There is high speed transit from San Francisco to Los Angeles today. It's called Southwest Airlines. Tickets are $45 for SFO-LAX each way in February right now (less than the expected cost of the train ticket). Other pairs (OAK-BUR, SJC-BUR) are similar ($49-$57 each way).
Before you say that it's ridiculous, consider how else $64 billion (current official estimated total construction cost of the project -- not counting operating cost)[0] could be spent:
- Commercial air travel costs around $0.10 per passenger-mile if you buy in bulk[1]. That means $64 billion could buy 640 billion passenger-miles of air travel. If allocated to the 11 million people who live in Los Angeles and San Francisco counties, the state could buy each resident 58,000 air miles of travel -- equivalent to about 88 round-trips between LAX and SFO.
- If the LAX-SFO air corridor becomes too busy, that $64 billion could also be spent upgrading existing fleets by buying 147 brand new A380s at an average list price of $435 million each. [2]
- If the environmental impact is a concern (not that laying tracks and punching holes through the Central Valley is free of impact), then buy new Teslas instead. Lots of them. At $35,000 per Model 3, you could buy 1.8 million new Teslas using that money. Add some solar panels to each purchase and you could still buy more than a million -- more than enough for every San Franciscan to get a brand new Tesla.
I do SFO to LAX, SNA, SAN weekly. It is not really fast and you are highlighting a special rate. Tickets easily go for $150 depending on the day, time, etc.
First, you have to deal with the security boondoggle. Add 30 minutes for that, because you never know what you are going to get.
Because of how SFO was built and the fact that they can't use both runways simultaneously with even a hint of bad weather, good luck leaving on time. Pad at least 30 minutes to your destination arrival time to be safe (but I've had plenty of early morning flights get delayed an hour or two waiting for fog to lift).
And then when you get into LAX… good luck getting out. Add an hour just to get out of the airport traffic. Unless you want to go north, you are better off flying into SNA… but tickets into SNA cost $175.
On a good day you can do it in 3 hours. On a bad day it's 6. The cost is $50-$200, and it's always a stressful and shitty experience.
I just recently took the Amtrak all the way down. I took 12 hours and cost $93 for a business class ticket. Yeah, it took forever. But it was really pleasant. It just takes forever. It be nice to have something in-between.
The other advantage of rail is that rail is generally less affected by weather. (which anyone that's sat at SFO or waited in the air or elsewhere on the ground for an SFO fog delay will appreciate)
Last time I was in Japan, a typhoon hit, and was working its way up the islands. My flight up to Tokyo was already cancelled due to high winds, but I was able to get a Shinkansen ticket and arrive in time to catch my flight before Narita was affected by the Typhoon.
The flight would have been 90 minutes (not including travel time to the airport), and the train was 5 hours, but still, it was a comfortable journey and I'd do it again. If I were traveling from downtown to downtown, the airplane time would be more like 4 hours (60 minutes to get to airport with padding to get to gate on time, 90 minute flight (scheduled time is over 2 hours, but usually the flight is around 90 minutes gate to gate), then at least 90 minutes to get off the plan and catch an express bus to Tokyo.
> The other advantage of rail is that rail is generally less affected by weather
That one does certainly depend on the amount of money the rail operator(s) invest in maintenance and upkeep, as well as how much area on the sides of the track they bought. In Germany, rail has three major issues with weather:
- during cold times, railroad switches freeze because they lack heatings and so they become stuck, and special maintenance teams have to be at standby across the country (source: was part of such a team for one season, well paid but shit that was cold)
- during storms, stuff gets blown onto the rail. Mostly dead trees, the problem is when the area next to the rails didn't get cleaned up (trees so high that they could fall into the rails are cut to a safe height or removed altogether). This can be caused either by a lack of upkeep - or because the surrounding area is not owned by the train operator
- during hot periods, the running gag in Germany is "how many trains will fuck up today?". The trains are either not properly maintained (due to a lack of funds) or simply have not been ordered with strong enough air conditioners.
tl;dr: getting rail immune from weather-related influences takes serious money. The Swiss and Japanese railroads did the proper investments and thus have next to zero weather related problems, the German railroads are seen as a cash cow ready to be milked by the politicians, consequences be damned.
As you say, rail systems aren't immune to weather.
But the German experience is that lack of funding is usually exaggerated as a reason. It's caused by many things, but mostly underappreciated is zoning, eminent domain (or lack thereof) as well as just basic technology.
The three main reasons for delays in Germany are:
1) suicides (up to two per day in the whole of Germany)
2) trees/branches falling on cables/tracks
3) train system overheating
Also rail is affected by
4) catastrophes that are happening next to the tracks: As rail tracks usually are next to industrial areas a burning industrial plant usually brings all train traffic to halt.
5) Germany being densely populated: Cars get stuck on crossings and trucks get stuck under rail bridges constantly.
6) forced interruptions, e.g. by people who steal power lines.
(4), (5) and (6) have nothing to do with rail funding. (1) Suicides are not caused by a lack of funding. (3) System collapses are caused by money restraints, but those trains were designed decades ago and the Bahn usually manages heating issues pretty well by shutting off single wagons.
On 2 (wood interrupting trains): A problem that would disappear if the Bahn could enforce a buffer zone around its tracks, where trees are to be cut off. But due to environmentalists, noise and zoning restrictions, the Bahn has to play gardener and spend millions on cutting trees each day.
> (4), (5) and (6) have nothing to do with rail funding.
Oh yes they do. There is a total lack of redundancy in the German network, which was only recently shown when that Rheintalbahn tunnel caved in during construction and took out the major traffic artery above for months.
1) Suicides: they can be prevented by walling off the tracks, which is thankfully done for the new high speed routes and as rework to existing routes. In addition to preventing suicides these also prevent wildlife accidents (a herd of sheep, for example, caused an ICE to derail in a tunnel once).
Ad 5) this could be solved by removing at-level crossings (and remotely supervising those which cannot be removed) and by reworking those bridges that get often hit by cars. This is a lack of funding.
Ad 6) walling off the tracks would help there too. Or providing enough rail service even at nighttimes...
Hey your problems are too serious, in France, each autumn, we'll get delays because of tree leaves on the tracks! (in addition to the cold/storm/hot problems) From what I understood, the leaves increase braking distances, so the trains have to be slowed.
> in France, each autumn, we'll get delays because of tree leaves on the tracks!
Yeah we get these too, but that's just delays, not the complete shutdown of the entire country's railroad system for sometimes days like last autumn after storm Xavier.
I think I was lucky since I avoided the worst of the latest storm. I just had a lot of delays on my first day of work this year: they had a tree fallen on the tracks, but they had managed to keep a few trains rolling.
Rail is also more environmentally efficient, once the initial infrastructure is put in place. Airplanes burn tons of fossil fuels, trains can run on renewables.
All the trains I have been on in California burn diesel fuel, including the one I commute on every day. Caltrain down the peninsula burns 10 million dollars in fossil fuels a year. I would hope we could convert already heavily used rail corridors to electric sometime in my lifetime.
Caltrain is currently in a project to convert to electric, as others have noted.
It's not particularly feasible in the US to convert freight-dominated lines to electric. Modern freight generally uses the double-stacked container as its loading gauge, and electric catenaries would sit several feet below the top of the double-stack container--the standard height for a bilevel in the US is 14.5 ft, but the double-stacked container runs to 20 ft.
This picture shows a double stack container under electric catenary, so it's possible. The cost would be high for the length of tank involved. Electrification's non-green advantage is faster acceleration, which is easy to justify on busy passenger lines as you get faster journeys and potentially more trains, but not important for freight.
If you think longer-term, electric trains are realistic. If batteries are cheaper than Diesel, you could just put 2x20ft container at the front with batteries. They can be swapped en-route and used as battery storage when not in use. As far as I know, most newer freight trains are diesel-electric anyway so not sure if you couldn't just feed the electric engine directly from a battery without buying new engines.
Currently not feasible because of high battery prices but realistic in 1-2 decades. And losses are lower than for electrified rail.
Busy routes are still better electrified but the huge US freight rail network would likely be cheaper to convert that way.
Not really. Freight lines are usually built at-grade and occasionally intersect city streets. Caltrain tracks included. Some of the Caltrain stations doesn't even have elevated platforms.
It would be... unpopular... to have an electrified third rail, at ground level, that you have to step directly over at a station or running directly through a city street. Somebody would surely trip on it or it could get touched by a little kid.
Third rail systems are usually only used when the tracks are physically inaccessible to passengers or other pedestrians.
> [Amtrak] was really pleasant. It just takes forever.
Absolutely -- IMHO for mid-distance (200 mi to 500 mi or so) trips, Amtrak is a really underrated option. I travel semi-often from Pittsburgh to NYC (450 mi) and choose train over flights because it's actually not that much slower (consider to/from airport, security, and (de)boarding, as you say) and it's much more comfortable: I can walk up and down the whole train, with no fasten-seatbelt sign to stop me; there's a cafe car; I have about 2 feet of legroom; there is reliable AC power and functional wifi. I just make it a work-from-train day and all's well.
For either end of the Northeast Corridor I almost always take the train. It's far easier and more relaxing. About the only reason I don't is if I have an AM meeting and can't head down the night before or if I have something odd going on that requires me to drive.
Boston to DC doesn't really make sense though unless I've just decided to work on the train for the day so I don't need to deal with the airport (and probably pay more to do so).
Other than that, it's hard to justify train from Boston. I looked at it once to Chicago and it made utterly no sense either in terms of time or cost given that I'm going to get a sleeper on a trip like that.
Judging from the Japanese HSR experience, that's also the distance range at which HSR door-to-door is faster. SF to LA is juuuust outside of that distance range, sadly.
Including security theatre, a modern conventional HSR (320~350 max speed) is competitive up to ~1000km (~600 miles), possibly 1500 but that could be over-reaching. SF-LA is well within that range, it's a shorter distance than Paris - Marseilles which is a ~3:20 trip by rail (and not the most modern line in the country/world, and one with a few stops on the way).
That's assuming euro-style cities where you probably want to go from one urban center to an other though: plane requires going outside the city (to the airport) in advance due to security procedure, waiting for security and boarding, then at the destination going from airport to city center.
With HSRs, the stations are in or relatively close to city centers (usually easily accessible through public transportation), you can arrive 5mn (or less) before departure, delays may be somewhat less common (though the justification differs e.g. suicides on the track is not an issue for planes) and you arrive at the city center with better travel comfort. Especially for people sensitive to air pressure.
Fair, but you are forgetting that this is California, so even though we are beginning construction in the 21st century all of the technological gains will be put toward safety and environmentalism, not efficiency or speed; we won't get a "modern conventional HSR (320~350 max speed)". And the the HSR line is not going to be one with "few stops along the way", but with lots of stops, this is further compounded by the reality that in California city centers aren't nearly as easily accessible through public transportation as they are in Europe or Japan. LA was built around cars, and good luck getting anywhere in the valley or even the East Bay without a car.
I agree completely, the sweet spot is in that 200-500 mile range. Anything longer and I’m not sure why someone would bother unless they really like to take things easy. I’ve always felt that the ideal scenario is just getting trains to average 100mph (forget the 200+mph stuff, you’re not going to sustain that very long). Then it would make it a no-brainer to take a train for those mid-range trips.
Having just moved to PGH, I had wondered about the viability and comfort of riding the rails for a weekend trip to the Big Apple. This is encouraging news.
Another Pittsburgher here endorsing the Pennsylvanian! From PGH to NYP, it runs from 7:30 AM to 4:50 PM, which is a workday plus lunch and a nap. Really nice. It's longer than it should be; you take those turnpike tunnels for granted until you're in a train and you have to navigate the mountains.
If you want to spice it up, check out Southern Airways Express[0]. You can fly between Pittsburgh and Lancaster for as little as $30 on a tiny little 8-to-10-seat plane, which is a really unique and scenic experience. Catch a ride to the Lancaster Amtrak where there are a lot more options for getting to NYC.
I've done Megabus and Greyhound on return trips. You get what you pay for. But if you happen to live in the North Hills, the bus depot for Megabus is in Ohio Township and if you ask nicely they'll let you ride up there.
Yup, the Pennsylvanian is actually pretty nice. The route is the old Penn Railroad mainline and zigzags through some really scenic parts of the Appalachians!
The only downside is that it's on a once-per-day schedule (Pgh->NYC at 7:30am and NYC->Pgh at 10:50am). It's 8-9 hr downtown-to-downtown (vs. ~5-6 when flying) so you'd really want to do Fri/Mon for a weekend. FWIW, there are three or four Megabuses per day too, including an overnight bus in each direction, for when the train schedule doesn't work.
Also, flying to NYC from Pgh is oddly expensive, like $400 roundtrip expensive. Amtrak is about $150 RT if far enough in advance.
Anyway, welcome to Pittsburgh! I hope you're surviving the snow...
