Comment by inferiorhuman | Hacker News Reader

Comment by inferiorhuman | Hacker News Reader

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  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".

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