California Isn’t Backing Off Bullet Train | Hacker News Reader

California Isn’t Backing Off Bullet Train

nytimes.com

43 pointsdanso93 comments

For the last two years I worked on autonomous cars. The one thing everyone in our company agreed on, regardless of political persuasion, was that robo-cars were going to thunder fuck the high speed rail. A 2033 deadline makes this all but certain.

I tend to agree that autonomous vehicles will revolutionize not only transport but society. That's how big I think they'll be. Say goodbye to the vast majority of automobile deaths every year.

But that still doesn't address the problem facing most large cities: gridlock. Whether the cars are automated or not won't drastically change that (although it may well reduce arterial traffic clogs due to accidents and rubbernecking) because there are still more cars than the roads can handle.

I really don't know why California is pursuing this. Planes are entirely valid solution to the problem of travelling between LA and SF. Why spend billions on an alternative that's going to take twenty years?

If anything, spend the money on public transport to reduce reliance on cars. The situation is decent in SF, poor in the Valley (Caltrain covers a limited area and runs quite infrequently) and woeful in LA. The 101 out of SF tends to be a car park at certain times (although not as bad as LA).

The big problem is that LA isn't really space-constrained. It has the ocean on the west but has sprawled far north, south and east. People like their big homes and that's a recipe for disaster when it comes to public transport. The only places public transport seems to work at all are those areas densely population or that have existing infrastructure (eg the commuter belt around NYC). But Dallas? Atlanta? LA? Chicago? Very limited public transport.

Actually, the robotic car will make for very cheap cabs that can be much smaller. Most will only need to carry a passenger and can have a much smaller engine without the need for speed that human drivers have.

So, smaller vehicles almost always moving and not parking will take up a lot less room per person-mile.

Why would it need a smaller engine? The load and cargo of the car is identical.

(i.e. one passenger, and one driver weigh exactly the same.)

The assumption is that autonomous cars would decrease the cost of taxi-style usage to the point where it competes with ownership, since you wouldn't have to pay for a driver.

When I buy a (non-autonomous) car, I size it for the maximum load I might want to carry. For the autonomous taxi, I can just rent the minimally-sized car for the trip that I'm currently on. If I'm by myself, the autonomous cab could even be a one-seater. Plus, I don't have to park it.

I still don't get what the difference autonomous makes. You can rent a car today. If one seaters were practical they would be rentable. Autonomous isn't going to change that.

Autonomous sounds great - but not because of car or engine size.

An autonomous single seater comes to you where you need it. A single seat, non-autonomous rental car doesn't come to you unless there is a driver, or a delivery vehicle with a driver, to bring it to you. The economics aren't going to be the same.

Its simply too costly to get the optimal size cab to a customer today. So cabs are usually much bigger than the average car. Flexibility is more important.

And cabs make up a small percentage of the overall market. And most of the cost of a cab ride is labor.

But if automated cabs become the norm, the cost of a cab ride will be governed by the size of the vehicle. And if a car costs 25 cents a mile to operate, a cab ride from my house to San Francisco will still cost me $11.

If a 1-seater with barely an engine and no trunk can do it for 10 cents a mile or $4.50, there will be demand. That's the commuter, the guy making 40 trips a month, who'd save $260 a month for giving up empty space.

Of course, we really don't know how this will all play out. But it will be fun to find out.

Automation will do the same thing for all kinds of things we rent.

Right now, the costs of finding items at the best price, going to get them and the manual paperwork involved, often make owning them easier.

But once all that is automated and you can rent the exact drill you need for a dollar an hour and it can be there in 15 minutes, why would you buy it?

And, yes, it will be delivered by a robotic vehicle, probably no bigger than a breadbox.

A robotic cab doesn't NEED a smaller engine. It can get by with a much smaller engine.

A robotic cab doesn't need a driver. Or a front seat for him. Or a powerful engine to suit his lead foot.

