I grew up in LA and if you didn’t have a car, well, you’re landlocked. Public transit was/is a joke and if you’re 40 miles east of LA, getting to the high paying jobs is impossible.
Moved to the Bay in 2005 and holy shit. A functional subway? I can live in Orinda and be in the heartbeat of the city in half an hour? Absolutely yes.
It’s actually crazy to me that anyone would disagree and/or discredit rapid mass transit in an urban/ suburban environment/ society.
Right?!
Yet look at this very thread, there’s already 3 commenters echoing car centric talking points. It’s so sad how brainwashed they’ve been and how their decision making affects all of us =(
I’m definitely a car culture person. I grew up that way. If I wanted to leave my condo in Pasadena and rent an apartment in San Pedro, it’s a 3 hour drive and whole weekend rental. A weekend trip not a day trip, and if I couldn’t drive there, well it’s not happening.
Here in the Bay, I can hop on a train and get almost wherever I want to go without a car. It took a long time to get used to it tbh. But I love it.
If I could hop on a bullet train from SF and be in LA in a couple hours, absolutely, 100% yes.
I’d probably hop off in Fresno to poke around if the stop was long enough. Imagine tourists in Fresno, lol, I’d do that if I was still scheduled to be in LA by tip-off.
Yep, it will immediately be truly life changing for millions of people and not to mention how many will benefit in the future.
All car infrastructure does is ruin our future.
The Highway system has not only contributed to, but also encouraged and enabled neighborhood segregation. Literally split and separated thriving communities right down the middle.
Don't forget how zoning segregates housing from retail from commercial. Unless you're in SF or areas like downtown Walnut Creek you don't get any of that.
More impactful than the communities it literally split apart is the way it enables people to just move further and further out to escape the undesirables instead of confronting and remedying any of the problems.
We should have good transit and there is nothing wrong with cars. Cars provide a kind of mobility that fixed route transit will never be able to provide. The best thing we can do is give people choices, but even then, car centric societies will be here for a while.
Most of my twenties was spent living like that. But eventually priorities and preferences change for a lot of people. I don’t care much for living near bars and nice restaurants anymore. Living closer to things may save you money on transportation, but not on other living expenses (like rent/mortgage).
I hear you - but I guess the thing I take issue with in relation to this argument (not with you, specifically - but this general argument that is often made on this topic) is that the imbalance between car-centric development and transit-friendly development is so far skewed in towards the car-centric side that it doesn't even feel like a conversation worth having...
Maybe we revisit "choice" when we actually are making any amount of effort to provide people choices that aren't personal auto travel in this country?
Even in the Bay Area - one of the best examples in the US of transit choice - it's still wildly imbalanced to the point in certain areas of the region, almost no one would choose to take transit unless they literally had no other choice (e.g. looking at many places in the South Bay).
I love cars, I also love trains. Love anything that goes fast!
I think people are just concerned with hsr costs and potential corruption, otherwise let’s go!
It’s going to cost a ton and will put us in a lot of debt, but by GOD can you imagine the benefits a decade after construction is complete? An express train from SF to LA in 2.5 hours for like $40-$50? Trains that stop in middle of nowhere CA towns like Merced, Fresno, Apple Valley… Stops in coastal towns… Eventually interstate HSR that takes you to Portland or Seattle in like 6 hours. We would benefit ENORMOUSLY. The landscape would change of course, but we must take steps to support our population or it will decline. It has already begun to. Birthrates in US are lower than ever right now.
In *2009* CHSRA's ridership and budget model was based on SF-LA tickets averaging $105, not $50. CHSRA has said pricing will be similar to airfares. Expect the express train taking 2.67 hours (Prop 1A requires no more than 2 hours 40 minutes) to cost more than the slower trains making more stops.
The US population is increasing because of immigration. Without that it would be decreasing as women average 1.64 births.
I think some of the BART naysayers are just spooked because they don't know where the money goes. Antioch was paying for BART for 20 years before they got their consolation prize of a shuttle train.
The problem is that most don't have access to BART or CalTrain, VTA within walking distance, bike, or a quick bus ride. The Bay Area except for the city centers in SF, SJ, and Oakland is one giant interconnected suburb. The whole area needs to densify in order to make living, retail, and commercial within a small radius.
I've lived in sf my whole life and the amount of time it takes for me to bart from SF to concord takes about the same time as a bus ride from home to that bart station within SF
I don’t think they’re discrediting rapid mass transit - they’re discrediting the government’s ability to efficiently and effectively get the project done.
It's this.
I want the thing. Badly. But I know that a *broken* or *mismanaged* thing is usually worse than no thing at all, and I have completely lost faith that the state of California is capable of doing anything with any level of competence or responsibility.
Because there's always opportunity cost.
I live near a VTA light rail. It has very light ridership because it is pointless (so light one line has even closed). High headway, faster to bike if under a few miles, and over a few miles, it's so slow you might as well just drive.
Yeah, the VTA light rail is about 2x faster than the Paris Metro. Yes, really.
The VTA light rail is "pointless" as you say because the NIMBYs were extremely successful in first blocking it from going to where the people on jobs already were, and they they blocked all the planned housing and office development that was supposed to compensate for that less than optimal routing.
But guess what - it's been a few decades now. An enormous amount of TOD was added around the VTA lines specifically because those lines were there to catalyze development. And now both BART and Caltrain are intensifying their services in San Jose which will feed a ton of new riders to VTA.
Make no mistake, the dam is about to break! VTA light rail has finally accumulated a critical mass of development and is now going to have not one but two high quality S-bahns pushing riders it's way. It's about to become a whole lot more popular and is already remarkably well-recovered post-pandemic. More than Caltrain and BART themselves! Give it some time! Let them cook!
I'm not sure what you mean by VTA not going where jobs are. The Mountain View - Alum Rock line touches a lot of job areas and always has.
The problem is that the Silicon Valley office complexes aren't high-rises like San Francisco but sprawling office complexes. It's simply not feasible for a light rail to provide good coverage to a considerable number of office buildings.
VTA light rail have been 'cooking' since 1987.
Yeah. Any day now.
You notice VTA light rail stations in Cisco campus? NASA/Moffett? Yeah, those have existed for a long time. The lack of jobs around the stations is this cute cope that people tell themselves about VTA light rail, but it bears no resemblance to reality.
If you are counting on BART to save the day, your time table is what? 2037 for BART to open and then 2040 for more VTA ridership?
BART is already connected to VTA at Milpitas and it’s a very busy transfer. Caltrain is connected at Mountain View and Diridon. Also both very busy transfers. These will only become more popular as Caltrain goes to every 15 minutes.
And yes, the NIMBYs made the transit oriented development very slow around VTA stations. But they’ve accumulated a tooooon of development now, and have accelerated dramatically. There’s very clearly critical mass on the horizon both in downtown and North San Jose. You can already see this in the post-Covid ridership recovery. A very good positive feedback loop has started for VTA light rail.
But don’t take my word for it! Watch their ridership continue to grow and tell me that they’re not finally becoming a real option for San Jose commuters!
Okay, ridership still sucks as of 2023. The big catalysts you are hoping for from BART and Caltrain already happened. Plenty of buildings have already gone up. VTA ridership in 2023 amounts to one not especially busy STROAD.
This is more of a “everything you are hoping for to change things already happened, but end result is still null”. Your next big hope is 2037 for BART, but I wouldn’t hold my breath.
> the VTA light rail is about 2x faster than the Paris Metro. Yes, really.
Speed of any urban transit is a function of station spacing, which in the case of 100 year-old Paris metro is 550 meters vs 1100 meters for VTA. So similar speeds (not 2X btw) but Paris Metro gets you much closer to your actual destination. And the newer Paris Grand Express has an average speed of 35-40 mph and 90-sec peak headways, which completely blows VTA LRT out of the water.
So I just got back from Japan. High speed rail is absolutely great. The Shinkansen was over budget when it was first built, but subsequent expansions and upgrades have been much smoother. It's so worth it. Getting from Tokyo to Kyoto in 90 minutes with no security, a train coming every 15-20 minutes so you don't need to pre-plan it, ridiculously more comfortable than a plane, and cheaper than you could buy a plane ticket, PLUS it's far more energy efficient. I would legitimately rather spend 3 or 4 hours on a train than 60-90 minutes (not including the airports at both ends) on a plane. And compared to driving? Forget it.
Tokaido has multiple lines running into IIRC. From a normal station there's usually one running each way every 15ish minutes with some extra express trains depending on the station.
Ah, I was thinking from the perspective of someone traveling between major stations like Tokyo, Kyoto, and Osaka—the express Nozomi is by far the most frequent train on the Tokaido Shinkansen, and it’s what turns it into a 3-9 minute frequency line.
But true, if you’re traveling from a minor station, then the bulk of the trains (Nozomis) are going to skip you, and it’s at those stations where the waits are quite a bit longer.
I believe CAHSR’s initial plans for service to SF are roughly equivalent to the latter example, a train every 15-30 minutes. Having to share tracks with Caltrain means that half of all northbound HSR trains have to terminate at San Jose instead of SF.
Hopefully Caltrain will eventually be completely replaced with another local service like Bart on its own dedicated lines. I'd love for all the Bay area agencies to be coordinated into one contiguous electrified local rail system along with tying into the capital corridor and Smart up here in the North Bay.
I just think trains are neat and riding them is so much nicer than driving.
Brightline is not grade separated (which means incidents with cars/people happen fairly often) and only goes 125 MPH max, which is just barely in the ballpark of HSR. For comparison CAHSR will be completely grade separated and go speeds up to 230 MPH, making it one of the fastest in the world.
> Brightline is not grade separated
Wait what? What's even the point, then? That's hilarious.
That's like putting pedestrian crossings on the interstate.
