Huge supporter of rail but sadly I believe there are a number of mistakes being made. This is a classic example of how projects like this in the US need to be monolithic, self contained, and gold plated to the hilt. The correct action would have been for CA to incrementally acquire and build railways along a number of corridors. Take the SF bay for example. There should be one agency running Caltrain, the Capitol Corridor, the ACE. It should electrify and improve all the routes. Extend reach to Monterey and other Central Valley locations. And do the same in Southern California.
The incompatibility of CAHSR with other rail strikes me as a repeat of the BART mistake.
Other successful high-speed rail systems (France's TGV, for example) also have dedicated rights-of-way, not shared with older equipment, and rail physically built to different standards (specially welded). You really don't want genuinely high-speed trains (300 km/h) running on the same tracks as anything slower, in normal operation. And if you try to build a high-speed system on earlier rights-of-way, you get something like Acela, in the US Northeast corridor. It can go at ~150 mph on track that can support it, but there are only a few miles of the route between Boston and Washington can support that. Net: it's only half an hour faster than conventional rail on the same route and track -- and something like half the difference is accounted for by the conventional trains making a lot more stops.
Correct. A difference is they start by thinking of (and running) the rail network as a whole system of supporting lines. Then add high speed railway segments to the network like expressways along key routes. This is what I think CA should do/have done. It's not too late actually, they could set up a "Caltrak". Develop a state wide rail plan that covered everything but urban metros, and begin buying assets/access and merging them into one whole network. What the CAHSR is building could continue, maybe with some adaptations of that plan, to just be those "expressway" sections mentioned.
This. I know HSR is sexy, but for the money California should put in a conventional rail network first. People would take the train between San Francisco and LA, say, if speeds were comparable to driving.
I had to look this up when you said "specially welded"...
As far as I can tell, TGV tracks are built to vey tight tolerances, but Continuous Welded Rail (CWR) is a worldwide standard on new railway lines, nothing special. I most recently saw some thermite welding equipment just about to be used in Dublin (Ireland) during the laying of new tramway tracks. So there's nothing exotic about the welding process, though it is quite dramatic.
European high-speed rail systems have some dedicated rights of way, but they definitely didn't start that way. They are systems that are integrated with regional and urban rail, and have grown to have more dedicated higher speed sections over time. Compatibility is the main reason for the success of the TGV and ICE, for example over the failed Transrapid maglev system.
All track with passenger rail on it should be welded, so not sure what your point is. Also, every passenger rail should ideally be electrified; more freight trains should be electrified as well.
Yes high speed track is built to much tighter tolerances, but high speed trains can go on lower class tracks with slower speed. Plenty of ICE trains in Germany run on 160 km/h track. Extreme examples include TGVs being pulled by diesel trains to reach beach resorts.
> European high-speed rail systems have some dedicated rights of way, but they definitely didn't start that way.
TGV was most definitely started that way. It was engineered to be able to run on regular railway ("standard gauge high-speed train") so that the existing "inner-city" rails could be used to reach inside existing metropolis, but it was designed primarily to run on new specific rights of way, regular service started on the dedicated "LN1" (now LGV Sud-Est) between Paris and Lyon: the line is 409km (254mi) for a total ride distance (station to station) of 425km (264mi).
> They are systems that are integrated with regional and urban rail, and have grown to have more dedicated higher speed sections over time.
The size of the dedicated high-speed network grew over time, but high-speed trains were always intended to run on high-speed networks, there's just no point otherwise, "regular" trainsets will reach older lines's rated speed just fine.
I'm saying that your claim of european high-speed systems "definitely not having started with dedicated right of way" is absolute bullshit.
Yes they are standard gauge and can run on regular old rail and that's plenty useful, but no that's not what they were built for, it would be a complete waste of the rolling stock.
You don't understand what dedicated means in the American context - which is this discussion. It would mean complete incompatibility, and building new tracks and maybe stations downtown. This is not what EU high speed rail was built on, they use a lot of legacy lines, especially earlier on, especially in Germany. Without that it wouldve failed - not being able to reuse existing infrastructure is why maglev failed.
As an aside, calling an idea complete bullshit based on an nitpick is pretty weak, especially since you're wrong: when tgv started in September 1981, they only had part of the line constructed. Without compatibility, I.e. a completely dedicated system, you could've only traveled between two random towns.
> You don't understand what dedicated means in the American context
It means the exact same fucking thing in every context. Dedicated means infrastructure which exists solely for high-speed train, not that high-speed trains can only exist on the dedicated infrastructure.
> It would mean complete incompatibility
That's completely nonsensical. European high-speed lines are dedicated, non-high-speed trains do not run on them, it's the high-speed rolling stock which is compatible with older electrified rail lines because they use a standard gauge and compatible/switchable electrical feed (some of the more complex rolling stock having to cross multiple borders can handle 4 different power inputs).
> This is not what EU high speed rail was built on, they use a lot of legacy lines
And they use dedicated infrastructure and have done so from the start.
> As an aside, calling an idea complete bullshit based on an nitpick is pretty weak
It's not a nitpick to point out that your statement is factually entirely incorrect.
> especially since you're wrong: when tgv started in September 1981, they only had part of the line constructed.
That was still a dedicated right-of-way which it started with, putting the lie to your statement.
> Without compatibility
That has nothing to do with your original statement. Your statement was not that high-speed rolling stock should be compatible with legacy rail and able to use it. Your statement was that european high-speed rail "definitely didn't start" with "dedicated rights of way", and further that high-speed rail only have some dedicated rights of way.
Probably a different mistake but BART uses 5'6" rail gauge. Standard US rail gauge is 4'8.5". This means that every railcar, every everything, has to be custom made with no economies of scale.
> BART uses 5'6" rail gauge. Standard US rail gauge is 4'8.5".
Interesting. When I saw this, I wondered if it was to match another standard gauge that was judged to be superior. But, looking at the list of rail gauges on wikipedia[0], 5'6" is the gauge for railways in India ("Indian broad gauge" to be specific). The initial BART rolling stock seems to have been build by Rohr, Inc.[1], which is based in California. So it seems unlikely that they were benefiting from any economies of scale from Indian rail construction. Rohr also seems to have built rolling stock for the Washington, D.C. metro, which uses a near-standard 4'8.25" gauge[2].
There is the theory that Rohr was an aerospace company and didn't know about standards; I find this hard to believe. Some say there was a study about car dynamics. But the article I read said that no one actually remembers. The design docs are in a transportation library in Monterey and they apparently don't say. Here's a collection of theories, all plausible with no confirming evidence:
if, 150+ years ago, when we were building all the rail infrastructure in India, someone said - that there would be no fast line from Delhi to London in 100 years - people would think you were nuts - right now it's tricky to get from London to Berlin, India is near impossible
It is pretty common knowledge why they did this. Original plans for the BART had it traveling over the Golden Gate Bridge into Marin County. Due to high winds across the bridge, they wanted a wider gauge to prevent trains from tipping.
With strange, custom-construction-requiring stuff like this, I tend to wonder how much of it would be explained by "help self/a buddy get rich". It's practically guaranteeing that there's going to be a single company supporting it for all time, which is a potentially-extremely-lucrative business deal.
If that's the case, obfuscating the reasons for these decisions is a rational move.
It's a bit cynical to say this but running HSR on an incompatible network protects it against future politicians who may seek to sabotage it by merging networks.
This sounds similar to the reason why the Glasgow Subway runs on a 4' (1219mm) gauge: to stop it from being taken over by the numerous (at the time privately owned) railways around the city which were all standard gauge.
I want to believe that the different gauge standards is a bit like the proliferation of programming languages in software - they solve their slightly different problem space well. Is this true?
What's the incompatibility? It's 4' 8.5" standard gauge with 25KV AC catenary. (BART is 5' 6" with 1KV DC third rail, both of which are unique to BART.)
The construction process does seem to be insufficiently standardized. There's all that falsework and ground paving. Compare the way it's done in China, with standardized bridge sections placed on pylons by a very specialized machine.[1]
They're insisting on a 50" above rail platform height for starters. Higher than anywhere else in the world and incompatible with all other rail in the US let alone CA. There is no comprehensive planning between the different agencies running commuter and regional rail and CAHSR to work towards common inter-operable standards. This should be state wide, if not across the whole west coast. (We really need state wide rail planning.)
50" is about normal. US northeast corridor is 48 inches; China is 49.2". Japan's Shinkansen is 49.2" EU high speed rail is much lower, requiring bogies between cars.
