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Comment by simonsarris | Hacker News Reader

Honestly this is the weirdest infrastructure project in the world.

Reminder that the initial plan was 130 miles of track laid by 2018. They are at 0.0 miles. The initial intended section they planned to finish wasn't even touching SF or LA, its in between with two fairly small cities (Merced to Bakersfield, populations 84K and 380K).

Is it even needed, for all this money? High speed rail between SF and LA would be neat for a bunch of upper-middle class people, but I would think > 90% of inhabitants would be better served simply by having better intra-metro-area rail. In other words it seems like LA would be better served by spending the billions on strong hub and spoke public transport in the ~20-40 mile area around LA far more than it needs a faster way to get to San Francisco.

But I'm far away on the outside looking in, maybe there's something crushlingly obvious to locals that I'm not seeing for why this is actually a great idea.

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Judging the road by its endpoints is not a fair assessment. Merced to Bakersfield will connect a large portion of the Central Valley, which is one of the most productive agricultural regions in the world with 7.2M people living in it. While indeed Merced and Bakersfield have 84K and 380K populations in the cities, the population of these and covered areas are much larger; (250K in Merced, 930K in Fresno area, 850K in Bakersfield, etc.)

edit: grammar

> is not a fair assessment

> one of the most productive agricultural regions

And since when farmers relied so heavily on trains for their commute?

Since trains were invented and the seasons kept cycling? The largest migrations of people are seasonal agricultural workers around the world.

Until gen z gets their polyculture garden cities with a large variety of crops for each season, I don't see that changing

Well, nobody relies heavily on trains for their commute in this region because the train hasn’t been built yet.

Also, a vast majority of the people who work in agriculture aren’t “farmers” who walk out of their house and till their own land. They are laborers, who often live far away from their work sites, which shift with the seasons.

Grape pickers using HSR to commute from their condo I. Palo Alto to the fields in Merced. Yep.

There are stops between those two places and “grape pickers” as you call them (though they do much more) also… do other things besides work. In fact, HSR will enable them to do those other things even more.

It will also allow people in those places to work other jobs besides “grape picking.”

Well, how about living in Merced and working in SF area? If a trip from Merced to SF would be less than 70mins, this would beat all rush-hour traffic along 101, and become viable living option.

It’s certainly not the “string of pearls” route that urban planning school told me was ideal for HSR (with Japan having some good examples of routes with big cities at relatively short intervals).

As an aside, I work for one of the main consultants on this project (wrote the state EIR, design criteria, program delivery, etc)… and I’m really glad my work has nothing to do with this project!

Ok, but central valley cities are all very car-oriented. If you take the train to Bakersfield you'll be in Bakersfield without a car. I've never been there to say for sure, but I suspect that's a bad time and you'd want to rent a car or take Uber when you arrive. Both of those aren't convenient, which is a problem for passenger rail in the US in general. You end up in a big parking lot by a strip mall near nothing walkable.

Sure but if you densify first then people start complaining there’s not enough parking. You need to do both.

Isn't it a classical chicken and egg problem? Reliance on car => no public transport; No public transport => reliance on car. Someone should make an effort to change it.

HSR isn’t “public transport.” Completely different things. And not even Japan has public transport serving agricultural places.

I would love to hear why HSR is not "public transport."

Also, Central valley is not just an agricultural place: "On less than 1 percent of the total farmland in the United States, the Central Valley produces 8 percent of the nation's agricultural output by value: US$43.5 billion in 2013." From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Valley_(California)

I'm not sure what your definition of public transport is. Regarding Japan, if you mean "publicly owned" then Japan Rail is private. If you mean "available to the public" then I can walk into Tokyo station 10min before a bullet train leaves, buy a ticket, and be in Kyoto in 2 hours.

“Public transit” means transit operated by or on behalf of municipalities for getting around cities or metro regions. Inter-city rail is generally not considered “public transit.”

It does not mean “available to the public.” You can also buy a plane ticket at Haneda and be in Kansai in less than 90 minutes. Japan Rail isn’t any more “public transit” than ANA.

I’m not sure what is the point in arguing semantics, but I’ll take the bait. I think you have a different idea of what public transit is then most people I’ve talked to.

