Prediction: Project will take 10 years too long and results in a normal (non-high-speed) rail system connecting the two places that is too expensive for people to reasonably use.
I don't think the commenter meant this route was especially unfeasible. I think they were referring to the fact that the track record (no pun intended) of high speed rail projects in the U.S. is mixed to terrible.
Whereas another certain California rail project literally transports you from [place you need car] to [place you need car]. Which I don’t think I need to explain why that is silly.
The root cause of this is blue states often get Euro public transport envy — yet they don’t understand Europe has 3X the population density (and subsequent urbanization) of the US. Obviously public transport would start to make a lot more sense if you 3X’d the population in the same land area.
IMO fetishizing the European way of life is a bit silly, given density comes with its own problems (ie nobody having kids). In fact, there was this German guy in the 1930s who led the killing of millions of people partly to get more “living space”, so European density does have its downsides for…shall we say…stability. In fact, Europe has roughly the same amount of people today as it had in 1939. Meanwhile the US has more than doubled.
In most things, if you post a comment with points of discussion you get a thoughtful response here.
However on HN trigger topics, you get emotionally downvoted and nobody wants to engage in discussion.
Instead of linking to a youtube video from the r/fuckcars filter bubble, is there any succinct points to refute why a 3X greater population density would not naturally result in greater public transportation formation?
Or is it just the "dumb americans" and their "evil car culture?" With no further investigation of the first-principles reasons that culture was formed?
i’ve been using this example for about a decade.
of course, that route didn’t exist 20 years ago when I took Madrid to Seville. I can’t imagine what the population density of Seville is.
it would help if you give us the numbers you’re working with. I sure hope you aren’t doing the population density of the entire country. That’s a common mistake.
Genuinely curious what is meant by this since if I was asked what the most progressive ideal city layout was I'd respond with extensive, highly connected, frequent metro lines with islands of density around the stations that included plenty of non-market rate housing options within easy walk of each station. When more housing is needed extend the lines and start a whole new island of density. Make sure plenty of public green space is accessible from the metros just beyond the density islands.
Inter-city connections would be broadly similar, just zoomed out. Each city an island of density connected by fast and frequent rail.
Creating hardwired infrastructure to transport people from one place where they don't want to be to another place where they don't want to be, over timespans measured in decades for construction and a good part of a century to pay off, at a time when technology is delivering more options for individual mobility concurrent with other options that render commuting and travel less relevant, doesn't strike me as progressive.
I'm a huge fan of ebikes and other micromobility solutions for solving the last mile problem that has always plagued rapid transit, especially in low density areas. You want to move huge amount of people any significant distance? You need a train. Pretty much every proposal I've seen to move masses of people without a train ends up being train but worse, either in OPEX or CAPX (usually both).
Of course, you're comparing a single rail line to a single road, rather than to the entire network of roads that could have been built with the same funding in a fraction of the time, but... that's why I offered the OP the advice I did.
When you compare total CAPX and OPEX including the vehicles themselves and then actually moving people from place to place trains crush everything else. A highway-mile might be cheaper to build than a rail-mile, but it requires maintenance and replacement far more often and the vehicles don't last any where near as long. Large amounts of total costs like vehicles and fuel are shifted to the traveller, reducing the options for many unless they meet a certain economic threshold.
And yet when people have a choice, they take their car.
And nobody ever asks why. They just stamp their feet and demand more trains.
I have no issue with people choosing a car. I have issues where a car is the only choice due to the built environment being actively hostile to all other forms of transportation. Walking --> Cycle --> Train depending on how far you want to travel is far more sustainable and opens options for far more people than car-centric infrastructure where only a car is functional.
Building out a train network also doesn't mean we shouldn't also have a quality road network as well; there are plenty of long tail needs where a vehicle that can go direct point-to-point is very valuable. We just need to be building more than just a road network as roads alone simply cannot handle the needs all travellers.
That just false. Yes some people prefer cars, others don't. Overwhelming evidence shows that people most often prefer what the fastest thing is, and secondarily what the cheapest is.
I have plenty of money for a car, and I don't use one. So apparently I don't exist. Talking in absolutes makes you seem foolish.
