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Comment by renewiltord | Hacker News Reader

California is also like this for the most part. Bay Area has 8 m, Los Angeles area has 17 m, and San Diego area has 3 m. 28 out of 39 live in those three. Straight line.

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With relatively little between the Bay Area and LA to serve as a viable customer base. Hence, a lot of the problems getting California HSR going. Imagine you had the Boston area and the Washington DC area and took out NYC and Philadelphia in the middle. You'd have the same issue. The Acela isn't the fastest rail service (in part because NYC is in the middle but Boston to NYC and NYC to DC are a lot more practical than the whole route. I did it once when I wasn't in a hurry but it was because I could afford the time.

Isn't this Japanese Railway Thesis that with the railway you build something in that "very little between"? Have the railway company buy up up all that cheap land, develop it into commute hubs with their own walkable retail and use that to fund the railway.

To an extent, a good train service can _create_ stuff. A while back, Irish Rail increased frequency on the Dublin-Belfast intercity train service. This had the side-effect (apparently unexpected) of kind of turning Newry (which is across the border in Northern Ireland) into a commuter town for Dublin. The Cork line also has a bunch of commuter towns which are on the face of it weirdly distant from Dublin, because the train compresses the distance.

You can see the effect of this here: https://www.chronotrains.com/en/station/2964574-Dublin?maxTi...

I'd assume that similar will happen with California HSR (which would be a far better service than either of the Dublin intercities above); it would make living in intermediate stops and working in LA or SF far more practical.

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