Yeah but unless you live in both airports the total trip time is easily 4+ hours. You’ve got to look at total trip time to be comparable. An SST could probably do it in 30 minutes. Still gotta get to/from the airport. Check in. Claim bags.
I remember Sheldon Atlantic Central on another thread saying he drove from rural Maryland to rural Michigan because it was faster than flying.
Because he goes directly there, making only the stops he wants to. Don’t even think of doing that with a bus, no matter how fast it can go in traffic. And the train is ridiculously worse at going where last-mile drop off and pickup – shuffling luggage and family – would be convenient.
It has not been particularly established how many of those people in the Central Valley will be paying the necessary premium to assure the necessary number of trains per day with the single-track concerns currently expected.
Railroads aren’t cheap to build. I’m willing to believe obvious screwups are part of the problem, and things that maybe could have been done better if people had made better choices and done better due diligence. I still imagine it would be a long, slow, expensive journey, just because it’s difficult to get anything like this built.
It would be neat to see a genuine high speed rail corridor in the US. I don’t know if it’s the answer to all our problems or not, I think I’d personally rather have better “regular speed” trains than any new high speed ones. But, well, I don’t really see either reality coming to pass.
-El
Driving San Diego to the Bay area takes on the order of 8 hours, so the 4 hours your talking about is still quicker. With the CaHSR, I would likely have to drive as far to get to the HSR station as I would for the airport. What time savings with HSR versus air would be avoiding the line for security and possibly a more frequent schedule.
The last time I had to go to Las Vegas for business, I figured the door to door was a wash and driving allowed me to arrive and depart when I wanted. The LA to LV HSR line doesn’t have much of a benefit for me as it would take ~2 hours to get to the station.
But if I lived within 20 miles of Rancho Cucamonga Brightline would be faster. And their LV station will be on the strip just south of the airport.
And I’ve driven I-15 on Fridays and Sundays. It’s more like 6 hours. My in-laws in LV finally showed me the back roads and boy they are back roads. They’re still faster than the interstate those days. But I wouldn’t recommend them for anyone not familiar with the area.
One lesson learned by experience was never to drive LV to SoCal on Sunday and conversely never to drive SoCal to LV on Friday. Traffic in the Inland Empire on a Friday afternoon is a nightmare, so someone living close to LAX or John Wayne would be better off flying.
There are three airports in the Bay Area, SFO, OAK and SJC. SoCal at one time or another had LAX, Hollywood/Burbank, Ontario, Long Beach, John Wayne, Santa Barbara, SAN and Palomar.
CAHSR will go down as one of California’s worst decisions ever. If the agency had cooperated with SNCF back in the 2000’s, then the trains would already be up and running. Instead SNCF’s plans were pushed aside and numerous delays began occurring. SNCF later pulled out in 2010-11…
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It certainly seems to have answered any questions remaining from Bombardier about American ability to design 220mph high speed railroads and equipment.
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I’m not sure what the trainsets would look like either…
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Calls to cut HSR
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What next?
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They’ll have to lie in the bed they made. Which, as I’ve argued on the other thread, is not unfair, because none of the CAHSR segments with any prospect of being completed in the next four years are ‘interstate’ in any reasonable semantic sense of the word.
I regret to say this, but the faster California politicians admit to the scam, and figure out some face-saving and legal exit strategy, the better. Or, in a future Federal administration, any Federal funding whatsoever should be made dependent upon strict Federal (FRA, DOT) oversight and control over all details…
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Maybe a scam or maybe not. Independent evidence?
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When I say ‘scam’, I mean that it was originally touted to voters and taxpayers as a system that would not involve heavy bond or finance requirements, but would be completely paid off out of revenue. With no yearly ongoing subsidy from the State of California. However, the fare to ride the train would be pegged low enough for average taxpayers to be able to ride the train.
It should be obvious to anyone that these are not mutually achievable in reality. It was obvious to me circa 2005 that it was outside the boundary of likely possibility – and that was when it was still feasible that the important parts of the system would be coordinated first, and that development could be expedited to get trains running as quickly as possible. The real enabling factor was the Obama stimulus after 2008; if it could massively rebuild everyone’s private truckstop along western I-80, it could surely assist with massive grading and drainage – and Obama declared early that high-speed rail was one of his priorities.
The other half of the scam was the confusion, delay, and wastage of time with all those sweetheart ‘consultant’ contracts. Any logical ‘design-build’ contractor of appropriate size operating in California could have designed a correct and expediently-followable plan within a couple of years, then updated it as needed as priorities changed. That would not affect the original scam economics, of course, but it would likely have had trains running long before now, let alone when CAHSR actually claims it will be able to have trains to run.
I am aware that Chinese sources say that many of their HSR routes actually have enough traffic to make their operation profitable. I remember seeing one or two stories indicating that some sort of reasonable payoff of construction cost over time was possible – this likely reflecting a wide range of economies from correct implementation of design and equipment provision remarkably absent from CAHSR in any respect – but the Chinese simultaneous construction was facilitated, not hampered, and was largely possible by using some of the over $37-trillion-odd dollars that we have plowed into the Chinese economy since the early '80s.
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Scams generally involves knowingly and deliberately fraudulent and usually illegal schemes.
Which is why I use it, advisedly, in this context.
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If the original initiative that provided the starting funds for the CAHSR was a prospectus for stocks or bonds, the group behind that would have been facing serious charges from the FEC. I agree with Woke in stating that there was no way that the CAHSR could have been built with the proposed funding. In an ideal world, the drafters of the initiative would have consulted with experienced project managers on what would be involved before starting the initiative process.
My recollection was that I voted ‘no’ on that initiative as I didn’t think it was feasible.
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You’re arguing that fraud and manipulation and lies are OK if you agree with them, but not if you disagree?
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No. Don’t try to slip words into others’ mouths. Cost overruns are not necessarily fraudulent. You like to play fast and loose with words to dramatize a point.
Fraud, in legal terms, is an act of deceit or trickery intended to deceive someone into parting with something of value or surrendering a legal right. It can be a civil or criminal offense, leading to legal consequences for the perpetrator and potential damages or legal remedies for the victim. Fraudulent activities can take many forms, including financial scams, identity theft, and misrepresentation of facts.
Go argue with Erik; he’s the one who brought up the unsustainability of the original cost estimates.
My argument is that it was patently impossible to build a system, even at the original price, on the terms presented to the voters who approved it. Primarily on the feasibility of the supposed payment for the system, not its cost.
The ridiculous ballooning of expenses, often clearly suggesting sweetheart deals, are a different matter, as is the attempt to cheapen deliverables by going to single-track construction and not even remotely addressing where the actual trains will be coming from, or even whether (as in the NEC) there will be any practical place to run 220mph service in the presumable service life of the high-speed equipment once built. They are not the scam.
Something I have a problem with, though, was Newsom’s argument that unspent Federal funding was somehow the property of California even though CAHSR had failed (more or less utterly as I recall) at delivering on the terms involved with that funding. It’s almost as if the Californians expect the Federal government to pay for the whole shebang, lies and schemes and all, to pull their butts out of the wringer.