"and it's always a stressful and shitty experience"
Many people overlook this. Because of this shitty experience, depending on your tolerance for shitty experiences, days of productivity is lost. If you are flying back on a Friday, your entire weekend is lost. If you are flying in for a business meeting on Monday, but for that 2-3 hour meeting, your entire day's productivity is lost. Frequent flying is a horribly stressful experience. No amount of luxury can make this palatable.
As I recall, a few years back they tried to push their way into train stations but Amtrak put their foot down and set get out. That's a good call. Trains are on rails and the amount of damage you can really accomplish with one is quite limited. Plus, is it even feasible to reach the engineer's position on the front of a train from inside the passenger cars?
You say that like there's a rational security analysis behind TSA's policies in airports.
But yeah, planes have a nasty habit of offering to amplify an attack of a certain magnitude by falling out of the sky and killing everyone on board, and potentially quite a few not on board. Trains just doesn't do that. The 7/7 attacks in London (bombs on three trains and a bus) resulted in probably an order of magnitude less loss of life than the same bombs on planes would have.
On a modern trainset (walk through coaches with power integrated along the train) its usually possible. There's probably a door, so the driver's doors can be used to escape in an emergency.
But I don't know about high speed trains. The first and last coaches are often first class, I'm not sure I've seen them on the inside.
That's a good point. What qualifies as modern in my experience is a good old classic Amtrak which is powered by a full size diesel-electric locomotive front & rear. I imagine there are ways to make it to the front, but I imagine they involve catwalks on the side of the locomotive.
But, much like I am not a lawyer, I am also not a train engineer. Or even a railfan. So I am probably completely wrong.
I do appreciate Amtrak keeping TSA out, in any case.
There are still locomotive-at-the-front trains in Europe, and on these I've never noticed being able to walk through to the locomotive from the carriages.
I have found the term for the more modern type: "Multiple Unit" [0]. Smaller motors are installed on many axles, the same as a metro train. It seems they're more reliable and cheaper to run (less wear on the track due to a better distribution of weight), but I agree with the noise issue — I prefer it when I travel on a locomotive-hauled train, since the interior is close to silent.
A site like [1] has a few train interior (and exterior) photos aimed at foreign tourists in Europe, rather than railfans. [2] will get boring quickly, but shows a European view of modern intercity trains.
> In all fairness, how many incidents will it take before boarding a train means 30 minutes of security theater?
If aircraft are any guide, until someone on the train drives a high-speed train off of a track into a skyscraper, national defense headquarters, and/or something similar causing massive non-passenger casualties and economic damages, it won't happen, even with lots of incidents, some of which result in complete loss of passengers.
We had a few train incidents in Europe and security hasn't been increased. They mostly handle that by more police at stations and in trains. The only train with heavy security is the Eurostar because it uses the Channel tunnel which is at higher risk.
Blowing up a train somewhere is not more dangerous than blowing up a car in the middle of a motorway.
Well, in France, it's the military that's deployed in the train station, since quite some time. And the number deployed has increased since the 2015 attacks.
Also, since they only go on tracks, if you want to blow one up, you can do an attack on any piece of the rail infrastructure, rather than getting on the train.
As comparison point in France, Paris to Marseille by high-speed train (TGV) takes 3h11 at the shortest, for a similar (should be ~10% longer) distance. And it's not the fastest commercially-operated train line AFAIK.
Time is money and 12 hours is a long time indeed. And trains experience delays too.
But I like the train when I have the time. I took Amtrak when I moved to California. And I've taken it up to Portland and Seattle, but flew back, as it's much faster and cheaper.
It's fun to sleep on the train in your own cabin. Just very expensive. And that is subsidized by the government to a degree.
Megabus, if you're not too cool for coach? Incredibly cheap (cheaper than gas), really pleasant ride, great views if you grab a seat in the top deck. 7-8 hours.
In the 80s my dad had business with almost every county in California, and they each required annual or semi-annual visits. It didn't take him long to get sick of the airport dance and just start driving everywhere.
I like trains and agree with a lot you say here, but trying to be a devil's advocate... American cities are a lot more sparse than those in Europe/Japan, right?
e.g. if you're in Silicon Valley, won't you still need 1 hour to drive to SF? Even if there's a station in, like, Mountain View, isn't it still 30 minutes from places like San Jose? Once you arrive in LA, isn't likely that you'll need a car again from the station to your destination? And also for eating, commuting and other daily necessities?
Yes, I have. Literally hundreds of times. I lived in downtown Manhattan for a few years not too long ago (2010). Took the subway multiple times a day, every day. 1,2,3,4,5,6,A,C,R all the time. Metro-North to CT quite a bit one year as well. Never stopped or questioned. Saw some DHS uniforms maybe a dozen times over a period of 4 years? Maybe more, never paid attention as they just seemed to be minding their own business.
Have you ever been on the NYC subway? Has something changed recently?
I take the train daily. I've only ever seen random cops walking around, setting up bag check tables in stations and infrequently armed swat guys on patrol. They never stop people and are more there as a show of force. The subway is no where near how awful the airports are.
Where are their bag check stations? I think I remember seeing this once or twice during Halloween and such by Times Square, but never in any other instance. Unless this is a new thing in that last year or so.
Usually in larger stations and it is really infrequent. It's usually a bunch of patrol cops with a plastic folding table and they set it up in the station outside the turnstiles. They'll "randomly" select people and check their bags. I've seen them in Queens (Roosevelt/74th) and other random stations.
Assuming 640 billion passenger-miles of air travel, the railway still makes rational sense.
Once the land is purchased, levelled, and conditioned you now have a space that can have trains running on it for the next fifty, one hundred, or more years. Look at the UK's railway lines, some of them have been operating for two hundred years and counting.
This type of short term thinking is why infrastructure spending in the US is at an all time low. Instead of spending for tens of years into the future, we only evaluate the costs relative to the next five years and therefore make decisions more valuable to tomorrow than next week.
Once CA buys this route, they own this route forever. And in a state gaining more and more people every day, cutting out land for infrastructure is only going to get more painful in time.
> Once the land is purchased, levelled, and conditioned you now have a space that can have trains running on it for the next fifty...or more years
Look at the route California's HSR takes [1]. That's a map drawn for short-term political gains, not long-term utility.
Unless we develop technology that cancels out inertia, that track is speed limited for much of its route. Comparing non-American infrastructure costs and benefits to American infrastructure is misguided because American infrastructure costs unreasonably more [2].
> Look at the route California's HSR takes [1]. That's a map drawn for short-term political gains, not long-term utility.
It did feel like this to me at the time (and was widely discussed as such) but having used the HSR Japan and Germany I reflected and realized they really helped the smaller cities to thrive. Tying Fresno and Bakersfield into the economies of LA and the Bay Area will be great for all concerned, relieving pressure on the megalopolises and expanding he economic opportunities of the Central Valley.
I had exactly this thought yesterday when thinking of my experience of China. The states are so disconnected exactly because there’s no rapid transportation that would also involve local centers. And don’t tell me about the country size, I’ve ridden large parts of transsiberian railway many times as a kid. Like 4 days on a train there and back again every year to see my grandparents.
I second that. Having a <1 connection from smaller cities to SFO will make commuting from there a realistic option and could help to somewhat normalise prices in SF and Bay Area.
Can you elaborate on why you think the route is drawn for "political gains"? I ask because the route makes sense to me geographically given that the initial useful core route is SJC/LAX.
Main use of HSR is going to be getting to and from peripheral cities. Fresno to SF and Bakersfield to LA in under an hour would be HUGE. That's going to get used more than the full SF to LA trip.
I'm not convinced the HSR is a good idea. But I actually suspect, if it turns out 50 years from now to have been, it's because it created a corridor through relatively undeveloped country (yes, there are significant cities but small relative to the endpoints) that could develop along a fast transportation link. Convenient (ADDED: somewhat) fast transit between SF and LA is almost beside the point.
> Comparing non-American infrastructure costs and benefits to American infrastructure is misguided because American infrastructure costs unreasonably more
Can you elaborate why you believe the comparison is misguided?
It costs more because it costs more is self evident, but doesn't suffice as an explanation in depth.
> The Citylab article...doesn't explain why you believe a non-US comparison is misguided
So you skimmed one article and didn't read the other. Here:
"The Times observed construction on site in Paris, which is building a project similar to the Second Avenue subway at one-sixth the cost."
Most of the factors in the CityLab piece are uniquely American. We pay more for the same infrastructure. Something that makes economic sense for one country may not for America, just as a tractor may make sense for a farmer at $100,000 but not at $10 million. Our inflated costs throw out of whack the balance of costs and benefits that makes certain infrastructure value adding abroad.
TL; DR We can't automatically assume infrastructure that works abroad works here.
The question, again, is why is there such a big difference in the cost? What are taxpayers and consumers of this infrastructure getting in exchange for these higher costs? That is, what's the opportunity cost? Even if it's a cultural opportunity cost, knowing that is party of assessing if it's really worth it.
The issue is in the absence of effective controls on corruption, it's in the self-interest of those holding the reigns to buy a $3 billion tunnel for $12 billion if the latter nets them $10 million in "campaign contributions"
I find it hard to believe U.S. unions and insurance are more expensive than their equivalents in other countries, but maybe - seeing as health insurance is universal everywhere except in the U.S.
> "The Times observed construction on site in Paris, which is building a project similar to the Second Avenue subway at one-sixth the cost."
I'm not taking issue with the fact that similar infrastructure projects have different costs in different countries, nor that there are reasons as to why this is.
I'm trying to understand why you think the comparison is misguided.
Only by way of comparison are we able to ascertain that the US is, probably, paying too much for infrastructure.
I mean, this whole conversation is predicated on the comparison.
It's not that the similar infrastructure can't work in the US; it's that for reasons-known similar infrastructure may be untenable. If the infrastructure was built anyway, say by an Act Of God, it would probably still function as expected.
Exactly. The comparison to non-US based projects is inadequate. California and other US states need to "earn the right" to spend this much money on one single monstrous project by proving it can handle smaller projects with 100% cost accuracy. BART extensions, LA Metro Rail and projects in the smaller cities should have near 1-to-1 precision in planning cost to implementation, before going after the big kahuna. Jerry Brown wanted to galvanize the population but instead it has bred cynicism state and nation-wide. Oh, and it will cost over $100 billion in taxpayer dollars before it's completed.
> The comparison to non-US based projects is inadequate
Can you explain why? For example comparing NYC's subway to Paris' subway. Why would one be more expensive than the other, since I don't think the base cost are that different
(I'm not from the US, I'm just trying to understand your point)
I think there are just a lot of intangibles so it's hard to compare mega projects, like the existing state of the subway where it is integrating into (like extensions), how many stations are being added, cost of labor, etc. I think comparing dozens of similar projects like the cost of replacing one street light, overpass or kilometer of highway from a non-US project, or even better within a single city in the same country, would be more informative.
Well, even if you say that capital expenses are irrelevant considering the very long time frame, you still have to make the argument that operating expenses of the rail are smaller. What are they, and are they smaller than air travel (~$0.10/passenger-mile)? The only estimate of that I could find with two minutes of googling is ~$0.39/passenger-mile (via http://ti.org/antiplanner/?p=88 supposedly using the National Transit Database). That means that a rail line is even _worse_ in the long run.
The cost for Amtrak and other commuter train services is inflated due to the fact that the rails are owned and/or preempted by commercial rail services. The whole point of California building out the line, directly from tax dollars, is to go around that. A dedicated line drops in price, is far more reliable and can be managed by text according to traffic.
I'm slightly unsure but I think CHSR runs next to freight rail lines for a fair amount in the central valley. And I think CHSR is also paying for part of CalTrain's grade separation and electrification. So benefits aren't exclusive to CHSR.
> That means that a rail line is even _worse_ in the long run
Critical qualifier: in the United States. The British rail system, as I understand it, runs with significantly lower variable costs than e.g. Amtrak or BART.
Rail costs go down as traffic and network expand. Most of the US is under-served by rail, and California is pretty ridiculous too. I was shocked by how few stations Amtrak had when I last visited (about 7 years ago). Like for most things, if you invest, costs go down in the long term.
You aren't saving those $.10 per mile, you're converting them to a different operating cost per mile, with fuel, maintenance, crew, and so on. Any well thought out cost benefit analysis says 64 billion is absolutely unreasonable.
You're right that short term thinking and underinvestment in infrastructure is a problem. But you have to choose your projects intelligently: things like revamping BART and New York's MTA, and taking better care of the most-used roads and bridges are far far better uses of public money.
Part of the reason we underinvest in infrastructure is that people see these pointless multi-billion-dollar boondoggles and cry out their money is being wasted. If you really want more spending on infrastructure, give up on your dream projects and spend on things that will actually make a big difference in people's lives.
> Look at the UK's railway lines, some of them have been operating for two hundred years and counting.
Good point. The government may not run all the trains[0], but the rail companies help with congestion and up-keep as well. And that is just the trains running on the National Rail, not including private rail lines.