A personal robotic car will be the same size. But a lot fewer people will need them when they can call cabs for less money per mile. Especially in urban areas where storing cars is a big expense.

Frankly, I don't see how public transportation will be able to compete. Its too slow and inconvenient and completely unavailable after certain times.

In other words, the bullet train is doubling down on old technology that is highly inflexible and a big time waster.

But, hey, maybe people like going to Bakersfield.

>Planes are entirely valid solution to the problem of traveling between LA and SF

The problem is that LA and SF-area airports are almost at capacity and increasing that capacity through adding runways or building new airports would be a significant undertaking (several 10s of $billions) that would face a number of hurdles. Air travel is also affected by weather issues that don't affect HSR.

And air travel is less efficient, noisier, and dependent on fossil fuels than gliding over a maglev track.

As far as I know, the High Speed Rail system is not maglev and modern trains have roughly them same energy efficiency as modern planes.

That's interesting. I'd instinctively presumed that HSR would be much more energy efficient than flying, but the quick research I did indicates you are right. Electric HSR probably has the edge if you are willing to assume hydroelectric generation, but it mostly comes down to projected ridership. A full plane beats and empty train, and vice versa.

Chicago isn't land constrained, but has a dense urban core (roughly comparable in overall density to London) and has great public transportation, both within the city and within the larger metro area (http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/77/Metra-Sys...).

Proper urban planning can go a long way.

"Proper" urban planning is helped tremendously when the city was planned and reached critical mass in the days before the automobile and freeway systems really took hold.

> Whether the cars are automated or not won't drastically change that because there are still more cars than the roads can handle.

Automated taxi cabs + existing public transit would solve gridlock... go outside to your auto-cab, take it to the rail, get off the rail into a different auto-cab, arrive at work.

> But that still doesn't address the problem facing most large cities: gridlock. Whether the cars are automated or not won't drastically change that (although it may well reduce arterial traffic clogs due to accidents and rubbernecking) because there are still more cars than the roads can handle.

Humans are going to be a lot less efficient than computers in driving cars. With proper networking, you could have cars doing 60mph while only a few car lengths from each other, vastly increasing the capacity of any segment of road.

For example, the presence of an unexpected crash or obstruction down the road can be relayed back at the speed of light via networked cars, and the entire wave of cars behind the crash can slow down and reroute.

There have been some simulation papers on this, comparing humans vs. automatic driving algorithms. It's similar to automatic control in other areas.

>With proper networking, you could have cars doing 60mph while only a few car lengths from each other, vastly increasing the capacity of any segment of road.

That works if 100% of the cars are autonmous. I'm betting that even if automous cars were available tomorrow, it would take longer than 20 years for that to be true.

I think there's a threshold beyond which it becomes socially mandatory for all cars to be autonomous. The pressures will be enormous at a certain point. Endangering the lives of others when there's an option to not do so, etc etc.

What that threshold percentage is and how the transition will be accomplished in practical terms, I don't know. But I do believe the pressures will manifest themselves mightily.

>I think there's a threshold beyond which it becomes socially mandatory for all cars to be autonomous.

Economics are still going to be the driving factor (no pun intended) for the poor and working class. As long as beater non-automated cars are going to cost less than the (used but still newer) automated cars, and as long as cars are still going to be necessary in much of the USA, there are still going to be normal cars around.

At some point (say in 40-50 years, and if "classic" driver cars are outlawed) I think we'll reach that point, but then that weakens the argument of autonomous cars (and its benefits) getting here before the CA HSR project.

I would imagine it would start with restricted lanes just for autonomous cars - I would be fine doing the start and end of the drive, and letting the car take over for the long distance stretch.

I think you are right, there will be a tipping point at some stage. For something that is so thoroughly baked into the American way of life, I think 20 years isnt a bad estimate.

