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Comment by nalrey | Hacker News Reader

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

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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).

> 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.

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