Eurostar does, and some TGV trainsets do. But some other high speed rail trainsets in Europe don't.
If the floor is below the top of the wheels, there has to be a narrow section at the car ends. The wheels have to go someplace. The lost space can be minimized by sharing a bogie between two cars.
(If the floor is below the axle line, as with ultra low floor trams, it's really complicated.)
Eurostar is the exception to every train. It's a monster of complexity because it has to work on three systems. It also does not have 550mm platform height. I think it has 750?
> some TGV trainsets
But not because of the platform height but because of stability in case of a crash. The TGVs with bogies between the cars has the same general height setup as the traditional ones.
> (If the floor is below the axle line, as with ultra low floor trams, it's really complicated.)
Sure, but that's hardly relevant here. Trams are generally set up completely different. Vienna for instance has the ULF tram and it's being phased out because such a low floor setup is just generally a bad idea for many different reasons. The new rolling stock will be Bombardier Flexity.
Eurostar is 760mm. The EU TSI requires 550mm or 760mm; the UK rail network has a blanket exemption excluding it from that (platforms are more-or-less universally 915mm in the UK).
A large part of what made the shinkansen work in ways that the current US rail system doesn't is its dedicated right of way, so I think building it separately makes some sense.
sharing with freight otrain slower commuter trains really reduces the value of HSR, especially on an older, slower right of way.
Capitol Corridor improvements from Richmond to San Jose are something that could be done right now to dramatically improve transportation in the region. And all we need to do is nationalize the UPRR. Who would complain, really?
In Toronto and surrounding area we've seen the expansion of our suburban rail network, through incremental purchase of track, over the past decade. It's owned by one company (Metrolinx, which is a gov. Body) and it seems to be working out well. It's taken a long time (it feels like) to see progress in certain corridors but the rider ship and effect its having on the surrounding regions of Toronto is clearly identifiable.
This approach has its problems too, but I do agree with you hear type of monolithic projects always become a boondoggle.
If I had known that they were going to run this through the Central Valley instead of down the coast where it belongs I never would have voted for it. It should have gone straight from la to Oakland or emeryville, turned and gone straight to Sacramento. Instead we have a convoluted mess of rail connections that take people places they don't even want to go (no offense to Bakersfield buts it's hardly a holiday destination).
It's a farse because of how it's getting implemented, and nobody is under any illusions this isn't going to turn into another bay bridge budget monster in California.
Still a rail proponent, but bitterly disappointed in the implementation choices of this project.
Nah, the coast is too expensive; you have to go over a bunch of hills and deal with steep terrain and thick forests. The correct option is to go for the cheapest land available, which any private company (not sure this kind of thing should be privatized but it's a useful comparison imo) would have obviously gone for. That would be just west of I-5, up the eastern edge of the Central Valley. Throw in a few improvements to the E-W roads between [Modesto/Bakersfield/Santa Cruz/etc] and the train corridor (which can be put off a few years to raise money) and you end up with nearly the same level of service to those areas anyway. But because it's political and activists want train service to their towns because [ideology] or just for the property values, we get cost overruns while delaying the big prize: service from SF to LA.
The inner areas will be more likely to want transit to the endpoints than to each other. Of course having only two stops wouldn't pay for the train but it's probably easier to drive from Bakersfield to Fresno eg and you need a car both places whereas going to LA/SF without a car doesn't present a hassle. If you look at page 43 here on the ridership projections:
It looks like about 2/3 or so of the revenue is to either the MTC or SCAG regions, with the remainder dominated by the San Joaquin Valley. So while traffic may not be entirely between the endpoint it is highly concentrated in trips going to and from the endpoints, and for this purpose, driving 30 minutes down a freeway to the train might not be too much of an inconvenience for the residents of Modesto who despite technocrats' brainwashing ambitions will probably still like to drive cars in 2030. Plus they won't complain about a cheaper fare, even if road improvements take another ten years to get in place (the train is the important part).
I don't quite get how you're coming to 2/3 of revenue between MTC and SCAG regions (Its not adding up to that for me). It also isn't very clear: MTC has a projection for ridership to SCAG, but SCAG doesn't have projections for ridership to MTC but they do for the SJV?
I'm also not sure where this newer forecast model came from, but it seems highly subject to politicized biases: they basically asked individual regions to forecast their ridership and revenue to other regions, and then added it all up.
The original forecasts [0] were built off of SNCF forecast modeling expertise, which is one of the best in the world and also from a country with very similar geodemographic characteristics as California. For just the subsegment of LA-SF, less than 50% of revenue is between SF and LA, and the ridership between SF-SJV and LA-SJV adds up to approximately the same amount as LA-SF. In other words, going through the valley doubles revenue potential.
This isn't a new phenomenon. It has been noted by and (if necessary) relearned by railroad capitalists going all the way back to the foundation of railroads. For an example, read chapters 16-20 of this economic history of Railway Mania [1]. Railway demand between termini has almost always been overforecasted by railroad capitalists, and they either figure it out and start serving intermediate destinations or they go bankrupt. If they build the line from the very beginning by bypassing intermediate population centers, their overestimates of ridership will doom them to a fate they can't recover from, barring major track realignment.
A background in Operations Research gives me a professional social network of people across pretty much every industry, all of whom understand some of the hardest business and technical problems of their industry. Some of my contacts work on schedule optimization in Germany and Spain. One of the quotes that constantly gets spouted in their conferences is that HSR is politically successful because of its top speed, but it is commercially successful because of the first derivative of its speed. Top speed gets votes, but the ability to start and stop very quickly allows them to obtain very significant ridership boosts with very little degradation in average speed. This is a very distinct competitive advantage...they can do something that no airline could ever do. Between major termini, there will always be some form of competition with airlines, but intermediate stations will always be a veritable monopoly for rail.
>I don't quite get how you're coming to 2/3 of revenue between MTC and SCAG regions
I said "to either", not "between". I also didn't suggest cutting out intermediate stops, but I did allow them to move outside of the town centers. In other words, most travelers from SJV are going to either MTC or SCAG, not within SJV, and in particular this is not directly analogous to the 19th century because of the extensive road network and the popularity of cars. Similarly, putting the rail corridor 30-60 minutes from the town is probably OK since the majority of residents of those towns will probably be driving to the train anyway, while doing that in a horse-and-buggy economy will of course doom ridership.
From page 5 of your link:
LA-Bay = $735M
LA-SJV = $355
SJV-Bay = $346
...
Within SJV = $29
total = $2355
to [LA or Bay] = 735 + 355 + 346 = $1436 or 62% of total.
So over 90% of ridership from SJV is going to either SCAG or MTC or further. The data seem to comport with my estimate that in order to start recouping costs you need, at the very least, service to one endpoint. This doesn't mean you should remove intermediate stops but it does support the idea that SJV HSR customers are mostly traveling long distances and might not mind leaving town to get to the train. This is particularly true if parking fees can be reduced by moving the train station out of town, since the current projection is $12 which I'm afraid might be "per day" (nearly as bad as the airport!) and people hate that.
The report I linked notes that the projection is for cars to continue accounting for 93% of intra-regional travel demand: i.e. while "the world is local" as your link states I have a hard time believing that market insights from a world without cars will translate readily to one with cars. Additionally, while some New Urbanists have started to try to build car-free cities, this goes against the wishes of the general public (including me) and I doubt it'll be popular in the politically conservative Central Valley. In this light, driving the train through the middle of Bakersfield as opposed to the outskirts looks like an attempt by the state to implement a vision of Bakersfield's future that the residents of Bakersfield did not really ask for. The majority of Central Valley customers will be driving, rather than walking/bussing, to the train even under the current plans. I'd also like to point out that, while there is an environmental motive for reducing our dependence on gasoline via cars, I personally expect electric cars to arrive sooner than a restructuring of the infrastructure of Central Valley cities that deprioritizes cars in favor of public transit. It could happen, but I'm not betting on it. So this:
>intermediate stations will always be a veritable monopoly for rail.
doesn't seem as clear to me as it does to you. And while as you mention the projections may have underestimated ridership in the (less-infrastructure-keen) non-city regions, they also assume a 50% real increase in the cost of auto travel, which as noted may be softened or reversed by the adoption of battery-powered vehicles. Therefore, Dionysus Lardner's observation that the median trip in 1846 was about 15 miles long probably would not apply in 2025.
