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Comment by slapshot | Hacker News Reader

There is high speed transit from San Francisco to Los Angeles today. It's called Southwest Airlines. Tickets are $45 for SFO-LAX each way in February right now (less than the expected cost of the train ticket). Other pairs (OAK-BUR, SJC-BUR) are similar ($49-$57 each way).

Before you say that it's ridiculous, consider how else $64 billion (current official estimated total construction cost of the project -- not counting operating cost)[0] could be spent:

- Commercial air travel costs around $0.10 per passenger-mile if you buy in bulk[1]. That means $64 billion could buy 640 billion passenger-miles of air travel. If allocated to the 11 million people who live in Los Angeles and San Francisco counties, the state could buy each resident 58,000 air miles of travel -- equivalent to about 88 round-trips between LAX and SFO.

- If the LAX-SFO air corridor becomes too busy, that $64 billion could also be spent upgrading existing fleets by buying 147 brand new A380s at an average list price of $435 million each. [2]

- If the environmental impact is a concern (not that laying tracks and punching holes through the Central Valley is free of impact), then buy new Teslas instead. Lots of them. At $35,000 per Model 3, you could buy 1.8 million new Teslas using that money. Add some solar panels to each purchase and you could still buy more than a million -- more than enough for every San Franciscan to get a brand new Tesla.

[0] https://www.mercurynews.com/2017/01/13/confidential-report-c...

[1] http://www.opshots.net/2015/04/aircraft-operating-series-air...

[2] http://www.airbus.com/content/dam/corporate-topics/publicati...

(Edit: added citation for $64 billion official estimate)

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I do SFO to LAX, SNA, SAN weekly. It is not really fast and you are highlighting a special rate. Tickets easily go for $150 depending on the day, time, etc.

First, you have to deal with the security boondoggle. Add 30 minutes for that, because you never know what you are going to get.

Because of how SFO was built and the fact that they can't use both runways simultaneously with even a hint of bad weather, good luck leaving on time. Pad at least 30 minutes to your destination arrival time to be safe (but I've had plenty of early morning flights get delayed an hour or two waiting for fog to lift).

And then when you get into LAX… good luck getting out. Add an hour just to get out of the airport traffic. Unless you want to go north, you are better off flying into SNA… but tickets into SNA cost $175.

On a good day you can do it in 3 hours. On a bad day it's 6. The cost is $50-$200, and it's always a stressful and shitty experience.

I just recently took the Amtrak all the way down. I took 12 hours and cost $93 for a business class ticket. Yeah, it took forever. But it was really pleasant. It just takes forever. It be nice to have something in-between.

The other advantage of rail is that rail is generally less affected by weather. (which anyone that's sat at SFO or waited in the air or elsewhere on the ground for an SFO fog delay will appreciate)

Last time I was in Japan, a typhoon hit, and was working its way up the islands. My flight up to Tokyo was already cancelled due to high winds, but I was able to get a Shinkansen ticket and arrive in time to catch my flight before Narita was affected by the Typhoon.

The flight would have been 90 minutes (not including travel time to the airport), and the train was 5 hours, but still, it was a comfortable journey and I'd do it again. If I were traveling from downtown to downtown, the airplane time would be more like 4 hours (60 minutes to get to airport with padding to get to gate on time, 90 minute flight (scheduled time is over 2 hours, but usually the flight is around 90 minutes gate to gate), then at least 90 minutes to get off the plan and catch an express bus to Tokyo.

Rail is also more environmentally efficient, once the initial infrastructure is put in place. Airplanes burn tons of fossil fuels, trains can run on renewables.

All the trains I have been on in California burn diesel fuel, including the one I commute on every day. Caltrain down the peninsula burns 10 million dollars in fossil fuels a year. I would hope we could convert already heavily used rail corridors to electric sometime in my lifetime.

http://www.caltrain.com/Assets/__Agendas+and+Minutes/JPB/Boa...

It's in progress:

http://www.caltrain.com/projectsplans/CaltrainModernization/...

As long as you're still alive in 2022 (and there are no more funding issues caused by the tie-in to HSR), it will happen within your lifetime.

Should have happened a decade or more ago, but Caltrain is the underfunded stepchild with the bulk of transit dollars going to BART.

Of course, BARTs eBART expansion is diesel, not electric.

At least it's standard gauge rail, so that's a plus.

Caltrain is being electrified right now and due to be done in six years, and of course CA High Speed Rail is going to be electric.

Caltrain is currently in a project to convert to electric, as others have noted.

It's not particularly feasible in the US to convert freight-dominated lines to electric. Modern freight generally uses the double-stacked container as its loading gauge, and electric catenaries would sit several feet below the top of the double-stack container--the standard height for a bilevel in the US is 14.5 ft, but the double-stacked container runs to 20 ft.

Could they use a third rail system? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_rail

Not really. Freight lines are usually built at-grade and occasionally intersect city streets. Caltrain tracks included. Some of the Caltrain stations doesn't even have elevated platforms.

It would be... unpopular... to have an electrified third rail, at ground level, that you have to step directly over at a station or running directly through a city street. Somebody would surely trip on it or it could get touched by a little kid.

Third rail systems are usually only used when the tracks are physically inaccessible to passengers or other pedestrians.

Plenty of third rail in the south of England, they just stop the rail before level crossings and start it again afterwards.

If you think longer-term, electric trains are realistic. If batteries are cheaper than Diesel, you could just put 2x20ft container at the front with batteries. They can be swapped en-route and used as battery storage when not in use. As far as I know, most newer freight trains are diesel-electric anyway so not sure if you couldn't just feed the electric engine directly from a battery without buying new engines.

Currently not feasible because of high battery prices but realistic in 1-2 decades. And losses are lower than for electrified rail.

Busy routes are still better electrified but the huge US freight rail network would likely be cheaper to convert that way.

This picture shows a double stack container under electric catenary, so it's possible. The cost would be high for the length of tank involved. Electrification's non-green advantage is faster acceleration, which is easy to justify on busy passenger lines as you get faster journeys and potentially more trains, but not important for freight.

http://testplant.blogspot.dk/2013/09/electrification-clearan...

> The other advantage of rail is that rail is generally less affected by weather

That one does certainly depend on the amount of money the rail operator(s) invest in maintenance and upkeep, as well as how much area on the sides of the track they bought. In Germany, rail has three major issues with weather:

- during cold times, railroad switches freeze because they lack heatings and so they become stuck, and special maintenance teams have to be at standby across the country (source: was part of such a team for one season, well paid but shit that was cold)

- during storms, stuff gets blown onto the rail. Mostly dead trees, the problem is when the area next to the rails didn't get cleaned up (trees so high that they could fall into the rails are cut to a safe height or removed altogether). This can be caused either by a lack of upkeep - or because the surrounding area is not owned by the train operator

- during hot periods, the running gag in Germany is "how many trains will fuck up today?". The trains are either not properly maintained (due to a lack of funds) or simply have not been ordered with strong enough air conditioners.

tl;dr: getting rail immune from weather-related influences takes serious money. The Swiss and Japanese railroads did the proper investments and thus have next to zero weather related problems, the German railroads are seen as a cash cow ready to be milked by the politicians, consequences be damned.

Hey your problems are too serious, in France, each autumn, we'll get delays because of tree leaves on the tracks! (in addition to the cold/storm/hot problems) From what I understood, the leaves increase braking distances, so the trains have to be slowed.

> in France, each autumn, we'll get delays because of tree leaves on the tracks!

Yeah we get these too, but that's just delays, not the complete shutdown of the entire country's railroad system for sometimes days like last autumn after storm Xavier.

Quite true.

I think I was lucky since I avoided the worst of the latest storm. I just had a lot of delays on my first day of work this year: they had a tree fallen on the tracks, but they had managed to keep a few trains rolling.

That's a yearly issue in the Netherlands as well. They even have special sweeper cars.

As you say, rail systems aren't immune to weather.

But the German experience is that lack of funding is usually exaggerated as a reason. It's caused by many things, but mostly underappreciated is zoning, eminent domain (or lack thereof) as well as just basic technology.

The three main reasons for delays in Germany are:

1) suicides (up to two per day in the whole of Germany)

2) trees/branches falling on cables/tracks

3) train system overheating

Also rail is affected by

4) catastrophes that are happening next to the tracks: As rail tracks usually are next to industrial areas a burning industrial plant usually brings all train traffic to halt.

5) Germany being densely populated: Cars get stuck on crossings and trucks get stuck under rail bridges constantly.

6) forced interruptions, e.g. by people who steal power lines.

(4), (5) and (6) have nothing to do with rail funding. (1) Suicides are not caused by a lack of funding. (3) System collapses are caused by money restraints, but those trains were designed decades ago and the Bahn usually manages heating issues pretty well by shutting off single wagons.

