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Comment by ummonk | Hacker News Reader

I used to support the HSR project on the grounds that connecting the state (both LA / Bay Area and the Central Valley towns) would yield long term economic benefits due the increased flow of people within the state. Decreasing the effective distance between people by making travel faster and cheaper has a lot of value in the information economy. Nothing beats face to face communication.

I now no longer support the project due to the large price tag. I don’t believe the convenience of HSR over air travel is worth the cost of this infrastructure investment. We could get way more value out of investing in building our local public transportation and expanding the highway network.

Maybe if we went back to the drawing board a reasonable HSR plan would be possible (this article certainly provides good areas of improvement). Until then, we need to stop forging ahead.

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All big infrastructure projects are very expensive, always miss their deadlines and go way over budget; it is the nature of the beast. I'm not saying it is ok or that it could not be managed better: it could and it should.

The thing is that the cost of such projects is an investments and a legacy for future generations to enjoy. Imagine if we had to build the BART or the highway system in this they and age. How much would it cost? How many buildings in highly concentrated areas will need to be taken down to make way? Do you even believe that BART was on budget or on time?

Would it be any cheaper to build a high speed rail system in 10 years? In 20 years? Should we throw the towel and decide that future generations will only have the option to fly to LA or should they have to build it themselves at an even bigger price tag?

I know the HSR project is going to be over budget and the ROI won't be there for my generation. But in the same way that I can commute to SF on Bart, I want future generations to have the option to travel to LA in HSR.

There's no need for high-speed, long-distance, expensive commuter rail in today's era of high-quality, reliable, free, socially acceptable, and highly available videoconferencing solutions. Business travel is in decline for a reason!

> There's no need for high-speed, long-distance, expensive commuter rail in today's era of high-quality, reliable, free, socially acceptable, and highly available videoconferencing solutions.

That baseless assertion is so profoundly wrong at so many levels. It's like claiming that there is no need for cars just because skype is cheap.

I’m sure my family and long-distance relationship partner will be glad to hear about this new development!

(Typed from a train leaving Tokyo at 320 km/h, with beer and sandwich sold on board)

Is it decline? I can’t find a reliable source showing such a trend.

Working in the tech industry, one can easily experience the massive advantage that in-person interaction has over remote. It's not even close.

Look, we're looking at a price tag of around $10,000 for every household in California. Assuming the costs don't go up further, as they likely would. That's a lot of money for a connection between SF and LA, especially when airlines are simply not that bad.

Especially given the poor state of public transit in SF and LA, we can do much more useful stuff with the money. For example, we could build a proper transit network in SF: http://www.newmunimetro.com/m-market/

For $100B you could buy ~33,000 $3M-dollar electric commuter planes with 10 person capacity and 600mi range - not quite anything like that on the market yet mind you - but it seems close at hand. You could cover nearly the whole state, not just LA <--> SF, and have 330,000 person capacity. By what measure would this train be better?

Certainly not economic, noise, land-use, speed, convenience, coverage, or flexibility. Probably in terms of operational costs - but not by a huge margin. And the economics change if you scale the capacity down to match the train system and invest the rest to partially cover the operating costs.

And it took me 5 minutes to think of a (possibly) better plan than theirs.

Your plan has never been done before. It might completely fail for risks you and everyone else has never considered.

For all of rail's faults, we are certain it is possible. It's been done many times before. Maybe it can be done cheaper or more efficiently but there is no question that if we build it it will actually work.

Ok I'm sure it's a horrible plan. But I'm also sure if you think a little out of the box you could mop the floor with this rail project. Being too risk averse is also a risk, it's a risk of settling when you could have had better.

Very impressive. But in just three minutes, I thought of an even better plan: put a $10M wormhole between LA and SF and have near instant travel. Wormholes don’t quite exist yet, but they seem close at hand.

There was a plane featured on HN this week with those exact specs.

For sale for $3M?

Yes, but I have my doubts

“aims to have one flying early next year.”, and HN is skeptical about it (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18602771)

...and last year, and the one before that, and the one before that. And each of them has, for some unfathomable reason, failed to materialize. But that's just a small matter of sky-piloting (in the original sense, i.e. "pie in the sky").

I thought of an even better plan: put a $7.5B Hyperloop between LA and SF and have near instant travel. Hyperloops don't quite exist yet, but they seem close at hand.

https://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/050815/elon-...

