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Comment by chroma | Hacker News Reader

High speed rail between San Francisco and Los Angeles isn't economically viable. California HSR will cost at least $30 billion to construct and California's own estimates claim it will cost $700-$874 million per year to operate.[1] Around four million passengers fly between SF and LA every year. Assuming every single one of them takes the train instead of flying, you're looking at $175-$218 per ticket just to pay for operations. If you wanted the project to pay for itself in 20 years, you'd have to charge $550-$600 per ticket. For comparison, airfare between the two cities starts at $80 round trip. Also the train will take 3 hours while flying takes 1.5 hours. Even including the time it takes to get to/from the airport and get through security, flying is faster.

1. https://hsr.ca.gov/wp-content/uploads/docs/programs/san_jose...

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Funny how trains are expected to be profitable from day 1, but you can drive a car from SF to LA and not pay a cent for the highway infra that costs billions to build and upkeep.

Also, in what world can you reliably get from central LA/SF to LAX/SFO and through checkin & TSA in 45 min each?

I didn't say anything about roads, but it's not true that roads are unprofitable. Roads are paid for by fuel taxes and vehicle registration fees. California's gas taxes raise $8 billion per year. The state's registration and licensing fees collect another $12 billion per year. The state spends $18 billion per year on Caltrans, meaning that vehicles provide $2 billion in revenue for other state programs.

BART takes 30 minutes to get from Civic Center to SFO. Even without TSA pre-check, it takes less than 15 minutes to get through security. If you get through security 15 minutes before the plane leaves, that's 2.5 hours total travel time to LAX. From the same place in SF it takes 20-25 minutes to get to 4th & King. (Yes, Muni is that bad.) Let's say the train leaves 15 minutes after you arrive at the station. Then it will take 2 hours and 40 minutes to get to Union Station in LA. Total travel time: 3.25 hours. And again, the train cost is 5-10x that of a flight.

Edit: If you think my math about the long-term profitability of California High Speed Rail is incorrect, I'd love to see some numbers showing how it could be priced similarly to air travel. I was agnostic about CA HSR for a long time. I even voted for Proposition 1A back in 2008. But no matter how I crunch the numbers, it really seems like CA HSR is a boondoggle.

Sorry, it takes at least an hour to get from lax to central LA. Once it even took two! You also woefully underestimate airport bs. 15 mins haha ha. Just an unobstructed walk to/from the gate takes that long.

Last time we arrived it took an hour to (get bags, wait for shuttle to rideshare park two miles away, and get paired), then another 45 minutes drive in heavy traffic to east Hollywood.

Train to union station would have been much more comfortable.

You might consider the climate and carbon impact of those flights vs rail.

Many of the rail lines are subsidized in countries with extensive rail travel. So they don’t have to be economically viable, it’s viewed as a public good, contributing to general economic development.

Air travel is 2% of global CO2 emissions. Making air travel carbon neutral (by capturing carbon) would increase ticket prices by around 20%. That would be much cheaper than switching from planes to high speed rail.

I'm not saying that countries with lots of rail are wrong. I'm saying that passenger high speed rail doesn't make sense in the US (at least, not outside of the northeast). We're too spread out.

I’m not an expert on this, but China seems huge and also spread out, and they have much better HSR coverage than basically anyone else.

Air travel is a problem when it comes to emissions because there really aren’t any viable alternatives, where as you could pretty much sub in nuclear + renewables for anything else energy/transportation wise and the math makes sense after a large investment. Knocking overland air travel out and replacing it with high speed rail cuts down a ton of air travel, and replaces it with something that is almost trivial to run on cleaner energy.

