Article states that I-5 corridor skips all major towns in central valley which kinda kills the purpose of HSR connecting SF to central valley towns to LA
"... which kinda kills the purpose of HSR connecting SF to central valley towns to LA ..."
Yes, that's exactly right.
The original - and highest value - purpose was a high speed rail route between SF and LA.
The meandering route through Fresno (and the new, ex post facto "purpose" the article refers to) is the result of political machinations that happened after the fact and traded utility for brief, local (and trivial) political gains.
there is no need to connect SF to LA only, there are many airports in each town that connect these large metro areas.
the purpose of HSR is to transform large swatchs of land into a large megalopolis, like in China.
China's HSR connects large metro areas into one giant megalopolis with up to 250+ mln population that totally changes the ballgame in terms of economic output
You never been to LAX if you don't immediately act with a sigh of relief over a direct train route. It's an potential 90 minute+ commute and another 90 minute TSA process for a 90 minute flight. Dreadful.
>The purpose of HSR is to transform large swatchs of land into a large megalopolis, like in China.
Bakersfield has a dozen reasons ever preventing it from becoming another SF/LA/SD.
Besides, China didn't build its rail all at once. A direct route would prove value when making future splinter routes. Instead, we chase 2 rabbits and get none.
> You never been to LAX if you don't immediately act with a sigh of relief over a direct train route. It's an potential 90 minute+ commute and another 90 minute TSA process for a 90 minute flight. Dreadful.
So your estimate is 270 minutes.
Where's the train stop supposed to be in LA? Downtown, right? What's the commute for that like? Sure, no 90 minute TSA process (big doubt if that's typical) but now the 90 minute flight turns into 160 minutes (which is the target they're aiming for and it's not likely). Add on how long it takes to get downtown and... not much time savings, is there?
Depends on the stops and route. The secret to LAX is to not take LAX if you can avoid it. BUR has a lot of destinations and is a lot less of a toll on sanity. If it is truly a direct LA to SF with minimal stops, then sure. There's not too much lag removed.
A 90 minute commute to simply downtown instead of LAX becomes a 60-70 minute commute simply because you're not spending 20 minutes trying to navigate LAX. Not enter the airport, be stuck in its own brand of LAX traffic.
That will be a relief. Though if I may rant a bit to a bikeshed:
I really hate that thr naming scheme of "people mover" was probably part of the reason this project is coming next year and not 2035. The phrase itself just oozes this sentiment that no one politically involved was allowed to say "train" or "rail" so it doesn't scare off investors.
Actually a "people mover" is a term of art [1]. I had the same reaction when I heard the term (or thought it was some other political gloss to get the thing approved faster), but it's actually a somewhat well-defined term.
>The term 'people mover' was used by Walt Disney, when he and his Imagineers were working on the new 1967 Tomorrowland at Disneyland. The name was used as a working title for a new attraction, the PeopleMover. According to Imagineer Bob Gurr, "the name got stuck," and it was no longer a working title.
Huh. Thinking about it does sound like a very "Disney" term. Interesting to think it spread from a resort park to professional transportation. Never would have guessed.
The reasoning is all too relatable as well. "working names" no one works on and suddenly it's your final product name. Such anti-bikeshedding would be very rare these days.
It’s also less than that in travel time, since CAHSR goes at its full 350 km/h on the Central Valley vs just 130 km/h on the Caltrain corridor from SF to Gilroy. It adds about 10 minutes to non-stop travel time.
The real benefit is opening the Central Valley to commuter development. San Jose to Madeira on CAHSR is around 45 minutes, not much more than commuting from Palo Alto with current traffic on 101, and so it’d open vast tracts of land in the Central Valley to housing. It might actually be practical to work in the Bay Area on something non-tech, live in a SFH, and commute less than an hour again.
They are running multiple trains. SF to LA non-stop trains won't even stop at stations like Gilroy or Madeira. The all-stop trains will preference commute hours. The seats are non-rivalrous: Central Valley commuters aren't even going to be on the same train as a SF to LA business traveler. It seems reasonable that fares would differ, and that traveling just 1-2 stops from SJ to the Central Valley will be a lot cheaper than going from SF to LA.
This really depends on how it ends up being priced.
In Germany, you can pay for a year-long high-speed rail all-you-can-ride pass. It costs just under 5000 Euros, which is very reasonable if you're using it every workday.
This is a bit like AWS pricing. If you book an entire year of usage up-front, you get a much lower price. Casual users pay much more per use.
the opportunity cost isn't a 7% increase in length, it's the tens of billions in extra infrastructure to build 350km/h right of way straight through the middle of every town all the way down the central valley, and the massive hit to SF-LA run time that will come with that. beyond the stop penalty, HSR just doesn't run at full speed through city centers anywhere in the world. doesn't happen.
> HSR just doesn't run at full speed through city centers anywhere in the world. doesn't happen.
Wrong. It's most definitely a thing in quite a few mid-sized Japanese cities. Here's a compilation video taken at Fukushima Station (https://youtu.be/K-wkX3vFU_A?t=403) on the fastest 320 km/h line for example. You can check for yourself that the station is dead smack downtown in a city of 275,000.
At the world level it doesn't tend to happen because existing developments in cities usually strongly inhibit the construction of straight rail alignments that can support high-speed operations. But that's not a problem in the Central Valley – they're blessed with excellent existing rights-of-way.