As you've probably inferred, most of my background in this area is political and personal rather than technical. So, for example, I don't really know if moving the train line out of Tulare actually results in a significant savings on land and/or a reduction in construction time (especially this!), without which my whole point is moot. But I do not think that Fresno is analogous to a city in Germany, nor do I have a desire to turn it into one. Americans like cars, despite the powerful people with professional social networks who want to control us.'
edit: agh this is a bit of a mess, I hope it isn't too confrontational, and I appreciate you sharing your expertise.
>I did allow them to move outside of the town centers.
Which is the case with a number of the shin- stations on the shinkansen lines. (Although, being Japan, those stations are still well-connected to the city transit systems and they're not that far out of the traditional town centers.)
I would agree that having two major city termini is a huge determinant of demand. I definitely wouldn't suggest starting with one city, although branch lines can definitely be built at lower risk levels once you have a strong backbone.
I've seen overviews of the LGV models to know that they aren't making decisions on where to stop based purely on politics (I'm sure there are some politics involved, but the schedule optimization models are very objective). Those optimization models take into account things like cannibalization, where most riders from two close small towns can be served by one station in between them, only losing a small percent over a situation with two stations. But mostly the model is an LP of the total revenue lost from removing a station vs the total revenue gained from adding a station, and the revenue projections obtained from a forecast model that predicts the cartesian set of all possible orig-dest pairs of a line. And these models have resulted in stops in tiny towns like Loche (pop 35k), Macon (pop 35k), and Le Creusot (pop 22k).
> It could happen, but I'm not betting on it. So this: [...] doesn't seem as clear to me as it does to you.
In France, the outlying towns are not much different from California. They may not be as car-centric as places like Madera or Merced, but they are at least as car-dependent. Density is low enough that cars are still a necessity. And while some of these stations avoid going directly through the towns they serve, very few are more than a 3-5 km from the town center.
From the perspective of someone who grew up in Stockton, I'd say that concerns about car dependency are still overblown outside of intra-SJV trips in general. If the destination is a line terminus, transit/taxis are abundant enough to use easily, and that leaves the trip to the station as the only deterrent. But getting a ride isn't that big of a deal. Living there, you almost always have access to someone that can give you a ride to the airport 45 minutes away if you need it...a trip across town should be pretty easy. Taxis are available on a scheduled ride basis, and most businesses with regular travelers maintain a list of van services that handle trips to and from airports. The concern is real, but I think most valley-dwellers have adapted to their situation quite well.
I'm not an expert on property values in the valley (haven't lived there for 2 decades), but I can imagine the possibility of it being cheaper to build through the cities simply because they already have freight ROWs running through them. Getting a ROW easement on an existing un-partitioned property tends to be fraught with peril. It is easy for a large land owner to hold a line hostage for higher prices if they know that one "no" ruins an entire plan. Buying up existing freight ROW (which I believe is part of the plan) would definitely be easier and faster...it might also end up being cheaper.
And no worries about being confrontational. I wasn't trying to, and I didn't interpret your response as confrontational either.
> If I had known that they were going to run this through the Central Valley instead of down the coast where it belongs I never would have voted for it.
The coast would be a stupid place to run high speed rail; it would be both more expensive to the lay the track there and less useful.
> no offense to Bakersfield buts it's hardly a holiday destination
No, it's not. I was born in and grew up there, and I'm glad I left (though as a kid, I thought it was a nice place to live).
But it (and Fresno, and the CV in general) does have something that the coast and SF/LA doesn't have: Low-cost housing/property.
Imagine being able to live in Bako, Fresno, etc - and commute quickly to SF or LA. By high-speed rail, it'd probably only take an hour or two each way. Provided that it didn't cost a lot (or you could get monthly 2-way passes), it would be a great way for those who want to work in SV or such to do so, and be able to afford to live comfortably in a home with a family.
In fact, the idea is interesting enough to me to consider moving back to California (I'd love a tech job in the SF area, but the cost of living - mainly housing - just blows that idea out of the water).
Seems to be the kicker with using these trains for commuter purposes. Everywhere you look - Switzerland, Japan, Spain, Eurostar - the prices seem to be at either high double digits or low triple digits one way.
The way it was sold to voters in California is that it would become a revenue generator, so some additional padding is needed for profit margins.
Seriously - trains should go where the people are. The people are in the central valley. Between Santa Barbara and Santa Cruz the population is very light and the terrain is very difficult.
It wasn't until the 20th century that access to the Big Sur area was possible. And even today for over a hundred miles highway 1 is the only access.
Fresno - 509,000 people
Bakersfield - 363,000 people
The first segment connects 1 million people with a high quality dedicated rail connection. Take a trip on the San Joaguin train - that train slow as it is, is very popular.
Next take a look at a map. Los Angeles is due south of Lake Tahoe. So going to central valley is not a detour or some other political game.
The real political mess is the choice of Pacheco Pass (hwy 152) rather than the Altamont Pass.(I-580) Once again Altamont Pass - a lot of people. hwy 152 - crickets in comparison.
Not every train needs to stop at every station. If you design the tracks and stations properly, you can operate a mix of non-stop trains and other trains that take some or all of the stops in between, and you can vary the composition depending on actual ridership.
BART is already being extended to Livermore (just west of the Altamont pass), and already goes to Dublin, so that area is at least already well-served by regional transit.
Going over the Pacheco Pass allows the train to hit San Jose and the Silicon Valley without going through huge windy detours, which has a lot more people in it than the Altamont Pass area.
Making trains go where people aren't relieves the pressure on ever increasing prices in populous areas. People will have a realistic option of living in cheaper areas.
AND it allows real estate speculators to get a much higher rate of return when they build up cookie cutter neighbourhoods in cheap land that is soon to be linked up by rail.
Both a good and a cynical reason for this behaviour, which is why I don't think you'll ever see it change (no matter where you are).
It is really disappointing that it doesn't at least go near the coast. I doubt they'd be able to eminent domain coastal lands now that california homeowners are so politically powerful now, but they at least could have tried to build it along the 101 so it was driving/bus distance to the coast.
If you want to take a beautiful coastal train ride, nothing beats the Amtrak from LA to San Diego.
In germany they have a similar problem, if you want to build a train rail through some unimportant backwaters, these backwaters will want you to make a stop in their little cities.
There is a relative easy solution to that problem, one that I suspect has happened quite a few times in history. The budget to staff and maintain the stop is put on the local budget of the backwater, and sooner or later a local politician will want to reclaim those costs.
If you look carefully at a map, LA is actually as far East as Lake Tahoe. It's confusing but what this means is essentially going through the Central Valley is not really particularly out of the way. In fact that's why the fastest way to drive to La is on I5. It was also important to incorporate all major metropolitan areas in the state for political reasons.
There is such an effort for LA to Vegas. Its been setback as it was a joint venture between a US firm and a Chinese partner. The Chinese pulled out, however, because of the requirement that high speed trains be manufactured in the US (there are currently no such manufacturers).
Another potential concern is that it runs through some good farmland, which CA has some of the best of in the world.
I would love to have an HSR along the coast however. When I was in Taiwan it was amazing being able to get to the bottom of the island in a couple hours.
We have more good potential farmland in CA than we have water. I don't see the impact to agriculture as being very large if the water allotment can be transferred.
>some good farmland, which CA has some of the best of in the world.
Is that a joke? California is a terrible place to be farming. Farming in California is only viable because farmers are allowed unfettered access to water, depriving it from residents (who are told they should turn off the water in the shower while farmers are pouring untold millions of gallons on crops that could be grown somewhere actually suited to farming).
From a nytimes article
"the valley is the world’s largest patch of Class 1 soil, the best there is. The 25-degree (or so) temperature swing from day to night is an ideal growing range for plants. The sun shines nearly 300 days a year. The eastern half of the valley (and the western, to some extent) uses ice melt from the Sierra as its water source, which means it doesn’t have the same drought and flood problems as the Midwest. The winters are cool, which offers a whole different growing season for plants that cannot take the summer heat. There’s no snow."
By volume (though certainly not by quality), I assume the Central Valley is the largest producer. Warmer temperatures mean more production but often low quality stuff.
You think two buck chuck is made from grapes grown in ritzy Napa valley? Large majority of California wine comes from grapes grown in the central valley.
