I gotta say, it's hard to know how much of a hurdle has been cleared here when this project seems to be absolutely nothing but hurdles to clear. Normally I would guess that getting this report approved would be a big deal in that construction could finally really get going, but then I read this:
> The Board’s certification of the San Francisco to San Jose Final EIR/EIS and approval of its project section will move the project section closer to being “shovel ready” when funding for final design, pre-construction and construction becomes available.
"Closer" to being "shovel ready" when "funding for final design... becomes available" is not a series of words that gives me confidence that meaningful progress has been made. However, I grant that I am no expert in the art of parsing press releases about big infrastructure projects.
Anybody out there with meaningful understanding of what this announcement might mean in practical terms?
that's referring specifically to the SF->SJ section; building of the HSR is apparently already underway in the central valley: https://www.buildhsr.com/
> They should have used the existing right of way on I5, no stops between SJ and LA.
If you build high speed rail, you want ridership. Adding Fresno to the line takes the distance from San Jose to LA from roughly 340 miles to 366, adding roughly[1] 7 minutes to the route for express trains - hardly a dealbreaker. This also allows other trains to stop at Fresno and Bakersfield, adding a population of ~1million to the route, increasing its' viability.
A straight shot down I-5 would save a few minutes but severely limit the economic and social benefits it will have by increasing access to the central valley.
[1] 26 miles/220 miles per hour = 7.1 minutes. Trains that stop will add a few more minutes. Equivalent systems in every country with HSR have a mixture of express trains and local trains in this situation
Nitpick: on a 26 mile stretch with stops at both end, that train will do closer to half its top speed. It has to decelerate and accelerate one more time. I think that will add closer to 15 minutes to the time on the full stretch.
But yes, they need riders, and thus intermediate stops. Most train passengers don’t ride the full track, just as most highway drivers don’t ride the entire highway.
Yes, that is why I explicitly noted the "express train" thing in my footnote. The route itself is longer, so a direct train will take a little bit longer. A local train that stops will add more time.
Bigger nitpick: 220MPH is the top speed. Average speed is going to be more like 130MPH, so more like 12 minutes (before considering the time for any stop).
They should have gone down the 101 corridor in the central coast area. The weather is pleasant and I could see people living along route and commuting to SF or LA.
Central Valley was a dumb move.
> They should have gone down the 101 corridor in the central coast area.
You can't even put a decent speed freeway, much less high speed rail, on parts of the 101 corridor.
Of all the armchair alternative route planning for HSR I've heard—and there's been a lot—this is the worst.
> The weather is pleasant and I could see people living along route and commuting to SF or LA. Central Valley was a dumb move.
People do live along the planned alignment (which is why it was chosen) and do already commute to the Bay Area as far as that is practical (and a bit more than most people would think reasonable) with existing transportation options (same on the LA end), and both displacing expected growth in freeway trips from that and extending the viable commute radius along that existing route is part of what HSR is aiming to do.
I’m confused doesn’t the 101 corridor go down the coast between Salinas and San Luis Obispo? And doesn’t the existing Coastal Starlight go along it?
I’ve actually taken that train. It takes 12 hours. A lot of that is padding because of the unreliability of the tracks, but also because the route is really tight. I doubt you would be able to improve the tracks there such that 5-6 hours would be possible, let alone the 2 hours through the valley.
I wish we had rail, including HSR, everywhere but the real world comes with financial constraints. While a Central Coast trunk alignment would be nice, any reasonable analysis indicates it really should be lower priority than the Central Valley trunk. It's something that would only be built in addition to and after the core system is running through the CV; to add additional capacity, redundancy, and to serve the Central Coast communities.
The Central Valley has millions more people and is projected to add millions more in the decades to come, which matters for ridership and the viability of the system. On speed, the Central Coast is only faster as the crow flies. It may not seem like it, but CV is actually is faster and more direct than the Central Coast on the ground. There's a reason people drive I-5 rather US-101 or CA-1/PCH when doing the NorCal-SoCal trip, unless they're intentionally taking the slower scenic coastal route [0]. There are formidable Coastal Ranges on Central Coast (and much California and Pacific coast of North America) [1][2]. This results in an alignment that is slower and more expensive due to more curves, elevated viaducts, and tunneling. It's also much more vulnerable to erosion, landslides, and flooding. [3][4] CalTrans and local DoTs struggle to keep roads open after winter storms.
But you can use the same track to run high speed rail going the full distance as well as a lower speed train going only half the way (or it could be high speed too just with an extra stop).
Much of the work in the Central Valley incorporates grade separation for the existing freight rail lines. So they have a small win every time they replace an at grade crossing with an overpass.
The whole thing seems like a self licking ice cream cone for consultants and construction firms. I’ll be amazed if anything useful staggers across the finish line decades from now.
Sorry, hold on. It was my understanding that the state had a vast surplus of money. Even with a rail project as drawn out and over funded as this one, is that something you expect to happen in the near future?
> Just in time for the state to declare bankruptcy again!
The state has not declared bankruptcy (because it legally can't), not has it repudiated it's debts without bankruptcy (which it also legally can't), so I'm not sure what your point is.
It stopped paying debts for quite awhile, and defaulted on a lot of tax sharing agreements it had with counties and the like. Which they didn't really have any recourse for.
You're right though it wasn't technically bankruptcy!
It isn't the first time the State has had solvency issues either.
It stopped paying a subset of its obligations from July-September 2009.
> and defaulted on a lot of tax sharing agreements it had with counties and the like.
It did not. It suspended, with the required governors declaration and legislative supermajority, a protected reservation of certain funding streams for local use that had only been adopted in 2004 (and only effective since 2006), before which such diversions by the state were common, to temporarily redirect $1.9 billion (which would be repayed) to deal with the state cash flow situation; note that proponents of the 2004 measure noted that $40 billion had been permanently redirected (not borrowed) by the state from the funds that would be protected by it over the preceding 12 years, or about $3.3 billion per year.
These aren’t “tax sharing agreements” made between different parties, they are assignments of revenue to particular uses under the State Constitution, which have exceptions.
> It isn’t the first time the State has had solvency issues either.
No, but it was the last, and Like literally all of the previous ones, it was a cash flow crises as a result of a budget impasse due to the 2/3 budget supermajority requirement (which has since been repealed), resulting in fund exhaustion without authority to do normal cash management things like selling short-term revenue anticipation bonds (there was more involved in 2009, but that was the foundational problem, the other complications were complications in solving the budget deadlock.)
States can't declare bankruptcy, but California was insolvent a bit over a decade ago.
I still have an "IOU" from those years sent by the state instead of the money I was owed due to overpaying state taxes. The state was essentially bankrupt for a signification time, even though no proceedings took place.
> States can't declare bankruptcy, but California was insolvent a bit over a decade ago.
California had a cash flow crisis in 2009.
> The state was essentially bankrupt for a signification time, even though no proceedings took place.
Not really. It was unable to make payments because of the political inability (due to supermajority requirements in the legislature—one of the key ones of which has since been removed—legislative/executive disunity, reliance on voter approval for certain actions which failed, etc.) to decide how to change operations to do so, not because of lack of resources.
Yes. It was a warrant which returned a couple percent interest on the balance. It said I could take it to a bank and cash it like a check in a few months, which I did.
No. And... I can't even imagine a way to bring hope or scale to the process. I appreciate the question, but it made me laugh.
...The best thing we could do would be to lobby to get regulators to:
- increase the number and type of CEQA exemptions.
- Add mandatory automatic approvals on things if there's no response after x number of days. CDFW does this sort of thing for Lake and Streambed Alteration Notifications. If they don't get back to you within 90 days, you get automatic approval. It's a beautiful thing. In practice, it keeps the agency running with much improved efficiency. They still try to stall occasionally by declaring your application "incomplete" for bullshit reasons, but that only resets the clock another 90 days, and if you respond with all requested information, they can't do shit.
But... the political climate in CA is relatively unfavorable to such things. Lots of NIMBY's and environmental groups will oppose it.
The exact problem of California's High-Speed Rail is that individuals (as well as local municipalities) keep suing them. The original timeline and budget would probably not have been too far off if it weren't for this
The current route has been modified a bunch to appease local municipalities that want, or don't want, part of the tracks or a stop near them. Maybe that can be stopped by voting, but the wealthy individuals will continue to sue and force more expensive litigative battles like the one that resulted in this environmental assessment needing to be cleared
I don’t think that is the only thing that is keeping this slow and expensive. I think the first estimates were way to optimistic (especially in terms of costs and funding opportunities).
I think the main thing that has been slowing things down is severe lack of funding, both from the state of California, and especially from the federal government. This is probably due to the fact that there was a lack of experience (both from the rail authority and especially from the legislator). Thankfully it looks like they have stopped withholding funds and at this point they have gained some experience. I doubt there will be another doubling of cost estimate nor much more delays (perhaps a year or two more at most).
> The exact problem of California's High-Speed Rail is that individuals (as well as local municipalities) keep suing them.
No, it's funding.
The switch to exclusive focus on environmental clearance outside of a particular area of focus was based on funding, not lawsuits. HSR has always relied on massive additional funding besides it's dedicated bond fund, much of which was expected from the federal government, and which has not materialized.
You can actually see that in action. The day before this EIS was cleared it was announced that contracts for advancing designs on the two remaining sections in the Central Valley (Madera to Merced and Shafter to Bakersfield; essentially preparing for construction packages 5 and 6, if I understand correctly). This news came just days after the federal government granted them 25M USD from the bipartisan infrastructure bill.
It is not even 4 years since Gavin Newsom ordered the stop on any new construction packages (which ironically made this a train from nowhere to nowhere) because there simply wasn’t enough funding to finish anything that hadn’t already started. Thankfully it looks like this era is over now, and we can finally start seeing things get the funding it needs and deserves.
Pass laws which provide less grounds for suing these kinds of projects, or at least group them into one class action lawsuit instead of a smattering of actions. Provide abridged proceedings for infrastructure projects so judgements can be rendered more quickly. I'm thinking things like judge only trials, etc.
I think these are great ideas, with not much chance of passing. Imagine all the environmentalist groups screaming that they're going to silence legitimate criticism, shut off debate, push through poorly thought-out projects, destroy our environment, etc. etc.
I said "not much chance" rather than "no chance." Eventually, some watered-down version of a law like that might pass.
In my experience, pro-environmental regulation is always passed over a chorus of screaming capitalists pointing out that it makes it very expensive and difficult to build things. There is a reason that China is the factory of the world - it is legal in China to build things cheaply. There are only a tiny handful of people who know how to build things that are compliant with the regulation (& demonstrate that compliance).
So while the last step in the sequence of events is wealthy people suing, the actual problem here is probably that the CHSR may be illegal to construct and there are people with an interest in testing that theory.
Irresponsible uses like building suburbs when we could live in cities? Like flying when could be taking trains? Like driving when we could be biking? Environmental law is the main force requiring us to do those things.
Sorry, what? Are you implying that streamlining the already absurdly long and frankly abused NEPA reviews so we can get them done in a more timely manner is somehow a bad thing?
Perhaps I should clarify: "disruptive" in data-intensive and sensitive decision-making processes, e.g. involving ecosystems and environmental processes for which there is limited knowledge and very often unavailable information, means in practice "careless" rather than "timely".
According to their 2022 business plan, sometime in 2023/2024. There are two sections left to clear: Palmdale to Burbank, and LA to Anaheim (they cleared Burbank to LA earlier this year if I remember correctly):
> Our last two project sections, Palmdale to Burbank and Los Angeles to Anaheim, will be advanced in 2023/2024
Having ridden the California Zephyr between Chicago and Sacramento multiple times already this year I'm extremely annoyed with the lack of HSR in the USA.
Really looking forward to California getting some HSR established within the state.
Hopefully the rest of the country gets on board before I die.
It's really wonderful to travel cross-country by rail with your bicycle in tow. I made the trip from CA to IL for ~$160 in coach and was able to pedal literally out the doors of Union Station in downtown Chicago to the West burbs in day.
If it didn't take ~2.1 days to make the trip I'd do it far more often to visit friends/family. And we'd be able to meet somewhere in the middle like CO with our mountain bikes in tow on the regular. As-is the trip wastes far too much time in transit for them to meet me, and it's too costly/ridiculous emissions-wise for most of them to fly to CO (or CA) for a weekend - nevermind the nuisance of bringing a mtb on a plane.
Bringing the mtb onto the Zephyr was as easy as checking a bag, fully assembled, zero preparation necessary. It just needs to go 300+MPH and this would be magical.