No, the reason for that is that the semi-privatised model failed abysmally, compounding historical lag.
Most of Europe pays less for a superior experience. Reasons: Europeans literally rebuilt their networks from scratch post-WWII, and used the chance to electrify and modernise most of them - whereas Britain, that was bombed much less, just kept using very old lines (most of them are STILL not electric, in 2018, which is absurd). That's investment failure #1, driven by short-sightedness.
Then you have the privatisation shenanigans from the 90s onward. This is investment failure #2: in order to reduce running costs and avoid having to deal with running trains, every few years taxpayers end up paying huge one-off sums that basically offset any potential savings. In the rest of Europe, despite attempts at privatisation, the old state-funded companies still dominate, achieving economies of scale and efficiencies that private competitors will never be able to match.
Sorry to blow your rose-tinted bubble about public European rail companies, but they suck sometimes. In France, the push in the last decades for high-speed rail (called TGV) has left wide stretchs of the netword underfunded, there's a lot of short and mid-distance railway that are in terrible shape. Also we had train stations, starting point of long-distance trains in Paris, that had outage (as in no train arriving/leaving) lasting days this summer. Also not all the network is electrified, and never will be.
So maybe it would be worse with one or more private companies, but public companies are no silver bullet and will fail sometime.
I'm Italian, I know very well where the state-funded model can (and will) fail. But it's way, way superior to the UK rip-off experience. The fact that the UK basically doesn't actually make trains anymore (the few factories left are foreign-owned and don't really produce much anyway), unlike any other major EU country, is another clear symptom of a broken system.
But then there is some local knowledge to add, like the fact that pretty much all factories left are just tweakers for the internal market (narrow-gauging and so on), afaik the only one with significant production and occasional export is Bombardier in Derby - which got very close to shutting down around year 2000 and is basically run from Berlin anyway. Most European factories, despite some consolidation after the EU common market reached full gear, still pump out trains sold around the world - and then you have Japan and China that play on a different level.
Afaik the best trains in the UK are all bought from abroad at the moment. Things might change with the HS2 (high-speed) project that should be tendered out this year [1], but note how the main candidates are basically just reselling Japanese tech.
Yeah, I found similar information, but I was interested if you had more information, like where the trains are built, since a company can have its headquarter in one country and factories elsewhere.
Yes, this so-called high-speed transit requires going to the airport 2 hours early, going through onerous security and checkin processes, plus 30-40 minute board times, airport runway/taxi delays, delays at the destination, deboarding, getting luggage, and getting from the airport to the destination.
Mythbusters already tried this experiment, and they were able drive from SF to LA door to door in the same time it took to fly, end to end, 5 - 6 hrs.
If you've ever traveled between cities in France or Japan on high speed rail you know its infinitely better than an airport. I can arrive at an Shinkansen 5 minutes before departure, travel a similar distance between SF->LA in 2.5hrs or less, in a super comfortable train, that I'm free to walk around it. At my destination, getting to/from the high speed rail is also super-convenient, hassle free, doesn't require driving, and overall, is cheap.
Short distance air travel is majorly annoying no matter the cost. I hate the airport in/out experience.
Two other super convenient things about Shinkansen:
- You always know how much the ticket will cost, no matter if you buy it the same day.
- If you had a reserved seat but you missed your train, just take the next one and go to the free seat area. Also, if you didn't have reserved seat and the free seat area is full, wait 15 minutes and take the next train.
(And yes, you can fly Tokyo - Osaka for cheaper than a Shinkansen ride, but the convenience of the Shinkansen is really higher than any flight.)
- While it's completely acceptable to eat fermented fish out of a bento box using your phone to make calls is a comlete no!no!
That leads to a very quiet, peaceful and smooth train experience.
Also, if you visit Japan as a foreigner look at JR Rail Pass. A three week pass for the green car (1st class) will cost ~80'000 yen ($720) and is a comperative bargain if you make use of it.
For example: Tokyo to Sapporo [which is Shinkansen to Hakodate only] and back is more than 92K.
> Also, if you visit Japan as a foreigner look at JR Rail Pass. A three week pass for the green car (1st class) will cost ~80'000 yen ($720) and is a comperative bargain if you make use of it.
OMG I regret so much that I didn't take advantage of that when I was on a tourist visa... :'/
> At my destination, getting to/from the high speed rail is also super-convenient, hassle free, doesn't require driving, and overall, is cheap.
This doesn't make a lot of sense in LA; you're going to a need a car wherever you end up -- it's huge sprawl; and most people aren't visiting to go to downtown LA, so they probably need a car. Can I rent a car at Union Station? Maybe (if I get there before 5pm), but do they have room to accommodate a larger facility needed if the volume increases? I can rent one at LAX, LGB, SNA, BUR, or any of the other LA area airports I forgot about.
Sure, if the HSR project ends up doing just regional transit improvements, and don't end up actually building the HSR, that's probably a better use of money.
I expect HSR money is going to get Caltrain grade separation and electrification done, which seemed like it would take 30-50 years otherwise, even though it was planned to finish in 10 years for the last 20 years.
Now that I have Global Entry which also gives you TSA Pre security is a snap. I don't get to the airport 2 hours before, usually 15 to 20 minutes before we board if I am flying at a non-peak time. No taking off the shoes and no taking laptops out. Simple metal detector and that is it.
20 minutes before boarding is 50 minutes before the plane leaves the gate and 60-80 min before take-off. You can stretch it and arrive 5 min before boarding but that's a very risky strategy, even with TSA Pre.
2:40 minute head time at your departure city? No way.
I typically show up roughly 60-45 minutes prior to flight time, so 15-30 minutes before boarding. By the time I get through security the plane is typically just starting to board and I walk right on.
I have gotten my door to door times between MSP and ORD to just over (sometimes under if I get lucky on train to city) 3 hours including a 20 minute Uber on one end and a 40 minute train ride into the city on the other. Pretty similar distances involved. That's basically 2 hours from dropoff and pickup at the airports for an hour flight.
> going through onerous security
I imagine that in the US, this will be much the same. Or will be the moment after the first attack on a train. I don't see any long-term security gains here, the US is simply not Europe.
Not that I think air travel is a decent replacement for high speed rail though, it's not. The security and time delays related to that I simply think are a long-term red herring within the US. Mostly because I remember air travel prior to 9/11.
I also think comparing a single high speed rail line built in isolation to Europe or Japan isn't all that great of a comparison. In Japan or Europe I arrive in a train terminal and transfer to the local rapid transit that pretty much covers every city and every neighborhood I'd ever want to go to in a reasonable manner. The US... doesn't.
> I imagine that in the US, this will be much the same. Or will be the moment after the first attack on a train. I don't see any long-term security gains here, the US is simply not Europe.
Even in Israel you don't have that kind of security check before boarding a train.
What you’re leaving out is CO2. California is committed to reducing CO2, but emissions from transportation are the largest component of state emissions, and they are growing. Air travel cannot be done except by burning hydrocarbon fuels. Train travel, while still energy-intensive at high speeds, can be powered by any electric source. Therefore rail, and not air, has the capability to cut the state’s CO2 emissions.
The track can be used for 1-2 centuries (as they have been in Europe). That includes many refurbishments and replacement of steel but much of the construction cost will be low per passenger.
Older tracks can't be used for high speed trains. In France, all the new high-speed lines are constructed for this usage (lot of straight lines). On older lines, an high-speed train will be at the same speed as a normal commuter train.
He didn’t say they could. But tracks built today can be used forever, because wheel-on-rail technology has a hard limit at Mach 0.5 and we’ll never have faster trains than we have today.
They who? I work in aerospace and while I have heard many proposals (most 20-40 years from commercial production) for improving efficiency, including hybrid electric systems, I have never once seen anyone propose an electric commercial passenger aircraft.
This is one of my biggest gripes about the tech community. We can't wait for tech that may or may not come to fruition when we have working solutions now. Don't let great be the enemy of the good.
You're not answering the question of how people from Fresno can easily get to SF or LA.
Traveling from city center to city center is also a far less stressful way to travel, and you can do things like work on a train that make TAXI -> AIRPORT LINES -> TERMINAL WAITING -> PLANE -> BAGGAGE CLAIM -> TAXI annoying.
But if you built a major infrastructure that could make SF or LA a morning commute, it'd sure do some interesting things to population distributions and land prices.
This. Take a look at the Rhine Ruhr region and you'll see a vibrant place with high standards of living where you don't need to sell a kidney to buy a house.
There are 7 million people who live in the Central Valley who do not have adequate and affordable air travel, the population centers of the stops Fresno, Merced, Kings/Tulare are justified, even more, if you account how much cheaper it would be for people to commute to urban areas, and how many people can move to these cheaper areas to live.
The demand between SF and LA is simply not big enough either. Luckily there are 27 planned stations on the line allowing for 351 possible origin/destination pairs, which added up accounts for way more demand than SF-LA.
That's exactly what's ruining the entire effort. 27 stops turn this high speed train into a slog. 27 multi-minute waiting periods for boarding. 27 times decelerating and accelerating. When exactly is this high speed train gonna go full speed?
Every train doesn't have to stop at all 27 stops. You can run a super-express that stops at 5 stops every 30 minutes, an express that stops at 10 stops every hour and a regular service that stops at every station every 2 hours. The schedule is constructed in such a way that the faster train passes the slower one while it's stopped at a station.
Shinkansen between Tokyo and Osaka is the busiest rail line in the world and there are a lot of stations between these two cities. The fastest train, Nozomi only has 6 stops and runs every 15 minutes.
And yet every successful high speed rail system out there has stops in small towns and cities, many of which are much smaller than Fresno or even Merced...like Verdun, Atami, or Montereau. They're successful because of these stops, not in spite of them.
The market size for SF to LA and back is not large enough to justify rail with no stops. Its not even close, even assuming monopolistic market shares. And airlines have shown extreme willingness to compete with rail on price grounds, and they could take half that market easily even with trains going top speed.
Sorry if that burns your dreams of fast rail to the ground, but it is objectively the most financially responsible way to build. It can actually pay for itself that way, whereas it would be America's biggest boondoggle if they took your advice.
These are high speed trains, but Britain hasn't upgraded the tracks, so they run at less than full speed. But the door design and number of passengers is what matters for the duration of a stop at a station, and as you can see, it's around 1-3 minutes.
It's certainly a factor, but it's not like the long distance Amtrack train I once used, which stopped for 5-15 minutes at most stops.
>At $35,000 per Model 3, you could buy 1.8 million new Teslas using that money. Add some solar panels to each purchase and you could still buy more than a million -- more than enough for every San Franciscan to get a brand new Tesla.
Which would be useless without the billions spent in maintenance every year for the roads and other maintenance. Its such a silly argument. If you include the full cost of airport construction it wouldn't be so pretty either. Having heterogeneous forms of transit is an intrinsic benefit as each are better under certain weather conditions and use cases.
You are comparing operating costs of air travel to capital costs of rail travel - you need far beyond airplanes. The trains themselves are not that expensive, after all.
You need to consider capital investment required for that air travel: How much does it cost to build the airports, repair centers, specialized land equipment, etc. to enable 640 billion passenger miles, and buy all the land required? Then you need to add airplane purchase costs - that's not optional either; before you even get to operating costs.
You need to of course include airports for each city on the trains' route. The train goes through a massive population corridor across dozens of towns and cities, not just SF and LA. What's the capital cost of connecting these people to air travel?
The SF Gate tried a plane versus car trip in 2001 and the driver won substantially – and that’s only gotten worse with the post-9/11 security theater and both airline and airport budget tightening pushing the whole system closer into the safety margins:
Travel time to/from the station only matters if you're closer to the rail station than the airport. As for time to fly, I've made the trip between various airports (SFO, OAK, SMF) and LAX via Southwest many times. I try to arrive about 45 minutes prior to take off and so the whole trip takes about 2 hours. Even adding time to wait for a checked bag would probably still be faster than the high speed train.
At least at the San Francisco end, the terminus is in the heart of downtown San Francisco near a bunch of major transi tlines. SFO is 45+ minutes away via BART (OAK is a little closer, SJC is way further away). SFO via car is going to be highly variable, less than 45 minutes best case, but worse in traffic.
Additionally there's the problem of airport expansion. There aren't a lot of palatable options as filling in the bay is (rightfully) a non-starter for most people. High speed rail wouldn't replace air travel but it would complement it (especially with the related regional improvements like electrifying Caltrain).
Yeah I see no problem with more choices if they make sense. My reply was in refutation to the point that flying is not faster than high speed rail because of time needed at airport, which is not my experience. Since travel time to/from the station/airport depends on the situation, it doesn't make sense to include it in a general statement (to which I was replying).
Keep in mind airline miles. I take the shuttle out of LGA to D.C. over the Amtrak. The shuttle is cheaper and I get the comfort of earning miles.
