High-speed rail taking shape even as opponents seek to kill it
sfchronicle.com
sfchronicle.com
The incompatibility of CAHSR with other rail strikes me as a repeat of the BART mistake.
sharing with freight otrain slower commuter trains really reduces the value of HSR, especially on an older, slower right of way.
Probably a different mistake but BART uses 5'6" rail gauge. Standard US rail gauge is 4'8.5". This means that every railcar, every everything, has to be custom made with no economies of scale.
No one can remember why they did this.
Interesting. When I saw this, I wondered if it was to match another standard gauge that was judged to be superior. But, looking at the list of rail gauges on wikipedia[0], 5'6" is the gauge for railways in India ("Indian broad gauge" to be specific). The initial BART rolling stock seems to have been build by Rohr, Inc.[1], which is based in California. So it seems unlikely that they were benefiting from any economies of scale from Indian rail construction. Rohr also seems to have built rolling stock for the Washington, D.C. metro, which uses a near-standard 4'8.25" gauge[2].
Perplexing.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Track_gauge
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rohr,_Inc. (you'll need manually add the period to the end of the URL, because of how HN converts this into a link)
http://myprogressiverailroading.com/rail_forum/maintenance_o...
BTW, Pittsburg uses 5'6" as well.
DC Metro is even more ridiculous. It's only 1/4" different from standard gauge.
FYI, the URL encoding for "." is "%2E", so replacing period with %2E works: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rohr,_Inc%2E
If that's the case, obfuscating the reasons for these decisions is a rational move.
I want to believe that the different gauge standards is a bit like the proliferation of programming languages in software - they solve their slightly different problem space well. Is this true?
The construction process does seem to be insufficiently standardized. There's all that falsework and ground paving. Compare the way it's done in China, with standardized bridge sections placed on pylons by a very specialized machine.[1]
Can you clarify what you mean by that? Most high speed rail in Europe does not have bogies between cars.
Example from Austria with 550mm platform height:
* Local trains: http://blog-oebb.at/backend/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/cityj...
* High speed rail: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e1/Railjet-...
If the floor is below the top of the wheels, there has to be a narrow section at the car ends. The wheels have to go someplace. The lost space can be minimized by sharing a bogie between two cars.
(If the floor is below the axle line, as with ultra low floor trams, it's really complicated.)
Eurostar is the exception to every train. It's a monster of complexity because it has to work on three systems. It also does not have 550mm platform height. I think it has 750?
> some TGV trainsets
But not because of the platform height but because of stability in case of a crash. The TGVs with bogies between the cars has the same general height setup as the traditional ones.
> (If the floor is below the axle line, as with ultra low floor trams, it's really complicated.)
Sure, but that's hardly relevant here. Trams are generally set up completely different. Vienna for instance has the ULF tram and it's being phased out because such a low floor setup is just generally a bad idea for many different reasons. The new rolling stock will be Bombardier Flexity.
This approach has its problems too, but I do agree with you hear type of monolithic projects always become a boondoggle.
As far as I can tell, TGV tracks are built to vey tight tolerances, but Continuous Welded Rail (CWR) is a worldwide standard on new railway lines, nothing special. I most recently saw some thermite welding equipment just about to be used in Dublin (Ireland) during the laying of new tramway tracks. So there's nothing exotic about the welding process, though it is quite dramatic.
All track with passenger rail on it should be welded, so not sure what your point is. Also, every passenger rail should ideally be electrified; more freight trains should be electrified as well.
Yes high speed track is built to much tighter tolerances, but high speed trains can go on lower class tracks with slower speed. Plenty of ICE trains in Germany run on 160 km/h track. Extreme examples include TGVs being pulled by diesel trains to reach beach resorts.
TGV was most definitely started that way. It was engineered to be able to run on regular railway ("standard gauge high-speed train") so that the existing "inner-city" rails could be used to reach inside existing metropolis, but it was designed primarily to run on new specific rights of way, regular service started on the dedicated "LN1" (now LGV Sud-Est) between Paris and Lyon: the line is 409km (254mi) for a total ride distance (station to station) of 425km (264mi).
> They are systems that are integrated with regional and urban rail, and have grown to have more dedicated higher speed sections over time.
The size of the dedicated high-speed network grew over time, but high-speed trains were always intended to run on high-speed networks, there's just no point otherwise, "regular" trainsets will reach older lines's rated speed just fine.
Yes they are standard gauge and can run on regular old rail and that's plenty useful, but no that's not what they were built for, it would be a complete waste of the rolling stock.
As an aside, calling an idea complete bullshit based on an nitpick is pretty weak, especially since you're wrong: when tgv started in September 1981, they only had part of the line constructed. Without compatibility, I.e. a completely dedicated system, you could've only traveled between two random towns.
It means the exact same fucking thing in every context. Dedicated means infrastructure which exists solely for high-speed train, not that high-speed trains can only exist on the dedicated infrastructure.