There isn't many people in the USA that love the idea of driving their car to ride a train so that they can then rent a car to get where they are going.
Rails work very well in situations were you have high density living areas connected to high density working areas and everybody needs to get from the same point A to the same point B very often.
There is only a few places in the USA were such situations exist and they generally already have railways for people to use.
There was once a time were the USA had useful network of trains that people could actually use to get where they wanted to go, but the Federal government flushed that down the toilet in the first half of the 20th century in the name of "improving efficiency".
Pretty much every town, big or small, in the USA that was started before train going through the heart of it. If it didn't have a way to get there by rail there was no real point in building it.
But that hasn't been true for a long long time.
The idea being that large numbers of privately owned railways with small depots all over the place wasteful use of resources. It was much better to regulate and consolidate to remove the redundancies. They used to be proud about all the different depots and stops that were being destroyed and railway spurs that were being shutdown because they thought that it would reduce costs and economize the railway network.
The end result of all of this was the Interstate highway system.
> There isn't many people in the USA that love the idea of driving their car to ride a train so that they can then rent a car to get where they are going.
You've just described airports, except with trains instead of planes. If I could take a train instead of fly I would.
Your statement applies to the current dysmal US freight-prioritized train situation, not any respectable modern HSR implementation.
A modern HSR in the USA not shared with freight should have no trouble beating ~500MPH air travel door-to-door. It should emit less co2 and cost less to boot.
Plus good luck affording an entire roomwithabed and privatetoilet on a plane, that's private jet amenities territory.
Observation and dining cars are also nice experience enhancers trains easily offer but planes can't afford the space for.
Planes are technically faster once they get going, but the processes related to security, boarding, and the location of airports often being very far from city centres negates this for HSR train journeys <= 4 hours long. In theory you could replicate all the worst features of airports with rail, too, I suppose, but for obvious reasons it's easier to build a train station in a city centre than an airport.
I share the same pipe dream. The Zephyr is a second class passenger service on old freight lines. They won’t be able to retrofit high speed rail on them, Amtrak spent enormous sums for the Acela and it only beats the Northeast Regional by 25 minutes between NYC and DC over a three and a half hour trip. The political gridlock to extend such a design across the Great Plains and through the Rockies pains me to imagine.
Last time I tried guessing the cost of a high speed rail line from Denver to Chicago it seemed fairly cheap because it's 1200 miles of flat and undeveloped land. I think probably $100 billion.
Like a few other people in this post, I generally support the idea but find the implementation details and the political climate to be iminicable to rapid progress, which, given the extraordinary cost associated with the project, makes one truly wonder if it will ever be completed.
I'm also curious what it will look like in detail for the HSR to share the Caltrain corridor. I live about 1 mile away and every night, I can hear the existing diesel (which are transitioning to electric https://www.caltrain.com/projects/electrification/electric-t...) Caltrains lumbering along once the freeway noise quiets down. It's not the engines so much as the horns- the horns are very loud and some drivers hold them down for long periods.
There are several areas along the way where people are regularly hit by the train (there are level crossings https://www.caltrain.com/projects/grade-crossing-improvement...). i struggle to imagine precisely how Caltrain will share this with a high speed rail service, even with fixing all the remaining level crossings. There isn't room to add more track.
The one time I saw really quick construction was after a truck burned in the Macarthur Maze and caused a section of overpass to collapse. The contractor for that one managed to expedite the process... significantly
https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/A-MAZE-ING-His-reputa...
With respect to "extraordinary cost" I direct your attention to the new, $600 million, less than one mile 6th Street Viaduct that L.A. just built, which just opened but they had to immediately close. That is a boondoggle.
I also direct your attention to the east span of the Bay Bridge, which came in 800% over budget and 25 years late.
But oddly the yammering nerd army never discusses the monumental failures of car infrastructure.
You're right, but: Caltrain is being electrified in order to make the track compatible with HSR. HSR precludes at grade crossing where you'd need to use a horn. Ergo Caltrain is eliminating the at grade crossings as part of electrification and the electric trains will be quieter than the diesels service of yore.
In the North Bay, SMART (which is anything but) applied for and got an exemption for quiet crossings in some spots. HSR is a good idea that's messy and complex because everyone wants a say. SMART is a great example of America proving that Americans don't want rail transit. It's the Pontiac Fiero of transit.
Caltrain electrification project is independent/notdependent on CAHSR and also not dependent on grade separation projects, which seem to be tackled individually/ad-hoc in partnership with the city it's in. Everything I've seen suggests Caltrain will still have at grade crossings for the foreseeable future due to the high cost of grade separations (hundreds of millions each), while overhead electrification is slowly approaching completion including over existing at-grade crossings. Nothing prevents a high speed train from using an at grade crossing, albeit at appropriate speeds.
While it would be nice for CalTrain (and most rail crossings) to be fully grade separated, it's incredibly expensive, doesn't add much value for rail users as the train already has the right of way, and it primarily benefits auto traffic. It only makes sense if road money pays for it, rather than more limited rail money.
Nothing prevents a high speed train from using an at grade crossing
Well…
albeit at appropriate speeds.
Then you've just removed the "high speed" from "high speed rail". That's why HSR funds are paying for some of the cost of grade separation. Grade separation is hugely important (and hugely important to get right -- look at the consequences of the shit design of BART's Oakland Wye).
While it would be nice for CalTrain (and most rail crossings) to be fully grade separated, it's incredibly expensive, doesn't add much value for rail users as the train already has the right of way, and it primarily benefits auto traffic.
There's significant value in not hitting pedestrians or automobiles. There are also ways to reduce the cost of grade separation.
I'm well aware of (and have personally suffered) all of that: BART's Oakland Wye delaying trains, suicide-by-train, the value of grade separations, and of Clem's Caltrain-HSR blog that I've been reading since the beginning and have learned a lot about railway engineering from it and technically informed commenters.
I would love for Caltrain to be fully grade separated (and electrified and modern Signaling and Train Control with Automatic Train Operation), but this costs a lot of money and there's an opportunity cost with that. Even with cost optimizations that Clem's blog discusses we are still talking billions of dollars and many years to grade separate the dozens of remaining crossings in the Caltrain corridor. Not to mention the ~210000 road-rail grade crossings across the USA, ~100000 in Europe, [0][1] and however many else exist in the rest of the world.
That is the scale of the problem. It is not affordable or realistic to eliminate all of them, we have finite resources and have to pick and choose our spots based on an objective analysis. And the benefit of that primarily goes to road users who should be the ones to pay for it or taxpayers at large, rather than rail users and more limited rail funds.
While loss of life is obviously tragic, in almost all case these are the result of illegal actions of people trespassing or committing suicide-by-train. I dislike characterization of "trains hitting people," as if it were the fault or malicious of the train. Trains operate on rail tracks which are fixed to the ground. Trains don't go anywhere all willy nilly like cars can, including right into people's houses (which has happened to a relative and a neighbor). It is not reasonable to compel a rail organization to spend billions to "fix" this problem, if it even can be. I've even endured a more than hour long Caltrain delay, because someone drove a truck into a structural support column of a Caltrain grade separated overpass, and we were not cleared to cross until structural engineer could come out, inspect it, and give the OK. So let's not act like this is some panacea.
HSTs are never going to operating at 200+ mph on the Caltrain corridor. It's going to be limited to "standard speeds," which can still be 100+ mph. Last I checked the US Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) allows up to 110 mph with grade crossings, and up to 125 mph with specialized upgraded crossings. This is plenty fast, and common in urbanized areas in other developed countries like Germany and Switzerland.
> While it would be nice for CalTrain (and most rail crossings) to be fully grade separated, it's incredibly expensive, doesn't add much value for rail users as the train already has the right of way, and it primarily benefits auto traffic. It only makes sense if road money pays for it, rather than more limited rail money.
Devil's advocate: at-grade crossings sound like a negative externality for rail that impacts other parts of society (road users, noise pollution for local residents, etc).
Why should rail not bear some of the social costs in addition to its direct costs?
Let me be a devil’s advocate against your devil’s advocate: Pedestrian, bicycle and even bus-only crossings costs a fraction to grade separate compared to car crossings. It is much easier for cars to take a significant detours then other transport modes. It is always a much cheaper option to simply close the road for cars and force them to cross at the nearest crossing that is already grade separated, and build a ped/bike-only bridge/tunnel over the tracks.
Cars are the reason this negative externality is so expensive to mitigate. Why should funds from other modes be diverted to it?
> Why should funds from other modes be diverted to it?
If the city's been built and is already car dependent, wishing away the existing uses and the massive amounts of capital dependent on them isn't an option. That is, we have to consider costs at the margin from where we are now.
Since you answered my second order devil’s advocate, I should answer your first order devil’s advocate:
> Why should rail not bear some of the social costs in addition to its direct costs?
The social costs created by private cars dwarfs those created by train, and is seldomly actually mitigated with funds diverted from car infrastructure. Historically this has been an unpopular political choice, made without considering the local communities. Now California is prioritizing a different mode with the hope of reducing car dependency. Why shouldn’t car infrastructure now bear the defunding that other modes have historically suffered in order to accommodate cars historically, infrastructures which has historically created social costs to local communities?
I see this as a way to fix historic wrongs. Rail does not need to bear the social costs of its infrastructure because car owes us a bunch. We should collect on those debts owed by cars.
> Why shouldn’t car infrastructure now bear the defunding that other modes have historically suffered in order to accommodate cars historically, infrastructures which has historically created social costs to local communities?
Because it devalues a whole lot of land and capital that have seen substantial investment under the prior equilibrium.
Fixing historic wrongs or not, churning our transport infrastructure incurs a whole lot of external costs and can't be just considered in terms of "road costs" vs. "rail costs".
I’m confused, are you still playing the devil’s advocate, or do you actually hold this believe?
In the case of the former, then I’ve already answered why it is totally fair for car infrastructure to pay for social externalities of other modes meant to relief car traffic.
In the case of the latter, I don’t know what to tell you except that you are wrong. I didn’t mean defunding as in let existing things churn, I meant removing car lanes and forcing detours so that train infrastructure can be cheaper. The overall effect is better transport for everybody except cars (which already have it plenty good).
Also are you sure that removing car lanes actually devalues land and capital. I’m not so sure that is true. And even if it was, good. Housing in the Bay area is plenty expensive as it is, if cheaper train infrastructure means cheaper housing, then I’d say we’ve succeeded on two fronts.
I hold a pragmatic set of views. I would like us to become less road dependent, but I don't think you can ignore the degree of investment that has been built on the existing road system. Breaking and devaluing existing uses is a social cost incurred by a change in modes of transport.
According to their Noise and Vibration section of the report, their plan for horn noise is to assist cities with setting up quiet zones. A child comment mentioned this possibility. Exactly what that means is unclear.
the proposal is to use electric trains on caltrain tracks. they allegedly will run at 110mph which i bet is loud, roughly 40mph more than caltrain today.
the horns are getting better with grade separation and stations that don’t have crossings. they are very loud. you can hear them all the time. HSR will add 4 more trains per hour, which means a lot more train horns.
hopefully more grade separation is done by then. i can’t imagine any city surviving without it. there was a study done by caltrain about this and some crossings are blocked 20% of the time during peak hours today - and they want to increase train count by like 30%
I live near a track that was converted a few years ago and runs at 125mph. It is very very quiet and barely noticeable even when you are close. There is no engine noise like you get on diesels.
I live in Kansas City, full of rail lines in many directions. Lived near rail lines most my time here. I think horns are sometimes used to warn homeless around corners.
Honestly this is the weirdest infrastructure project in the world.
Reminder that the initial plan was 130 miles of track laid by 2018. They are at 0.0 miles. The initial intended section they planned to finish wasn't even touching SF or LA, its in between with two fairly small cities (Merced to Bakersfield, populations 84K and 380K).
Is it even needed, for all this money? High speed rail between SF and LA would be neat for a bunch of upper-middle class people, but I would think > 90% of inhabitants would be better served simply by having better intra-metro-area rail. In other words it seems like LA would be better served by spending the billions on strong hub and spoke public transport in the ~20-40 mile area around LA far more than it needs a faster way to get to San Francisco.
But I'm far away on the outside looking in, maybe there's something crushlingly obvious to locals that I'm not seeing for why this is actually a great idea.
Judging the road by its endpoints is not a fair assessment. Merced to Bakersfield will connect a large portion of the Central Valley, which is one of the most productive agricultural regions in the world with 7.2M people living in it. While indeed Merced and Bakersfield have 84K and 380K populations in the cities, the population of these and covered areas are much larger; (250K in Merced, 930K in Fresno area, 850K in Bakersfield, etc.)
