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Comment by fragsworth | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> 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.

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.

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.

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".

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