On 2 (wood interrupting trains): A problem that would disappear if the Bahn could enforce a buffer zone around its tracks, where trees are to be cut off. But due to environmentalists, noise and zoning restrictions, the Bahn has to play gardener and spend millions on cutting trees each day.

> (4), (5) and (6) have nothing to do with rail funding.

Oh yes they do. There is a total lack of redundancy in the German network, which was only recently shown when that Rheintalbahn tunnel caved in during construction and took out the major traffic artery above for months.

1) Suicides: they can be prevented by walling off the tracks, which is thankfully done for the new high speed routes and as rework to existing routes. In addition to preventing suicides these also prevent wildlife accidents (a herd of sheep, for example, caused an ICE to derail in a tunnel once).

Ad 5) this could be solved by removing at-level crossings (and remotely supervising those which cannot be removed) and by reworking those bridges that get often hit by cars. This is a lack of funding.

Ad 6) walling off the tracks would help there too. Or providing enough rail service even at nighttimes...

Generally yes, weather is less of an impact on rail, but occasionally you can get <cue ominous music> the Wrong Type of Snow (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_wrong_type_of_snow)

> [Amtrak] was really pleasant. It just takes forever.

Absolutely -- IMHO for mid-distance (200 mi to 500 mi or so) trips, Amtrak is a really underrated option. I travel semi-often from Pittsburgh to NYC (450 mi) and choose train over flights because it's actually not that much slower (consider to/from airport, security, and (de)boarding, as you say) and it's much more comfortable: I can walk up and down the whole train, with no fasten-seatbelt sign to stop me; there's a cafe car; I have about 2 feet of legroom; there is reliable AC power and functional wifi. I just make it a work-from-train day and all's well.

Judging from the Japanese HSR experience, that's also the distance range at which HSR door-to-door is faster. SF to LA is juuuust outside of that distance range, sadly.

Including security theatre, a modern conventional HSR (320~350 max speed) is competitive up to ~1000km (~600 miles), possibly 1500 but that could be over-reaching. SF-LA is well within that range, it's a shorter distance than Paris - Marseilles which is a ~3:20 trip by rail (and not the most modern line in the country/world, and one with a few stops on the way).

That's assuming euro-style cities where you probably want to go from one urban center to an other though: plane requires going outside the city (to the airport) in advance due to security procedure, waiting for security and boarding, then at the destination going from airport to city center.

With HSRs, the stations are in or relatively close to city centers (usually easily accessible through public transportation), you can arrive 5mn (or less) before departure, delays may be somewhat less common (though the justification differs e.g. suicides on the track is not an issue for planes) and you arrive at the city center with better travel comfort. Especially for people sensitive to air pressure.

Fair, but you are forgetting that this is California, so even though we are beginning construction in the 21st century all of the technological gains will be put toward safety and environmentalism, not efficiency or speed; we won't get a "modern conventional HSR (320~350 max speed)". And the the HSR line is not going to be one with "few stops along the way", but with lots of stops, this is further compounded by the reality that in California city centers aren't nearly as easily accessible through public transportation as they are in Europe or Japan. LA was built around cars, and good luck getting anywhere in the valley or even the East Bay without a car.

I agree completely, the sweet spot is in that 200-500 mile range. Anything longer and I’m not sure why someone would bother unless they really like to take things easy. I’ve always felt that the ideal scenario is just getting trains to average 100mph (forget the 200+mph stuff, you’re not going to sustain that very long). Then it would make it a no-brainer to take a train for those mid-range trips.

Having just moved to PGH, I had wondered about the viability and comfort of riding the rails for a weekend trip to the Big Apple. This is encouraging news.

Yup, the Pennsylvanian is actually pretty nice. The route is the old Penn Railroad mainline and zigzags through some really scenic parts of the Appalachians!

The only downside is that it's on a once-per-day schedule (Pgh->NYC at 7:30am and NYC->Pgh at 10:50am). It's 8-9 hr downtown-to-downtown (vs. ~5-6 when flying) so you'd really want to do Fri/Mon for a weekend. FWIW, there are three or four Megabuses per day too, including an overnight bus in each direction, for when the train schedule doesn't work.

Also, flying to NYC from Pgh is oddly expensive, like $400 roundtrip expensive. Amtrak is about $150 RT if far enough in advance.

Anyway, welcome to Pittsburgh! I hope you're surviving the snow...

Another Pittsburgher here endorsing the Pennsylvanian! From PGH to NYP, it runs from 7:30 AM to 4:50 PM, which is a workday plus lunch and a nap. Really nice. It's longer than it should be; you take those turnpike tunnels for granted until you're in a train and you have to navigate the mountains.

If you want to spice it up, check out Southern Airways Express[0]. You can fly between Pittsburgh and Lancaster for as little as $30 on a tiny little 8-to-10-seat plane, which is a really unique and scenic experience. Catch a ride to the Lancaster Amtrak where there are a lot more options for getting to NYC.

I've done Megabus and Greyhound on return trips. You get what you pay for. But if you happen to live in the North Hills, the bus depot for Megabus is in Ohio Township and if you ask nicely they'll let you ride up there.

[0]: https://iflysouthern.com/

For either end of the Northeast Corridor I almost always take the train. It's far easier and more relaxing. About the only reason I don't is if I have an AM meeting and can't head down the night before or if I have something odd going on that requires me to drive.

Boston to DC doesn't really make sense though unless I've just decided to work on the train for the day so I don't need to deal with the airport (and probably pay more to do so).

Other than that, it's hard to justify train from Boston. I looked at it once to Chicago and it made utterly no sense either in terms of time or cost given that I'm going to get a sleeper on a trip like that.

> First, you have to deal with the security boondoggle. Add 30 minutes for that

In all fairness, how many incidents will it take before boarding a train means 30 minutes of security theater?

Apparently quite a few. I take West coast trains semi-frequently and have never had to wait for security. Officials we're in the station once.

In fairness, I believe there's no indication the TSA will appear anywhere but airports anytime soon.

As I recall, a few years back they tried to push their way into train stations but Amtrak put their foot down and set get out. That's a good call. Trains are on rails and the amount of damage you can really accomplish with one is quite limited. Plus, is it even feasible to reach the engineer's position on the front of a train from inside the passenger cars?

I mean, they managed it in Snowpiercer. Just gotta claw your way to the front car.

When BART got a connection to SFO the TSA started using that as an excuse to bust people for pot on BART.

That lasted like two days.

On a modern trainset (walk through coaches with power integrated along the train) its usually possible. There's probably a door, so the driver's doors can be used to escape in an emergency.

But I don't know about high speed trains. The first and last coaches are often first class, I'm not sure I've seen them on the inside.

That's a good point. What qualifies as modern in my experience is a good old classic Amtrak which is powered by a full size diesel-electric locomotive front & rear. I imagine there are ways to make it to the front, but I imagine they involve catwalks on the side of the locomotive.

But, much like I am not a lawyer, I am also not a train engineer. Or even a railfan. So I am probably completely wrong.

I do appreciate Amtrak keeping TSA out, in any case.

There are still locomotive-at-the-front trains in Europe, and on these I've never noticed being able to walk through to the locomotive from the carriages.

I have found the term for the more modern type: "Multiple Unit" [0]. Smaller motors are installed on many axles, the same as a metro train. It seems they're more reliable and cheaper to run (less wear on the track due to a better distribution of weight), but I agree with the noise issue — I prefer it when I travel on a locomotive-hauled train, since the interior is close to silent.

A site like [1] has a few train interior (and exterior) photos aimed at foreign tourists in Europe, rather than railfans. [2] will get boring quickly, but shows a European view of modern intercity trains.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_unit

[1] https://www.seat61.com/France.htm

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2-u1a2WswpI

You say that like there's a rational security analysis behind TSA's policies in airports.

But yeah, planes have a nasty habit of offering to amplify an attack of a certain magnitude by falling out of the sky and killing everyone on board, and potentially quite a few not on board. Trains just doesn't do that. The 7/7 attacks in London (bombs on three trains and a bus) resulted in probably an order of magnitude less loss of life than the same bombs on planes would have.

The thing about trains is, you can blow up a train anywhere.

Another thing about trains is, they only go on tracks, so you can't hijack them and fly them into famous buildings.

Also, since they only go on tracks, if you want to blow one up, you can do an attack on any piece of the rail infrastructure, rather than getting on the train.

We had a few train incidents in Europe and security hasn't been increased. They mostly handle that by more police at stations and in trains. The only train with heavy security is the Eurostar because it uses the Channel tunnel which is at higher risk.

Blowing up a train somewhere is not more dangerous than blowing up a car in the middle of a motorway.

We've got companies in the US who have some fancy security theater machines to sell.

Well, in France, it's the military that's deployed in the train station, since quite some time. And the number deployed has increased since the 2015 attacks.

> In all fairness, how many incidents will it take before boarding a train means 30 minutes of security theater?