The question you should be asking is, looking at society as a whole, whats and efficient and green way to meet the transportation needs of the population.
The reality in most cities less then 50% of population have cars, often much less. And that is after 50 years of pro-car policy. And literally every other possible benefit for cars.
What you should actually educate yourself on is that HUGE AMOUNT of pro car subsidies that actually exist in the real world. Of course if you make parking free, ram a highway right into the city center (burning existing communities down) and then make those people not even pay for the cost of that, then they will prefer the car.
If you design your roads in a why that makes it incredibly dangerous for anybody that is not in a car, guess what, more people take cars.
> And nobody ever asks why. They just stamp their feet and demand more trains.
There is actually lot of people that ask why. There is lots of research on this topic.
This research you clearly ignore because you have already made up your mind.
So maybe you should ask the 'why' question about your own position and study the history of it.
The reality is cites don't move, and population don't move very much either. And once you actually have fixed trains, population are even less likely to move. Many cities in Europe have literally been in the same place for 1000+ years.
Your augment might apply to mongolians in 1800s, but not to real existing western society.
Living in a country with amazing public transport, its just amazing what you can do. I was using public transport by myself when I was like 10, by 14 I was traveling all over the country and by 16 internationally without parents.
I can at any part of the day, randomly decide to go literally to any village above 100 people (and sometimes below), check and App that gives me a step by step guide how to get there. I have no fixed cost (if I don't want to) and then I can efficiently reach my destination while using almost no carbon. How is this not progressive? And btw, this can be done by anybody from 14 to late 70s. And this works right now, not in some amazing techno utopia future.
And I can use may laptop with high speed internet. I can easily go to a high quality bakery in between and get a high quality meal without losing any travel time either.
How non progressive it is to sit in a nice quite place with my laptop, eating a sand-witch driving threw beautiful country side.
A railway is simply the most efficient way to transport goods and people and if you have city and you have a lot of people, it will always be better then whatever 'individualized fancy AI pod' you imagine.
Notice how those companies working on all these individual pods eventually come back to 'platooning' and then 'docking'. Then they realize that operations on rubber wheels suck. Just slowly reinventing trains. The same techno future ideas existed in the 60s.
The fact is 2 cities exist, and will continue to exist. People will want to continue travel between them, that was true 100 years ago and its true today, and its still true in 100 years. Rail ways were the most environmentally friendly and efficient way to do that, both 100 years ago, and still today and it will still be true long into the future.
And its absolutely perfectly compatible with the most intelligent individual of transport, the bike. Getting on low impact, high threw-put trains to connect urban centers (urban doesn't mean big city) and then having individual transport in terms of bikes and e-bikes waiting for you is by far the most progressive and most innovative transport system you can design today. People on bikes will navigate more efficiency then whatever AI pods some California startup will come up with.
In Netherlands a staggering amount of people arrive at the train station by bike and they can easily pick up another bike when the arrive at their location. This is not only incredibly green, incredibly energy efficient, its also good for health and fitness (one of the biggest public health crisis) and road safety.
And the sad thing is, non of these are fancy high tech solution. These are literally all technologies that existed 50 years ago. But we should really way for some company to finally sell us some individualized EV pods that cost 40k$ per pod.
Fixed rail is the only reasonable way to get large numbers of people in and out of cities.
- walking and cycling takes too long
- cars lead to congestion and you need to store them somewhere
- flying has security overhead and is terrible for the environment
You are also starting from the assumption that higher population density is better for high speed rail, which is easily countered with my previous point. An argument could be made that, practically, high speed rail is really better suited to places with low population densities centered around urban areas... like the unpopulated parts of the US West.
HSR is expensive and requires high degrees of funding and coordination. In other words there has to be a strong political and cultural will behind it, so yeah, it stands to reason that the US doesn't want it since they certainly have the money to do it if they want. Maybe there is a culture around forms of transportation that is particular to the US...
> Instead of linking to a youtube video from the r/fuckcars filter bubble, is there any succinct points to refute why a 3X greater population density would not naturally result in greater public transportation formation?
Do you really not understand how aggravation works?
