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Comment by niftich | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, the cognitive dissonance is only among the leadership of the project here. Big projects like this are chronically underbudgeted (or "optimistically budgeted"), and leadership always jumps through various mental hoops to attribute cost overruns to unforeseen factors, where more than half of the factors were easily foreseen by commentators.

That being said, I sympathize with the nigh-impossible pressures here: it's difficult to convince an entire, diverse state to contribute funds to a project that will take a long time to come to fruition, and whose benefits will be broad, but marginal, across a variety of metrics. So there's a pressure to deliver an ambitious project at prices that are scarcely realistic. Being able to lead this does invite a certain amount of cognitive dissonance; in the famous words of Upton Sinclair, "it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it".

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Do you think the people running it really didn’t know how much it would cost? Everyone involved lied about the cost because they knew it would never have been funded if they had been honest about it. Pretty much everyone involved from the voters to the contractors to the lawmakers that passed the budget knew that the numbers were a fantasy.

So far no evidence has been shown for these "broad" benefits.

Yeah exactly. Considering in many cases a plane ticket from SF to LA will cost less and get you there faster, the high speed rail project makes little sense

Trains are better than planes along several dimensions, if done right. "Why would I take the train when I could fly for the same price?" isn't a very good question. The answer is that (again, when done correctly):

- Trains are generally more comfortable

- Trains allow you to use your cell phone

- Trains can take you from city center to city center

- Trains don't have the same security requirements

- Trains are safer

- Trains are cheaper to operate (and so should actually be cheaper in the long run)

Planes are better over very long distances. But trains are better for regional travel.

I will defend the OP here, and say that LA-SF trains indeed make little sense, when perfectly good sunk-cost airports already exist that allow various airlines to compete over that route on price and features. Trains are more susceptible to disruptions along the route, because the route itself is more anchored to a particular geography, not to mention they cost a lot to build out to the satisfaction of being truly competitive with airlines if the infrastructure and level-of-service is lacking at this time (which it is).

However, where a train does make sense, is connecting other points along the route.

Air travel tends to be either hub-and-spoke between busy hubs and tiny spokes, or point-to-point between two busy points; rail travel, however, is always along a route that allows intermediate points to be served at similar levels-of-service as major destinations.

Whereas a Sacramento-Bakersfield journey would typically require at least one hop to SF or LA by air, train (and roads, for that matter) allow that journey to be taken without intervening hops, and serviced at a marginal cost, because the two lie along a route that a train would travel anyway. That ability to connect ancillary cities is where rail travel really shines, in ways that air travel can't currently mimic.

I can't argue with sunk costs and future constructions costs. You're right about those. I'm just relaying my experiences using Amtrak along the Northeast Corridor, which I find to be far superior to the equivalent air travel.

Are trains safer? I am not sure the statistics support that.

You are right. Sorry about that one.

There's little evidence to the final pricing yet, other than some speculation it will be between $85-$115, which are approximately what flights are.

BART faced all of these objections as well. It was also over budget. Are you against infrastructure projects in general? Do you think the bay area would be better off without BART, even with the cost overruns?

BART is one of the worst public transit projects in the western world... if you ask "would we have been better off with BART or something else?" the answer is probably something else.

BART has the highest farebox recovery ratio of any public transit system in the United States (excepting the very small, tourist-oriented Vegas monorail). It has among the best farebox recovery of any system in the world, with only a handful of systems (Tokyo, London, Osaka, Singapore, Taipei) higher.

It has seen massive ridership growth over the past decade.

What metrics are you using to claim it is one of the worst transit projects in the world?

Farebox recovery ratio is a shitty way of measuring public transit. Consider: do you rank highway projects by how much revenue they bring in (via tolls, if they exist, or gas taxes to pay for them)? Of course not--hell, most highway projects have negative recovery ratio.

Ridership per mile or transit modeshare is often a better way to rank transit systems. In terms of ridership per mile, BART is the worst of the major systems in the US and Canada. Admittedly, it's somewhat misleading since BART is kind of a mixed commuter rail/inner city subway system, but it is still far less than the other major mixed system (Washington Metro).

Ridership “per mile” is also a dumb way to measure transit systems. BART has a general geographically-mandatory ten track-miles of tube right in the middle of the system that bloats up the denominator.

It's not as bad as you think. It's measuring system length, not track-mile, so the Transbay Tube only comes out to 6 miles including approaches.

Also, it's a chokepoint: there's not a lot of alternatives to crossing the bay, so it should also be driving a much higher numerator as well. And it's not like other systems don't have geographic barriers--consider the crossings of the East River or Boston Harbor.

For the length of BART, taking out the Transbay Tube doesn't reduce track mileage by all that much, and consider that BART is ⅔ the ridership of the Washington Metro by mile. That's not a small gap. Maybe you could say it's slightly better than MARTA, but it's far from Philly or Chicago's performance, let alone NYC or international statistics.

BART is currently running at what could be considered its maximum theoretical capacity given conditions. What I mean is that the built environment provides only unidirectional flow of passengers: toward SF in the morning, way from SF in the evening.

With the addition of tracks to San Jose, this could change. We could start getting more flows of people where neither end is SF. That should boost ridership but of course they are adding a lot of miles.

This article covers the good and bad of BART pretty well.

https://www.mercurynews.com/2016/03/25/has-barts-cutting-edg...

The nonstandard track width may have had good intentions but I think was a mistake.

  BART has the highest farebox recovery ratio of any public transit system in the US

Source? This[0] one has it tied for 7th.

[0] http://www.wsdot.wa.gov/NR/rdonlyres/55CF12C9-9D4E-4762-A27A...

I suspect it's a lot worse now. Turnstile-jumping is rampant, and fare evasion has been decriminalized altogether for minors.

That's a >10 year old source. I was referencing this Wikipedia article, which is sourced from a 2015 FTA Study:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farebox_recovery_ratio

The cars are dirty and smelly. The upholstery you sit on is gross. Once in a while you will find human feces in the cars. Most BART stations do not even have restrooms, water fountains etc, so I hope you don't have any human needs.

The trains do not run often during the day. If you miss one, have fun waiting 20-40 minutes for the next one. They stop at midnight.

It takes a long time to get to your destination, and the destinations available are not a very large subset of where you actually want to go. Most of the time you will have to chain together another form of public transport on one or both ends, and the transfer time between different forms of transport is often long and pads out the length of a commute tremendously.

The stations and trains are unsafe, and people get attacked on them with some regularity.

On top of all these things, BART is very expensive!

I don't know how you could think BART was good unless you had never used any other comparable transport system.

Part of my leaving the bay is being unable to handle the idea of having to ride Bart again.

For most people the benefit of a train system is self evident.

I wish these funds were being spent on improving the speed and quality of travel within the largest urban areas in California: SF Bay Area and Los Angeles.

Broader reach and faster travel times within those urban areas would go much farther to improve the quality of life of Californians than this high speed train project in the middle of nowhere.

I would really like California to have a high speed travel network from north to south at some point in the future - but I just don't think it's the right priority at this time - as air travel is good enough for now - and most people have to commute within their urban area every day. How often do you need to commute between SF and Los Angeles?

Air travel serves SF and LA well but the central valley is underserved. They could be better served by the hsr. Not sure if that warrants the cost or not.

Yup, those airports in Stockton, Modesto, Scaramento, Fresno, and Bakersfield are just for show.

I'm assuming you are being sarcastic but the comments above were mostly about low cost southwest flights that are likely cheaper than the HSR tickets will be. Other than the subsidized flights to Merced from OAK the central valley airports are very expensive to fly in and out of.

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