If aircraft are any guide, until someone on the train drives a high-speed train off of a track into a skyscraper, national defense headquarters, and/or something similar causing massive non-passenger casualties and economic damages, it won't happen, even with lots of incidents, some of which result in complete loss of passengers.

> First, you have to deal with the security boondoggle. Add 30 minutes for that, because you never know what you are going to get.

You seem to be talking like the security theatre in airports is never going to come to rail? Have you ever been on the NY subway?

I take the train daily. I've only ever seen random cops walking around, setting up bag check tables in stations and infrequently armed swat guys on patrol. They never stop people and are more there as a show of force. The subway is no where near how awful the airports are.

Where are their bag check stations? I think I remember seeing this once or twice during Halloween and such by Times Square, but never in any other instance. Unless this is a new thing in that last year or so.

Usually in larger stations and it is really infrequent. It's usually a bunch of patrol cops with a plastic folding table and they set it up in the station outside the turnstiles. They'll "randomly" select people and check their bags. I've seen them in Queens (Roosevelt/74th) and other random stations.

Yes, I have. Literally hundreds of times. I lived in downtown Manhattan for a few years not too long ago (2010). Took the subway multiple times a day, every day. 1,2,3,4,5,6,A,C,R all the time. Metro-North to CT quite a bit one year as well. Never stopped or questioned. Saw some DHS uniforms maybe a dozen times over a period of 4 years? Maybe more, never paid attention as they just seemed to be minding their own business.

Have you ever been on the NYC subway? Has something changed recently?

In the 80s my dad had business with almost every county in California, and they each required annual or semi-annual visits. It didn't take him long to get sick of the airport dance and just start driving everywhere.

Time is money and 12 hours is a long time indeed. And trains experience delays too.

But I like the train when I have the time. I took Amtrak when I moved to California. And I've taken it up to Portland and Seattle, but flew back, as it's much faster and cheaper.

It's fun to sleep on the train in your own cabin. Just very expensive. And that is subsidized by the government to a degree.

I recommend looking into TSA PreCheck.

Noooo .. you want Global Entry, as that gets you TSA Pre as well.

Megabus, if you're not too cool for coach? Incredibly cheap (cheaper than gas), really pleasant ride, great views if you grab a seat in the top deck. 7-8 hours.

As comparison point in France, Paris to Marseille by high-speed train (TGV) takes 3h11 at the shortest, for a similar (should be ~10% longer) distance. And it's not the fastest commercially-operated train line AFAIK.

"and it's always a stressful and shitty experience" Many people overlook this. Because of this shitty experience, depending on your tolerance for shitty experiences, days of productivity is lost. If you are flying back on a Friday, your entire weekend is lost. If you are flying in for a business meeting on Monday, but for that 2-3 hour meeting, your entire day's productivity is lost. Frequent flying is a horribly stressful experience. No amount of luxury can make this palatable.

I like trains and agree with a lot you say here, but trying to be a devil's advocate... American cities are a lot more sparse than those in Europe/Japan, right?

e.g. if you're in Silicon Valley, won't you still need 1 hour to drive to SF? Even if there's a station in, like, Mountain View, isn't it still 30 minutes from places like San Jose? Once you arrive in LA, isn't likely that you'll need a car again from the station to your destination? And also for eating, commuting and other daily necessities?

Assuming 640 billion passenger-miles of air travel, the railway still makes rational sense.

Once the land is purchased, levelled, and conditioned you now have a space that can have trains running on it for the next fifty, one hundred, or more years. Look at the UK's railway lines, some of them have been operating for two hundred years and counting.

This type of short term thinking is why infrastructure spending in the US is at an all time low. Instead of spending for tens of years into the future, we only evaluate the costs relative to the next five years and therefore make decisions more valuable to tomorrow than next week.

Once CA buys this route, they own this route forever. And in a state gaining more and more people every day, cutting out land for infrastructure is only going to get more painful in time.

Well, even if you say that capital expenses are irrelevant considering the very long time frame, you still have to make the argument that operating expenses of the rail are smaller. What are they, and are they smaller than air travel (~$0.10/passenger-mile)? The only estimate of that I could find with two minutes of googling is ~$0.39/passenger-mile (via http://ti.org/antiplanner/?p=88 supposedly using the National Transit Database). That means that a rail line is even _worse_ in the long run.

> That means that a rail line is even _worse_ in the long run

Critical qualifier: in the United States. The British rail system, as I understand it, runs with significantly lower variable costs than e.g. Amtrak or BART.

Rail costs go down as traffic and network expand. Most of the US is under-served by rail, and California is pretty ridiculous too. I was shocked by how few stations Amtrak had when I last visited (about 7 years ago). Like for most things, if you invest, costs go down in the long term.

The cost for Amtrak and other commuter train services is inflated due to the fact that the rails are owned and/or preempted by commercial rail services. The whole point of California building out the line, directly from tax dollars, is to go around that. A dedicated line drops in price, is far more reliable and can be managed by text according to traffic.

I'm slightly unsure but I think CHSR runs next to freight rail lines for a fair amount in the central valley. And I think CHSR is also paying for part of CalTrain's grade separation and electrification. So benefits aren't exclusive to CHSR.

> Once the land is purchased, levelled, and conditioned you now have a space that can have trains running on it for the next fifty...or more years

Look at the route California's HSR takes [1]. That's a map drawn for short-term political gains, not long-term utility.

Unless we develop technology that cancels out inertia, that track is speed limited for much of its route. Comparing non-American infrastructure costs and benefits to American infrastructure is misguided because American infrastructure costs unreasonably more [2].

[1] http://www.ushsr.com/images/632_CA_HSR_Phasing_632.jpg

[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/nyregion/new-york-subway-...

> Comparing non-American infrastructure costs and benefits to American infrastructure is misguided because American infrastructure costs unreasonably more

Can you elaborate why you believe the comparison is misguided?

It costs more because it costs more is self evident, but doesn't suffice as an explanation in depth.

> It costs more because it costs more is self evident, but doesn't suffice as an explanation in depth

I linked to a New York Times article [1] that analyses the issue well. For a shorter, bloggier read try this CityLab piece [2].

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/nyregion/new-york-subway-...

[2] https://www.citylab.com/life/2014/04/7-reasons-us-infrastruc...

The Citylab article provides 7 Reasons U.S. Infrastructure Projects Cost Way More Than They Should.

That doesn't explain why you believe a non-US comparison is misguided, rather it supports the notion of a non-US comparison.

US infrastructure projects cost more because the US isn't Japan or Europe would be a neat summary.

> The Citylab article...doesn't explain why you believe a non-US comparison is misguided

So you skimmed one article and didn't read the other. Here:

"The Times observed construction on site in Paris, which is building a project similar to the Second Avenue subway at one-sixth the cost."

Most of the factors in the CityLab piece are uniquely American. We pay more for the same infrastructure. Something that makes economic sense for one country may not for America, just as a tractor may make sense for a farmer at $100,000 but not at $10 million. Our inflated costs throw out of whack the balance of costs and benefits that makes certain infrastructure value adding abroad.

TL; DR We can't automatically assume infrastructure that works abroad works here.

The question, again, is why is there such a big difference in the cost? What are taxpayers and consumers of this infrastructure getting in exchange for these higher costs? That is, what's the opportunity cost? Even if it's a cultural opportunity cost, knowing that is party of assessing if it's really worth it.

Not the OP. I imagine unions and insurance play a huge role.

I’m not interested in starting a union/anti-union fight. Please.

I find it hard to believe U.S. unions and insurance are more expensive than their equivalents in other countries, but maybe - seeing as health insurance is universal everywhere except in the U.S.

Did you read the New York Times link above?

The issue is in the absence of effective controls on corruption, it's in the self-interest of those holding the reigns to buy a $3 billion tunnel for $12 billion if the latter nets them $10 million in "campaign contributions"

> "The Times observed construction on site in Paris, which is building a project similar to the Second Avenue subway at one-sixth the cost."

I'm not taking issue with the fact that similar infrastructure projects have different costs in different countries, nor that there are reasons as to why this is.

I'm trying to understand why you think the comparison is misguided.

Only by way of comparison are we able to ascertain that the US is, probably, paying too much for infrastructure.

I mean, this whole conversation is predicated on the comparison.

It's not that the similar infrastructure can't work in the US; it's that for reasons-known similar infrastructure may be untenable. If the infrastructure was built anyway, say by an Act Of God, it would probably still function as expected.

Can you elaborate on why you think the route is drawn for "political gains"? I ask because the route makes sense to me geographically given that the initial useful core route is SJC/LAX.

Main use of HSR is going to be getting to and from peripheral cities. Fresno to SF and Bakersfield to LA in under an hour would be HUGE. That's going to get used more than the full SF to LA trip.

I'm not convinced the HSR is a good idea. But I actually suspect, if it turns out 50 years from now to have been, it's because it created a corridor through relatively undeveloped country (yes, there are significant cities but small relative to the endpoints) that could develop along a fast transportation link. Convenient (ADDED: somewhat) fast transit between SF and LA is almost beside the point.