> It would mean complete incompatibility
That's completely nonsensical. European high-speed lines are dedicated, non-high-speed trains do not run on them, it's the high-speed rolling stock which is compatible with older electrified rail lines because they use a standard gauge and compatible/switchable electrical feed (some of the more complex rolling stock having to cross multiple borders can handle 4 different power inputs).
> This is not what EU high speed rail was built on, they use a lot of legacy lines
And they use dedicated infrastructure and have done so from the start.
> As an aside, calling an idea complete bullshit based on an nitpick is pretty weak
It's not a nitpick to point out that your statement is factually entirely incorrect.
> especially since you're wrong: when tgv started in September 1981, they only had part of the line constructed.
That was still a dedicated right-of-way which it started with, putting the lie to your statement.
> Without compatibility
That has nothing to do with your original statement. Your statement was not that high-speed rolling stock should be compatible with legacy rail and able to use it. Your statement was that european high-speed rail "definitely didn't start" with "dedicated rights of way", and further that high-speed rail only have some dedicated rights of way.
It's a farse because of how it's getting implemented, and nobody is under any illusions this isn't going to turn into another bay bridge budget monster in California.
Still a rail proponent, but bitterly disappointed in the implementation choices of this project.
I don't think that's the biggest deal here.
I'll refer you to this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13630341
http://www.hsr.ca.gov/docs/about/business_plans/2016_Busines...
It looks like about 2/3 or so of the revenue is to either the MTC or SCAG regions, with the remainder dominated by the San Joaquin Valley. So while traffic may not be entirely between the endpoint it is highly concentrated in trips going to and from the endpoints, and for this purpose, driving 30 minutes down a freeway to the train might not be too much of an inconvenience for the residents of Modesto who despite technocrats' brainwashing ambitions will probably still like to drive cars in 2030. Plus they won't complain about a cheaper fare, even if road improvements take another ten years to get in place (the train is the important part).
I'm also not sure where this newer forecast model came from, but it seems highly subject to politicized biases: they basically asked individual regions to forecast their ridership and revenue to other regions, and then added it all up.
The original forecasts [0] were built off of SNCF forecast modeling expertise, which is one of the best in the world and also from a country with very similar geodemographic characteristics as California. For just the subsegment of LA-SF, less than 50% of revenue is between SF and LA, and the ridership between SF-SJV and LA-SJV adds up to approximately the same amount as LA-SF. In other words, going through the valley doubles revenue potential.
This isn't a new phenomenon. It has been noted by and (if necessary) relearned by railroad capitalists going all the way back to the foundation of railroads. For an example, read chapters 16-20 of this economic history of Railway Mania [1]. Railway demand between termini has almost always been overforecasted by railroad capitalists, and they either figure it out and start serving intermediate destinations or they go bankrupt. If they build the line from the very beginning by bypassing intermediate population centers, their overestimates of ridership will doom them to a fate they can't recover from, barring major track realignment.
A background in Operations Research gives me a professional social network of people across pretty much every industry, all of whom understand some of the hardest business and technical problems of their industry. Some of my contacts work on schedule optimization in Germany and Spain. One of the quotes that constantly gets spouted in their conferences is that HSR is politically successful because of its top speed, but it is commercially successful because of the first derivative of its speed. Top speed gets votes, but the ability to start and stop very quickly allows them to obtain very significant ridership boosts with very little degradation in average speed. This is a very distinct competitive advantage...they can do something that no airline could ever do. Between major termini, there will always be some form of competition with airlines, but intermediate stations will always be a veritable monopoly for rail.
[0] http://www.hsr.ca.gov/docs/about/ridership/ridership_revenue...
I said "to either", not "between". I also didn't suggest cutting out intermediate stops, but I did allow them to move outside of the town centers. In other words, most travelers from SJV are going to either MTC or SCAG, not within SJV, and in particular this is not directly analogous to the 19th century because of the extensive road network and the popularity of cars. Similarly, putting the rail corridor 30-60 minutes from the town is probably OK since the majority of residents of those towns will probably be driving to the train anyway, while doing that in a horse-and-buggy economy will of course doom ridership.
From page 5 of your link:
LA-Bay = $735M
LA-SJV = $355
SJV-Bay = $346
...
Within SJV = $29
total = $2355
to [LA or Bay] = 735 + 355 + 346 = $1436 or 62% of total.
So over 90% of ridership from SJV is going to either SCAG or MTC or further. The data seem to comport with my estimate that in order to start recouping costs you need, at the very least, service to one endpoint. This doesn't mean you should remove intermediate stops but it does support the idea that SJV HSR customers are mostly traveling long distances and might not mind leaving town to get to the train. This is particularly true if parking fees can be reduced by moving the train station out of town, since the current projection is $12 which I'm afraid might be "per day" (nearly as bad as the airport!) and people hate that.
