I have a question to all the naysayers and praisers of the future autonomous car: have any of you ever been on a high speed rail link in europe? Assuming everything else equal, they're just a far superior way to travel, where you can walk around, drink coffee, work in a relatively quiet and steady environment and all of that going 300 km/h.
That said, there are obvious questions why the project is far more expensive than a comparable one in Europe, but that is a completely separate question.
The original plan called for a LA to San Fran trip time of less than 2 hours or 40 minutes, which would have required peak speeds of over 350 km/h (faster than any other train in the world), and average speeds of 320 km/h. This would be difficult to achieve anywhere, but it's especially hard (read: utterly impossible) to achieve on that route, since for regulatory reasons the train will be limited to 160 km/h for significant portions of the route.
Since then, the plan has changed repeatedly, and not for the better. It currently looks like average trip times will be in the 4-6 hour range. That is hopefully achievable (although they haven't built it yet), but one thing it isn't is high speed. (They're hoping to work in some "express" trains which will do better, but it's an open question whether they're manage it, and even if they do, they won't be remotely as fast as Europe, China, or Japan.)
You're talking about trains going 300 km/h, but California is looking to build a train that will be doing literally half that. By many common definitions, it's not even "high speed rail".
> I have a question to all the naysayers
I love high speed rail, and I hope maybe one day California will try and build a high speed rail network. :) Naysaying what they're actually building doesn't mean I don't like rail.
Wikipedia says about speed limits "220 mph (350 km/h) from San Jose to LA (about 422 mi (679 km))
110 mph (180 km/h) from San Jose to San Francisco (about 57 mi (92 km))[2]
"
Is this what you are referring to? 90 km at "half-speed" out of 770 km doesn't sound too bad.
High speed rail between Moscow and Sankt Peterburg takes 4 hours exactly. This includes leaving Moscow urbanized area from city centre, a few intermediate stops, and traversing Sankt Peterburg to city centre. I don't see why traveling from SF to LA would take more than 3:30 given that the distance is 100 kilometers shorter.
(It also costs around $50 currently but obviously don't expect that)
WP says that train only goes 250 km/h and that the railway is congested, with another rail being built for just the high speed. So it is really a low lower bound.
I assume the issues are related to sharing the tracks with Caltrain. I'm not sure if they are going to fully grade-separate the line from San Jose to San Francisco, so that harms top speed as well.
It's too bad too because 350km/h from San Francisco to Mountain View would mean you could make the trip in 11 minutes.
Which is great if the train goes from A to B and you need to go from A to B. If you're a contractor like me bouncing between customers all day, a train just isn't going to cut it.
An autonomous car lets me get work done while I travel just like the train. Only it actually gets me from one stop to the next. Taking a train 90% of the way there, then spending an hour walking or finding a taxi to get the last 10% is borderline useless. Great if you sit at a desk all day I suppose.
Autonomous cars and trains coexist, and trains are more efficient for long distance travel. In a world where autonomous cars are available, you'll probably be able to get one from your door to the train and from your train to the final destination, rather than walking or trying to "find" a taxi by any means more onerous than having tapped a button in an app, possibly integrated with the workflow of buying a train ticket.
And, for long distances, trains will probably be both faster and more reliable than cars, automated or otherwise.
Assuming everything else equal, they're just a far superior way to travel, where you can walk around, drink coffee, work in a relatively quiet and steady environment and all of that going 300 km/h.... and end up in a place that's not actually where you wanted to go.
Trains are going to start to seem really quaint and retro-chic, right around the time this one is finished.
I would be interested to hear what a similar capacity highway on the same stretch of land would cost. I would be extremely surprised if that would be an order of magnitude different.
The sixty-billion-dollar bullet train they’re proposing in California would be the slowest bullet train in the world at the highest cost per mile,” Musk said. “They’re going for records in all the wrong ways.” California’s high-speed rail is meant to allow people to go from Los Angeles to San Francisco in about two and a half hours upon its completion in—wait for it—2029. It takes about an hour to fly between the cities today and five hours to drive, placing the train right in the zone of mediocrity, which particularly gnawed at Musk. He insisted the Hyperloop would cost about $6 billion to $10 billion, go faster than a plane, and let people drive their cars onto a pod and drive out into a new city.
To be fair, experts said that $6-$10 billion estimate was not realistic. First time projects always overshoot their budget. Also, it assumed placing tubes on the highway, instead of buying land (by far the biggest expense of the project).
Politically, from my own personal experience, most infrastructure projects are sold to the public with a much lower price tag than what they know to be the actual costs, because people are incredibly price sensitive when approving important infrastructure projects.