Absolutely agree. Even just this first segment, from Fresno to the Bay Area, is going to be transformative.

While I obviously think cheaper and faster is better, connecting two of the worlds largest city economies with vacant land is a feature not a bug.

> Look at the route California's HSR takes [1]. That's a map drawn for short-term political gains, not long-term utility.

It did feel like this to me at the time (and was widely discussed as such) but having used the HSR Japan and Germany I reflected and realized they really helped the smaller cities to thrive. Tying Fresno and Bakersfield into the economies of LA and the Bay Area will be great for all concerned, relieving pressure on the megalopolises and expanding he economic opportunities of the Central Valley.

I second that. Having a <1 connection from smaller cities to SFO will make commuting from there a realistic option and could help to somewhat normalise prices in SF and Bay Area.

I had exactly this thought yesterday when thinking of my experience of China. The states are so disconnected exactly because there’s no rapid transportation that would also involve local centers. And don’t tell me about the country size, I’ve ridden large parts of transsiberian railway many times as a kid. Like 4 days on a train there and back again every year to see my grandparents.

Exactly. The comparison to non-US based projects is inadequate. California and other US states need to "earn the right" to spend this much money on one single monstrous project by proving it can handle smaller projects with 100% cost accuracy. BART extensions, LA Metro Rail and projects in the smaller cities should have near 1-to-1 precision in planning cost to implementation, before going after the big kahuna. Jerry Brown wanted to galvanize the population but instead it has bred cynicism state and nation-wide. Oh, and it will cost over $100 billion in taxpayer dollars before it's completed.

> The comparison to non-US based projects is inadequate

Can you explain why? For example comparing NYC's subway to Paris' subway. Why would one be more expensive than the other, since I don't think the base cost are that different

(I'm not from the US, I'm just trying to understand your point)

I think there are just a lot of intangibles so it's hard to compare mega projects, like the existing state of the subway where it is integrating into (like extensions), how many stations are being added, cost of labor, etc. I think comparing dozens of similar projects like the cost of replacing one street light, overpass or kilometer of highway from a non-US project, or even better within a single city in the same country, would be more informative.

looks like the map is drawn to go into various city centers, unless I am mistaken

> Look at the UK's railway lines, some of them have been operating for two hundred years and counting.

Good point. The government may not run all the trains[0], but the rail companies help with congestion and up-keep as well. And that is just the trains running on the National Rail, not including private rail lines.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_companies_operating_tr...

> Look at the UK's railway lines, some of them have been operating for two hundred years and counting

That could be the reason why flying is 4x cheaper than trains there.

No, the reason for that is that the semi-privatised model failed abysmally, compounding historical lag.

Most of Europe pays less for a superior experience. Reasons: Europeans literally rebuilt their networks from scratch post-WWII, and used the chance to electrify and modernise most of them - whereas Britain, that was bombed much less, just kept using very old lines (most of them are STILL not electric, in 2018, which is absurd). That's investment failure #1, driven by short-sightedness.

Then you have the privatisation shenanigans from the 90s onward. This is investment failure #2: in order to reduce running costs and avoid having to deal with running trains, every few years taxpayers end up paying huge one-off sums that basically offset any potential savings. In the rest of Europe, despite attempts at privatisation, the old state-funded companies still dominate, achieving economies of scale and efficiencies that private competitors will never be able to match.

Sorry to blow your rose-tinted bubble about public European rail companies, but they suck sometimes. In France, the push in the last decades for high-speed rail (called TGV) has left wide stretchs of the netword underfunded, there's a lot of short and mid-distance railway that are in terrible shape. Also we had train stations, starting point of long-distance trains in Paris, that had outage (as in no train arriving/leaving) lasting days this summer. Also not all the network is electrified, and never will be.

So maybe it would be worse with one or more private companies, but public companies are no silver bullet and will fail sometime.

I'm Italian, I know very well where the state-funded model can (and will) fail. But it's way, way superior to the UK rip-off experience. The fact that the UK basically doesn't actually make trains anymore (the few factories left are foreign-owned and don't really produce much anyway), unlike any other major EU country, is another clear symptom of a broken system.

Ok. I have nearly no experience with UK railways, so I can't say how bad they are.

Where did you get your info about train production? I would be interested how the figures vary from country to country.

You can have a look on Wikipedia, like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_locomotive_builders

But then there is some local knowledge to add, like the fact that pretty much all factories left are just tweakers for the internal market (narrow-gauging and so on), afaik the only one with significant production and occasional export is Bombardier in Derby - which got very close to shutting down around year 2000 and is basically run from Berlin anyway. Most European factories, despite some consolidation after the EU common market reached full gear, still pump out trains sold around the world - and then you have Japan and China that play on a different level.

Afaik the best trains in the UK are all bought from abroad at the moment. Things might change with the HS2 (high-speed) project that should be tendered out this year [1], but note how the main candidates are basically just reselling Japanese tech.

[1] http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-38684010

Yeah, I found similar information, but I was interested if you had more information, like where the trains are built, since a company can have its headquarter in one country and factories elsewhere.

You aren't saving those $.10 per mile, you're converting them to a different operating cost per mile, with fuel, maintenance, crew, and so on. Any well thought out cost benefit analysis says 64 billion is absolutely unreasonable.

You're right that short term thinking and underinvestment in infrastructure is a problem. But you have to choose your projects intelligently: things like revamping BART and New York's MTA, and taking better care of the most-used roads and bridges are far far better uses of public money.

Part of the reason we underinvest in infrastructure is that people see these pointless multi-billion-dollar boondoggles and cry out their money is being wasted. If you really want more spending on infrastructure, give up on your dream projects and spend on things that will actually make a big difference in people's lives.

> Any well thought out cost benefit analysis says 64 billion is absolutely unreasonable.

This desperately needs the support of at least one such “well thought out” cost/benefit analysis.

Yes, this so-called high-speed transit requires going to the airport 2 hours early, going through onerous security and checkin processes, plus 30-40 minute board times, airport runway/taxi delays, delays at the destination, deboarding, getting luggage, and getting from the airport to the destination.

Mythbusters already tried this experiment, and they were able drive from SF to LA door to door in the same time it took to fly, end to end, 5 - 6 hrs.

If you've ever traveled between cities in France or Japan on high speed rail you know its infinitely better than an airport. I can arrive at an Shinkansen 5 minutes before departure, travel a similar distance between SF->LA in 2.5hrs or less, in a super comfortable train, that I'm free to walk around it. At my destination, getting to/from the high speed rail is also super-convenient, hassle free, doesn't require driving, and overall, is cheap.

Short distance air travel is majorly annoying no matter the cost. I hate the airport in/out experience.

> At my destination, getting to/from the high speed rail is also super-convenient, hassle free, doesn't require driving, and overall, is cheap.

This doesn't make a lot of sense in LA; you're going to a need a car wherever you end up -- it's huge sprawl; and most people aren't visiting to go to downtown LA, so they probably need a car. Can I rent a car at Union Station? Maybe (if I get there before 5pm), but do they have room to accommodate a larger facility needed if the volume increases? I can rent one at LAX, LGB, SNA, BUR, or any of the other LA area airports I forgot about.

> This doesn't make a lot of sense in LA; you're going to a need a car wherever you end up

If only someone had thought to include regional transit improvements alongside and coordinated with HSR.

Oh, wait, wait, they did.

Sure, if the HSR project ends up doing just regional transit improvements, and don't end up actually building the HSR, that's probably a better use of money.

I expect HSR money is going to get Caltrain grade separation and electrification done, which seemed like it would take 30-50 years otherwise, even though it was planned to finish in 10 years for the last 20 years.

From what happened in France, funding for high-speed rail usually means that maintenance get slashed for the rest of the network.

2:40 minute head time at your departure city? No way.

I typically show up roughly 60-45 minutes prior to flight time, so 15-30 minutes before boarding. By the time I get through security the plane is typically just starting to board and I walk right on.

I have gotten my door to door times between MSP and ORD to just over (sometimes under if I get lucky on train to city) 3 hours including a 20 minute Uber on one end and a 40 minute train ride into the city on the other. Pretty similar distances involved. That's basically 2 hours from dropoff and pickup at the airports for an hour flight.

> going through onerous security

I imagine that in the US, this will be much the same. Or will be the moment after the first attack on a train. I don't see any long-term security gains here, the US is simply not Europe.

Not that I think air travel is a decent replacement for high speed rail though, it's not. The security and time delays related to that I simply think are a long-term red herring within the US. Mostly because I remember air travel prior to 9/11.

I also think comparing a single high speed rail line built in isolation to Europe or Japan isn't all that great of a comparison. In Japan or Europe I arrive in a train terminal and transfer to the local rapid transit that pretty much covers every city and every neighborhood I'd ever want to go to in a reasonable manner. The US... doesn't.