The report I linked notes that the projection is for cars to continue accounting for 93% of intra-regional travel demand: i.e. while "the world is local" as your link states I have a hard time believing that market insights from a world without cars will translate readily to one with cars. Additionally, while some New Urbanists have started to try to build car-free cities, this goes against the wishes of the general public (including me) and I doubt it'll be popular in the politically conservative Central Valley. In this light, driving the train through the middle of Bakersfield as opposed to the outskirts looks like an attempt by the state to implement a vision of Bakersfield's future that the residents of Bakersfield did not really ask for. The majority of Central Valley customers will be driving, rather than walking/bussing, to the train even under the current plans. I'd also like to point out that, while there is an environmental motive for reducing our dependence on gasoline via cars, I personally expect electric cars to arrive sooner than a restructuring of the infrastructure of Central Valley cities that deprioritizes cars in favor of public transit. It could happen, but I'm not betting on it. So this:
>intermediate stations will always be a veritable monopoly for rail.
doesn't seem as clear to me as it does to you. And while as you mention the projections may have underestimated ridership in the (less-infrastructure-keen) non-city regions, they also assume a 50% real increase in the cost of auto travel, which as noted may be softened or reversed by the adoption of battery-powered vehicles. Therefore, Dionysus Lardner's observation that the median trip in 1846 was about 15 miles long probably would not apply in 2025.
As you've probably inferred, most of my background in this area is political and personal rather than technical. So, for example, I don't really know if moving the train line out of Tulare actually results in a significant savings on land and/or a reduction in construction time (especially this!), without which my whole point is moot. But I do not think that Fresno is analogous to a city in Germany, nor do I have a desire to turn it into one. Americans like cars, despite the powerful people with professional social networks who want to control us.'
edit: agh this is a bit of a mess, I hope it isn't too confrontational, and I appreciate you sharing your expertise.
Which is the case with a number of the shin- stations on the shinkansen lines. (Although, being Japan, those stations are still well-connected to the city transit systems and they're not that far out of the traditional town centers.)
I've seen overviews of the LGV models to know that they aren't making decisions on where to stop based purely on politics (I'm sure there are some politics involved, but the schedule optimization models are very objective). Those optimization models take into account things like cannibalization, where most riders from two close small towns can be served by one station in between them, only losing a small percent over a situation with two stations. But mostly the model is an LP of the total revenue lost from removing a station vs the total revenue gained from adding a station, and the revenue projections obtained from a forecast model that predicts the cartesian set of all possible orig-dest pairs of a line. And these models have resulted in stops in tiny towns like Loche (pop 35k), Macon (pop 35k), and Le Creusot (pop 22k). > It could happen, but I'm not betting on it. So this: [...] doesn't seem as clear to me as it does to you.
In France, the outlying towns are not much different from California. They may not be as car-centric as places like Madera or Merced, but they are at least as car-dependent. Density is low enough that cars are still a necessity. And while some of these stations avoid going directly through the towns they serve, very few are more than a 3-5 km from the town center.
From the perspective of someone who grew up in Stockton, I'd say that concerns about car dependency are still overblown outside of intra-SJV trips in general. If the destination is a line terminus, transit/taxis are abundant enough to use easily, and that leaves the trip to the station as the only deterrent. But getting a ride isn't that big of a deal. Living there, you almost always have access to someone that can give you a ride to the airport 45 minutes away if you need it...a trip across town should be pretty easy. Taxis are available on a scheduled ride basis, and most businesses with regular travelers maintain a list of van services that handle trips to and from airports. The concern is real, but I think most valley-dwellers have adapted to their situation quite well.
I'm not an expert on property values in the valley (haven't lived there for 2 decades), but I can imagine the possibility of it being cheaper to build through the cities simply because they already have freight ROWs running through them. Getting a ROW easement on an existing un-partitioned property tends to be fraught with peril. It is easy for a large land owner to hold a line hostage for higher prices if they know that one "no" ruins an entire plan. Buying up existing freight ROW (which I believe is part of the plan) would definitely be easier and faster...it might also end up being cheaper.
And no worries about being confrontational. I wasn't trying to, and I didn't interpret your response as confrontational either.
I would love to have an HSR along the coast however. When I was in Taiwan it was amazing being able to get to the bottom of the island in a couple hours.
Is that a joke? California is a terrible place to be farming. Farming in California is only viable because farmers are allowed unfettered access to water, depriving it from residents (who are told they should turn off the water in the shower while farmers are pouring untold millions of gallons on crops that could be grown somewhere actually suited to farming).
In an average year, about 39% of California's water consumption, or 34.1 million acre-feet, is used for agricultural purposes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_in_California#Uses_of_wa...
So if you sum the rest, agriculture does use 80% of the water used by humans.
This way we could talk about the incredible amounts of gold that is diluted in oceans that we could harvest "anytime" [0]. It's around 21x more than humans mined in the whole history.
"Solely relying on these statewide volumes is controversial because they don't consider the fact that most of the volume of water used for environmental purposes includes flows down Wild and Scenic Rivers in the North Coast where there is no practical way to recover it for either agricultural or urban use because it lacks many connections to the statewide water supply system."
