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Comment by legitster | Hacker News Reader

The reality is for every government constraint, there are even more difficult economic constraints that it has to work against.

A 90-minute flight between these SF and LA can be had for ~$80 or less. A 7-hour bus ticket between these two cities is ~$50. To put it another way, the train would have to be only half-again more expensive per passenger to operate than a bus to beat a flight on price.

I get it that there are niche reasons some individuals would prefer a train. But the economies of scale that they need to achieve here is ridiculous.

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It's a similar distance to Paris to Marseille, a 3 hour journey. Price for that seems to vary between 29 and 80 EUR depending on time of day.

That's "get on the train, get off the train three hours later", so in practice is much faster than a 90 minute flight, which is "get to airport, go through security, walk seemingly endlessly to gate, fly, walk seemingly endlessly through baggage claim etc etc, get out of airport". The train is, of course, also _far_ more comfortable than a plane. Personally, I'd opt for the train...

I suspect if the damn thing ever gets built, flying between SF and LA will more or less become a thing of the past. Like, why would you?

I love trains! And I agree that they are superior in comfort and ease than flying. But the train still has to generate massive amounts of new traffic that doesn't currently exist to justify its huge costs.

The TGV is something of an anomaly, and tough to compare against. It both beats all ridership estimates, and also comes in at half the price of even the Shinkansen: https://pedestrianobservations.com/2023/06/21/why-does-tgv-r...

Eh, ICE journeys of similar distance seem to be in the same general price range.

> But the train still has to generate massive amounts of new traffic that doesn't currently exist to justify its huge costs.

There are apparently about 130 SF Bay Area to LA flights daily. Let's say on average 200 person planes, at 80% occupancy, so 20,000 people. The biggest high speed trains have a capacity on the order of 1300, though those are very long trains; 800 or less is more common. Assuming an 18 hour day, that's a train every 45 minutes or so. That seems... fine? You'd also expect some traffic to the intermediate destinations, and possibly some increase in travel because, really, it is so much less bloody awful than flying (anyone who tells you otherwise has either never been on an intercity train or never been on a plane).

One weird aspect of American exceptionalism is that it is not _just_ Americans saying "we're the best"; sometimes it is Americans saying "we can't have the nice things that all other large rich countries have because [whatever]". The US can manage a high speed rail line or two.

Trains are routinely competitive with flights on corridors like this. Thats why its being built in this stretch

That's 90 minutes in the air, not total trip time.

The HSR is 160 minutes from downtown to downtown. There's no check-in, no security check, no arriving 1-2 hours early, no travel to and from the airport. When you count all of that, HSR will be faster than flying. It's also far, far more comfortable - there's no comparison there.

The flight doesn’t include the time to get to and from the airport plus TSA screening.

I greatly prefer taking a train because I can just show up and go.

90 minutes in the air + 1 hour on each end at the airport.

On a train I can work the entire time with internet.

You can do that in the air if you're willing to pay out the nose! That's another reason we need rail like this: air carriers won't be able to get away with quite as much bullshit as they do with the added competition.

I arrive 30 minutes before boarding, sail through security, and work on the internet on a plane. I don’t check a bag, either, so I’m out in twenty reliably enough that I can call a car when I deplane. Unless you live in San Francisco or LA, loyalty programmes probably mean you’ll default to taking a flight between cities.

(Saying this as someone who likes flying, loves trains and dislikes driving.)

I've done LA-SF many times for work, and I was able to be in the rental car in LA only 2 hr after being dropped off at SFO. Luckily both airports are pretty easy to navigate.

Having a high-speed train be less expensive to operate than a bus isn’t unrealistic, as long as the train is packed. You have to pay the bus driver, while the train amortizes operational salaries over many more people.

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