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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

#351

Post by steamrolled »

trollbridge wrote: post #271
stephen_g wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 transi…

Transit to... Bakersfield? It's 112 miles from Los Angeles. Dumping high-speed rail (which in the current plan won't be high speed at all between Bakersfield and LA, but is going to be a slow, circuitous route going through Palmdale and Lancaster) is not really going to be realistic for any kind of commuting to LA. There is a reason these cities never got developed more than they are. It's kind of flat, unappealing s…

> It's kind of flat, unappealing scenery and it's boiling hot in the summer.

Several decades ago, you could have levied the same criticisms against South San Jose, Morgan Hill, and so on. But people now want to live here.

There are basically two ways to sustain the growth in California. One is to greatly densify places like the SF Bay Area, another is to improve the infrastructure elsewhere. And I don't expect see residential high rises in Palo Alto any time soon.

Up north, there's plenty of places that are more desirable in terms of weather, but they're not gonna get developed for environmental reasons. So what's left?

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

#352

Post by suraci »

makotech221 wrote: post #186
vondur wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It probably helps when you can simply take the land you need. One major issue with the California project has been the difficulty in securing land rights. Additionally, California’s strict environmental laws have made construction even more challenging. In contrast, China can largely ignore these obstacles.

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

#353

Post by LargoLasskhyfv »

nostrademons wrote: post #286
yongjik wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The geology of the Bay Area would make that difficult. The Peninsula flats are mostly loosely-consolidated sediment, and in some areas you have less than half a mile between the mountains and the Bay. And it's less than 2 miles from the San Andreas fault. You'd likely have significant problems with flooding [1], and all the difficulties that the Pacheco Pass segment is having tunneling through an active fault would b…

The Japanese would probably say 'Hold my beer.' to that.

Because of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seikan_Tunnel

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

#355

Post by LargoLasskhyfv »

bronson wrote: post #323
trollbridge wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hundreds of thousands? A TGV holds 500 people, so you're saying a successful TGV line does... 400 trips a day?

Sure. Gare du Nord handles thousands of train movements per day. Shinjuku Station is even busier. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shinjuku_Station

I raise https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamburg_Hauptbahnhof as 'also ran' with an average of 550,000 passengers a day.

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

#356

Post by amadeuspagel »

> the expectation was that the $9.95 billion in state bonds voters approved would be matched or exceeded by federal funding (as is normally the case for highway projects)

Where is that fourth biggest economy of the world talk now? The fifth biggest economy of the world can build things without federal funding.

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

#357

Post by booi »

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,…

Yah it's BART that uses an odd track gauge. Although I did read a report saying they did it to make the trains both lighter and also able to withstand wind shear in certain parts of the system.

To be honest though, I didn't find that report very compelling and they didn't back it up with actual load calculations. You really don't hear standard trains being blown over and the Bay Area isn't exactly famous for "high winds" anyway

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

#358

Post by Karrot_Kream »

janalsncm wrote: post #148
rayiner wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s structurally impossible. The half of the political coalition that contains virtually all the people who want to build any sort of urban infrastructure is too fractured into groups that each have their own distinct priorities unrelated to infrastructure or good governance. And of course the other half of the polity hates the government. If you’re a democrat in california, where does infrastructure fall on your li…

> If you’re a democrat in california, where does infrastructure fall on your list of priorities? What big voting bloc does it get you? As of now, nothing because everything takes forever to build. The authors of Abundance talk about how rural broadband is gummed up in bureaucratic processes. Same with CHIPS. Biden couldn’t point to it as an accomplishment because…it wasn’t accomplished yet.

Right but to waive environmental review, pass laws which push back against frivolous lawsuits, and allow city and state budgets to allocate money to transit you need a coalition that cares. rayiner is very right here, the problem is very few coalitions care. Urbanist/YIMBY groups are coming up that do care and they've taken politics by storm over the last 10 years, but they're still a small coalition.

I do transit and multimodal advocacy in the Bay Area and transit is just a ball that everyone passes one. Low income advocacy groups want stops in low income areas, high income homeowners want high frequency routes, some riders want more police presence, anti-policing advocates hate the police, some residents think it's ableist to have a bike lane take up what could be a bus priority lane, anyone who uses any parking spot that will be decreased protests, disability advocates want transit to have level boarding and pro-accessiblity options on the bus, some folks want free fares, other folks want to meter by distance; I could go on and on. I have talked to activists and members of the public each with these positions.

Getting the actual thing built is the last priority on everyone's list. Sure they all want it. But they only want it if their pet concession is on the list. That's the problem.

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

#359

Post by petesergeant »

jonahrd wrote: post #145
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…

this is actually exactly what has been happening over the past few decades, and with the current proposal, for HSR from Toronto to Montreal, two of the largest cities in terms of both population and economy in Canada. Ottawa felt excluded, and is where the federal govt is based, so instead of going along the 401, a straight highway that follows a river valley and lake and has existing rail corridors, it has to go fro…

This is every attempt to improve a software project in a corporation ever… Small QoL fix gets pushed off because “the big rewrite work will fix it anyway” and five years later the small fix still hasn’t been done.

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

#360

Post by inglor_cz »

aylmao wrote: post #219
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…

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.

Here in the EU, we usually consider Italy and Spain somewhat more corrupt than the Western average, but high-speed rail in both countries got built reliably and without major delays.

Even though both peninsulas are mountainous, by no means an easy terrain.

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