* The Central Valley is California's largest wine region stretching for 300 miles (480 km) from the Sacramento Valley south to the San Joaquin Valley. This one region produces nearly 75% of all California wine grapes and includes many of California's bulk, box and jug wine producers like Gallo, Franzia and Bronco Wine Company.*
It's actually not false. If you read the article you posted, you will see that half of the water is used for environmental uses. That means is not used by humans, but "let go".
So if you sum the rest, agriculture does use 80% of the water used by humans.
Directing water to a tree to grow almonds, and directing it to a stream to support the delta smelt are both human directed usages. You can't just count the usages you don't like to make the number look big.
If you're looking at it this way, that every single stream is managed, then yes, you're right. I rather think that we develop only the water sources that make the most sense and leave the rest be.
This way we could talk about the incredible amounts of gold that is diluted in oceans that we could harvest "anytime" [0]. It's around 21x more than humans mined in the whole history.
"Solely relying on these statewide volumes is controversial because they don't consider the fact that most of the volume of water used for environmental purposes includes flows down Wild and Scenic Rivers in the North Coast where there is no practical way to recover it for either agricultural or urban use because it lacks many connections to the statewide water supply system."
The problem isn't that farming occurs, it's that some stupid crops are grown in California--like alfalfa. It uses a ton of water and it's not very profitable.
But the state can grow a lot of crops that are worth the water usage.
All that is needed is to price water with a market mechanism rather than first come, first serve free water.
> If I had known that they were going to run this through the Central Valley instead of down the coast where it belongs I never would have voted for it.
Do everyone a favor. In the future, when such projects come up for vote, assume the politicians are lying to you and, most importantly, they are as incompetent as a truck driver attempting open heart surgery. That's a good start. Then do some research and see if in the last fifty years they have ever completed any project on time, on budget and without major problems.
Armed with that reality, please don't vote to give incompetent liars the ability to create another mess and screw us all, again.
Forget high speed rail, where's the commuter trains? It seems ridiculous that in most US cities public transit is mostly non-existent. Traffic is bad in most major US cities you'd think people would be jumping for this as urbanization increases.
Those are covered under other bond measures. LA has a multi-generation plan [1] for building out several new rail lines, busways, etc. It's harder to find an overarching document for the Bay Area because there are too damn many counties and transit agencies around here, but there are lots of projects -- BART to San Jose, Caltrain electrification, new rail lines and improved lines in SF, rebuilding the Dumbarton Rail Bridge -- that are in various stages of planning and construction.
Well, without really disagreeing, you tend to need a layout where hub & spoke makes sense. With older east coast cities (e.g. NYC & Boston) you have commuter rail lines radiating out from central city stations from which people can walk or take the subway to jobs connecting to suburban stations with parking.
It doesn't work if you don't have that central density & transit. It doesn't generally work in the opposite direction either. (Urban dwellers to suburban jobs.)
Lost in the high speed rail bit, the CHSR is actually what you're asking for. Because it serves as commuter rail in the Bay Area and LA Basin. And to a lesser extent elsewhere. That's the actual reason it's expensive.
Part of the fallout of this is likely that the electrification and modernization of Caltrain will die, since it's dependent on funding from the high-speed rail project.
Caltrain is currently running 30-year-old diesel locomotives and 30-year-old passenger carriages on many of its trains, because they have no funding to get more modern equipment or electrify the line. Minor breakdowns have been increasing for a while, with occasional major problems (like last week when they had a fire in one of the locomotives during the evening rush hour).
Not sure why they decided to build an elaborate viaduct [1] to allow for a high-speed curve radius in Southeast Fresno, if Fresno will be a likely stop anyway. Just make all trains stop in Fresno, a place conveniently midway between SF and LA and desperate for improved connections with California's more prosperous areas. After all, isn't the whole point of HSR to improve connectivity between more than just the two termini, since those who want to go direct between SF and LA will always have a direct flight as an option?
> since those who want to go direct between SF and LA will always have a direct flight as an option
Therein lies the problem. The cost of the line can't be justified unless it provides a viable alternative to flying between SF and LA, because that's the only conceivable way to get enough ridership. The problem is the distance between SF and LA means being competitive with flying in terms of travel time is incredibly difficult. To achieve parity the trains will need to average around 220 MPH, which is incredibly optimistic. Existing high speed rail lines rarely run at 200 MPH even momentarily due to high operating costs.
All this means that most trains will have to run nonstop between SF and LA to even have a hope of competing with flying. If the trains fail to draw passengers away from the airlines, ridership will be far too low to sustain the line without absurdly high subsidies.
> The cost of the line can't be justified unless it provides a viable alternative to flying between SF and LA,
I have no trouble imagining that the train can compete with flying between SF and LA. Even if the train has to stop in several backwater towns along the way.
The shuttle flights between SFO/SJC and LAX are completely unreliable. When I was doing the SF-LA haul regularly, I'd be delayed (delayed!) by 6+ hours at least once per month. That's longer than it takes to drive. Do you really think the high speed train will take that long to travel between LA and the Bay Area?
So what if the minimum time of the train is a little longer than a flight? The expected time enroute is still much less.
"I have no trouble imagining that the train can compete with flying between SF and LA. Even if the train has to stop in several backwater towns along the way."
Especially if the train stops in "several backwater towns" (Fresno and Bakersfield ain't particularly glamorous, but I'd hardly call them "backwaters"; I digress...), this will automatically be more useful than just an ordinary flight between SFO and LAX for that reason alone.
In addition, the time required to travel from each airport to where you actually want to be can be much less, since train stations can be built much closer to major metropolitan areas. Plus, weather is far less of a problem; when the planes at SFO are grounded due to fog, the trains will still run on time.
For me, the line is effectively useless without Phase 2 (since that connects to Sacramento). With Phase 2 added, you'd have a high-speed connection to all four of California's major cities, significantly improving the already-pretty-great utility of the line.
That ignores the fact that there are already 6 airports in Southern California and 3 (5 if you include Central Valley airports) in Northern California. Do you really think getting to Disneyland or Pasadena will be faster if you take a train to downtown LA than if you flew to SNA or BUR or ONT?
And that ignores the fact that not all of those airports are going to have the same airline coverage as the major ones (namely: SFO and LAX) - and even if they do, certainly not with a significant selection of flights, and certainly not at readily-affordable rates. To the average traveler, they might as well not exist; even Amtrak or Greyhound are more viable.
Also, again: weather is still a major factor for any airport.
Absolutely false - for NorCal-SoCal trips, all of the aforementioned airports have plentiful flights at similar cost to SFO and LAX. And weather primarily affects SFO - OAK and SJC rarely have the same problems as SFO.
"The shuttle flights between SFO/SJC and LAX are completely unreliable. When I was doing the SF-LA haul regularly, I'd be delayed (delayed!) by 6+ hours at least once per month."
I'm curious how that happened to you - I used to fly SFO-LAX from time to time, and was surprised that they didn't even really worry about me missing my flight - they just told me to catch the next one in line. United runs 27 flights daily from SFO to LAX, and presumably have some extra planes they can inject into the system if needed... (SFO is a United Hub)
If it rains at SFO or there is fog they have to close 2 of the 4 runways and now you got massive delays. I've had a flight delayed from 8pm to 1:30am last year. Having lots of flights going the same way doesn't help, if the flights cannot take off.
And what do you do if there's a suicide (unfortunately) on the HSR? The Caltrain that runs down the Peninsula from SF to SJ has a pretty high suicide rate; high enough, that there are people posted to look for potential suiciders.
Part of the cost is improving the peninsula rail corridor for full grade separation, along with the suicide prevention improvements Caltrain is already performing on the corridor. When it's built, there should be a lot fewer places for suicide and a lot tighter control.
Mostly a combination of needing to travel at particular times to particular airports.
The last two flights from SJC to LAX each evening seemed to be the most often delayed. You can't exactly hop on the next flight if it doesn't leave until the following morning.
Morning flights to SFO are often delayed due to weather, and fighting peninsula traffic to get to work sucks. BUR-SJC on Southwest would have been optimal from a flying perspective, but LAX was a shorter drive.
I assumed that the Northeast Corridor (which I believe is the only place where Amtrak actually makes any money) would be much different from other routes but that actually isn't the case. Acela is better than the long distance routes but not by a huge amount.
Of course OTA % doesn't account for the size of the miss and I've heard plenty of stories of long distance trains sitting for hours while multi-mile long freights go by.
You clearly have never taken Amtrak over distances. I have taken Amtrak numerous times Emeryville - Denver.
The reality is:
1. if the siding is only 1km long - the Amtrak train is taking the siding as the freight train will not fit on it.