What we need is a true accounting of the cost of things, and the political willingness to do them. This way we don't have to worry about politicians 'underbidding' their projects just to get enough popular support. It becomes a rigged game when that happens, where the public approves projects that everyone on the project side knows will costs several times that early estimate.
If we want the bridges and the tunnels and the shared transportation, sanitation, etc. We need to understand that these projects cost money, and we need to be able to have t true accounting of them, not one that is politically convenient.
Otherwise, we'll just have this, with 2x and 3x being common run ups, ad infinitum.
Good numbers, on all projects, would help us better allocate our future dollars. Big numbers shouldn't kill meaningful and worthwhile projects. Bad ideas should.
This isn't to say that such projects should not be built, just that those selected should be the ones with the best realistic cost benefit, not those where the backers have made up the numbers most creatively.
I've noticed during the HS2 high-speed rail arguments in the UK that one effect of giving more accurate costing up front (which the UK govt appears to have got better at recently) is that people will just double your numbers anyway, due to long-standing lack of trust. Despite the government giving a very generous £40bn cap on the project, opposition groups still quote £80bn as the final price.
Of course, no-one will actually know if the costing was accurate until it's finished. Does being accurate really pay off for a politician?
The initial budget for the Gotthard Base Tunnel was CHF 8 billion; the actual costs are now up to about CHF 12 billion. So not exactly on budget either. :) The increased costs were because of geology (4.5%), changed requirements (6.3%), environmental enhancements (1.3%) and upgrades for rail technology and safety (8.5%).
Hm, that adds up to ~20%; yet the project went 50% over. So the bulk of the overrun is ... something else?
Anyway, the point of these large project is, we will need them. We can build them easier now, than later as congestion and land prices go up even more. When calculating overruns, I'd like to compare the ultimate cost with, what would it cost if we hadn't? Congestion, choked commerce, slowed economic growth all cost something.
Sometimes you have to buckle down and actually build the brave new world. "Skate toward the puck" is how its sometimes called - build the thing we will need to be a functional, thriving society in 100 years.
I'm not sure you can make many inferences from a single project - here in/near Edinburgh we had a terrible trams project (way over budget at about £1B, greatly reduced scope, years late) and a new bridge over the Forth that is under budget (now down to £1.4B) and going to open early.
I hope someone does a detailed comparison between the two projects!
The tunnels under the San Gabriel Mountains is an optional alignment that is being studied by the CHSRA at the request of the residents who live in affected areas.
It may indeed not be cost-effective, at which point one would assume the CHSRA will go with a different alignment. (The others of which have been studied for longer. This tunnel alignment is a new option they wanted to study before finalizing the route for this stage.)
"The 11-mile East Side Access tunnel in New York City, for example, is 14 years behind schedule, and the tab has grown from $4.3 billion to $10.8 billion. Boston's 3.5-mile Big Dig was finished in 2007 — nine years behind schedule and at nearly triple the estimated cost."
Blue state America, at least. Around here we routinely do projects on time and budget.
Might be as much a scale problem, are there any Red state America projects being done on vaguely similar scales, with, say, a billion dollars as a minimum baseline?
Can't say much for America, but in the UK our own HS2 high speed rail line, which probably won't be too far longer than 200 miles of track in total is projected to cost £40bn, with some suggestions that the true cost will be closer to £80bn.
Conversely we're also building a new west-east railway across/beneath London that seems to be going fairly well for about £15bn.
High speed rail is just a hugely expensive thing to get built in the developed world it seems.
The question is why? If China can build 10,000 miles of HSR and the developed world can't build 400 miles, won't there be an infrastructure penalty at some future time?
Spain has built 1500 miles of HSR so it seems that the extreme high cost is avoidable.
I'd blame politicizing infrastructure projects and (related) listening too much to NIMBYs. In China, they care much less. And probably for the better; infrastructure is a public good. At some point you have to tell someone to suck it up and take one for the team.
Two major drivers of the cost, as I understand it, are geography and geology of the region and existing land values, especially near the termini (eminent domain, in the US, requiring fair compensation to existing landholders.)
There's also non-cost factors involved with the PRC: for a land based empire like their's, internal lines of communication are critical, and since 1866 Prussia has shown the utility of railroads for that. Faster ones are obviously better, modulo how much heavy equipment you might need to move as well (for a lot of the PRC's issues, lightly armed troops are just fine).
The $68 billion figure is actually an overestimate. It's not in 2015 dollars; rather, it's adjusted for hypothetical future inflation. So if a tunnel is planned for 2025, that tunnel is priced in inflated 2025 dollars (using whatever made-up number for future inflation), not 2015 dollars.