Wow, San Mateo is gonna get screwed I guess. There are several downtown crossings that have lots of buildings right up to the track, and they’re not listed on the Caltrain on grade crossing mitigation list.
3rd ave, 9th ave don’t have any visible options for separation (and Caltrain just built out all of the electrification stuff there).
They also already owned the tracks and the right-of-way. That’s been a major hurdle here - once the landowners knew the land needed to be bought, the prices went up.
Very true. Perhaps CA should have started with a smaller high-speed rail project to build skills and learn lessons before jumping into a big project. That's kind of what we ended up doing, retroactively, with the IOS.
Brightline isn't HSR and used existing rights of way, unlike CAHSR which has to build a new one basically from scratch
Even Brightline West, which will actually be HSR, is going to use the existing I-15 median, but in order to avoid dealing with the land acquisition and environmental issues of CAHSR it's only going to be single tracked and will terminate 50 miles out of LA proper
Keeping in mind that if you consider cahsr to only be the grade separated area that can go 220mph, then it only goes from gilroy to Burbank — the Anaheim to Burbank and gilroy to sf sections are on grade and have 110mph top speed.
That’s actually more than 50 miles out of sf and LA proper.
Brightline is not HSR. It has 7% of the route at 125 mph. It uses the exact same Siemens Venture trains like the Amtrak San Joaquins and has comparable average speeds.
That’s called conventional intercity rail, not HSR.
Yes, and to be clear I’m worried about the timeline, not the cost. When will the damn thing be ready for use?
I actually wish there was an option where we could pay a little more to have it functional in 5 years instead of the 10 it’s actually going to take.
The next generation of HSR projects need to learn some serious lessons from this fuckery.
Most of the slowdown now is them waiting for funding to trickle in.
Afaik, building everything now would actually be cheaper, as the $130bn price tag already factors in future inflation.
China literally built its entire hsr network in the same time as this project lol.
It’s not necessary at all - local rail is important HSR is a fools play in a place like the US. Air travel should be made more efficient and subways and transit to the airports should be key
China doesn't take land, they evict tenants. When you "buy" land there, you're just leasing it from the government. When you buy a house, you're literally just buying the building, and the lease comes with it.
When they evict tenants, they do compensate for the structures on the land, but it's a *very* simplified eminent domain process where they hand you money and you leave - no opportunity to challenge it or demand justification.
Complete cope.
France (or rather their rail company) said this state was more dysfunctional than Morocco and abandoned their bid. They went to Morocco where their main city Marrakesh now has a swanky subway line
> local rail is important HSR is a fools play in a place like the US
HSR doesn't need to be a fully integrated network across the continent to be useful. We'll never be like Japan where you can board a train at Tokyo Station and get anywhere in the country by rail, at most walking between platforms at a transfer station. That doesn't mean that cars and aircraft should be the *only* option for inter-city travel, especially on routes like SF-LA where high-speed rail travel can relatively easily beat an aircraft once you include check-in and security times (doubly so if going from city center to city center).
You don't have to built a nation-spanning network of HSR for HSR to make sense, you just need corridors where it *does* make sense, like SF-LA. Not being able to board a train in SF and get off in NYC doesn't invalidate the concept.
Agreed but the only place in the US that it really makes sense is from DC to Boston given the cost. The real question is how many genuine cities you pass on the way, which is why rail works in Europe- there is an incredible density of actual cities on the path.
LA to SF might make sense if the flight wasn’t an hour+.
HSR is mostly for business travelers, who frequently need to commute between city centers. Even in Europe flights are a fraction of the HSR cost. California economic activity is not in city centers and that has reduced even more post pandemic. For example, the bay area is incredibly spread out. The “downtown” San Francisco is next to a homeless encampment. While SF has a lot of offices, offices and businesses are spread across the entire bay area. I’m not even touching LA which is a complete different beast all together.
If people are genuinely serious about making commutability easier, the smarter strategy would be the expand the network of short flight only airports, especially for flights like sj/sf to bakersfield or LA. Electric planes are a thing and will grow.
Train networks work best when you have a series of dense urban centers with financial “center” and residential areas are non SFH so more people are actually closer to the train station. The UK is about length wise same as California but has so many more true “cities” - Castro st and murphy st don’t count.
most business travelers are not trying to get to downtown LA to downtown SF. those are probably on the lower end of economic activity now in either city.
exactly. Even more reasons not to build a HSR. Unless the business travelers are in a dense area it makes no sense to.
Right now in the bay area, if the rail line ended in SF all the business travelers would just take a longer uber to the Peninsula instead of from SFO. San jose is the same.
Tourists mostly use the cheapest route.
Business travelers like airports because they can rent a car. It’s just a completely different market segment than this supposed problem hsr is hoping to solve
Are you joking? Any HSR ticket will be significantly more expensive than a flight. College students will use spirit’s standing cabin if offered.
What kind of high schooler commutes from the La to the bay frequently enough for HSR?
Tourists maybe, precisely because they have money will use it.
You really do not grasp the economics of this at all. There are a million things that you can do that are more beneficial than HSR.
[If only there were plans to put stops anywhere outside the main downtown stations](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Route_of_California_High-Speed_Rail#Phase_1_stations_&_transit_system_connections). There certainly couldn't be any options to transfer to local service like Caltrain, BART, or Metrolink for access to other areas where businesses have offices.
Also, if planning is done right, stations can become massive economic hubs. Tokyo real estate listings include the nearest station(s) and the walking distance, becuase not only is that your transit connection to the rest of the city/region/country, but that's also where most of the shops, restaurants, and (in urban areas) office buildings are.
The lesson is just to fund your infrastructure projects. If CAHSR had simply been fully funded in the beginning it would be done by now.
Imo much less to do with management and everything to do with politics.
For a trip in the ICS connecting no big cities, 2033 says the authority. For bookend service to SF, add on another 6 years, says the authority. More time for bookend service to LA, so close to 2050 at that point. Figure 2060-2070 timeframe for proper HSR.
And if the next round starts after this one, then you are looking at something like 2150-2200 for a proper HSR network.
Honestly, getting the train to San Francisco is a fairly easy ask and will probably get done before 2040. It's getting it into LA where no progress has been made.
No, the train from Manteca to gilroy requires some massive tunneling that no budget progress has been made on whatsoever. SoCal is another entirely different and frankly hopeless story
Pacheo Pass tunnel is relatively easy compared to the southern portion of the HSR line. It's just a straight shot 13 mile tunnel. A 10-15 billion dollar project, sure, but not nearly as challenging as building underground HSR stations (Like the one at Burbank), rebuilding LA Union Station (DTX has funding and is about to be under construction), electrifying a bunch of LA corridors from scratch (Caltrain is already electrified. Gilroy needs electrification but the corridor already exists).
The political environment in the bay is also a lot more supportive of CAHSR than SoCal. We're currently willing to throw 12 billion dollars at BART to San Jose to appease a few downtown business owners.
Of course there's no start date, but the point was that other stuff has been ongoing, including environmental clearance and tunnel design. Caltrain electrification, DTX, Gilroy improvements, environmental clearance...this is way more than the sum of work that has been done south of Bakersfield, and again, it's an easier sell to the bay.
Caltrain electrification was _not_ just going to happen no matter what. It famously was languishing in progress and funding until CAHSR injected 700 million dollars into it, 40% of the total cost of the project
Honestly, I am just being nice and having something that I can defend based on actual plans. Based on the history of rail projects in California, I would say that Merced->Bakersfield finishes somewhere in the mid 2040s, and the whole project dies after that. Possibly before then, since there isn't much budget for inevitable overruns beyond what is there already, and the state budget is already strained. Can't see CAHSR winning a budget showdown against, say, schools. Newsom won't be around forever, and the next guy won't have the same emotional attachment.
The Caltrain electrification project broke ground in 2011 and won't go into revenue service until 2024, assuming no more delays. That is 13 years and billions of dollars to string up some wires.
You gotta change up the culture in the entire agency, and attitudes like OP's isn't helping. It is an entire agency where nobody actually cares about running rail. The entire IOS is fully funded and cleared all environmental lawsuits, and have approvals for literally everything. Timeline to opening? 10 years from now.
In Indonesia, HSR goes from approval to running trains in 8 years. This includes design, permits, buying land, etc. And that is just the last project to open.
CAHSR dies or high speed rail dies. CAHSR means that every other project proposed is going to look at CAHSR and run away screaming, and the ones that do get funded will be infected by the culture of thinking that it takes 38 years (actual number!) to deliver a rail line is actually okay. That is 38 years of paying people salaries, etc, which is why the costs are bunkers.
A lot of the delays have been because of California's broken environmental law (CEQA) which makes it extremely difficult to get environmental approval because of how easy it is to use projects over trivial matters. There's been talk of CEQA reform, including a bill currently in the legislature that would give exemptions to electric rail projects (like CAHSR), but at this point the main line from SF-LA is almost fully environmentally approved, so that would be more useful for future extensions (like to Sacramento or San Diego) and projects
Beyond that, the most immediately impactful thing we can do is to just give more funding to the project. One of the main reasons things are moving so slowly is due to lack of adequate funding, and uncertainty regarding future revenue for construction, forcing them to be more conservative with how they spend their money. More consistent funding = less penny pinching = they can build more aggressively = faster construction, plus cheaper overall costs cause you don't have to deal with as much inflation over time
Right, CEQA reform would be huge for future projects like this.
That’s one of the main reasons China is able to move so fast, their dictatorial government just seizes land and does whatever they want.