I've already invested into making flying comfortable. Lounge-access credit cards, Global Entry (which grants TSA Pre-check), upgrade-giving status, et cetera. I'd need trip time or cost cut in half relative to air travel to make switching worth it.
I'm not the median consumer. But weighted by likely usage, I'm closer to the average.
I did a bunch of trips recently. Flying is usually faster and cheaper, but more likely to go awry. Taxis to airports can vary widely in speed and cost. Flights can be delayed, security lines, etc.
Train is easy, consistent and comfortable. Always power, Wi-Fi and cell signal too.
Fair enough. I'm an infrequent NYC-DC commuter. And my preferred mode to JFK from the city is via the LIRR, a rail route. It takes longer, most of the time, but less time on average. Most importantly: it's consistent.
I optimize miles too but, for short distances, it's mostly not worth it. For Boston to NY I essentially always take the train which is more comfortable if not necessarily faster. And Amtrak points are probably actually more useful for me in general than airline points. I'd get 500 points on United and use of the lounge but, really, that's not worth a whole lot. Amtrak is already basically as comfortable as an airline upgrade--which is hard to get on a weekday peak travel slot.
Going through the Central Valley and stopping in Fresno, Madera, Kings-Tulare, Bakersfield... (etc) to get to Los Angeles is not faster either. Buy a fully autonomous car and go point-to-point faster/cheaper/better.
The train will stop at SFO and BUR -- if the train's last-mile delivery is better then we should focus on that last-mile rather than the stretch in the middle that is already well-solved.
Make sure you put a winged pony on the shopping list too. They're a great fashionable match any time you're making fantasies of acquiring things that don't exist.
While that's true, the less flippant question is whether fully autonomous cars -- where "fully autonomous" is defined as being able to climb in one, kick back and do your work with no concern the way you conceivably could on a train -- will (a) exist, (b) be road-legal, (c) be widely available, and (d) be generally affordable within a timeframe that makes a high-speed rail line moot. I don't think that's remotely a given.
We're going to have autonomous cars that can drive SF-LA long before we have high-speed rail. Self-driving cars from the big players are planned for the 2020-2021 model years.
More cars, or at least more car trips,—independent of whether they need drivers or what kind of powerplant they have—is, in fact, exactly the problem at which HSR is directed.
And every family and anyone who likes having a car. I'd expect not more than 10-20% to stop buying cars. Having your own car is about more than just access to transportation.
You will just hail one for less than the cost of gas.
If the cost of the ride is less than the cost of gas, how is the operator making a profit? Especially since they have to cover more than just the cost of gas.
(an Uber-style "use VC money to subsidize below-cost services" model is not sustainable in the long term, by the way)
In addition to closeparen's point that such autonomous cars will be electric, they will also have much lower mantenance costs due to the lower internal complexity of doing away with the ICE.
Not really. The platform-to-platform time from LA to SF is going to be, at best, a little less than three hours. That's comparable to the time it takes to fly from LAX to SFO plus the ~30 minute BART ride to downtown SF.
LA is so spread out that departing from LAX or Union Station doesn't make a big difference. Most people are going to have to fight traffic to get to either location.
Having an extra track at the station and timing so that they pass while the other train stops. You don't have services every 5 minutes so that works quite well usually. Worst case the express train has to go a bit slower before but they tend not to go at maximum speed so can catch up again later.
Union Station is or will by a direct subway ride away from a lot of dense pockets in Los Angeles (Red, Purple & Blue lines when the regional connector opens). Yes, the train will come to LAX as well, but transfer will be less convenient and likely less direct than from Union Station.
If you live in SFO and have a business meeting in LA (or vice versa), you'll only need the trip on one side. Few people will need to travel in both cities.
Excepting travel time and security time, is the airline imposition of arriving anywhere from 45 to 1.5 hours before departure or you can't check a bag. And all the airlines recommend arrival 1-2 hours before a flight. This is to account for myriad unknown factors that apply to airline travel that don't apply to trains.
Have child, just got Pre Check. Kids under 12 don't need their own known traveler number. Pack light, gate check the car seat, and you're pretty close to the parent post's timing. Even if you have to check luggage, Southwest's check-in lines are short more often than not.
I would assume that adding children to the mix also increases your time to prepare and get to and from some future HSR train station as well, so it's probably a wash.
But you are giving up their fingerprints to the government. That's one thing that really bugs me about those programs. I want to remind everyone of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandon_Mayfield. They arrested him because some of his fingerprints slightly matched. The FBI claimed they exactly matched. Quoting from the wikipedia article
"His prints were ... taken ... when he joined the military. He became the prime suspect because of his conversion to Islam and because he had represented one of the Portland Seven...
The FBI described the fingerprint match as "100% verified". According to the court documents in judge Ann Aiken's decision, this information was largely "fabricated and concocted by the FBI and DOJ".
This is why I'm reluctant to give the govt. my fingerprints, but my friends think I'm overreacting.
$2M in taxpayer money is nothing to them. Just like the expense of incarceration didn’t bring down jail terms for minor offenses. Or settlements for police brutality haven’t affected that one iota either.
If they did that to ten thousand US citizens (.0031 percent chance of being messed with), a 2 million dollar settlement would cost them $20bn. Affordable, but certainly not a rounding error line item.
The officers working on the case do not decide about the govt budget. I'm not even sure if the government tracks expenses from those cases and would know how to react if the costs escalate.
The real secret is not flying United out of SFO. I typically make it through security in Terminal 2 (Virgin / AA / Alaska) in about 10 minutes. Not much longer with the international terminal.
30 minutes before boarding they no longer allow you to print a boarding pass (so you’d better be checked in and have it on your phone). I learned this the hard way when I arrived 20 minutes before a flight. However, it’s no big deal really, I caught the next flight an hour or so later since they are obligated to book you the next available flight.
I try to be there about 30 minutes before the flight now, but with boarding pass ready on my phone. The only reason I give 30 minutes is in case of traffic or if I want to grab a quick bite. If I could guarantee my arrival time at the airport it would be even less.
A super-illegal drive isn't really useful for comparison. With moderate traffic you'd be lucky to average 60mph for the entire trip from SF to LA.
Regardless, I'm not talking about what's ideal or perfect; even if HSR could get me there in 2-3 hours, that's not a meaningful enough improvement over 3-3.75 hours to justify a $64B+ price tag in my book.
I am not sure how the price tag is relevant to you personally. If you build an effective network of High speed rail it ends up cheaper per trip which over time means the effective cost is ~0$.
I doubt they are going to succeed, but in other areas it has worked.
Averaging 100mph is unrealistic for I-5 most of the time. You'll get stuck behind cars doing 80 in the left lane while semis sit in the right, and that can last for miles and miles. I think things were faster in 2010-11, when the economy was slower, but I only drove it twice then -- even then, 90mph was more realistic.
Which is fine I guess? If I'm going above the speed limit I have no issues staying on the left lane if I continue passing other cars. I don't have to always make space for someone 30+mph above the limit (both legally and morally).
Sure, on current infrastructure 100MPH is unrealistic in that area, but if they added more roads so you could do 100MPH nobody would call it high speed transit.
I regularly drive ~120mph+ in the empty expanses of Spain and elsewhere that isn’t America, and even I can’t average 100mph in that route in California.
SFO to LAX is 85-100 minutes, depending on airline and equipment.
For me it's ~20 mins driving SF to SFO, ~10 mins for TSA junk and walking to the gate, ~30 mins for waiting and boarding, then the 90 minute flight, ~15 minutes for deplaning, walking, and getting a ride, and then then anywhere from 15-60 minutes depending on where I'm going.
Actual flight schedules published by airlines say 85-100. My actual experience flying that route agrees. Taxiing to and from the gate and waiting in the queue to take off may not be included in travelmath's calculations, but that's real actual time you have to spend.
More airplanes doesn't increase capacity to the extent it's limited by airports. You'll need to add expanding the airports and maybe building new ones. Also, what about the stations between SF and LA?
Or, if you use cars, then you need to include widening the highways in congested areas.
Of course bus lines would be much cheaper, if we can convince people to use them. How often do you take a bus between SF and LA?
Additional lanes for buses and a law that allows autonomous buses in dedicated lanes to go 100mph. That way you're faster than car or train at lower cost.
You ignore the value in the intermediate stops. Think about living within 45 minutes from San Francisco downtown, somewhere in between LA and SF. Also think how bloody miserable are flights in economy, and taking your shoes off before boarding a plane. Trains are luxury!
a 40 minute flight between the two destinations in economy is not at all miserable, certainly not miserable enough to justify the expense on this project that will never be completed.
The intermediate stops bite both ways, though: if you're on a train that stops several times in the central valley, and in SJ, I'd expect your travel time to be a bit more than 45 minutes.
Why not spend (a small fraction of) that money to improve Caltrain and service between Caltrain and the central valley in a different manner?
They are spending money to improve Caltrain; the plan is to move to electrified trains by 2021. It's the "service between Caltrain and the Central Valley" part that's a more significant challenge.
I'm not convinced that the current HSR project is the best way to do it, but I'm also not aware of any serious counterproposal -- and it's hard to even imagine one that wouldn't also be a huge, expensive undertaking with limitless opportunity for missed schedules, cost overruns and undue optimism.
I'm not convinced that the current HSR project is the best way to do it
Most criticism boils down to a "perfect is the enemy of the good" problem. Anything that isn't the most perfect possible solution from a given critic's viewpoint is attacked as a "boondoggle" while ignoring that opening up the corridor and making it easier to travel between SF, LA, and smaller cities in between will be a good thing (and that there's plenty of evidence for it in similar rail lines elsewhere).
Yep, I agree. That's what I (imperfectly) meant by the lack of serious counterproposals: I'm not sure the current HSR is the best approach, but I haven't seen anyone come up with a better idea, and I'd rather have something than nothing.
I agree that it's a good thing, but is it good enough to warrant its price tag, when we're painfully aware of significant issues with our existing transit systems?
> If the environmental impact is a concern (not that laying tracks and punching holes through the Central Valley is free of impact), then buy new Teslas instead. Lots of them. At $35,000 per Model 3, you could buy 1.8 million new Teslas using that money.
The main justification for HSR is reducing freeway construction and maintenance costs that will be needed to keep up with expected travel without it that will be reduced by it.
Not dealing with pollution impacts of travel or buying cars for the freeway travel, but reducing the freeway construction and maintenance costs.
Buying a bunch of Teslas doesn't address that at all. (Actually, the state buying more cars increases the problem.)
I'm not disagreeing with you completely, but your 50$ each is a bit optimistic. can I get that price any time? not now, when I go to a website and try to find something for tomorrow its 109$ (Expedia).
the travel time listed is 1:30 compared to 2:30 (from numbers I heard) so you do chop off one hour of ride time.
however, air port security checks, being kicked from your seat, sf airport not directly in the city, the one hour starts to mean a whole lot less
There's a lot of reasons as to why this is the case, but the bulk of it is labor.
* Trains ultimately require close to 1 staff member per 4 passengers, much more than a budget airline.
* Unions and legacy salaries further add to those personnel costs. The average Amtrak employee ($75K/yr) nearly makes as much as the average commercial pilot ($77K/yr).
* Since train journeys take longer, the labor cost per trip is considerably higher, especially for long haul routes. When you're doing a long trip like Chicago to Los Angeles, a train takes a lot longer than a plane, so you're paying for yet more labor for that trip. 44 hours of labor for the train versus 4 hours for the plane.
> * Trains ultimately require close to 1 staff member per 4 passengers, much more than a budget airline.
Maybe in the US. In Europe, a train with 500-750 people capacity has one train driver and maybe 3-4 staff (plus on-board restaurant but that's run at a profit). No staff at smaller train stations and only minimal staff at many larger ones.
Maintenance needs staff but that's the same at airports.
As stated in another comment (which links to a transcript by the author with ~two dozen cited sources), this isn't staff on the train, but calculated by breaking down Amtrak's headcount of 20K people, and amortizing it over the number of annual trips and passengers.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16179794 Result is ~1 employee per 4 passengers per trip.
The author has some other really interesting (with cited sources) videos about many other transit topics, including how hub-and-spoke/direct played out in the aircraft marketplace, how budget airlines have such great profit margins, long haul aircraft economics, airline schedule methodology, etc.
Amtrak employs ~20,000 people. When you get to the number of annual passengers, and how many trips they operate a year, it breaks down to ~4 passengers per employee per trip.
Tesla batteries can be pretty damaging to the environment to produce. Rail is a lot cleaner in that regard if you can get an electrified rail (not sure if this works with high speed). Rail is also a much more efficient way, with regards to energy, to transport that many people as opposed to buying near 2 million Teslas.
Rail doesn't run on batteries; the track is electrified, which overall gives you a lower environmental impact than manufacturing a ton of Tesla batteries.
Yeah, I wasn't thinking, I guess, brain fart because I was thinking how the US refers to systems of non-electrified rails that can carry trains at above 115-mph as "higher-speed".