Somehow the US can have very dense subways in New York, how is this possible, the US isn't dense. Its as if aggregate statistics aren't a good indicator when doing regional transportation planning for a region.
Direct from Wikipedia:
“Lebensraum (Living space) was the leading motivation of Nazi Germany to initiate World War II”
The Germans wanted 'Lebensraum' because they didn't want to import food and resources from others. They didn't want to relay on anybody else. They wanted the German race to dominate those resource areas. They wanted to compete in the great power game with US, Britain and the Soviets.
You act like they saw the apartment buildings in Berlin, decided that was 'to dense' and therefore they started WW2. That is simply not accurate.
Their aim was not to reduce density, but rather massively increase the population of the German race. Their policy was literally pro population growth. Their 'Lebensraum' was not for currently existing Germans, because German was to dense. The 'Lebensraum' was for future generations of German Supermen that they would literally breed.
I am serious by the way that this is an utterly disgusting way to argue. You should seriously be ashamed of yourself. I know that housing policy makes people insane, but you responding with 'Hitler genocide is because of urbanization' is the lowest level of argument I have come across.
Anyways, being confronted with contrarian ideas on the supremacy of European urbanism is clearly triggering for you (proving the point I made earlier). So much so that you feel the need to resort to ad-hominem personal attacks!
I won’t be responding anymore, but I recommend examining why you’re revisiting a thread days later to call a random stranger on the internet “utterly disgusting” for challenging your feelings on this topic.
> for challenging your feelings on this topic.
Don't flatter yourself, you aren't 'challenging' anything. There are plenty of arguments you can make about Urbanism and I have heard plenty of of them. Reasonable people can differ and I'm fine with that.
> I recommend examining why
Because you are using the suffering, death and rape of millions to justify your position.
> days later
Yeah whole 'days'. I mean its like you wrote this in the 1960s.
While you're checking the provided citation, you might want to compare those countries' fertility rates too (and others as well, of course – France's for instance is quite a bit higher than that of the US': 1.82 vs. 1.67). You have yet to demonstrate that your hypotheses are well supported by data.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_dependen...
The root cause is that blue state Americans are still toxically individualist and anti-social and can’t undertake collective projects for shit. Europeans are at least somewhat orderly—in part because in several countries the disorderly anti-social people left for America: https://www.ft.com/content/dd212e0f-508a-3171-824c-d6076ae19....
If you’re built like a linebacker, you should give up your dreams of becoming a world-class ballet dancer. Likewise, blue states should give up the delusion that they can build large scale public projects like Europeans and Asians.
You’ve got the wrong color unless you think right leaning Americans are even worse than this description.
… should give up the delusion that they can build large scale public projects…
The highway system is a counterexample.
That does seem to be exactly the point. Notice the word "still".
Indeed, California isn’t very good at being a blue state. Its educational rankings are near the bottom. It doesn’t have universal healthcare. It doesn’t have good transit. Its cities aren’t safe and clean and homeless people aren’t taken care of. California—the beating heart of globalist financial capitalism, with some of the highest income inequality in the country—is much better at being a red state than even Texas.
Your take, as usual, is badly wrong. You fail to take into account pertinent facts and draw the wrong conclusion. Here’s one pertinent fact: California subsidizes states like Mississippi. California is also hamstrung by the fact that isn’t its own country. There are limits to what it can do given these two facts.
How? All the areas where California falls short—education, transportation, housing, healthcare, etc.—are ones left primarily to the states. For example, state and local governments provide 90% of educational funding, while the federal government provides only 10%. No federal law is stopping California from levying Sweden-like taxes to provide Sweden-like education, transportation, healthcare, and housing services.
It’s true that, under our system of progressive taxes, Californians pay a disproportionate share of federal taxes—because they make more money. They pay about 13% of all federal taxes, and get back about 83% of what they pay in federal services. That nets out to about $100 billion net transfer out. But that’s out of an economy of $3.9 trillion. That’s just 2.5% of California’s GDP. That money isn’t what’s standing between California and having high quality social services.
I think in many cases right leaning Americans are even worse in that regard. (E.g. tatted up Trump supporters and anti-vaxxers.) Orderly traditional conservatives are a minority on the right today.