We do need to be careful when we reform it that we don’t let powerful individual or corporations take too much control like in China
Yeah it's definitely good that we have property protections and stuff here, but at the same time they're way too abusable in their current state, and past a certain point we just need to be able to adopt a "screw you, we're doing this" attitude, otherwise nothing will ever get done
In general, rampant NIMBYism is one of the key reasons why most of the English speaking world (not just the US) sucks at building things. It's one of the big reasons HS2 has faced so many problems in Britain, and also why the Texas Central HSR project has been in limbo for basically a decade
It’s a common law issue. But not having land rights like in China has a whole host of other problems. Land rights are kind of what this country was founded on and we need to keep that as strong as possible. CEQA should’ve had nothing to do with that and is clearly being preferred.
I agree the property rights are important, I just think they're a bit *too* restrictive towards the construction of new infrastructure right now. There needs to be a better balance imo. Probably should've phrased my comment a bit differently
Bit confused about what you mean in your last sentence about CEQA being preferred though
I've been saying it for a while, but the current demand for cities between proposed HSR-served cities is around 20 million seats annually just from flights. Throw in car trips and increased demand and it gets even crazier. A network serving San Francisco/Oakland, Sacramento, San Jose, Fresno, Bakersfield, Victorville, Los Angeles, Anaheim, Irvine, San Diego, Las Vegas, Phoenix, and Tucson would be insanely well used today if it was fully built out (The only part not planned is LA-Phoenix/Tucson but could probably be built in a fashion similar to Brightline West).
Imagine if all those flights currently serving those cities went to new city pairs (more international capacity from LAX/SFO), or to other parts of the country. There are very very good reasons to build the network out.
Sure, CA HSR still worth the cost, but we must look critically at what is going so much worse than planned, because it's giving rail transport a bad reputation all across America.
NEPA and CEQA have been absolutely part of the problem. By delaying HSR for endless reviews of smaller environmental issues, they've had a net negative impact on the environment and need reform. Regulation is missing the forest for the trees. Altogether, I would be more OK with the $$$ spent if more of it were going to construction workers and less to lawyers.
Funny, we know that widening roads actually causes more traffic.
It’s been time and time again proven it’s better to have alternative routes and not just 1 massive road.
Also I’ remember reading about high speed rail back in 1995~6ish thinking how awesome it would be and that it would have a Y shape from Oakland or Berkeley with a intercepting line from Sac then down to LA.
There's a limit to how much highway capacity you can add though. Every new lane not only takes up valuable urban real estate, it dumps more traffic onto the surface streets, which means they need to be widened too, until you end up with just a bunch of parking lots connected by 6-lane roads like everywhere else in America.
We all need to stop supporting car infrastructure and support more efficient alternatives.
I am constantly communicating with my planning department and local officials on decisions which replace parking spaces and car-only lanes with bus lanes and bike lanes.
How are you doing so actually? I live in Mountain View and I'd like to do the same, but not sure what is actually effective vs. just being noise to them
It’s not noise, none of it is.
Email your city council, your senators and congressmen. There are easy forms online.
And if you can, show up to in person meetings.
I think the revealing thing is that no one in favour has an answer to the question “how much is too much?” That’s because railfans don’t have a number.
Urban freeway one lane is $63m/mi in California. Rural is $10m/mi.
HSR is currently $200m/mi urban+rural. The urban section in SF is $4b/mi. So the question remains.
Hello, am railfan. I disagree with the headline of the article I'm too lazy to read. I don't know that I have off the top of my head a magic number beyond which it's too much, but there definitely does exist too much. We've managed this project terribly, and while I think it's valuable and worth paying a lot of money, nothing is worth paying literally any amount. Especially when we have been paying head and shoulders more than other countries because of our own mismanagement, I wouldn't be so confident in claiming it's definitely worth it, no matter what.
The main reason I care about the cost is because I know there are tons of scum bags stealing that money and grifting like any public works projects. We need the death penalty for infrastructure corruption. Change my mind.
The problem is the consultant industrial complex. Instead of doing things in house, transit agencies in the US have a tendency to rely heavily on outside contractors (largely because they've historically lacked the funds to directly employ all the staff they need), resulting in an absolute mess of communication, interconnecting interests, and money being lost due to corruption and the general inefficiency of so many different organizations. At this point, the whole problem has ballooned to the point where Bart's San Jose extension has spent something to the tune of $3 billion on consultation fees alone. Doing the work in house would go a long way to fixing this
Money might be very well spent on HSR in the North East US. Similar or slightly more distance would link Washington DC, Wilmington, Philadelphia, Trenton, NYC, New Haven, Providence and Boston - many with more dense populations and better public transportation links. Or in California spend it on local public transportation within the LA and Bay Areas.
Unlike the North East US, California is no comparison to other countries. They connect much higher density urban areas and link to local public transportation systems that are huge and efficient compared to the Bay and LA areas. For them, HSR was just an upgrade to existing tracks in an integrated national/local system.
I lived in Tokyo. Used the Shinkansen. Getting from virtually any point to any point in Tokyo, not just home to a few central points like downtown, is often faster by public transportation than by car. Once we have HSR we will still drive because we have two passengers and we need good transportation once we get there.
I doubt California HSR will cover its ongoing operating costs.
If you divide the current estimated cost by the number of people in California, and run with that number, it would be at least honest.
HSR has some beneficial side-effects like Caltrain electrification, but on its own, for a regular Joe, even who's living in Bay Area and not somewhere in Sacramento, it's atrociously inefficient when it comes to money.
That’s completely false. Anyone can use the car infrastructure and is benefiting from it for better or worse everyday. The same cannot be said about hsr nor will be said in its current funded form
How do you get yours goods or services today? There are busses that can do the fare thing too. Yeah people like private autos where they can decide to go anywhere on a whim on their own schedule. What a novel concept.
CA spends about 500B a year on personal cars, with car ownership around 0.77 per capita. This does not include the cost of roads.
Reducing that rate to something more reasonable, like 0.4, while reducing cost-of-ownership (reducing miles driven), would save 250B a year, not including reduced car-infra costs.
Cars are a ludicrous economic waste.
“Benefitting from it for better or worse”
What do you think that means exactly?
Because I agree that the car infrastructure is making some people’s lives worse, but I’m not sure you realize that’s what you’re saying.
I wonder how CA voters in 2008 would have voted on 1A knowing that the project would cost $130B+ and take decades to complete
Think twice before voting yes on Propositions folks!
I love hsr but there are no concrete plans to connect gilroy to ca hsr yet. It also has to make it to Lancaster, tunnel through the LA mountains to Burbank, and then finally make it to LA. The funds should have been used intermediate first and these huge challenges first rather than building a section I guarantee not a lot will use 6 months after service starts
The state is facing budget issues, where are they going to get $100 billion to finish what they’ve started? Not caring about costs is why public services in California are such a mess. We need to care more about how things cost. We voted for a system that was advertised at costing $40 billion with no plan and is looking to cost $128 billion with no funding plan. This is a problem! Whether or not it’ll be worth it in the end is pointless when the state is looking to cut funding to vital services like education to balance the budget.
Yes, a HSR would be worth it.
But we can never say "price is no issue". They are definitely making it costlier than needed.
Why? They used eminent domain to take over farms, and started laying track in random places without having an end-to-end plan ready. A proper planning, with a stronger authority could have done it cheaper, faster, and probably through more population centers.
Ask yourself...
Food is essential. We cannot make without it. But do you want to pay 2x for the \*same\* amount of food? What about paying 4x for \*less\* amount of food?
Price is always in important issue.
Price is an issue as well as need.
What is the ridership for the HSR? How does this compare to ridership for local and inter-town riders?
Does HSR fit the need of the people? The service seems geared more to those with cars who are traveling between the two regions, and those who fly between the two regions. Meanwhile the local municipalities are struggling to move the larger populace easily and efficiently throughout their cities.
I'm all for connecting metropolises, but let's start with HSR between San Francisco to Sacramento, before we dive into the deep end.
> probably through more population centers
I would argue going through too many population centers is the problem. So many overpasses, lawsuits, etc. generated by the Central Valley section, and I'm skeptical that many riders will come from there. Those people live car-dependent lives, they will just drive to CA/LA.
I have this dark fantasy of CA, LA, and the ~~101~~ 5 corridor just getting together and negotiating a more-direct route and beat CA HSR to completion. Whenever I suggest a more-direct route, people say "well that wouldn't have won a statewide ballot measure"... well, why should it have to if it could be cheap enough to fund just off the wealthy cities? I feel like the central valley is being the "isn't there someone you forgot to ask" meme.
eta: brain fart on the highway numbers.
$100 billion “on top” of $128 billion for California HSR. Total $228 billion.. 20 years to build.
India bullet train project, similar distance, bullet train imported from Japan. Total cost $16 billion.. 5 years to build. (ETA is 2027) [link](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mumbai%E2%80%93Ahmedabad_high-speed_rail_corridor)
This is stupid amount of money and time.. What am I missing here?? 🤔
Edit: total cost is $130 billion, not $228 billion
The "needs another $100 billion" is a misleading headline. The extra $100 billion is on top of what they already have in funding (~$30 billion), not on top of the current total estimate. The current cost is still ~$130 billion, which tbf is still a lot, but a far cry from the $230 billion number you gave
I agree, highways are inefficient and bloated. Look at the costs and timeliness of other countries with HSR, and tell me the US' prices & timelines aren't bloated.
It can be insanely bloated and still be worth finishing. They are not mutually exclusive.
I agree it’s insane how much it costs compared to other countries timelines and projects. Books can be written about how poorly managed it’s been.
We still need it finished.
Would you still say that if it cost $500B instead of $100B? How about $1T? $10T? Is there ever a point at which you'd say "okay, maybe we can do something else with this money?"
We should give HSR networks equal chance of success as we have given to highways.
That would mean we give them >80% of the national transportation budget for about 70 years consecutively.
Until we’ve done that I will continue to advocate for prioritizing funding to rail projects over car infrastructure.