I'm not totally up on autonomous car tech, but while very promising, it still seems to be proof of concept stage. To me that means ~10 years from commercializarion, and then at least 10 years before it has penetrated enough of the fleet that you can even start to consider making it mandatory. Automotive engineering is conservative because of the scale and age of the industry, the cost of the goods sold, and the risks inherent in their failure. Automobile owners are conservative because cars are big purchases.

The thing about timeframes like that is that there are enough unknowns that estimates can easily be 2x too optimistic.

I tend to agree that rail (whether urban light rail, or region high speed rail) may not be the most cost effective way to move a lot of people from point a to point b given existing patterns of development, I know that part of the reason planners favor it is that its cost comes comes as part of a permanence that can shape the way communities develop around it over the long term.

They seem to have little in common, aside from the fact that both get people from A to B with relatively little attention required on the part of the people.

High speed rail is:

(a) Vastly more efficient

(b) Much faster (SF -> LA in < 3 hours, versus ~6.5 for a car)

(d) Much more comfortable (compare Amtrak to a private automobile)

How do autonomous cars overcome these deficiencies?

One can probably presume by the time autonomous cars are mainstream that all of these might all be the case. Fully automated highways will probably have vehicles that look and feel nothing like the cars of today.

Trains and buses suffers from last mile problems on each end. And you sometimes/often have to share an air space with rude, dirty, sometimes crazy people. Not so with individual vehicles. Now make them electric (to reduce pollution and enabling the getting off of fossil fuels) and automated (to reduce frequency of accidents, and wear-and-tear caused by aggressive driving, etc, etc.) and the trade-offs can look attractive.

Admittedly, I'm no expert on electric cars, but they always make me feel like the emperor isn't wearing any clothes.

Electricity is frequently generated by fossil fuels like coal. Electric cars don't reduce pollution, they just move it to wherever the coal is being burned.

You have to get the electricity to the car from the far-away power plant, which means you're going to suffer from transmission loss (e.g. not every watt that is generated is going to make it to your drivetrain).

Finally, we suck at making batteries. They're still big heavy lumps of highly toxic materials that wear out in relatively short amounts of time. What do you do with all the exhausted batteries?

Like everyone, I'm all for making our infrastructure more environmentally-friendly. Sadly, I'm not convinced electric vehicles are anywhere close to where we'd need them to be. I feel like we have a lot of misplaced enthusiasm from people who want to clean up the industrial age a lot sooner than we realistically can.

Moving the electrical generation to a central point allows you to build more sustainable power plants that only really work at scale - just try building a windmill on a single car, or a nuclear plant that can fir in your trunk.

Electric cars don't reduce pollution

They most certainly do. Even the latest, most wonderfully advanced gasoline engines are positively filthy compared to a modern coal plant, which is positive filthy compared to a nuclear plant, which is positively filthy compared to a solar/wind/wave plant.

You have that last one backwards, nuclear is cleaner than solar/wind/wave, because you are forgetting just how much land those need.

How does land use have anything to do with pollution?

Because you have to construct them, and it takes a ton of energy to do so. The construction process also produces a lot of waste.

You aren't taking into consideration the vast amounts of concrete and steel that go into a nuclear plant, nor the mining and refining of the uranium, nor, for that matter, it's disposal.

Further, I think you are overestimating the impact of building and deploying wind turbines. They may require a lot of land, but their physical footprint is pretty small, and most of the land around them can be used for other purposes, like agriculture.

I am taking those into consideration. A nuclear plant produces a tremendous amount of energy for the materials it's made from.

I was doing the math, and this document popped up as a search: https://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&q=cache:UjtsvTfrOgQJ:...

So they did the math for me - wind turbines require 60 times as many resources as nuclear. The amount of uranium needed is tiny, very very tiny. And all the uranium ever made can be disposed of in one site, it's not really a lot.

They also require far far more land. I don't just mean how much air space, but the actual tower.

Wind turbines are better than coal, and since we are building lots of coal plants I am all for wind. But they are not better than nuclear - not even close.

