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Comment by dangus | Hacker News Reader

While I think the project should cost less money, thinking purely in terms of money is a slippery slope.

The $20 I spend on feeding myself a healthy dinner could buy 10 sundaes at McDonald's, that doesn't mean I should eat 10 sundaes.

Turning a whole lot of flights into energy and carbon-saving train trips is a huge benefit.

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> thinking purely in terms of money is a slippery slope

I agree. Flights would also be much faster and more flexible.

But flights emit co2, and a train system is electrified. It can be completely powered by renewables.

Given California's extreme susceptibility to climate related disasters, avoiding flights is a great idea.

Not faster by enough to matter, a difference of 1 hour that airport security, taxi, boarding, and takeoff/landing easily eats up.

You also can't be productive on a flight packed in like sardines and being required to put away your laptop for for a large portion of the flight time.

in addition... you need a real id or a passport to fly. a lot of people have extreme anxiety about flying. those are big hurdles that a train does not have.

I made an appointment at the DMV, walked in, waited about 10 minutes, answered a few questions, and walked out with a piece of paper saying I'd get the real ID mailed to me, which happened.

As for getting a birth certificate, I googled how to get a birth certificate from XX state, followed the directions, and got a birth certificate in the mail.

"Works for me, WONTFIX"

Spoken like a true software engineer

A better reply would have been presenting an example of the "big hurdles".

Besides, WONTFIX are for problems that are not worth fixing. INVALID are for irreproducible problems.

True, but at these prices you could have a dedicated terminal to make the process as easy as getting on a bus.

One of the premises behind the CAHSR is that the existing airports and runways in LA and SF are nearing capacity. There's no room to expand, and the metropolitan regions are so sprawling you'd end up driving an additional hour or more to any newly built airport. Cars and buses don't solve the problem, either, precisely because of the sprawl and traffic--it can take longer to traverse Bay Area and LA sprawl than it does to zoom the hundreds of miles down I-5.

From an engineering and planning perspective HSR makes sense anyway you look at it. The problem is our inability to build major infrastructure projects. Even highway construction and expansion in these regions is becoming absurdly expensive, along with all other forms of development. Completely independent from HSR, we need to fix our regulatory policies. The ballooning price tag for CAHSR shouldn't inspire ire against HSR, it should inspire ire against our regulatory policies and governance.

Is that really true? LAX and SFO are near capacity, at least during certain times of the day. But we still have room to increase flights at SJC, STS, OAK, ONT, BUR, SNA, and LGB. With a little more work it should also be possible to shift some cargo flights to NUQ in order to free up SFO capacity.

These questions have been exhaustively studied. For example, https://hsr.ca.gov/wp-content/uploads/docs/about/business_pl...

That analysis may be biased, but it does a decent job sketching out how to compare modes and capacities. Also, regulatory obstruction and cost inflation apply just as much to airport and highway expansion as it does to HSR. In some ways it's much worse. SFO should build a new runway, and it'd be incredibly cost effective, but NIMBY opposition was so intense SFO repudiated the idea years ago and dare not even speak of it, now.

No, that report doesn't address my point. Did you even read it? OAK in particular has been losing flights lately and is well below capacity. We don't need to build a new runway there, the existing ones are under utilized.

> that report doesn't address my point

It gives number for how much airport (gates and runways) and highway expansion would be needed to meet future demands without the HSR. And it does so apportioning traffic across the 3 major Bay Area airports and 5 LA airports.

The OAK situation only drives home the point. It's not as convenient, at least relative to the segment of people flying. Location matters. If you want to optimally utilize existing airports, we need more infrastructure, including better mass transit systems. OAK is connected to BaRT, but it's yet another transfer with about an extra 15 minutes of travel time, not including walking through the stations. And BaRT itself isn't an effective mass transit system; it's more commuter train than subway.

I'm traveling to LA next month from SF and still haven't decided whether to fly or drive. With CAHSR point-to-point the decision would be easier--take the train and rent a car.

There's no terminal that's going to make getting on a flight as simple or quick as getting on a bus.

Many smaller airports are comparable. Like a few minutes from parking to being at the gate.

Have you ever been to Europe?

Bingo.

Never seeing a good public transport project everyone assumes that it’s not possible. It is possible when the goal is to provide transportation services, not resource extraction from masses to limited (in the grand scheme of things) number of individuals.

How many years and how many billions do you think it would take Europe to build this railroad?

Yes. Isn't Ryanair more popular for the distance this California project would cover? (800 km)

Both options exist and both are heavily utilized. Having multiple options helps alleviate congestion issues.

> Turning a whole lot of flights into energy and carbon-saving train trips is a huge benefit.

Consider the embodied carbon of 500 miles of train tracks and embankment. The carbon released from producing all that cement, smelting the steel, and diesel fuel to move the earth is immense.

This claim that train infrastructure construction will negate the carbon savings of train travel is just a factually untrue argument.

You also can’t power planes with renewables like solar.

"Turning a whole lot of flights into energy and carbon-saving train trips is a huge benefit."

It's a question of what gets the most bang for the buck. Suppose you spent $230 billion on replacing fossil fuel with renewables for electricity generation, on switching to EVs from gasoline powered cars, on insulating houses? I think you get a lot more bang for the buck from these or lots of other activities.

They’d probably get some good results if they spent $100 billion on coming up with more fuel-efficient ways of flying and still have enough left over for 200 years of flights

The next generation of small airliners with thin wings and open-rotor turbofans are expected to be significantly more fuel efficient. Hybrid battery-electric propulsion also holds some promise for shorter flights.

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