It’s certainly not the “string of pearls” route that urban planning school told me was ideal for HSR (with Japan having some good examples of routes with big cities at relatively short intervals).
As an aside, I work for one of the main consultants on this project (wrote the state EIR, design criteria, program delivery, etc)… and I’m really glad my work has nothing to do with this project!
Ok, but central valley cities are all very car-oriented. If you take the train to Bakersfield you'll be in Bakersfield without a car. I've never been there to say for sure, but I suspect that's a bad time and you'd want to rent a car or take Uber when you arrive. Both of those aren't convenient, which is a problem for passenger rail in the US in general. You end up in a big parking lot by a strip mall near nothing walkable.
Isn't it a classical chicken and egg problem? Reliance on car => no public transport; No public transport => reliance on car. Someone should make an effort to change it.
I would love to hear why HSR is not "public transport."
Also, Central valley is not just an agricultural place: "On less than 1 percent of the total farmland in the United States, the Central Valley produces 8 percent of the nation's agricultural output by value: US$43.5 billion in 2013." From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Valley_(California)
I have taken a train through agricultural areas of Japan. It was really nice actually. Tokyo Subway to Shinkansen to a regional train to a single car train. All with painless in-station transfers.
Also the California HSR project includes modernization of connecting services. Do you consider Caltrain to be public transit?
I'm not sure what your definition of public transport is. Regarding Japan, if you mean "publicly owned" then Japan Rail is private. If you mean "available to the public" then I can walk into Tokyo station 10min before a bullet train leaves, buy a ticket, and be in Kyoto in 2 hours.
“Public transit” means transit operated by or on behalf of municipalities for getting around cities or metro regions. Inter-city rail is generally not considered “public transit.”
It does not mean “available to the public.” You can also buy a plane ticket at Haneda and be in Kansai in less than 90 minutes. Japan Rail isn’t any more “public transit” than ANA.
I’m not sure what is the point in arguing semantics, but I’ll take the bait. I think you have a different idea of what public transit is then most people I’ve talked to.
Most other uses of the qualifier “public” are not this limited. e.g. public infrastructure, public art, and public libraries only requires that it is available to the public without major hurdles or restrictions, not who operates it and for what purpose. In my books, transit is no different. If a transit is available to the public it is public transit.
In fact there are many airlines which I consider public transit. Including domestic air travel in Iceland and Greenland (and even between Iceland and Greenland) is public transit.
In which case, I would find myself uttering the phrase "Tokyo has no public transit" which I don't think is the case. Every train in Tokyo is inter-city rail, and I think that seems to work just fine.
I’ve actually taken the bus from LA to Bakersfield and the train onward to Oakland. Both were packed. Bakersfield is not a prosperous city by any means. I doubt car ownership is any higher there then in LA. The people that live there deserve to be able to travel comfortably to nearby cities without having to have to put in the expense of owning a car.
The area around the current Amtrak station is actually quite walkable, with some transit serving it (I’m not so sure about the planed HSR station north of downtown, though hopefully they’ll make some improvements before it opens in 2030).
> If you take the train to Bakersfield you'll be in Bakersfield without a car
And if you live in SF or LA and are going to Bakersfield to visit friends or family, that won't be an issue at all. And Bakersfield will likely densify a bit with HSR. And maybe it'll cause higher ridership on the currently limited local transit options, allowing them to expand routes and increase frequency, increasing their usefulness to the local area.
Well, nobody relies heavily on trains for their commute in this region because the train hasn’t been built yet.
Also, a vast majority of the people who work in agriculture aren’t “farmers” who walk out of their house and till their own land. They are laborers, who often live far away from their work sites, which shift with the seasons.
There are stops between those two places and “grape pickers” as you call them (though they do much more) also… do other things besides work. In fact, HSR will enable them to do those other things even more.
It will also allow people in those places to work other jobs besides “grape picking.”
Well, how about living in Merced and working in SF area? If a trip from Merced to SF would be less than 70mins, this would beat all rush-hour traffic along 101, and become viable living option.
To be fair some of the HSR money did end up being spent on electrifying CalTrain, the Bay Area commuter railway on which HSR will run unto SF. The upgrade to 1970s tech should improve service substantially since electric trains accelerate much faster.
West coast is no where near dense enough to support mass transit rail system. You would have to get in your car, drive to a central rail station, park in a massive parking garage, ride the train to your destination, then rent a car when you get there. At that point you basically have slower and far more expensive version of an airport.
Many east coast cities have the advantage of being planned out before cars so they are structured for high urban density. It is different in cities like LA or SF where it's all about urban sprawl.
California is living with sprawl therefore you can never do anything to fix sprawl. That the worst possible thing you can do for LITERALLY every metric, water use, energy use, noise pollution, living cost, housing cost and the list goes on and on.
You will not fix any of the problems if you continue to use that excuse. And despite what people seem to think, you can actually fix city design and sprawl. Having a decent train-station that connects you to other places is a good start. From the there you have trams and buses going out. And then you do higher density infill development along all those routes.
This has been argued by city planners for 30+ years and its not that difficult.
What exactly stops LA from having any working public transit in the first place?
Why this _thing_ would not prevent LA from public transit with HSR as well?
The answer is very simple: Most of the LA metro is not LA. You can build a rapid transit system to Huntington Beach[a], but if the Huntington Beach municipality doesn’t allow for dense housing, parking, and right of way around their train station it’s a railway to nowhere. Policy is geographically shattered in Southern California, and it takes only a lawsuit or furious public comment period to throw a wrench in a wide ranging public goods project. It’s a prisoner’s dilemma: Why should we rezone our single family homes so the riffraff from Hollywood can enjoy our own precious town?
[a] So called because the Huntington street car system used to go there!
So, HSR will have exactly the same issues as current airports right now: lack of transportation. So the main selling point of HSR (saving time) is diluted somewhat by a necessity to rent a car next to the train station. I’m wondering how many ppl will pick planes just because the traffic is better outside of downtown where all the train stations are.
You can live next to a train station. Like, within walking distance. You can’t live next to an airport. Transit connections are much easier with trains. You can catch a local light rail or bus directly from the station.
This is what the entire rest of the world does. It actually isn’t hard at all.
By the rest of the world you mean Europe, right? Because outside of Europe it’s not really the case. Granted, i’ve not visited every country on earth, but in most cases i’ve seen “small livable downtown” is mostly an European thing. In other cases, you will need to take a looong ride home from the downtown (1h+).
You can attribute this to the economics of the Renaissance pre-modern Europe. Most regions and peoples of the world imported modern economies to go straight from Dark Ages to globalism. Europe somewhat uniquely transitioned to dense, walkable mercantile centers during this period before spreading the system abroad, whether by sword or ship.
"The Civilization of Europe in the Renaissance" by John Hale is a great, lengthy reference here.
Did you reply to the right comment? I never said everyone gets to live in an idyllic neighborhood that serves their needs for housing, work, and entertainment. What I said is it is possible to live near rail and transit but not air.
> Many east coast cities have the advantage of being planned out before cars so they are structured for high urban density. It is different in cities like LA or SF where it's all about urban sprawl.
San Francisco is the second densest city of its population or larger in the United States (behind NYC), and has about 50% greater density than the third, which is Chicago, not an East Coast city.
Also the LA-Long Beach-Santa Anna metro is the densest metro area in the US, and San Francisco-Oakland-Fremont is the fourth.
LA has areas of density. LA as a whole though includes large mountain ranges where almost no one lives. It would be like including the Marin headlands in SF and saying SF isn't that dense.
You can’t scale air travel to serve as many people as HSR. There’s not room and we don’t have enough pilots. Airlines are already barely keeping up. Rail is much less expensive than flying because trains don’t have to overcome gravity. It’s simple physics.
The science is settled, we can’t all drive cars, let alone all fly. We have to stop burning gas to get around. HSR enables that and enables more sustainable urban development.
There’s nothing dramatic about this. These are plain facts. If we don’t act now future generations will suffer.
HSR will make California a more hospitable and sustainable place to live.
When first it was approved, the Bakersfield routing appeared to be a boondoggle to get a specific vote.
But the more I think about it the more important I think it is to tie the Central Valley into SV, SF, and the LA basin. It will reduce housing pressure, move some industry into the Central Valley, and tie a red place together with a blue and a purple area.
And it was smart to start in the reddest part of the state and give them any benefit first.
To be honest I think the debates over the route miss the main issue, namely why the project is so expensive. If we could bring costs down to Spanish levels (not a country that is known for its frugality!), we could build both a direct SF-LA route and a route that hits the Central Valley cities, along with spurs to San Diego and Sacramento, and still save more than $40 billion over what the current SF-LA line is expected to cost.
Instead the debates get reduced to "we should build this no matter what the cost" and "we should cancel the project entirely." There doesn't seem to be much interest in digging into why the costs of the project are so out of line with other countries. (Which, to be fair, is a hard question to answer).
Fully on agree on trying to get costs down to Spanish-levels and other developed world costs, and building everywhere while saving money.
But the reasons for the dysfunction are pretty straight forward: there is group of engineering consultancies and construction firms (Parsons, Bechtel, HNTB, AECOM, and other non-household names) that have captured the system and profit handsomely from the status quo. All those billions of taxpayer money is going somewhere, and it's their bank accounts.
Such a project's costs are highly location specific - labour costs, geography, regulatory environment, existing infrastructure to adapt to/connect to/work around, etc.
However, it usually gets better over time with experience.
The high speed rail from Grapevine to the San Fernando Valley isn't going to happen because of geology + money. Which leaves Bakersfield, Tehachapi, Palmdale as the viable route.
Gilroy to Bakerfield is the same distance whether you go down I5 or HWY99.
And the current rail corridor needs a bunch of grade separation work done. It would be dumb to build grade separated high speed rail on the west side of the valley. And at the same time also build duplicate grade separation on the east side.
If you look at the current work being done about half if it is the above mentioned grade separation.
I'll also mention the point of high speed rail was to carry passengers quickly but not as fast as possible from SF to LA. Really there are four goals. Connect the northern and southern passenger rail lines. Grade separation in the central valley. Commuter rail in the Bay Area and Socal. And avoid having to upgrade airport capacity.
I believe almost all long distance high speed train proposals are based on land banking for future value increase, and nonsense like that. The actual social benefit agenda is secondary to an investment model which sees speculative rise in land and property value along the route at strategic locations with a very long tail, and the local and state tax outcomes which follow motivate agreements by authorities.
Instance in point: Brisbane Cross River rail. The economic impact statement is spectacular for land, rent, rate and building income. Same for intercity rail Sydney Brisbane Melbourne. For Brisbane, a state minister lost her job over a house purchase near a significant rail development (rightly or wrongly) but it's even explicit in economic modelling: they bank the future economic impact.
>Reminder that the initial plan was 130 miles of track laid by 2018. They are at 0.0 miles.
This is a bit of a disingenuous take. There is a significant amount of work to be done before tracks get laid. There are dozens of active construction projects right now including building bridges, viaducts, overcrossings and grade separations. Actually laying the high speed track is probably one of the last things they'll do (there's no value in having tracks laid until a substantial section can be laid without gaps).
The stupidest part is that now we have politicians campaigning on not doing big infrastructure projects instead of fixing the things that make them fail.
I was just in South Florida, and they have one of the few good setups in the US for this with Miami-Ft Lauderdale-W Palm Beach being close, but far enough that getting on the hellscape of I-95 is daunting. The train is fairly slow by HSR standards, but the routes are straight, and there are only 3 stops total (they are adding Orlando for the 4th).
By contrast, the CA HSR is connecting two dense areas with not much in between. Because of all the “stakeholder” negotiations, it is not straight, and there are far too many stops. There is no need for a stop in LA and Burbank and Palmdale. The Palmdale stop is a bit mindblowing. There are 170k people in Palmdale. You don’t need a stop in Anaheim and Fullerton and Norwalk. I could keep going
This was a real lost opportunity. There should have been 4 stops total: Anaheim-LA-SJ-SF. The result of all this is that the trip is going to take too long to make sense vs a 45 minute flight
Much faster, cheaper, and comfortable to take HSR between major metros a few hundred miles apart than fly. For a trip like Osaka to Tokyo it’s a no brainer, the airport experience fails in every category. The issue with CAHSR is that it’s right at the margin of economic sense. LA and SF are huge metros, but they are far enough apart that airfare will still be competitive for many even if this project succeeds.
What if we stopped subsidizing fuel costs? What if we accounted for environmental externality?