* The Central Valley is California's largest wine region stretching for 300 miles (480 km) from the Sacramento Valley south to the San Joaquin Valley. This one region produces nearly 75% of all California wine grapes and includes many of California's bulk, box and jug wine producers like Gallo, Franzia and Bronco Wine Company.*
But the state can grow a lot of crops that are worth the water usage.
All that is needed is to price water with a market mechanism rather than first come, first serve free water.
SF/LA commuting is still a thing, though, and will be great!
If you want to take a beautiful coastal train ride, nothing beats the Amtrak from LA to San Diego.
http://www.latimes.com/world/asia/la-fg-xpresswest-rail-line...
It wasn't until the 20th century that access to the Big Sur area was possible. And even today for over a hundred miles highway 1 is the only access.
Fresno - 509,000 people Bakersfield - 363,000 people
The first segment connects 1 million people with a high quality dedicated rail connection. Take a trip on the San Joaguin train - that train slow as it is, is very popular.
Next take a look at a map. Los Angeles is due south of Lake Tahoe. So going to central valley is not a detour or some other political game.
The real political mess is the choice of Pacheco Pass (hwy 152) rather than the Altamont Pass.(I-580) Once again Altamont Pass - a lot of people. hwy 152 - crickets in comparison.
That's why the money would be better spent on local transit improvements inside the Los Angeles area and the Bay Area, not connecting them.
AND it allows real estate speculators to get a much higher rate of return when they build up cookie cutter neighbourhoods in cheap land that is soon to be linked up by rail.
Both a good and a cynical reason for this behaviour, which is why I don't think you'll ever see it change (no matter where you are).
For HSR you want to connect large hubs, there's no point in a train which can go 200mph if it has to stop every 60mi.
Going over the Pacheco Pass allows the train to hit San Jose and the Silicon Valley without going through huge windy detours, which has a lot more people in it than the Altamont Pass area.
Higher sustained speeds = shorter trip times.
Go look at a terrain map.
Pacheco Pass ---------------------- From Gilroy to San Jose the train can go no faster than ~125, ~150mph because it has to do a fairly sharp turn.
Anyone come from San Francisco is doing the first ~100 miles at speeds no greater than ~125mph.
Altamont Pass -------------------- Trains leaving San Francisco and San Jose join up in Fremont.
Once they leave Fremont, the right of way opens up. The trains can then hit 220 mph until Los Angeles.
This saves in total time ~ 30 minutes.
The coast would be a stupid place to run high speed rail; it would be both more expensive to the lay the track there and less useful.
Do everyone a favor. In the future, when such projects come up for vote, assume the politicians are lying to you and, most importantly, they are as incompetent as a truck driver attempting open heart surgery. That's a good start. Then do some research and see if in the last fifty years they have ever completed any project on time, on budget and without major problems.
Armed with that reality, please don't vote to give incompetent liars the ability to create another mess and screw us all, again.
No, it's not. I was born in and grew up there, and I'm glad I left (though as a kid, I thought it was a nice place to live).
But it (and Fresno, and the CV in general) does have something that the coast and SF/LA doesn't have: Low-cost housing/property.
Imagine being able to live in Bako, Fresno, etc - and commute quickly to SF or LA. By high-speed rail, it'd probably only take an hour or two each way. Provided that it didn't cost a lot (or you could get monthly 2-way passes), it would be a great way for those who want to work in SV or such to do so, and be able to afford to live comfortably in a home with a family.
In fact, the idea is interesting enough to me to consider moving back to California (I'd love a tech job in the SF area, but the cost of living - mainly housing - just blows that idea out of the water).
Seems to be the kicker with using these trains for commuter purposes. Everywhere you look - Switzerland, Japan, Spain, Eurostar - the prices seem to be at either high double digits or low triple digits one way.
The way it was sold to voters in California is that it would become a revenue generator, so some additional padding is needed for profit margins.
It doesn't work if you don't have that central density & transit. It doesn't generally work in the opposite direction either. (Urban dwellers to suburban jobs.)
Caltrain is currently running 30-year-old diesel locomotives and 30-year-old passenger carriages on many of its trains, because they have no funding to get more modern equipment or electrify the line. Minor breakdowns have been increasing for a while, with occasional major problems (like last week when they had a fire in one of the locomotives during the evening rush hour).
[1] https://www.google.com/maps/d/viewer?mid=1NYS0Y3nyyYZowXFDtJ...
Therein lies the problem. The cost of the line can't be justified unless it provides a viable alternative to flying between SF and LA, because that's the only conceivable way to get enough ridership. The problem is the distance between SF and LA means being competitive with flying in terms of travel time is incredibly difficult. To achieve parity the trains will need to average around 220 MPH, which is incredibly optimistic. Existing high speed rail lines rarely run at 200 MPH even momentarily due to high operating costs.
