What I learned today about SNCF and California HSR (2012) | Hacker News Reader

What I learned today about SNCF and California HSR (2012)

marketurbanism.com

36 pointsnawre36 comments

> Namely, they wanted to make a straight shot from LA to San Francisco by running along the flat, government-owned I-5 corridor with spurs out to the eastern Central Valley, whereas the California High Speed Rail Authority (CHSRA) and state politicians wanted the main line to go through every little town in the Central Valley, directly.

For Germans, this is nothing new. Local/regional politicians always want to have the ICE (Intercity Express, our version of high-speed rail) stop in their more or less tiny village.

The problem is almost always that the villages lack adequate rail connections to the next hub, and I imagine that this problem is even more expressed in the US, given the near total lack of passenger rail...

This is a classical example of American "worst of both worlds" governance. People in Bakersfield aren't going to take the HSR to LA, at least not in enough numbers to justify connecting Bakersfield to the HSR. It'd be better to just build a straight-shot HSR and take all the money you save and give a tax break to folks in Bakersfield, or something. But our political system isn't able to achieve that result.

How do European countries deal with it? It's not like Germany and France don't have rural areas versus urban areas (vast swaths of both countries are farmland).

Centralized government.

In Germany the ICE train mostly runs on existing routes, for newly build routes you have to make the trade off between connecting cities and travel time.

But not connecting a city of almost 400,000 people is odd, it should get a stop. I don't think the Deutsche Bahn oder SCNF would be allowed not connecting those cities in their home markets.

I know quite a few folks living out there in the central valley, they are very conservative. They hate the idea of costly train being built with their tax money.

That doesn't mean they wouldn't grow to like it eventually, but it wont help ridership in its early and fragile years.

It all depends on the service the train offers. If it helps people to get to LAX faster or any other destination to a reasonable price it will win.

Also if you build the route and avoid cities of almost half a million people you can't really fix this later without building a new route.

It is not just about infrastructure about also about access to the infrastructure.

I guess that would be a sensible argument except those people aren't exactly carrying the state on their backs. Santa Clara County has only twice the population of Fresno County, but it pays 15x more in state income taxes. State revenue in general depends almost wholly on the Bay Area, LA Basin and San Diego counties.

I'm betting in the summer they'll be happy to occasionally take the high speed rail into LA to go to the beach. Hour and a half each way.

Well, it will no doubt arrive at Union Station, which is at least another hour from the beach, sadly, due to traffic.

Never underestimate the ability of "very conservative" people, who hate tax-funded infrastructure, to nonetheless be heavy users of that infrastructure.

Remember, even Ayn Rand accepted payments from entitlement programs she hated.

It's not a question of liberal versus conservative. The main value of HSR is allowing people to rapidly move between city centers for business or pleasure. How often do people in Bakersfield need to go to LA or SF?

As someone else noted in this discussion, the train doesn't just stop in LA, Bakersfield, and San Francisco. Journeys between other cities on the route are also important.

If the HSR is fast enough, it might induce a long distance commuter community in bakersfield as it induces demand. So it's hard to say.

It's kind of like the joke that it's cheaper to live in vegas and fly every day to work in SF than to live in SF.

> How often do people in Bakersfield need to go to LA or SF?

When I lived I Fresno, people in my household needed to go to somewhere in the LA or SF area (mostly the latter) more frequently than we needed to go to LA when we lived in the SF Bay Area.

In France, we don't have direct TGV lines to every places, only major lines, see http://about-france.com/photos/tgv-route-map2.jpg (note that this is a couple years old now).

The rest of the network is covered by lower speed and maintenance TER lines (here for full network: https://www.bonjourlafrance.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/F...)

Those connect local/regional points and make sense on a regional level, then get connected to the TGV network for the national level.

"People in Bakersfield aren't going to take the HSR to LA, at least not in enough numbers to justify connecting Bakersfield"

This is a pretty vague and evidence-free claim!

Note that thousands of people commute from Bakersfield to LA daily: http://www.bakersfield.com/news/residents-go-to-and-drive-gr.... The commute from the central valley to San Jose is also very heavy.

"take all the money you save and give a tax break to folks in Bakersfield"

I'd like to see HSR critics back up their claims with the ridership forecast model and public benefit accounting that you'd need to compute this tax break.