> I imagine that in the US, this will be much the same. Or will be the moment after the first attack on a train. I don't see any long-term security gains here, the US is simply not Europe.

Even in Israel you don't have that kind of security check before boarding a train.

Now that I have Global Entry which also gives you TSA Pre security is a snap. I don't get to the airport 2 hours before, usually 15 to 20 minutes before we board if I am flying at a non-peak time. No taking off the shoes and no taking laptops out. Simple metal detector and that is it.

20 minutes before boarding is 50 minutes before the plane leaves the gate and 60-80 min before take-off. You can stretch it and arrive 5 min before boarding but that's a very risky strategy, even with TSA Pre.

Two other super convenient things about Shinkansen:

- You always know how much the ticket will cost, no matter if you buy it the same day.

- If you had a reserved seat but you missed your train, just take the next one and go to the free seat area. Also, if you didn't have reserved seat and the free seat area is full, wait 15 minutes and take the next train.

(And yes, you can fly Tokyo - Osaka for cheaper than a Shinkansen ride, but the convenience of the Shinkansen is really higher than any flight.)

That and I'd add the following:

- While it's completely acceptable to eat fermented fish out of a bento box using your phone to make calls is a comlete no!no!

That leads to a very quiet, peaceful and smooth train experience.

Also, if you visit Japan as a foreigner look at JR Rail Pass. A three week pass for the green car (1st class) will cost ~80'000 yen ($720) and is a comperative bargain if you make use of it.

For example: Tokyo to Sapporo [which is Shinkansen to Hakodate only] and back is more than 92K.

> Also, if you visit Japan as a foreigner look at JR Rail Pass. A three week pass for the green car (1st class) will cost ~80'000 yen ($720) and is a comperative bargain if you make use of it.

OMG I regret so much that I didn't take advantage of that when I was on a tourist visa... :'/

To be fair distances in France make air travel a less interesting proposition than in the US.

What you’re leaving out is CO2. California is committed to reducing CO2, but emissions from transportation are the largest component of state emissions, and they are growing. Air travel cannot be done except by burning hydrocarbon fuels. Train travel, while still energy-intensive at high speeds, can be powered by any electric source. Therefore rail, and not air, has the capability to cut the state’s CO2 emissions.

They are working on electric powered jets kind of like the Chevy Volt. That may reduce the CO2 burden.

until battery power/weight ratio gets 10x better electric flying vehicles (specifically passenger jets) are dead in the water.

I don't know that we're making the right trade from atmospheric pollution co2 vs the pollution of throwing away batteries.

This is one of my biggest gripes about the tech community. We can't wait for tech that may or may not come to fruition when we have working solutions now. Don't let great be the enemy of the good.

They who? I work in aerospace and while I have heard many proposals (most 20-40 years from commercial production) for improving efficiency, including hybrid electric systems, I have never once seen anyone propose an electric commercial passenger aircraft.

As a rule of thumb high speed rail is 1/10 the CO2 of flying. However, I wonder what the carbon footprint of creating the tracks is?

The track can be used for 1-2 centuries (as they have been in Europe). That includes many refurbishments and replacement of steel but much of the construction cost will be low per passenger.

Older tracks can't be used for high speed trains. In France, all the new high-speed lines are constructed for this usage (lot of straight lines). On older lines, an high-speed train will be at the same speed as a normal commuter train.

He didn’t say they could. But tracks built today can be used forever, because wheel-on-rail technology has a hard limit at Mach 0.5 and we’ll never have faster trains than we have today.

You're not answering the question of how people from Fresno can easily get to SF or LA.

Traveling from city center to city center is also a far less stressful way to travel, and you can do things like work on a train that make TAXI -> AIRPORT LINES -> TERMINAL WAITING -> PLANE -> BAGGAGE CLAIM -> TAXI annoying.

The people of Fresno are simply not numerous enough to justify a major infrastructure project to get them to SF and LA.

Not yet.

But if you built a major infrastructure that could make SF or LA a morning commute, it'd sure do some interesting things to population distributions and land prices.

This. Take a look at the Rhine Ruhr region and you'll see a vibrant place with high standards of living where you don't need to sell a kidney to buy a house.

This is what the folks behind the HSR are banking on, and also why I voted for it

Which explains why after almost two decades of Acela, Wilmington is booming!

There are 7 million people who live in the Central Valley who do not have adequate and affordable air travel, the population centers of the stops Fresno, Merced, Kings/Tulare are justified, even more, if you account how much cheaper it would be for people to commute to urban areas, and how many people can move to these cheaper areas to live.

The demand between SF and LA is simply not big enough either. Luckily there are 27 planned stations on the line allowing for 351 possible origin/destination pairs, which added up accounts for way more demand than SF-LA.

That's exactly what's ruining the entire effort. 27 stops turn this high speed train into a slog. 27 multi-minute waiting periods for boarding. 27 times decelerating and accelerating. When exactly is this high speed train gonna go full speed?

This is what we are competing with: http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-KM7B_auaBgE/UNr_iYv1v-I/AAAAAAAAAY... This is unlikely to get us there: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/ca/Fresno_C...

And yet every successful high speed rail system out there has stops in small towns and cities, many of which are much smaller than Fresno or even Merced...like Verdun, Atami, or Montereau. They're successful because of these stops, not in spite of them.

The market size for SF to LA and back is not large enough to justify rail with no stops. Its not even close, even assuming monopolistic market shares. And airlines have shown extreme willingness to compete with rail on price grounds, and they could take half that market easily even with trains going top speed.

Sorry if that burns your dreams of fast rail to the ground, but it is objectively the most financially responsible way to build. It can actually pay for itself that way, whereas it would be America's biggest boondoggle if they took your advice.

Look at this, and click "stops/details" on a few.

https://traintimes.org.uk/KGX/EDB

These are high speed trains, but Britain hasn't upgraded the tracks, so they run at less than full speed. But the door design and number of passengers is what matters for the duration of a stop at a station, and as you can see, it's around 1-3 minutes.

It's certainly a factor, but it's not like the long distance Amtrack train I once used, which stopped for 5-15 minutes at most stops.

Every train doesn't have to stop at all 27 stops. You can run a super-express that stops at 5 stops every 30 minutes, an express that stops at 10 stops every hour and a regular service that stops at every station every 2 hours. The schedule is constructed in such a way that the faster train passes the slower one while it's stopped at a station.

Shinkansen between Tokyo and Osaka is the busiest rail line in the world and there are a lot of stations between these two cities. The fastest train, Nozomi only has 6 stops and runs every 15 minutes.

>At $35,000 per Model 3, you could buy 1.8 million new Teslas using that money. Add some solar panels to each purchase and you could still buy more than a million -- more than enough for every San Franciscan to get a brand new Tesla.

Which would be useless without the billions spent in maintenance every year for the roads and other maintenance. Its such a silly argument. If you include the full cost of airport construction it wouldn't be so pretty either. Having heterogeneous forms of transit is an intrinsic benefit as each are better under certain weather conditions and use cases.

You are comparing operating costs of air travel to capital costs of rail travel - you need far beyond airplanes. The trains themselves are not that expensive, after all.

You need to consider capital investment required for that air travel: How much does it cost to build the airports, repair centers, specialized land equipment, etc. to enable 640 billion passenger miles, and buy all the land required? Then you need to add airplane purchase costs - that's not optional either; before you even get to operating costs.

You need to of course include airports for each city on the trains' route. The train goes through a massive population corridor across dozens of towns and cities, not just SF and LA. What's the capital cost of connecting these people to air travel?

Including time to get to the airport and through security, flying LAX -> SFO is not high speed :/

Going through the Central Valley and stopping in Fresno, Madera, Kings-Tulare, Bakersfield... (etc) to get to Los Angeles is not faster either. Buy a fully autonomous car and go point-to-point faster/cheaper/better.

The train will stop at SFO and BUR -- if the train's last-mile delivery is better then we should focus on that last-mile rather than the stretch in the middle that is already well-solved.

This is peak Hacker News: "Don't buy a $50 train ticket - buy a not-actually-invented yet probably $120,000 car instead".

The high-speed rail project is a shit show, but more cars is not the answer either.

More cars, or at least more car trips,—independent of whether they need drivers or what kind of powerplant they have—is, in fact, exactly the problem at which HSR is directed.

Almost no one will buy autonomous cars. You will just hail one for less than the cost of gas.

Only rich people and people in and out of a car all day (full time parents, car-based workers, etc) will buy them.

You will just hail one for less than the cost of gas.

If the cost of the ride is less than the cost of gas, how is the operator making a profit? Especially since they have to cover more than just the cost of gas.

(an Uber-style "use VC money to subsidize below-cost services" model is not sustainable in the long term, by the way)

I think the point is that they’ll be electric.