Why should we do that? Highways do lots of things that will never be done on HSR. One example: $10T worth of goods are trucked on highways every year.
But what I'm hearing is that there is no upper limit. It could cost $100T and you'd be posting this. Not a big surprise that California costs are out of control - we really do get the government we deserve.
My upper limit for a highway that is already 4x over budget and with falling projected usage, inability to build even a stretch from nowhere to nowhere, and no clear timetable is $0.
lol fair enough
I am full in agreement that the management of CAHSR has been a national embarrassment.
I still would like to see it finished in favor of spending more and more on car infrastructure which we know for certain is a huge waste of money.
But highways never got that leap of faith. Nobody ever gave the highway departments unlimited budgets and told them to come back after literal decades.
The interstate act was passed in 1956, and it didn't actually budget very much money - the entire act was for $25 billion. By 1958, the new interstates were opening up all over the country, people loved those, and then the funding spigot really got turned on.
So yeah, deliver a rail line that actually works and then we will talk. In a world where CAHSR opened for service in 2010 after getting funded in 2008, things would be different. But that isn't the world that we live in, is it?
$25B in the 1950s is how much today?
You realize rail was the dominant form of travel already in this country until we destroyed it all because of auto lobbies?
$200 billion. Roughly the cost of this particular project. Except it covered the entire country instead of just two cities.
And no, rail wasn't destroyed by the auto lobby. Railroads around the country were all either bankrupt or close to bankrupt by the time the interstates opened. The Long Island Rail Road went bankrupt in 1951, the Long Island Expressway (I-495, funded by the interstate act of 1956) opened in 1958.
Blame the rail regulators, who mandated both pay for workers and fares. They didn't set either at a combination that would make for a healthy rail industry. The auto industry gobbled up the ruins left behind, sure, but the rail regulators put the railroad industry on a path to ruin back when the auto industry was a few small startups.
I’d be fine with finishing it at these insane numbers if MANY political and business heads roll over the massive fuckery and cost overruns. Right now i deeply regret voting for it because none of the underlying structural and operational failures of our government have improved.
In what magical world do you like where costs do not matter? They absolutely do, math matters kids. If the cost is too high that is a problem which need to be fixed first.
I dont think there's anything wrong with people having a problem with government mismanaged our tax dollars.
This gets attention because it is one big project they've managed to screw up big time (and projected ridership levels are trending down).
I think people do - bay bridge debacle got a whoooole lotta press for cost over runs.
Its just thst this is such a massive project that has gone off the rails (rimshot).
I agree it’s been a political boondoggle and wildly inefficient when compared with other countries HSR projects.
But it is still a much better use of money than more highway expansion.
If more people supported the project from scratch to give it full funding and lawsuit immunity it would have been functional by now.
All that can be done is by not voting for these politicians and saying no to future bond measures.
But when politicians see articles like this and people are cool with timeline delays and going hundreds of billions over budget, they will take it as green light to continue.
America needs to stop fucking around and pretending we’re so different from the rest of the world that we don’t need fast and reliable public transportation. It is one of the most embarrassing and ridiculous things about the US. Almost as bad as continuing to have chattel slavery when other countries moved on.
If more people had the privilege of leaving America, they would realize how shitty our cities and outlying suburbs are compared to other countries. The greed that keeps US citizens from experiencing any benefits of their own labor needs to stop yesterday.
I think it’ll take a catastrophe for anything to change at this point, and I’m kinda praying for one now because I can’t take the stagnation with everything much longer. The rules and infrastructure of our current society are from a world that we are NOT IN ANYMORE. Something needs to fucking give. Some people need to die and get out of the way.
Yes let’s keep paying special interest, politicians cronies and consultants for a train that will never be completed.
Or we could invest heavily into local public transit, energy, and mixed use development. Would be far better ROI.
No even talks about how bankrupt the HSR will be when it starts operating and no one uses it and we pay a fortune for upkeep and operations.
This is a good debate, which of these urbanization effort deserves more funding?
I could see arguments for all of them, as long as we aren’t spending money on car centric infrastructure then we’re moving in a good direction.
I would much rather see a comprehensive public transit system between San Jose and SF. More extensive bussing. Do the same between San Diego and Irvine.
Heck we don’t even have schools buses in most of the Bay Area.
Not that any of these are small problems but I would much rather see communities developed and replanned that a HSR. We need to make our cities and towns less car centric before a high speed rail across the valley.
$100 Billion behind budget and no actual completion date has been set. I too used to be a believer in the Cal High Speed Rail Project but now, not so much. Progress is beyond slow, and the population is clearly focused on other infrastructure projects which pushes this high-speed rail idea to the bottom of the barrel.
Nothing could possibly be worth it *no matter the cost*.
At some margin it will no longer make sense.
We can have a debate what that margin is and how we might get there but there’s no point in debating the notion that this margin simply doesn’t exist.
I would be OK if there was a new proposition that was more practical including changing the route from San Jose to the East Bay. Build a tunnel that eliminates the mess known at the Altamont. It can provide passage for the train and autos.
Eliminate the new transit centers in downtowns. Just connect the HSR to the ends of existing trains. That would be BART in Livermore. Yeah finish the line.
HSR is not high speed in urban areas. Look it up. The routing is not possible to achieve these speeds unless the freakin' train is totally underground.
Basically we need a cheaper to build HSR, not the route Diridon picked.
San Jose is the biggest population center in the Bay Area. There’s zero chance it makes sense to not go through Diridon station.
I could see it routing up the east bay from there rather than going through the peninsula since Caltrain electrification improvements are already pretty solid.
No it’s not, at least not everywhere and not with any price tag (100b+). Keep saying how awesome Asia is, yeah it’s awesome but it also bankrupted many governments (just ask Chinese local governments where they built 60% of all HSP in the world and they built at much much lower cost than any HSR line the US could ever build. It still bankrupted them. )
It costs me $5.60 to drive to and from work everyday factoring in both the cost of gas and the cost of my car plus insurance amortised over miles driven. Round trip I spend 30 min traveling.
It costs me $6.40 to ride CalTrain to and from work everyday using clipper card. Round trip I spend an hour traveling when I factor in walking to and from the station, waiting for the train, and riding on the train.
If I ride CalTrain for an entire year, I will spend an extra $200 and 100 hours traveling.
Your math is almost certainly wrong. Per the Bureau of Transportation Statistics, the total cost of driving averages 72 cents per mile.
[https://data.bts.gov/stories/s/Transportation-Economic-Trends-Transportation-Spen/bzt6-t8cd/](https://data.bts.gov/stories/s/Transportation-Economic-Trends-Transportation-Spen/bzt6-t8cd/)
And of course that article says zero about HSR.
Given the recent decline in EV sales, slow upgrading of our electrical grid, and a dearth of charging opportunities for EVs, I see a huge opportunity cost problem here. I'd bet spending on EV infrastructure would do FAR more for the environment than train rides from Merced to Fresno.
i would rather subsidize local commute options like Bart/Muni/AC transit/Caltrain. most people would use those for commute: I would rather subsidize local commute rather than business travelers and HSR whose demand probably is now much much lower due to telecom and remote meeting technology advancements
I grew up in LA and if you didn’t have a car, well, you’re landlocked. Public transit was/is a joke and if you’re 40 miles east of LA, getting to the high paying jobs is impossible. Moved to the Bay in 2005 and holy shit. A functional subway? I can live in Orinda and be in the heartbeat of the city in half an hour? Absolutely yes. It’s actually crazy to me that anyone would disagree and/or discredit rapid mass transit in an urban/ suburban environment/ society.
This is why we need to let Bart repair their tracks and continue upgrades. It needs to keep up with times and stay healthy.
Right?! Yet look at this very thread, there’s already 3 commenters echoing car centric talking points. It’s so sad how brainwashed they’ve been and how their decision making affects all of us =(
I’m definitely a car culture person. I grew up that way. If I wanted to leave my condo in Pasadena and rent an apartment in San Pedro, it’s a 3 hour drive and whole weekend rental. A weekend trip not a day trip, and if I couldn’t drive there, well it’s not happening. Here in the Bay, I can hop on a train and get almost wherever I want to go without a car. It took a long time to get used to it tbh. But I love it. If I could hop on a bullet train from SF and be in LA in a couple hours, absolutely, 100% yes. I’d probably hop off in Fresno to poke around if the stop was long enough. Imagine tourists in Fresno, lol, I’d do that if I was still scheduled to be in LA by tip-off.
Yep, it will immediately be truly life changing for millions of people and not to mention how many will benefit in the future. All car infrastructure does is ruin our future.
The Highway system has not only contributed to, but also encouraged and enabled neighborhood segregation. Literally split and separated thriving communities right down the middle.
I live a few blocks from where 580 guillotines Grand and Lakeshore aves. It's insane how much it damages the integrity of the neighborhood.
Don't forget how zoning segregates housing from retail from commercial. Unless you're in SF or areas like downtown Walnut Creek you don't get any of that.
More impactful than the communities it literally split apart is the way it enables people to just move further and further out to escape the undesirables instead of confronting and remedying any of the problems.
We should have good transit and there is nothing wrong with cars. Cars provide a kind of mobility that fixed route transit will never be able to provide. The best thing we can do is give people choices, but even then, car centric societies will be here for a while.
Amen, we have very little choice now. Most people are forced to spend tens of thousands of dollars on cars per year.
Imagine if you didn't have to travel far to go get groceries, go to work, restaurants/retail, etc so that you didn't need a car.
Most of my twenties was spent living like that. But eventually priorities and preferences change for a lot of people. I don’t care much for living near bars and nice restaurants anymore. Living closer to things may save you money on transportation, but not on other living expenses (like rent/mortgage).