All this means that most trains will have to run nonstop between SF and LA to even have a hope of competing with flying. If the trains fail to draw passengers away from the airlines, ridership will be far too low to sustain the line without absurdly high subsidies.
If you can get the trains to take you directly into the city center, it can often be a better option.
That's because Boston and NYC are both navigable without a car. Only one side of the SF-LA link can claim to be close to that ideal.
But the time and hassle of airport parking and security and delays might be able to keep a 3.5 hour train ride viable even in CA. That would require a train system that allowed passengers to step through a quick scanner with no line and onto the train without queueing or carefully organized boarding. Lots of train systems used to do that in the USA but the bureaucrats don't like passengers freely walking around platforms by heavy machinery or directing themselves or quick predictable security procedures. Acela has been abandoning efficient and established traditional practices to copy instead the airports. How long are they going to stand for a train system that isn't as awful as airport security and boarding?
Since politicians can't risk being blamed for trouble, we have no ability to control the bureaucrats and every high speed transportation system will inevitably get to be as bad as airports.
If rail could be built at the same costs as in France or Japan (or even, optimistically, Spain or Korea), to wit, $20-30MMM, you could justify it just for saving the cost of airport expansion. But at $80-120MMM it's lunacy to proceed.
You'd have to actually change the rules and overcome the NIMBYs. Some problems can't be solved with cash.
Just put some car rental places near the station in LA, just like is done for airports.
If the answer to arriving in LA is "you need to rent a car in any case" (which it often will be), then you lose one area of train potential advantage.
I avoid flying like the plague but I'll do it if morning meeting and can't go down night before.
That means I leave for the airport 75 minutes before my flight, fly for 1 hour, arrive in JFK/LGA/EWR, and then take about 30-40 minutes of public transit to my destination in Manhattan. And that's the ideal.
There's some break-even point for travelers between the more relaxed pace of train travel as opposed to the efficiency of air travel, but BOS - NYC is still within the realm of the train, even at Amtrak speeds.
Really?
Zaragoza to Barcelona does 310kph and very smoothly too. Much more comfortable than flying: https://dilemma-x.net/2014/03/14/high-speed-rail-in-spain-is...
I have no trouble imagining that the train can compete with flying between SF and LA. Even if the train has to stop in several backwater towns along the way.
The shuttle flights between SFO/SJC and LAX are completely unreliable. When I was doing the SF-LA haul regularly, I'd be delayed (delayed!) by 6+ hours at least once per month. That's longer than it takes to drive. Do you really think the high speed train will take that long to travel between LA and the Bay Area?
So what if the minimum time of the train is a little longer than a flight? The expected time enroute is still much less.
There are a whole host of additional problems that affect rail travel that you never have to think about with air-travel.
Currently, Amtrak OTA is 80% - so that means 1/5 of your trips will experience a delay of some sort.
If it were all controlled by the Government, like it is in other countries, nobody would need to have 'priority'. You just schedule the trains properly.
What qualifies as commuter rail? I think most of Amtrak's cross-country tracks would probably not be considered intercity or commuter lines.
The real issue is that often operationally, a passenger train has to stop for a freight train. If you have a 1000' siding that you have to have a 6 car passenger train pass a 30 car freight train at, the passenger train is going to have to stop for the freight train. That doesn't even take into consideration other factors like how freight dispatchers don't like to stop hazmat/"hot" trains for safety reasons.
The reality is:
1. if the siding is only 1km long - the Amtrak train is taking the siding as the freight train will not fit on it.
2. if the dispatcher decides the freight train goes ahead of Amtrak -- there is no lawyer around to argue the point.
3. if there is a long section of single tracking, with freight backed up the opposite direction, the dispatcher allows the all the same direction freights to move. ( 2+ hour delays when that happens )
4. If there is enough of a delay and a freight train crew in front goes outlaw - then that train stops until a replacement crew is brought in... which usually results in the Amtrak crew going outlaw as well.
It has gotten a lot, lot better and the scenery is beautiful - but please don't kid yourself about the realities on the ground. Amtrak has to stay in the good graces of the railroad companies especially with a hostile congress.
Of course OTA % doesn't account for the size of the miss and I've heard plenty of stories of long distance trains sitting for hours while multi-mile long freights go by.
Several times I've been on the Downeaster headed to Boston and gotten shunted onto sidings, to the point that we got an hour behind schedule.
I'm curious how that happened to you - I used to fly SFO-LAX from time to time, and was surprised that they didn't even really worry about me missing my flight - they just told me to catch the next one in line. United runs 27 flights daily from SFO to LAX, and presumably have some extra planes they can inject into the system if needed... (SFO is a United Hub)
That's just United. Southwest (and I'm pretty sure Jetblue and Virgin) has numerous flights to all airports in the greater LA area: https://www.southwest.com/thmpg/flights-from-SFO-to-LAX.html
Mostly a combination of needing to travel at particular times to particular airports.
