Hacker News Reader

Comment by Diggity | Hacker News Reader

That region is flat and has few physical obstacles to a rail line (like mountains, major inclines, major declines etc)

Getting a rail line between a major city (LA/San Jose/San Diego/SF etc) requires going through pretty serious mountain ranges. There is already rail line between them in their own geographical pockets (LA-San Diego, SF-San Jose-Oakland)

View on HN

They could build a train in central Nevada too. That’s “easy” — doesn’t mean it actually useful. I’d be happy with a Maglev replacing Caltrain to get from Mountain View to SFO in 5 minutes. More people could use that than a train to Bakersfield.

  Mountain View to SFO in 5 minutes

That would be awesome for the 3 people looking to go specifically from Mountain View to SFO at a given time... but not so awesome for the 300 people wanting to get on or off somewhere in between.

The number of physical obstacles is less important than the number of legal obstacles.

If it has to go somewhere, everyone wants the high speed rail to go through someone else's house, preferably a long ways away.

For land rights issues it is easy enough to create stations that are sufficiently distanced from the city centers but close enough to tap into local Bus/Uber-ish/car rental options. Most Californian metropolis' have an area distanced enough but accessible where land is still relatively cheap, the exception being LA which has sprawled into Orange County and completely enveloped other regions.

However going through mountain in an environmentally conscious way gets radically expensive in very short order. Additionally this style of construction tends to have its own legally contentious issues. (Dam construction for water management being comparative)

I disbelieve in your "easy enough". Certainly it is a problem that the plans for high speed rail never solved.

You already pointed out that Los Angeles was a problem. For San Francisco the route chosen ran into problems 30 miles south of San Jose, where they were planning to use existing rails (at slower speeds). And once you're in San Jose, you still have a long ways to go to get into San Francisco.

See https://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-bullet-train-... for verification.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com