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Comment by jcranmer | Hacker News Reader

> Another difference: populations in Europe, China and Japan are more concentrated.

This is commonly trotted out, and it is false for all practical purposes. The US does have a lot of empty spaces where no one lives--but no one is seriously proposing to hook up empty spaces to HSR. If you instead look at where people in the US do live, it's not all that different from those places. If you mapped out the major cities of the Midwest centered on Chicago and compared it to France, you'll find that the US has larger cities whose distances from the major regional hub are roughly the same as their corresponding cities in France. Since HSR works in France to connect those cities, it should generally work equally well in the US to connect those cities.

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>but no one is seriously proposing to hook up empty spaces to HSR.

The California HSR plan begs to differ.

>Since HSR works in France to connect those cities, it should generally work equally well in the US to connect those cities.

Only if people routinely travel to those cities rather than further away cities.

The proposed San Francisco/Los Angeles HSR line is fairly comparable to the Madrid/Barcelona HSR line.

I'll point out that Fresno, CA has roughly the same population as Nantes and Nice, France, both of which have dedicated TGV lines specifically to reach those cities.

Do you still think that qualifies as "empty spaces"?

Fresno (1700/sq. km) also has less than half the population density of Nantes or Nice (4200-4800/sq. km). It's not exactly a fair comparison if the area of the city is far larger unless the last-kilometer transit seamlessly scales to last-2km transit. You can actually walk to a reasonable number of places, or take a bus 1-2 km to many more, from a main station in Nantes, Nice, or any number of similarly-sized cities in many countries.

Don't think either Nantes or Nice have dedicated TGV lines.

A better example in France would be Bordeaux.

Not really, the high-speed line was supposed to connect to Spain and Toulouse and the beaches of courses (it's not named LGV SEA for nothing).

Fresno is a county seat and there's Cal State. That's it.

Same in France, every local baron wanted his dedicated HS line, so now we got plenty but only one is profitable.

Yes, and the line to Fresno is going to keep going to Los Angeles if they finish building it.

CAHSR’s mainline is intended to be SF-LA via the Central Valley, and connect the major cities along the way. Some of those valley have around a 1m+ people or will grow to that over time, making them viable to connect. Think “pearls on a string.”

>Only if people routinely travel to those cities rather than further away cities.

They do. People naturally travel more to places closer to them than further away. There is a strong correlation here. When you’re hungry and want to go out, do you go to a food place 5-10 minutes away? Or a place hours away? Or 3 Michelin starred place on the other side of the planet.

The regions targeted for HSR often have significant auto traffic on the highways connecting them, and short haul flights between their airports. HSR hits a sweet spot for trips that are long drives and short flights. Cost and time competitive, while also being more comfortable.

> Cost and time competitive, while also being more comfortable.

This is only true in a vacuum without our political and legal environment. If you could make the project immune to CEQA, eminent domain challenges, and union pressure, then you have a much more viable railway. If you could at least brush off two of those three and one of them was the union pressure, then it might actually get built in the manner it was intended to be linking San Francisco, Sacramento, Los Angeles and San Diego. At this point we’ll be lucky to get a line that doesn’t share tracks with freight between SF and LA.

How is it that freeway construction can be assumed to somehow be immune to all these problems?

I won't say freeways are immune to all these problems , but built freeways don't close for union strikes.

They’re not but they’re already built and therefore are already an ongoing concern. CEQA and a lot of the more asinine pro-labor and tax policies that exist today throughout the State postdate the established right of ways for most of the highways.

No eminent domain issues as the state already owns the right of way.

Part of the issue is that the Midwest isn’t centered around Chicago. American inter city travel exists much less on the hub spoke style that you get in some European countries. While the density isn’t that different, the pattern of demand is!

the only difference between the US and europe that really matters is the degree to which our identification with cars is ingrained, and therefore how that has shaped our development patterns. it's why we have so many large trucks and SUVs even though 75-95% of trips are single-occupancy, why we dedicate so much land to roads and parking, and why we care so little for public transporation, pollution, and transport/energy efficiency. it's not population density, inter-city distance, or patterns of demand, as these are also byproducts of the same phenomenon (cause & effect reversal).

Don’t forget the extremely large us air network!

that doesn't matter either. air networks in both the US and europe are plenty extensive.

and to be clear, it's not that high-speed rail is an unmitigated good, but that we love our cars so much that any challenge to their supremacy is a literal (perceived) threat to our own egos.

high-speed rail makes a ton of sense for the coastal cooridors, as well as at least a few interior ones (e.g., the midwest, texas). it's probably not a good use of resources for a cross-continental passenger run of HSR, since air can more efficiently and flexibly link the coastal and interior intercity networks.

That's not the only difference. People occupy way more space in the US.

For example, the population density of Paris is about 20 times that of Atlanta, a city ~3x as large (including the Greater Atlanta Area).

sure, and i'd posit that that's also a consequence of our love affair with cars. cars encourage urban sprawl (there's really no such thing as rural sprawl). perhaps a land value tax (with tax deferral until sale for non-wealthy primary home owners) can help us find an efficient optimum, something that would encourage urban density while not discouraging rural expanse.

>I’d posit that that’s also a consequence of our love affair with cars.

I’ve always operated under the assumption that there is massive selection bias in the United States for people who like more personal space. Never considered it was part of car culture.

the car, particularly for americans but also in other countries (mainland china being a prominently rising example), literally embodies individualistic expression, expansive freedom, and bold adventurism, as 50+ years of tv car ads can attest. that's not to pass an overly harsh judgement on any of those things, but rather, to say the balance is out of whack and has been for a while.

in LA, outside of a very few of the oldest core districts, even our supposedly sleepy neighborhood streets are often 40+ feet wide (note that cars are typically 6-7 feet wide), with 15 feet of public easement, and 15+ feet of mandatory setbacks, so urban land use gets out of whack real quicklike that way.

That's partly consequence rather than cause. All that space is being taken up by parking lots and wide streets for on-street parking.

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