Hacker News Reader

Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

The deeply ironic thing about California HSR is that it's basically going to be most useful for business travelers. Who the hell else needs to go from SF to LA on any regular basis? If you spent that money on regional rail instead, you might actually help out working class people.

In cities like New York, Philadelphia, and Chicago, tons of middle class people ride the train to/from what used to be streetcar suburbs. Caltrain/BART is a joke in comparison, and $68 billion would go a long way towards making that not the case.

View on HN

California HSR goes to San Francisco, Millbrae, San Jose, Gilroy, Merced, Madera, Fresno, Hanford, Bakersfield, Palmdale, Burbank, Los Angeles, and Anaheim. It provides frequent single-seat rides between every origin-destination pair of these cities. Many of these routes don't currently have any similar commercial air service (or the air service that does exist has very high fares due to low competition and scale), so HSR is providing new connectivity that didn't exist before.

The San Jose to Bakersfield segment is scheduled to begin operating in 2021. It will provide 1 hour travel time between Fresno and San Jose[1]. High speed rail isn't replacing regional rail -- it's providing it over a much longer distance than would otherwise be possible.

[1] http://www.mercurynews.com/2017/07/23/will-san-jose-to-fresn...

Regional rail facilitates regular trips between satellite cities and core cities, usually for commuting. Fares on Metro North/MARC/Metra/SEPTA are on the order of $5. On the California HSR, the fare from Fresno to San Francisco is estimated to be over $60. That puts it completely out of the ballpark of regional rail into Amtrak territory.

The stupid thing is that those business travelers won't use the rail line, they'll happily chug along in their self-driving Teslas and ultra comfy Audis/Mercedes/BMWs.

Toronto just dealt with this. We built a rail line that goes from our international airport right into the heart of the downtown. The plan was that business travelers could get off the plane, get on the train, and go right into the city without a car. Nobody uses it. They forgot about the comfort of the taxi and limo - you don't have to carry your luggage and you don't have to share the car and listen to screaming children.

Or not. That seems like an awfully large generalization based on one city whose airport rail service hasn't had much time to establish itself.

Counter examples: In London I'll take the Heathrow Express over the alternatives because it is a much more compelling option to get to downtown London. Recently in Johannesburg the airport rail took me to the airport in 14 minutes where as a car would take 90 minutes in commuter traffic. In Germany, I've seen people commute half way across the country every day on high-speed rail because it opened up opportunities to work that didn't exist before.

The Toronto line failed because it basically only catered to rich business travelers. By only having two stops — downtown and airport — it significantly constrained its TAM just to shave a few minutes off of its travel time.

There is a great write up of why it failed here: http://humantransit.org/2016/03/keys-to-great-airport-transi...

> Nobody uses it

The few times I've used it, the train was pretty full (with people standing). Maybe I got seriously lucky.

I think they meant the only people that use it are the screaming children.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com