>> And you sometimes/often have to share an air space with rude, dirty, sometimes crazy people.

Oh come on. God forbid you are ever forced to interact with another human. The bubbleization of "society" is a concept that we are better served by fighting, not further embracing. Sure, there are some crazies on public transportation. I also met one of my best friends on a train. On the whole, the balance of public-transportation-riders I've interacted with has yielded far more beneficial interactions than negative ones. This as compared to my fellow car-commuters, whom which interactions generally fell on a spectrum between honks and extended medial digits.

I guess the two could compliment each other if the automated cars were more like taxis, and their main purpose was to move people to and from train stations.

That's the biggest problem I can see with train travel in the US... the country is too spread out so you need some sort of flexible integrated travel to support the trains.

b) and c) might wind up solved by reduced traffic jams, and d) assumes cars wouldn't change any once becoming autonomous.

The other benefit is that I don't have to own a train (although that would be quite awesome). Buying monthly Metrocards for a year will cost you about $1200, significantly less than car payments, gas, insurance payments, repair payments, ...

> (a) Vastly more efficient

But without occupancy/ridership figures and precise fuel consumption statistics (including the amortized energy expenditure used to build the train), it is not at all obvious that trains beat cars from a fuel-efficiency-per-passenger standpoint. Given the price tag on the train, it is not obvious that it is more efficient from a cost-efficiency-per-passenger standpoint either.

> (b) Much faster (SF -> LA in < 3 hours, versus ~6.5 for a car)

But the door-to-door time is what truly matters. You aren't factoring in travel time to and from the train station, or wait time at the stations.

> (c) Not subject to traffic (which can greatly increase the latter time)

As noted above, the first and last legs (involving getting to the train station) are subject to traffic. The train leg itself is subject to wait times as it won't be running 24/7 with a new train leaving every minute. In addition, there will likely be nontrivial TSA/VIPER security checkpoints that will further slow down travel.

  http://motherjones.com/mojo/2011/06/tsa-swarms-8000-bus-
  stations-public-transit-systems-yearly

  Think you could avoid the TSA's body scanners and pat-
  downs by taking Amtrak? Think again.

> (d) Much more comfortable (compare Amtrak to a private automobile)

This is highly arguable. You can directly control the cleanliness/comfort/appearance of your own automobile, but you cannot control the cleanliness of public transport.

Moreover, you can leave items overnight in your car, play music without headphones, and have a full volume conversation on a hands-free headset (or with a passenger) without someone else overhearing. You can't do this on a train.

>In addition, there will likely be nontrivial TSA/VIPER security checkpoints that will further slow down travel.

If Amtrak's experience is any indication, this won't be an issue: http://cs.trains.com/TRCCS/forums/t/188504.aspx?PageIndex=1

Unfortunately, VIPR does not seem to be going away. Your article was from March of this year in Savannah. As is common practice at most federal agencies, TSA paused the program for a bit till the outcry blew over.

Then they started it up again. Take a look at this clip from October.

http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2011/10/like-tsa...

  "Today's VIPR searches did not come from any particular threat"

  "Where is a terrorist more apt to be found? Not these days 
  on an airplane more likely on the interstate," said 
  Tennessee Department of Safety & Homeland Security 
  Commissioner Bill Gibbons.

http://news.slashdot.org/story/11/10/28/1921254/tsas-vipr-bi...

  According to TSA Administrator John Pistole's testimony 
  before the Senate last June, 'TSA conducted more than 
  8,000 VIPR operations in the [previous] 12 months, 
  including more than 3,700 operations in mass-transit and 
  passenger-railroad venues.' He wants a 50% budget increase 
  for VIPR for 2012. Imagine what TSA would do with the 
  extra funding."

The TSA Administrator himself says 3700 operations were done "in mass-transit and passenger-railroad venues". One of them got blogged, which is why there was an outcry and temporary pullback. But major news stations have just ignored this or bent over (see the Tennessee report above), though even the VIPR name is like a parody from a bad movie.