Not surprised. But not hugely important in the scheme of things. The fact that the project exists and is being worked on seems a win to me given public transit history in the USA.
heavy rail, whether in city or between them always cost more than any alternative. this is a pure political project, it will not benefit any significant number of people other than those connected with the powers that be.
as another pointed out, automated vehicles will likely negate any purpose to this train. just automating buses alone will negate the need for any heavy rail people transport because unlike trains, bus routes are flexible.
Building more trains and other fixed-location transit systems that will be finished right around the time autonomous road vehicles start to become viable seems like a bad idea.
Public transit planners need to get a clue, seriously. The cars of 2050 are not going to be their father's Oldsmobile. This is more of an issue in urban environments than for cross-country transit, of course, but still... if trains are the answer, then we're asking the wrong question.
Relying on something you might have in the future seems like a bad idea to me. Infrasturcture needs constant improvements if you don'T do anything for years you might end up in a unresolveable mess.
One train is like 500 autonomous vechicles on one road, and more comfortable. It will still win energy-wise. That you can hop on robotaxi after arriving makes it even more desirable.
> The Three Capitals sets are 394 m (1,293 ft) long and have 766 seats, weighing 752 tonnes.
Most of the other trains seem similar. The mass is about one tonne per passenger. So in terms of mass of metal you need to drag around per passenger, a full train is very similar to a small car (say, the latest model Mazda Miata which weighs 1056 kg) occupied by a single passenger.
But of course trains are very rarely entirely full (and cars average more than one passenger). But the whole mass of the train needs to make the journey regardless of whether there's people onboard or not! The train I caught the other day was probably dragging around ten tons of metal for every passenger. This is what makes trains a horrendously energy-inefficient means of transport.
Aerodynamics? Self-driving cars could draft behind each other at high speed. Probably not a drag coefficient quite as low as the aerodynamically designed train, but it also has a colossally lower cross sectional area, because a train is ridiculously high and ridiculously wide (in the interests of not being ridiculously long, and also for historical reasons).
What else? Oh yes, the car doesn't have to stop 'til it reaches the destination, trains tend to have stops along the
route.
For speed, I don't see any reason why, once self-driving is solved, you couldn't have cars cruising at 200mph+ in self-organised "trains" on the existing I-5. No present car is really optimised for that kind of thing, so it's difficult to say how hard it would be, you'd need different tyre compounds for a start.
As for comfort I'll take the privacy of my own little bubble over travelling in the close company of four hundred random strangers.
It won't be your own little bubble. You're not going to own a 200MPH autonomous car. You will lease it by hour.
And even that is very far away. Meanwhile trains just work. No high-speed connection between LA and SF is an anomaly by world standards given size, proximity and economical importance of two cities.
Also, modern high-speed trains don't have 4-person compartments (or have those at premium), they are rows of seats not unlike plane business class seats. You usually have power, sometimes wi-fi. You can get coffee and a newspaper.
ICEs in Germany have 6-person compartments at no extra charge. You can choose where you would like to sit when making a reservation (compartment or open space (table or no?), window or aisle seat?), or hope that there will be empty compartments.
Let's try an experiment. Let's meet in the lobby of an office building in the middle of downtown LA, and see how long it takes each of us to get to a bar in downtown SF. Loser buys the drinks.
You fly at 500 MPH, I'll drive at 65-70 or whatever the speed limit on I-5 is these days.
I will win this bet, most likely. You will lose. A train won't help you much, if at all, because it's going to embark and disembark on its own fixed schedule, probably in some crappy/scary part of town miles away from where you need to go. (Here's another reason: eventually some terrorists are going to attack the train. The TSA will muscle its way in, and you'll have to arrive at the station an hour or two early, just like we do now when we fly.)
There's just too much hassle and overhead involved in multi-modal transit... which is why people who can afford to drive still do, even when they have alternatives.
Hey, I'm trying to throw some actual numbers into the discussion in response to the assertion that trains are more efficient. Perhaps those who want to make that claim can start supporting their own? Give me something to work with here.
Rolling resistance is the big issue that usually favours trains. On the other hand, could we design cars with an extra set of wheels or something?
Expensive, single-purpose hardwired tracks that make it much more efficient for the whole vehicle to travel. 500 autonomous vehicles all carry engines, batteries, lights and a lot of stuff that is not needed when those car are all traveling together, but wastes energy anyway. Also, the price tag of those single-purpose tracks is amortized by all the millions of "cars" that travel on them.
Something you're missing is that autonomous cars can bring an end to the era where everyone feels compelled to own at least one car, if not two. Most cars spend 1-2 hours per day on the road and 22-23 hours parked somewhere. With appropriate resource planning, a network of autonomous cars can probably serve as many people as our current urban highway systems do with 10% of the vehicles. And you can rest assured none of them are going to be burning gasoline.