Another part of that comment you were responding to dealt with comfort and convenience, and having ridden HSR in Japan and Europe, I much prefer it to air travel. Air travel sucks and it’s only getting worse as fuel costs more. If you’re not flying business, you’re basically treated the same way livestock is treated, with a multi-hundred dollar or thousand dollar price tag to add to the insult. I’ll vote for my tax dollars going to HSR all day, “boondoggle” or not. I remember in Massachusetts the big dig was marked as such, but man has it worked. Tunnels under the city where you can drive 45 rather than elevated roads or no roads or surface streets, yep it was expensive but it’s so much better. I’m willing to bet with my tax dollars and ballot measure votes HSR will be the same.

China is the same size as the US but has four times the population, and most of them are in the east. This means they have much higher population density. Another important difference is that they can build rail for much cheaper than the US because their government doesn’t have to respect property rights or follow stringent environmental regulations.

About the 2% figure: many things are insignificant in terms of climate change if you narrow down on them. Also, this 2% figure of the share of air travel is projected to increase, because the number of revenue passenger kilometers flown is quickly increasing (doubled in the last 10 years), cf https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/airline-capacity-and-traf....

And unfortunately carbon offsetting is rather unreliable (companies buying offsets don't have any incentive for the offsets to be actual savings). I'd be wary of climate change solutions that consist of continuing business as usual and assuming that decarbonation will happen in some other sectors. I also suspect the 20% price increase estimate works for a specific price of carbon, but that price could increase if carbon offsets started becoming widely used (and the demand increases).

Anyway, I don't know what's the right way for the US to reduce travel emissions, whether that's electric coaches, cheaper rail, taxation to increase prices and reduce demand... But I don't think the solution can be "just keep planes and add carbon capture".

So in your best case scenario, it's taken you 2.5 hours to get to LAX, how long from there to LA itself? What if you checked bags and need to wait for them to show up? (Not a thing on trains, just take your suitcase with you.)

Also, your best case scenario of 1 hour from SF to plane is hysterically optimistic. BART headways are 20 minutes in theory and often delayed in practice. If you have bags to check, that'll chew up another 15 min easy. TSA is 15 min on a good day but many days are bad. Gates close 15 minutes before departure, so you need to get through TSA another 15 min earlier so you can walk to your gate. I would leave at least two hours before my flight, and most airlines recommend arriving at the airport two hours before.

I've never gotten to an airport two hours ahead of my flight, not even for international travel. For a short, frequent flight like SFO-LAX, I arrive at the airport 15 minutes before boarding starts. I'm not at all worried about missing my flight. Worst case I'll get on the next flight.

The reason I didn't add travel time from LAX to Union Station is because LA is incredibly spread out and most destinations are not downtown. To get to where you want to go in LA, you'll need a car.

And don't forget that this is a comparison of a trip you can take today versus a hypothetical train that will cost you several times more. In real life the train is unlikely to run as frequently or to be as fast as claimed. Honestly, I'm not sure if anyone will ever take high speed rail from SF to LA. The current plan is to finish Merced to Bakersfield some time between 2030 and 2033. Will the political willpower to continue the project still exist a decade from now? I don't know.

We can go back and forth arguing about which is faster all day long, but the real problem is the finances of CA HSR. I've yet to see any figures that show it being financially competitive with air travel. Is the plan to increase taxes on everyone to subsidize ticket prices? Considering the clientele of high speed rail, that seems rather regressive.

What would change your mind about this? I'd be in favor of CA HSR if costs were significantly lower. (I naively assumed government competence when I voted for prop 1A.) It looks like that's not an option, so the best course of action is to stop wasting money on this boondoggle.

Part of the allure of trains is much higher volumes of passengers. Part of the value prop would be many more people willing to take a train then fly.

Flying has huge friction to engage in, as OP indicated Japanese trains have almost none.

> Even including the time it takes to get to/from the airport and get through security, flying is faster.

I highly doubt that, since you have to board 20 minutes before take off, plus the time it takes to get through security, as well as getting to the airport which won't be in the city center.

The current airfare also doesn't include any sort of fee to ease the ecological impact of burning jet fuel.

Why do you assume the project will replace all airplane passengers and zero car or bus passengers on the same route, and why do you assume a complete absence of intermediate stops?