Any train that costs $XX billion dollars is going to be deemed a terrorist target, so you can expect insane TSA/VIPR searches. This will further erode any purported time/convenience advantages.

VIPR also operates on roadways (highway rest stops, truck weigh stations, etc) so in comparing car vs train delays, at best it's a push.

>Any train that costs $XX billion dollars is going to be deemed a terrorist target, so you can expect insane TSA/VIPR searches.

If that was true, we'd have insane VIPR searches right now on the Northeast Corridor, not to mention we would be seeing terrorists targeting HSR in Europe and Asia.

VIPR is ramping up now, and their budget will be increased next year. Here's one more link to an Amtrak/VIPR search from earlier this month, indicating that the Amtrak head of police only succeeded in slowing rather than stopping the program.

http://blogs.sacbee.com/crime/archives/2011/11/tsa-conducts-...

  November 4, 2011

  TSA agents search Amtrak trains in Sacramento

  Transportation Security Administration agents boarded 
  Amtrak trains in Sacramento today to conduct one of their 
  periodic VIPR operations, officials said.

Our priors appear to be different on (a) whether the TSA's VIPR is likely to gain power and (b) whether they will start with centralized arteries like trains. From a practical standpoint, they can't set up checkpoints at every traffic intersection in the country, but they can set up checkpoints at every train station. Thus I don't agree that the two situations are equivalent in expected VIPR delay, and I do believe that we are going to see sharply increasing searches of Amtrak/train passengers, as nothing else TSA has done has been seriously resisted, let alone rolled back.

But opinions may differ, so I'll leave it at that.

It's also not 6.5 hours to drive from LA to SF. I've gone from city to city, door to door, in roughly 5 hours, a number of times.

know some people enjoying 110-120+ mi/hour on that route :)

For one thing, autonomous cars can, theoretically, increase the practical carrying capacity of individual roadways, they can also better utilize the capacity of road networks by routing vehicles to underutilized roads. This would mitigate the impact of traffic.

For the same reasons they can increase practical carrying capacity, they can also increase practical fuel efficiency, because the vehicles can be kept moving at a near constant speed with minimal breaking.

Sure. if you don't care about the environment, are willing to pay more (for petrol) overall, have enough roads that everyone can have their own car, and can put up with the inevitable congestion....

Although I'm sure the present-day 'business case' agrees with you, I don't think this means it is necessarily the right thing to do.

It doesn't have to be an either-or situation, they may be able to coexist together. For autonomous personal vehicles, you get an end-to-end solution that is infinitely flexible, but may be subject to congestion, parking and ownership problems. For HSR, you have higher speeds between metro areas without having to worry about parking, fuel or weather, at the cost of not having a door-to-door solution or the flexibility of a personal car.

Depending on your trip, one method may be more desirable than another. In October, I made two trips from Western MA to NYC. The first time I drove - my schedule was unknown, I had a lot of baggage with me and I wasn't staying in Manhattan so it made sense to drive. The second trip was for a day meeting in mid-town, so taking the train made more sense.

There is single perfect mode, diversity in transportation matters.

200-300 mph autonomous cars? Getting the right of ways only gets harder for trains. The only reason that it's going to take so long is because people are in the way, a lot of people.

In 30 years, the trains can be swapped out for 400 mph Maglevs.

You can't simply "swap" out trains for maglev, it's a completely different infrastructure with different requirements.

The biggest hurdle is probably property rights. The second biggest would be clearing a path (building bridges, leveling the ground, etc). Those two would be solved now, and the rest could essentially be "swapped" out. It wouldn't be trivial, but you'd have the two toughest problems already solved.

The faster something goes, the less turning radius it has, and the tighter your manufacturing tolerances gets.

It's more than likely that track designed for 200mph HSR will be completely incompatible with 400mph maglevs. Unless you want to cap the maglevs at 200mph. The maglev will easily fly off the rails trying to take a 200mph curve at 300mph.