The problem with air travel is throughput. There are 6+ million trips between SF and LA per year, and any significant increase either replaces other flights or requires another two airports in SF/LA, which ain't cheap.
HSR between LA and SF would be able to handle 15+ million people per year, on top of providing routes between other cities in CA, some of which don't have anything except for bus/car routes, and it would also free up capacity for more long distance domestic and international flights.
There is also the question of who benefits from HSR. If you look at the Northeast Regional, it's primarily business travelers looking for a more comfortable way to work while hopping between Boston and DC.
That money could be so much better spent in ways that have an actual impact on lower income people.
Agreed. Our local and regional transit story is so poor right now. Improving that would drastically improve the lives of lower- and middle-income people who have to drive on our over-congested highways day after day.
At least in the Bay Area, part of the draw of HSR is that it's also the motivation for improvements to Caltrain (electrification, grade separation, mythical extension to downtown).
One of the sad parts of this story is that, in order to sabotage the HSR, Republicans wound up sabotaging the federal share of Caltrain electrification, even though electrification is good on its own merits.
So we're going to spend $66 billion on something that primarily benefits higher income people just for the indirect benefits it might have for local transit?
How do you figure? If the target price is equivalent to a plane ticket that's not really such a high income group to target, is it? Besides, cars are inherently a luxury item. Poorer folks take public transit (e.g. trains).
Cars are not a luxury item in the U.S. 88% of U.S. households own a car. If lower income folks travel between SF and LA, they'll probably drive the car they already own. Gas + depreciation for the SF-LA drive is about the same as the cost of a round-trip plane ticket, but as soon as you factor in additional passengers (say a family) there is a massive cost advantage to a car over a plane or train. And people who can't afford generally don't fly places, they take the bus.
HSR is not "public transit." Public transit helps lower-income people commute to their jobs. Lower income people don't travel regularly between SF and LA--they have no need to. They might do it occasionally, but they don't do it often enough where the convenience of a train is going to mean much if the train isn't any cheaper than flying.[1]
The folks who really benefit from HSR are business travelers. They're the ones who need to travel city center to city center regularly. They're the ones who really have a reason to prefer taking a train, because they can work more comfortably en route.
[1] Also, the target price ($86 one way) is a completely fantasy. At that price, it would be one of the cheapest HSR trips per mile in the world. https://nextcity.org/daily/entry/fare-cost-ride-california-b.... There is no way California is going to run the cheapest anything.
I’m kind of smitten with the idea that if we’re going to spend a bunch of public money, it shouldn’t be used to subsidize a service directed st higher income people.
You make some very good points, however, I still support the HSR even with the higher costs. Why? First, I think it will major way to somewhat solve california's high cost of housing. If you are using HSR to commute then you can go further out. I could technically have a reasonable commute from Merced, Fresno or Madera all of which have super low cost of housing as well as tons of land to build on.
The UK is not a good example on how rail systems can work. Rather look at France, Germany, Switzerland or Japan. HSR tickets in most countries have an upper limit, only the (partly) privatised UK system has these absurd prices.
What's worse is that French, German and Dutch national rail operators have subsidiaries running rail contracts in the UK. So in a way we help fund the fantastic continental rail services...
But I understand that rail services on the continent are also heavily subsidised.
Depends on the system. In Germany, where you don't automatically buy a seat, you can hop on any train last minute at a high (but reasonable) price. You'll stand for the journey but in some situations I preferred that over some waitlist with an airline.
Take a look at ACELA, the last minute prices aren't that bad (well insofar as I missed my train and booked a seat on the next one with a minimal penalty - around $40).
True. However assuming the price of high speed rail tickets will be fixed because it is a public service, the government could similarly operate an airline instead of high speed rail using the same fixed price system. What would be the cost then?
> - If the LAX-SFO air corridor becomes too busy, that $64 billion could also be spent upgrading existing fleets by buying 147 brand new A380s at an average list price of $435 million each. [2]
Sorry but I'm super confused... 147 planes that cost $435 million each, would total 64 Billion dollars. And that appears to be 64 Billion on top of the 64 Billion you already plan on spending from above.
That cost of the project in the article has jumped to 10 Billion. Where are you getting your number from?
If in fact the $64B could be spent on your proposals, you have a point. Otherwise, it is better to spend the $64B in this landmark project vs. it being diverted somewhere else where neither you nor me could figure out what happened to it. This is a landmark project - let it happen. Your future generations will thank you.
Except maybe the $64B doesn't need to be spent at all and can be returned to the taxpayers. The point OP was making is that it's unnecessary to build HSR because there's an existing company (several actually) that provides the same service at a fraction of the price, at no cost to the taxpayer.
Actually infrastructure projects like this (and including this one I believe) are usually paid for with bonds which means id the project doesn't happen, the money is never borrowed in the first place.
> Tickets are $45 for SFO-LAX each way in February right now (less than the expected cost of the train ticket). Other pairs (OAK-BUR, SJC-BUR) are similar ($49-$57 each way).
And how do I magically get from the airport to the city and city to the airport? Is it free? Is it instant?
It’s not really that high speed if you factor in parking, tsa, terminal quirks and delays, and working with checked baggage.
Personally I’d much rather take a form of transit where I can bring a water bottle and avoid being groped by security for literally no rational reason at all.
The real killer is that the $64B total project cost was the initial estimate. And costs are now up 77%! So we are likely north of $100B total cost. And bond repayments triple that to $300B over 30 years. Funds which are currently being diverted from the State's Highway Improvement fund. All so Brown can build a monument to 1800's rail technology that poorly competes with the 1900's airline industry.
> The real killer is that the $64B total project cost was the initial estimate. And costs are now up 77%! So we are likely north of $100B total cost.
Actually, the initial estimate was close to $100B. But when the public reacted with shock, they handwaived and said the cost would now be $68B. Just like that: poof! $32B knocked off the budget. Of course we all know that the initial cost was more accurate; and the final cost will be a lot more than $100B.
You forgot that control of private people and their property is what projects like this end up being about in a single-party state like California. It isn't about transportation: it is about control.
Southwest airlines does not solve the problem, because it does not give politicians or public sector unions or public sector unions' pensioners control over money. Only a train project can do that for them.
Airports and roads are all funded by public monies. A new runway for SFO was projected to cost over $2 billion in 1999 (in 1999 dollars).
Highspeed rail was projected to cost less than expanding highways and airports. Not sure what it looks like with the increases. OTOH, the budgets for those other modes also tend to balloon over time.
This project is going to be more than just la to sf route. It will allow people to live further away from the over crowded Bay Area (probably Southern California too) and getting more commuters off of our clogged highways.
Besides, sf to la has an additional hour+ wasted with Security and 1 hr travel time to the airport (if you live in SF).
It's the same thing in Europe. On a passenger/km basis, and without subsidies, budget air transport costs ten times less than train (look at company expenses and how much people they transport). It is also much safer. It is counter intuitive, but that's how it is.
Okay, so you've got SF <-> LA down. Now give me the calculations for the rest of the 351 city pairings made possible by a system with 27 stops.
HSR doesn't just serve the endpoints, and the passenger volume from that Cartesian set of city pairings vastly exceeds the passenger volume from the endpoints. It's not even in the same ballpark.
Hell, let's just redirect that money toward better local (SF, SJ, LA, OC, SD) and regional transit (stuff like Modesto/Fresno/Monterey/Napa/Sonoma/Sacramento<->SJ/SF and Bakersfield/SB/SLO/SD<->LA/OC). Local traffic congestion and poor transit options are where we're hurting the most.
This doesn't improve the situation for travel between NorCal and SoCal, but I think this is already pretty well-served by air travel, as you point out.
This also doesn't help people who live in, say, Modesto or Fresno get to SoCal (they'd have to train up to SJ and fly down to LA or SD, or drive), but is fixing that really a high priority need when compared to the rest?
Worst case scenario? Plenty of time for costs to exceed even these projections by the time the initial segment is due to be completed in 2025.
The $6 billion price tag was ridiculous. That's as much as the D.C. Metro Silver Line cost, and that was only 22 miles long. This HSR segment is 119 miles long. Yeah, it's probably cheaper to build through the Central Valley rather than the D.C. exurbs, but that much cheaper?
I looked up construction costs for European high speed rail lines earlier. The best estimate I could find state costs between 12 - 40 million euros per kilometer.
For the 119 miles of this train, that lands you between 2.3 to 5.7 billion euros. So the $6 billion doesn't sound that unreasonable.
It costs us 5-7x as much as Europe per mile to build rail: https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/nyregion/new-york-subw.... That article addresses tunnels, but there is no reason to expect it would be different for above ground rail. Indeed, it could be worse. The eminent domain and environmental review problems that plague our system are worse for an above ground project.
Subway!=ground rail. The former is vastly more expensive. Brand new, two line high-speed ground rail costs 10-30 millions €/km[0], while the cost of underground kilometer typically is 200-300 millions €/km in Europe and sometimes up to billions in USA[1].
OP suggested that the HSR budget was realistic if we looked at the per mile cost of European high speed rail. My point is that if it costs us 5-7x as much as Europe to build subway, it’s unrealistic to expect we can build above ground rail for the same price as Europe.
I can't find it now, but I recall an article from about a year ago that compared per-mile/km transit costs in the US and various cities in Europe. The costs in the US were ridiculously higher. I don't recall if there was a conclusion as to why. So comparing to a comparable project in Europe isn't really representative, unfortunately.
> On the horizon are more difficult segments, such as the long underground passage through the Tehachapi and San Gabriel Mountains and the route into the urban San Francisco Bay Area.
Especially the latter segment. I live along the assumed route to SF and let me tell ya, there are any number of wealthy NIMBYs who are ready to fight any attempt at building a noisy, unsightly, and potentially dangerous rail line past their houses in any way possible.
What I don't understand is why they don't use eminent domain authority to take these properties.
It seems this project is exactly what eminent domain is for.
Even though I hate taking peoples property this project is public and benefits all.
I do wonder about using bonds that are paying out from the Highway Fund. So if this fails the highway fund still has to pay and that will mean less future money for road maintenance.
I believe you can still put up legal challenges against eminent domain actions. Even if the HSR group wins those challenges, it costs time and money to deal with them.
There are also opportunities for legal challenges on environmental grounds and other things that can slow things down.
For eminent domain there's little you can do _legally_, even in California, but politically it can be very costly if you try to bulldoze rich homeowners and business owners properties.
The way less well-heeled NIMBYs hold up projects is through environmental review (California's CEQA makes this all too easy) and historic preservation laws.
> For eminent domain there's little you can do _legally_
Directly, sure, but there's plenty of ways of legally challenging the project itself, or politically challenging it, that don't rely directly on legal challenges to.the eminent domain action. But if you can legally challenge aspects of the projects central to the purpose for which they are using eminent domain, it's as good as a fire t challenge.
2035 and $30 billion might be reasonable estimates based on the typical performance of California public works although there is also a reasonable possibility that it is scrapped before ever entering operation.
According to the article pretty much everybody else in this project said that it's going to cost $10B, and only the guy in charge was still living in the fantasy land where it could be done for $6B.
Yeah, the cognitive dissonance is only among the leadership of the project here. Big projects like this are chronically underbudgeted (or "optimistically budgeted"), and leadership always jumps through various mental hoops to attribute cost overruns to unforeseen factors, where more than half of the factors were easily foreseen by commentators.
That being said, I sympathize with the nigh-impossible pressures here: it's difficult to convince an entire, diverse state to contribute funds to a project that will take a long time to come to fruition, and whose benefits will be broad, but marginal, across a variety of metrics. So there's a pressure to deliver an ambitious project at prices that are scarcely realistic. Being able to lead this does invite a certain amount of cognitive dissonance; in the famous words of Upton Sinclair, "it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it".
Do you think the people running it really didn’t know how much it would cost? Everyone involved lied about the cost because they knew it would never have been funded if they had been honest about it. Pretty much everyone involved from the voters to the contractors to the lawmakers that passed the budget knew that the numbers were a fantasy.
BART faced all of these objections as well. It was also over budget. Are you against infrastructure projects in general? Do you think the bay area would be better off without BART, even with the cost overruns?
BART is one of the worst public transit projects in the western world... if you ask "would we have been better off with BART or something else?" the answer is probably something else.
BART has the highest farebox recovery ratio of any public transit system in the United States (excepting the very small, tourist-oriented Vegas monorail). It has among the best farebox recovery of any system in the world, with only a handful of systems (Tokyo, London, Osaka, Singapore, Taipei) higher.
It has seen massive ridership growth over the past decade.
What metrics are you using to claim it is one of the worst transit projects in the world?
Farebox recovery ratio is a shitty way of measuring public transit. Consider: do you rank highway projects by how much revenue they bring in (via tolls, if they exist, or gas taxes to pay for them)? Of course not--hell, most highway projects have negative recovery ratio.
