Reports of the death of California High-Speed Rail have been greatly exaggerated • Hacker News Board

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

#471

Post by SllX » Wed, Apr 30, 2025, 11:27 PM UTC

inferiorhuman wrote: post #455

SllX wrote: post #450

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

That's the point. Props 13 and 8 were part of the republican anti-government movement often memorialized by Norquist's remark about making government small enough to drown.

The motivations and rhetoric are before my time. What’s leftover is just this stupid counterproductive set of laws undermining the legislature’s ability to legislate.

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

#472

Post by com » Thu, May 01, 2025, 4:50 AM UTC

ta1243 wrote: post #426

com wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

International HSTs with passport required border crossings (ie Schengen-UK) have passport control and security - I think the security checks are to minimise the risk of terror attacks in the channel tunnel though. But yeah, for intra-Schengen you just go to the platform a few minutes before departure, find where your carriage will be, and step in once the train comes to a stop. So much less faff than air travel, and…

Security theatre. What's the point of metal detecting you on eurostar? You going to hijack the train with your knife? Cars and vans in the tunnel don't go through metal detecters, and you can smuggle a far larger bomb that you can in a suitcase. But eurostar is the exception to the rule with security. I tend to aim to arrive at my mainline station about 5 minutes before the train leaves incase I get delayed on-route,…

I agree. But I just looked at Le Shuttle’s pages on security and they claim to put 100% of trucks through millimeter wavelength scanners (presumably to detect unauthorised travellers) and x-ray systems that are supposed to detect arms and explosives.

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

#473

Post by babyent » Thu, May 01, 2025, 8:44 AM UTC

saagarjha wrote: post #467

babyent wrote: post #406

Earlier quoted context omitted.

30 minutes is a lot between just the Bay Area when the entire flight between LA and SF takes 90 minutes. Not to mention, you have to get to and from the train station or airport. For example from where I live in SF, it takes about 20 minutes (depending on traffic) to get to King St station. It takes about 30 minutes to get to SFO. If I was taking MUNI to king street, looking at like 40+ minutes plus walking. I’m a se…

This is of course a personal choice but I really can't understand people's insistence that a train that takes a single minute longer than a plane ride is inferior. I actually like planes, especially going down the California coast, which is pretty much every day of the year. But plane seats are cramped, and half the time you can't use your computer even if you wanted to. I usually fly from SJC if I want to go to LAX,…

The train will use shared tracks. I will bet one million dollars it will run into scheduling issues and when you’re stuck on land it will suck. Source: former Amtrack customer. Same story, and I doubt a project that’s been mismanaged so far will fare any better if actually realized.

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

#474

Post by saagarjha » Thu, May 01, 2025, 11:01 AM UTC

babyent wrote: post #473

saagarjha wrote: post #467

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is of course a personal choice but I really can't understand people's insistence that a train that takes a single minute longer than a plane ride is inferior. I actually like planes, especially going down the California coast, which is pretty much every day of the year. But plane seats are cramped, and half the time you can't use your computer even if you wanted to. I usually fly from SJC if I want to go to LAX,…

The train will use shared tracks. I will bet one million dollars it will run into scheduling issues and when you’re stuck on land it will suck. Source: former Amtrack customer. Same story, and I doubt a project that’s been mismanaged so far will fare any better if actually realized.

I take the Caltrain to work almost every day and it's on shared tracks (in fact it will the same shared tracks that HSR uses). It's rarely late by more than a few minutes.

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

#475

Post by scroot » Fri, May 02, 2025, 9:43 PM UTC

cuuupid wrote: post #47

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…

You're right and everyone -- including government contractors -- has been quietly shouting this for ages, but existing efforts have already been ideologically co-opted and new efforts are too brash and can't wrap their head around spending more to save more. Also 18F was not truly shut down and still lives on at GSA, albeit only the worst parts. They're hard at work adding as much red tape as they can imagine to proc…

> Also 18F was not truly shut down and still lives on at GSA

No, 18F is gone. All of the staff were fired and the organization no longer exists within TTS.

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

#476

Post by jonahrd » Tue, May 06, 2025, 2:59 PM UTC

jltsiren wrote: post #279

bombcar wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. A huge part of these projects is proving to the public the value. So even a short, direct line is useful - as some will start to use it and then extending it becomes a simple "this thing we have is good, it should be good more."

But the short direct line might also not get built, if the projections show passenger volume will not be high enough to justify the costs. Passenger rail has high fixed costs and low marginal costs. Even with high-speed rail, you generally want to maximize the number of passengers rather than speed. Making detours to nearby major cities often makes sense, while stopping at smaller cities the route already passes thro…

I know this is super late and nobody will likely see it, but the population of Quebec + Ottawa together is 18% of the population of Montreal + Toronto.

And the amount of track to connect the 4 cities together is double the simple Montreal-Toronto route -- on paper. In reality it's much larger, because most of the track along the Montreal-Toronto corridor is useable for HSR, but the proposed Ottawa-Toronto stretch is the one that needs a lot of new track.

There already are trains connecting to all of these cities, so HSR would still benefit people trying to get from, say, Toronto to Quebec City (the current rail service has a ~30 min stop in Montreal anyway, a transfer wouldn't add any real delay in that respect, and you'd cut down several hours of the journey with HSR service for the first leg). I'm simply saying that it would be great to just lay the damn track for HSR between the two largest Canadian cities, and deal with the smaller ones down the road.