As I wrote elsewhere, the average speed of CA HSR (as planned) is 250 km/h, which is very competitive, internationally. It's about as fast as the fastest French TGV routes. It only really lags behind the fastest Chinese routes, which run at average speeds of about 290 km/h.
If CA HSR can go through the cities in the Central Valley and still achieve an average speed of 250 km/h, that's well worth it.
SF-LA ~380mi is actually a real sweet spot for HSR.
Flight time of 90 minutes but the hassle of getting out to airport, check-in, boarding.. and then the opposite on the other end makes your all-in travel time about 4~5 hours. With HSR you are generally going city center to city center, and 380mi is achievable in 2~2.5 hours all-in.
I took a 700mi HSR in Japan that was probably on the very far end of being competitive time wise with flying and was still great. 5hr train vs 2hr plane segment, but all-in door-to-door travel times were comparable (5h45m vs 5hr).
Train 5hr45m door to door with majority of time sat in a comfy quiet train with big comfy seats and high speed internet. A flight which is 5hr door to door is mostly a ton of hurry-up-and-wait with small blocks of 30-90min here or there you can read a book.
I thunk it boils down to the fact that acquiring land near San Francisco or LA through imminent domain would be both hideously expensive and extremely unpopular.
Building "High Speed Rail to nowhere" in the Central Valley allowed them kick that can of political infighting down the road.
> I thunk it boils down to the fact that acquiring land near San Francisco or LA through imminent domain would be both hideously expensive and extremely unpopular.
“Eminent domain”, and the SF to SJ run for CA HSR uses almost entirely existing rail right-ot-way shared with Caltrain.
> Building "High Speed Rail to nowhere" in the Central Valley allowed them kick that can of political infighting down the road.
You are right that doing Central Valley first was political, but you have the wrong political motivation. The political motivation was (1) to mitigate partisan political resistance to the project by prividing the most immediate benefit to the Republican districts in the Central Valley, and (2) to secure federal funding under ARRA, which prioritized shovel-ready projects, because the issues that needed cleared to reach an approximation of that state for the termini were more time consuming.
Who's shedding a tear for some farmer getting paid above market rates (presumably) for their land? California is probably the last place I'd expect people to think using eminent domain in this case is a slipper slope to communism or whatever.
Eventually you will have to build out the rail line in densely populated areas (especially near San Francisco and LA). High speed rail requires that you to avoid unnecessary curves.
At that point, you're going to have to start using imminent domain.
Putting it off until after you have billions of dollars in sunk costs in the Central Valley doesn't change that.
That's why they went with the blended system with Caltrain. Caltrain already owns a suitable right-of-way; they just needed to electrify it. Which they've already done. The SF-to-SJ part of CAHSR is effectively done; they just need to built acquire the SJ-to-Gilroy right of way and tunnel under the Pacheco Pass to connect with the rest of CAHSR.
>Eventually you will have to build out the rail line in densely populated areas (especially near San Francisco and LA). High speed rail requires that you to avoid unnecessary curves.
why can't you have it run slowly in built up areas? As another commenter mentioned that's how it works in France.
The current plan actually accounts for this; the 2:40 includes the amount of time it takes to run on the current Caltrain tracks from San Jose to SF which will not be running at the highest speeds.
Said another way, that SF/San Jose stretch accounts for 25-30% of the total time. That’s similarly true for the last stretch of LA meaning a truly engineering driven design could have done it within ~1h50. And note that the 2h40 goal is admitted as a pipe dream by everyone involved, particularly because of the last mile issues and the circuitous route.
IIRC the last stretch in LA is actually planned to be new build with Palmdale to Los Angeles taking about twenty minutes.
Engineering is about optimizing and updating where you can. There aren't really high speed rail lines anywhere that go into the center of their major cities at full speed. In Europe and Japan the city-center sections are slower; China solved this problem mostly by having high speed trains skirt around built up areas.
> China solved this problem mostly by having high speed trains skirt around built up areas.
Which is what we should have done. Follow the 5 and build out high speed spokes to the other cities. And really unfuck the rail system in the Bay Area instead of travelling at Caltrain speeds for San Jose -> SF.
Upgraded signaling along the Caltrain ROW is in the works, but again you've got to balance the egos of the three big stakeholders. Caltrain is a far smaller problem to CAHSR than e..g Metro North is to Acela. The big issue is going to be the approach to downtown SF — which is still a ridiculous political football.
Disagree. Waiting for San Francisco to get its act together would potentially doom CAHSR. Building something now even if it means no downtown SF service could still reap benefits. Even Millbrae to LA would be very useful.
Giving operating HSR to the Valley first, even though this isn't historically the reason for it, is probably a very good way to motivate a solution to any political problems in the urban areas around the termini.
China would have likely just stopped the rail line at San Jose, the same way the Shanghai HSR stops at Hongqiao 50 minutes away from the actual city center.
Yeah, I don't think people in LA or SF are worried about competing with airlines over a few dozen city miles not being 200+ mph. Avoiding the LAX is reward in and of itself.
the state can manage that expense over time, for example by refusing to enforce laws, spiking crime rates, turning into dystopia and chaos, thus lowering property values.
after land is acquired, the property and law enforcement will bring up values
