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Comment by oceanplexian | Hacker News Reader

Florida recently completed a high speed rail project (The same cannot he said for CA HSR). It’s no bullet train but pretty comparable to Acela. Everyone throwing shade on FL might be surprised that they are actually ahead of the game on a lot of infrastructure.

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Brightline runs on tracks that give priority to freight traffic (Florida East Coast Railway) and not passenger traffic, it's a 2nd class citizen.

The Brightline train travels at 75 mph for a significant portion of its distance. It has to slow down due to dozens and dozens of road crossings.

It's half-assed compared to what California is building.

But to be fair to the Brightline, the half of the ass that they do have is actually moving passengers today.

Track upgrades and locomotive upgrades are also being done to the Pacific Surfliner which in theory could get it above 120 MPH at some points, putting it semi-officially in "high speed rail" territory.

But to be completely fair Brightline is only running passengers on a portion of this route (yet) between Miami and West Palm Beach, but so is the state of California, which is actually moving passengers today on both the Caltrain corridor between SF and Gilroy and the LOSSAN corridor between LA union station and Anaheim.

Okay class... Everyone's trains are great. We don't need to compare. Trains are cool. Lets just encourage and build more of them.

CA HSR is now actively being built. You can track its progress at https://buildhsr.com/.

It has been actively being built for 8 years, in the wrong part of the state, with nothing functional yet.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/jan/07/california-b...

It’s not necessarily the worst idea ever to launch a Bakersfield to Fresno high speed line and to have your train traverse the Bay Area and LA corridors at a lower speed until work on those are complete.

But my understanding is that they were feting a plan which left passengers with a 20 mile bus bridge to Bakersfield, and that’s just deranged

There is no existing rail corridor acceptable for passenger travel between Bakersfield and Lancaster/Palmdale (let alone to LA). There is one rail line that traverses the Tehachapi pass (famous for the Tehachapi loop https://www.railfanguides.us/ca/tehachapi/index.htm) however that corridor is not fit for passenger service barring major and expensive upgrades.

Personally if it were up to me I would have started the CAHSR between Bakersfield and LA simply because of the lack of any current rail connection. However this is by far the most expensive portion of the phase 1 plan, and given the lack of funding it is no surprise they started with the cheapest portion.

The risk of starting it in Fresno is that if you don't finish (which I think is likely), you are left with something of very little value srving few people with low need for rail.

If you start in SF or LA, you at least have a fast train serving an area with terrible traffic and a population of millions.

Please keep in mind that infrastructure projects for cars also go late and over budget. There's no need to excessively bash HSR.

Rome wasn’t built in a day. Cali has very difficult construction challenges wrt earthquakes and land acquisition

California’s bullet train delays have basically nothing to do with fundamental challenges like seismic engineering, and everything to do with planning permission issues / NIMBYs and California specific regulations on one hand, and with bad management on the other.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/09/us/california-high-speed-...

https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2020-03-09/californ...

https://ktla.com/news/local-news/poor-decision-making-manage...

Earthquakes have little to do with it. They are simply an excuse for horrible policy. Go explain to Japan why earthquakes should prevent them from building effective infrastructure.

Funny enough, the same company that built the high speed rail in Florida is now going to build a high speed rail line from Southern California to Las Vegas. It appears that this project will start construction soon.

Still doesn't change the fact that highway driving and automobile based transportation is not going anywhere. High speed rail won't ever replace cars. It's a nice supplemental form of transport, and works fine for point to point transport between major hubs, but it doesn't work at a distributed scale.

Well, but cars don't work very well as soon as you concentrate parts of your population in urban centres. Both are needed and both are optional depending on where you live. At least individual ownership, because you will always need trucks, but you will also always need freight trains.

I think that's kind of the point.

* CA talks a lot about replacing cars, and accomplishes nothing.

* FL makes no pretense about being primarily a based car-culture, but successfully implements mass transit where it makes sense

>* FL makes no pretense about being primarily a based car-culture, but successfully implements mass transit where it makes sense

Effectively no FL city has mass transit, unless you want to count South Florida which has a commuter train (Trirail) and the Metro, which are both essentially north-south only. It makes sense to do everywhere, but has been done nowhere.

