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Comment by ewoodrich | Hacker News Reader

It was approved by a ballot measure, so in this case it may be the "idiocy" (or will) of the voter.

http://ballotpedia.org/wiki/index.php/California_Proposition...

It's interesting that in Jun 2012, voters might've voted differently if asked again [1]:

In fact, some of the highest resistance to the high-speed rail project that would run from L.A. to the Bay Area comes from Angelenos, according to new data released over the weekend by the USC Dornsife / Los Angeles Times Poll:

About 56 percent of would-be voters in L.A. County would say no to the train if allowed to vote on it again; 37 percent would be in favor. In San Francisco the train would win 47-45.

About 66 percent of Central Valley voters were opposed to the train, which would run through their farm region.

Statewide, if a re-vote on the train were allowed, 59 percent of would-be voters would say no; only 33 percent would give reaffirm it.

About 55 percent of statewide voters said they'd be down for a re-vote.

The article later goes on to state:

The biggest problem for this train is timing -- California is facing another crushing budget deficit and a stalling economic recovery. Dan Schnur, director of the poll:

    Californians aren't necessarily against the idea of high-speed rail. But they don't want to spend all that money right now, and they don't trust the state to make the trains run on time.

[1] http://blogs.laweekly.com/informer/2012/06/california_bullet...

I'm not from the area, so I don't know how such a ballot works but for voters who didn't have Musk-level engineering knowledge, was the choice the status quo of not fast trains and spending on fast trains?

IIRC, the choice was between no trains and a train. I think a lot of people voted for it so they had a cheaper alternative than planes and a less time/effort intensive alternative than driving.

Also because fuck the TSA.

Too late: http://www.seattlepi.com/technology/businessinsider/article/...

> If you don't want to be searched at the train station, you have the freedom to not ride the train.

I wonder what the security checkpoints would be like on the HyperLoop if it ever got built? They are saying capsules could depart 30 seconds apart. Imagine is there was an attack in on of them, with several others travelling at high speed just behind.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-23677205

I'm sure there some contingency has been thought of, unfortunately it's just the world we live in these days :(

Forget about an attack. The system would need to be robust against simple malfunctions which could also result in a massive pile-up.

This system would seem very weak to criminals / terrorists / whatever firing bullets at it. It would be exceptionally difficult to track where the shot/s came from, and it would cause serious pressure problems.

As opposed to aircraft sitting on the tarmac, which are not subject to such problems?

Aircraft sitting on the tarmac doesn't have to take off if it has been shot at. In the process of taking off could be more of a problem, I suppose. On the other hand, at least airports are a relatively small area to keep secure.

Presumably the Hyperloop isn't actually in danger when shot at. The cars just slow down when depressurization occurs. Thought I read that somehow.

I responded to concern over the Hyperloop shutting down for hours whilst the damage is repaired.

And, if someone fired a few pot shots into a taxing A380 at LAX, I have to imagine that the whole place would be shut down for a few hours.

Airplanes leak so much air that a couple more half-inch holes would not affect overall integrity. Most control systems are implemented with redundancy, so taking out a control point would just failover to a backup. Occupants aside, there little such damage could do to an airplane; noting the occupants, worst case is a couple casualties, not loss of everyone on board. And, of course, you could simply choose to not take off.

As mhandley noted, Hyperloop might be more susceptible, as the concern is more like your airplane flying an inch off the ground and hitting a stationary large brick.

...which reminds me of an old analogy: Back when large-capacity (ooh! 10MB!) hard drives were becoming common, I recall hearing the comparison that the read head was akin to a 747 traveling Mach 3 just 1 inch off the ground. Perhaps Elon wondered how this might work in real life, and so came up with Hyperloop.

Aircraft are actually supposed to leak air. In non-bleedless aircraft, the engine compressors pressurize air to be used in the A/C unit, which then sends all the pressurized air throughout the cabin. To prevent excess pressure buildup, valves are opened partially most of the flight with a veinlike network of tubes venting air to the exterior of the aircraft.

Of course, if any damage occurred on the ground, this would be a non-issue entirely as the aircraft wouldn't be pressurized at all.