Most other uses of the qualifier “public” are not this limited. e.g. public infrastructure, public art, and public libraries only requires that it is available to the public without major hurdles or restrictions, not who operates it and for what purpose. In my books, transit is no different. If a transit is available to the public it is public transit.

In fact there are many airlines which I consider public transit. Including domestic air travel in Iceland and Greenland (and even between Iceland and Greenland) is public transit.

In which case, I would find myself uttering the phrase "Tokyo has no public transit" which I don't think is the case. Every train in Tokyo is inter-city rail, and I think that seems to work just fine.

I have taken a train through agricultural areas of Japan. It was really nice actually. Tokyo Subway to Shinkansen to a regional train to a single car train. All with painless in-station transfers.

Also the California HSR project includes modernization of connecting services. Do you consider Caltrain to be public transit?

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/public%20transpor...

"a system of trains, buses, etc., that is paid for or run by the government"

I thinks the idea is companies would put their back offices in Bakersfield instead of Salt Lake or somewhere.

> If you take the train to Bakersfield you'll be in Bakersfield without a car

And if you live in SF or LA and are going to Bakersfield to visit friends or family, that won't be an issue at all. And Bakersfield will likely densify a bit with HSR. And maybe it'll cause higher ridership on the currently limited local transit options, allowing them to expand routes and increase frequency, increasing their usefulness to the local area.

I’ve actually taken the bus from LA to Bakersfield and the train onward to Oakland. Both were packed. Bakersfield is not a prosperous city by any means. I doubt car ownership is any higher there then in LA. The people that live there deserve to be able to travel comfortably to nearby cities without having to have to put in the expense of owning a car.

The area around the current Amtrak station is actually quite walkable, with some transit serving it (I’m not so sure about the planed HSR station north of downtown, though hopefully they’ll make some improvements before it opens in 2030).

To be fair some of the HSR money did end up being spent on electrifying CalTrain, the Bay Area commuter railway on which HSR will run unto SF. The upgrade to 1970s tech should improve service substantially since electric trains accelerate much faster.

25kV was developed in the 1960s but is a world standard now. It’s the only thing that makes sense.

If you've ever driven the I-5 Corridor, it isn't exactly always an easy thing.

To be able to do LA-SF without the possibility of a road accident causing you a multiple-hour delay is a huge benefit.

Intra-state would be even better. Link the entire West coast with high-speed passenger rail.

West coast is no where near dense enough to support mass transit rail system. You would have to get in your car, drive to a central rail station, park in a massive parking garage, ride the train to your destination, then rent a car when you get there. At that point you basically have slower and far more expensive version of an airport.

Many east coast cities have the advantage of being planned out before cars so they are structured for high urban density. It is different in cities like LA or SF where it's all about urban sprawl.

yeah i did that flight dozens of times and super simply easy and cheap. dont see the benefit of making it a train

Scale. Cost. The continued existence of humanity.

scale and cost are already coveted by the plane. the last seems dramatic

You can’t scale air travel to serve as many people as HSR. There’s not room and we don’t have enough pilots. Airlines are already barely keeping up. Rail is much less expensive than flying because trains don’t have to overcome gravity. It’s simple physics.

The science is settled, we can’t all drive cars, let alone all fly. We have to stop burning gas to get around. HSR enables that and enables more sustainable urban development.

There’s nothing dramatic about this. These are plain facts. If we don’t act now future generations will suffer.

HSR will make California a more hospitable and sustainable place to live.

La sure, SF is one of the densest cities in the US and one of like two where it isn’t terrible to get by without a car

LA has areas of density. LA as a whole though includes large mountain ranges where almost no one lives. It would be like including the Marin headlands in SF and saying SF isn't that dense.

> Many east coast cities have the advantage of being planned out before cars so they are structured for high urban density. It is different in cities like LA or SF where it's all about urban sprawl.

San Francisco is the second densest city of its population or larger in the United States (behind NYC), and has about 50% greater density than the third, which is Chicago, not an East Coast city.

Also the LA-Long Beach-Santa Anna metro is the densest metro area in the US, and San Francisco-Oakland-Fremont is the fourth.

You are experience circular thinking.