Ridership per mile or transit modeshare is often a better way to rank transit systems. In terms of ridership per mile, BART is the worst of the major systems in the US and Canada. Admittedly, it's somewhat misleading since BART is kind of a mixed commuter rail/inner city subway system, but it is still far less than the other major mixed system (Washington Metro).
Ridership “per mile” is also a dumb way to measure transit systems. BART has a general geographically-mandatory ten track-miles of tube right in the middle of the system that bloats up the denominator.
It's not as bad as you think. It's measuring system length, not track-mile, so the Transbay Tube only comes out to 6 miles including approaches.
Also, it's a chokepoint: there's not a lot of alternatives to crossing the bay, so it should also be driving a much higher numerator as well. And it's not like other systems don't have geographic barriers--consider the crossings of the East River or Boston Harbor.
For the length of BART, taking out the Transbay Tube doesn't reduce track mileage by all that much, and consider that BART is ⅔ the ridership of the Washington Metro by mile. That's not a small gap. Maybe you could say it's slightly better than MARTA, but it's far from Philly or Chicago's performance, let alone NYC or international statistics.
BART is currently running at what could be considered its maximum theoretical capacity given conditions. What I mean is that the built environment provides only unidirectional flow of passengers: toward SF in the morning, way from SF in the evening.
With the addition of tracks to San Jose, this could change. We could start getting more flows of people where neither end is SF. That should boost ridership but of course they are adding a lot of miles.
The cars are dirty and smelly. The upholstery you sit on is gross. Once in a while you will find human feces in the cars. Most BART stations do not even have restrooms, water fountains etc, so I hope you don't have any human needs.
The trains do not run often during the day. If you miss one, have fun waiting 20-40 minutes for the next one. They stop at midnight.
It takes a long time to get to your destination, and the destinations available are not a very large subset of where you actually want to go. Most of the time you will have to chain together another form of public transport on one or both ends, and the transfer time between different forms of transport is often long and pads out the length of a commute tremendously.
The stations and trains are unsafe, and people get attacked on them with some regularity.
On top of all these things, BART is very expensive!
I don't know how you could think BART was good unless you had never used any other comparable transport system.
I wish these funds were being spent on improving the speed and quality of travel within the largest urban areas in California: SF Bay Area and Los Angeles.
Broader reach and faster travel times within those urban areas would go much farther to improve the quality of life of Californians than this high speed train project in the middle of nowhere.
I would really like California to have a high speed travel network from north to south at some point in the future - but I just don't think it's the right priority at this time - as air travel is good enough for now - and most people have to commute within their urban area every day. How often do you need to commute between SF and Los Angeles?
Air travel serves SF and LA well but the central valley is underserved. They could be better served by the hsr. Not sure if that warrants the cost or not.
I'm assuming you are being sarcastic but the comments above were mostly about low cost southwest flights that are likely cheaper than the HSR tickets will be. Other than the subsidized flights to Merced from OAK the central valley airports are very expensive to fly in and out of.
Yeah exactly. Considering in many cases a plane ticket from SF to LA will cost less and get you there faster, the high speed rail project makes little sense
Trains are better than planes along several dimensions, if done right. "Why would I take the train when I could fly for the same price?" isn't a very good question. The answer is that (again, when done correctly):
- Trains are generally more comfortable
- Trains allow you to use your cell phone
- Trains can take you from city center to city center
- Trains don't have the same security requirements
- Trains are safer
- Trains are cheaper to operate (and so should actually be cheaper in the long run)
Planes are better over very long distances. But trains are better for regional travel.
I will defend the OP here, and say that LA-SF trains indeed make little sense, when perfectly good sunk-cost airports already exist that allow various airlines to compete over that route on price and features. Trains are more susceptible to disruptions along the route, because the route itself is more anchored to a particular geography, not to mention they cost a lot to build out to the satisfaction of being truly competitive with airlines if the infrastructure and level-of-service is lacking at this time (which it is).
However, where a train does make sense, is connecting other points along the route.
Air travel tends to be either hub-and-spoke between busy hubs and tiny spokes, or point-to-point between two busy points; rail travel, however, is always along a route that allows intermediate points to be served at similar levels-of-service as major destinations.
Whereas a Sacramento-Bakersfield journey would typically require at least one hop to SF or LA by air, train (and roads, for that matter) allow that journey to be taken without intervening hops, and serviced at a marginal cost, because the two lie along a route that a train would travel anyway. That ability to connect ancillary cities is where rail travel really shines, in ways that air travel can't currently mimic.
I can't argue with sunk costs and future constructions costs. You're right about those. I'm just relaying my experiences using Amtrak along the Northeast Corridor, which I find to be far superior to the equivalent air travel.
Now divide by the amount of GDP growth you'll see from massively simplifying transit between two of the largest cities in the US, and see how they look.
I doubt most state roads would fare well in that kind of analysis, frankly, but we still fund those...
Japan spent trillions of dollars on constantly building, improving, maintaining vast infrastructure. It gave them among the best infrastructure in the world.
It netted them ZERO economic growth over a quarter century, and ZERO improvement in their standard of living (which went backwards considerably between the late 1980s and today due to the debt they took on, which led to considerable destruction in their currency and savings rate).
Spending hundreds of billions on rail will not necessarily generate significant economic growth for the US. The US has a very efficient and productive economy, with among the world's highest GDP per capita. There's a high likelihood, in my opinion, that spending large sums on consumer rail will do absolutely nothing to boost GDP, and may harm the economy by drowning states like California in debt they can't afford.
Is it better for transportation purposes and the environment? Yes.
"It netted them ZERO economic growth over a quarter century, and ZERO improvement in their standard of living"
That's just total nonsense. Regardless of the performance of the broader economy (which depends on other factors) during the last few decades, it's obvious to anyone who looks that Japan's investment in the Shinkansen has played a huge positive role in the dramatic growth of their post-war economy.
You can certainly argue that the situation has changed, but arguing that high-speed rail never benefitted them is the economic equivalent of arguing that it snowed last week, therefore global warming is a hoax.
The 6-10B increase is to connect Madera to Fresno - not exactly bustling hives of population... you can’t compare costs for 10% of a project to something then handwave the rest away.
Some food for thought: Congress just passed a tax cut bill costing $1.5 trillion over ten years, or $150 billion. That's enough to build a California HSR ever year for the next ten years, accounting for 50% budget overrun, and still have $500 billion or so left over.
It's a peeve of mine when analysts refer to a tax cut "costing" the government money. This is a deliberate dishonest re-framing (not your invention, but I blame those who invented it as trying to mislead people.) One could equally frame is as the taxpayers "recovering" $1.5 trillion that would have normally been taken from them. A better framing is "is expected to reduce tax revenues by XXX amount."
Not to mention that projecting tax cut "losses" is a game of prediction anyway. Taking that projection, and then backing out "how many HSRs will we have saved" makes even less sense than taking the projection itself as gospel, because the HSR is also a projection, and also paid out over time, and also subject to inflation, etc etc.
IOW this kind of analysis has the surface qualities of pointing out an interesting comparison but I don't feel it's conveying anything meaningful.
It's completely reasonable to state that the government has lost $1.5 trillion in revenue, no matter what frame you choose. "Cost" would be one way to refer to that. I suppose I can imagine someone nitpicking that "cost" should refer to only expenditures, but that's an uphill battle against colloquial speech and even some formal usage (an opportunity cost is not an expenditure).
The general argument that taxation itself is theft is stronger than the argument that reduced revenue is only referred to as a cost dishonestly. And that's not saying much.
> Not to mention that projecting tax cut "losses" is a game of prediction anyway.
IIRC, the $1.5 trillion figure is among other things the prediction of the legislators who created the policy when playing by the required legislative rules.
Usually when X "loses" money Y "gains" money. The verb itself is relative. A tax cut means the government collects less tax; so it has less money. That sounds like a loss to me. I think it is deliberately dishonest to re-frame this well understood verb in any other way.
I don't follow. A tax cut is called a cut because the gov looses some tax income. This is simply a fact & does not at all depend on anything you/I think about who should have money. Our politics depends on that, but not the facts.
When you spend X dollars on a goverment project, materials and labor worth approximately X dollars are eliminated from the face of the earth. When you give a tax break of X dollars nothing is removed from the face of the earth, the X dollars are now in the pockets of people who may save or spend them. This is a CRITICAL difference.
> materials and labor worth approximately X dollars are eliminated from the face of the earth
They aren't eliminated from the face of the earth. The materials exist, just in a new and more useful state state (as tracks, trains, etc.). The labor I suppose doesn't exist, but it never existed as it's not a physical object.
> When you give a tax break of X dollars nothing is removed from the face of the earth, the X dollars are now in the pockets of people who may save or spend them
Well sort of--those X dollars are presumably spent on something, either immediately or (if saved) some years in the future. When they're spent, the functionality is similar to government spending, in that resources are taken from the earth and transformed into some other good.
I'll grant that there's reasonable debate about whether a HSR is a better way to spend $100B than a tax cut, but I don't think "eliminating" things is a valid argument for/against either side.
This critical difference is compensated by another critical difference - that X dollars in the hands of Y people (where Y is comparable in magnitude to Y) are much less effective than X dollars pooled in the hands of a single actor.
I think the state just needs to gulp the costs here. There are a few large bets which every state should make every decade to make landmark progress. For California, having this bullet train will be it. No matter what happens, California needs to build this infra to help easier transportation and leisure travel for generations to come. The cost equation will seem peanuts in comparison to the benefits offers for multiple decades thereafter.
Otherwise, we won't even know where this $64B went.
The only upside will (briefly) be not having to deal with the TSA and showing up ~2 hours before the flight. Unfortunately, the TSA is making an appearance in local metro and train systems more and more, so I expect them to show up pretty quickly.
Then we'll have an grossly underestimated project with higher than "expected" costs with high ticket prices and no tangible benefits over the alternative - and likely faster - mode of travel.
And odds are, the system upgrades will need to start immediately so the ongoing maintenance will not be significantly cheaper than construction.
The Transbay Terminal is in a lot more convenient location than SFO. Lyft to-and-from the airport adds $60 to your fare.
Also, I don't know what the price model will be. In Italy, for instance, you buy a ticket reflecting the route you want to take and you can get on any train you want. Miss the 4:05? Take the 4:25. I wouldn't be surprised if this was similarly flexible. Most airlines, on the other hand, charge change fees unless you are a frequent flyer.
>Hill said the cost increases were mainly driven by problems including higher costs for land acquisition, issues in relocating utility systems, the need for safety barriers where the bullet trains would operate near freight lines and demands by stakeholders for the mitigation of myriad issues.
There could of been an entire article written about these issues. Instead we got a bunch of stuff about politics. What's the point of writing an article about problems with a major infrastructure project without any discussion of the problems?
There are small ones within each major state. They keep costs insanely high for basic maintenance and also keep repair times extremely slow, versus comparables in Europe or Japan. Just compare how well the roads crews do in California versus Germany, it's night and day. California roads are an embarrassment at 4x the cost of German roads.
> Just compare how well the roads crews do in California versus Germany, it's night and day.
Well as a German I can say that most road workplaces aren't even worked at during the day - you need to be lucky to see a worker there, and heaven forbid working on weekends or during night. In addition it's rare that politicians have the guts to say "okay we close $Autobahn totally for a year instead of having a 2-to-3 years halfway usable Autobahn", even though this mode of work is way more efficient. Something like the 48-hour sinkhole repair in Fukuoka/Japan or the Russians repaving a whole massive street in a single day (https://sploid.gizmodo.com/watch-a-huge-swarm-of-machines-pa...) would be unthinkable in Germany.
From the article, it sounds like the biggest obstacles are "land buys" and "delays relating to land buys".
We need to strengthen eminent domain for transit projects so that we don't end up wasting tons of money appeasing corrupt landowners trying to hit the jackpot.
It's not clear to me how you arrived so quickly to the conclusion that these obstacles are a consequence of "money-appeasing corrupt landowners trying to hit the jackpot".
While it's possible that's the case, it's also entirely possible that the initial estimates for the cost of land purchases were simply inaccurate.
Its a self full-filling prophecy. Now that you know the budget will expand 50%, your leverage only increases, meaning you can ask for more before eminent domain is used and thus increases budget costs, etc.
No, eminent domain is already a questionable practice of screwing over the individual in the name of the collective. The state should never be able to simply co-opt private ownership just for "reasons".
I hate this argument. "Property", as in land ownership, does not exist outside of the State. You "own" land only by the consent of society. Conceptually, land ownership is inseparable from the State.
I don't understand how an American can manage this thought. It runs in the face of every stated ideal and philosophical underpinning of this dear republic. I'll refer you to the concept of natural rights, Locke, Paine, the Deceleration of the Independence, the Bill of Rights and the rest of the Constitution, and the entirety of classical liberal philosophy.
The Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights were written when land was one virtually unlimited resource in the US. Because it was sparsely populated (even more sparsely than a few centuries before that), and most of its inhabitants simply didn't matter.
Let's stop pretending that the 18th century understanding of society transcends time just because this nation happened to be founded at that particular era.
I don't buy the idea of "natural rights" in general. That doesn't mean I think constitutional democracy is a bad idea. It's just a good idea for different reasons.
Believing that the concept of owning property is inseparable from a government that defines property and resolves property disputes doesn't make me un-American. Sheesh.
The lack of universal voting rights, as well as slavery, existed despite what I mentioned, not because of it. The Declaration of Independence is quite unequivocal: ...all men are created equal...endowed..with certain unalienable rights...
All you have shown is that we as people are flawed, even when the truth is right there in front of us.
Strong ownership laws are a fundamental requirement of a State that is deemed worthy of investment. Why would anyone bother if the government could just take all your shit without compensation.
Eminent domain doesn't happen without compensation. It's done at fair market value, almost always settled by the courts, that don't have a political interest in the outcome.
It doesn't mean take your land without compensation. It means take your land whether you like it or not, for fair market compensation.
Actually it kind of does. Even in the animal world, an animal will mark its territory and defend that territory against encroachment.
Humans would do the same thing, except now we have outsourced the violence to the state. Instead of peeing on trees to mark our property, the state keeps a registry of property owners. Instead of physically fighting with intruders, we call the law enforcement arm of the state.
The concept of property or territory you control exists apart from the state.
But now you're not talking about a "right", but merely a biological imperative. Nothing that separates humans from, say, spiders. And then your "natural right" to property extends no farther than your ability to defend it from someone bigger and meaner than you.
I can shoot you, and then your land becomes mine, by "natural right". Is this really the hill you want to die on?
Not even in feudal society. That "deed on file" was originally a relationship with the sovereign lord (usually the king) who actually "owned" the land. In fact, ownership in Anglophone countries is still referred to as "fee simple", derived from "fief"; you hold the land from your Lord the state, under a form of tenure that happens not to include any feudal obligations ("simple").
Only if you equate society and State, which I don’t. But do you believe that anything is made morally right when the State does it, e.g., confiscating property?
The State is not the exact equivalent of society in general, but there's enough overlap to interchange them in most arguments.
And you say "do you believe anything is made morally right when the State does it", but what you mean is "do you believe everything is morally right when the State does it". So you're turning bad phrasing into a bad argument. I can think that some things, even most things that the State does are good, without being universal. This includes eminent domain, which is a social good but must be applied carefully, on a case-by-case basis.
Absolutism is the second core failing of libertarianism, after the absurd ideas of "natural rights".
What the State does depends on which State. You would probably agree that what the State does in Venezuela is atrocious, but of course pales in comparison to what State has done historically in other countries.
So by what principle do you judge whether a particular thing the State does is good or bad?
You're still looking for a universal criteria, and I am not going to give you one. Absolutism is a bad thing, in software and in society.
States that behave atrociously toward their citizens tend to fall victim to revolution, sooner or later. Constitutional democracies, where "consent of the governed" has some real teeth, tend to be stable and avoid violent revolutions, because the need for social change can be handled via the ballot box.
But in terms of State injustice, we're talking about matters of degree, not absolutes. If you're saying that any injustice invalidates the State, you fail, because as long as the State is working pretty well for the majority (as it usually does), then the complaints of the few will just be seen as complaining, not cause for revolution.
Hence, eminent domain. It works pretty well for most people, who see direct benefit in terms of, say, new transportation systems.
The problem with the by-the-ballot approach is that, if voters had reasonably considered that acts of eminent domain might be or would be pursued to complete the project, there is at least some reasonable likelihood that it would not have received enough votes for its funding.
It’s speculative, of course, but “well they voted for it” is not necessarily cause for “well we’ll force out landowners with a fair market value price”. These are often someone’s homes — places for families, their memories, and their sense of pride and security — for which fair market value does not fully appreciate.
By denouncing absolutism, you are being absolutist yourself ;-)
Okay, so if the absense of State would prove to work for the majority of people (which seems to be your criterion), you would support a State-free society?
I'm pretty familiar with historic and modern anarchist thought. In theory, I would support (and prefer) a State-free society. In practice, I don't see it as viable, especially at this point in history.
That said, a State-free society would necessarily be a property-free society. We need the State in order to have the records and the courts to resolve disputes over property ownership.
I don’t think it is viable currently either. I just think it is the ideal we should strive towards.
Paradoxically, I don’t believe an anarchist society could work without private property rights. And if you are familiar with anarchist thought, you are probably also aware of and have considered the arguments for privatizing courts and so on, so I won’t bore you with that.
Um, no. Me and mine is me and mine, regardless of what a government may think. And if you try to take or cause harm to me and mine, I have natural right to stop it from happening, regardless of the presence or non-presence of a government.
I cannot fathom disagreeing with anything more than I disagree with your post.
Do you at least acknowledge the reality of how laughable your “natural right” to resist would look against even a minute fraction of the state’s power?
> Do you at least acknowledge the reality of how laughable your “natural right” to resist would look against even a minute fraction of the state’s power?
Acknowledge? Yes. We gave them all the guns.
Accept? Consent to? Absolutely not. I despise the status quo and want to see my children grow up in a more free society than what we're living in now. Unfortunately things have consistently gone in the wrong direction and I seem to be in the minority of people not okay with that, but I'll still do what I can as one man.
What you can do as one man is precisely nothing, except to make yourself feel a bit better. Caring in the absence of organizing and acting, is that really caring? At the very least our priorities are made clear by our actions and not our attitudes.
Fair point, I took your “one man alone” comment to mean something it didn’t necessarily imply. I’m sorry for any offense I’ve caused with that unwarranted assumption.
Here in this nation of the United States, we claim that the state derives its power from the consent of the governed.
It's a novel concept, really.
Obviously, if you like the idea of a powerful nation-state, you can try any number of other experiments, elsewhere. Those nations do not even try to veneer their actions with the consent of their populace.
"Consent of the governed" means consent of society in general, not the consent of every individual to every action of the State. Society has long been okay with eminent domain.
When things become unacceptable, we can elect legislators to change the laws and make them acceptable again. I don't hear a cry to end eminent domain in our elections, or see anyone in Congress making any effort in that direction. That's consent of the governed.
Of course it's hotly contested. It involves taking property against the wishes of the property owner. But it's not contested by society in general, but rather those on the pointy end of the stick - many of whom are perfectly happy with the results of previous eminent domains (ie highways).
One could say society in general is "on the take". Which gets back to my contention that your "property" is yours only by the consent of everyone else.
I think you’re taking my acknowledgement of reality to be an endorsement of it. You can’t hope to change anything if you’re living in a fantasy. The reality is that the government of “this here nation” can roll over you like you never existed. Want that to change? I do.
Property hoarding/rent-seeking is screwing over the collective in favor of the individual. They are at least paid at or above market rate. Private ownership only exists in the framework of a society, and sometimes the needs of the society as a whole are more important than that of the individual. Otherwise we wouldn’t need a military or borders.
This attitude is why public transportation in this country is third-world level, and why all our projects cost an order of magnitude than they do in the rest of the developed world.
Is eminent domain used widely in other countries infrastructure projects? I think part of the issue might be that the US is very large, esp. compared to European countries with better transportation systems.
I claim that once I have completed whatever processes are required to claim the land as mine, it remains mine until I consent otherwise.
If I have to put up fences, pay down a mortgage, file a deed at a title company, etc. then those requirements are disclosed beforehand.
After that the land is mine, I will defend it as mine. Various states have discovered how difficult eminent domain is to fully enforce. The "little old lady" is often tougher than anybody.
(I will ignore any arguments that start with "property taxes," because it distracts from the point.)
> I claim that once I have completed whatever processes are required to claim the land as mine, it remains mine until I consent otherwise.
I reject that claim altogether because any land that the State gave you, the State took from someone else, or from nature. And who gave the State the authority to own nature?
> After that the land is mine, I will defend it as mine. Various states have discovered how difficult eminent domain is to fully enforce. The "little old lady" is often tougher than anybody.
Its hard to politically enforce domestically, but bear in mind that if it were a serious risk to the state, it would take very little effort to kill everyone and take the land. The capacity of the state to do that is beyond any doubt.
Yes, when I look at a government project being massively over budget, it's the people who are legally compelled to give up their land for the project to be successful that I look at and ask myself, "how can we be more forceful with these corrupt people?"
"appeasing corrupt landowners trying to hit the jackpot" is a strong claim considering the government is stepping in and forcing people to sell land that has been in families for generations. For you to so brazenly say it's the right of the state to take it and not adequately compensate people who use land as a source of income (via agriculture) and that we should strengthen the governments ability to do so has virtually no place in this discussion and it is a disgusting and ignorant stance on the matter. The state already does it's best to go after the central valley folks with high taxes and regulations paid for by coastal elites who are too wealthy to be negatively affected, do we really need to now steal their land?
The cost is unlikely a legal issue. In California eminent domain powers are strong and the adjudication process usually swift. The cost is likely part of evolving political calculus--project developers paying out more than the courts would require as a strategy to relieve political pressure. The political backlash against HSR is greater than expected and growing. HSR is likely paying out more money to fragment and quiet opposition in the Central Valley.
It's always easier to steal other people's property, especially if you have them by the short-hairs. In other contexts, this would be called extortion.
There's something I profoundly don't understand about someone who would seriously advocate for things like eminent domain or estate taxes.
Big items in the United States are incredibly expensive to build. Nuclear reactors, high-speed rail, etc.
China, for example, has almost 18,000 miles of high-speed rail, and they're on target 23,000 miles by 2025. They are going to finish another 2000 miles in 2018:
It's easy to build infrastructure when labor costs are around $3/hour, eminent domain payment can't be litigated, and environmental impact studies are effectively not required.
Labor costs on these projects are closer to $10/hour these days. The workers get paid reasonably well because their job is in shifts and seasonal. They're also usually provided some basic housing and food, health insurance and transport.
Eminent domain compensation also tends to be very high for this kind of projects. People intentionally seek farmland that might be in the way of construction to get paid. Since it's all technically long-term "rent" in the communist regime, they usually get compensated on a yearly basis for as long as the rent stands, which may be as long as 5-15 years.
And for the environmental impact studies, if Western media and people can't read Chinese, it doesn't mean these studies do not exist. China is very serious about ecology in the last years, it's not there yet, but it's moving in the right direction.
China’s HSR lines didn’t come cheap, even if labor is cheaper there. They incurred a lot of debt to do this (much of it private via public SOEs), and it isn’t clear if it will pay off (only SH BJ is operating in the black ATM).
I imagine $1 trillion in infrastructure, for example, will pay future dividends. Simply saying something wasn't cheap doesn't help us compare. For example, the US spent $1 trillion in the Iraq War and another $1 trillion in Afghanistan.
If China can build infrastructure at a fraction of the cost, and their economy passes the US by 2032, as predicted, it doesn't bode well for the United States.
So a little math - china has 22km of HSR ATM - well, that is a big number, $418 billion.
If you are a private investor and your bonds paid for this, whether it can make a profit is important. Unless the government is going to bail them out (and being SOEs, everyone expects they will!), then it is important to move that debt from private to public. China's debt numbers ATM assume that much of the SOE debt is private, which is dubious at best. China Railway's $6 trillion yuan debt is 6% of China's GDP.
I've ridden the Beijing-Guangzhou HSR a couple of times (my wife's hometown is on the route and it lacks an airpot), and the car we were traveling in was always very empty for much of the 8 hour trip.
Busy lines are busy and profitable, while many lines are essential but not enough passengers yet.
I used to travel between Shanghai and Hangzhou regularly on HSR and it is basically fully packed all the time. Same thing for Shanghai to Beijing and Beijing to Tianjin. Actually they are building a second line from SH to BJ.
Similar to Japan's Shinkansen, the only profitable line is Tokyo to Osaka.
You may see some under-capacity HSR lines, but they mean a lot to economy development. My hometown is a small city off trunk railways. 10 years ago the travel time to Beijing is 14 hours, now, with HSR, it's 5 hours. No one thinks Beijing is far away any more and people tend to travel farther and more frequently. After years in US, I think US government is not good at "generating" or "boosting" social needs. Moonshot in infra is really worth investing and sometimes you have to take the risk. US has been away from major infra (like interstate hwys) for years and I cannot believe economy growth without more infra.
> Moonshot in infra is really worth investing and sometimes you have to take the risk. US has been away from major infra (like interstate hwys) for years and I cannot believe economy growth without more infra.
I agree in principle, but my belief is that we (the US) need to focus a lot more on infra that serves local and regional needs before worrying so much about interstate infra (CA HSR is not technically interstate, but given the size of CA it's an interstate-scale project). We have a ton of aging and insufficient local/regional infra that badly needs upgrades and expansion.
> We have a ton of aging and insufficient local/regional
> infra that badly needs upgrades and expansion.