Even if the pressure problems could be countered, a bullet hole is likely to leave a pretty ragged profile on the inside of the steel tube. The specification calls for the air bearing skis to ride 0.5 to 1.3mm off the tunnel wall. They'd need to be pretty robust to take hitting the ragged edge of a bullet hole at 700mph.

I think that a bullet hole in the type of tube that supports this much weight is unlikely. Oil pipeline tubes would typically be thinner (less weight to support) and the concept of a bullet piercing those tubes is unlikely.

I wonder - could you line the high-speed part of the tube with half an inch of soft wax or something similar? Then any dents or imperfections caused by bullets would rapidly be smoothed out again, and the damage to the skis would be minimized by vaporizing the wax you hit.

The specification for the tube is inch-thick steel. Most bullets not meant for tanks would leave a dent, not a hole.

The pdf mentioned something like tsa, only streamlined.

If they turn off the compressor there's a giant air cushion in front of them and the capsule no longer has air bearings. It probably lands on wheels and can then engage the breaks. A small capsule has low inertia as well.

Most likely safer than a train.

Unfortunately the passengers inside still have high inertia. It doesn't matter if the capsule stops without damage if all the people inside are crushed by G-forces.

This is covered in some detail in the proposal. The capsules will be able to stop in the event of an emergency without hitting capsules in front or crushing passengers.

The Shanghai maglev has no security at all... or at least not last time I went on it. Neither do any of the European HSR systems I've been on.

Remember a big part of TSA isn't to protect the people on the planes, but to protect other people from the planes themselves. It's pretty hard to weaponize a vehicle that's stuck inside a tube or on rails.

The choice was fast trains or no trains.

Well, fast trains or no new trains. It is still technically possible to get on BART in San Francisco and get off from a train in Los Angeles. You wouldn't choose to do this -- nobody would choose to do this [1] -- but it is possible.

[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/14/magazine/14Train-t.html?pa...

I see, fair enough, cheers for pointing that out. I'm in the UK and we're pretty well connected by rail, I wasn't expecting the alternative to be that ridiculous, just normal slower trains.

Rail in California is sadly a total joke.

In the US, rail is optimized for freight, not people.

Inasmuch as it's optimized at all.

We really do have arguably the best freight rail system in the world. http://business.time.com/2012/07/09/us-freight-railroads/

"America's freight railways are... universally recognised in the industry as the best in the world":

http://www.economist.com/node/16636101

Australia is the same, here passenger rail between major cities is mostly something old person take as a scenic route. Often it is actually more expensive than flying.

A logical outcome of the combination of private companies owning the railways and the government's willingness to build a lot of road capacity for passenger use.

I don't know why the parent got downcoted. US rail freight is the envy of the world. You didn't get the European passenger rail experience without some trade offs. Here's a briefing on the subject from the Economist.

http://www.economist.com/node/16636101

Considering that most rivers go from the north to the south and the big distances (compared to, say, Japan or Europe), that's logic. Also explains the role of air travel.

Density is destiny. Population densities:

  407/km² England
  256/km² UK
   93/km² California
   32/km² USA

2.8/km² Australia

And here you can travel from most parts of Melbourne to most parts of Sydney with just two train changes. One at a Melbourne hub to the interstate trains and one at Sydney to the local system.

Even so, we feel our train systems suck too.

Yes, our high speed rail process is currently on a ridiculous timescale, something like 50 years out. If something isn't slated for major construction works within a single term of government you can pretty much assume it will never happen in its current form.

That figure is meaningless considering Australia is a large piece of largely uninhabited land, with two or three metropolitan areas on the coasts.

Unless you can take a train into the center of Australia, in which case I apologize.

Actually you can, rather expensive though.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Australia_Railway

But this comparison is wrong and meaningless. Certainly no one would build a high-speed, dense train network across, say, Nevada.

But building one across the coastal part of California? Or across the NE United States? Why yes, that does make sense, and why yes, it is warranted by the densities in those areas. The fact that the U.S. also owns Alaska doesn't really matter. No one is arguing Alaska needs a high-speed rail network.

Build fast trains connecting all the red areas:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/ae/Californi...

Repeat for suitable other areas across the U.S.

I can believe that's a good plan for the US NE corridor... which already has usable (but improvable) Amtrak.