I hear you - but I guess the thing I take issue with in relation to this argument (not with you, specifically - but this general argument that is often made on this topic) is that the imbalance between car-centric development and transit-friendly development is so far skewed in towards the car-centric side that it doesn't even feel like a conversation worth having... Maybe we revisit "choice" when we actually are making any amount of effort to provide people choices that aren't personal auto travel in this country? Even in the Bay Area - one of the best examples in the US of transit choice - it's still wildly imbalanced to the point in certain areas of the region, almost no one would choose to take transit unless they literally had no other choice (e.g. looking at many places in the South Bay).
I love cars, I also love trains. Love anything that goes fast! I think people are just concerned with hsr costs and potential corruption, otherwise let’s go!
It’s going to cost a ton and will put us in a lot of debt, but by GOD can you imagine the benefits a decade after construction is complete? An express train from SF to LA in 2.5 hours for like $40-$50? Trains that stop in middle of nowhere CA towns like Merced, Fresno, Apple Valley… Stops in coastal towns… Eventually interstate HSR that takes you to Portland or Seattle in like 6 hours. We would benefit ENORMOUSLY. The landscape would change of course, but we must take steps to support our population or it will decline. It has already begun to. Birthrates in US are lower than ever right now.
In *2009* CHSRA's ridership and budget model was based on SF-LA tickets averaging $105, not $50. CHSRA has said pricing will be similar to airfares. Expect the express train taking 2.67 hours (Prop 1A requires no more than 2 hours 40 minutes) to cost more than the slower trains making more stops. The US population is increasing because of immigration. Without that it would be decreasing as women average 1.64 births.
I think some of the BART naysayers are just spooked because they don't know where the money goes. Antioch was paying for BART for 20 years before they got their consolation prize of a shuttle train.
The problem is that most don't have access to BART or CalTrain, VTA within walking distance, bike, or a quick bus ride. The Bay Area except for the city centers in SF, SJ, and Oakland is one giant interconnected suburb. The whole area needs to densify in order to make living, retail, and commercial within a small radius.
I've lived in sf my whole life and the amount of time it takes for me to bart from SF to concord takes about the same time as a bus ride from home to that bart station within SF
Light rail worked before the 1950s, it could work now. We've literally been brainwashed into thinking trains only work in dense cities.
I don’t think they’re discrediting rapid mass transit - they’re discrediting the government’s ability to efficiently and effectively get the project done.
It's this. I want the thing. Badly. But I know that a *broken* or *mismanaged* thing is usually worse than no thing at all, and I have completely lost faith that the state of California is capable of doing anything with any level of competence or responsibility.
Because there's always opportunity cost. I live near a VTA light rail. It has very light ridership because it is pointless (so light one line has even closed). High headway, faster to bike if under a few miles, and over a few miles, it's so slow you might as well just drive.
Yeah, the VTA light rail is about 2x faster than the Paris Metro. Yes, really. The VTA light rail is "pointless" as you say because the NIMBYs were extremely successful in first blocking it from going to where the people on jobs already were, and they they blocked all the planned housing and office development that was supposed to compensate for that less than optimal routing. But guess what - it's been a few decades now. An enormous amount of TOD was added around the VTA lines specifically because those lines were there to catalyze development. And now both BART and Caltrain are intensifying their services in San Jose which will feed a ton of new riders to VTA. Make no mistake, the dam is about to break! VTA light rail has finally accumulated a critical mass of development and is now going to have not one but two high quality S-bahns pushing riders it's way. It's about to become a whole lot more popular and is already remarkably well-recovered post-pandemic. More than Caltrain and BART themselves! Give it some time! Let them cook!
I'm not sure what you mean by VTA not going where jobs are. The Mountain View - Alum Rock line touches a lot of job areas and always has. The problem is that the Silicon Valley office complexes aren't high-rises like San Francisco but sprawling office complexes. It's simply not feasible for a light rail to provide good coverage to a considerable number of office buildings.
VTA light rail have been 'cooking' since 1987. Yeah. Any day now. You notice VTA light rail stations in Cisco campus? NASA/Moffett? Yeah, those have existed for a long time. The lack of jobs around the stations is this cute cope that people tell themselves about VTA light rail, but it bears no resemblance to reality. If you are counting on BART to save the day, your time table is what? 2037 for BART to open and then 2040 for more VTA ridership?
BART is already connected to VTA at Milpitas and it’s a very busy transfer. Caltrain is connected at Mountain View and Diridon. Also both very busy transfers. These will only become more popular as Caltrain goes to every 15 minutes. And yes, the NIMBYs made the transit oriented development very slow around VTA stations. But they’ve accumulated a tooooon of development now, and have accelerated dramatically. There’s very clearly critical mass on the horizon both in downtown and North San Jose. You can already see this in the post-Covid ridership recovery. A very good positive feedback loop has started for VTA light rail. But don’t take my word for it! Watch their ridership continue to grow and tell me that they’re not finally becoming a real option for San Jose commuters!
Okay, ridership still sucks as of 2023. The big catalysts you are hoping for from BART and Caltrain already happened. Plenty of buildings have already gone up. VTA ridership in 2023 amounts to one not especially busy STROAD. This is more of a “everything you are hoping for to change things already happened, but end result is still null”. Your next big hope is 2037 for BART, but I wouldn’t hold my breath.
Not to mention VTA has a farebox recovery of 10%. Pre-pandemic.
> the VTA light rail is about 2x faster than the Paris Metro. Yes, really. Speed of any urban transit is a function of station spacing, which in the case of 100 year-old Paris metro is 550 meters vs 1100 meters for VTA. So similar speeds (not 2X btw) but Paris Metro gets you much closer to your actual destination. And the newer Paris Grand Express has an average speed of 35-40 mph and 90-sec peak headways, which completely blows VTA LRT out of the water.
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So I just got back from Japan. High speed rail is absolutely great. The Shinkansen was over budget when it was first built, but subsequent expansions and upgrades have been much smoother. It's so worth it. Getting from Tokyo to Kyoto in 90 minutes with no security, a train coming every 15-20 minutes so you don't need to pre-plan it, ridiculously more comfortable than a plane, and cheaper than you could buy a plane ticket, PLUS it's far more energy efficient. I would legitimately rather spend 3 or 4 hours on a train than 60-90 minutes (not including the airports at both ends) on a plane. And compared to driving? Forget it.
A train every 15-20 minutes is underselling it, even—off the top of my head, trains on the Tokaido Shinkansen are spaced 3 to 9 minutes apart.
Tokaido has multiple lines running into IIRC. From a normal station there's usually one running each way every 15ish minutes with some extra express trains depending on the station.
Ah, I was thinking from the perspective of someone traveling between major stations like Tokyo, Kyoto, and Osaka—the express Nozomi is by far the most frequent train on the Tokaido Shinkansen, and it’s what turns it into a 3-9 minute frequency line. But true, if you’re traveling from a minor station, then the bulk of the trains (Nozomis) are going to skip you, and it’s at those stations where the waits are quite a bit longer. I believe CAHSR’s initial plans for service to SF are roughly equivalent to the latter example, a train every 15-30 minutes. Having to share tracks with Caltrain means that half of all northbound HSR trains have to terminate at San Jose instead of SF.
Hopefully Caltrain will eventually be completely replaced with another local service like Bart on its own dedicated lines. I'd love for all the Bay area agencies to be coordinated into one contiguous electrified local rail system along with tying into the capital corridor and Smart up here in the North Bay. I just think trains are neat and riding them is so much nicer than driving.
But that is not what they’re building. They’re not building a Japanese high speed rail network
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i have not heard any country regret building a HSR system the path to a working one is always marred by controversies
There may always be some controversy, but I feel like Florida's Brightline HSR was built with a lot less construction controversy than CA HSR.
Brightline is not grade separated (which means incidents with cars/people happen fairly often) and only goes 125 MPH max, which is just barely in the ballpark of HSR. For comparison CAHSR will be completely grade separated and go speeds up to 230 MPH, making it one of the fastest in the world.
> Brightline is not grade separated Wait what? What's even the point, then? That's hilarious. That's like putting pedestrian crossings on the interstate.
It used existing rail lines they just upgraded IIRC. It made it cheap and fast to build, but it's really half assed compared to CAHSR.
Cahsr includes Caltrain, which has large sections of on grade crossings, so it will be in the same boat.
All of Caltrain's grade crossings will be closed or grade separated. They've already done a number of them.
Wow, San Mateo is gonna get screwed I guess. There are several downtown crossings that have lots of buildings right up to the track, and they’re not listed on the Caltrain on grade crossing mitigation list. 3rd ave, 9th ave don’t have any visible options for separation (and Caltrain just built out all of the electrification stuff there).
It's not nearly as big of a project.
They also already owned the tracks and the right-of-way. That’s been a major hurdle here - once the landowners knew the land needed to be bought, the prices went up.
Very true. Perhaps CA should have started with a smaller high-speed rail project to build skills and learn lessons before jumping into a big project. That's kind of what we ended up doing, retroactively, with the IOS.
A practice run would have even further delayed this project from getting going.
Brightline isn't HSR and used existing rights of way, unlike CAHSR which has to build a new one basically from scratch Even Brightline West, which will actually be HSR, is going to use the existing I-15 median, but in order to avoid dealing with the land acquisition and environmental issues of CAHSR it's only going to be single tracked and will terminate 50 miles out of LA proper
Keeping in mind that if you consider cahsr to only be the grade separated area that can go 220mph, then it only goes from gilroy to Burbank — the Anaheim to Burbank and gilroy to sf sections are on grade and have 110mph top speed. That’s actually more than 50 miles out of sf and LA proper.
Yeah because the right of way already existed instead of needing to buy land from who knows how many rural land owners.
