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.