That was _precisely_ the point of HSR--to slow growth in automobile traffic so there'd be less need to upgrade and expand the highway infrastructure. Airports and highways are immensely expensive.
There were extensively analyzed projections that showed investing in HSR was more sensible than doubling-down on the automobile. We can quibble over the calculus all day long, but that sort of quibbling is why we can never get sh*t done.
I live in the Richmond District of SF. We have one of the busiest bus lines in the country, and that's just one line out of 4+ parallel lines 2 blocks apart. Everybody here wants a subway, but the city is building BRT because of cost and as a compromise with local business owners (who don't want _anything_). Nobody wants BRT, but it's a done deal, and it irks me the amount of energy people put into killing BRT ostensibly in pursuit of a subway. It's idiotic. All it does is make BRT more costly without making a subway any more likely. If you want government to be more efficient, we need to come together as a community and learn how to compromise and _support_ infrastructure development. This stuff is costly because the opposition is a self-fulfilling prophecy.
> That was _precisely_ the point of HSR--to slow growth in automobile traffic so there'd be less need to upgrade and expand the highway infrastructure.
That sounds weird to me. HSR serves a different set of people and solves different problems than local/regional transit does.
As a simple example, I wouldn't see HSR reducing traffic on 101 or 280 between SJ and SF all that much. There are certainly some people who commute between SF (or very close by) and SJ (or very close by), but there are still plenty of people for whom driving to/from SF or SJ to catch the HSR to go to the other destination wouldn't make sense.
The major benefits of HSR are people traveling between NorCal, Central Valley, and SoCal. The most common type of commute pain is only minimally helped by HSR.
> [a bunch of stuff about BRT in SF]
That would seem to support my point: that we need better local transit options, including a subway, and we need to find a way to get what we actually want and need, not what interest groups like local business owners want. I see this as completely unrelated to whether or not we need HSR, though.
Tokaido is the most profitable Shinkansen, but most of the other Shinkansen's are in the black. The only unprofitable one is the new one toward Hokaido.
Shanghai - Beijing has a lot of people riding it, it is also the only line that is profitable (ticket sales > operating costs + debt interest, otherwise, only 6 lines pull in enough to cover operating costs). There are lots of short (relatively speaking) commuter jaunts also (from one HSR station to the next), as mentioned in the article you linked.
But then you have the rest of the track....
Don't get me wrong, HSR will be good for China. But someone is going to pay for it.
I always imagine worst case scenarios involving thousands of deaths and probably explosions.
This is just a very, very expensive train. I'm not sure why anyone would think building something in a very expensive state would not itself be very expensive. Did we expect building major infrastructure in an expensive state to be surprisingly cheap?
I've long held the opinion that the Central Valley portion of the project, and/or the first phase of this project -- which in this case, refer to the same stretch -- is overbuilt in ways that make little practical sense.
If you're putting stations into every major town, roughly 30 miles apart, it makes little sense to build things like curves with a radius of over 3.5 miles (~ 5.6 km) on a viaduct, comparable to open-line track radii in France for TGV lines, just outside of Fresno's station where you're going to slow down to 0 mph anyway.
This kind of silliness is why they're over budget. The most acute impediments to long-distance rail in California is the lack of dedicated, quality track along which a trainset could speed along between towns without regard to freight, so it would stand to reason to solve that part first, while leaving a bunch of expensive niceties for later, when enough appetite for them has been built up.
When France built the TGV, or Germany their equivalent, they didn't rebuild their downtowns to accommodate high-speed tracks; this is a uniquely American fetishism the same way the US took interstate highways into their downtowns in the 60s.
In order to meet the voter-mandated requirements of the proposition which started the project, some trains must run non-stop from San Jose to Los Angeles at 220 MPH. Many trains will go right through Fresno at very high speeds. That is why the track has the radius it has.
I think the original Prop 1 bill [1] lays out maximum nonstop travel time targets between major cities to be delivered, and a requirement to be able to bypass any station at "mainline operating speed", (which I strongly believe is an engineering detail that has no place in law), but not a requirement to actually have some trains on the books that will proceed through Fresno without a stop.
The spirit of your post stands nonetheless; the Prop 1 bill codified a bunch of ambitious requirements ahead of time, ignorant of local conditions or engineers' opinion.
Yeah, but we’re not talking about total budget, not even the total military budget; that’s $7 trilllion just on two losing wars. You need to lose another decimal place, and remember that you also print your own money and can levy taxes.
Care about budgets, and cut the waste such as losing wars and corrupt, broken nonsense like the F-35. Care about price controls in the health sector, and care about investing in infrastructure.
Try dividing it by 50: every state could get two of these projects with half a trillion left over for DC and the territories. That’s even before you factor in that California’s population and economy would merit a larger chunk than, say, South Dakota.
Seems like a better deal than paying to destabilize a region and create a lot of long-term enemies.
I can't help but think that the California bullet train is solving the wrong problem. How much would it cost to extend BART into the Central Valley? And for that matter, extend BART all the way around San Francisco Bay? And can you do that for less than 60 billion dollars? And what kind of ridership could such a system attract?
It's also not a good use of money, as BART has an unusual track gauge, strange engineering decisions, and is operationally and mechanically incompatible with other commonly deployed rail systems. Not to mention, even with BART fulfilling a strange role between an in-city rapid transit and far-exurb commuter rail, extending lines further out from the operating core comes with issues around trainset supply and capacity allocations in congested areas, like the Oakland Wye, the Mission Street Subway, or the Transbay Tube. It's far more likely to "extend" fringes of the system with other modes that can then operate independently, like the eBART [1], ACE, or the Capitol Corridor, or even a bus line.
Extending the BART entirely around the western side of the bay won't happen, disproportionately due to the city of Atherton [2]. It's also silly, considering Caltrain fulfills a very similar role in transit to what BART would bring to the table, along the identical corridor.
I once wrote [3][4] about why the geography of the current transit options in the Bay are unfortunate, and single mode of transit completing the entire circle would do little to alleviate the problem that so much of transit around the Bay is already around this circle.
> And can you do that for less than 60 billion dollars?
Doubtful. Look at the cost per station (e.g. the half billion dollar cable car to the Oakland airport) and cost per mile (e.g. Warm Springs extension). Then look at the mismanagement (they still haven't gotten the new cars to work right) and that BART train control is at capacity and can't handle additional system expansion. Or take a look at eBART -- even BART is self-aware enough to know how expensive it is and thus the BART board is going through with a diesel extension instead of bringing the mainline BART to the boonies.
"Moving forward, he said, the authority will not start construction on future segments until all the land is in hand, a practice that outside experts have long said is prudent project management."
Seems like they believed their own optimistic outlooks.
I wish that voters and leaders could’ve seen a menu of policy options when they approved this. I think they wouldn’t have gone in for such an irreversible project.
For example, electric bus technology has been getting better and cheaper and seems will continue to get better in the future. So for all the money we’ll be spending on this throughout the 2020’s, we could’ve been converting buses, where practical, to electric. And if electric buses don’t work that well (few US models have yet been in operation for a long time), we can always just upgrade many thousands of regular buses to cleaner and more comfortable modern models.
Incremental improvements are nice because they can be reversed and right-sized. It seems HSR is setting the size of its budget itself, as no one wants a half finished rail system. This wouldn’t be too bad except that there is a risk California will face pension problems in the future. The less money we tie up in debt now, the less chance there is for terrible cutbacks to critical services if a recession destroys tax revenues and pension assets.
Agreed, and to take a bit further: I don't think we should be tackling projects of this size and scale when we don't even have good local and regional rail stories. They are the squeakiest wheel that should get the grease.
Indeed. Regular CA roads have faint line paint and are falling apart. We have bigger priorities than high-speed trains. Is it too late to trade the money?
> Moore said the surge in costs is likely to foreshadow even greater future increases. On the horizon are more difficult segments, such as the long underground passage through the Tehachapi and San Gabriel Mountains and the route into the urban San Francisco Bay Area.
...
> In Hill’s presentation to the board, he said intrusion barriers will cost an extra $450 million; land buys, $400 million, delays for not acquiring land, $325 million; satisfying issues raised by localities, $250 million; and relocating wires, pipes and cables used by utilities, $350 million.
These issues are all related to surface land acquisition and management (except piping/cabling relocation). Hopefully tunnel boring won't come up with new unexpected problems; they're far enough from built-up areas that there shouldn't be too much underground infrastructure to work around.
We need a high speed train connection. But the Federal government should be building such infrastructure, considering we pay 35% of our taxes to the Fed. In most countries, the central governments builds infrastructure at this scale.
Most countries don't have strong states/provinces like the US does.
Regardless, part of the funding for the CA HSR project does come from the US federal government[0]. It's pretty common in the US for infra projects like this to have multiple funding sources.
One significant downside is the way the bonds and ballot measures work. In CA, we're asked to approve a few billion for the project in each election. Failure to pass means sunk costs or higher costs in the future to re-start efforts.
If the state asked upfront for $2B/year for 15 years, I doubt it would have passed.
> One significant downside is the way the bonds and ballot measures work. In CA, we're asked to approve a few billion for the project in each election.
No, it was all Prop 1A in 2008 for ~$10 billion. Voters have not been asked for additional CA HSR bond funds since.
Presumably, given the level of other funding that has been secured, additional bonds will at some point be necessary, but the “every election” thing is not even remotely related to reality.
$10B will likely end up being 10% of the total cost. Not to mention all of the Prop 1A mandates that the state has already violated, such as the requirement for private partnership, and ridiculous ridership estimates...
> The repayment of the existing bonds will cost about $18 billion in principal and interest over the next 30 years, money that is coming out of the state highway improvement fund.
Great. Not only is this thing a waste of money, it's also sucking the air out of existing projects. Fuck this shit.
I guess that's one of the "benefits" of an authoritarian government: you just tell people what's going to happen, and they either agree, are ignored, or get fined or jailed.
Why are they wasting cycles buying land and dealing with right-of-way and safety issues? They could just buy 100,000 shipping containers for $2M (50,000 each way), stick them together, seal them up, and sink them off the coast.
My objection to the bullet train is that we could get many more people much more effectively to work/home with local transit, which largely doesn't exist, than with this boondoggle out in the central valley.
I wish they instead built more airports within each city linked by short high speed rail lines. LAX is overcrowded and getting to it is a nightmare in any traffic (which is most the time). The traffic within the airport drop off circle is also ridiculous.
Imagine an LAX2 and LAX3 in different parts of the city with short high speed links between them.
I like that idea. The links between each could double as public transportation for all, just include connections with existing metro stations. It would encourage the city to build around each of those nodes: put one in West LA, one DTLA, and one in the Valley, improve the one in Inglewood. The 405 from LAX to West LA and the 10 from West LA to DTLA are among two of the worst stretches in the country.
Though, people in for eg. West LA would have fits over the idea of airplanes flying over their sacred lands.
LA's airspace is already crazy as is. And the metro lines they are trying to put in are just, well, cute. Putting an international airport somewhere in Santa Monica would be silly. It's 20 miles away from LAX as is.
I mentioned the Valley, and having a West LA airport I don't find silly at all if it cuts LAX traffic in half, contingent on OP's idea of public transportation into and out of West LA relieving the 405 and the 10. OP's idea isn't to increase air traffic, it's to disperse it.
>Metro lines cute
Yes, that is also what OP was addressing. Faster lines between these theoretical airports, because metro is slow. These would double as public transportation for commuters. I'd love a straight shot with no stops from LAX to West LA to DTLA.
Yes, the Burbank airport is very nice and convenient. So is the Johnny Wayne one in Santa Ana. A bit further out, I also love the Palm Springs airport.
Before you say that it's ridiculous, consider how else $64 billion (current official estimated total construction cost of the project -- not counting operating cost)[0] could be spent:
- Commercial air travel costs around $0.10 per passenger-mile if you buy in bulk[1]. That means $64 billion could buy 640 billion passenger-miles of air travel. If allocated to the 11 million people who live in Los Angeles and San Francisco counties, the state could buy each resident 58,000 air miles of travel -- equivalent to about 88 round-trips between LAX and SFO.
- If the LAX-SFO air corridor becomes too busy, that $64 billion could also be spent upgrading existing fleets by buying 147 brand new A380s at an average list price of $435 million each. [2]
- If the environmental impact is a concern (not that laying tracks and punching holes through the Central Valley is free of impact), then buy new Teslas instead. Lots of them. At $35,000 per Model 3, you could buy 1.8 million new Teslas using that money. Add some solar panels to each purchase and you could still buy more than a million -- more than enough for every San Franciscan to get a brand new Tesla.
[0] https://www.mercurynews.com/2017/01/13/confidential-report-c...
[1] http://www.opshots.net/2015/04/aircraft-operating-series-air...
[2] http://www.airbus.com/content/dam/corporate-topics/publicati...
(Edit: added citation for $64 billion official estimate)