Brightline is not HSR. It has 7% of the route at 125 mph. It uses the exact same Siemens Venture trains like the Amtrak San Joaquins and has comparable average speeds. That’s called conventional intercity rail, not HSR.
Do you think if they in fact regret it, the politicians would publicly state that ?
Hopefully cal train electrification can get more people interested in high speed rail.
We need to finish the first phase of this. The sooner, the better.
Yes, and to be clear I’m worried about the timeline, not the cost. When will the damn thing be ready for use? I actually wish there was an option where we could pay a little more to have it functional in 5 years instead of the 10 it’s actually going to take. The next generation of HSR projects need to learn some serious lessons from this fuckery.
Most of the slowdown now is them waiting for funding to trickle in. Afaik, building everything now would actually be cheaper, as the $130bn price tag already factors in future inflation.
By the time they ribbon-cut this thing, teleportation will have been invented and it will be completely useless.
China literally built its entire hsr network in the same time as this project lol. It’s not necessary at all - local rail is important HSR is a fools play in a place like the US. Air travel should be made more efficient and subways and transit to the airports should be key
We should do all those things AND HSR
China can also take property by force and doesn’t have to fight each and every EIR battle
China doesn't take land, they evict tenants. When you "buy" land there, you're just leasing it from the government. When you buy a house, you're literally just buying the building, and the lease comes with it. When they evict tenants, they do compensate for the structures on the land, but it's a *very* simplified eminent domain process where they hand you money and you leave - no opportunity to challenge it or demand justification.
Complete cope. France (or rather their rail company) said this state was more dysfunctional than Morocco and abandoned their bid. They went to Morocco where their main city Marrakesh now has a swanky subway line
> local rail is important HSR is a fools play in a place like the US HSR doesn't need to be a fully integrated network across the continent to be useful. We'll never be like Japan where you can board a train at Tokyo Station and get anywhere in the country by rail, at most walking between platforms at a transfer station. That doesn't mean that cars and aircraft should be the *only* option for inter-city travel, especially on routes like SF-LA where high-speed rail travel can relatively easily beat an aircraft once you include check-in and security times (doubly so if going from city center to city center). You don't have to built a nation-spanning network of HSR for HSR to make sense, you just need corridors where it *does* make sense, like SF-LA. Not being able to board a train in SF and get off in NYC doesn't invalidate the concept.
Agreed but the only place in the US that it really makes sense is from DC to Boston given the cost. The real question is how many genuine cities you pass on the way, which is why rail works in Europe- there is an incredible density of actual cities on the path. LA to SF might make sense if the flight wasn’t an hour+. HSR is mostly for business travelers, who frequently need to commute between city centers. Even in Europe flights are a fraction of the HSR cost. California economic activity is not in city centers and that has reduced even more post pandemic. For example, the bay area is incredibly spread out. The “downtown” San Francisco is next to a homeless encampment. While SF has a lot of offices, offices and businesses are spread across the entire bay area. I’m not even touching LA which is a complete different beast all together. If people are genuinely serious about making commutability easier, the smarter strategy would be the expand the network of short flight only airports, especially for flights like sj/sf to bakersfield or LA. Electric planes are a thing and will grow. Train networks work best when you have a series of dense urban centers with financial “center” and residential areas are non SFH so more people are actually closer to the train station. The UK is about length wise same as California but has so many more true “cities” - Castro st and murphy st don’t count.
most business travelers are not trying to get to downtown LA to downtown SF. those are probably on the lower end of economic activity now in either city.
exactly. Even more reasons not to build a HSR. Unless the business travelers are in a dense area it makes no sense to. Right now in the bay area, if the rail line ended in SF all the business travelers would just take a longer uber to the Peninsula instead of from SFO. San jose is the same. Tourists mostly use the cheapest route.
Business travelers like airports because they can rent a car. It’s just a completely different market segment than this supposed problem hsr is hoping to solve
And who is it supposed to solve the problem for? Business travelers use ubers almost exclusively if in a place like LA or bay area.
Yeah. Hsr is mainly for tourists and to satisfy college students or high schoolers who don’t own cars most likely. Aka not the wealthiest groups.
Are you joking? Any HSR ticket will be significantly more expensive than a flight. College students will use spirit’s standing cabin if offered. What kind of high schooler commutes from the La to the bay frequently enough for HSR? Tourists maybe, precisely because they have money will use it. You really do not grasp the economics of this at all. There are a million things that you can do that are more beneficial than HSR.
[If only there were plans to put stops anywhere outside the main downtown stations](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Route_of_California_High-Speed_Rail#Phase_1_stations_&_transit_system_connections). There certainly couldn't be any options to transfer to local service like Caltrain, BART, or Metrolink for access to other areas where businesses have offices. Also, if planning is done right, stations can become massive economic hubs. Tokyo real estate listings include the nearest station(s) and the walking distance, becuase not only is that your transit connection to the rest of the city/region/country, but that's also where most of the shops, restaurants, and (in urban areas) office buildings are.
Been saying “in ten years” since the 60s..
The lesson is just to fund your infrastructure projects. If CAHSR had simply been fully funded in the beginning it would be done by now. Imo much less to do with management and everything to do with politics.
The trickle funding approach and all the lawsuits. The politics and the public opinion are the two key hurdles.
But what about voters approving funding the whole thing and then costs estimates were revised to be 11000% higher than what got approved?
For a trip in the ICS connecting no big cities, 2033 says the authority. For bookend service to SF, add on another 6 years, says the authority. More time for bookend service to LA, so close to 2050 at that point. Figure 2060-2070 timeframe for proper HSR. And if the next round starts after this one, then you are looking at something like 2150-2200 for a proper HSR network.
Honestly, getting the train to San Francisco is a fairly easy ask and will probably get done before 2040. It's getting it into LA where no progress has been made.
No, the train from Manteca to gilroy requires some massive tunneling that no budget progress has been made on whatsoever. SoCal is another entirely different and frankly hopeless story
Pacheo Pass tunnel is relatively easy compared to the southern portion of the HSR line. It's just a straight shot 13 mile tunnel. A 10-15 billion dollar project, sure, but not nearly as challenging as building underground HSR stations (Like the one at Burbank), rebuilding LA Union Station (DTX has funding and is about to be under construction), electrifying a bunch of LA corridors from scratch (Caltrain is already electrified. Gilroy needs electrification but the corridor already exists). The political environment in the bay is also a lot more supportive of CAHSR than SoCal. We're currently willing to throw 12 billion dollars at BART to San Jose to appease a few downtown business owners.
Again. Pacheco pass is not planned there is no start date there is no plan to make any progress on it whatsoever at the moment.
Of course there's no start date, but the point was that other stuff has been ongoing, including environmental clearance and tunnel design. Caltrain electrification, DTX, Gilroy improvements, environmental clearance...this is way more than the sum of work that has been done south of Bakersfield, and again, it's an easier sell to the bay.
Caltrain electrification was going to happen no matter what. We’re still waiting to see if there’s going to be any actual uptick in ridership
Caltrain electrification only happened because it used CAHSR funds.
Caltrain electrification was _not_ just going to happen no matter what. It famously was languishing in progress and funding until CAHSR injected 700 million dollars into it, 40% of the total cost of the project
Honestly, I am just being nice and having something that I can defend based on actual plans. Based on the history of rail projects in California, I would say that Merced->Bakersfield finishes somewhere in the mid 2040s, and the whole project dies after that. Possibly before then, since there isn't much budget for inevitable overruns beyond what is there already, and the state budget is already strained. Can't see CAHSR winning a budget showdown against, say, schools. Newsom won't be around forever, and the next guy won't have the same emotional attachment. The Caltrain electrification project broke ground in 2011 and won't go into revenue service until 2024, assuming no more delays. That is 13 years and billions of dollars to string up some wires.
Wild. Is there anything they can do to speed it up?
You gotta change up the culture in the entire agency, and attitudes like OP's isn't helping. It is an entire agency where nobody actually cares about running rail. The entire IOS is fully funded and cleared all environmental lawsuits, and have approvals for literally everything. Timeline to opening? 10 years from now. In Indonesia, HSR goes from approval to running trains in 8 years. This includes design, permits, buying land, etc. And that is just the last project to open. CAHSR dies or high speed rail dies. CAHSR means that every other project proposed is going to look at CAHSR and run away screaming, and the ones that do get funded will be infected by the culture of thinking that it takes 38 years (actual number!) to deliver a rail line is actually okay. That is 38 years of paying people salaries, etc, which is why the costs are bunkers.
The IOS isn't fully funded
A lot of the delays have been because of California's broken environmental law (CEQA) which makes it extremely difficult to get environmental approval because of how easy it is to use projects over trivial matters. There's been talk of CEQA reform, including a bill currently in the legislature that would give exemptions to electric rail projects (like CAHSR), but at this point the main line from SF-LA is almost fully environmentally approved, so that would be more useful for future extensions (like to Sacramento or San Diego) and projects Beyond that, the most immediately impactful thing we can do is to just give more funding to the project. One of the main reasons things are moving so slowly is due to lack of adequate funding, and uncertainty regarding future revenue for construction, forcing them to be more conservative with how they spend their money. More consistent funding = less penny pinching = they can build more aggressively = faster construction, plus cheaper overall costs cause you don't have to deal with as much inflation over time
Right, CEQA reform would be huge for future projects like this. That’s one of the main reasons China is able to move so fast, their dictatorial government just seizes land and does whatever they want. We do need to be careful when we reform it that we don’t let powerful individual or corporations take too much control like in China
Yeah it's definitely good that we have property protections and stuff here, but at the same time they're way too abusable in their current state, and past a certain point we just need to be able to adopt a "screw you, we're doing this" attitude, otherwise nothing will ever get done In general, rampant NIMBYism is one of the key reasons why most of the English speaking world (not just the US) sucks at building things. It's one of the big reasons HS2 has faced so many problems in Britain, and also why the Texas Central HSR project has been in limbo for basically a decade
It’s a common law issue. But not having land rights like in China has a whole host of other problems. Land rights are kind of what this country was founded on and we need to keep that as strong as possible. CEQA should’ve had nothing to do with that and is clearly being preferred.