The Disney World monorail[1] has higher daily ridership than BART[2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walt_Disney_World_Monorail_Sys... [2] https://www.bart.gov/news/articles/2020/news20200225

How many people daily take the ferry that runs between the entrance of Small World and the exit? By expanding the definition of "mass transit" into meaninglessness, we might find that Florida really is a leader!

How many tourists take the subway from Chinatown to Fisherman's Wharf? None, because it doesn't exist.

There's only one definition of "mass transit" that matters and it's the one you know CA can't deliver on.

The sad thing is, I think if Walt Disney hadn't died when he did, the monorail system would have expanded throughout the city of Orlando and probably to other parts of the state.

His plans for EPCOT were originally to build an actual planned city using these technologies to manage traffic flow: https://sites.google.com/site/theoriginalepcot/overview/the-...

The Disney world ridership numbers are from 2012, back then the daily ridership numbers for BART was well over 300,000 or more than twice that of Disney’s Monorail.

Your BART number is also in the middle of the Pandemic, back then the daily ridership of the Disney’s monorail was 0, as the park was closed.

Most resent number for BART is (Q4 2022) 146,500 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bay_Area_Rapid_Transit

I’m having difficulty finding ridership numbers for Disney’s monorail. The best I can give is 150,000 per day. https://www.tampabay.com/life-culture/2023/05/04/disney-desa... which is something some legislator says while playing politics.

Amusing stat, but doesn't really speak to FL builds.

Why not? It's in Florida, and one way or another, Florida policymaking enabled mass transit where it made sense.

You probably don't like that it's a private company on private land, but that's irrelevant to the question of decarbonation.

You know there's a Disney park in California too, that has a monorail and shuttle services too?

So why not compare Disney to Disney and the metros to... well...

Was it a FL public project? That Disney, famously in "battle" with the FL government right now, did something commendable says little about what FL would do.

It say that Florida had regulations and land-use policies that allowed private enterprises to set up effective mass transit! That's a good thing that most states didn't do!

Not really. Florida effectively gave a large chunk of land to Disney. This has famously been covered in recent litigation and they tried to claw it back. Such that, no, I don't think you can take Disney's situation as at all indicative of something from the Florida land-use policies. Would be akin to financial advice from a lottery winner.

Unless you are saying maybe we should pursue more local governments run by a corporation? That also feels wrong, all told. Though, I would grant I don't have enough perspective there to know.

FL didn't give land to Disney. Disney bought all of its own land via W.E.D. Enterprises and other dummy companies they used to discretely make the purchases in 1964 [2]. Later, after Walt's death in 1965, in 1967, Roy O. Disney made the case for the Reedy Creek Improvement Act [1], which gave Disney an exclusive zone in the state independent of county/city/state zoning laws, building codes, school districts, etc.

Part of the pitch to getting the Reedy Creek Act passed, was the plans for E.P.C.O.T. (Experimental Prototype City of Tomorrow) and the plan to build a new urban development. Those plans were complicated after Walt's death and permanently shelved after his brother Roy's retirement in 1968, but Disney retained its exemptions in spite of never truly undertaking the original plan and simply operated a tax-reduced, virtually regulation-free amusement park, until this year.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reedy_Creek_Improvement_Act [2] https://web.archive.org/web/20140903204555/http://articles.o...

Right. "Give land" was used in a way that is a clearly meant more colloquially than any specific form. To the point of this thread, I am asserting that Disney acted far more independently in all things that they did than not. Such that counting it as a thing that the Florida government did well feels like a stretch.

At the least, it is far more complicated than makes sense, and can't really be used as evidence one way or the other for Florida making good choices.

CA has moved on and is just going to electrify all of the cars

Electric cars solve almost none of the problems associated with cars.

Adding fossil carbon to the atmosphere seems like a pretty important one though.

The pandemic proved that pollution is primarily caused by trucks and not cars. Most of the highest polluted cities in the world that were clear during the global lockdown regained their pollution once trucks went back on the road.

Genuine question: How do you know this? (Maybe a source or something)?

I know the supply chain got messed up, but given that trucks are so crucial to transporting goods (at least here in the US) I would think that trucks remained on the road during the pandemic while individuals driving cars all stayed home during quarantine.

