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Comment by jeffbee | Hacker News Reader

The route makes fine sense. It passes through every significant city in the state and travels between the principal urban areas in a time competitive with air travel. If it did not serve Fresno, Bakersfield, etc then it does not accomplish the decarbonization goals of the project.

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I disagree. The route has major problems and is a big reason why the project will take so long and be so expensive to complete. The most reasonable to approach would have been to more or less follow I-5. Instead, to get Central Valley politicians on board with the project, they chose an easterly route that hits a number of cities in the Central Valley.

Unfortunately this decision has a lot of bad consequences for the main corridor. First, the easterly direction that the train has to take after it gets out of the south bay adds around 20 minutes to the overall trip, which is a substantial fraction of the SF-LA travel time.

The bigger issue is that coming out of Bakersfield, the route is now too far east to make it through the Grapevine. Instead they will have to build a 15 mile tunnel through the San Gabriel mountains which will add more time to the route and cost tens of billions of dollars.

In effect, the choice of route added 25 minutes of travel time at a cost of tens of billions of dollars.

I do believe that Central Valley cities should have rail service, but the main SF-LA route should have been built out first and then spurs or additional lines could have been added to that core.

"I have a better but politically infeasible idea" is just sort of silly. This isn't Sim City. You need the voters.

To that point, in Prop 1A the voters approved a specific project: namely an SF-LA line with a travel time of 2 hours and 40 minutes. They did not approve a line hitting a string of cities in the Central Valley. To the extent that those alternate paths prevent this main corridor from hitting 2 hours and 40 minutes it is in conflict with the will of the voters.

Except they did. Prop 1A does specifically mentions the corridors that need to be built, including the cities that need to be served in section 2704.04 subsection (b)(3).

This is exactly right. All of these details were laid out at the time we voted for it! This is what we voted for. Newsom getting cold feet on it hasn’t helped, I’ve gotta say.

If a high-speed rail line would run long distances in the middle of nowhere, that's usually a sign that you should not build the line in the first place. There are rarely enough end-to-end passengers on any line to justify the investment.

The Central Valley is sparsely populated at the moment, but it doesn't have to remain so. Expanding the cities there by 5 or 10 million people might actually make the high-speed rail project sensible.

Worth looking at Japan’s Toukaidou Shinkansen. The route could take a direct path from Tokyo to Nagoya to Osaka, being super fast and hitting up only the main cities.

But it doesn’t. It hits up the southern coast through Shizuoka and a bunch of small cities.

That's also because the shortest path is basically a tunnel.

They're now building the Chuo maglev, which does take the shortest path and is currently projected at $65 billion and climbing.

The I5 Tejon Pass goes up to an altitude of 1.2km with a 6% section [1]. From a quick search, it appears that the steepest gradients in France/Germany and Japan's Shinkansen are 4% [2]. I'm not certain about China but it appears that the HSR to Kunming (1.9km altitude) has a limiting gradient of 2.3% [3].

Maybe they could solve it with clever engineering. However, I don't think 20 minutes is a big deal, especially considering that the Japanese have put up with the humiliation of spending 2:21 instead of 1:07 to go from Tokyo to Osaka for the last few decades. I think focusing on only SF-LA also ignores long-term goals, like connecting with the Brightline from Victorville to Las Vegas. If you live in Fresno or Bakersfield and want to go to Las Vegas, your options are pretty ridiculously long bus rides, or long multi-legged flights. If both the CA HSR and Brightline succeed (I know, I'm hopeless optimistic), then it can be a pretty killer app.

* [1] https://www.dangerousroads.org/north-america/usa/4366-tejon-... * [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_steepest_gradients_on_... * [3] [Note that the gradient here is listed as per-mille] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanning%E2%80%93Kunming_high-s...

The route could be significantly improved by dropping Palmdale and routing HSR through Tejon Pass instead. Going over Altamont instead of Pacheco is a harder sell because it means bypassing San Jose but would also be an improvement IMO.

Skipping all the Central Valley cities and running out along I-5 is kind of pointless though.

It doesn’t actually go into any of the cities though does it?

Do you mean in the sense that they are still working on it? The route goes straight through downtown Fresno, Bakersfield, and Madera (to the extent that "downtown Madera" exists).

The people who quibble over the alignment want it to go straight down I-5, bypassing millions of people but only shortening the route by about 50 miles.

the main problem with the alignment is palmdale/pacheco, which are going to cripple the project operationally and add a lot of unnecessary travel time. running through the downtown's is comparatively less of a shitshow (still a giant shitshow though). nobody runs HSR at full speed through downtowns.

It was the right choice in the end though IMO, it avoids an even harder to pass set of mountains and serves yet another high population town (175k people) and provides a potential transfer station for getting to Las Vegas bypassing LA for people in Northern California once Brightline West comes down I-15, only needing to build a branch line between Palmdale and Victorville.

no, palmdale is insanity. at 550km SF-LA is already marginal for high speed rail, that plus going out of the way to go through every single town in the central valley on the way down and then doing a huge zig zag to hit palmdale is going to cripple service. and also cost a lot of money. should have just followed I-5

Really going to have to disagree with you on that one, 3 hours SF to LA is well within HSR times (4 hour is considered the max), and will still be time competitive with flying because of how long it takes to check in and what a nightmare LAX is. Serving more people is absolutely higher value then the 50 total minutes lost going the route it's going.

Look at any HSR map in Europe and you'll see the same thing, the major city service is great, but it's the smaller regional service that makes the system and drives ridership. With remote work on the rise, people already are moving to smaller towns in between SF and LA, this gives them an alternative to driving when they need to go into the office. Once SJ to Merced service is operating, you could even reasonably do a daily commute, <1 hour.

Nobody is going to use this thing. The number of people moved by HSR in this route will be comical if they ever finish it which is also unlikely.

the ridership will be very high. the capacity will be shit because it's managed by a consultant mafia and criminally incompetent politicians who have gone out of the way to deliver the least train for the highest amount of dollars. the transbay terminal is nigh unusable as a train station [1], and instead of leaving the caltrain right of way as soon as possible (ie south of redwood city across the dumbarton through altamont) it's going to run in mixed traffic for caltrain's entire route, operationally crippling both caltrain and CAHSR and requiring huge investment in unnecessary quad tracking to claw back some of the capacity that would have come for free if altamont was built. all because san jose politicians have an inferiority complex and demand that diridon is served on the mainline, when it isn't even important enough to be served on a branch.

a great idea, ruined by the transit industrial complex

building pacheco instead of altamont is going to go down in history as the greatest failure of all time in bay area transit, surpassing even the impressively cursed BART SFO extension

[1] see richard mlynarik's writing on this

According to the map on this page, stations are planned right in Fresno and Bakersfield https://www.buildhsr.com/

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