California is living with sprawl therefore you can never do anything to fix sprawl. That the worst possible thing you can do for LITERALLY every metric, water use, energy use, noise pollution, living cost, housing cost and the list goes on and on.

You will not fix any of the problems if you continue to use that excuse. And despite what people seem to think, you can actually fix city design and sprawl. Having a decent train-station that connects you to other places is a good start. From the there you have trams and buses going out. And then you do higher density infill development along all those routes.

This has been argued by city planners for 30+ years and its not that difficult.

What exactly stops LA from having any working public transit in the first place? Why this _thing_ would not prevent LA from public transit with HSR as well?

The answer is very simple: Most of the LA metro is not LA. You can build a rapid transit system to Huntington Beach[a], but if the Huntington Beach municipality doesn’t allow for dense housing, parking, and right of way around their train station it’s a railway to nowhere. Policy is geographically shattered in Southern California, and it takes only a lawsuit or furious public comment period to throw a wrench in a wide ranging public goods project. It’s a prisoner’s dilemma: Why should we rezone our single family homes so the riffraff from Hollywood can enjoy our own precious town?

[a] So called because the Huntington street car system used to go there!

So, HSR will have exactly the same issues as current airports right now: lack of transportation. So the main selling point of HSR (saving time) is diluted somewhat by a necessity to rent a car next to the train station. I’m wondering how many ppl will pick planes just because the traffic is better outside of downtown where all the train stations are.

You can live next to a train station. Like, within walking distance. You can’t live next to an airport. Transit connections are much easier with trains. You can catch a local light rail or bus directly from the station.

This is what the entire rest of the world does. It actually isn’t hard at all.

By the rest of the world you mean Europe, right? Because outside of Europe it’s not really the case. Granted, i’ve not visited every country on earth, but in most cases i’ve seen “small livable downtown” is mostly an European thing. In other cases, you will need to take a looong ride home from the downtown (1h+).

You can attribute this to the economics of the Renaissance pre-modern Europe. Most regions and peoples of the world imported modern economies to go straight from Dark Ages to globalism. Europe somewhat uniquely transitioned to dense, walkable mercantile centers during this period before spreading the system abroad, whether by sword or ship.

"The Civilization of Europe in the Renaissance" by John Hale is a great, lengthy reference here.

Did you reply to the right comment? I never said everyone gets to live in an idyllic neighborhood that serves their needs for housing, work, and entertainment. What I said is it is possible to live near rail and transit but not air.

  What exactly stops LA from having any working public transit in the first place?

Nothing. In fact LA is building out more light rail than the Bay Area and they're doing a damn good job of it.

When first it was approved, the Bakersfield routing appeared to be a boondoggle to get a specific vote.

But the more I think about it the more important I think it is to tie the Central Valley into SV, SF, and the LA basin. It will reduce housing pressure, move some industry into the Central Valley, and tie a red place together with a blue and a purple area.

And it was smart to start in the reddest part of the state and give them any benefit first.

Its so that you don't have to go threw the mountains and that should actually make it cheaper.

Most housing needs to be fixed with infill, not continuing sprawl around more cities.

Not to mention there will no water left after draining the Colorado River and the place will need to be abandoned before any rail can be used.

Wrong priorities here. You cannot continue agriculture in a desert.

https://calmatters.org/environment/2022/08/colorado-river-wa...

To be honest I think the debates over the route miss the main issue, namely why the project is so expensive. If we could bring costs down to Spanish levels (not a country that is known for its frugality!), we could build both a direct SF-LA route and a route that hits the Central Valley cities, along with spurs to San Diego and Sacramento, and still save more than $40 billion over what the current SF-LA line is expected to cost.

Instead the debates get reduced to "we should build this no matter what the cost" and "we should cancel the project entirely." There doesn't seem to be much interest in digging into why the costs of the project are so out of line with other countries. (Which, to be fair, is a hard question to answer).

Such a project's costs are highly location specific - labour costs, geography, regulatory environment, existing infrastructure to adapt to/connect to/work around, etc. However, it usually gets better over time with experience.

Fully on agree on trying to get costs down to Spanish-levels and other developed world costs, and building everywhere while saving money.

