Calif. awarded $2.25B for high-speed rail | Hacker News Reader

Calif. awarded $2.25B for high-speed rail

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27 pointswglb36 comments

Transportation infrastructure is a great investment in the future: where would we be today without our highway system? With air travel becoming more of a hassle each year it'll be great to have an alternative. Note that about 8 billion in total was approved, SF to LA is only one of the routes planned.

I think transportation infrastructure is a great solution to yesterday's problems.

Look at the newspaper industry: some commentators think their problem is that delivering news on dead tree is overly expensive relative to what people want to pay for it. Even if you accept that diagnosis, increasing investment into dead tree processing, dead tree distribution, and dead tree delivery is not the way forward.

I use trains to commute to my job as a computer programmer. My commute is fairly inexpensive, hassle-free, and uses the best distribution system for human bodies the world has ever seen. My commute is also a jaw-droppingly stupid waste of resources.

My company and I waste three hours a day five times a week shuttling a few pounds of grey matter and a pair of eyeballs from one glowing screen to another glowing screen. The glowing screens connect to each other instantly, for so cheap next to my (cheap) train passes it doesn't even make sense to measure.

Your company doesn't waste 15 hours a week, you do. If you weren't commuting, would you work an extra 15 hours per week? That's 15 hours of your life that you're losing, not 15 hours of productivity.. But otherwise, I do agree with you.

I'm very productive on trains. Often more productive than in office settings.

Three hours a day five times a week?

If I were in that situation, I'd either move closer to my job, or find a job closer to where I live. Unless the train had wifi...

Sort of off-topic: The train is a convenient socially acceptable excuse to leave work: "I'm sorry guys, but I have to catch the last train." This gets me a whole 15 hours a week of leisure time for reading or sleeping which I would not otherwise have.

After I separate from my day job (two more months, hopefully) I'll discuss societal insanity and its relationship to being a Japanese salaryman at length.

Meat-space bandwidth is currently unbeatable.

Telecommuting works for some people, in some jobs.

If eye contact, body language, serendipitous personal interaction, and shared experiences are not important to the social and communicative aspects of a job, then maybe staying home works well.

Maybe there is need to develop means/skills for it to work in more jobs. As Pascal hyperbolized:

"All human evil comes from a single cause, man's inability to sit still in a room. "

[If not all human evil... at least we can now append: "burden of transportation infrastructure + CO(2)."]

I agree. The experience at the Atocha train station in Madrid and on the Renfe train system is a dream. You go there, buy your tickets, spend maybe 30 seconds going through security, board your train, and enjoy a roomy seat while you're whisked across the country at 300 km/h.

And here in Japan there isn't even security: you buy a ticket at the ticket machine, then go through the gate and get in. No need to speak to a human until the controller checks your ticket during the ride.

I do wonder how important the highway system is to our economy. It used to be a great boon to commerce because we made a lot of goods and needed to get them to other regions, and to ports for export. Now we import everything, and the highway system just aids our increased consumption without actually helping create jobs.

High-speed rail is for persons, not for goods. With high-speed train you can travel from A to B (with A and B being in the 'right' range of course) cleaner and faster than with the highway. And it may actually create a demand for more travel. In France, Marseille had a big housing price increase as the high-speed train brought Marseille 3 hours from Paris (http://bit.ly/9qPHlM).

Hopefully this one won't lose $32 per passenger.

"The Pew Charitable Trusts SubsidyScope Project has just released a new report that finds 41 out of Amtrak's 44 routes lose money."

http://reason.com/blog/2009/10/27/riding-the-subsidized-rail...

Why would it need to make any money? Look at roads: they cost huge amounts to build and maintain, yet the vast majority don't bring in any direct revenue whatsoever.

Let's turn this statement on its head, and reframe it as a question: why isn't all mass transit free?

(Yes, I understand economically why this isn't the case, and I still think it's a worthwhile viewpoint/question to ask.)

Roads aren't free. You pay a toll to the government for their use every time you go to the gas station. And they shouldn't be free, although gas should be taxed additionally for its environmental externalities.

Gas taxes pay for the interstates, but they don't cover the local road network in most parts of the country. Road maintenance is a massive part of most municipalities' budgets and it comes from general tax revenue.

And that is truly unfortunate. There should be a tax on gas (mostly) and automobiles that completely pays for roads, and compensating tax cuts should be made against whatever the municipality collects; perhaps property or sales. Above all else I think we can all agree that people should be taxed especially to pay for what they use when it is possible.

They are free to use, which is what is relevant to the Gparent post.

Taxes on something directly and irrevocably associated with the use of a resource _is_ a tax on the resource. But someone pointed out that gasoline taxes do not pay for roads in their entirety; the toll basically doesn't cover the expense of maintaining the road.

I don't know how it is in the US but in Germany taxe revenues can't be bound to their sources, that means the government can (well, have to) spend the oil tax on whatever he wants.

It doesn't matter as long as the amount it costs to maintain the roads is collected in fuel taxes.

Because near-term job creation is the government's job, right? If this were such a good idea, it would have been privately funded. It's nice to know I'll be paying for another state's rail system for years to come

Other funding sources for California’s bullet train include $10 billion in voter-approved bonds and cash from private investors, which the California High-Speed Rail Authority hopes will provide about $10 billion.

Californian voters are in the unique position in American history where they can unilaterally approve bonds that will probably be repaid by other people's taxes. (Its similar to the position California unions have been in for the last few decades, where they can unilaterally approve pay/benefits raises which will be repaid by other people's taxes. These two situations are not unrelated.)

Actually, you won't. California pays out more in federal taxes than it gets back. It's more likely that your state is getting money from Californians.

Of course, it's all deficit spending anyway, so no one will have to pay for it!

Wait.

That's one way of looking at it... Another way is CA is a huge part of US federal tax revenue. They are basically subsidizing other states via the taxes they pay the federal government. If you have benefited from the protection of US armed forces, or the safety of modern air travel via the FAA, or the safety of modern food & drugs via the FDA you are reaping the benefits of CA's population. I use those specific examples because they are programs most people would not dispute as being essential government services. In my opinion it's a very wise investment for the country. We want CA to keep being rich and prosperous so they can keep giving us lots of tax revenue in the future.

I absolutely dispute our armed forces as "essential government services" in it's current incantation, especially the TRILLION DOLLARS of our federal tax money that has been used to fight two needless wars in order to increase oil profits.

$33B for Afghanistan but only $2.25B for California?

Don't forget the $30B for Israel to keep occupation of Gaza. So a total of $63B for foreign occupation, and a total of $8B for domestic infrastructure transportation.

Sadly, the new California "High-speed rail" is slated to go 75MPH.

According to the CA High Speed Rail Authority [1], a trip from San Jose to Los Angeles is 384 miles and will take 2hr9m. That is an average of 180 MPH.

[1] http://www.cahighspeedrail.ca.gov/map.htm

That's fascinating. If it costs even the same as air travel, I might just use it spontaneously. A 40 minute flight easily takes two hours these days.

Interesting. This is completely different from the hyped up CAHSRA plan about 6 months ago that was saying "high speed raiL" when what they really meant was "catching up on existing track maintenance"

Honestly, if all they did was take old rail tech and make sure passenger rail gets its own track (instead of being preempted by freight) I'd be pretty happy already. This is where the bulk of the speed limitations come in.

129 min trip includes several stops, Fresno, Bakersfield, Palmdale, etc. The actual hardware will support speeds of ~200 MPH.

[1] http://www.railway-technology.com/projects/california/

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