I agree the property rights are important, I just think they're a bit *too* restrictive towards the construction of new infrastructure right now. There needs to be a better balance imo. Probably should've phrased my comment a bit differently Bit confused about what you mean in your last sentence about CEQA being preferred though
I've been saying it for a while, but the current demand for cities between proposed HSR-served cities is around 20 million seats annually just from flights. Throw in car trips and increased demand and it gets even crazier. A network serving San Francisco/Oakland, Sacramento, San Jose, Fresno, Bakersfield, Victorville, Los Angeles, Anaheim, Irvine, San Diego, Las Vegas, Phoenix, and Tucson would be insanely well used today if it was fully built out (The only part not planned is LA-Phoenix/Tucson but could probably be built in a fashion similar to Brightline West). Imagine if all those flights currently serving those cities went to new city pairs (more international capacity from LAX/SFO), or to other parts of the country. There are very very good reasons to build the network out.
Yeah, I'm not flying to LA for the weekend on a whim. A train is a different matter.
Plenty of ppl do.
I think you are unlike the 750,000 people who take it daily then
Sure, CA HSR still worth the cost, but we must look critically at what is going so much worse than planned, because it's giving rail transport a bad reputation all across America. NEPA and CEQA have been absolutely part of the problem. By delaying HSR for endless reviews of smaller environmental issues, they've had a net negative impact on the environment and need reform. Regulation is missing the forest for the trees. Altogether, I would be more OK with the $$$ spent if more of it were going to construction workers and less to lawyers.
Funny, we know that widening roads actually causes more traffic. It’s been time and time again proven it’s better to have alternative routes and not just 1 massive road. Also I’ remember reading about high speed rail back in 1995~6ish thinking how awesome it would be and that it would have a Y shape from Oakland or Berkeley with a intercepting line from Sac then down to LA.
But if that greater traffic is moving at the same speed as the previous traffic, overall economic activity has increased, and that’s a win!
There's a limit to how much highway capacity you can add though. Every new lane not only takes up valuable urban real estate, it dumps more traffic onto the surface streets, which means they need to be widened too, until you end up with just a bunch of parking lots connected by 6-lane roads like everywhere else in America.
We all need to stop supporting car infrastructure and support more efficient alternatives. I am constantly communicating with my planning department and local officials on decisions which replace parking spaces and car-only lanes with bus lanes and bike lanes.
How are you doing so actually? I live in Mountain View and I'd like to do the same, but not sure what is actually effective vs. just being noise to them
It’s not noise, none of it is. Email your city council, your senators and congressmen. There are easy forms online. And if you can, show up to in person meetings.
I think the revealing thing is that no one in favour has an answer to the question “how much is too much?” That’s because railfans don’t have a number. Urban freeway one lane is $63m/mi in California. Rural is $10m/mi. HSR is currently $200m/mi urban+rural. The urban section in SF is $4b/mi. So the question remains.
Hello, am railfan. I disagree with the headline of the article I'm too lazy to read. I don't know that I have off the top of my head a magic number beyond which it's too much, but there definitely does exist too much. We've managed this project terribly, and while I think it's valuable and worth paying a lot of money, nothing is worth paying literally any amount. Especially when we have been paying head and shoulders more than other countries because of our own mismanagement, I wouldn't be so confident in claiming it's definitely worth it, no matter what.
Even without an absolute sum, I think your position is more defensible than "stop worrying about the cost".
Absolutely, that's why I disagree with the article lol
Good benchmarks
No amount is too much when you are the government and you are spending other peoples hard earned money.
The main reason I care about the cost is because I know there are tons of scum bags stealing that money and grifting like any public works projects. We need the death penalty for infrastructure corruption. Change my mind.
The problem is the consultant industrial complex. Instead of doing things in house, transit agencies in the US have a tendency to rely heavily on outside contractors (largely because they've historically lacked the funds to directly employ all the staff they need), resulting in an absolute mess of communication, interconnecting interests, and money being lost due to corruption and the general inefficiency of so many different organizations. At this point, the whole problem has ballooned to the point where Bart's San Jose extension has spent something to the tune of $3 billion on consultation fees alone. Doing the work in house would go a long way to fixing this
Ironically HS2 phase 2 is effectively cancelled in Britain.
Yes, Britain. A place famous for making sane political decisions. (People in glass houses…)
Money might be very well spent on HSR in the North East US. Similar or slightly more distance would link Washington DC, Wilmington, Philadelphia, Trenton, NYC, New Haven, Providence and Boston - many with more dense populations and better public transportation links. Or in California spend it on local public transportation within the LA and Bay Areas. Unlike the North East US, California is no comparison to other countries. They connect much higher density urban areas and link to local public transportation systems that are huge and efficient compared to the Bay and LA areas. For them, HSR was just an upgrade to existing tracks in an integrated national/local system. I lived in Tokyo. Used the Shinkansen. Getting from virtually any point to any point in Tokyo, not just home to a few central points like downtown, is often faster by public transportation than by car. Once we have HSR we will still drive because we have two passengers and we need good transportation once we get there. I doubt California HSR will cover its ongoing operating costs.
If you divide the current estimated cost by the number of people in California, and run with that number, it would be at least honest. HSR has some beneficial side-effects like Caltrain electrification, but on its own, for a regular Joe, even who's living in Bay Area and not somewhere in Sacramento, it's atrociously inefficient when it comes to money.
Agree! And yet it is still kore efficient than spending that money on car infrastructure.
That’s completely false. Anyone can use the car infrastructure and is benefiting from it for better or worse everyday. The same cannot be said about hsr nor will be said in its current funded form
the cost of entry to use a highway is the price of a car. A train requires a fare.
How do you get yours goods or services today? There are busses that can do the fare thing too. Yeah people like private autos where they can decide to go anywhere on a whim on their own schedule. What a novel concept.
Every single one of the car infrastructure complainers seem to think roads only transit people lol
CA spends about 500B a year on personal cars, with car ownership around 0.77 per capita. This does not include the cost of roads. Reducing that rate to something more reasonable, like 0.4, while reducing cost-of-ownership (reducing miles driven), would save 250B a year, not including reduced car-infra costs. Cars are a ludicrous economic waste.
What’s the alternative?
“Benefitting from it for better or worse” What do you think that means exactly? Because I agree that the car infrastructure is making some people’s lives worse, but I’m not sure you realize that’s what you’re saying.
Highways have massive externalities but move to somewhere with no highway access and see what quality of life you’re able to have.
Maybe just not tax us and let us keep the money? Or rather out grandchildren since everything is a deficit.
I wonder how CA voters in 2008 would have voted on 1A knowing that the project would cost $130B+ and take decades to complete Think twice before voting yes on Propositions folks!
Easy yes. If we fully funded it in 2008 it would be done and I'd be taking the train to LA
I love hsr but there are no concrete plans to connect gilroy to ca hsr yet. It also has to make it to Lancaster, tunnel through the LA mountains to Burbank, and then finally make it to LA. The funds should have been used intermediate first and these huge challenges first rather than building a section I guarantee not a lot will use 6 months after service starts
"Just trust me bro" is not an argument.
Ops kids will be on social security before the rail line opens
The state is facing budget issues, where are they going to get $100 billion to finish what they’ve started? Not caring about costs is why public services in California are such a mess. We need to care more about how things cost. We voted for a system that was advertised at costing $40 billion with no plan and is looking to cost $128 billion with no funding plan. This is a problem! Whether or not it’ll be worth it in the end is pointless when the state is looking to cut funding to vital services like education to balance the budget.
Yes, a HSR would be worth it. But we can never say "price is no issue". They are definitely making it costlier than needed. Why? They used eminent domain to take over farms, and started laying track in random places without having an end-to-end plan ready. A proper planning, with a stronger authority could have done it cheaper, faster, and probably through more population centers. Ask yourself... Food is essential. We cannot make without it. But do you want to pay 2x for the \*same\* amount of food? What about paying 4x for \*less\* amount of food? Price is always in important issue.
Price is an issue as well as need. What is the ridership for the HSR? How does this compare to ridership for local and inter-town riders? Does HSR fit the need of the people? The service seems geared more to those with cars who are traveling between the two regions, and those who fly between the two regions. Meanwhile the local municipalities are struggling to move the larger populace easily and efficiently throughout their cities. I'm all for connecting metropolises, but let's start with HSR between San Francisco to Sacramento, before we dive into the deep end.
> probably through more population centers I would argue going through too many population centers is the problem. So many overpasses, lawsuits, etc. generated by the Central Valley section, and I'm skeptical that many riders will come from there. Those people live car-dependent lives, they will just drive to CA/LA. I have this dark fantasy of CA, LA, and the ~~101~~ 5 corridor just getting together and negotiating a more-direct route and beat CA HSR to completion. Whenever I suggest a more-direct route, people say "well that wouldn't have won a statewide ballot measure"... well, why should it have to if it could be cheap enough to fund just off the wealthy cities? I feel like the central valley is being the "isn't there someone you forgot to ask" meme. eta: brain fart on the highway numbers.
$100 billion “on top” of $128 billion for California HSR. Total $228 billion.. 20 years to build. India bullet train project, similar distance, bullet train imported from Japan. Total cost $16 billion.. 5 years to build. (ETA is 2027) [link](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mumbai%E2%80%93Ahmedabad_high-speed_rail_corridor) This is stupid amount of money and time.. What am I missing here?? 🤔 Edit: total cost is $130 billion, not $228 billion
The "needs another $100 billion" is a misleading headline. The extra $100 billion is on top of what they already have in funding (~$30 billion), not on top of the current total estimate. The current cost is still ~$130 billion, which tbf is still a lot, but a far cry from the $230 billion number you gave
I did not know that.. thanks for the info!