But the reasons for the dysfunction are pretty straight forward: there is group of engineering consultancies and construction firms (Parsons, Bechtel, HNTB, AECOM, and other non-household names) that have captured the system and profit handsomely from the status quo. All those billions of taxpayer money is going somewhere, and it's their bank accounts.

When I look at it the three things I note are

The high speed rail from Grapevine to the San Fernando Valley isn't going to happen because of geology + money. Which leaves Bakersfield, Tehachapi, Palmdale as the viable route.

Gilroy to Bakerfield is the same distance whether you go down I5 or HWY99.

And the current rail corridor needs a bunch of grade separation work done. It would be dumb to build grade separated high speed rail on the west side of the valley. And at the same time also build duplicate grade separation on the east side.

If you look at the current work being done about half if it is the above mentioned grade separation.

I'll also mention the point of high speed rail was to carry passengers quickly but not as fast as possible from SF to LA. Really there are four goals. Connect the northern and southern passenger rail lines. Grade separation in the central valley. Commuter rail in the Bay Area and Socal. And avoid having to upgrade airport capacity.

I believe almost all long distance high speed train proposals are based on land banking for future value increase, and nonsense like that. The actual social benefit agenda is secondary to an investment model which sees speculative rise in land and property value along the route at strategic locations with a very long tail, and the local and state tax outcomes which follow motivate agreements by authorities.

Instance in point: Brisbane Cross River rail. The economic impact statement is spectacular for land, rent, rate and building income. Same for intercity rail Sydney Brisbane Melbourne. For Brisbane, a state minister lost her job over a house purchase near a significant rail development (rightly or wrongly) but it's even explicit in economic modelling: they bank the future economic impact.

>Reminder that the initial plan was 130 miles of track laid by 2018. They are at 0.0 miles.

This is a bit of a disingenuous take. There is a significant amount of work to be done before tracks get laid. There are dozens of active construction projects right now including building bridges, viaducts, overcrossings and grade separations. Actually laying the high speed track is probably one of the last things they'll do (there's no value in having tracks laid until a substantial section can be laid without gaps).

See: https://www.buildhsr.com/

Any infrastructure project that touches land is going to be bogged down in a NIMBY quagmire in California. That includes your LA metro rail proposal. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2022-04-20/the-landm...

The stupidest part is that now we have politicians campaigning on not doing big infrastructure projects instead of fixing the things that make them fail.

CityNerd does an informative video on SF-LA highspeed rail vs aircraft[0]. Your variables may vary.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Cvt8QA4SvY

"The Concord" models often get speculated as the future, but as often the energy economics does not sustain.

There is perhaps a very probable risk of rising energy costs this decade, which might make such models unfeasible.

In that light, your comment makes a lot of sense to me.

I was just in South Florida, and they have one of the few good setups in the US for this with Miami-Ft Lauderdale-W Palm Beach being close, but far enough that getting on the hellscape of I-95 is daunting. The train is fairly slow by HSR standards, but the routes are straight, and there are only 3 stops total (they are adding Orlando for the 4th).

By contrast, the CA HSR is connecting two dense areas with not much in between. Because of all the “stakeholder” negotiations, it is not straight, and there are far too many stops. There is no need for a stop in LA and Burbank and Palmdale. The Palmdale stop is a bit mindblowing. There are 170k people in Palmdale. You don’t need a stop in Anaheim and Fullerton and Norwalk. I could keep going

This was a real lost opportunity. There should have been 4 stops total: Anaheim-LA-SJ-SF. The result of all this is that the trip is going to take too long to make sense vs a 45 minute flight

Much faster, cheaper, and comfortable to take HSR between major metros a few hundred miles apart than fly. For a trip like Osaka to Tokyo it’s a no brainer, the airport experience fails in every category. The issue with CAHSR is that it’s right at the margin of economic sense. LA and SF are huge metros, but they are far enough apart that airfare will still be competitive for many even if this project succeeds.

What if we stopped subsidizing fuel costs? What if we accounted for environmental externality?

