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Comment by JumpCrisscross | Hacker News Reader

> Every time California's high speed rails come up on HN it's obvious that everyone here hates the idea

California's major cities are almost in a line along the coast. That's the route that makes sense.

California's HSR instead took a tour through the Central Valley's farming communities, taking a slam dunk pitch for linking San Francisco and San Diego via L.A. and turning it into a carcass.

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Unless you wanted to build an HSR line through a long coastal mountain range most of way from SF to LA further driving up the cost, having it go the majority of the distance through a relatively flat valley definitely has its benefits. I do think that the line should have paralleled i-5 instead of going through Bakersfield and Fresno, but that's not the choice that was made.

Not only that but you could put housing there

Mountain ranges didn't seem to be a problem for Japan's high speed rail network.

Huh? They absolutely were. Cities that look close on a map can easily take 3x long as you would think to get to by train because the high speed line goes a long way around (or, in the case of e.g. Nagasaki, because there's no high speed line there at all).

That's because they mostly avoided mountains on their high speed routes. The Tokaido and Sanyo Shinkansen mostly follow the coastline and the Tohoku Shinkansen mostly goes through a valley. There are lines that do bore through mountain ranges, but nothing to the extent of several hundred miles as would be required for a line through the California coastal range.

Except the one they're building now...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ch%C5%AB%C5%8D_Shinkansen

"About 90% of the 286-kilometre (178 mi) line to Nagoya will be built underground or through tunnels"

I feel like this sort of thing just proves that the problem with building high speed rail in the US is cultural[1] and political[2] not technical or economic.

[1] Americans have been carefully propagandized to believe that governments can't do anything right. And cars represent manhood and freedom.

[2] For instance Ubber and Lift are funding the same anti public transportation organizations the Koch brother(s) were.

Americans have been carefully propagandized to believe that governments can't do anything right

Then the people decide to give the government a chance, pass a proposition asking for rail, and then the government completely screws it up. Terrible route, corrupt, massively over budget, graft, and effectively cancelled after a decade of waste and work. So now even progressive people in progressive California are thinking the government can't so anything right, not because of propaganda, but because they see the failure.

As someone who loves tunnels, I'm going to write myself a note to try this line when I make my first trip to Japan.

Well, then definitely try the Kurobe Gorge mountain railway! It's a originally industrial railway in a deep valley that was used for dam construction. On the hour long journey it goes through none less than 42 tunnels & the view (when not underground :) ) is breathtaking. :)

And the current estimated cost of that hsr system exceeds the estimated cost of the entire 520 mi (840 km) phase 1 system in California. Imagine scaling the cost of a similar design to travel the distance from SF to LA, ignoring the fact that the Japanese tend to build these grand infrastructure projects far more cost effectively than we do.

The maglev Shinkansen is literally a tunnel bored from Tokyo to Nagoya

Bakersfield and Fresno metro's are about half a million people each. And also the current planned route is close to Santa Cruz and Monterrey Counties which adds another 3/4 of a million people.

No matter how you slice it the original route is going to leave some people out.

If you count Gilroy as close to Santa Cruz and Monterrey, then sure. But the planned line does take a hard east turn through the Pacheco pass into the central valley south of Gilroy.

Six and a half million people live in the Central Valley. So it's about 15% of the state population. And running high speed rail through the central valley is fairly cheep. The planned high speed rail line tends to follow the existing freight rail lines.

Always possible to build the high speed rail and then run another connector down the Salinas Valley between Monterrey and Santa Barbara on to Thousand Oaks. (Following HWY 101 basically) Political opposition that is probably bigger than the geography though.

Being along the coast also makes offshore supersonic flight possible. With a good aircraft, San Diego to Seattle should be about an hour.

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