I'm really curious how this conclusion ('trucks are the primary cause of pollution') was reached

Probably something like this:

> In the most recent year for which data are available, combination trucks made up only 1% of the vehicle population but were responsible for 6% of all vehicle miles traveled (VMT) and 17% of vehicle fuel use.

Given that diesel is often considered "more polluting" you can probably make it work out given a bunch of assumptions that may or may not apply. Trucks are the primary cause of road wear, for example.

Trucks also produce the lions' share of the noise pollution. Don't laugh, noise pollution is very serious; it causes cognitive damage to people who live near busy roads which in turn has innumerable deleterious social effects.

There’s a number of climate fights that I think would be better argued with noise pollution reduction instead of carbon reduction, and vehicles especially trucks is one of them.

> Given that diesel is often considered "more polluting"

Modern diesel engines are less polluting than unleaded cars, thanks to diesel particle filters:

"gasoline cars emitted on average 10 times more carbonaceous PM at 22°C and 62 times more at -7°C compared to diesel cars"

[1] https://phys.org/news/2017-07-diesel-gas.html

I don't actually have a problem with that, but if so they should have spent the $128 billion HRS buying every tenth person in CA a Model 3 instead.

Or spent it to keep their nuclear points operating and generating clean energy.

The Pacific Surfliner can go faster than Brightline currently. It's also longer and has been in service for ages now. Florida isn't ahead of the game, they're playing catch up.

The Brightline vision is finally arriving, partially, after three decades of failures in funding and planning. To call that “ahead of the game” is disingenuous.

Brightline is operational and wildly successful between Miami and Palm Beach, expanding soon to Orlando, and it's literally the only higher-speed passenger railway actually built in the US since the Acela. So, yes, it is very much ahead of the game.

It's worth pointing out that higher-speed rail is technical jargon used to describe rail services that are not high speed, but aren't slow. Brightline is also apparently only planned to be higher-speed at some point, but currently has an operating speed of 130 km/h, slower than most definitions of higher-speed. There were regularly-scheduled services with comparable or faster speeds in the early 20th century in both Europe and the US; there were faster US services in the 1930 pulled by steam locomotives. Brightline is far slower than high-speed services elsewhere in the world today, going less than half the speed of many TGV services, for example.

With that said, as you point out, it's a new intercity service that is actually operational, popular, and being used today, which for the US is an enormously rare feat.

The Amtrak Wolverine service (Chicago to Detroit) begs to differ. And just last week the Lincoln service (Chicago to St. Louis) and the Texas Eagle service (Chicago to Dallas/San Antonio) got approval for higher-speed operation.

Brightline is very successful, part of which is due to having so few stops, something that a public railroad could never get away with politically. The Amtrak trains stop so often that they spend very little time at their top speed.

I don't have access to stats, but is it really particularly successful? I just checked and the Boca - Downtown Miami route takes 51 minutes, compared to (not quite comparable) Boca - MIA on the Trirail in 61 minutes. This, with way fewer stops in between. I can't believe too many commuters are paying a premium price unless they're specifically wanting to go downtown for work.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brightline#Ridership_by_year

They had 1.2 million rides in 2022, that's good by any measurement. Pacific Surfliner in Southern California is a wildly successful intercity rail and only had 1.6m rides in 2022.

Some people may use them to commute but it's not primarily commuter rail, would be my guess.

The Pacific Surfliner in 2022 may not be a great comparison, as what I believe is the most popular and frequent segment (between San Diego and LA) was out of service for the entirety of Q4, and apparently has been out of service since then, with the exception of 10 days in April.

I didn’t know that - was it replaced by a bus or just completely gone?

Edit: looks like it got bussed: https://www.railjournal.com/infrastructure/aamtraks-pacific-...

Compare to Trirail which now covers largely the same region, opened in 1995 with around twice as many riders (2.5 million). Last stats on the wiki are 4.5 million in 2019.

Tri-Rail seems comparable to Metrolink or the Coaster - that's commuter rail and often has lower costs and higher ridership, because the average ride is shorter.

The San Diego trolley has 63 miles of track and 34 million riders in 2022; but that's an entirely different type of rail that serves a different purpose. Even if it eventually reached all the way to Los Angeles there would still be uses for commuter and intercity rail.

Many places in Europe have the various types of rail all sharing the same "lines" or stations, but the ICE is a completely different beast than the Regionalbahn or Regional-Express.

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