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Comment by barbacoa | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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