> yet they don’t understand Europe has 3X the population density
Aggregated statistic comparison are completely meaningless. They might serve in a low-quality online rant but not much more then that.
California has many cities over 500k people and some with many millions connect in a line. The idea that there isn't enough population density is total nonsense.
Switzerland has towns with 100 people in low density areas that have regular public transport. The idea that cities like LA and Bay Area are to small or not dense enough is insane.
> IMO fetishizing the European way of life is a bit silly, given density comes with its own problems
Again, you totally misusing density statistics and that invalids your whole argument completely.
> comes with its own problems (ie nobody having kids). In fact, there was this German guy in the 1930s who led the killing of millions of people partly to get more “living space”, so European density does have its downsides for…shall we say…stability.
What complete and other nonsense are you peddling now? Nothing said here makes any sense at all.
hing Hitler was a zero-sum thinker who didn't believe in density and that's why he thought conquering more land was a good idea.
Also invoking Hilter and Genocide in a argument about trains in California is such a insane thing do. It shows that you have no interest in real debate and rather spout inflammatory nonsense about Hitler.
> In fact, Europe has roughly the same amount of people today as it had in 1939.
At least try to look up basic statistics:
558,000,000 -> 746,225,356
And to somehow relate this to some argument about density doesn't make any sense anyway so its completely idiotic to bring it up in an argument about trains in California.
First, aggregated statistics matter a lot, especially when examining the history of why humans have clustered in the US the way they have.
Second, nobody is saying public transport doesn't make sense inside the most dense US cities like LA, SF, etc (yes NYC exists). The issue is the network beyond those areas, due to suburbanization. The topic of this thread is building high speed rail to a suburban desert location.
Third, when discussing internet people's fetishization of European density over American suburban sprawl, its not crazy to bring up downsides -- of which there are many. It's true, the German desire for territorial expansion (and resulting World Wars and Genocides) were a direct result of perceived overpopulation. I dunno...I would call that a downside?
I know it's impossible to understand for an internet person in 2024, but childless urban living wasn't always cool and aspirational. Why do you think the automobile found such strong product-market-fit in the 1900s.
> At least try to look up basic statistics: 558,000,000 -> 746,225,356
If we want to argue of the semantics of "roughly the same," I'd say 35% growth qualifies when comparing a US population that grew 250% over the same time and a world that grew by 400%.
That's not what you did and its not what I objected to. But do play up the whole victim complex you have going on.
You are truly hitting all the 'alt-right' highlights. First make grand statements using totally misleading statistics then when this is pointed out to you react with 'Oh sorry I'm not allow to question things'.
There are actually good statistics that you could have used to make your point, but you didn't.
> Second, nobody is saying public transport doesn't make sense inside the most dense US cities like LA, SF, etc (yes NYC exists).
All of these huge places are by far big enough to have a robust local and regional public transit network. And then you connect those networks with an inter-regional connection, making both networks stronger by doing so.
That argument might not make sense to connect NYC with Denver. But it makes a hell of a lot of sense for LA and the Bay area. Specifically when both are trying to expand their public transit network and there are major cities in between where people would like to access both the Southern and the Northern regional transport networks.
> The issue is the network beyond those areas, due to suburbanization.
Aggregate density statistics would look the same no matter if urbanization or suburbanization.
> Third, when discussing internet people's fetishization of European density over American suburban sprawl, its not crazy to bring up downsides -- of which there are many.
And yet of those many non of the ones mentioned were correct or made sense or had statistical evidence backing them up. Maybe that why you got pushback.
Then you spun into some nonsense argument about Hitler.
> It's true, the German desire for territorial expansion (and resulting World Wars and Genocides) were a direct result of perceived overpopulation.
Assuming this was true, the term 'perceived' is meaningless. People can 'perceive' anything if they want to with enough ideology. The evidence would have clearly point out that they were wrong.
And people like you making argument in favor of those wrong positions against evidence are part of the problem with that perception.
> I dunno...I would call that a downside?
You are literally reducing WW2 to an argument about housing density. That completely ridiculous.