California HSR is forward looking. Every state in the nation should be building and expanding public transit infrastructure. It’s an existential necessity.
yes, the LA metro area is roughly 18.5M people (nearly half of CA; the bay area is about half of this at ~9.5M) and the 2nd densest metro area in the country (though that density is pretty unevenly distributed).
improving the LA metro would have provided better bang for buck, but it doesn't spread the wealth nearly as much, and we're already building metro rail here as part of the run up to the '28 olympics (but not nearly enough, given that the LA region extends roughly 100 miles along the main axes).
the main problem with this HSR is that it doesn't beat air for time or price between LA/SF, and that accounts for the majority of the projected trips (and purported benefit) of this rail line. i've done the air trip many times, and door-to-door times are about 4-5 hours, while this train will take that long without the door-to-door part (though city center to city center is nice, if they ever complete that part).
They pretty much chose the most expensive route possible, requiring long urban viaducts and numerous tunnels through seismically active areas. It is probably unconstructible, but the engineering consultants made out.
Some perspective from the UK: HS1 completed in 2009 for domestic passengers (also used by the Eurostar to Europe) is our first high speed railway since the 60s. The three "high speed" stations on the route once leaving central London are Stratford (London Olympics 2012 site), Ebbsfleet, and Ashford, have between them probably had close to 200,000 homes built within walking/cycling distance of the station. Further 'slow line' stations that the services serve once they leave the high speed line probably contribute as much new housing again. That's over the 30 years of route planning to opening.
Yes, there's a bit of a spurious correlation between the UK house building, and the high speed line, but there is a direct and indirect economic correlation.
Regarding 'personal safety' on the service. Trains in the UK are typically pretty safe, but the HS1 route in particular, they're obsessive about catching fare dodgers, so the trains are staffed with 'revenue protection officers', and often British Transport Police (and branch of the police force peculiar to the railway).
And then there's Canary Wharf, reachable from... Stratford on the HS1 route. The former London Docklands that since the late 80s/early 90s has gone from being acres of empty docks, to skyscraper offices and skyscraper apartment blocks (pretty uncommon in London).
My point being that there's a virtuous circle of 'build it and they will come'. Planning is everything in making it successful. In fact, any large infrastructure project in the UK is government planned (federal - in the US?), and the cost/benefit value is calculated, and explains why the south and south-east of England gets a disproportionate amount of investment, because the economic returns are so high. California high speed rail would have money thrown at it if it were in the UK.
I really hope California's high speed rail works. But people need to be patient. It really is going to be 20 or 30 years before the economic and social benefits become obvious to everyone.
In the UK if there's a mainline station in a city, we typically build many high rise office buildings in and around that station wherever possible, and then the outer stations often become 'dormitory towns'. I'd envisage something similar in California. The areas around the terminal stations in particular will grow offices, and the other stations, will see more housing and commuters. If, of course, working from home doesn't kill it.
I think there’s a lot to learn from the UK’s rail system so thanks for sharing this.
> In fact, any large infrastructure project in the UK is government planned (federal - in the US?)
California the state is more comparable to the UK than the UK is to the US.
California is about 60% of the population of the UK in 170% of the land.
California: 40,000,000 people in 163,000 square miles
UK: 67,000,000 people in 94,000 square miles
US: 330,000,000 people in 3,800,000 square miles
So I think UK rail modernization is probably actually pretty comparable to California HSR.
Federal dollars and regulators are involved in California HSR but it’s a necessity in the United States that the states do a lot of this for themselves.
Who is this train for? If I'm in business and need to fly between la and sf it's a $100 non stop 1 hour flight. Or $50 in gas (and wear and tear).
If I'm not well off (or have a family) I'm probably driving because once I get there I still need a car (because la has terrible public transportation and car rentals are pretty expensive these days. ) And it's not bad. 6 hours or so.
What they should have done was spend the money to invest in robust and extensive fast public transportation in Los Angeles that would immediately benefit millions of people every single day.
As it stands it takes 45 minutes on the metro from Santa Monica to downtown (~10 miles) because they designed it with one rail each direction. So it has to hit every stop (no express lane). It's the same as sitting in traffic.
If you are not directly along the metro lines in LA and headed to a place that's also on the lines ( and the entire westside is a desert) you are driving.
I would love to take the train from la to San Diego. But it would take me an hour to drive to the train station (over an hour on the bus) and then a 2 hour train ride which still costs $40. What's the point? I see the same for this high speed rail. Who are the customers and how can anyone justify the cost?
#1, it's not exactly cost-free to increase capacity at major airports. LAX currently operates near its maximum capacity. There's a $15 billion upgrade project, but it's not going to add all that much capacity. And given noise abatement and spacing requirements, there are fundamental limits to how much capacity can be added.
#2, planes are dirty and we lack the technology to make them clean. Perhaps by the time HSR is built, we'll all have solar-powered e-fuels, or a major battery revolution that enables electric planes. But we don't have that yet and it's not clear we'll have it any time soon.
#3, the flying time between LA and SF is quick, but there is much time getting to airports, waiting at airports, delays at airports due to weather and inbound flights, and getting back to city centers.
#4, there are all sorts of other locations on the route. For instance, the Bay Area is a major economic center, but housing is extremely expensive. HSR enables people to live in Stockton or Modesto and get to San Jose, or Oakland in under an hour. It will invigorate Bakersfield, Modesto, Stockton, Fresno, Madera.
There is no good public transit even within bay area (where SFO and SJC are located). Without public transit HSR is close to useless. How HSR will make public transit to appear?
Public transport will grow from the trunk line, which is essentially what High Speed Rail becomes. The state of public transport and the car centric focus of the state is because the public infrastructure isn't there, rather than in spite of it.
> If you are not directly along the metro lines in LA and headed to a place that's also on the lines ( and the entire westside is a desert) you are driving
This is a problem with every type of transport. You still have to drive to the highway, to the airport, to intercity the bus station. You might see as 'burbs served well by the HSR become popular and developments form near them, that the stations become hubs for business and commerce.
I think there is a subset of US government officials that have a weird obsession with trains. It's a cargo cult. They see asian/european trains, and just think that if we make trains it will somehow solve transportation problems.
I saw in my former city a bus line get replaced by a train. It was infuriating. They tore up the roads and replaced the busses with trains which are worse in every imaginable way. They did this while also passing local laws which made it harder to operate scooter/bike rentals (bird scooters and the like).
But these politicians just think literal trains are the solution. Again, its' weird cargo cultism.
A legit high speed rail (300kph) line that went from Seattle to San Diego, or from Minneapolis to New Orleans would be great. It doesn't seem like anybody is even trying to do that.
> saw in my former city a bus line get replaced by a train. It was infuriating. They tore up the roads and replaced the busses with trains which are worse in every imaginable way
Trains are faster, have more capacity and usually grade separated so flow is easier to manage. In what way is any form of train worse than a bus besides the few obvious ones - needs infrastructure and upfront costs.
This train is not grade separated (it drives with the cars, and creates massive confusion in the vehicles lanes) and doesn’t hold more people than the busses did. It also requires overhead power lines, and has fewer stops than the busses it replaced.
I don't see how a train could be creating confusion - it's just a vehicle (apparently, what a shit implementation).
I find it hard to believe that even the smallest light rail/tram deployment won't have higher capacity than your average bus deployment (not BRT). Can you name the system so that we can check the passengers per hour capacity?
Overhead power lines means electric propulsion, so lower noise and less pollution (electric buses are a rarity and only work on short routes).
I don’t know: San Jose - Seattle is ~900 miles or 1400km-1500km. That is 5-6 hours direct train at best at 300kmh. I don’t see this as something beneficial to a plane. Borderline comparable to flying and only because of slow TSA.
~5h is how long a train takes from Warsaw to Berlin, compared to ~1h by plane (~2-3h including getting to and from airport), and I know multiple people who still prefer the train - even when they are able to easily afford any mode of transportation.
With the train, you have way more freedom in choosing the time and the hour. You have multiple trains leaving during the day, and you can choose 30 min before needing to hop onto one. Also, if you miss one, you just wait for the next one.
Also, on the train you can work, relax and stretch your legs or eat freely. So it doesn't feel like lost time really. Planes often do, even if you travel business.
SeaTac is out in the middle of nowhere and easily one of the most unpleasant airports I've ever flown out of. Last time I had to go through immigration at SEA there was vomit smeared all over the floor.
Meanwhile the Amtrak station in Seattle is centrally located, about fifteen minutes to downtown by tram. The Amtrak station in Portland is pretty much right in the middle of downtown. I don't know that I'd want to go from the Bay Area to Seattle on a train, but something like Portland to Seattle would benefit greatly from HSR (currently it's about a 4 hour trip).
There are plans for HSR between Vancouver, BC and Portland, OR. Washington state just allocated a few hundred million to advance design. I think they are waiting for some matching federal grants before proceeding. I think they are hoping for a high speed line within 10 years or something.
I actually think that if the High Speed line is built all the way south to Eugene it kind of makes sense to build a traditional electrified rail way between Eugene and Redding CA. through Medford, and a higher speed line to Sacramento where it could interline with California High-Speed Rail to LA. Connecting Medford with Redding and Eugene with a traditional rail should be worth it on its own, but with the surrounding high speed lines it becomes possible to operate a west coast sleeper between Seattle and LA in like 10-13 hours (as opposed to the current 36 hours).
150 000 people live in the Medford urban area. There are popular tourist activities close by. This stop would serve both the locals in the Medford area and tourists alike. In fact it could really help Medford’s economy as the drive from Seattle or San Francisco is intense, it would enable tourists to take an easy train ride there and rent a car for further tourist activities (or simply take the bus to Ashland for some hot springs or a Shakespeare play).
But more importantly though, this portion is very mountainous, making finding a high speed alignment without unrealistic amount of tunneling impossible. A traditional electrified train with speeds up to 120 MPH is far more likely to actually happen, and would do plenty to enrich the area as well as provide an alternative to flying between the Pacific North West and California.
You’re really missing the point. These places are remote and neglected. Meth is a symptom. Connect them to jobs and opportunity and we can develop thriving communities along the rail corridor. That’s where midwest and west coast cities originated in the first place.
King Street Station is a fifteen minute walk from “downtown”. It’s basically in downtown already and by light rail is one stop to the first “downtown” stop at University Street. It’s more like 4 minutes by train. They come every 10 minutes so that’s 15 minutes worst case.
The same light rail will take you anywhere from the airport in the south to the northern edge of the city. Within a decade it will go as far south as Tacoma. In a couple years a new connecting line will reach Bellevue. Eventually as far as Redmond (Microsoft). My own neighborhood of West Seattle will connect in 2035.
The future is bright for the west coast. If HSR connects us all this will be the most desirable place on Earth.
That's roughly the same time as Paris-Nice, which is a very heavily used high speed rail corridor. Not enough to make the plane route unviable like it did with Paris-Lyon and Paris-Bordeaux, but there are drastically less planes now, so it's still a massive net win.
Money earmarked for HSR is not money that can be applied for LA transit. LA transit can only be funded by increasing transit appropriations by LA residents.
Nobody said that's the miracle solution to bring public transportation for all, that's a key step to it though. Public transports in California cities need to be built too!
Keeping on doubling down for cars/flights will surely never bring any sustainable and environmental solution.
While I agree with the sentiment, I think some lawmakers in CA think they can get public transportation to rival cities like New York. It will never happen in places like LA/SD unfortunately. There is far too much sprawl. Most ppl in NYC can step off a subway and walk a couple blocks and be at there destination. In SD, where I live, it doesnt seem financially possible.
Recently SANDAG approved a $160 billion dollar Transit Plan. That would equate to $110k per resident if we paid out of pocket; hopefully they can do some financial voodoo so that's not the case.
A few weeks ago SANDAG officials were forced to withdrawal the most controversial part of their plan, a mileage tax that would tax San Diegans for every mile they drive (obviously very unpopular among residents). But, this tax was the main source of funding for the $163B Regional Transportation Plan, so they are forced to find a new funding mechanism. I'm curious what they will come up with.
It’s a throughput play. Assuming population and economic growth continues that $100 one hour flight will run into airport capacity issues sooner or later. The train will start looking attractive when the flight is either frequently delayed or becomes $500.
Great! I’ve driven the I5 so many times and I’m so sick of it. I’d love for a viable alternative and going from downtown LA to San Francisco on a train sounds like a dream.
It's not clear if you're saying mass transit within the metros or also to other metros. It sounds like you're trying to imply the later by a way of using the former as a reason. The distances in the US between major population centers are vast, far more than what the average person from other regions of the world would likely imagine them to be.