>It's more than likely that track designed for 200mph HSR will be completely incompatible with 400mph maglevs.

Again, it's completely different infrastructure, so yes, it's completely incompatible in the sense that a bicycle trail is incompatible with motor boats. If you have an HSR ROW that you want to change over to maglev, you have to rip up the tracks, rip up the catenary, rip up the power-substations, and build a completely new guideway.

viscanti's main point is that infrastructure costs aren't the bulk of the difficulty, but rather acquiring the right of way.

But it's extremely unlikely that the right of way acquired for HSR will ever be recyclable to a faster system, even if we ignore the problems of tearing down a system and rebuilding it in-place with no service to mitigate the downtime.

Property rights might not directly translate over, and there may be some need for new acquisitions, but it's still (likely) a much easier sell. It's a bigger step to do something once than to do it in a slightly different way. I don't mean to trivialize the "swapping" process. There would be significant political and capital costs with any kind of "swap". But I think those are smaller hurdles than getting the land rights and processing the land.

Yes, I do completely understand that. The right of way is the hardest part once you have a large population in the way. The rest is trivial in comparison in the US. All the lawsuits, etc because HSR will inconvenience people. We are simply implementing 50 year old technology(pre-moon landing).

China, on the other hand, built the world's largest HSR system in a decade (about 5000 miles), as opposed to 400 miles that will take 20-30 years between LA and SF.

Of course people in the US have branded it a failure after the first accident. The fact remains they have built infrastructure that will pay dividends for centuries.

I think the failure is speculated to be caused by buggy reverse-engineered railway control systems --so not a problem with the system, but rather the implementation.

I'd be willing to bet good money that there will be high speed trains between LA & SF before there are widespread robo-cars.

- it's a hard problem, in my mind comparable to general AI, which has been "10 years away" since the 1950's. It seems to me to be one of of those "hard 10%" problems where you get what you think is 90% there, but the last 10% takes a lot longer than the first 90%.

- I believe that a generational change will be required to get over the strange attachment most Americans have to conventional cars

- American litigiousness will put manufacturers out of business. They might be safer than normal cars, but at some point they're going to kill or seriously injure somebody, and then they're going to come in for huge damage awards.

With regard to your first point, Google's autonomous cars have logged thousands of hours now without human intervention. You're spot on with the second and third, however; the challenge now is regulatory and psychological, not technological.

So they've done the first 90%. Bully for them. Come back to me when they've the navigated the full range of traffic, weather and stupid driver/bicyclist/pedestrian obstacles. Google has a long way to go yet.

Yes exactly! I've been telling anyone who would listen that most of the high-speed rail projects going in now will be seen as gigantic white elephants in 30 years. They'll be unable to service their debt due to low ridership and will become another nail in the coffin of government solvency.

It's not going to be just robo-cars, but efficient electrically powered robo-cars that make the difference. Even though they won't be quite as efficient as rail on a per-kilometer basis they will be able to take you point-to-point rather than having to transfer to a bus or rental car once you reach LA.

The other factor — which many of you seem to ignore — is that train travel kind of sucks with small children. You have to drive to the train station, then drag kids, strollers, diaper bags, etc onto the train, then repeat the process at your destination. Obviously it's doable to take the train but I would still prefer to have my own personal vehicle even if it costs a little more and takes a little longer.

The future of transportation is personalized and distributed. Not some huge, inflexible, government-controlled monolith that's incapable of adapting to changes in travel patterns.

Autonomous cars aren't (just) a competitor to high-speed rail, they can also complement it. Autonomous (=> cheaper) taxis help solve the last-mile issues at the ends of the trip.

I'd be surprised if an autonomous car could compete with the high-speed rail speeds, though.

As a resident of Los Angeles, I don't see why we are funding this project ahead of advancing L.A.'s pathetic rail/subway system.