What matters to the Nazis was not relative density of urban areas but rather the TOTALITY of LAND and RESOURCE under state control. The wanted this to compete with continental scale powers like US and the Soviets.
So their conquests and ideology had LITERALLY nothing to do with urban housing density. They didn't see Berlin and think 'man people are so close together here, I guess we need to conquer Ukraine. That just total wrong, your argument is 100% wrong.
I suggest you read Adam Tooze work on Interwar and WW2 economics.
In terms of their architecture and city design they were french and Napoleonic inspired.
> I know it's impossible to understand for an internet person in 2024, but childless urban living wasn't always cool and aspirational. Why do you think the automobile found such strong product-market-fit in the 1900s.
The largest expansion in human population happened when humans started to live together more closely during the industrial revolution. And immigrants who usually have more kids most often move to cities as well.
The biggest fear of the 'over population' crazy people are mega cities like Delhi and Lagos.
Unless you have really amazingly solid statistics about humans living in density having much lower child rates when taking into account education, wealth and other factors. But you have not presented any such evidence. You have just asserted it to be true.
And even if it was true, to create urban sprawl just in the vague hope that people are gone have more kids is insane.
> If we want to argue of the semantics of "roughly the same,"
If you think '35%' qualifies as 'roughly the same' I question your sanity.
Need I remind you that you used pre-WW2 statistics and millions of people got displaced or killed? And millions of men died, leading to less kids? That had long term effects on population.
So if anything that 35% totally under-sells how many people would be in Europe how had WW2 not happened. So the argument that Europe grew less was related to housing density is nonsense.
WW1 had happened and reduced long term growth potential, then WW2 happened and made it worse. So of course for the next couple decades the US had a powerful economy and literally millions of Europeans went to the US and had kids there and many millions of Mexicans and Cubans (and many others) moved to the US. And non of that happened because of housing density.
The only real challenging part of the route is going to be pass out of the inland empire where the I-15 grade is a really steep. The rest of the project is pretty straightforward, with rights of way already in place and very few expensive and complex grade crossings. They picked this city pair and route very carefully to have an excellent chance to succeed both on construction simplicity and ridership. I'm not sure they will actually open in time for the 2028 Olympics, but I wouldn't bet against 2029 operations.
As for high speed, it won't be able to sustain true high speed rail velocity across the whole route (150mph / 250 kph), but it will be much faster than driving and there will be long stretches that are very high speed.
Both takes are oblivious to the problem domain, to the point that you didn't even realize your worst-case scenario is completely irrelevant and doesn't even put any of the project's aspects into question.
Keep in mind that this is an infrastructure project. The expected outcome, such as the Interstate Highway System, is providing the US with infrastructure that is of critical importance to the local, state, and national strategic interests. Taking 10 years to build is not a problem because infrastructure projects often take decades to pull through. See Switzerland's Gotthard Base Tunnel and how it took billions to build and decades from signing off until being opened to the public.
Being non-high-speed is also perfectly ok. The difference between high-speed and non-high-speed in practice is the door-to-door travel time being close to 3h instead of around 1h30m. Once you start to think about it, you'll eventually realize airplanes take far longer than that to cover the same door-to-door trip as the flight itself takes less than a third of the time. In fact, it's widely established that commercial flights are only competitive with regards to high-speed trans for distances greater than ~600km, and trains remain competitive for half the distances if you have their commercial speeds.
More interesting, high-speed is just a brand. The important property is commercial speed, and you can have non-high-speed lines outperforming high-speed lines. A textbook case is Britain's high-speed rail network, whose top speed is ~160km/h, which is considerably slower than France's ~320km/h, but still ensures high commercial speeds as the track layout was designed to allow trains to constantly circulate at speeds close to the top speed.
[0] https://www.openrailwaymap.org//mobile.php?availableTranslat...
I was referring to Britain's adoption and pervasive use of its InterCity 125 trains.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/InterCity_125
The interesting aspect of the InterCity 125 was the fact that, instead of going with an optimized record breaking train, British Rail went the other way around and optimized their track layouts to allow an unimpressive train to achieve what was at the time unmatched commercial speeds.