The last two flights from SJC to LAX each evening seemed to be the most often delayed. You can't exactly hop on the next flight if it doesn't leave until the following morning.
Morning flights to SFO are often delayed due to weather, and fighting peninsula traffic to get to work sucks. BUR-SJC on Southwest would have been optimal from a flying perspective, but LAX was a shorter drive.
Especially if the train stops in "several backwater towns" (Fresno and Bakersfield ain't particularly glamorous, but I'd hardly call them "backwaters"; I digress...), this will automatically be more useful than just an ordinary flight between SFO and LAX for that reason alone.
In addition, the time required to travel from each airport to where you actually want to be can be much less, since train stations can be built much closer to major metropolitan areas. Plus, weather is far less of a problem; when the planes at SFO are grounded due to fog, the trains will still run on time.
For me, the line is effectively useless without Phase 2 (since that connects to Sacramento). With Phase 2 added, you'd have a high-speed connection to all four of California's major cities, significantly improving the already-pretty-great utility of the line.
Also, again: weather is still a major factor for any airport.
He would take such a train.
Another thing is that a one hour flight from SF to LA means, 30 minutes to airport, 30 minutes to get through gate, 15 minutes to board, 10 minutes on tarmac, an hour flight, 10-20 minutes for landing/deplaning, 15 minutes to ground transport.
So, two hours seems ballpark.
Trains typically don't have as much security and boarding is simplified. I'm thinking plane and train travel times door-to-door would be comparable.
Finally, train seats are usually much more comfortable than seats on domestic flights.
I think a substantial number of travelers would use the train instead of flying.
And people can't understand why large swaths of the population think well-off techies are out-of-touch.
Every Amtrak train I've been on (which, of course, is not the model of efficiency) takes on the order of two or three minutes for most intermediate station stops, if not less. The train stops, people leave, new passengers enter, and it starts rolling again. Stowing/gathering belongings, getting seated, lining up at the exits, and ticketing is all done while the train is in motion. It's not like having a flight layover.
Plus, we could see added environmental impact taxation for short-hop flights (carbon tax, if nothing else) that would raise airfare costs.
I'd wager a lot of people would take that. Once you factor in arriving at the airport an hour before your flight, along with the time taken to get to/from both airports to the actual centre of the city as opposed to where the airports actually are, 1.5 hours actually starts to sound like an improvement.
Germany uses 300km/h on some tracks. Here the view from a train at that speed overtaking cars on the Autobahn:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Js3XDTE5Iyg
China learned from it, here using a version of a German Siemens ICE train, Shanghai/Beijing in under five hours. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xvytUaRs2dU
France and Spain have those tracks in Europe.
The newer German tracks with 300km/h are operated at 300km/h with the ICE 3. Even through towns and tunnels. It's not the average speed, but a typical cruising speed on those tracks. France has more and longer high-speed tracks, thus the high-speed trains operate at higher average speed than in Germany.
Operating at 300km/h and beyond is indeed expensive. As are high-speed train in general. Still Western Europe now has an extensive amount of high-speed tracks:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/bf/High_Spe...
350 nowadays, that's the rating for the latest LGV Est although the current trainsets are only rated for 320.
The construction of the high-speed rail system is/will be heavily subsidized by the government. So presumably, the government will have a vested interest in keeping the train service running and will subsidize operating costs if airlines cut prices in that manner.
By which you mean taxpayers will subsidize operating costs.
I wonder exactly how regressive the wealth transfer from the average middle-class California taxpayer to the California weekly-commute bullet-train businessperson will be, in practice.
My big fear is that HSR will ultimately be subsidized by middle class Californians so business people and wealthy vacationers can travel between SF and LA at the expense of more regionally focused transit that has a greater impact on the lives of working/middle class people.
If you tried to charge passengers adequately to fund rail, the system would go into a death spiral, absent radical changes in consumer preferences.
Also if both rail and roads were funded only by users then rail would be the more attractive option.
Can you elaborate? This is the first time I've heard this claim – I'm curious about the details.
If we then start to take into account the other costs such as pollution, land wasted on parking and wider roads, the increased area of municipal services that have to be covered because of the much lower density require for cars, and the massively increased health costs associated with a car lifestyle and trains not only are more cost efficient than cars they're an order of magnitude more cost efficient.
Trains are wildly efficient, they only use energy to overcome air and rolling resistances as energy used to accelerate is put back into the system during deceleration. They can pack many more people with much higher throughput. For example Crossrail in London is designed to have 24 1500 person trains an hour on a single track.
> Cost per passenger per mile is cheaper by rail than by road. It is just much more efficient.
Is this still true if one also considers the infrastructure investments that need to be made, both in terms construction and maintenance?
Yeah, exactly.
> I wonder exactly how regressive the wealth transfer from the average middle-class California taxpayer to the California weekly-commute bullet-train businessperson will be, in practice.
