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Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

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).

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"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.

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.

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)

Centralized government.

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