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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

#441

Post by johnnyanmac »

xienze wrote: post #412
johnnyanmac wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You never been to LAX if you don't immediately act with a sigh of relief over a direct train route. It's an potential 90 minute+ commute and another 90 minute TSA process for a 90 minute flight. Dreadful. >The purpose of HSR is to transform large swatchs of land into a large megalopolis, like in China. Bakersfield has a dozen reasons ever preventing it from becoming another SF/LA/SD. Besides, China didn't build its r…

> You never been to LAX if you don't immediately act with a sigh of relief over a direct train route. It's an potential 90 minute+ commute and another 90 minute TSA process for a 90 minute flight. Dreadful. So your estimate is 270 minutes. Where's the train stop supposed to be in LA? Downtown, right? What's the commute for that like? Sure, no 90 minute TSA process (big doubt if that's typical) but now the 90 minute f…

Depends on the stops and route. The secret to LAX is to not take LAX if you can avoid it. BUR has a lot of destinations and is a lot less of a toll on sanity. If it is truly a direct LA to SF with minimal stops, then sure. There's not too much lag removed.

A 90 minute commute to simply downtown instead of LAX becomes a 60-70 minute commute simply because you're not spending 20 minutes trying to navigate LAX. Not enter the airport, be stuck in its own brand of LAX traffic.

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

#442

Post by johnnyanmac »

ta1243 wrote: post #425
johnnyanmac wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nothing happens overnight. Except governmental upheaval, I suppose. And yes, SF to LA would be in much more demand. Not as a commuting option, but it'd make for some great weekend commerce. In a world of increasing work from home, I don't think many people would care for commuting to LA from Bakersfield.

LA to Bakersfield is 110 miles. That's about an hour, certainly plenty of people do that journey in the UK multiple times a week. Tamworth for example is exactly 110 miles from Euston. In peak times the fast trains stop there for the commuter traffic and it takes 67 minutes. Peterborough, Gratham, Newark (100-140 miles) are all common commuter places,

If we ever got HSR I'm not saying the is unviable. People commuting from suburbs to downtown LA have a 60-79 minute commute, a commute they can't sleep or be productive through. That's no issue.

I'm just saying the hubs are completely incompatible in both culture and market. Bakersfield is an energy/agriculture hub and LA is an entertainment hub. The utility here isn't exactly efficient if people are traveling that far every day to work as a cashier. Probably wouldn't stimulate much in that regsrd

Likewise, there's not going to be a lot of people in LA who willingly want to go to Bakersfield if given an option. At worst they are forced there as another suburban option if the city prices them out.

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

#443

Post by DrFalkyn »

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…

Then how did BART get built ?

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

#444

Post by api »

nayuki wrote: post #438
api wrote: post #389

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cars employ more people. A lot of the opposition you hear from EVs comes from the fact that they require less maintenance and upkeep and so they employ fewer people.

Make-work is not a virtue - see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window . People want transportation, not necessarily cars. Cars also contribute to an immense amount of misery in society - the financial burden, being stuck in traffic, road expansions demolishing houses, noise and pollution, injuries.

I wasn't saying it was good, just pointing out a reason politicians support them. Jobs and tax base gets politicians elected.

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

#445

Post by femiagbabiaka »

Karrot_Kream wrote: post #358
janalsncm wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 an…

This seems like self-perpetuating dysfunction. If people knew that the government would eventually meet everyone's needs, then it would be more sensible to not have to meet everyone's needs right away. But as it is, we build nothing, which meets nobodies needs, and creates a kind of zero-sum game of thrones for anything that has the potential to be built.

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

#446

Post by nostrademons »

DrFalkyn wrote: post #443
nostrademons wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Then how did BART get built ?

Not under the Peninsula.

(The part of BART that extends through the Peninsula runs aboveground from Daly City to Millbrae. For that matter, the part of BART that runs through the East Bay goes along the former Western Pacific right-of-way, aboveground. And the Transbay Tube was constructed with the "immersed tube" technique, built on land, towed out to sea, and submerged. Where BART runs underground and was built with TBMs, it's usually in bedrock under the cities of SF and Oakland.)

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

#447

Post by agent281 »

babyent wrote: post #405
agent281 wrote: post #377

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I live in America. I have all my life. I've ridden on nice trains in Europe and Japan. The culture in the last 80-100 years has revolved around cars, but before that relied heavily on trains. I much prefer riding a spacious train to riding in a cramped airplane. I like to be able to get up and walk around while the train is traveling. I prefer the minimal security processes on a train to an airplane. Driving 6-10 hou…

Right but have you flown for business every few days like that? It seems like you’re still thinking about leisure travel between LA and SF. My whole point was about business flight. Sure for leisure I’ll take a train. But if I’m flying for work I’d rather deal with a consistent (mostly, compared to any rail I’ve taken) experience.

I would not describe LA to SF as a consistent experience. I had an 8:30 PM flight delayed until 1:30 AM. Actually, the only consistency I've had with those flights is that they are consistently delayed.

I've heard that the flight delays cascade throughout the day. So if the first flight is 10 minutes delayed, all SF-LA flights are delayed for the rest of the day. Since SFO has a lot of fog, my understanding is that it's often delayed.

Maybe it's okay coming from Burbank, but I live on the Westside so I have to take LAX.

I would love to have another option. Ideally, a train would decrease the load on the airlines so that they could handle delays better.

To answer your question directly, no I don't have to do work trips every couple of days, but I do have work trips from LA to SF every couple of months.

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

#448

Post by cantrecallmypwd »

queenkjuul wrote: post #70
cantrecallmypwd wrote: post #24

CAHSR was opined years before SR 85 and 87 and before VTA light rail. It's the perpetually never-happening, chicken-vs-egg aspirational project for mass transit in an area dominated by urban sprawl and car-first infrastructure that would need massive investment in local mass transit like Japan first.

LA has been investing very heavily in mass transit for decades, fwiw. If the terminals (SF and LA) can be navigated by transit, then leaving the car at home and taking the train becomes a plausible option for most people. It always made more sense for me to leave the car at home and take the train to Chicago than deal with the traffic and parking in the city, it's hard to imagine SF being that different in that regar…

20 years ago, parking in SF was hell. I remember driving around and around for like 45 minutes to find a spot and the fun of parking on a hill with a racing clutch in a spot only a valet could fit into.

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

#449

Post by Eridrus »

SllX wrote: post #242
Eridrus wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did it have to be funded by a proposition? Could the CA legislature not have passed a law?

Tax increases and bond measures have to go through the voters. The alternative is to get enough of the legislature, including probably some in Central Valley, to agree to cut a bunch of other more popular programs in order to fund it out of the general fund.

I dug into this a bit since these comments were just confusing, but apparently Prop 13 required tax increases to get a 2/3 majority of the legislature.

So it seems like Prop 13 just fucked California.

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

#450

Post by SllX »

Eridrus wrote: post #449
SllX wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tax increases and bond measures have to go through the voters. The alternative is to get enough of the legislature, including probably some in Central Valley, to agree to cut a bunch of other more popular programs in order to fund it out of the general fund.

I dug into this a bit since these comments were just confusing, but apparently Prop 13 required tax increases to get a 2/3 majority of the legislature. So it seems like Prop 13 just fucked California.

Correct. What is the point of having a representative government with a legislature if you just forcibly remove the lynchpin of power for that type of government?
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