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Reports of the death of California High-Speed Rail have been greatly exaggerated
301–310 of 476 posts
Re: Reports of the death of California High-Speed Rail have been greatly exaggerated
#302Earlier quoted context omitted.
It would be one thing if they were just going to Fresno. There are three major cities in the Central Valley: Bakersfield, Fresno and Sacramento. You get Bakersfield for free; Sacramento is north of SF and has existing commuter rail. Fresno is big enough to justify a stop; it has room to grow, too. You could put a stop that's ten miles outside of Fresno, and you don't have to cut through the city too much. That's what…
Having HSR stops inside cities is one of the things that make it far better than flying for certain distances. Put the station outside the city and you're killing a lot of your benefits...
Ten miles from Fresno might be too far. I just picked a distance out of thin air.
But when you have a minor stop, it's less important to build the perfect configuration. Even if you have to go outside of Fresno to get on the train, you're still in downtown SF or LA when you get off. And the traffic in Fresno is not as bad as the traffic in SF. And the flights from Fresno airport are probably not as cheap, since it's a lower-volume airport (capex per flight is larger), so you have more of a cost advantage.
So I'm pointing out a false dilemma. You don't have to choose between downtown Fresno and no Fresno. You can have a worse-is-better Fresno without sacrificing the goals of HSR for the really big cities.
Re: Reports of the death of California High-Speed Rail have been greatly exaggerated
#303Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> 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. What economies of scale are even possible here? California in particular is relatively isolated from the rest of the country because the thing directly to the east of it is a major desert, fo…
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Re: Reports of the death of California High-Speed Rail have been greatly exaggerated
#304This 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…
SNCF was one of the early bidders for this project, proposing the I5 route. They later pulled out from the politics of the Central Valley line in 2011, and went on to successfully implement high speed rail in Morocco instead - which went live in 2018. Here we are 8 years after they finished a different project with nothing. American infrastructure at its finest. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SNCF#Modern_era
This is discussed in the article.
Re: Reports of the death of California High-Speed Rail have been greatly exaggerated
#305This 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…
In my region (Latin America) when a "boondoggle" of such high monetary cost happens, we call it for what it usually is— corruption. All those billions of dollars are going to someone's pockets. There's a lot of money to be made from inefficient infrastructure projects.
Well, in this case, the problem is more so that money wasn’t spent on large swaths of the project.
Re: Reports of the death of California High-Speed Rail have been greatly exaggerated
#306To everyone saying SF-LA already has plenty of flights, consider the following benefits of trains: - No need to worry about how much luggage I have. It will likely be a minimal charge if there is even one - Trains are more comfortable with larger seats, usually - Trains will make tickets cheaper, putting downward pressure on flight tickets as well (competition) - Less security theatre and less worrying about what I c…
You know most of these are business travelers right? The last thing I want (as a former consultant who did like 400k plus miles flying) is to spend more time traveling. Not to mention flights booked out in advance are like sub 200 bucks, or even 100-150. It takes like 2-3 hours from leaving home to arriving at destination. Have you flown between SFO and LAX? SFO is easy to get to, no real headaches. So is San Jose an…
You should try riding real HSR, like Madrid to Barcelona. Superior to flying in every way.
Re: Reports of the death of California High-Speed Rail have been greatly exaggerated
#307Earlier quoted context omitted.
You know most of these are business travelers right? The last thing I want (as a former consultant who did like 400k plus miles flying) is to spend more time traveling. Not to mention flights booked out in advance are like sub 200 bucks, or even 100-150. It takes like 2-3 hours from leaving home to arriving at destination. Have you flown between SFO and LAX? SFO is easy to get to, no real headaches. So is San Jose an…
You should try riding real HSR, like Madrid to Barcelona. Superior to flying in every way.
I live in America.
I’m sure Europe has nice trains. I’ve rode the best trains in the world in Japan.
America is a completely different dynamic and is not at all comparable to Europe nor Japan.
The culture here has always revolved around cars (objectively better IMO for ME, I don’t like tiny cramped cities like in EU or Japan), and our roads are big and our buildings are large and really nice. New builds especially in cities like SF or LA.
SF to LA is about 400 miles. Going from LA to SD is another 120 miles. Spain by itself is like 150 miles wide and 500 miles long. It’s about the same distance, sure, but totally different dynamics. It’s hard to explain unless you’ve been here.
Besides, nobody really has a need to travel between LA and SF that regularly unless it’s for business. People might visit their families every month or two. But most of the travel is for business.
Comparing Europe and America is apples to oranges.
Re: Reports of the death of California High-Speed Rail have been greatly exaggerated
#308California "high-speed" rail is failing because it doesn't make sense. For all the billions already spent and planning to be spent, the delivered product is severely underwhelming. Trains go few of the places people want to go on the schedule they want to go. Planes, by comparison, are an absolute bargain. Travel between almost any two cities quickly and affordably. By most calculations, planes also have less environ…
Travel more buddy because holy shit. Also, stop spewing unresearched garbage about emissions. Its not 1990. https://chatgpt.com/share/680fe50f-3cec-8009-bd5e-609bb1e485...
> Nationwide reach: Amtrak serves more than 500 stations, but only a minority of routes see multiple trains per day.
That's crazy
Re: Reports of the death of California High-Speed Rail have been greatly exaggerated
#309This 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…
In my region (Latin America) when a "boondoggle" of such high monetary cost happens, we call it for what it usually is— corruption. All those billions of dollars are going to someone's pockets. There's a lot of money to be made from inefficient infrastructure projects.
The term in the 20th century was honest graft.
Re: Reports of the death of California High-Speed Rail have been greatly exaggerated
#310Even if it succeeds on its current trajectory, it will be studied for 100 years as a massive failure.
All civil engineering projects are failures until people forget what it cost to build them and just start taking the infrastructure for granted. Eleven people died constructing the Golden Gate Bridge, 96 for the Hoover dam, thousands for the Panama Canal. Do we remember them, or think that these projects were failures for killing people? No. We just think of how convenient they are. I grew up contemporaneous with the…
For the golden gate bridge, that's not a particularly large impact of deaths. Even if you don't like assigning a monetary value to lives, bad infrastructure causes its own deaths in the people using it. But it's simpler to say lives are worth ten million dollars and then calculate that those deaths were about 4% of the cost.
For the other two, the death toll was much more significant.