I don't think you can even get a (new) 10 seat plane for less than $10,000,000. And I doubt that a plane built using technology that doesn't exist yet will be 70% cheaper than ones you can get today. Even if you can find 33,000 planes for that cost there will be significant infrastructure costs (if you want to multiply the # of planes in the air in California by 10, you'll need more ATC, more runways, more hangars, more parking garages, and probably more airports).

Upfront costs are just a small fraction of the price of flying planes around. That 3 (or 10) million per plane quickly gets subsumed by maintenance, staffing, and other recurring costs.

I don't know how loud these hypothetical electric planes are, but if they're like traditional ones I doubt that they'd beat a train in terms of noise (even though HSR can be 10-20 decibels louder than slower trains). I would question that there would actually be an advantage in speed or convenience, at least between highly populated areas.

> For $100B you could buy ~33,000 $3M-dollar electric commuter planes

If you intend to make a honest comparison then you need to factor in at least the cost of building and operating at least two airports.

> For $100B you could buy ~33,000 $3M-dollar electric commuter planes with 10 person capacity and 600mi range

So, how much does all the new airport and hanger capacity and support infrastructure cost, and what are the maintenance, operations, and replacement costs like over time?

> And it took me 5 minutes to think of a (possibly) better plan than theirs.

Not even close.

There is also the environmental impact to consider. Air travel has a much larger emission profile compared to train travel, and train travel has a much larger capacity. Plus, rail station are often in the center of the city rather than on the outskirts like airports are. e.g. traveling by train from Boston to NYC vs flying is almost a wash time wise due to travel to/from the airport + buffer time for security.

Getting to the city center, though, is often problematic. You either follow the existing railroad lines, which often have tight curves, or you build your own, which involves ripping out a long path through the already-existing city.

if Japan can manage it America can

The more relevant comparison would be California specifically instead of all of America.

Still, given that if California were an independent country it'd be right behind Japan in terms of GDP, if Japan can manage high-speed rail, we should be able to.

The issue is a large chunk of tax revenue goes to the federal govt, not the state of calfornia.

That and their mismanagement of property tax and pubic pensions.

Or you tunnel. Expensive, but effective.

Exponentially expensive. Do I hear "seismically active terrain"?

> There is also the environmental impact to consider. Air travel has a much larger emission profile compared to train travel

I'm not sure that's true.

Heavy locomotives require a lot of fuel, and aircraft turbine engines are fairly efficient these days (airplanes roughly get 1% more efficient per year, compounded annually.)

Railroads also divide the landscape, which has a highly negative impact on wild-life roaming and migration patterns.

It definitely is true, these are electrified lines and rolling resistance is low. For equivalent distances elsewhere emissions are 80-90% lower with rail over air transport. With the potential for solar in SoCal there is no reason this could not be even better.

Dividing the landscape is a separate issue. It can be mitigated against (tunnels, habitat bridges, route planning), but alone it's not an excuse to stick with emission heavy modes of transport.

Yep, same here. It's been such a boondoggle. I wish I could take back my support.

It looks like sometimes you do need a Robert Moses to have a vision and force it through. Here there were too many compromises and too many cooks in the kitchen demanding things and putting their c2 in.

I think all of your arguments could have been made against BART 30 years ago as well. I'd be willing to bet that future generations will be glad we made the investment in HSR despite inefficiencies in it's construction.

HSR is not only supposed to support LA and SF. Air travel is great for those cities but it doesn't do much for anything in between.

The HSR will be overpriced, but it may benefit the state for a long time. The BART train used to not go to SFO because the counties below SF did not want to pay for it. And then they did. Was it too expensive? I don't know. My grandchildren will probably be able to take BART from SF to the airport. What they would those counties spent on that would benefit my grandchildren?

What’s interesting to me is that the federal tax cuts passed last year cost around $150B a year. I know you may not support this either, but that would pay for the construction of 1 and a 1/2 HSR’s a year, even with the cost overrun.

Reminds me of PG’s essay about how it’s easy to loss lots of money on bad investments, even for people who are normally frugal on luxuries.

Tax rates were cut; tax revenue was not. The federal government is expecting $26 billion more in tax revenue than in 2017.

That’s a bit semantics as it’s looking at just one year, and in any case doesn’t look at the delta from the old law.

Edit: IIRC the law had some incentives to onshore money at special tax rates, which may cause a one-time bump in revenues.

That may have been the estimate, but so far receipts are not keeping pace with 2017. Depending on your reference tax year revenues are 3% - 8% lower than 2017 thus far [1].

[1] http://www.crfb.org/blogs/tax-bill-did-not-cause-revenue-ris...

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