In addition to closeparen's point that such autonomous cars will be electric, they will also have much lower mantenance costs due to the lower internal complexity of doing away with the ICE.

This is self evidently true because incredibly complex software implementations that interact with the real world have no maintainance requirements.

... hoping sarcasm. But you never know on here...

And every family and anyone who likes having a car. I'd expect not more than 10-20% to stop buying cars. Having your own car is about more than just access to transportation.

Some trains will run sf-sj-la without further stops. Those will be far faster than air if you are traveling between city centers.

Not really. The platform-to-platform time from LA to SF is going to be, at best, a little less than three hours. That's comparable to the time it takes to fly from LAX to SFO plus the ~30 minute BART ride to downtown SF.

LA is so spread out that departing from LAX or Union Station doesn't make a big difference. Most people are going to have to fight traffic to get to either location.

It is only two tracks. How can they run express services at the same time as stopping services?

Having an extra track at the station and timing so that they pass while the other train stops. You don't have services every 5 minutes so that works quite well usually. Worst case the express train has to go a bit slower before but they tend not to go at maximum speed so can catch up again later.

> Buy a fully autonomous car

Make sure you put a winged pony on the shopping list too. They're a great fashionable match any time you're making fantasies of acquiring things that don't exist.

At least one of those is far closer to reality than the other.

While that's true, the less flippant question is whether fully autonomous cars -- where "fully autonomous" is defined as being able to climb in one, kick back and do your work with no concern the way you conceivably could on a train -- will (a) exist, (b) be road-legal, (c) be widely available, and (d) be generally affordable within a timeframe that makes a high-speed rail line moot. I don't think that's remotely a given.

We're going to have autonomous cars that can drive SF-LA long before we have high-speed rail. Self-driving cars from the big players are planned for the 2020-2021 model years.

I have this weird feeling that before we have many of them in mass production, we'll have a single car that fits this description.

Travel time to/from the station only matters if you're closer to the rail station than the airport. As for time to fly, I've made the trip between various airports (SFO, OAK, SMF) and LAX via Southwest many times. I try to arrive about 45 minutes prior to take off and so the whole trip takes about 2 hours. Even adding time to wait for a checked bag would probably still be faster than the high speed train.

Keep in mind airline miles. I take the shuttle out of LGA to D.C. over the Amtrak. The shuttle is cheaper and I get the comfort of earning miles.

I've already invested into making flying comfortable. Lounge-access credit cards, Global Entry (which grants TSA Pre-check), upgrade-giving status, et cetera. I'd need trip time or cost cut in half relative to air travel to make switching worth it.

I'm not the median consumer. But weighted by likely usage, I'm closer to the average.

I optimize miles too but, for short distances, it's mostly not worth it. For Boston to NY I essentially always take the train which is more comfortable if not necessarily faster. And Amtrak points are probably actually more useful for me in general than airline points. I'd get 500 points on United and use of the lounge but, really, that's not worth a whole lot. Amtrak is already basically as comfortable as an airline upgrade--which is hard to get on a weekday peak travel slot.

> Keep in mind airline miles. I take the shuttle out of LGA to D.C. over the Amtrak.

Anecdotally: people where I work do a lot of traveling between our NYC and DC offices. Only one person flies rather than taking Amtrak...

I did a bunch of trips recently. Flying is usually faster and cheaper, but more likely to go awry. Taxis to airports can vary widely in speed and cost. Flights can be delayed, security lines, etc.

Train is easy, consistent and comfortable. Always power, Wi-Fi and cell signal too.

> Train is easy, consistent and comfortable

Fair enough. I'm an infrequent NYC-DC commuter. And my preferred mode to JFK from the city is via the LIRR, a rail route. It takes longer, most of the time, but less time on average. Most importantly: it's consistent.

Of course it's all just going to depend on your situation:

* How often you travel

* How much you will be able to take advantage of perks

* How close you are to various terminals/airports

* How far you regularly need to go

* How you like to travel (fast & cramped, slow & spacious)

etc.

At least at the San Francisco end, the terminus is in the heart of downtown San Francisco near a bunch of major transi tlines. SFO is 45+ minutes away via BART (OAK is a little closer, SJC is way further away). SFO via car is going to be highly variable, less than 45 minutes best case, but worse in traffic.

Additionally there's the problem of airport expansion. There aren't a lot of palatable options as filling in the bay is (rightfully) a non-starter for most people. High speed rail wouldn't replace air travel but it would complement it (especially with the related regional improvements like electrifying Caltrain).

Yeah I see no problem with more choices if they make sense. My reply was in refutation to the point that flying is not faster than high speed rail because of time needed at airport, which is not my experience. Since travel time to/from the station/airport depends on the situation, it doesn't make sense to include it in a general statement (to which I was replying).

For the train you also need to include the time to get to LA's union station. So the main difference ends up being TSA time.

Excepting travel time and security time, is the airline imposition of arriving anywhere from 45 to 1.5 hours before departure or you can't check a bag. And all the airlines recommend arrival 1-2 hours before a flight. This is to account for myriad unknown factors that apply to airline travel that don't apply to trains.

If you live in SFO and have a business meeting in LA (or vice versa), you'll only need the trip on one side. Few people will need to travel in both cities.

Union Station is or will by a direct subway ride away from a lot of dense pockets in Los Angeles (Red, Purple & Blue lines when the regional connector opens). Yes, the train will come to LAX as well, but transfer will be less convenient and likely less direct than from Union Station.

From the time an Uber drops me off at SFO to the time I get through security is probably all of 10-15 minutes.

The secret? TSA precheck and the Global Entry program.

And, I'm going to guess, not having children.

Children can be enrolled in the program as well.

Also I do not check in any luggage.

But you are giving up their fingerprints to the government. That's one thing that really bugs me about those programs. I want to remind everyone of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandon_Mayfield. They arrested him because some of his fingerprints slightly matched. The FBI claimed they exactly matched. Quoting from the wikipedia article

"His prints were ... taken ... when he joined the military. He became the prime suspect because of his conversion to Islam and because he had represented one of the Portland Seven...

The FBI described the fingerprint match as "100% verified". According to the court documents in judge Ann Aiken's decision, this information was largely "fabricated and concocted by the FBI and DOJ".

This is why I'm reluctant to give the govt. my fingerprints, but my friends think I'm overreacting.

In no way is that remotely acceptable, but the dude got $2 million. The government making a habit of that behavior would get expensive quickly.

Are you kidding, that’s your defense?

$2M in taxpayer money is nothing to them. Just like the expense of incarceration didn’t bring down jail terms for minor offenses. Or settlements for police brutality haven’t affected that one iota either.

If they did that to ten thousand US citizens (.0031 percent chance of being messed with), a 2 million dollar settlement would cost them $20bn. Affordable, but certainly not a rounding error line item.

The officers working on the case do not decide about the govt budget. I'm not even sure if the government tracks expenses from those cases and would know how to react if the costs escalate.

Have child, just got Pre Check. Kids under 12 don't need their own known traveler number. Pack light, gate check the car seat, and you're pretty close to the parent post's timing. Even if you have to check luggage, Southwest's check-in lines are short more often than not.

I would assume that adding children to the mix also increases your time to prepare and get to and from some future HSR train station as well, so it's probably a wash.

I would assume that the vast majority of train passengers between LA and SF would also not be children.

How many minutes before the flight do you usually arrive to the airport? If not 15, why?

30 minutes before boarding they no longer allow you to print a boarding pass (so you’d better be checked in and have it on your phone). I learned this the hard way when I arrived 20 minutes before a flight. However, it’s no big deal really, I caught the next flight an hour or so later since they are obligated to book you the next available flight.

I try to be there about 30 minutes before the flight now, but with boarding pass ready on my phone. The only reason I give 30 minutes is in case of traffic or if I want to grab a quick bite. If I could guarantee my arrival time at the airport it would be even less.

The real secret is not flying United out of SFO. I typically make it through security in Terminal 2 (Virgin / AA / Alaska) in about 10 minutes. Not much longer with the international terminal.

I can usually get door-to-door in 3-3.75 hours flying SFO->LAX, depending on my destination in LA. That's good enough for me.

That's ~100MPH which is basically highway speeds in many areas. http://www.cnn.com/2013/10/31/us/new-york-los-angeles-cannon... While illegal they averaged 98 MPH coast to coast.

Granted this rail project does not really allow for high speed either, but it's still going to be reasonable.

A super-illegal drive isn't really useful for comparison. With moderate traffic you'd be lucky to average 60mph for the entire trip from SF to LA.

Regardless, I'm not talking about what's ideal or perfect; even if HSR could get me there in 2-3 hours, that's not a meaningful enough improvement over 3-3.75 hours to justify a $64B+ price tag in my book.

I am not sure how the price tag is relevant to you personally. If you build an effective network of High speed rail it ends up cheaper per trip which over time means the effective cost is ~0$.

I doubt they are going to succeed, but in other areas it has worked.