I am so bored of people repeating the "but... trains will never work for rancher joe out in North Dakota! The US is too big for mass transit and trains".
Yes there are very empty places in the US, turns out though that the vast majority of people don't live in those places. The dense places in the US are dense and massive like anywhere else in the world, and if suburban sprawl makes them somewhat more spread out that is just pointing out how bad the status quo is with city planning/mass transit.
Also.. ok so the distance between two cities is vast... a highspeed train is far more efficient at transporting people (at absurdly higher volumes) over a distance than aircraft are. If it is a popular route between cities I dont see how distance negates this inherent advantage. Yes, if we we talking hugeeee distances that means a massive infrastructure investment but there would still be a major advantage in the end?
On one hand I see why you are being downvoted, on the other, for people who haven't lived in San Francisco, crime on public transport is legitimately real. I personally have friends who have had bikes stolen from buses and phones stolen from their hands. A lot of the stations smell like urine. There are signs of drug abuse, and some of the stops don't feel very safe at all. I've watched women be sexually harassed on busses and have had friends groped at bus stops. The public transportation experience in San Francisco is not just about the price or the timing, but about the safety and cleanliness too. Seattle buses have been known to be de facto homeless shelters, particularly the late night bus. On one hand, I understand the "what right do we have to kick homeless people off busses" argument. How are people supposed to get their lives back together in a car country if they don't have a car? On the other hand, I've been on buses with urine smelling seats or urine streaming down the bus and if I am asked to make a sacrifice by tolerating that to support another person, I will just avoid public transportation instead because I have the means to do so.
The vast majority of people in west coast mega cities who can, use uber, bikes, or their own car. Public transportation in San Francisco is often seen as a last resort. In foreign countries everyone rides the public transportation, so there is public demand for quality. Our transportation situation results in the economic classes most able to effect political power uncaring about the infrastructural rot that is occurring since they can afford to avoid it and it's not a better, more predictable offering than just driving yourself.
California and the Bay Area specifically need to seriously look in the mirror and apply some basic logic to the situation.
Public transport being bad and crime filled, is not the fault of public transport. Its a symptom of systematic failure to do even the most basic city planning, in fact maybe the historically worst example of city planning I can imagine.
The solution is to continue to invest into walking, biking and public transport infrastructure. Continue to make it better while at the same time attempt to build real urban environments in the area. You need to build housing for literally millions of people inside of the current boundaries of the cities around the bay. The good news is that there is gigantic amount of commercial zoned land that could be turned into mixed use urban environments. Even better if you can defeat the NIMBY and rezone all the single family housing zones to low density mix use urban.
Given the state of emergency, the city could even build these project and have 15% be public housing.
City planners have been arguing for these basic things for 30+ years. Here is a modern take on some basic things that can be improved:
"Public transport being bad and crime filled, is not the fault of public transport. Its a symptom of systematic failure to do even the most basic city planning, in fact maybe the historically worst example of city planning I can imagine."
San Francisco is home to some of the most powerful and wealthy tech companies on earth. There is unbelievable, literally unfathomable amounts of money in the city and yet there is a major homeless population that gets treated like shit and swept under the rock.
If the public transit in San Francisco is as full of crime and "dirty homeless" as people say here, that clearly reflects shamefully on the companies and people who have more money than 99.99% of people on earth being incredibly cruel and hoarding it.
I mean.. do rich people have no shame? How are you supposed to have pride about your city and techhub if there clearly people suffering massively right under your feet? What an incredible demonstration of cruelty and violence on that cities part not to use a tiny TINY fraction of its wealth to make sure people have basic support.
There are a few problems, first of all, the government in a democratic place doesn't necessary directly reflect the rich cooperation there. Specially when it comes to things like land use policies.
Rich companies or people don't necessary understand how to solve these issues, they have very little understanding of city planning, land use and so on.
These rich people have a lot of things going on, if somebody could convince a group of rich people and companies what the right solution is, and you could get past the broader NIMBY community then you might get somewhere. But this is hard to do even for those with the right answer.
I was there and I did feel shame, but what can really be done? While I agree in spirit, I have to believe the problem is more complicated than "apply money."
Depression, drugs, debt/money based homelessness, abuse derived homelessness, and psychosis are probably a subset of archetypes each with very different solutions. Chronic vs Temporary homelessness are probably entirely different problems, and my understanding is Chronic homelessess surprisingly isn't the main problem in SF. Then you have the questions of creating an institution of some sort to deal with it, which involves staffing it and fighting corruption within it. Then you have the NIMBY's. Then there are DA's willing to tolerate entirely unacceptable behavior. Historic abuses of vulnerable people in homeless addressing systems. Historic underfunding, understaffing, and lack of safety policy for workers in that area. Homeless immigration. We don't like to be around homeless people, but homeless people don't like to be around other homeless people either which makes scalable solutions harder. Then there are entire policies around requiring homeless to "make progress" or not use drugs or other things like that which has shown to fail. Then it's downright unamerican (not to me) to have the government do something rather than contract out to businesses. Then there is how the tax burden falls. Does San Jose pay into SF's homelessness fund? How do you design and execute outreach or policy or funnel people into your "remedy"?
American culture is biased towards "if you don't help yourself, then you don't deserve help." There are probably a significant number of people who need help adopt that mindset and don't believe they deserve help themselves. How do you make cultural progress? Do we even have any idea how many people are homeless and trying vs homeless and hopeless?
So funding, employment, research, policy, culture, laws, and a potential "homeless industry," all have elements that need to be addressed.
Then there are the straight alignment problems: Who wants to work on that problem when they could be studying engineering and making the big bucks? Who wants to get payed government wages for low reward probably unsafe jobs that probably suck?
Where would the ambition to solve, not hide, the problem come from?
Google "why is homelessness still a problem in San Francisco." There isn't even any kind of consensus on where the root of the problem is. There's not even an authoritative or high quality source or organization explaining the problem or explaining policy in the results, it's all news which is beholden to engagement, not problem solving.
I kind of think you need to address the root problem first, once you clear that up, the symptoms, like homelessness, would actually be far more solvable.
We know what the root problem is, housing supply. We know how to make cities far better and reduce total cost of living in them.
There would still be many homeless left, but at that point you might actually have a hope of actually dealing with that specific problem.
>> There isn't even any kind of consensus on where the root of the problem is.
> We know what the root problem is, housing supply.
How do we know that is the root problem?
If we knew the root problem is housing supply, and we haven't been able to address housing supply, then clearly housing supply isn't the root problem and it's something like entrenched interests (NIMBY's) or alignment problems regarding people not wanting to be taxed. Clearly there is some more "5 why's" work to be done.
I think it's hubris to think you have the answer for a problem that's been around for 3 decades+ worth of administrations.
> We know how to make cities far better and reduce total cost of living in them.
This also needs citation. I don't think we do. It's not "build better public transportation" or "build more housing", it's build more under the American legal system, under American culture and American politics.
These problems require systemic thinking. Why is the website down? Because we don't have enough web servers (not enough housing?)? No, because the databases are overloaded slowing down requests, because we haven't increased the number of database shards, because the database team is understaffed, because our hiring pipeline has problems, because recruiting is understaffed... etc.
I wonder why buses in NYC feel safe, as are subway trains, shoplifting is a very rare sight, and it's pretty hard to find excrement on the streets.
It seems that the problem is not in density, not in the large difference of wealth levels, not in ethnic / cultural composition, etc. Maybe it's somewhere around law enforcement, maintenance of public places, etc. Something that could be even changed by voting.
Uber subsidized tech/finance employee commute trips for many years. Uber was frequently twice the price of public transportation anywhere in the city for a point to point trip. It was irrational not to use Uber. Many businesses (facebook/google) provided private company only commuter buses, which meant tech employees never had to face the realities of public transportation and could easily avoid it.
NYC has a functioning subway system that can land you 2 blocks from just about anywhere. There are entire areas of San Francisco you have to navigate bus transfers, bus transfers that were not predictable, to get to. Bus transfers nearly always inflate trip time significantly and are subject to the unpredictable force of traffic.
New York benefits greatly from economies of scale by use of NYC transportation. A subway that runs every 5 minutes is vastly vastly different from one that runs every 20 or 30. How much parking does New York provide? Because if you can pay, parking in San Francisco is not too hard.
So while it wasn't difference in wealth levels directly, different wealth levels opted into different forms of transportation, leaving the public options woefully less used, and particularly less used by those with power (those with money).
Since I didn't edit it in time, I'll follow up with:
There are entire areas of San Francisco you have to navigate bus transfers, bus transfers that were not predictable, to get to. Bus transfers nearly always inflate trip time significantly and are subject to the unpredictable force of traffic.
Oh come on. You've identified a great red herring. There are 9 Muni subway stations in San Francisco. The rest of the rail system operates in mixed traffic making it subject to the exact same delays and uncertainty that the buses deal with. In fact because there are no metro lines that run entirely underground (or are otherwise completely grade separated) delays on the street spill over into the subway service.
The best example of this is the 4th and King intersection. SFMTA explicitly prioritizes automobile traffic. During peak hours it's often faster to walk to Market street than to wait in a crowded Muni train while automobile after automobile drives by. Every time you choose to drive you make things like this demonstrably worse. In fact if your only concept of the Muni Metro is the subway that means when you drive your car you're doing so in some of the most densely populated parts of San Francisco and creating the most negative impact.
I can't speak to the NY MTA's standards but in San Francisco Muni's goal is that every resident lives within 1/4 mile of a Muni stop (see the SRTP I linked to in the sibling comment). What's not covered in that SRTP are the finer points. Stops are much closer together on steep grades, and specifically the stops are supposed to be served around 18 hours a day. The standards are a bit more relaxed after hours, but Muni does run 24x7. I lived within a stone's throw of an Owl (1-5AM bus routes) stop and it was great.
NYC has a functioning subway system that can land you 2 blocks from just about anywhere. There are entire areas of San Francisco you have to navigate bus transfers, bus transfers that were not predictable, to get to. Bus transfers nearly always inflate trip time significantly and are subject to the unpredictable force of traffic.
To put it politely: that's a load of crap unless you equate Lower Manhattan with all of New York City. There are huge swaths of New York that are inaccessible via the subway (primarily the outer boroughs). Go to the more suburban parts of Brooklyn or Queens for instance. Here's a Bloomberg article on what they call "subway deserts" or the "plight of the outer boroughs"
No subway runs every five minutes all day. Late night NY is every 20-30 (same as Muni), there's a wiki page for it. Per Muni's SRTP the light rail headways are b/t 12 and 20 minutes depending on the time of day. And before you complain Muni doesn't meet those standards, the New York subway is subject to human and mechanical delays just like San Francisco.
Because if you can pay, parking in San Francisco is not too hard.
Eh? There are roughly 500,000 vehicles registered in San Francisco and about 275,000 on street parking spots. There are residential permits in some areas to ensure turnover because, yes, it can be extremely difficult to find a spot.
Large parts of outer NYC boroughs are inaccessible by subway. But other large parts of outer boroughs are very much accessible by subway, mostly those with high enough density to make it economically viable. But even Rockaway Beach is accessible by subway, of all places!
Trains go every 10-15 mins even some time past midnight. They go every 30 minutes at time like 3 am; so do some buses.
Compared to some other large cities around the world where I've been, NYC is pretty well connected, and Manhattan (all of it) is superbly connected.
The NY MTA does an admirable job, the issue I take is pretending that they're perfect. New York is pretty well connected, sure, and I can't think of another city that runs a subway 24x7. Even Tokyo shifts to buses eventually.
Trains go every 10-15 mins even some time past midnight. They go every 30 minutes at time like 3 am; so do some buses.
Right, but OP was going on about rail service (with some key facts wrong). Buses stuck because they get in traffic… well all Muni Metro routes operate in traffic for most of their length (and one operates entirely in mixed traffic).
Muni schedules Owl (1–5 AM) bus service every 30 minutes. They run some regular bus routes 24x7 (not-Owl), Owl buses along the light rail routes, as well as a couple mega Owl routes to make up for the local routes that don't run late night. Except for Treasure/Yerba Buena Island (and the uninhabited islands), you can get within about 1/4–1/2 mile of anywhere in San Francisco on Muni. Evening rail service is like every 20–30 minutes on each line which equates to 10–15 (or better) underground since five of the lines run along the same subway tracks.
Compared to some other large cities around the world where I've been, NYC is pretty well connected, and Manhattan (all of it) is superbly connected.