2. if the dispatcher decides the freight train goes ahead of Amtrak -- there is no lawyer around to argue the point.
3. if there is a long section of single tracking, with freight backed up the opposite direction, the dispatcher allows the all the same direction freights to move. ( 2+ hour delays when that happens )
4. If there is enough of a delay and a freight train crew in front goes outlaw - then that train stops until a replacement crew is brought in... which usually results in the Amtrak crew going outlaw as well.
It has gotten a lot, lot better and the scenery is beautiful - but please don't kid yourself about the realities on the ground. Amtrak has to stay in the good graces of the railroad companies especially with a hostile congress.
Amtrak is the contracted operator for a number of commuter rail services, such as MARC. Not sure if that counts as "by or for Amtrak".
The real issue is that often operationally, a passenger train has to stop for a freight train. If you have a 1000' siding that you have to have a 6 car passenger train pass a 30 car freight train at, the passenger train is going to have to stop for the freight train. That doesn't even take into consideration other factors like how freight dispatchers don't like to stop hazmat/"hot" trains for safety reasons.
Agreed. Except that it's the freight railways that generally own the trackage in most (all?) places where it's shared with Amtrak. And the freight railways generate significantly more revenue from that trackage (about $75B annually vs $3B).
Not to the freight line companies owning the networks (Apparently there is a law saying that Amtrack has priority, but enforcing it has as of now just lead to years of lawsuits, without useful results)
This is the problem with the stupid American capitalist system. You have these sorts of problems.
If it were all controlled by the Government, like it is in other countries, nobody would need to have 'priority'. You just schedule the trains properly.
How silly you are, to expect government to be responsible for coordinating things. The only reasonable purpose for government is to hand out candy to friends, relatives, and people who can keep you in government.
I live about 30 minutes from BOS by bus/rail. Let's say everything is timed perfectly: I get TSA Precheck, 10 minute curb-to-gate, 5 minute wait, boarding commences at T-20, first in line for takeoff.
That means I leave for the airport 75 minutes before my flight, fly for 1 hour, arrive in JFK/LGA/EWR, and then take about 30-40 minutes of public transit to my destination in Manhattan. And that's the ideal.
There's some break-even point for travelers between the more relaxed pace of train travel as opposed to the efficiency of air travel, but BOS - NYC is still within the realm of the train, even at Amtrak speeds.
If you can get the trains to take you directly into the city center, it can often be a better option.
That's because Boston and NYC are both navigable without a car. Only one side of the SF-LA link can claim to be close to that ideal.
But the time and hassle of airport parking and security and delays might be able to keep a 3.5 hour train ride viable even in CA. That would require a train system that allowed passengers to step through a quick scanner with no line and onto the train without queueing or carefully organized boarding. Lots of train systems used to do that in the USA but the bureaucrats don't like passengers freely walking around platforms by heavy machinery or directing themselves or quick predictable security procedures. Acela has been abandoning efficient and established traditional practices to copy instead the airports. How long are they going to stand for a train system that isn't as awful as airport security and boarding?
Since politicians can't risk being blamed for trouble, we have no ability to control the bureaucrats and every high speed transportation system will inevitably get to be as bad as airports.
If rail could be built at the same costs as in France or Japan (or even, optimistically, Spain or Korea), to wit, $20-30MMM, you could justify it just for saving the cost of airport expansion. But at $80-120MMM it's lunacy to proceed.
I live in LA and travel to the Bay for work frequently. I can walk to a Metro station from my house in Highland Park in 10 minutes and be at Union Station in 13 minutes. If I could spend 3 hours on the train to SF from Union instead of driving to Burbank, arriving an hour before my flight, and then spending an hour on a plane, I would do it every time.
You can't make a city transit and walking friendly by grafting rail infrastructure over a car-based design. You need to allow development on narrower streets without minimum parking requirements on every lot and you need more population density.
You'd have to actually change the rules and overcome the NIMBYs. Some problems can't be solved with cash.
Pretty much this, if its sub-5 story slum (aka most US cities & nearly all suburbs) overlaying rail is a bandaid. The city was built wrong in the first place, and needs to gain density, rail can keep a dense city economically viable by providing reliable, rapid transit. There is no good transit solution for suburban sprawl.
I think the point is that one of the things making train travel to, say, Manhattan attractive vs. air is that I can just walk, subway, or take a shortish cab trip to my destination from Penn Station. That's a big advantage over getting into Manhattan from any of the NYC airports.
If the answer to arriving in LA is "you need to rent a car in any case" (which it often will be), then you lose one area of train potential advantage.
I'm one of those people that go NYC to Boston and NYC to DC. I work in the dining car with laptop and WiFi. Only take planes when taking early AM flights to get to Boston or DC early in the morning.
That theory doesn't really work for LA because it's so spread out that you are very likely going to need to take a car to your final destination regardless of which mode of transportation you use to get into the city.
Depends what part of LA your in, but in most cases your absolutely right. Most areas are designed with cars being the prime transport, with sidewalks halfheartedly tacked onto high speed roads. I'd never walk along that by choice!
320 kph is the maximum cruising speed. Average speed for a trip is typically much less than that because the trains can only hit 320 kph on certain stretches of track. Even 320 kph is about 30 kph short of what the California trains are planing to average. From what I understand the operating costs go up considerably between 320 kph and 350 kph due to the need for much more stringent track maintenance.
> 320 kph is the maximum cruising speed. Average speed for a trip is typically much less than that because the trains can only hit 320 kph on certain stretches of track.
France and Spain have those tracks in Europe.
The newer German tracks with 300km/h are operated at 300km/h with the ICE 3. Even through towns and tunnels. It's not the average speed, but a typical cruising speed on those tracks. France has more and longer high-speed tracks, thus the high-speed trains operate at higher average speed than in Germany.
Operating at 300km/h and beyond is indeed expensive. As are high-speed train in general. Still Western Europe now has an extensive amount of high-speed tracks:
Oh, most new track is designed for operation speeds far beyond what's commercially expected: it's very cheap to do (the primary requirement, after all, is about curve radius, which just affects your choice of route). The signalling, the overhead line equipment, the rolling-stock… all of that is all designed for the initial operational speed, because that does become expensive (or non-existent) if you want to push the speed up.
This is completely false. The entire flight demand of SF to LA is so pathetically low in comparison to the demand from the Cartesian set of intermediary routes that catering to just SF to LA would doom the project to failure. There isn't a successful HSR system in the world that hasn't already learned this lesson. Not only is Fresno crucial to ridership projections, but so are all the other small towns like Merced.
According to the figures released before the project, it will cost the same, but take twice as long to go from LA to SF compared to flying. No one is going to take the train instead of flying, except maybe John Madden.
According to a quick look, a flight between LA and SF takes approximately 1.5 hours. So, a train would be 3 hours?
I'd wager a lot of people would take that. Once you factor in arriving at the airport an hour before your flight, along with the time taken to get to/from both airports to the actual centre of the city as opposed to where the airports actually are, 1.5 hours actually starts to sound like an improvement.
The relevant duration for an honest comparison is door-to-door timing -- lime left origin to time arrived at ultimate destination. Travel to/from airport, security, checked bag retrieval, early arrival for margin-of-error to not miss a flight, etc. favors rail, making the overall time-in-transit difference less.
Plus, we could see added environmental impact taxation for short-hop flights (carbon tax, if nothing else) that would raise airfare costs.
This. I don't even drive to Giants games anymore (South Bay to Mission Bay area of SF), although I have full-season parking passes -- I drive to the nearest CalTrain station with safe parking, then I can read or do online work. And the parking passes sell at a profit.
I have a friend who cannot fly due to temperament. He's tried everything from hypnotherapy, to beta blockers, to getting near black out drunk. His fear, which he knows is irrational, has only worsened over time.
He would take such a train.
Another thing is that a one hour flight from SF to LA means, 30 minutes to airport, 30 minutes to get through gate, 15 minutes to board, 10 minutes on tarmac, an hour flight, 10-20 minutes for landing/deplaning, 15 minutes to ground transport.
So, two hours seems ballpark.
Trains typically don't have as much security and boarding is simplified. I'm thinking plane and train travel times door-to-door would be comparable.
Finally, train seats are usually much more comfortable than seats on domestic flights.
I think a substantial number of travelers would use the train instead of flying.