I regularly drive ~120mph+ in the empty expanses of Spain and elsewhere that isn’t America, and even I can’t average 100mph in that route in California.

Averaging 100mph is unrealistic for I-5 most of the time. You'll get stuck behind cars doing 80 in the left lane while semis sit in the right, and that can last for miles and miles. I think things were faster in 2010-11, when the economy was slower, but I only drove it twice then -- even then, 90mph was more realistic.

Which is fine I guess? If I'm going above the speed limit I have no issues staying on the left lane if I continue passing other cars. I don't have to always make space for someone 30+mph above the limit (both legally and morally).

If you're only going 10 over just like everybody else you belong in the right lane.

Sure, on current infrastructure 100MPH is unrealistic in that area, but if they added more roads so you could do 100MPH nobody would call it high speed transit.

Honestly if they added a third lane to I-5, that would be good enough. At least from Grapevine to 152.

That's rather striking considering that the "flight" itself is, what, 50 minutes?

SFO to LAX is 85-100 minutes, depending on airline and equipment.

For me it's ~20 mins driving SF to SFO, ~10 mins for TSA junk and walking to the gate, ~30 mins for waiting and boarding, then the 90 minute flight, ~15 minutes for deplaning, walking, and getting a ride, and then then anywhere from 15-60 minutes depending on where I'm going.

travelmath.com says 55 minutes.

Actual flight schedules published by airlines say 85-100. My actual experience flying that route agrees. Taxiing to and from the gate and waiting in the queue to take off may not be included in travelmath's calculations, but that's real actual time you have to spend.

Is the term "flight itself", meaning wheels up to wheels down, somehow unclear?

Along with getting there early enough to be sure that your flight isn't overbooked.

The SF Gate tried a plane versus car trip in 2001 and the driver won substantially – and that’s only gotten worse with the post-9/11 security theater and both airline and airport budget tightening pushing the whole system closer into the safety margins:

http://www.sfgate.com/news/article/The-Great-Race-car-vs-pla...

You're leaving out some costs.

More airplanes doesn't increase capacity to the extent it's limited by airports. You'll need to add expanding the airports and maybe building new ones. Also, what about the stations between SF and LA?

Or, if you use cars, then you need to include widening the highways in congested areas.

Of course bus lines would be much cheaper, if we can convince people to use them. How often do you take a bus between SF and LA?

> Of course bus lines would be much cheaper, if we can convince people to use them.

Pretty easy - electric buses with seats that resemble business class instead of Ryanair.

Additional lanes for buses and a law that allows autonomous buses in dedicated lanes to go 100mph. That way you're faster than car or train at lower cost.

You ignore the value in the intermediate stops. Think about living within 45 minutes from San Francisco downtown, somewhere in between LA and SF. Also think how bloody miserable are flights in economy, and taking your shoes off before boarding a plane. Trains are luxury!

a 40 minute flight between the two destinations in economy is not at all miserable, certainly not miserable enough to justify the expense on this project that will never be completed.

The intermediate stops bite both ways, though: if you're on a train that stops several times in the central valley, and in SJ, I'd expect your travel time to be a bit more than 45 minutes.

Why not spend (a small fraction of) that money to improve Caltrain and service between Caltrain and the central valley in a different manner?

They are spending money to improve Caltrain; the plan is to move to electrified trains by 2021. It's the "service between Caltrain and the Central Valley" part that's a more significant challenge.

I'm not convinced that the current HSR project is the best way to do it, but I'm also not aware of any serious counterproposal -- and it's hard to even imagine one that wouldn't also be a huge, expensive undertaking with limitless opportunity for missed schedules, cost overruns and undue optimism.

I'm not convinced that the current HSR project is the best way to do it

Most criticism boils down to a "perfect is the enemy of the good" problem. Anything that isn't the most perfect possible solution from a given critic's viewpoint is attacked as a "boondoggle" while ignoring that opening up the corridor and making it easier to travel between SF, LA, and smaller cities in between will be a good thing (and that there's plenty of evidence for it in similar rail lines elsewhere).

I agree that it's a good thing, but is it good enough to warrant its price tag, when we're painfully aware of significant issues with our existing transit systems?

If only some of the money for HSR were going to be used to improve existing transit systems as well as building a new line.

(hint: some of the money is going to be used to improve existing transit systems!)

Yep, I agree. That's what I (imperfectly) meant by the lack of serious counterproposals: I'm not sure the current HSR is the best approach, but I haven't seen anyone come up with a better idea, and I'd rather have something than nothing.

The main problems with Caltrain seem to be cost, too-infrequent trains, and delays. Does electrification address that?

And even if it does, this doesn't improve VTA, BART, SF Muni, etc.

> If the environmental impact is a concern (not that laying tracks and punching holes through the Central Valley is free of impact), then buy new Teslas instead. Lots of them. At $35,000 per Model 3, you could buy 1.8 million new Teslas using that money.

The main justification for HSR is reducing freeway construction and maintenance costs that will be needed to keep up with expected travel without it that will be reduced by it.

Not dealing with pollution impacts of travel or buying cars for the freeway travel, but reducing the freeway construction and maintenance costs.

Buying a bunch of Teslas doesn't address that at all. (Actually, the state buying more cars increases the problem.)

I'm not disagreeing with you completely, but your 50$ each is a bit optimistic. can I get that price any time? not now, when I go to a website and try to find something for tomorrow its 109$ (Expedia).

the travel time listed is 1:30 compared to 2:30 (from numbers I heard) so you do chop off one hour of ride time.

however, air port security checks, being kicked from your seat, sf airport not directly in the city, the one hour starts to mean a whole lot less

There's a lot of reasons as to why this is the case, but the bulk of it is labor.

* Trains ultimately require close to 1 staff member per 4 passengers, much more than a budget airline.

* Unions and legacy salaries further add to those personnel costs. The average Amtrak employee ($75K/yr) nearly makes as much as the average commercial pilot ($77K/yr).

* Since train journeys take longer, the labor cost per trip is considerably higher, especially for long haul routes. When you're doing a long trip like Chicago to Los Angeles, a train takes a lot longer than a plane, so you're paying for yet more labor for that trip. 44 hours of labor for the train versus 4 hours for the plane.

There's a good video that breaks down the costs that make up your train ticket: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fwjwePe-HmA&t=29s

> Trains ultimately require close to 1 staff member per 4 passengers, much more than a budget airline.

Err, why? I've taken my share of commuter and Acela rides in the Northeast and there is nowhere near that level of staffing.

Do you have a source for the 1 employee per four passengers? Metra trains here in Chicago typically have only one conductor.

Watch the video, which cites sources (https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B2p-HoK9KXEAamNTTkdSaERqdGc...). This isn't just staff active on the train, but maintenance, administration, back office, etc.

Amtrak employs ~20,000 people. When you get to the number of annual passengers, and how many trips they operate a year, it breaks down to ~4 passengers per employee per trip.

> * Trains ultimately require close to 1 staff member per 4 passengers, much more than a budget airline.

Maybe in the US. In Europe, a train with 500-750 people capacity has one train driver and maybe 3-4 staff (plus on-board restaurant but that's run at a profit). No staff at smaller train stations and only minimal staff at many larger ones.

Maintenance needs staff but that's the same at airports.

As stated in another comment (which links to a transcript by the author with ~two dozen cited sources), this isn't staff on the train, but calculated by breaking down Amtrak's headcount of 20K people, and amortizing it over the number of annual trips and passengers. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16179794 Result is ~1 employee per 4 passengers per trip.

The author has some other really interesting (with cited sources) videos about many other transit topics, including how hub-and-spoke/direct played out in the aircraft marketplace, how budget airlines have such great profit margins, long haul aircraft economics, airline schedule methodology, etc.

Tesla batteries can be pretty damaging to the environment to produce. Rail is a lot cleaner in that regard if you can get an electrified rail (not sure if this works with high speed). Rail is also a much more efficient way, with regards to energy, to transport that many people as opposed to buying near 2 million Teslas.

> Rail is a lot cleaner in that regard if you can get an electrified rail (not sure if this works with high speed).

Jeez! You know Tesla batteries and you don't know that high speed trains are electric?? WTH

Rail doesn't run on batteries; the track is electrified, which overall gives you a lower environmental impact than manufacturing a ton of Tesla batteries.

Yeah, I wasn't thinking, I guess, brain fart because I was thinking how the US refers to systems of non-electrified rails that can carry trains at above 115-mph as "higher-speed".

The problem with air travel is throughput. There are 6+ million trips between SF and LA per year, and any significant increase either replaces other flights or requires another two airports in SF/LA, which ain't cheap.

http://cahsr.blogspot.com/2009/10/la-sf-nations-second-busie...

HSR between LA and SF would be able to handle 15+ million people per year, on top of providing routes between other cities in CA, some of which don't have anything except for bus/car routes, and it would also free up capacity for more long distance domestic and international flights.