Yeah, New York City is generally well connected if you take into account the bus service. But so is San Francisco. I'd argue that the outer lands are better connected than the outer boroughs, but SF is so much smaller geographically that's not a fair comparo.
And yea I've done the subway bus shuffle in Queens (both because of subway maintenance and because of the distance to the subway) in the middle of winter. It's doable but OP was going on about not needing buses in NY. I've also done the late night subway thing and caught an earful from some natives who were real unhappy about all the transferring they had to do.
It's not that NY transit is bad or that San Francisco transit is particularly good. The idea that public transit in San Francisco is uniquely bad and grimy is just frustratingly wrong. That said, BART really shit the bed today when someone walked into the transbay tube. The mind boggles.
Also lets not forget that the NYC metro moves more people daily than the entire air travel network in the US does. It moves an incredible amount of humans at a scale that cars and airplanes just can't even begin to approach in a million years.
Yeah you are gonna need to cite your sources on way more cops = increased public safety. Further you are going to need to prove that the astronomical amount of money spent on police departments wouldn't better reduce crime if spent on caring directly for the needy.
At the end of the day the only real correlation between the amount of homeless people in a place I have noticed in my visits to different cities in the US is how easy it is to survive outside without a home. NYC gets incredibly, brutally cold in the winter. Many homeless probably either die (not directly from cold most of time, but the hardship makes other problems way worse) or are forced to move south. Yes there are plenty of homeless in NYC obviously but it must be a brutally hard life trying to get through the really cold nights of the NYC winter (whether thats trying to find a shelter or just holing up on a grate spewing out steam somewhere).
San Francisco you can probably survive in pants and a tshirt for most of the year and be ok.
"They are now used extensively by homeless for a variety of activities."
Good, everytime a homeless person uses a public bathroom it is a net savings on health, safety and environmental impact because many of those people are denied access to anywhere to go take a shit and turns out people shitting everywhere isn't a great idea.
If some of the homeless are out of control and trash the bathroom... ok fine we are talking about people in the most tumultous and vulnerable positions in our society here. Make the bathroom like portlands public bathrooms; design them so they are hard to break and you can hose them down.
I think there are a lot of people who would have trouble with that knowing that person could be their own child, an ex, a parent, a friend, or themself. Even if you personally believe retribution or comeuppance, I there are good faith arguments that can be made. My dad smells like he's rotting due to a degenerative condition and can no longer drive, does he not deserve the ability to get to the hospital or bank on public transportation despite an offensive odor, occasional incontinence, and a somewhat homeless look? Should family be responsible? What if the rest of the family died in a car crash?
The opiod epidemic alone showed significant numbers of people trusting a corrupted system being over prescribed addictive medications leading to the destruction of their lives so some billionaire can make a few extra dollars. Situations like that mean I don't find the people in bad situations deserve their fate argument very compelling.
I personally don't want them on public transportation myself, I'm even ok with banning them, but I do think society owes the unfortunate transportation, even if it is comped uber. I think good faith people can disagree on that and respect arguments otherwise.
This isn’t about unfortunate people’s access to transportation, it’s about unsanitary and unsafe abuse of the public transportation system, including public substance abuse and sleeping on the bus overnight.
>I think there are a lot of people who would have trouble with that knowing that person could be their own child, an ex, a parent, a friend, or themself
Every downward-spiraling addict has had parents, friends, and maybe children. How would they feel watching their loved one rot away on the street (or a bus) in the grip of addiction? It is inhumane to watch people shoot up heroin and drink themselves to death day after day in public spaces without intervention.
FWIW, the standard argument is that once we can hide people from our view, we forget about them and fail to invest resources in them, resulting in de facto prison sentences or abusive situations with under resourced institutions. The direct implication of intervention is taxation, and most people don't want homeless people around AND they don't want to be taxed, which creates a pretty hazardous set of incentives.
I agree that non intervention is inhumane, but also worry about how humane the intervention is.
It sounds like we're more or less both pro intervention, but arrive at that conclusion in different ways and likely with different caveats.
@hayst4ck we lost a family member to opioids in early 2019. He died in a Richmond bay area airbnb with his girlfriend, they were found by the owner several days after they died. He alternated living on the street and staying in airbnbs - he had to be narcan'd in homedepot (ironically while boosting power tools), and on the streets before finally dying.
Many addicts prefer to be on the street and not behind a door so they can be seen and revived when they OD. This is a fundamental flaw in governor Newsom's project homekey 'housing first' logic. What we are desperately short of are paths to sobriety as Shellenberger and others have pointed out. what we are not short of are 'non profit' bay area homeless industrial complex operations that facilitate street living. There are rumors the cartels donate massively to keep freshman clientele flowing.
It is a very grim situation. In most european countries a junkie self harming in public will be given a choice of prison or some form of rehab. We do not have those options in a lot of north America, just open air drug scenes openly operating 24 hours a day. Obviously addicts steal to get their fixes...this is not viable on multiple societal levels.
This idea that San Francisco (or California or the whole west coast) shouldn't build transit because it doesn't meet some idealized version of transit in some other hip city is one of the worst takes I've seen. It's naive at best disingenuous at worst.
The last time I checked (which was pre-pandemic) Muni carries around 750,000 riders daily – it's waaaay lower now. It's the last resort for privileged, antisocial techie types who've never lived in a city before, but is in fact the primary transit for a whole lot of people (including bicyclists). BART saw closer to 500,000 daily. Honestly I can't remember the last time I thought a station smelled overwhelmingly like urine.
Seattle? Waiting in a vomit soaked line to clear immigration at the airport was up at the top of my list of unpleasant travel experiences.
New York? Have any of you actually talked to New Yorkers? Or even bothered to look at a NY oriented site like Gothamist? I'm guessing not because otherwise you'd be well aware of the decrepit state of the NY subway (rats, violent crime, constant late night service disruptions, etc). Complaining about the subway is pretty much the city's favorite pastime. God help you if you end up in Penn Station (easily the most aggressively awful public toilets I've ever seen) or Grand Central and have to deal with the various infighting between the transit agencies. Late night service has been a mess for years as they try to prop up the dilapidated infrastructure. And if you want to talk expensive boondoggles there's always the 2nd Ave subway line.
Paris? Plenty of junkies and whatnot when I was in Montmartre. RER out by the Eiffel Tower was equally sketchy.
Frankfurt? Plenty-o-prostitutes and junkies around Frankfurt Hbf. Busted TVMs at the airport station. Want to check out the Lufthansa Technik museum? Good luck catching a train.
Madrid? Easily the worst smelling metro I've ever been on. It's absolutely oppressive during the summer. Hopefully you're able bodied because the Madrid metro stations are pretty dang deep.
Singapore? Do you know why food/drink are banned? Because people are fucking gross. Ask a Singaporean what they think of the efforts to increase the automation on MRT lines.
Osaka? Homeless guys living out of cardboard boxes.
Public transit is a reflection of the society in which it's located. Unfortunately for all the handwaving, and as it turns out foreign countries are not utopias.
"Public transit is a reflection of the society in which it's located"
Exactly which is why shitting on public transit for revealing the flaws of the society it is in instead of having a conversation about those flaws and the cruelty at the heart of it is absurd. It is like seeing someone break down crying and then yelling at them for being weak and crying while ignoring the reason why the person is crying.
Ok, so public transit is one of the public spaces that the collapse of the US social safety net and absurdly violent socio-economic inequality comes to light in. If you think that is an argument against public transit you don't even remotely understand the problem.
Arguing for or against public transit is irrelevant if using it is unsafe because of lack of law enforcement that will prevent criminals who chose not to abide by laws harming travelers.
The 'US social safety net' has little to do with this - violent, opportunistic thugs use public transport to bring huge quantities of drugs into SF every day using BART, while terrorizing passengers largely with impunity. This may seem like hyperbole but a quick look at local news will confirm this.
"The 'US social safety net' has little to do with this - violent, opportunistic thugs use public transport to bring huge quantities of drugs into SF every day using BART, while terrorizing passengers largely with impunity. This may seem like hyperbole but a quick look at local news will confirm this."
The reason US society is fucked up is largely because of this kind of thinking. The US social safety net has everything to do with crime. The vast, overwhelming amount of crimes aren't committed because people are bored or are disney villains and like being evil. Crime happens primarily when people are desperate and the US is grinding innumerable people into dust right now.
"More cops/Tough On Crime" is a stupid af way to deal with crime because it is a form of reactive violence against the symptoms of a suffering society that doesn't attempt to understand the root causes.
I'm not sure at all if that's what's being proposed. I think both are being advocated and that's why that makes no sense since as the OP suggested there are vast voids in between dense metros in the US.
Lots of negativity in this thread. Typical of large infrastructure projects. But other than the US Military this is the best way for the government to provide jobs. Lots of them. And it turns out this project is more than HSR. It’s an entire modernization project. And it’s working!
We need more big infrastructure projects. Lots more. Every dollar spent is an investment in the future.
> Lots of negativity in this thread. Typical of large infrastructure projects.
This isn’t a large infrastructure project. It’s a small project with the price tag of a large one and the timeline that people could start and retire careers on.
A train project like this in China would have taken 2 years and would have been about 1/10th of the cost. It would have the been the same in the US 90 years ago.
If you want examples of large infrastructure projects, look to FDR’s Dams.
There’s nothing small about the California HSR project. I’m not persuaded by “we should be more like China”. The grass is always greener. They have problems with their rail system that make California HSR look like a Disneyland attraction.
I'm actually a big fan of high speed rail in America for routes that make sense, but this project is going to be such an embarrassment for rail in America that it's going to hurt future projects.
California only knows how to increase red tape and hurdles to construction. I voted against the project because I thought it would be excessively slow and costly to complete as a result of the regulatory landscape. It's a fine concept. Under different law it would be a great project.
Who cares if it’s slow and costly though? If that’s what it takes, so be it. Every high speed rail in history has come in way over budget, and when it’s done no one remembers that, they just just love taking the new, fast train.
Your naivety and lack of care is the reason why this project will enrichen a handful of people while incrementally making everyone else poorer. This is no ordinary 25% cost overrun which can be understandable in complex projects. This is 105 BILLION dollars horrendously wasted (the original estimate was 33 BILLION). They've already spent 10 BILLION and NOT A SINGLE MILE OF TRACK has been constructed.
Imagine what great and useful things could be done with 105 BILLION dollars. Homelessness, Traffic in urban centers (LA, SF, etc.), healthcare...
I assume, given your passion, that you live in California? So hey, that’s fine. Far be it from me to tell you how to conduct your business. To me it’s possibly one of the great US infrastructure projects, a way to take millions of tons of carbon out of the air, and an opportunity for Californians to commute between their two great cities in style and comfort.
But, it’s in a state I rarely visit, and I’d probably never even ride it more than a couple times. If you think the money is better spent adding half a dozen more lanes to 405, I won’t argue. No matter what, I’ll be living somewhere that doesn’t require me to waste my life sitting in a car, and that will probably never be somewhere in California, train or no train.
In 2017, 6.5% of global GDP ($5.2 trillion) was spent on fossil fuel subsidies. And you're complaining about trains? Most of the money wasted has been because litigation battles by wealthy individuals who oppose the project
$105 billion is about the size of California's current (and growing) surplus. Or about a fifth of how much California spent in 2021 ($512.8 billion). Yes it could be used to do more important things in the immediate sense but projects like these pay off tenfold in the long term
In 2017, 6.5% of global GDP ($5.2 trillion) was spent on fossil fuel subsidies. And you're complaining about trains?
Yes, he's complaining about the abject failure of trains (and I have too). The project won't pay off if the same corruption that cost $105 billions results in an impractical project and that's the common result.
The US can't create an alternative to fossil fuels unless it solves it's inability to create public transit projects problem.
One way to get better at infrastructure is to actually build it. Japan also massively over-payed for their first High speed rail, but got better at it.
And if that money is not invested in trains, they only other suggestion practically speaking is, lets make highways bigger.
So yeah, I agree, you the US needs to get better at public infrastructure projects, but doing so while also working on trains, is better then doing so and building insane Texas highway cloverleaf interchanges.
One way to get better at infrastructure is to actually build it. Japan also massively over-payed for their first High speed rail, but got better at it.
If a nation pays a lot for a given infrastructure project because the nation is developing the means to produce it, then that nation would likely be able to produce the thing better later. Maybe that's Japan.
If a nation pays a lot for a given infrastructure project because corrupt interests have positioned themselves to soak up a lion's share of the money, there's no reason to think that won't happen the next time. That's what happens in the US. Further, thing about the US is that failed public transit project have become normal and accepted. Something is needed to change this but uncritically throwing money at them obviously won't be it.