I am frequently traveling between Portland and Seattle. I've tried airplane, bus and train. The train is the slowest of the three. However, The Lyft ride from SeaTac to downtown Seattle costs more than the train ride. The train is also so much more comfortable. Unless I am under time pressure I take the train. The bus frequently smells like porter potty which eliminated that cheaper and faster option. Of course the LA-SF distance is about twice as far, but it's also not supposed to be a shitty Amtrak train that has to constantly yield to cargo trains. I am super concerned about the stops in irrlevant cities though.
Not only that, but they presumably have never ridden on a train before.
Every Amtrak train I've been on (which, of course, is not the model of efficiency) takes on the order of two or three minutes for most intermediate station stops, if not less. The train stops, people leave, new passengers enter, and it starts rolling again. Stowing/gathering belongings, getting seated, lining up at the exits, and ticketing is all done while the train is in motion. It's not like having a flight layover.
You also lose time by slowing down and speeding up but that notwithstanding, you may have fewer intermediate stops with HSR (as is the case with Acela vs. Regional service) but you can't cut out intermediate stops. All you have to do is look at Shinkansen routes.
This is not 100% true and the situations that "not near anything" is true for are varied. DFW was located "in the middle of nowhare" ca. halfway between two cities when it opened. I visited there more in the past than now but "anything" was building up around it when I did go sporadically. LAX is not close to Downtown LA but there are lots of office buildings out there. San Diego's and Pheonix's airports are very close to Downtown. In the case of San Diego it would be difficult to do anything but reuse the existing railways. I suspect if you look around there are a range of airport distances and a range of abilities to get high-speed railways close to city centers, rather than everything setup like Heathrow vs London.
In Southern California this is utterly untrue. Burbank, Ontario, Santa Monica, Long Beach, and Orange County/Santa Ana are all airports with multiple daily flights to/from Northern California, and between them you're close to 75-80% of the Los Angeles area. A train that stop at union station downtown will be close to one place - downtown. LA doesnt really work that way though - it's ridiculously spread out.
It depends a lot too on how airports are connected to cities. While it admittedly probably takes a good hour from gate to hotel, the fact that I can hop on BART from SFO (or several train options from Heathrow to London) negates some of the airport vs. center city difference. Especially because it's not like you can just walk from a given downtown station to your final destination in all cases anyway.
310kph is probably the maximum cursing speed. I can't find precise distance information for AVE between Zaragoza and Barcelona, but it's somewhere around 320-330 km. The minimum travel time I see listed is about 1.5 hours. So conservatively the average speed is around 220 kph or 137 mph.
As I see it, the price of rail tickets will be pretty high.whats stopping the price of flights from being halved in the next couple of decades and killing this train service too?
My understanding and part of why I support the high speed rail project is this.
Airports in California coastal cities are near max capacity. And expansion is either very expensive[1] or near impossible. And would face even more community objections than the high speed rail project. So the airlines likely wouldn't try to compete with high speed rail. Instead they would try to attract more national and international travelers. Paradoxically to high speed rail would increase the airports area of service. Because one could then take the train + cab to the airport rather than drive 100 miles or take a puddle jumper.
[1] I offhand remember, between 500 million to 2 billion _each_.
Even if the airports are near max capacity (and I think that's probably only LAX) there could be a lot more passenger-miles.
Right now most SFO-LAX flights are on nothing larger than a 737 or A320, and on LAX-SJC I seem to wind up on some abominable regional jet.
There's a lot of room to increase capacity by flying wide bodies if the demand exists. Compare to the SYD-MEL route, a similar distance, where you're likely to wind up on an A330 or 767.
I was trying to be conservative. But yeah. Take the six or so coastal airports times a couple of billion each for expansion. And add that Bakersfield and Fresno are undeserved. That adds up to a big chunk of the money needed to build the Bay Area to LA Basin part of the project.
High speed trains are much better than flights for small commutes, after the expenses are payed, it will be cheaper, it's easier to get on a train than wait hours for flights to take off.
High speed rails are the future; flights are the past. Why would you not want to see this work out? Flying is quite annoying because it has constant delays, TSA, and hours of waiting in between.
It's not that I don't want to see it work out, or that I don't expect people would enjoy the ride more than flying. It sounds perfectly pleasant and nice.
But it has a pricetag of $64 billion. How much more exactly are they going to enjoy it, in dollar terms? How much is it worth sticking taxpayers so that wealthy SF<->LA commuters can have a slightly more pleasant experience?
While I tend to agree, on the right routes, planes can easily run on an hourly shuttle schedule. As happens for some city pairs. And we're one attack away from potentially having increased security for trains.
Not just SFO and LAX either, you have OAK, SJC and SFO up here, and ONT, BUR, LAX, LGB, and SNA down south. There are flights between any of those combinations many many times per day, and the locations involved are often much more convenient than the HSR depots will be.
The HSR depots are going to be downtown San Francisco, which is a lot more convenient than the pain in the arse SFO is, and LA Union Station, which is rapidly becoming a hub for rail lines going to Orange County, Santa Monica, Pomona, the South Bay, East LA, etc. LA Union station is rapidly becoming a rather good transit hub.
The airlines never asked for TSA. In fact the airlines would prefer doing their own screening like the old days. And 'crony capitalism?' That makes no sense.
The airlines asked for both retrospective and prospective relief from liability for the actual past (retrospective) and potential future (prospective) security failures in the wake of 9/11.
Nationalization of the security function was the mechanism for the prospective portion of that relief; since they no longer controlled the function, they would no longer be liable for any failures.
Now, they would have preferred immunity from liability while controlling the function, but even their allies in Washington couldn't sell that open-ended a handout publicly. But TSA security theater made adequate political cover for the real purpose.
Leaving aside excessive and largely ineffective security screening for flights in the US (and pretty much everywhere else), a lot of European high speed trains absolutely have metal detectors, luggage inspection, and document inspection. As do many buildings.
It doesn't take long to go through most of the time but then going through Pre-Check probably averages me 10 minutes. But I do leave a good buffer.
It's probably a bad idea to predicate travel time estimates on arriving at the train 3 minutes before it leaves and getting on.
Eurostar's the obvious one, but I've seen scanners at Gare du Nord for TGV/Thalys as well, and when we caught TGV from Barcelona Sants to Paris (Gare de Lyon, I think) we got marshalled into some sort of departure lounge at Sants. Only time I've ever seen that in Europe though. Oh and changing from Eurostar to ICE in Brussels we had our ID's checked before being able to get to the platform (this was on the 23rd of December though).
It currently serves as many passengers each year as the vastly larger Washington Dulles airport. It's quite the anomaly due to being in the capital. Despite many security and noise concerns, it all the Congress-folk love using it to get home, so it enjoys a great deal of political protection.
I don't think there's any hope of building new airports anywhere near city centers now. Some that already exist may hang on, but the security and noise concerns would easily NIMBY any new construction, not to mention the absurd expense of buying the land.
London city airport is a tiny airport, it would be terrible if this was a decent size.
It's bad enough having Heathrow where it is, with all the planes over London.
One good thing about the "Boris" island idea was that planes wouldn't have had to fly over London itself, which would have probably helped noise and pollution.
* more days when it would be fog bound
* interfere's with existing flight paths for AMS and BRU
* wrong side of London for most people
* ship full of high explosive not too far away
* higher likelihood of bird strikes as it's in the middle of area that's key for migratory birds
If Heathrow was to move somewhere along the M40 corridor is probably the best bet (and attach it to HS2)
Is there any reason Heathrow couldn't be moved out to the suburbs where expansion could take place to allow London to continue to be a worldwide travel hub, but then use high speed rail to connect with London proper?
Not sure what you're saying. Heathrow is sorta in the suburbs already--about an hour tube ride--but you can get from Heathrow to Paddington in about 15 minutes by Heathrow Express (which may or may not be a good value) with another rail project underway. Certainly Heathrow isn't going to be picked up and moved.
From what I've read, they've decided to focus on Bakersfield to points north first (whereas they were originally focused on the southern part of the route). Presumably the project pretty much has to complete the entire Phase 1 route (at minimum) at some point to avoid being a complete disaster. (There are doubtless benefits to connecting Fresno to SF but they almost certainly don't justify the project.)
Maybe. It will first arrive at San Jose's Diridon station, but the longer term plan is for the trains to go to the Transbay Terminal, which is in Downtown San Francisco.
However, a lot of things could happen, which would derail these plans.
