California, and every other of the dozen plus states where this rolled out should've barely even had any say in the matter. Maybe deciding what artwork to put up in the stations and what to nam…

It's reflective of the imbalance of political power in the state and the corruption this power base now suborns. They don't care about the rail project. They're the least likely people to need or use it. They either want it to not happen or if it does at least it provides them with ample opportunities for creating further graft and corruption.

It was almost impossible to find a map where the proposed HSR routes are overlaid with the current Interstate routes. I wonder why. Anyways, in all it's glory I give you this [0]. A route designed to waste money and serve the fewest people.

If it was twice as fast and half the hassle of just driving from Sacramento to Los Angeles on I-5 I would genuinely consider using this service. Which is a really low bar. 120mph average speed with comfortable seating and I'm yours. They just can't manage to incorporate this, which I feel, is refelective of the majority of people in CA who actually need this trail to exist.

[0]: https://imgur.com/a/J15pDPG

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

#263

Post by Lammy »

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.

> There are only two tracks (North and South) and there is no room to build more.

The SP/Caltrain/Bayshore-Cutoff line into SF used to be partially quad-tracked. It's easiest to see at Tunnel 2 just south of 22nd Street Station. The current two-track main uses one tunnel and there's a second tunnel portal blocked off next to it.

Here are the north and south ends respectively:

- https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/90/Tunnel_n...

- https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/9f/South_po...

Ironically the Caltrain electrification project blocked it off even further by putting the supports for the overhead wires right where the other tracks used to be.

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

#264

Post by jimt1234 »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #209
tidbits wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Take a look at the voting data for Prop 1A. It is very likely HSR would not have been approved in the first place if the central valley had been excluded. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_California_Proposition_...

> likely HSR would not have been approved in the first place if the central valley had been excluded Then don't build it. That money would have been far better spent improving urban metro and regional rail. (And airports and roads and charging stations, et cetera .)

> Then don't build it. That money would have been far better spent...

...only literally anything else!

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

#265

Post by everybodyknows »

bombcar wrote: post #254
socalgal2 wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought they were unclear if LA-Bakerfield is even possible. My understanding comes from a podcast that wasn't about the rail at all, it was about how to make decisions. In the podcast they gave the example that if you decide to have a music box and a dancing monkey at a fair to make money, which do you do first, make the music box or train the monkey. The answer is, train the monkey, because if you can't train the…

But neither would have to be the first step. Making the route from San Diego to LA high-speed is perfectly doable (the route exists already), and would be a great stepping stone. Even if it turns out the Tehachapi is basically the mountains of Mordor and the project ends, you'd still have a valuable high-speed corridor.

You'd think. But efforts long underway to incrementally improve the SD-LA section are now caught in a deep mire of NIMBYism:

https://www.trains.com/trn/news-reviews/news-wire/new-study-...

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

#266

Post by yongjik »

porphyra wrote: post #101
rsync wrote: post #13

One issue with "CA HSR" is that it isn't even "high speed". We may have happily referred to is as "high speed rail" 30 or 40 years ago but, given a possible completion date of 2035 (or whatever) the 2:40 travel time from SF LA is unimpressive ... and even that will not be achieved: "California legislative overseers do not expect the 2 hr 40 min target will be achieved."[1] The simple fact is that the I-5 corridor is…

The operating speed on the fast stretch is actually one of the fastest in the world at 350 km/h, it's just that it has to waste half an hour on the Caltrain tracks from San Francisco to Gilroy and from Burbank to Anaheim. It's kinda like how the TGV from Paris to Nice goes from Paris to Marseille super fast but then has to spend hours to go from Marseille to Nice even though the latter part is a small fraction of the…

CA should've just bitten the bullet and built the whole SF-SJ section underground. It's about 50 miles, about the length of one mid-sized subway line in many part of the world, and it would've simplified the issue of acquiring prime suburban land.

Besides, I just don't see how HSR and Caltrain can share the same railway and avoid major service capacity issues. I think Caltrain is close to capacity as is, and at least a few years ago, major (an hour or more) delays were common.