There is also the question of who benefits from HSR. If you look at the Northeast Regional, it's primarily business travelers looking for a more comfortable way to work while hopping between Boston and DC.

That money could be so much better spent in ways that have an actual impact on lower income people.

Agreed. Our local and regional transit story is so poor right now. Improving that would drastically improve the lives of lower- and middle-income people who have to drive on our over-congested highways day after day.

At least in the Bay Area, part of the draw of HSR is that it's also the motivation for improvements to Caltrain (electrification, grade separation, mythical extension to downtown).

So we're going to spend $66 billion on something that primarily benefits higher income people just for the indirect benefits it might have for local transit?

Why is it relevant if it benefits people with high or low income? Are we back to Marxist class warfare?

I’m kind of smitten with the idea that if we’re going to spend a bunch of public money, it shouldn’t be used to subsidize a service directed st higher income people.

How do you figure? If the target price is equivalent to a plane ticket that's not really such a high income group to target, is it? Besides, cars are inherently a luxury item. Poorer folks take public transit (e.g. trains).

Cars are not a luxury item in the U.S. 88% of U.S. households own a car. If lower income folks travel between SF and LA, they'll probably drive the car they already own. Gas + depreciation for the SF-LA drive is about the same as the cost of a round-trip plane ticket, but as soon as you factor in additional passengers (say a family) there is a massive cost advantage to a car over a plane or train. And people who can't afford generally don't fly places, they take the bus.

HSR is not "public transit." Public transit helps lower-income people commute to their jobs. Lower income people don't travel regularly between SF and LA--they have no need to. They might do it occasionally, but they don't do it often enough where the convenience of a train is going to mean much if the train isn't any cheaper than flying.[1]

The folks who really benefit from HSR are business travelers. They're the ones who need to travel city center to city center regularly. They're the ones who really have a reason to prefer taking a train, because they can work more comfortably en route.

[1] Also, the target price ($86 one way) is a completely fantasy. At that price, it would be one of the cheapest HSR trips per mile in the world. https://nextcity.org/daily/entry/fare-cost-ride-california-b.... There is no way California is going to run the cheapest anything.

One of the sad parts of this story is that, in order to sabotage the HSR, Republicans wound up sabotaging the federal share of Caltrain electrification, even though electrification is good on its own merits.

You make some very good points, however, I still support the HSR even with the higher costs. Why? First, I think it will major way to somewhat solve california's high cost of housing. If you are using HSR to commute then you can go further out. I could technically have a reasonable commute from Merced, Fresno or Madera all of which have super low cost of housing as well as tons of land to build on.

FYI Same day prices are much much higher, buying a ticket leaving tomorrow from SJC->LAX is around $220, and SFO->LAX is basically sold out.

True. However assuming the price of high speed rail tickets will be fixed because it is a public service, the government could similarly operate an airline instead of high speed rail using the same fixed price system. What would be the cost then?

That's not how Amtrak works now, they price it the same way as airlines, last minute is more expensive.

I'm in NYC and would never, ever fly to Boston or DC. For what that's worth.

Two points on this:

1. I'm not sure how that affects my point.

2. In my experience the price difference for last minute on Amtrak has been at most about 20% (though I'm not a frequent Amtrak traveler).

Take a look at European high speed rail prices. They act similarly to airline prices, increasing close to departure to high levels.

What's that you say? You're in Manchester but need to pop down to London (2 hours 10 mins, 209 miles) tomorrow for a meeting? That'll be £338/$467.

The UK is not a good example on how rail systems can work. Rather look at France, Germany, Switzerland or Japan. HSR tickets in most countries have an upper limit, only the (partly) privatised UK system has these absurd prices.

You don't need to tell me, I live there :D

What's worse is that French, German and Dutch national rail operators have subsidiaries running rail contracts in the UK. So in a way we help fund the fantastic continental rail services...

But I understand that rail services on the continent are also heavily subsidised.

Take a look at ACELA, the last minute prices aren't that bad (well insofar as I missed my train and booked a seat on the next one with a minimal penalty - around $40).

Depends on the system. In Germany, where you don't automatically buy a seat, you can hop on any train last minute at a high (but reasonable) price. You'll stand for the journey but in some situations I preferred that over some waitlist with an airline.

> - If the LAX-SFO air corridor becomes too busy, that $64 billion could also be spent upgrading existing fleets by buying 147 brand new A380s at an average list price of $435 million each. [2]

Sorry but I'm super confused... 147 planes that cost $435 million each, would total 64 Billion dollars. And that appears to be 64 Billion on top of the 64 Billion you already plan on spending from above.

That cost of the project in the article has jumped to 10 Billion. Where are you getting your number from?

The cost of the Central Valley segment ALONE is $10 billion.

The total cost SF-LA is $64 billion: https://www.mercurynews.com/2017/01/13/confidential-report-c...

If in fact the $64B could be spent on your proposals, you have a point. Otherwise, it is better to spend the $64B in this landmark project vs. it being diverted somewhere else where neither you nor me could figure out what happened to it. This is a landmark project - let it happen. Your future generations will thank you.

Except maybe the $64B doesn't need to be spent at all and can be returned to the taxpayers. The point OP was making is that it's unnecessary to build HSR because there's an existing company (several actually) that provides the same service at a fraction of the price, at no cost to the taxpayer.

The fact of the matter is that those $64B will not be returned to the taxpayers and will probably be diverted to other less relevant projects.

Actually infrastructure projects like this (and including this one I believe) are usually paid for with bonds which means id the project doesn't happen, the money is never borrowed in the first place.

> Tickets are $45 for SFO-LAX each way in February right now (less than the expected cost of the train ticket). Other pairs (OAK-BUR, SJC-BUR) are similar ($49-$57 each way).

And how do I magically get from the airport to the city and city to the airport? Is it free? Is it instant?

It’s not really that high speed if you factor in parking, tsa, terminal quirks and delays, and working with checked baggage.

Personally I’d much rather take a form of transit where I can bring a water bottle and avoid being groped by security for literally no rational reason at all.

The real killer is that the $64B total project cost was the initial estimate. And costs are now up 77%! So we are likely north of $100B total cost. And bond repayments triple that to $300B over 30 years. Funds which are currently being diverted from the State's Highway Improvement fund. All so Brown can build a monument to 1800's rail technology that poorly competes with the 1900's airline industry.

> The real killer is that the $64B total project cost was the initial estimate. And costs are now up 77%! So we are likely north of $100B total cost.

Actually, the initial estimate was close to $100B. But when the public reacted with shock, they handwaived and said the cost would now be $68B. Just like that: poof! $32B knocked off the budget. Of course we all know that the initial cost was more accurate; and the final cost will be a lot more than $100B.

You forgot that control of private people and their property is what projects like this end up being about in a single-party state like California. It isn't about transportation: it is about control.

Southwest airlines does not solve the problem, because it does not give politicians or public sector unions or public sector unions' pensioners control over money. Only a train project can do that for them.

Airports and roads are all funded by public monies. A new runway for SFO was projected to cost over $2 billion in 1999 (in 1999 dollars).

Highspeed rail was projected to cost less than expanding highways and airports. Not sure what it looks like with the increases. OTOH, the budgets for those other modes also tend to balloon over time.

This project is going to be more than just la to sf route. It will allow people to live further away from the over crowded Bay Area (probably Southern California too) and getting more commuters off of our clogged highways.

Besides, sf to la has an additional hour+ wasted with Security and 1 hr travel time to the airport (if you live in SF).

It's the same thing in Europe. On a passenger/km basis, and without subsidies, budget air transport costs ten times less than train (look at company expenses and how much people they transport). It is also much safer. It is counter intuitive, but that's how it is.

HSR's right-of-way will be here for centuries. If you buy 147 brand new A380s, they'll be outdated in a decade or two.

Trains also carry freight. Make more off of that in fact. So passenger benefits are kind of moot?

Okay, so you've got SF <-> LA down. Now give me the calculations for the rest of the 351 city pairings made possible by a system with 27 stops.

HSR doesn't just serve the endpoints, and the passenger volume from that Cartesian set of city pairings vastly exceeds the passenger volume from the endpoints. It's not even in the same ballpark.

this ignores rail stops in communities outside of SFO and LAX...

Hell, let's just redirect that money toward better local (SF, SJ, LA, OC, SD) and regional transit (stuff like Modesto/Fresno/Monterey/Napa/Sonoma/Sacramento<->SJ/SF and Bakersfield/SB/SLO/SD<->LA/OC). Local traffic congestion and poor transit options are where we're hurting the most.

This doesn't improve the situation for travel between NorCal and SoCal, but I think this is already pretty well-served by air travel, as you point out.

This also doesn't help people who live in, say, Modesto or Fresno get to SoCal (they'd have to train up to SJ and fly down to LA or SD, or drive), but is fixing that really a high priority need when compared to the rest?

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