Traffic in L.A. is so bad during rush "hour" (which lasts several hours) that you can't travel by car faster than walking speed. It routinely takes 30+ minutes to travel 3 miles or so. Car is your only option in most locations.

The state would benefit from a solid metro system in L.A. FAR more than one between L.A. and S.F.

I can only hope that this metro will link Downtown L.A. to West L.A. and spur local metro development.

agreed, by 2033 it's going to be a disaster here if no solutions are completed by then.

These things fix themself to some degree. If it's that bad people move out (or don't move in). Then it becomes not as bad.

You end up with a steady state where things are as pad as people are willing to tolerate, but it never reaches "disaster".

Because SF is more important than LA, in terms of wealth generation.

If SF is the center of the technology universe, it would make sense to make LA the place where you live and SF where you work.

This is why the Japanese commute to Tokyo by trains from the suburbs.

380 miles is a hell of a commute. That's going to take two hours each way (plus travel to/from stations), unless we manage to build a maglev or something. I do expect large-scale airlines to be infeasible to fuel someday, but by then I don't think we'll be able to operate this either. I just don't see the use case.

Edit: They're actually figuring 2.5 hours and 430 miles, due to an excursion through Freno and Bakersfield: http://www.cahighspeedrail.ca.gov/trip_planner.aspx

It's also going through Lancaster, I guess because Tehachapi Pass is easier to navigate than the Grapevine, which is probably true. But it does add some miles.

According to http://esa.un.org/wup2009/unup/index.asp?panel=2 (cited at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_by_GDP#America.2...), Los Angeles is behind only New York in GDP, and San Francisco isn't even in the top five. Sure, you can throw in Santa Clara and maybe get something close but I haven't done those calculations.

Los Angeles has essentially all the entertainment industry west of the Mississipi, the tech industry that supports it, the logistics/distribution businesses based out of Long Beach, the "cradle of aerospace" businesses like Raytheon and Boeing, and of course a huge diverse population doing lots of diverse things.

How far would the commute be from LA to SF to Cupertino? If there's a local transit network, I would include Apple's revenues.

OED: 1. they commute on a stuffy overcrowded train: travel to and from work, travel to and fro, travel back and forth, come and go, shuttle.

Travelling home during the weekends and then back on weekdays continuously would be commuting.

Why didn't LA fund mass transit 40 years ago instead of building more roads? The US now has 100 million more people, so building bullet trains is going to be more costly. However, in 40 more years, I imagine that it will be even more difficult with 400 million Americans. We really need to invest in moving people and goods a more effectively now.

> Traffic in L.A. is so bad during rush "hour" (which lasts several hours) that you can't travel by car faster than walking speed. It routinely takes 30+ minutes to travel 3 miles or so. Car is your only option in most locations.

Bicycles? Have you heard of'm?

Have you tried to bike from Venice Beach to Silverlake? 90 minutes. Santa Monica to Hollywood? 1 hour.

For long journeys, public transportation.

If only there were some way to combine them http://www.brompton.co.uk/

Every person I know in L.A. who uses a bicycle as one of their primary transportation options has been hit by a car at least once.

No thanks.

There are only two profitable high-speed rail lines in the ENTIRE WORLD. One in Japan and I believe the other is in France. High speed rail just doesn't make sense especially in the spread out urban centers that make up the US. The last mile problem is huge.

Someone commented on the airports being near capacity. That's only because our air traffic system is horrible. If they updated the system and automated much of it, we could drastically increase capacity since the planes could fly straighter routes instead of the current zig zap pattern and fly much closer together safely. Sadly the air traffic controllers union won't allow the changes since they'll lose jobs in the productivity increase.

No, right now the big constraint on air travel is runways.

You need 3,5, or 7 miles between planes depending on size, and that works out to one flight every minute or two per non-conflicting runway. Seattle just completed a third parallel runway, that gives them three simultaneous ops in good weather, and two in bad. Atlanta has 5 or 6 now.

