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Comment by cjensen | Hacker News Reader

Ok, but folks are perfectly willing to drive to Rancho Cucamonga if it means avoiding the 200-mile long traffic jam on I-15 on Sunday afternoon. A full transit system for everyone in LA would dwarf the cost of this rail line and it would take so long for people to return home they just would drive instead.

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I think the parent commenter's point that it would have been much more useful to extend the main line itself into LA city centre rather than stop ~75 km away in the middle of nowhere. The good thing about railway stations is that they take up much less space than an airport—they're about the size of a large condominium complex—so cities could actually fit them inside, without having to do the whole airport thing and put the terminal tens of kilometres away.

And many cities even build office blocks and hotels on top of their railway stations. See London, Paris, Berlin, etc.

The problem is the space for the tracks running to the station, not the space for the station itself. Taking enough land by eminent domain to run tracks to downtown (or anywhere else dense) is prohibitively costly. And digging tunnels is even more expensive.

Rancho Cucamonga isn't near downtown LA, but it also isn't in the middle of nowhere. The whole stretch along I-210/I-10 from downtown LA to Rancho, and further past to San Bernardino, is contiguous suburbia (urban in some places). There are existing commuter rail lines between them too.

The size of the train station isn't the issue, it's the space taken by the tracks. This is when Tunnel Boring Machines (TBMs) are supposed to step in and save the day, but the cost of going underground is still too high to make it feasible.

You could expand the number of lanes on I15 (like it is on the Nevada side) for a small fraction of what this project would cost.

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