The California coastal cities (and connecting areas) are still pretty sparse, comparatively. And the marquee High Speed Rail project takes a big inland detour to the smaller interior cities, for political reasons. If ever finished, that will hurt its price/time attractiveness compared to flying.

The US NE corridor is arguably the only place it makes sense to build a high speed train network.

You'll notice that Elon Musk's plan for the Hyperloop includes an option for shooting automobiles through the tubes. That's because the mass transit within the cities on that coast is shit.

Inter-city mass transit only makes sense once you've solved intra-city mass transit. Unless you really, really love hanging out within a few city blocks of an inter-city train station, you need to have a convenient, desirable mass transit system waiting for you in the city you're going to. If you're linking Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and DC, you're liking the best mass transit system in America with four other pretty good transit systems. Cutting Boston to DC from 6.5 hours to 90 minutes is definitely worth doing.

That's because the mass transit within the cities on that coast is shit.

As someone who uses only mass transit, I think that's untrue.

I was going to make a flippant comment about "Congratulations on living in San Francisco!", but hilariously, there's a better chance you live in Los Angeles (lower ridership percentage, but significantly higher population).

Even in Oklahoma City, where only ~1% of people commute via mass transit, there are still thousands of people who can live happily without a car because mass transit serves them fine. That does not mean that Oklahoma City has a great transit system.

I live in Oakland, have lived in San Francisco for a long time, frequently work in LA, and have lived in London, Amsterdam and Barcelona as well, so I feel I've had exposure to a good variety of transit systems in order to form my opinion.

Even in the Northeast, Amtrak's improvement plans are incredibly wasteful:

http://pedestrianobservations.wordpress.com/2012/07/10/north...

> Certainly no one would build a high-speed, dense train network across, say, Nevada.

I wonder. It's easier to find low cost airfares to Las Vegas than other cities. A conduit to Las Vegas from the populated west coast might be interesting to some.

Whilst our train service in the UK is a mess (and it really is), I suppose at least we have a mess that we can moan about rather than "buy a car, hippy".

I've actually done this, but in the reverse direction and because I missed my flight (asked hotel in Burbank to take me to the airport and they brought me to the Burbank airport instead of LAX.) Since it was a redeye, I just slept most of the long trip.

They approved it at a much lower budget ($9.95 billion). It would be interesting for the voters to get another vote based on the current cost projections.

The $9.95 billion was for the initial bond issuance. The estimate on the ballot was $40 billion versus the current estimate of between $98.5 billion and $118 billion.

Edit: correction from dragonwriter, via wikipedia [1]:

"The cost of the initial San Francisco-to-Anaheim segment was originally estimated by the CHSRA to be $33 billion (2008) / $35.2 billion (2013), but a revised business plan released in November 2011 by the CHSRA put the cost at $65.4 billion (2010) / $68.9 billion (2013) / $98.5 billion (YOE). The latest plan has revised the costs down to $53.4 billion (2011) / $54.5 billion (2013) / $68.4 billion (YOE)."

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_High-Speed_Rail#Fund...

Those numbers still seem absurd to me. $120 billion? France built the entire TGV network, about 2,000 km (1250 miles, ~2x the length of LA-SF, including numerous stations in urban areas) for around $20-30 billion. Maybe the U.S. should borrow some management practices from inefficient socialist "old Europe".

Uh, the number above is $70b and the TGV was built 30+ years ago so you could at least double that number based on inflation.

Even the most expensive TGV lines, have a per-km cost of around $20m/km in present dollars, and that's high enough to cause controversy. The bulk of the network was built for prices of $2-4m/km at the time, which is about $3-5.5m/km if you adjust for inflation. For a 700-km line like SF-LA, even the $20m outlier cost would work out to only $14 billion. Where's the 8x multiplier coming from? No TGV line has cost >$100m/km, or even close, in 2013 dollars. I am not sure any line in the world has cost that much, even in inhospitable terrain like China's high-speed rail in Tibet, or Japan's high-speed rail through the mountains.

I'd just like to plug the Dictionary of Numbers chrome extension at this point which provides context for all of the numbers in this thread. For example, did you know that $14 billion [≈ net worth of Steve Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft]?

Maybe the real estate that it goes through is significantly more expensive? I know if you wanted to build a new, totally segregated line from DC to Boston would probably cost 100B easily.