Los Angeles and the Bay Area don't have a single metro area to put one in the middle of - that's why there are 5 airports in SoCal and 3 up north that all have frequent flights between them.
In China, the high speed rail tickets are just about equally as expensive as flights. Though not having to go through Chinese airport security and flights are worth it. No mobile devices allowed at all during flights!
> whats stopping the price of flights from being halved in the next couple of decades and killing this train service too?
The construction of the high-speed rail system is/will be heavily subsidized by the government. So presumably, the government will have a vested interest in keeping the train service running and will subsidize operating costs if airlines cut prices in that manner.
> the government ... will subsidize operating costs
By which you mean taxpayers will subsidize operating costs.
I wonder exactly how regressive the wealth transfer from the average middle-class California taxpayer to the California weekly-commute bullet-train businessperson will be, in practice.
This is my big reservation about HSR even as a huge proponent of rail transit. I live in a working class area of south LA and there is huge demand here for local/regional rail and other transit. Neither LA, despite its improvements over the last decade, nor the Bay Area, have anywhere near the needed levels of regional mass transit.
My big fear is that HSR will ultimately be subsidized by middle class Californians so business people and wealthy vacationers can travel between SF and LA at the expense of more regionally focused transit that has a greater impact on the lives of working/middle class people.
> By which you mean taxpayers will subsidize operating costs.
Yeah, exactly.
> I wonder exactly how regressive the wealth transfer from the average middle-class California taxpayer to the California weekly-commute bullet-train businessperson will be, in practice.
Yeah. And a lot of the funding for the rail project is already coming from Federal and State coffers (via taxpayer money or deficit spending), so this wealth transfer is already happening. There's at least $6 billion already allocated from Federal funding programs (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_High-Speed_Rail#Fin...) and the Proposition 1A required Federal Funds matching the $9.95 billion approved by bonds (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Proposition_1A_(200...). I don't know if the $6 billion in stimulus money "counts" towards the $9.95 billion in matching funds, nor do I know if the funds have been fully matched.
The subsidies are qualitatively different: If roads had to be paid for entirely from user fees in the form of gas or mileage taxes, they could be for effective rates not much higher than fuel prices of a few years ago. Capital and maintenance.
If you tried to charge passengers adequately to fund rail, the system would go into a death spiral, absent radical changes in consumer preferences.
Europe has significantly higher taxes on fuel yet still needs to subsidise roads from general taxes so I think if roads were properly funded it would be higher than fuel prices a few years ago.
Also if both rail and roads were funded only by users then rail would be the more attractive option.
Cost per passenger per mile is cheaper by rail than by road. It is just much more efficient.
If we then start to take into account the other costs such as pollution, land wasted on parking and wider roads, the increased area of municipal services that have to be covered because of the much lower density require for cars, and the massively increased health costs associated with a car lifestyle and trains not only are more cost efficient than cars they're an order of magnitude more cost efficient.
Trains are wildly efficient, they only use energy to overcome air and rolling resistances as energy used to accelerate is put back into the system during deceleration. They can pack many more people with much higher throughput. For example Crossrail in London is designed to have 24 1500 person trains an hour on a single track.
Highway costs less per lane than a single line of rail but considering most highways are 3 lanes either side the cost factor starts to become favourable to railway lines.
Folks down-voting: I know "subsidized by the government" == "subsidized by the taxpayers". My phrasing wasn't intended as a judgment on the merits of such action, just as a possible scenario in response to the GP's question.
I loved Chomsky's response to this "Like the one I took in Japan... in the 1950's..."
For extra fun, realize that California had already begun about the same time as Japan to install more public transport, but the car companies moved muscle on them to stop it.
I would prefer to see the money spent on improving Caltrain. It really is not a viable option for a lot of people. South of SJ Diridon, the trains only run 3x in the morning and 3x in the evening and they require you to basically wake up at 5 or 6 AM depending on the train you want to catch. A lot of tech workers don't come into the office until after 10 AM.
The high speed rail won't really help people already living in Silicon Valley except for the rare few who live near downtown San Jose and plan to work in SF (or vice versa).
And yet, they are the ones who will bear the inconvenience. The proposed plans I have seen will have the train elevated 60 ft in the air, it's about 70-80 ft total from my bedroom window and the train will travel 150 mph several times an hour at around 100 dB. Additionally, they will be narrowing a major road that is 2 lanes in each direction to 1 lane in each direction to make room for the train. Which is weird, because the Caltrain tracks are just another 30 feet away so not sure why they don't just build it above that.
There was some talk of a proposal to reimburse home owners due to the loss of value to their homes if this goes through. Based on the proposal I was looking at they showed a $100K to $200K loss of property value if the train goes through.
If I actually wanted to take the train, it would take me 20-45 minutes to get to the train station in San Jose even though I am already in San Jose.
I'm really disappointed in how impractical this is for the majority of people who live and work in SF bay area and the level of cost and inconvenience it will cause.
High speed rail isn't generally meant for commuters - if it had frequent stops, it would never have a chance to reach high speeds before it would have to slow down again.
Perhaps they could provide some subsidy to help you soundproof the side of your house facing the tracks?
Both can, should, and are being done. The California Water Project is rather adequately funded. The Oroville Dam problem is due to a pretty unprecedented winter, not a lack of maintenance. The emergency overflow seems to have held, at least for now, so with hope they can put in a fix for the spillway.
I was against the project back when it was a ballot measure, but since then my opinion on it has changed -- I don't care if trains ever run on the damned thing, what really matters in this project is getting the right of way to the land, because they're going to put in a MASSIVE amount of fiber optic cable as they dig out the path.
One thing that nobody has mentioned - autonomous cars. Close to the time this will be completed, I assume I'll be able to sit in my vehicle and be shuttled from SF to LA in 5 hrs in the comfort of my own vehicle.
I suppose if you regard sitting in a seat not being able to move as comfortable.
But before you get too relaxed in that glorious possible future:
1) high speed trains exist and proven - no new science or engineering to figure out
2) autonomous cars are constrained by the realities of space to put the vehicles. Too many vehicles, autonomous or otherwise = congestion and slow travel.
3) At 6 hours, this is nearly twice as long as the train will be.
4) In the autonomous car, you will need to stop for food and bathroom break. The train does not need to stop. So your trip time is extended, especially true with kids.
5) At 3.5 hours, someone can leave for LA at 6am - get to a 10am meeting and return in time for dinner and bed. Not going to happen if each direction takes 5-6 hours.
I really like high speed trains but have you paid for them? They are great for business where you need to go somewhere and come back, but for a family of 4 they are extremely expensive. From Tokyo to Osaka ~350 miles, it's about $130 per person each way on the Shinkansen. For 4 of us (2 adults, a child, and a free toddler), it would be ~$650 for round trip tickets.
The problem is that same person can pay about $50 for gas to go from SF to LA and have the car with them in LA or pay $130 for a one way ticket (I haven't read the numbers but that's about the cost in Japan and I expect other countries with high speed rail). Then you have to get to the station which might be a little far for some.
I really love the high speed rail system in Japan and Europe but it's not cheap.
Normally I'm as skeptical of autonomous vehicle timeframes as anyone. But this is a case where even just the highway portion would be a huge win. And one of the cities (as well as pretty much all the intermediate locations) aren't very public transit or pedestrian friendly.
If I'm leaving SF and will be in LA in 5-6 hours (door-to-door) with a minimum of driving [ADDED: with my own vehicle], how attractive is that train?
I do get the efficiency of train travel but if you're already skeptical that the numbers work...
Once autonomous driving works well, I see no reason why cars can't scream along I-5 at twice the current speed, too. So five hours could become three and a bit, door to door.
They could even autonomously draft behind each other for maximum efficiency. Cars could be designed with high speed drafting aerodynamics in mind. With that, a line of cars might actually be more energy efficient than a high speed train running at typical occupancy levels, or at least competitive.
I'd be surprised if a "car train" running on rubber tires, even if as aerodynamically efficient somehow as a high-speed train, could ever match the same efficiency per occupant-mile. Ignoring everything else, steel wheels on steel rails have a massive efficiency advantage from lower rolling resistance alone - and a train carrying 400 people is going to have far fewer wheels per passenger than a "car train" carrying 400 people.
Yep, rolling resistance is the big factor in favour of the train.
The big factors for the car-train are much smaller cross sectional area and the fact that it's always exactly as long as it needs to be, unlike the train which needs to run even when it's mostly empty.