South Korea built its second branch of HSR reaching Seoul almost entirely underground, with a single 31-mile tunnel [1]. I guess it was faster than trying to acquire land on top of it.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yulhyeon_Tunnel

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

#267

Post by bombcar »

screye wrote: post #201
xnx wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Be careful citing the Brightline as a success. It is expensive, doesn't go to many places, has low ridership, regularly kills pedestrians and drivers, and is hemorrhaging money.

> regularly kills pedestrians and drivers Ah yes, the train that seeks you out and kills. Much like all the free-soloists who are killed by the ground. Come on man. Expecting people to stay behind barriers and rail lines is a basic expectation. Brightline has killed zero people. If anything, it has reduced ~150 deaths by guiding people to a safer mode of transport. Ridership has tripled in 3 years. Brightline is a pr…

Trains are really unpredictable. Even in the middle of a forest, two rails can appear out of nowhere, and a 1.5-mile fully loaded coal drag, heading east out of the low-sulfur mines of the PRB, will be right on your ass the next moment.

Still one of the best copypastas.

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

#268

Post by stephen_g »

blackguardx wrote: post #258
trollbridge wrote: post #237

This was both a very good read and thoroughly depressing. It makes a lot of sense to connect San Diego/LA/Sacramento/San Francisco. It makes a lot less sense to try to connect Merced, Bakersfield, Fresno, et al. People there like to have cars, like to drive, there isn't a lot of traffic. Once you arrive in those places, there is very little transit infrastructure. You basically need a car. And they're far more centre…

I agree with you, but infrastructure is often built to expand future regions. Before the Golden Gate and Bay Bridges, there was a lot less commuting to SF. They only had ferries. Building the bridges allowed the broader region to expand and prosper.

Exactly, as people are priced out of the cities, having good HSR connections to SF and LA would be able to spur a lot of regional growth.

This is a pretty common kind of blindspot for people to have, talking about how crazy it is to build transit to places with or lower populations or less population density, but forget that a lot of well-connected, dense places with good transit weren't very dense before good transit was built!

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

#269

Post by trollbridge »

blackguardx wrote: post #258
trollbridge wrote: post #237

This was both a very good read and thoroughly depressing. It makes a lot of sense to connect San Diego/LA/Sacramento/San Francisco. It makes a lot less sense to try to connect Merced, Bakersfield, Fresno, et al. People there like to have cars, like to drive, there isn't a lot of traffic. Once you arrive in those places, there is very little transit infrastructure. You basically need a car. And they're far more centre…

I agree with you, but infrastructure is often built to expand future regions. Before the Golden Gate and Bay Bridges, there was a lot less commuting to SF. They only had ferries. Building the bridges allowed the broader region to expand and prosper.

Well, Bakersfield at al is not exactly a "future region" - it's been there for a long time with a giant freeway into it (and railroads, too, including rail service from Bakersfield all the way to Stockton with connections to San Francisco and Sacramento) and it has remained a sleepy agricultural corridor. The weather is awful and it's just not where most people in California want to live.

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

#270

Post by stephen_g »

yongjik wrote: post #266
porphyra wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The operating speed on the fast stretch is actually one of the fastest in the world at 350 km/h, it's just that it has to waste half an hour on the Caltrain tracks from San Francisco to Gilroy and from Burbank to Anaheim. It's kinda like how the TGV from Paris to Nice goes from Paris to Marseille super fast but then has to spend hours to go from Marseille to Nice even though the latter part is a small fraction of the…

CA should've just bitten the bullet and built the whole SF-SJ section underground. It's about 50 miles, about the length of one mid-sized subway line in many part of the world, and it would've simplified the issue of acquiring prime suburban land. Besides, I just don't see how HSR and Caltrain can share the same railway and avoid major service capacity issues. I think Caltrain is close to capacity as is, and at least…

That's still something that wouldn't be that difficult to change in the future. Probably easier to fund once the initial system is operational and the case for the extra expenditure is clearly demonstrable.

Having it connect into Caltrain is probably something that is nice to have anyway (like if there's maintenance required in the hypothetical tunnel or whatever kind of direct bypass, so you can still run services on the slower route) so it's not a waste to have both.

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