Could High-Speed Rail Ease California’s Housing Crisis? See Japan

On the other hand, it's hard to argue that places like Tracy, Stockton, Modesto, and Sacramento aren't already in the gravitational pull of the Bay, or Lancaster and Palmdale aren't already in the commuter belt for LA. Desirability in these places is likely to rise with the option to trade a long car commute to a shorter P+R train commute.

The toss-ups are Bakersfield and especially Fresno. These are metros far removed from others, can't significantly interface daily commuters with others, so their housing and job markets stand on their own. But for the same reasons, among California metros they're also the least subject to existing affordability crises. If their access to the Bay and LA improves, this will change -- and already-sprawling, already-transit-poor Fresno and Bakersfield can hardly distribute this rise in demand evenly in their grid.

EDIT: 'Organic' affordable housing has always been greenfield, because it's cheap to turn peripheral land to inexpensive dwellings. But HSR will serve built-out city centers, where expensive redevelopment is required if one wants to satisfy demand. And if the demand is there, the asking price will reflect that.

A better transit investment would not be high speed rail, but expanding city-wide rail/metro combined with zoning that allows denser housing to be built around stations.

In the Californian model, you decide in committee where people ought to go (which is everywhere represented by committee members) and design something too big and expensive to succeed.

If you want commuters to use HSR, you have to make it easy for people to use. This means the line from SF to Sac/Roseville being placed directly along the 80 corridor with frequent stops for locals as well as dedicated express trains. This requires sidings at all tops in both directions to enable passing, something not currently envisioned for 90% of the stops (iirc).

The biggest problem with CAHSR imho is that they started grading the RoW and laying track in the central valley before they had started on crossing the Tehachapi mountains. The highest long-term value to HSR is going to be the LA-SF route. The one piece with the longest build and highest cost is the route over the mountains (the existing route owned by the UP and with BNSF having trackage rights is 2/3 single track and completely at capacity, with speeds of less than 30MPH average).

There is no way that HSR will be long term viable without that route in place. Until they build that and rationalize the routes, it will be nothing but a faster and vastly more costly replacement for the San Joaquin corridor passenger trains.

I want it to be a success. I'm very pessimistic about that in the current state of affairs.

Isn't the easing of japan's housing prices due to japan population stagnation/decline and nearly 30 years of economic stagnation?

Also, didn't japan's housing prices rise dramatically in the first 25 years of their high speed rail's existence before crashing in the early 1990s?

Japan's population growth since 1990 has been pretty much 0%. California's population has increase nearly 50% since 1990.

Intercity trains will come with an intercity price tag, which is more than most people are willing to pay for without a subsidy. There's a reason very few people in Europe use ICE trains for their daily commute.

That being said, high-speed rail is often seen as a ploy for other things.

The best example I can think of is during the Obama administration the attempt to build a High Speed rail link between Manhattan and Washington DC. Bringing Wall Street closer to DC is the last thing the world needs, and shows how out of touch the rail planners were at times.

As I remember they had some other great plans like in Florida that were sadly rejected, but I never got a clear explanation for some of those real dumb proposals that made everyone suspicious and tanked the project.

Overall, California's population is leveling off. So is the US. The US hit "peak baby" several years ago and population growth is below replacement rate.

There are some 30 million people living in the greater Tokyo metro area, depending on where you draw the line, of which 14 thousand have Shinkansen commuter passes:

https://www.reddit.com/r/japan/comments/6mfho3/of_the_14k_co...

That's 0.047%, a negligible drop in the bucket, and that's despite Tokyo having last-mile transit options infinitely better than California's.

Note for fairness: this does exclude the considerable numbers of salarymen who effectively maintain two homes, namely a tiny bachelor pad in Tokyo and a larger family household elsewhere, and "commute" by Shinkansen to return on the weekends. This is common enough that there's a Japanese term for it, 夫婦別居 fuufu bekkyo, literally "husband and wife living separately" but lacking the separation-before-divorce connotation that carries in the West.

However, California is notably lacking in affordable bachelor pads and stay-at-home moms financially able and psychologically willing to tolerate this.

I think the global warming angle is a much more compelling reason for HSR.

I feel like San Francisco and Mountain View would get far bigger bang for their buck if SFMTA and the Planning Commission could coordinate to build bus-centric high-density transit developments around the existing freeway off-ramps. Just add another pedestrian/bike/transit-friendly bus loop connected to the freeway (like the Salesforce Transit Center, although maybe not on stilts). Facebook, Google, Apple, etc already pay for operating the buses, and would add more if the buses achieve high enough utilization.

The real winners will be Fresno and Bakersfield to SF or LA. Lower living costs, and tying those economies into the Bay Area. Having an office of your startup out there becomes just as reasonable as doing one in Fremont or Pleasanton.

The actual Fresno<->Bakersfield link itself (from one terminus to other) I think will be less likely -- the drive is boring but most likely you're not going from city center to city center and the local transport is limited. So I'd probably still drive down 99.

They've been trying variants on this for two hundred years in the UK. It's always ultimately self defeating. The only way you fix it is dispersing industry.

Also, Unlike japan where stations can also be commercial spaces resulting in both revenue and making the transit location super popular, in the us transit locations of course have to be public land and government can’t be seen profitable leasing out said land (unless it’s for a sports team :p)

You'd think CHSR proponents would've noticed that comparison with Japan makes little sense not even because of density, but because Japan already (and had when they started building the Shinkansen) an extensive local rail and other transit network -- you can actually get to the train and get to where you actually want to go from the train.

The last proposed plan would have the HSR running over 100 MPH less than 100 feet from my bedroom window.

Another negative is that this will accelerate gentrification in the newly expanded commute zones.

Imagine taking, say, $50B that gets dumped into the quagmire that is Afghanistan and using that instead to modernize and expand the current rail system so that it can handle even more freight as well as performant passenger service.