>I am not sure any line in the world has cost that much, even in inhospitable terrain like China's high-speed rail in Tibet, or Japan's high-speed rail through the mountains.

you should check cost of highways in Moscow - $300M/mile. Hint - it isn't about terrain :)

France probably doesn't tie both its rail agency's hands behind its back with pointless environmental impact reports (the sole purpose of which seems to be to generate extra revenue for civil engineering contractors) and then let NIMBYs sue because this or that insignificant detail wasn't included.

France is an interessting case. If I remember well, the have a group of people (project managers, politians, you name it) preparing the case well before any actual construction work starts. Yet, as afar as I remember, there actually were some controversies when they started a TGV line somewhere in northern France. But it still works pretty well, one benefit of being highly centralized.

Another factor at play is that TGV lines are purpose built for high-speed traffic (curve radius, climb rate, ...) while for example in Germany they are mostly shared. That makes the single TGV track cheaper, but you still ahve to built another track for lets say freight. If want another track, that is.

But the cool thing ist that TGV don't stop at every single village that happens to be the hometown of some polititian.

I think one aspect is just that the decision is made definitively at some point, in advance. People have different opinions: impact on historic buildings, noise, environment, other things. This is all debated up front, and then the legislature either approves it, or it doesn't. But when it was approved, it was approved. You can't sue in court to stop the plan on environmental grounds or noise grounds or something else, once the legislature has decided to go ahead with it, because the authorizing legislation supersedes any contrary legislation.

But the U.S. delegates decision-making to agencies and courts in a way that this doesn't happen. California might take input for a long time before deciding on its plan, but its final plan is still not final. Anyone can sue it for many different reasons. Maybe it violates the federal Clean Air Act, maybe it violates property rights, maybe something else. The decision is never final until every challenge to an agency or court is decided, which massively adds to uncertainty and costs.

Crossrail is 118km and is going to cost 16bn GBP or about 135m GBP per km (~$209m/km) (if I've done my maths right.)

Though it's somewhat difficult to separate out the 42km of new tunnels (expensive) and a whole bunch of new stations (expensive) including a whole bunch of revamped ones in the centre of London (very expensive).

America is an inefficient, Socialist old Europe.

$6.4 trillion in total government expenditures.

Largest welfare and entitlement programs.

Nearly 15% U6 unemployment. Collapsing labor force. Falling real incomes. 15% on food stamps. Massive fiscal mismanagement in every respect. Endless QE just to fund the government. 0% interest rates just to reach 1% GDP growth. Healthcare is clearly moving toward a completely socialized approach over time and completely away from any free market solution. Taxes are extremely high, between federal and state; typically higher than supposedly socialist European countries. America also has more economic regulations on the books than any other country (and that's rapidly expanding). The largest land owner in America is the government, by a drastic margin. Half of all mortgages are held by the government. And on and on.

Doesn't get any more old European Socialist than what America is today. It would be fiscally impossible to go any further.

> It would be fiscally impossible to go any further.

We'll try.

I honestly doubt the higher cost projections would change the vote -- when talking about that much money, most voters -- myself included -- can't really discern the impact of the difference between $10 billion and $70 billion.

The only hope would be that the anti-rail side could point to the growth of projections as either incompetence or out of control budgeting, which could both sway the vote. But I think if you go back to 2008 and say, "This will cost $100 billion," the vote would be the same.

BTW - the link disproves your point somewhat - voters approved a $10bn train, which is now expected to cost over 10x that. Brings into question what exactly they approved, or what it means to "approve" if there is no cost control in the approval.

I don't have a point really, I'm just saying this was a publicized ballot measure at the time and not carried out against the voters' will.

And as I said in above comment, the $9.95 billion was for the initial bond issuance. The estimate on the ballot was $40 billion versus the current estimate of between $98.5 billion and $118 billion.

> The estimate on the ballot was $40 billion versus the current estimate of between $98.5 billion and $118 billion.

The estimate from the current Business Plan is $68.4 billion, not "between $98.5 and $118 billion."

They call it a "Business Plan"? That's rich!

(I voted against it) In the ballot, they claimed a cost of $45B. But after the measure passed, the cost ballooned to $98B (yes, you read that correctly). Then, after howls of protest, the cost now is $68B.

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