What California really needs is adding more lanes to fix traffic.
There are way to better spend money, but fixing traffic is literally the last thing anybody should try to do. Unless fixing traffic means public transport and bike infrastructure.
Go and actually look at the cost of those projects. Adding another line to a major highway is incredibly expensive both now and in maintenance and has a minor impact on avg speed of travel.
From a European perspective American cities already look like a bunch of highways with to occasional development of identical looking single family homes sitting between the highways. The idea that putting down even more road infrastructure is gone improve anything is bonkers.
The amount of road, water pipe and other utilizes the city has to support per citizen has exploded to an absurd degree and is a big reason why most US towns can't maintain their infrastructure. Actually utilizing existing infrastructure in a better way would be far more useful building new one.
Don’t forget the ongoing subsidies required and the unfunded pension liabilities it will rack up. Still, it’s not even projected to be on par with airfare, but I suppose CA could pass some special taxes to force equivalency.
While I’m mildly skeptical about the whole HSR project, it’s a little disingenuous to say “not a single mile of track has been constructed”. Maybe they are not laying track, but it not like they are doing nothing. Their YouTube page shows a lot of grade separation projects being done.
Every high speed rail in history has come in way over budget
I'm gonna have to go digging through some stuff to see if I can find a source but I'm pretty sure that's not the case (even if you ignore authoritarian style countries like China). California government is fairly dysfunctional and that makes things more expensive, and I say this as a proponent of CAHSR.
The biggest problem with CAHSR though is that the rich suburban fucks (especially on the SF peninsula) are trying to kill HSR with death from a thousand paper cuts^W^W lawsuits. That's how you get things like cities (coughathertoncoughbelmontcough) wanting underground sections built on someone else's dime. They'll cite things like noise while ignoring that a.) electric trains are quieter than diesels and b.) grade separation eliminates the need to sound the horn.
A relevant comparison here is with Spain. California is currently projected to spend around $110 billion for about 500 miles of track. By contrast Spain built out a network of 2000 miles of rail for about $70 billion.
Other European countries have similar costs. California is the outlier.
Spain is sparsely populated though, with the highest urban density in the world. It would be a place where rail both makes sense due to excellent urban networks and not much right of way issues.
No, the main reasons to vote for or against an infrastructure project would be its utility (how many people would take it, what things it will enable, how many people would take it instead of a car or plane and the benefits that will bring), not how good it is at estimating costs.
But the budget and the cost estimate is used as the denominator in the utility justification function, so if it returns positive ROI at a certain cost, but cost overruns are 2-10x that, then it carries negative utility...
This isn't unique to California by any means. If anything this should be a big warning sign for any megaprojects in the whole of the US. The laws that allowed wealthy individuals to hold up such a project are federal not state level
Definitely don't think it's a waste though. Hopefully this can make clear what legislation needs to be passed to get stuff like this through. I mean, should we also just give up on nuclear? Nuclear power plant projects across the US have been famous for double or tripling the initial expenses and timelines
We need to revisit these kinds of endeavors after legal reform. They're good projects; I support the CA HSR and more nuclear power. But they're doomed to be low-ROI suffer-fests until we can remove hurdles, so let's do that first.
I don't have a ton of familiarity with the project or the region, but the section of rail in the linked article certainly looks like it makes sense to me. A high-speed connection including the airport and downtowns of the two major metros seems like a decent project.
I'm not sure if this will actually be an HSR stop, but it would be super convenient for someone living in e.g. Fresno: Instead of having to use a connector flight to SFO, you can just take the train and transfer.
There are formal partnerships between rail providers and airlines around the world, where your train ride is treated like a leg of your flight. You have a guaranteed connection, and often your bag is transferred from the train to your airplane.
Why would you connect the two airports if the point is supposed to be that you don’t have to use the airports?
What? That sounded pretty hinky to me so I looked at the wiki page. The only airport included in Phase 1 is Burbank. Phase 2 includes proposed station at San Diego and Ontario airports. Soooo no, there's no direct service to any Bay Area airport or LAX. Being able to stop right in the heart of the destination city is one of the key advantages of rail.
There are, however, stations in downtown San Francisco, San Jose, and Los Angeles.
Edit: And just to throw a bone to the anti-HSR folks: the downtown SF situation is still a clusterfuck the net result of which is a billion dollar bus station and a poorly connected (4th/King) rail station. There's a ton of related stuff that needs to be fixed, but needs to be fixed is still better than never going to happen.
The Millbrae station is a gigantic clusterfuck and is best ignored.
BART's kind of remedied the situation, but for a while their operational costs were so high that there was no direct SFO-Millbrae service during the day. You had to backtrack all the way to San Bruno. By 2019 there was a "shuttle", and now the red (but not yellow!) line serves SFO and Millbrae.
In addition the Caltrain/BART connection at Millbrae requires a lot of walking. It's tedious and poorly designed.
A friend from Japan landed at SFO on a Sunday and figured they would take the train to Mountain View. It took them four hours to take one BART to San Bruno, a second to Millbrae and a Caltrain to MV.
Part of that is because there is only one train per hour on Sunday, and its a slow local. The latter is going to improve a bit soon since electrification is nearly done, but I somewhat doubt service is going to get much more frequent on the weekend.
The BART connection does suck, but I dont know how it look 2 hours to get to the Caltrain Station.
Let’s say you want to provide an alternative to flying between some major airports. Wouldn’t you want it connected to them so people arriving on one end had a really convenient way to just get on the alternative system?
Because the train stops other places too, and it allows the train to replace both SF/LA flights as well one leg of a Fresno -> SFO -> somewhere else flight.
One example - I can get a direct flight from my city in Australia to LA, but not to SF. Would be useful to be able to take the train from the airport at LA into somewhere in SF.
So it could potentially replace a lot of short-haul connecting flights.
You are mistaken. I doubt you will choose to take a train from LA to SF if you are already at the airport. I haven't kept up with the details of just how slow "high speed" rail is supposed to be, but to those who live in California just seeing Fresno on the route triggers an immediate reaction of "why are you going 100 miles off the direct route?"
Pulling up a map of Australia, this is the equivalent of setting out to improve transport from Canberra to Melbourne, and the first sections to be built will connect Leeton to Echuca.
Because that's how it is in almost any major modern metro area in the world. Forming a tunnel vision into only one aspect of an issue almost always leads to bad outcomes, maybe except in programming and specifically in unit testing.
The route makes fine sense. It passes through every significant city in the state and travels between the principal urban areas in a time competitive with air travel. If it did not serve Fresno, Bakersfield, etc then it does not accomplish the decarbonization goals of the project.
I disagree. The route has major problems and is a big reason why the project will take so long and be so expensive to complete. The most reasonable to approach would have been to more or less follow I-5. Instead, to get Central Valley politicians on board with the project, they chose an easterly route that hits a number of cities in the Central Valley.
Unfortunately this decision has a lot of bad consequences for the main corridor. First, the easterly direction that the train has to take after it gets out of the south bay adds around 20 minutes to the overall trip, which is a substantial fraction of the SF-LA travel time.
The bigger issue is that coming out of Bakersfield, the route is now too far east to make it through the Grapevine. Instead they will have to build a 15 mile tunnel through the San Gabriel mountains which will add more time to the route and cost tens of billions of dollars.
In effect, the choice of route added 25 minutes of travel time at a cost of tens of billions of dollars.
I do believe that Central Valley cities should have rail service, but the main SF-LA route should have been built out first and then spurs or additional lines could have been added to that core.
If a high-speed rail line would run long distances in the middle of nowhere, that's usually a sign that you should not build the line in the first place. There are rarely enough end-to-end passengers on any line to justify the investment.
The Central Valley is sparsely populated at the moment, but it doesn't have to remain so. Expanding the cities there by 5 or 10 million people might actually make the high-speed rail project sensible.
The I5 Tejon Pass goes up to an altitude of 1.2km with a 6% section [1]. From a quick search, it appears that the steepest gradients in France/Germany and Japan's Shinkansen are 4% [2]. I'm not certain about China but it appears that the HSR to Kunming (1.9km altitude) has a limiting gradient of 2.3% [3].
Maybe they could solve it with clever engineering. However, I don't think 20 minutes is a big deal, especially considering that the Japanese have put up with the humiliation of spending 2:21 instead of 1:07 to go from Tokyo to Osaka for the last few decades. I think focusing on only SF-LA also ignores long-term goals, like connecting with the Brightline from Victorville to Las Vegas. If you live in Fresno or Bakersfield and want to go to Las Vegas, your options are pretty ridiculously long bus rides, or long multi-legged flights. If both the CA HSR and Brightline succeed (I know, I'm hopeless optimistic), then it can be a pretty killer app.
To that point, in Prop 1A the voters approved a specific project: namely an SF-LA line with a travel time of 2 hours and 40 minutes. They did not approve a line hitting a string of cities in the Central Valley. To the extent that those alternate paths prevent this main corridor from hitting 2 hours and 40 minutes it is in conflict with the will of the voters.
Except they did. Prop 1A does specifically mentions the corridors that need to be built, including the cities that need to be served in section 2704.04 subsection (b)(3).
This is exactly right. All of these details were laid out at the time we voted for it! This is what we voted for. Newsom getting cold feet on it hasn’t helped, I’ve gotta say.
Worth looking at Japan’s Toukaidou Shinkansen. The route could take a direct path from Tokyo to Nagoya to Osaka, being super fast and hitting up only the main cities.
But it doesn’t. It hits up the southern coast through Shizuoka and a bunch of small cities.
The route could be significantly improved by dropping Palmdale and routing HSR through Tejon Pass instead. Going over Altamont instead of Pacheco is a harder sell because it means bypassing San Jose but would also be an improvement IMO.
Skipping all the Central Valley cities and running out along I-5 is kind of pointless though.
Do you mean in the sense that they are still working on it? The route goes straight through downtown Fresno, Bakersfield, and Madera (to the extent that "downtown Madera" exists).
The people who quibble over the alignment want it to go straight down I-5, bypassing millions of people but only shortening the route by about 50 miles.
the main problem with the alignment is palmdale/pacheco, which are going to cripple the project operationally and add a lot of unnecessary travel time. running through the downtown's is comparatively less of a shitshow (still a giant shitshow though). nobody runs HSR at full speed through downtowns.
It was the right choice in the end though IMO, it avoids an even harder to pass set of mountains and serves yet another high population town (175k people) and provides a potential transfer station for getting to Las Vegas bypassing LA for people in Northern California once Brightline West comes down I-15, only needing to build a branch line between Palmdale and Victorville.
no, palmdale is insanity. at 550km SF-LA is already marginal for high speed rail, that plus going out of the way to go through every single town in the central valley on the way down and then doing a huge zig zag to hit palmdale is going to cripple service. and also cost a lot of money. should have just followed I-5
Really going to have to disagree with you on that one, 3 hours SF to LA is well within HSR times (4 hour is considered the max), and will still be time competitive with flying because of how long it takes to check in and what a nightmare LAX is. Serving more people is absolutely higher value then the 50 total minutes lost going the route it's going.
Look at any HSR map in Europe and you'll see the same thing, the major city service is great, but it's the smaller regional service that makes the system and drives ridership. With remote work on the rise, people already are moving to smaller towns in between SF and LA, this gives them an alternative to driving when they need to go into the office. Once SJ to Merced service is operating, you could even reasonably do a daily commute, <1 hour.
the ridership will be very high. the capacity will be shit because it's managed by a consultant mafia and criminally incompetent politicians who have gone out of the way to deliver the least train for the highest amount of dollars. the transbay terminal is nigh unusable as a train station [1], and instead of leaving the caltrain right of way as soon as possible (ie south of redwood city across the dumbarton through altamont) it's going to run in mixed traffic for caltrain's entire route, operationally crippling both caltrain and CAHSR and requiring huge investment in unnecessary quad tracking to claw back some of the capacity that would have come for free if altamont was built. all because san jose politicians have an inferiority complex and demand that diridon is served on the mainline, when it isn't even important enough to be served on a branch.
a great idea, ruined by the transit industrial complex
building pacheco instead of altamont is going to go down in history as the greatest failure of all time in bay area transit, surpassing even the impressively cursed BART SFO extension
I'm a fan as well but the money would have been better spent on upgrading the existing lines so passenger traffic could be a first class citizen of the rails.
That's already happening. Caltrain's finished electrifying their route and is currently conducting clearance testing of the electric rolling stock. Electric revenue service is expected is by Autumn 2024. The other big upgrade Caltrain got out of HSR is that a number (all?) of the at-grade crossings were removed. That's a huge win.
