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Comment by rsync | Hacker News Reader

Good.

I want an actual high speed train from the new downtown SF transit station to Union Station LA in two hours or less.

I would like a high speed train that won't be obsolete the day it is opened.

What was being (haltingly) built was a ridiculous route-by-committee with time consuming (and sprawl inducing) stops in whichever districts had an assertive rep willing to sacrifice a project of national importance for their little town.

All you needed to know about CA HSR could be learned by seeing it was not built on the I-5 corridor. Fresno and Palmdale should be spurs - not route benders.

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High speed rail isn't that good for what you want. It will churn through too much infrastructure for too little value for point-to-point. What it is good at is creating regions. Done correctly it can open up a lot of land and opportunities. (I don't know the specifics of this project however).

IMHO: No. Way more important would be a high-speed BART for the Bay area, and an equivalent for LA. Most people would benefit from it; instead, an SF-LA high-speed with slow "local" public transport would only benefit a few.

The Bay Area already has enough train routes to create a viable commuter system, but they are not connected, or even time synchronized. Some are idle, or prioritize freight over commuters.

The systems include (counter clockwise from east bay):

Bart, Amtrak Capitol Corridor, ACE, VTA, the old valley <-> Santa Cruz line, Caltrain, and Muni.

The only part missing commuter rail stops is Marin county, and they have a nice ferry to SF (they intentionally blocked BART).

BART is also ridiculously slow. To compare, within the similarly dense and similarly sized Swiss middlelands I can hop on the train system and compete with cars going highway speeds while reading HN or do whatever. In the Bay area I felt like I had to plan half a day to get into SF one way alone. There's no reason why you can't have at least Swiss quality rail there, not even talking about Japanese levels.

I'm not sure what day you tried to take BART, but getting to SF from the far end of a line takes about an hour or less. Oh, and there are several stretches of that where the train will run at 70MPH - freeway speeds.

Sure, it could be faster (and quieter, and more comfortable) but it's not slow.

I went from San Jose to SF which is about 1h 35min for a distance that's slightly less than Basel to Zurich, once you get there. There's two major factors that make it slow for me: One, American trainstations are often far away from town centers. Two, BART stops everywhere even though it's quite a sizeable distance. For these distances we'd typically have an interregional connection that only stops 3-4 times. Basel Zürich takes about 55min btw. and you arrive right in each city's center, with tons of public transport to connect you further. SF main station by comparison looked tiny to me, with less connections than lots of Swiss towns with maybe 200k inhabitants have. And I'm not even talking about HSR, for that have a look at Paris to Lyon or Tokyo to Osaka for some example.

But BART isn't high speed rail at all. It's basically a 50 year old design infrastructure.

Stops are not a problem. Japan's Shinkansen has exactly the same problem of prefectures/municipalities forcing railways to build a station in the middle of nowhere. There are literally dozens of such stations even on the busiest routes. The solution is simple: most trains don't stop at these station and pass them at near max speed. There are special "slow" trains that stop at each station and timed so that they get bypassed by quicker ones.

No, it really wasn't. Have you looked at a map of topography of California? I5 was built that route for a reason - it is the easiest route unless you want the route to be in 100s of km of incredibly expensive tunnel.

I don't think you're disagreeing with the parent comment.

“Easy” isn’t the project. The project is to connect the two major population centers. Nobody cares about Merced to Bakersfield. And expensive? Building a hundred miles of line that nobody cares about is more expensive than building a train people would actually use. Why would I spend 4 hours riding to LA via Bakersfield when I can spend 45 min on an airplane. I live 12 minutes from the San Jose Airport. Facilitating air shuttles wouldn’t require billions of dollars and I wouldn’t have to waste time transiting the Central Valley for no good reason other than politics.

Look at a map. I5 is NOT where the rail was going to be built.

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