Yeah. And a lot of the funding for the rail project is already coming from Federal and State coffers (via taxpayer money or deficit spending), so this wealth transfer is already happening. There's at least $6 billion already allocated from Federal funding programs (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_High-Speed_Rail#Fin...) and the Proposition 1A required Federal Funds matching the $9.95 billion approved by bonds (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Proposition_1A_(200...). I don't know if the $6 billion in stimulus money "counts" towards the $9.95 billion in matching funds, nor do I know if the funds have been fully matched.
Just as we subsidize operating costs for freeways, city streets, buses, subways, and virtually all other forms of transportation infrastructure.
London presently needs more runways and one of the serious proposals (now declined) was to build them in the Thames like the above.
It's bad enough having Heathrow where it is, with all the planes over London.
One good thing about the "Boris" island idea was that planes wouldn't have had to fly over London itself, which would have probably helped noise and pollution.
* more days when it would be fog bound
* interfere's with existing flight paths for AMS and BRU
* wrong side of London for most people
* ship full of high explosive not too far away
* higher likelihood of bird strikes as it's in the middle of area that's key for migratory birds
It currently serves as many passengers each year as the vastly larger Washington Dulles airport. It's quite the anomaly due to being in the capital. Despite many security and noise concerns, it all the Congress-folk love using it to get home, so it enjoys a great deal of political protection.
I don't think there's any hope of building new airports anywhere near city centers now. Some that already exist may hang on, but the security and noise concerns would easily NIMBY any new construction, not to mention the absurd expense of buying the land.
However, a lot of things could happen, which would derail these plans.
But it has a pricetag of $64 billion. How much more exactly are they going to enjoy it, in dollar terms? How much is it worth sticking taxpayers so that wealthy SF<->LA commuters can have a slightly more pleasant experience?
Their secondary mandate is crony capitalism.
Their tertiary mandate is to acclimatize the population to the trappings of the unconstitutional American police state.
Only the latter would be substantially aided by encroachment onto rail, so I'm not too worried about it for now.
Nationalization of the security function was the mechanism for the prospective portion of that relief; since they no longer controlled the function, they would no longer be liable for any failures.
Now, they would have preferred immunity from liability while controlling the function, but even their allies in Washington couldn't sell that open-ended a handout publicly. But TSA security theater made adequate political cover for the real purpose.
It doesn't take long to go through most of the time but then going through Pre-Check probably averages me 10 minutes. But I do leave a good buffer.
It's probably a bad idea to predicate travel time estimates on arriving at the train 3 minutes before it leaves and getting on.
Airports in California coastal cities are near max capacity. And expansion is either very expensive[1] or near impossible. And would face even more community objections than the high speed rail project. So the airlines likely wouldn't try to compete with high speed rail. Instead they would try to attract more national and international travelers. Paradoxically to high speed rail would increase the airports area of service. Because one could then take the train + cab to the airport rather than drive 100 miles or take a puddle jumper.
[1] I offhand remember, between 500 million to 2 billion _each_.
Right now most SFO-LAX flights are on nothing larger than a 737 or A320, and on LAX-SJC I seem to wind up on some abominable regional jet.
There's a lot of room to increase capacity by flying wide bodies if the demand exists. Compare to the SYD-MEL route, a similar distance, where you're likely to wind up on an A330 or 767.
It has long been an aviation joke that it is easy to make a small fortune running an airline...As long as you start with a large fortune.
For extra fun, realize that California had already begun about the same time as Japan to install more public transport, but the car companies moved muscle on them to stop it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_consp...
The high speed rail won't really help people already living in Silicon Valley except for the rare few who live near downtown San Jose and plan to work in SF (or vice versa).
And yet, they are the ones who will bear the inconvenience. The proposed plans I have seen will have the train elevated 60 ft in the air, it's about 70-80 ft total from my bedroom window and the train will travel 150 mph several times an hour at around 100 dB. Additionally, they will be narrowing a major road that is 2 lanes in each direction to 1 lane in each direction to make room for the train. Which is weird, because the Caltrain tracks are just another 30 feet away so not sure why they don't just build it above that.
There was some talk of a proposal to reimburse home owners due to the loss of value to their homes if this goes through. Based on the proposal I was looking at they showed a $100K to $200K loss of property value if the train goes through.
If I actually wanted to take the train, it would take me 20-45 minutes to get to the train station in San Jose even though I am already in San Jose.
I'm really disappointed in how impractical this is for the majority of people who live and work in SF bay area and the level of cost and inconvenience it will cause.
Perhaps they could provide some subsidy to help you soundproof the side of your house facing the tracks?
Also, it's 100 dB at what distance?
Simultaneously we'll become slightly less rural and more urban in terms of population concentration.
Even if the autonomous electric vehicle has a huge role to play in improving traffic in the US - which it clearly does - high speed rail (whether hyperloop-like, above ground, below ground, whatever) will still make sense alongside that. There is going to be plenty of demand to go around, such that having multiple approaches will be useful. Sometimes the autonomous car will make sense, sometimes rail will make sense.