People don't understand just how insanely different things are going to look in another couple of decades. Trains make sense if, and only if, everything stays exactly the same.
I am first to hope for the autonomous cars and ending car ownership, because IMO the current road situation is absolutely ridiculous (In the meantime, someone would please train drivers like they do train airline pilots? I.e. beat the stupidity out of them with enough training.). A PRT network made out of autonomous electric cars would be something absolutely wonderful... in a city.
But between the cities, you still have tons of cars going together, in a line, all the time. There is no flexibility here, almost everyone is going the same direction for most of the way. I don't see how even autonomous electric cars could beat trains on that. I think that the best way for the future is bullet trains/hyperloop connecting the large cities, and PRT within the city. I'm open to math that shows otherwise though.
I'd never previously considered the question of what sort of speed a self-driving car could reach on an intercity freeway. No reason why it would need to be significantly slower than a high-speed train.
Think individual cars are inefficient? Not compared to a train, and especially not compared to a train that is anything other than 100% full.
Airplanes are even faster... yet it's possible to drive from LA to SF in less time than it would take to fly, even if you never break the present-day speed limits. Remember, it's not fair if you count the distance from one city limit to another. You have to consider the time it takes a given passenger to get from their home or business to their end destination.
Also, all it will take is one (un)lucky 9/11-style terrorist attack, and everything we've come to know and love about air travel and the TSA will instantly apply to the train station. This is a matter of "when," not "if."
Finally, there's also a hidden economic cost associated with fixed tracks, similar to the costs/risks borne by someone who buys a house. They're stuck there. A homeowner might like to move to a nearby city to take a better job, but oops, they're still underwater on their mortgage. Likewise, locations and other trends in urban economic development shouldn't be biased by a decision made 50 years earlier regarding where to put the train tracks.
It's better to stay agile, and trains are perhaps the least agile things humanity has ever built.
You could conceivably space cars closely enough when they're automated that the aerodynamic drag would be considerably reduced for every car except the front one.
You're still going to have to deal with rolling resistance and going up-hill you'd have to limit the speed of such a convoy to the speed the slowest car can attain.
But for most distances that a car will normally travel the difference between 150 and 300 Km/h will not translate into meaningful changes in time spent on the road and probably you're still going to beat high-speed rail in door-to-door scenarios.
It seems a really good idea, to me. The autonomous autos are good local connectors to high speed rail or transit systems optimized for lnger-range travel, but not much better than existing autos add long-range travel options.
Autonomous cars are about to make this entire project redundant. It should be canceled, or maybe turned into a new kind of highway designed for 100% autonomous cars.
I'd feel much safer in a private car pod going 40 mph than a manually operated car going 80 mph. And I'd feel more comfortable in a private car pod than a busy public train.
> Autonomous cars are about to make this entire project redundant.
No, they aren't. One of the major motivations of the project is avoiding both the environmental cost of operating autos on the same route, and as an alternative to the infrastructure costs (including land lost from other uses) of adding the road capacity to handle volume growth on the routes the HSR will support.
Autonomous cars don't address either of those concerns.
One of the major motivations of the project is avoiding both the environmental cost of operating autos on the same route, and as an alternative to the infrastructure costs (including land lost from other uses) of adding the road capacity to handle volume growth on the routes the HSR will support.
This is absurd. The cars are going to get much more efficient, and the roads are already there.
The road capacity is not already there, and to meet the increased capacity needed will be quite expensive. The cost avoided in terms of road load was a major justification for HSR.
You don't think that a fleet of networked, semi-autonomous vehicles will be at least several hundred percent more efficient at using existing road space than human drivers?
For $68 billion, you could fly everybody in San Francisco to Los Angeles, and everybody in Los Angeles to San Francisco, and back again, about forty times. And that's before it starts going over budget.
But of course, the line doesn't go from Los Angeles to San Francisco. It goes from Burbank to Merced, on the good-governance principle that if you build something completely freaking useless, then somebody might find another hundred billion dollars to turn it into something useful at some point in the indeterminate future.
The $68 billion figure includes the full length of the line from downtown LA to downtown SF. The segment from Burbank to Merced is just the first one to be built. There are already tracks (albeit not high speed ones) from Burbank to LA and from Merced to Oakland, so when that section finishes you'd still have a one seat ride except for the last five miles crossing San Francisco Bay (for which you'd have to transfer to BART).
That said, there are obvious questions why the project is far more expensive than a comparable one in Europe, but that is a completely separate question.