What's your point, re profitability?

Are highway systems and surface roads "profitable?" And the airline industry (as opposed to the aircraft industry) has generated little or no wealth in more than half a century of existence.

The point of high-speed rail isn't to be profitable, it's to transport people. You won't believe how unprofitable interstate highways are.

>But for many Californians, struggling through a bleak era that has led some people to wonder if the state’s golden days are behind it, this project goes to the heart of the state’s pioneering spirit, recalling grand public investments in universities, water systems, roads and parks that once defined California as the leading edge of the nation.

well, why don't we return the golden days and invest these billions in the universities, water systems, roads and parks ... And if there some money left - for healthcare and basic school education. That would definitely put CA back on the leading edge of the nation.

Invest in roads - presumably for cars powered by oil to drive on?

Now that's a long term vision of the future!

>Invest in roads - presumably for cars to drive on powered by oil. Now that's a long term vision of the future!

roads are presumably for wheeled vehicles. Until you can show a good prospects for flying cars, we need roads.

Edit: Despite the lobby and being favored by the political system, the use of fossil fuels in cars is going away. Even today, the 30KW batteries weighting 500kg will get you 150mi range at the price $10-20K - about the price and weight of ICE engine + transmission. The avalanche is starting ... The argument that there is no infrastructure to fill-up the electric cars is BS - the electricity is everywhere, including existing gas stations. Some upgrades may be necessary though - this is exactly minor (compare to the rail system) investment that would provide huge return.

To be pulled by horses or mexican immigrants ?

Edit: well you might get the range if you want to drive tiny little Honda golf carts at 30mph. But what about real men that want to drive a 5000hp electric train at 300mph

apparently.

It's not a terrible idea, but our Public university system is crumbling on 3 billion a year and Brown wants to invest 98 billion (an average of roughly 4.6 billion a year) on a train.

Sounds like a bad long term strategy to me. Then again, epic public projects are huge sources of pride and tell the world "California is not falling into the past," unlike so many other aspects of a country in mature decline.

I think that free or 1980's level-priced UC education would easily be on par with a train, if not even better; especially what's been said about autonomous driving. For all we know, if states play their hand right, there could be a ton of never-before-seen widespread private fundin for road systems, if this whole autonomous thing takes off.

Public transit: more efficient on the macro scale, but less on the micro (individual) scale. Close that gap and you'll have me, and probably a lot of other folks, and not before. As others have mentioned in this thread, perhaps robo-cars can fill that role.

My family owns a 320 acre ranch in the valley and one of the proposed rail routes runs right through it. I've yet to hear details on how the state plans to handle compensation.

IME the state won't start talking compensation until after the Final Environmental Impact Report has been accepted for your segment.

I visited California in 2009 and found it very strange that there wasn't a daily direct train between the two largest cities. Every second day there was a connecting bus between LA and Bakersfield.

Two largest cities in the world's eigth largest economy, and there's no daily train between them. Very odd.

There's daily trains from LA to San Jose (which is actually bigger in terms of population than SF). You can then connect on commuter rail to SF. Not ideal, but an option.

I think the reasoning is that SF would be either a dead end for a train line, due to the whole peninsula thing, or an expensive place to build a rail line out of, across the bay.

San Francisco is not the largest city in the area (San Jose has about 200,000 more people), let alone the state (San Diego has more than San Jose), and has a number of geographical problems with any associated train system between Los Angeles and San Francisco. Because it's at the edge of a peninsula, getting from anywhere else requires fairly significant engineering feats, and due to the slowness of Amtrak, most people don't want to take an 8+ hour train trip; both flying and driving are faster than the train.

We may measure city populations differently - where I am, we go by the metropolitan area. Wikipedia lists SF as a metro population of 4 million, San Diego 3, and San Jose only 2.

The bulk of the trip is outside SF though - that 8+ hours has little to do with the very end of the trip... something a bullet train might help with.

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