Ok, that's a start. But my point is that US rail treats passenger traffic as a second class citizen and it doesn't have to be that way.
Mandating Positive Train Control and adding in track to allow better multiplexing of traffic could be done for a fraction of the HSR budget.
I think this should be done at a national level (nationalize the rail lines and invest in infrastructure to better utilize a very constrained resource). Yeah, crazy talk.
The next major investment is the capital corridor route needs to be purchased by the state and then electrified between San Jose and Sacramento via Oakland. That would give CAHSR a route to run on between SF and SAC once there's a second transbay tube with standard gauge tracks.
When they built the San Jose stadium (in a wetlands reclamation area), they ignored their environmental mitigation plan starting on day one.
I know bicyclists that were severely injured as a result (they set up unsafe and illegal temporary bike lanes instead of using the ones in their plan, then neglected them).
This was reported to the appropriate local authorities, but they said no one actually had the authority to enforce the environmental plans.
I assume high speed rail will proceed in the same way, and these decade long delays will be completely pointless in the end.
The pointless paper shuffling and corruption in this state never cease to amaze me.
I can't help but compare California HSR with Brightline in Florida. There are indeed major differences between the two - Brightline is not high-speed, for one (top speed is 79 mph). And California's route will be 4 times the length (~210 miles long vs ~800 miles). And California has much more track being run elevated (Brightline has had several automobile fatalities from drivers going around the crossing gates)
But .. Brightline started construction in 2014 with the Fort Lauderdale station, and is now in operation from Miami to West Palm Beach (Orlando is projected to be added by the end of 2022). Brightline is also double-tracking the route so their trains don't get diverted onto passing sidings. California HSR hasn't run a single train yet.
About half-ish is new track. There was an existing single track owned by the Florida East Coast Railway used by freight trains, and they are adding a second track (double-tracking). But to be fair, they already owned the right of way from when it was previously double-tracked in the 1920's, so adding the second track hasn't been hugely expensive.
Nit: CAHSR is not quite 100% new track. The alignment between Anaheim and Burbank is the same as the Metrolink’s and between Gilroy and San Fransisco is the same as Caltrain’s. Both need(ed) major improvements, but so did Brightline’s.
I’m not saying though that both projects are comparable (they are not. CAHSR is several factors more ambitious), this was merely a nitpick.
If he decision to kick off this project took a bill in the California legislature, then why didn’t they save tens of billions by tacking on a “CEQA does not apply to HSR” sentence to the end?
Lawyers have power if you give them power. You can just endlessly delay negations and simple build the rail and deal with lawsuits when the rail is reality.
The SF peninsula line now has to eliminate all grade crossings for high speed rail to run above 70MPH. That's the big job. Which means re-doing most of the line, right after electrification is completed.
I think the high speed rail system should have bypassed San Francisco and gone through Oakland to Sacramento. Just build a BART station with a cross-platform transfer between high-speed rail and BART. No ticket barriers. High speed rail would include a BART ticket, and anyone who gets on high speed rail without a ticket gets dumped in Fresno, which should discourage free ride attempts.
SF still plans to tunnel over to connect Caltrain and high speed rail to the "Salesforce Transit Center". But by the time that's needed, downtown SF will have finished moving eastward to the existing train station. Look where the new construction is.
As I understand it (and all I know is what I read there), completing an environmental impact statement means that environmental impacts have been considered and documented in a way that is hopefully secure against lawsuits claiming that an environmental impact review hasn't been done. (But you never know what people will sue about.)
It doesn't mean anything in particular has been done to protect the environmental or any plans were changed. It's just... documentation, that's hopefully adequate.
Compare with the laundry list that the FAA required SpaceX to do to get a launch license in Texas. This random stuff, hopefully that benefits the environment, that the FDA wants so that they don't have to write an environmental impact statement. (Which could take years.)
ICE can already power cars that travel 150mph. But cars are small and currently need human drivers. Perhaps self-driving buses going that speed would help.
It is actually more like a suburban express rail then a subway. But this is justifiable because the Bay Area is densely populated with a large international airport, so trips will be generated from multiple locations.
To clarify, these stops are:
1. Downtown San Francisco, which is a future station that will probably open later then this section.
2. SOMA, the only for sure stop in San Francisco proper when the line opens.
3. SFO airport. Makes sense because the airport will generate lots of trips.
4. San José, the largest city in the Bay Area with many connections to other public transit options.
But you can expect express trains to actually skip SOMA and SFO (and possibly even San José).
Oh, maybe I misunderstood, but I thought this was a part of the SF to LA high speed rail initiative?
Definitely understand downtown SF, SFO, and San Jose, but SOMA? Why?
One time when I was riding CalTrain from SF to Palo Alto I was timing each stop and it was just so frustrating how many stops, especially shared with BART (!), there were for what is supposed to be an intercity express rail line.
No you are right, this is actually both caltrain and the high speed rail. These two will interline in the bay area starting in Gilroy (which also has a station, making the station count 5 actually). SOMA is the current terminus of Caltrain. There are plans to connect to the downtown transbay transit center (I refuse to call it Salesforce transit center) but there are no estimates to when the downtown extension (DTX) will be completed to allow that. CAHSR actually finishes before DTX (which is a real possibility) then SOMA will be the terminus of CAHSR as well until the DTX finishes. However I wouldn’t be surprised if SOMA will be skipped by all but hyper-local trains ones DTX is ready.
Before you say "fewer stops" (or its equivalent), remember that if you don't stop someplace, someone who wants to get to/from that place has to find an alternative, and that alternative may well involve 101.
That would be what Caltrain electrification and better ops and planning should do. The peninsula has the problem of the commerical spaces being away from the line.
I've been following this project off and on. There are various Youtube videos about it. Lots has been written. It's interesting because it's really a failure on almost every level but most especially political. Some examples:
- Proposal 1A, the voter amendment that was passed to build the project, specified the speed of 220mph. This was really a mistake. It's greatly added to the cost;
- California's notorious environment impact review for a project of this scale require about the same planning, time and budget as the JWST. This is only a slight exaggeration. This article refers to the northern section (SF to the Central Valley). The southern section (Central Valley to LA) is, I believe, still in review. California has started to rollback some of these onerous review processes (eg CEQA) as its become apparent they're largely weaponized by NIMBYs to delay or derail (pun intended) pretty much anything;
- They're still securing land parcels through the Central Valley. Why this wasn't a textbook case for eminent domain for farmland (which is usally WAY cheaper than any kind of residential, industrial or commercial land) is beyond me. I'm sure there's a reason but it seems crazy;
- Counties along the route have managed to extract concessions for not blocking the project that greatly add to cost and travel time. For example, instead of running down the I5 through the west side of the Central Valley, it runs through regaional towns like Bakersfield on the east side. This is greater tack length ()ie more cost and overall travel time) and more stops (ie even more travel time);
- The Sacramento spur originally had a plan where I believe it went through Oakland rather than along the Caltrain line. IIRC this was overruled for political reasons;
- LA is huge. Acquiring land for this is going to be a massive and expensive undertaking.
So I'm a fan of a robust public transit infrastructure but the likely $100b+ price tag for this just seems insane to me. I actually think it probably would've been better to build a LA to Las Vegas line first. There is a ton of demand for this. Yes you have to cross some mountains (but less than the HSR does) but you're also dealing with desert on the Nevada side, so acquiring land gets a whole lot less problematic. It's also shorter.
The Brightline West route from LA to Las Vegas seems like it's going ahead. But it has different design constraints (eg 180mp speed vs 220). You should really design all these systems with the same design constraints and the same rolling stock.
Whenever I see projects like the HSR and even the NY 2nd Ave Subway with their truly massive price tags for very little my mind always goes to Crossrail in the UK. It might've been late but really not that much and to me it seems to be a stunning success. To build that much new tunnel under london (which is essentially a ruin/graveyard with 2000+ years of accumulation) is, to me, an astounding feat.
The comparison to China is always made. Well, that's central planning for you. It may have its benefits but it also has its costs.
> specified the speed of 220mph. This was really a mistake. It's greatly added to the cost;
Why? That is well within the speeds of typical high speed rail systems. Going slower with a totally new project would just be embracing. The main cost are not really improved by using a slightly slower design speed and you end up with a much worse system.
> Counties along the route have managed to extract concessions for not blocking the project
Going threw those towns actually makes a lot of sense for a serious rail project and potentially even safes money.
Only in the US people say things like 'why would we connect these millions of people with a rail line'.
> Why? That is well within the speeds of typical high speed rail systems.
So consider this set of goals:
1. You want to get from SF to LA as fast as possible;
2. You want to go 220mph; and
3. You want to stop in many places along the way.
With just these 3 goals you already have conflict. More stops makes 220mph less valuable because it takes time to accelerate and decelerate. The driving distance between SF and LA is (according to Google maps) 382 miles. Will this route get there in 382 / 220 = 1h44m? No, it's more like 4 hours.
Getting from SF to LA in 2 hours by train would be fantastic. But that's not what's getting built.
> Going threw those towns actually makes a lot of sense for a serious rail project and potentially even safes money.
You clearly don't realize the consequences of this as I described above. You may pick up extra passengers in Fresno but you may then lose passengers by taking too long to get from SF to LA.
LA is building a rail extension to LAX, which is going to solve so many problems for using LAX. I believe it's costing $2.2 billion and it's about the best money you could spend.
If the route takes too long you may as well just drive or take a plane. That's what you're competing against.
> 1. You want to get from SF to LA as fast as possible;
This is a dumb goal, and a total misunderstanding of the whole point and benefit of a rail system.
The real benefit of rail is that you can have stops and integrate the high speed rail with many other regional rails and local transport solution in order to build a sustainable practical transportation system for the whole state.
We are not talking about 100s of stops, you take a few stop in a few places where you have 100'000s of people living. A system that doesn't just connect 2 things point by point but rahter all cities directly to the next closes large city and the next closes after that.
HSR should be the backbone of a transportation system that enables as many people as possible to live without a car. Its far more important to prevent people from driving all those inside of California routes with their cars, then it is to prevent non-stop travel between SF-LA by cars or planes.
The West is in terminal decline, especially Democrat states. Since the California High Speed Rail project was passed and funded, California has completed just over 30 miles. China on the other hand, has build over 12,000 miles of fully connected High Speed Rail in the same period of time. I've ridden on it, and it's wonderful. China's network has a top speed that far surpasses California's plan. Additionally, Red states have completed high speed rail projects, notably Florida's SunRail project, though the top speed of their projects are still lower than China's system. I'm not sure California will ever finish this project, I support high speed rail; but the corruption of our state is incredible. We should fire the State of California, join the Belt and Road initiative and hire the Chinese to complete the project.
SunRail has an average speed of 31 mph. This is less than BART (35 mph). Tell me more jokes about how red states are superior?
And tell me again about how this is high-speed rail? It also has a ridership that's a small fraction of BART.
Would it be too much to ask for you to get a grasp of basic facts before bashing California for its efforts? California did better with the system it built half a century ago than Florida did in 2017.
I’m sorry I live in California Brightline is the name of the line. The point is Florida could build it California can’t, even in 20 years time we won’t have it.
And in regards to efforts, it seems a money laundering operation more than a construction project.
Pure guessing and speculation. You have no idea what California will manage and what it won't.
As for Brightline, that's another joke argument: it's privately run! It's not public at all! So it cannot possibly prove anything about what "Florida" can build. Right? So what's your point?
Right now, it runs between Miami and West Palm Beach, btw. That's it. So climate change will wipe that out soon anyway, along with most of Miami.
Postscript: it's also not "high-speed" rail. At all. It fails to meet even "the lowest high-speed rail standard set by the International Union of Railways" as of now, which is 200kph. It's about the speed of car travel.
Your remark is quite the statement. The death toll of CCP is >40 million. The only other organization that might beat that is the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.
Well one, it doesn't really add much to the conversation about high speed rail in the US state of California. Also, you would need some type of citation before talking about death tolls. I would also argue that your numbers are wrong and that you're clearly biased, so any discussion about the CCP or the CPSU would be pointless.
> The Board’s certification of the San Francisco to San Jose Final EIR/EIS and approval of its project section will move the project section closer to being “shovel ready” when funding for final design, pre-construction and construction becomes available.
"Closer" to being "shovel ready" when "funding for final design... becomes available" is not a series of words that gives me confidence that meaningful progress has been made. However, I grant that I am no expert in the art of parsing press releases about big infrastructure projects.
Anybody out there with meaningful understanding of what this announcement might mean in practical terms?