It’s no rose garden over here either. The Lorraine TGV station is built in the middle of nowhere, halfway between Nancy and Metz, because both cities wanted a train station.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gare_de_Lorraine_TGV (short), https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gare_de_Lorraine_TGV (longer, in French)

For those interested, here is a rebuttal article, also from 2012: http://www.cahsrblog.com/2012/07/new-evidence-shows-flaws-in...

When the rebuttal letter literally says "I am aware that there was significant controversy over SNCF in 2010, emanating from their role in deporting French Jews to death camps during WW II", I suspect the reasoning is more political bickering than anything else.

Even if the company did literally support the Nazis during the French occupation over 70 years ago, that's no reason to boycott them now.

I had guessed this would work myself:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13632763

Note that neither I nor SMCF had suggested the cities on SR-99 would be excluded from the HSR service area, but that transportation "spurs" would be created at some point in the future to connect those towns to the HSR conveniently. This concurs with projected trip data (linked and discussed in above thread) suggesting that most trips from the CV cities end north of the Gilroy or south of Palmdale, i.e. Bakersfield to Fresno even with direct-to-city HSR has difficulty competing with the convenience of cars (which are going to get cheaper as battery technology improves). As such it's my opinion that HSR on the I-5 corridor would not really underserve those towns, although they would (correctly IMO) no longer be the first to get rail connectivity.

Does anyone know why using spurs (branch lines) is a bad thing?

For example, the BART runs a branch line to Dublin/Pleasanton (and possibly Livermore) but it's not part of the "trunk" to Richmond.

The route is branching, you have a route from LA to San Francisco but it is branching to Merced and later this branch gets extended to Sacramento.

It is always a trade-off, you'll never get the perfect route.

I also think that people get way too hung up on the SF to LA bit. Where the California HSR is about a lot more than just that. The SF -> LA -> San Diego part is actually mostly about freeing up airports to handle longer distance national and international traffic.

The central valley part is to tie the central valley cities to the each other and to the coastal cities. I think another part to is try to reduce future sprawl of the central valley cities. Much as people in Bakersfield and Fresno may hate that, it's the right thing to do going forward.

Other part that is totally ignored is that most of the riders will be commuters similar to BART. They won't go from SF to LA, but from SF to San Jose, or Morgan Hill to San Jose, etc.

It's interesting gossip, but someone talking about private financing in a meeting seems quite far from having a deal lined up?

If this project makes financial sense, ideally an existing railroad company would run it.

Berkshire Hathaway (as the owners of the BNSF railroad) is the only US-based company that has the capital and railroad experience to even consider it.

In this situation, I'm not sure how or why the California government would turn away any foreign company willing to do it.

The project can make sense for the State of California in ways that are impossible for private investors. For example, providing fast convenient transport to places people want to go generally increases the value of land. The state can benefit from this passively via its taxing authority while a private investor would have to purchase land outright with an enormous capital outlay (if it were possible at all). HSR is also a substitute good for short-haul air travel, which is typically provided with government subsidy (in the form of airports).

2012

HSR is a great example of what happens when a bunch of coastal elites look at the countryside ("flyover country") and assume it's empty and worthless so nobody will object if they run a bulldozer through it for a big government project.

On the contrary, California's Central Valley is one of the most vibrant and important areas of the state with property claims going back to the homesteading period. So shocking that these people aren't happy with a bunch of LA and SF people wanting to tear up their back yards for a boondoggle they will never use or care about.

The amount of land needed for HSR is much less than that needed to transport current and future population by either air or road. Just look a how much prime land SR-99 and of course many HSR opponents want to widen it.

Nice talking point. Locals actually use roads. They will never use this "bullet" train to go to cities hundreds of miles away from where they live and work.

Think how happy locals will be then that the people traveling farther aren't clogging up the roads.

IME (having grown up in Fresno) people from the valley travel to SF and LA areas quite a bit.

Can you explain what's "vibrant" about the central valley? Their economy certainly is not.

> HSR is a great example of what happens when a bunch of coastal elites look at the countryside ("flyover country") and assume it's empty and worthless so nobody will object if they run a bulldozer through it for a big government project.

If you look at the prop 1A results map, most of the counties (inland or coastal) it would serve with stations tsupported it, while most of the rest opposed it. Though coastal/inland split might explain the non-secret counties that supported it, and the smaller number of served counties that opposed.

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