Only in theory - current estimates are that by the time stops, noise abatement, track changes, etc have all been factored in, the CAHSR trains will average under 100MPh - closer to 80, which is easily achievable on i5 by a car.
If I'm leaving SF and will be in LA in 5-6 hours (door-to-door) with a minimum of driving [ADDED: with my own vehicle], how attractive is that train?
I do get the efficiency of train travel but if you're already skeptical that the numbers work...
They could even autonomously draft behind each other for maximum efficiency. Cars could be designed with high speed drafting aerodynamics in mind. With that, a line of cars might actually be more energy efficient than a high speed train running at typical occupancy levels, or at least competitive.
http://www.lafn.org/~dave/trans/energy/rail_vs_autoEE.html#s...
The big factors for the car-train are much smaller cross sectional area and the fact that it's always exactly as long as it needs to be, unlike the train which needs to run even when it's mostly empty.
I really love the high speed rail system in Japan and Europe but it's not cheap.
If you look at HsR in Europe and Japan, you notice that driving isn't heavily subsidized so it wins in a clear way.
But before you get too relaxed in that glorious possible future:
1) high speed trains exist and proven - no new science or engineering to figure out
2) autonomous cars are constrained by the realities of space to put the vehicles. Too many vehicles, autonomous or otherwise = congestion and slow travel.
3) At 6 hours, this is nearly twice as long as the train will be.
4) In the autonomous car, you will need to stop for food and bathroom break. The train does not need to stop. So your trip time is extended, especially true with kids.
5) At 3.5 hours, someone can leave for LA at 6am - get to a 10am meeting and return in time for dinner and bed. Not going to happen if each direction takes 5-6 hours.
There is a logic to that for a project of this magnitude that may take dozens of years to complete.
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2016-04-08/why-u-s-i...
[2] http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2013/06/how-much-bang-...
[3] https://pedestrianobservations.wordpress.com/2011/05/16/us-r...
[4] https://pedestrianobservations.wordpress.com/2013/06/03/comp...
[5] http://theweek.com/articles/449646/why-expensive-build-bridg...
The us rail infra was built when this wasn't an issue or could be solved by sending some heavies in or bribing the right people.
And it applies to urban rail where the right of way is entirely public just as much as high speed.
http://www.texascentral.com/alignment-maps/
They're partnering with Japan National Railways and planning on running the N700-I Bullet total system (the international version of the Tokaido Shinkansen).
[1] https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/planning/economic_development/studi...
That's a pretty common pattern (except for maybe China). HSR may be a nice option but it not infrequently costs more than flying.
That's most of the reason why you can't just show up at the gate of your airplane 5 minutes before they shut the doors.
Security is the only big difference. You gotta plan on it possibly taking 30 minutes.
The problems with all these projects are cost: Simple back of envelope calculations show it to be (a) dubious, or (b) possibly criminal (ie. standard taxpayer ripoff to cronies).
$64B - do the quick math on that. Figure a 30 year return on investment earning 4% per year:
$2.2B payback per year + operating cost of what? So somewhere around $7M per day in revenues minimum?
How many riders per day and what is average ticket price to make $7M per day?
I think you will suddenly find there are cheaper, faster, better options.
I agree that seems pretty dubious. Why on earth is infrastructure so expensive in the US?
Infrastructure always is, but in the USA it's worse than normal. Nobody is entirely sure why.
Imagine freedom, the innovation, the improvement in quality of life if we could hop on a train in the morning NYC and arrive in SF at night for ~$100. I found the trains so much more comfortable than even flying first class. Seeing the countryside fly by at 350km/hr is worth the price alone. Americans have no idea what they're missing.
http://www.beijingchina.net.cn/transportation/train/train-fr...
Imagine the improvement in quality of life if we could get on a supersonic airplane and be in NYC from SFO in two hours.
Today, as I go to whip that out as a counterexample, I see that Thalys would make a whole lot of sense vs. flying for me (though I don't know how door-to-door costs would compare).
The only time I take the train over flying in Europe is typically Avignon-Paris. Everywhere closer and it's faster to drive, anywhere further and it's faster to fly.
Long/slow trains create an impermeable partition in the area, causing huge disruptions to local transportation (even pedestrians). Train tracks are also dangerous, requiring extra supervision of children and claiming the lives of the suicidal/oblivious/reckless every now and then.
If I asked to build something which
- Makes a huge amount of noise as it passes through residential areas at night.
- Disrupts all pedestrian, bicycle, and automobile traffic while it passes.
- Has no hope of stopping for the hazards that can trivially enter its path.
- Will obliterate anything it hits, 100% of the time.
You'd look at me like I was crazy, unless you grew up viewing trains as just part of the landscape.
All the same, I think we should build more of them. But trains are much worse for externalizing costs than airplanes.
I've lived less than 50 m from one for quite a while, and cars on the road inbetween were worse than passing high-speed trains. Freight trains or old, slow trains were another thing.
What disturbs me slightly more are the planes.