California HSR is forward looking. Every state in the nation should be building and expanding public transit infrastructure. It’s an existential necessity.

yes, the LA metro area is roughly 18.5M people (nearly half of CA; the bay area is about half of this at ~9.5M) and the 2nd densest metro area in the country (though that density is pretty unevenly distributed).

improving the LA metro would have provided better bang for buck, but it doesn't spread the wealth nearly as much, and we're already building metro rail here as part of the run up to the '28 olympics (but not nearly enough, given that the LA region extends roughly 100 miles along the main axes).

the main problem with this HSR is that it doesn't beat air for time or price between LA/SF, and that accounts for the majority of the projected trips (and purported benefit) of this rail line. i've done the air trip many times, and door-to-door times are about 4-5 hours, while this train will take that long without the door-to-door part (though city center to city center is nice, if they ever complete that part).

It is mandated to take under 2 hours and 40 minutes between LA and San Francisco, not 4-5 hours.

The whole point of HSP rail so connect the different rail-system and serve a backbone between the northern and southern rail systems.

If you want to be serious about rail, having a such a backbone makes sense.

Of course, you need to continue improving regional rail as well. And as far as I know, California has been trying to do that too.

California HSR includes modernizing connecting services. Caltrain is converting to world standard 25kV overhead lines. Service starts in 2024.

I would love a postmortem of the whole thing, understand what on Earth happened there.

Vox basically did exactly this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S0dSm_ClcSw

tl;dr: US regulation makes it too easy for individuals to sue and stall megaprojects like this into nonstop litigation

They pretty much chose the most expensive route possible, requiring long urban viaducts and numerous tunnels through seismically active areas. It is probably unconstructible, but the engineering consultants made out.

Some perspective from the UK: HS1 completed in 2009 for domestic passengers (also used by the Eurostar to Europe) is our first high speed railway since the 60s. The three "high speed" stations on the route once leaving central London are Stratford (London Olympics 2012 site), Ebbsfleet, and Ashford, have between them probably had close to 200,000 homes built within walking/cycling distance of the station. Further 'slow line' stations that the services serve once they leave the high speed line probably contribute as much new housing again. That's over the 30 years of route planning to opening.

Yes, there's a bit of a spurious correlation between the UK house building, and the high speed line, but there is a direct and indirect economic correlation.

Regarding 'personal safety' on the service. Trains in the UK are typically pretty safe, but the HS1 route in particular, they're obsessive about catching fare dodgers, so the trains are staffed with 'revenue protection officers', and often British Transport Police (and branch of the police force peculiar to the railway).

And then there's Canary Wharf, reachable from... Stratford on the HS1 route. The former London Docklands that since the late 80s/early 90s has gone from being acres of empty docks, to skyscraper offices and skyscraper apartment blocks (pretty uncommon in London).

My point being that there's a virtuous circle of 'build it and they will come'. Planning is everything in making it successful. In fact, any large infrastructure project in the UK is government planned (federal - in the US?), and the cost/benefit value is calculated, and explains why the south and south-east of England gets a disproportionate amount of investment, because the economic returns are so high. California high speed rail would have money thrown at it if it were in the UK.

I really hope California's high speed rail works. But people need to be patient. It really is going to be 20 or 30 years before the economic and social benefits become obvious to everyone.

In the UK if there's a mainline station in a city, we typically build many high rise office buildings in and around that station wherever possible, and then the outer stations often become 'dormitory towns'. I'd envisage something similar in California. The areas around the terminal stations in particular will grow offices, and the other stations, will see more housing and commuters. If, of course, working from home doesn't kill it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Speed_1

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canary_Wharf

I think there’s a lot to learn from the UK’s rail system so thanks for sharing this.

> In fact, any large infrastructure project in the UK is government planned (federal - in the US?)

California the state is more comparable to the UK than the UK is to the US.

California is about 60% of the population of the UK in 170% of the land.

California: 40,000,000 people in 163,000 square miles

UK: 67,000,000 people in 94,000 square miles

US: 330,000,000 people in 3,800,000 square miles

So I think UK rail modernization is probably actually pretty comparable to California HSR.

Federal dollars and regulators are involved in California HSR but it’s a necessity in the United States that the states do a lot of this for themselves.

people get realt sensitive if you criticize their boondoggle because they worship public transit even if its clearly awfully executed

Not weird when you understand its intended purpo$e.

This is the most money wasted on something nobody wants in the history of California. It’s just a kickback scheme for political supporters

As someone that lives in the Bay Area and doesn't want to fly or drive to LA I want this so bad.

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