And that’s before even considering induced demand.

The attempt at analysis here is just nonsensical. Not even wrong.

Assuming this is all true, what then makes the Japanese Shinkansen economically viable?

They already have the land rights, favorable social environment for construction, more compliant population, less local/more federal legal zoning and land use power, more federal level direction to get things done, higher rate of engineers in population.

That CA is bad at all of those makes it expensive and hard

In addition to very low competence levels in gov't compared to Japan due to many factors. Sure Japan has financial corruption in construction but it's a known system and they build things treating it as a tax. In CA there are many more parties who all attempt to hold construction projects hostage.

Those factors aligned for the original Shinkansen when it was built in the sixties; now, not so much.

The maglev Chuo Shinkansen, originally meant to be finished by 2030 or so, has been stuck in limbo for several years now because the prefecture of Shizuoka refuses to issue the necessary permits.

https://www.asahi.com/ajw/articles/14718670

>less local/more federal legal zoning and land use power, more federal level direction to get things done,

Nitpick: this part isn't correct. There's no federal legal zoning or direction or anything federal at all. Japan doesn't have a federal government; like most countries, it has a unitary government. The US is unusual this way, along with Germany and Russia.

But otherwise, you're right. It's much easier to build stuff here for all those reasons.

Ah, thanks. My comment was based on this link which I share often on Japanese Zoning. http://urbankchoze.blogspot.com/2014/04/japanese-zoning.html

Looking it up, I see you're right. They have national zoning laws but even there, things do seem to be getting more complicated.

That's a great blog post. As I understand it, the national law is just as described, with only 12 zones, but the localities have some latitude in how to apply the law and make some blanket restrictions about things like building height. For instance, Kyoto famously has very strict limits on building height, though this is biting them in the ass because it keeps them from creating enough density to get more tax money, and too much land is occupied by religious sites that don't pay any taxes at all, so the city is going bankrupt.

I expect one of the biggest factors is population density.

California has a land area of 165,000mi^2. Japan has a land area of 145,000mi^2.

California population is 39M. Japan population is 125M.

Most of the people in CA are in the bottom left. No need for bullet train to Arcata. Though to Vegas would probably be profitable.

The distance between SF and LA (350 miles) is 50% greater than the distance between Tokyo and Kyoto (227 miles), making the time tradeoff favor trains to planes. The two cities are much bigger than SF and LA, so many more people travel between the two cities (85 million per year). Also Japan can build and maintain rail much cheaper than the US.

Many people who ride it have one of various train passes that reduce the cost, or have a plan with work that covers it. I usually use a JR pass, it's pretty expensive without it.

Unfortunately the JR pass literally doubled in price in Oct 2023, it's now 50,000 yen for 7 days and makes no sense unless you're planning to speedrun the length of Japan and back.

Yep, it is not worth it anymore. I got mine for my trip at the end of the year on literally the last day it was on sale :). End of an era.

Note that 50,000 yen is $335. So that’s a ceiling on how much you’ll spend for 7 days of Shinkansen travel.

That's the upfront cost and profit, but think of the economic opportunities created once people can travel between the two largest cities in California with no hassle and regularly.

To make this a fair comparison you need to look at the average price per ticket, not the “starting at” price, and include the government subsidies of airports/security/atc/ etc that enable this system.

I would also add in a cost for carbon. I realize that’s more controversial but it seems like we will have to pay to remove co2 at some point.

I don’t know what the numbers look like when you do that.

Regardless, I do agree the amount per traveler to make a train work seems depressingly high.

Also that Shinkansen trip was about $250 and worth every penny. Didn’t even need rideshare or taxi.

well if you're assuming the same number of passengers - given the logistics and hassles of air travel, one is likely more inclined to travel with hassle-free HSR, not to mention the secondary economic benefits

flying is also not ecologically sustainable. We need alternatives, even if we can't eliminate long distance flights, to reach zero emissions quickly.

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