Hacker News Reader

Comment by chabons | Hacker News Reader

I don't have a ton of familiarity with the project or the region, but the section of rail in the linked article certainly looks like it makes sense to me. A high-speed connection including the airport and downtowns of the two major metros seems like a decent project.

View on HN

Why would you connect the two airports if the point is supposed to be that you don’t have to use the airports?

I'm not sure if this will actually be an HSR stop, but it would be super convenient for someone living in e.g. Fresno: Instead of having to use a connector flight to SFO, you can just take the train and transfer.

There are formal partnerships between rail providers and airlines around the world, where your train ride is treated like a leg of your flight. You have a guaranteed connection, and often your bag is transferred from the train to your airplane.

  Why would you connect the two airports if the point is supposed to be that you don’t have to use the airports?

What? That sounded pretty hinky to me so I looked at the wiki page. The only airport included in Phase 1 is Burbank. Phase 2 includes proposed station at San Diego and Ontario airports. Soooo no, there's no direct service to any Bay Area airport or LAX. Being able to stop right in the heart of the destination city is one of the key advantages of rail.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_High-Speed_Rail#Pha...

There are, however, stations in downtown San Francisco, San Jose, and Los Angeles.

Edit: And just to throw a bone to the anti-HSR folks: the downtown SF situation is still a clusterfuck the net result of which is a billion dollar bus station and a poorly connected (4th/King) rail station. There's a ton of related stuff that needs to be fixed, but needs to be fixed is still better than never going to happen.

The Millbrae stop is a very short transfer to SFO.

The Millbrae station is a gigantic clusterfuck and is best ignored.

BART's kind of remedied the situation, but for a while their operational costs were so high that there was no direct SFO-Millbrae service during the day. You had to backtrack all the way to San Bruno. By 2019 there was a "shuttle", and now the red (but not yellow!) line serves SFO and Millbrae.

In addition the Caltrain/BART connection at Millbrae requires a lot of walking. It's tedious and poorly designed.

A friend from Japan landed at SFO on a Sunday and figured they would take the train to Mountain View. It took them four hours to take one BART to San Bruno, a second to Millbrae and a Caltrain to MV.

Part of that is because there is only one train per hour on Sunday, and its a slow local. The latter is going to improve a bit soon since electrification is nearly done, but I somewhat doubt service is going to get much more frequent on the weekend.

The BART connection does suck, but I dont know how it look 2 hours to get to the Caltrain Station.

This is true. I am intentionally flying in to San Jose on Monday because I hate the Millbrae disaster of "which train goes where".

Let’s say you want to provide an alternative to flying between some major airports. Wouldn’t you want it connected to them so people arriving on one end had a really convenient way to just get on the alternative system?

> Let’s say you want to provide an alternative to flying between some major airports.

This seems like first-order analysis: people fly between SFO and LA so let's build a railway between them.

Second-order analysis: people actually want to go from downtown SF to downtown LA, so build a railway between those places directly.

Why would be provide an alternate to a clearly superior technology?

Because mass transit is most useful when it connects transportation hubs. It would be insane for major high speed rail not to connect to airports.

Because the train stops other places too, and it allows the train to replace both SF/LA flights as well one leg of a Fresno -> SFO -> somewhere else flight.

One example - I can get a direct flight from my city in Australia to LA, but not to SF. Would be useful to be able to take the train from the airport at LA into somewhere in SF.

So it could potentially replace a lot of short-haul connecting flights.

You are mistaken. I doubt you will choose to take a train from LA to SF if you are already at the airport. I haven't kept up with the details of just how slow "high speed" rail is supposed to be, but to those who live in California just seeing Fresno on the route triggers an immediate reaction of "why are you going 100 miles off the direct route?"

Pulling up a map of Australia, this is the equivalent of setting out to improve transport from Canberra to Melbourne, and the first sections to be built will connect Leeton to Echuca.

It’s supposed to be less than three hours, so I’d definitely consider it as an option.

Because that's how it is in almost any major modern metro area in the world. Forming a tunnel vision into only one aspect of an issue almost always leads to bad outcomes, maybe except in programming and specifically in unit testing.

because people flying into SJ from elsewhere (therefore not taking the train) can take the HSR to get into SF instead of driving (and vice-versa)

If I flew from New York to San Francisco, then I can go to another location on the HSR route. Isn’t that straightforward?

Airports are great sources/destinations of passengers who don't have cars.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com