Once you have steel wheels, air resistance is the main problem. For trains it largely only depends on the nose of the train, then the length doesn't really matter. Since your "car train" isn't smooth, it'll have much more overall air resistance.
The car is slower, and an order of magnitude less efficient. And efficiency matters -- there's a limit to how much energy can be sustainably spent, and if transportation is more efficient, we get to do more other things.
Not to mention that the US is going to continue to expand in terms of population. We've added 60 million people in 20 years, nearly equal to the population of France. We'll add another 20+ million in the next decade.
Simultaneously we'll become slightly less rural and more urban in terms of population concentration.
Even if the autonomous electric vehicle has a huge role to play in improving traffic in the US - which it clearly does - high speed rail (whether hyperloop-like, above ground, below ground, whatever) will still make sense alongside that. There is going to be plenty of demand to go around, such that having multiple approaches will be useful. Sometimes the autonomous car will make sense, sometimes rail will make sense.
Only in theory - current estimates are that by the time stops, noise abatement, track changes, etc have all been factored in, the CAHSR trains will average under 100MPh - closer to 80, which is easily achievable on i5 by a car.
Europe or Japan were nice, but China was amazing. No pre-paid ticket, no planning just show up at the Shenzen train station the morning, arrive in Beijing in the evening on the other size of the country.[1]
Imagine freedom, the innovation, the improvement in quality of life if we could hop on a train in the morning NYC and arrive in SF at night for ~$100. I found the trains so much more comfortable than even flying first class. Seeing the countryside fly by at 350km/hr is worth the price alone. Americans have no idea what they're missing.
I get your point, but that's a slightly inconvenient comparison. Shenzhen - Beijing is ~1200 miles, SF - NY is ~2600 miles. At the highest passenger rail speeds out there, the trip would probably end up being 12-18 hours.
There are several hundred miles of very tall mountains in the way. Unless someone is contemplating a century long project to dig a tunnel, those miles will be taken at a crawl.
Heck, even the geography between NYC and Chicago--which would be potentially interesting based on crow flies distance and amount of travel--almost certainly makes HSR not viable.
Not really. Tokyo-Osaka is going to be a bit under $200 whichever way you might choose. Maybe rail is $30 cheaper but it's a 15% difference rather than say 50%+.
Infrastructure is expensive. For example, the project to upgrade state route 99 in California, which parallels the High Speed Rail tracks for about 130 miles, to Interstate standards was projected to cost $22 billion ten years ago [1]. A lot of the huge costs are from the infrastructure debt of refusing to pay for a rail network, and for destroying a lot of the network that was in place. The HSR system will give a lot of benefits for a substantial amount of the state in terms of giving a modern transit backbone.
Its a hell of a lot easier to fly over the dozens or hundreds of different landowners and jurisdictions than it is to convince each of them to allow you to build a giant railroad through them
The us rail infra was built when this wasn't an issue or could be solved by sending some heavies in or bribing the right people.
They're partnering with Japan National Railways and planning on running the N700-I Bullet total system (the international version of the Tokaido Shinkansen).
The landowner problem was much worse in Japan and Europe, but was overcome with cash and persuasion. The US rail construction problem is much more complicated and costly than that.
And it applies to urban rail where the right of way is entirely public just as much as high speed.
For short distances high-speed rail can be a good option, particularly in connecting neighboring cities (LA-SF, etc).
The problems with all these projects are cost: Simple back of envelope calculations show it to be (a) dubious, or (b) possibly criminal (ie. standard taxpayer ripoff to cronies).
$64B - do the quick math on that. Figure a 30 year return on investment earning 4% per year:
$2.2B payback per year + operating cost of what? So somewhere around $7M per day in revenues minimum?
How many riders per day and what is average ticket price to make $7M per day?
I think you will suddenly find there are cheaper, faster, better options.
Well, a flight from SFO to LAX is $70 if you book at least a couple weeks in advance. If you assume parity for the ticket price, you need to sell an average of 100,000 tickers/day. With 100 passengers per car and 10 cars per train, you would need 100 trains/day, full, in order to make the math work.
I agree that seems pretty dubious. Why on earth is infrastructure so expensive in the US?
It's less wasteful to spend $20 billion building a pointless wall on the Mexican border than the ~$40 billion in losses this rail is going to eat. I'm glad I'm not a California resident.
And the fastest if you take into consideration the fact that you can come to the train station less than 30 minutes in advance just hop in the train and travel downtown to downtown.
30 minutes in advance for a train? Sometimes I arrive a minutes in advance and just enter the train before it is continuing its journey. Happens when my connecting train had a delay.
In Switzerland, where the train schedule is stunningly efficient, you can do this very reliably. Check in and security procedures make this impossible with airports. Unfortunately, this is also an issue with international high speed trains (TGV) where there are queues and checks.
In Germany the issue is, there is enough money to plan and build motorways but not for train routes. Consequence is, that many routes are over capacity and cargo, local, and long distance trains share one track. The result is that one delayed train creates a wave of delays through the entire network.
Fortunately there are still a few hassle free international high speed trains in Europe. Travel between France and Germany isn't subject to any special security measures. You just get on the train. Sometimes the train stops at the border for a really quick check and that's it.
That works when it's a commuter train, but you can't plan on just showing up minutes before a high-speed train that assigns seats. Because you can't just hop on the next one.
That's most of the reason why you can't just show up at the gate of your airplane 5 minutes before they shut the doors.
Security is the only big difference. You gotta plan on it possibly taking 30 minutes.
It depends on the routing especially as you get to traveling over borders in Europe. It does seem to be steadily improving though. Just a few years ago, I was going from Dusseldorf to Paris and I was rather surprised that train really wasn't a very good option.
Today, as I go to whip that out as a counterexample, I see that Thalys would make a whole lot of sense vs. flying for me (though I don't know how door-to-door costs would compare).
The Marseille/Avignon area to Geneva, Frankfurt or pretty much anywhere in Germany is surprisingly frustrating. I can fly from Marseille to Frankfurt in barely an hour -- a train ends up eating most of the day.
The only time I take the train over flying in Europe is typically Avignon-Paris. Everywhere closer and it's faster to drive, anywhere further and it's faster to fly.
They will be much more likely to walk 10 minutes from the train to something interesting than to do the same thing in the same distance from and airplane.
Ever lived near a busy level crossing? Passing trains may simply make the floors shake; train horns are deafening. You don't just hear them, you feel them in the core of your body. If you building is not well soundproofed, or you have any windows open for ventilation, you have no hope of sleeping through the night. Passing airplanes are background noise, passing trains refuse to be ignored.
Long/slow trains create an impermeable partition in the area, causing huge disruptions to local transportation (even pedestrians). Train tracks are also dangerous, requiring extra supervision of children and claiming the lives of the suicidal/oblivious/reckless every now and then.
If I asked to build something which
- Makes a huge amount of noise as it passes through residential areas at night.
- Disrupts all pedestrian, bicycle, and automobile traffic while it passes.
- Has no hope of stopping for the hazards that can trivially enter its path.
- Will obliterate anything it hits, 100% of the time.
You'd look at me like I was crazy, unless you grew up viewing trains as just part of the landscape.
All the same, I think we should build more of them. But trains are much worse for externalizing costs than airplanes.
Most of these points don't apply as much to purpose-build high-speed passenger rail lines (which is part of why they are so expensive: you don't just throw a level crossing through a street, they require extensive building to isolate them to mitigate these things, and if you already have a street grid that isn't prepared for it everything gets even more complicated)
I've lived less than 50 m from one for quite a while, and cars on the road inbetween were worse than passing high-speed trains. Freight trains or old, slow trains were another thing.
Should be noted all your points are also true about airplanes, except the transport disruption. Having lived near an airport they are EXTREMELY loud and take up a truely titanic amount of space.
All those problems are solved by grade separation. If railways are fully grade separated there is no need for trains to use their horns. Since rail needs shallower gradients than road it often makes sense to sink it below street level, drainage allowing.
I have a train line ca. 1km away where the ICE high-speed train from Hamburg to Berlin passes. It's not driving there with full speed though. The train is basically not to notice. Though I hear the freight-trains or sometime the local trains (S-Bahn). Of course the ICE train is very silent and sure uses no horns - why should it - there are no level crossings. The tracks are placed higher and crossings are under bridges. The track is just next to other tracks for local trains, which then also have no level crossings inside the city.
The incompatibility of CAHSR with other rail strikes me as a repeat of the BART mistake.