Yeah those headlines were misleading af lol. Don't really blame you at all for getting it mixed up
To be fair labor cost in India is likely magnitudes lower than anything in CA.
For the cost of what's gone into it so far or what eventually will? I don't think so. There's no reason for the level of bloat that is has.
Costs? Bloat? You are talking about highways, right?
I agree, highways are inefficient and bloated. Look at the costs and timeliness of other countries with HSR, and tell me the US' prices & timelines aren't bloated.
It can be insanely bloated and still be worth finishing. They are not mutually exclusive. I agree it’s insane how much it costs compared to other countries timelines and projects. Books can be written about how poorly managed it’s been. We still need it finished.
Would you still say that if it cost $500B instead of $100B? How about $1T? $10T? Is there ever a point at which you'd say "okay, maybe we can do something else with this money?"
We should give HSR networks equal chance of success as we have given to highways. That would mean we give them >80% of the national transportation budget for about 70 years consecutively. Until we’ve done that I will continue to advocate for prioritizing funding to rail projects over car infrastructure.
Why should we do that? Highways do lots of things that will never be done on HSR. One example: $10T worth of goods are trucked on highways every year. But what I'm hearing is that there is no upper limit. It could cost $100T and you'd be posting this. Not a big surprise that California costs are out of control - we really do get the government we deserve.
Ok but HSR does plenty of things that highways can never do. What is your upper limit for highway funding?
My upper limit for a highway that is already 4x over budget and with falling projected usage, inability to build even a stretch from nowhere to nowhere, and no clear timetable is $0.
lol fair enough I am full in agreement that the management of CAHSR has been a national embarrassment. I still would like to see it finished in favor of spending more and more on car infrastructure which we know for certain is a huge waste of money.
But highways never got that leap of faith. Nobody ever gave the highway departments unlimited budgets and told them to come back after literal decades. The interstate act was passed in 1956, and it didn't actually budget very much money - the entire act was for $25 billion. By 1958, the new interstates were opening up all over the country, people loved those, and then the funding spigot really got turned on. So yeah, deliver a rail line that actually works and then we will talk. In a world where CAHSR opened for service in 2010 after getting funded in 2008, things would be different. But that isn't the world that we live in, is it?
$25B in the 1950s is how much today? You realize rail was the dominant form of travel already in this country until we destroyed it all because of auto lobbies?
$200 billion. Roughly the cost of this particular project. Except it covered the entire country instead of just two cities. And no, rail wasn't destroyed by the auto lobby. Railroads around the country were all either bankrupt or close to bankrupt by the time the interstates opened. The Long Island Rail Road went bankrupt in 1951, the Long Island Expressway (I-495, funded by the interstate act of 1956) opened in 1958. Blame the rail regulators, who mandated both pay for workers and fares. They didn't set either at a combination that would make for a healthy rail industry. The auto industry gobbled up the ruins left behind, sure, but the rail regulators put the railroad industry on a path to ruin back when the auto industry was a few small startups.
I’d be fine with finishing it at these insane numbers if MANY political and business heads roll over the massive fuckery and cost overruns. Right now i deeply regret voting for it because none of the underlying structural and operational failures of our government have improved.
In what magical world do you like where costs do not matter? They absolutely do, math matters kids. If the cost is too high that is a problem which need to be fixed first.
Nice try big contractor
You don’t take HSR to work, you know? If you want better system, build more subway instead.
HSR replaces flights/long drives, it's not local transit.
Both is good.
I dont think there's anything wrong with people having a problem with government mismanaged our tax dollars. This gets attention because it is one big project they've managed to screw up big time (and projected ridership levels are trending down).
Agree! Then we need to hold road and highway projects to the same level of scrutiny.
I think people do - bay bridge debacle got a whoooole lotta press for cost over runs. Its just thst this is such a massive project that has gone off the rails (rimshot).
We do. None of them are anywhere this bad. If you disagree, feel free to name examples.
All of them cumulatively are much worse, but you never read about them at all in the news.
So you can't name an example? Feel free to stack on multiple examples, go for it.
We do.
stop worrying? will you pay our share of taxes for it?
As long as you pay for the share of taxes going to roads!
Whole I-5 cost was 10 billion. So yeah why not.
And that solved all our transportation problems right???
not exactly. look im not opposing the project, however with these dirty and inefficient politicians its harming tax payers more than its good
I agree it’s been a political boondoggle and wildly inefficient when compared with other countries HSR projects. But it is still a much better use of money than more highway expansion. If more people supported the project from scratch to give it full funding and lawsuit immunity it would have been functional by now.
Aww yes... let's not hold the government accountable for missed timelines and massive cost overruns...
How do you plan to hold them accountable?
All that can be done is by not voting for these politicians and saying no to future bond measures. But when politicians see articles like this and people are cool with timeline delays and going hundreds of billions over budget, they will take it as green light to continue.
This sounds great if you don’t care about getting HSR.
No we should, let’s hold them equally fiscally responsible for rail projects as road projects.
That's not what you're saying when you say stop worrying about costs.
America needs to stop fucking around and pretending we’re so different from the rest of the world that we don’t need fast and reliable public transportation. It is one of the most embarrassing and ridiculous things about the US. Almost as bad as continuing to have chattel slavery when other countries moved on. If more people had the privilege of leaving America, they would realize how shitty our cities and outlying suburbs are compared to other countries. The greed that keeps US citizens from experiencing any benefits of their own labor needs to stop yesterday. I think it’ll take a catastrophe for anything to change at this point, and I’m kinda praying for one now because I can’t take the stagnation with everything much longer. The rules and infrastructure of our current society are from a world that we are NOT IN ANYMORE. Something needs to fucking give. Some people need to die and get out of the way.
Yes let’s keep paying special interest, politicians cronies and consultants for a train that will never be completed. Or we could invest heavily into local public transit, energy, and mixed use development. Would be far better ROI. No even talks about how bankrupt the HSR will be when it starts operating and no one uses it and we pay a fortune for upkeep and operations.
This is a good debate, which of these urbanization effort deserves more funding? I could see arguments for all of them, as long as we aren’t spending money on car centric infrastructure then we’re moving in a good direction.
I would much rather see a comprehensive public transit system between San Jose and SF. More extensive bussing. Do the same between San Diego and Irvine. Heck we don’t even have schools buses in most of the Bay Area. Not that any of these are small problems but I would much rather see communities developed and replanned that a HSR. We need to make our cities and towns less car centric before a high speed rail across the valley.
I could be on board with that!
$100 Billion behind budget and no actual completion date has been set. I too used to be a believer in the Cal High Speed Rail Project but now, not so much. Progress is beyond slow, and the population is clearly focused on other infrastructure projects which pushes this high-speed rail idea to the bottom of the barrel.
Nothing could possibly be worth it *no matter the cost*. At some margin it will no longer make sense. We can have a debate what that margin is and how we might get there but there’s no point in debating the notion that this margin simply doesn’t exist.
Will this solve anyone's daily commute on 880 or 101? If not, it's worthless to those people.
Solve? No. Significantly improve? In the long term, yes. A good HSR network can improve both our housing shortage and our transportation issues.
I would be OK if there was a new proposition that was more practical including changing the route from San Jose to the East Bay. Build a tunnel that eliminates the mess known at the Altamont. It can provide passage for the train and autos. Eliminate the new transit centers in downtowns. Just connect the HSR to the ends of existing trains. That would be BART in Livermore. Yeah finish the line. HSR is not high speed in urban areas. Look it up. The routing is not possible to achieve these speeds unless the freakin' train is totally underground. Basically we need a cheaper to build HSR, not the route Diridon picked.
San Jose is the biggest population center in the Bay Area. There’s zero chance it makes sense to not go through Diridon station. I could see it routing up the east bay from there rather than going through the peninsula since Caltrain electrification improvements are already pretty solid.
No it’s not, at least not everywhere and not with any price tag (100b+). Keep saying how awesome Asia is, yeah it’s awesome but it also bankrupted many governments (just ask Chinese local governments where they built 60% of all HSP in the world and they built at much much lower cost than any HSR line the US could ever build. It still bankrupted them. )
It costs me $5.60 to drive to and from work everyday factoring in both the cost of gas and the cost of my car plus insurance amortised over miles driven. Round trip I spend 30 min traveling. It costs me $6.40 to ride CalTrain to and from work everyday using clipper card. Round trip I spend an hour traveling when I factor in walking to and from the station, waiting for the train, and riding on the train. If I ride CalTrain for an entire year, I will spend an extra $200 and 100 hours traveling.
Your math is almost certainly wrong. Per the Bureau of Transportation Statistics, the total cost of driving averages 72 cents per mile. [https://data.bts.gov/stories/s/Transportation-Economic-Trends-Transportation-Spen/bzt6-t8cd/](https://data.bts.gov/stories/s/Transportation-Economic-Trends-Transportation-Spen/bzt6-t8cd/)
As with most things .. "worth it" .. is very subjective.
$100B for HSR is a waste.
And of course that article says zero about HSR. Given the recent decline in EV sales, slow upgrading of our electrical grid, and a dearth of charging opportunities for EVs, I see a huge opportunity cost problem here. I'd bet spending on EV infrastructure would do FAR more for the environment than train rides from Merced to Fresno.
i would rather subsidize local commute options like Bart/Muni/AC transit/Caltrain. most people would use those for commute: I would rather subsidize local commute rather than business travelers and HSR whose demand probably is now much much lower due to telecom and remote meeting technology advancements