6 ms·

It's ludicrous that we in this country can't have modern infrastructure. One thing that bothers me, is that there is this narrative that high speed rail just s

It's ludicrous that we in this country can't have modern infrastructure. One thing that bothers me, is that there is this narrative that high speed rail just somehow cannot work, and is a pipe dream, and not right for America. We cannot afford /not/ to have high speed rail. We're already heavily subsidizing airlines to schedule flights to nowhere. And as of last time I researched it, a few years ago, there wasn't an HSR line in existence that didn't net revenue for the state. Not building this line because of some NIMBY rich people in California is the sign of a crumbling civilization, where the elites are too concerned about their own comfort to prevent us from being left behind, technologically.

seanp2k2 10y ago
Yeah, this makes me super upset. I honestly have no problem subsidizing it with my tax dollars. I would honestly use the LA <-> SF route, even though that wouldn't be built until I'm middle-aged. It's also ridiculous that we never built out BART to the original plans, since that could have done so much to improve the traffic situation, the housing situation, and increase property values. I never understood why wealthy land owners don't want trains; in every case I've seen, land by a train station goes up hugely in value.
- jclulow 10y ago
  Trains allow more people from a more diverse spectrum of socio-economic conditions to work or live in and around an area. If you're a keen isolationist, whether for more or less discriminatory reasons, you almost certainly will vote to avoid useful public transport. Besides, wealthy land owners have drivers on staff. Or don't have to commute to work on a schedule, so an occasional small ferry is good enough (cough... Marin). It's all pretty awful, but not that hard to understand once you look at the more tacit end of public behavior.
- x0x0 10y ago
  My problem with this project is: 1 - if you want to spend $80B on public transport infrastructure, there are productive places in CA to do that. This project is not in the top 20. You could, alternatively, build out bart/muni/caltrain/vta/LA metro. I'm sure San Diego also has transit projects available. 2 - the ridership numbers for this project are created in what can only be described as a crack-aided manner. It's already $80/pp, up from $50/pp. By the time it's actually built, I'd guess tickets will be well over $100/pp. If you have even two people, you may as well drive. How many people need to commute between LA and SF? The HSR estimates are between 18m and 31m passengers annually [1] which seems unlikely. Also note the $86 far comes to about 20c/mi, while amtrak on the east coast charges 50c/mi and most european long haul trains charge 45+c/mi [1]. Which should make you suspicious that tickets will cost far more than $86, or the ridership numbers are farcical. 3 - when these projects are sold with transparently fake numbers, it poisons public support for all transport infrastructure projects. Currently the part of the project under construction is pure bait and switch rail construction for amtrak, which will use the track until at some unnamed date HSR starts using it. 4 - the local transit projects in sfbay, san jose, LA, or probably san diego have much less risk: we can reasonably project usage. [1] http://www.latimes.com/local/politics/la-me-adv-bullet-fares-20150510-story.html http://www.latimes.com/local/politics/la-me-adv-bullet-fares...
  - npunt 10y ago
    Spot on. Local travel is where majority of need is, and in most places in CA it's sorely lacking and could benefit a great deal from state funds. Time waste there FAR exceeds that between HSR stops. HSR is a bet on people commuting more between city centers, which - if true - would only increase the local transport problem that city centers have today (as people arrive sans cars), and if false, would remain underutilized. Isn't a win either way.
  - dragonwriter 10y ago
    On #1, part of the HSR program of making improvements to local and regional mass transit networks connecting to HSR. They aren't competing alternatives.
    - x0x0 10y ago
      Of course they are. Every dollar wasted on building high speed rail on, eg, merced to bakersfield could be used to build public transport lots of people will regularly use, in population centers of California.
cjensen 10y ago
"last time I researched it, a few years ago, there wasn't an HSR line in existence that didn't net revenue for the state". The linked article says that only 3 of the 111 systems worldwide run without subsidies. That claim comes from the construction company which benefits if HSR goes forward.
- ojbyrne 10y ago
  How many highways run without subsidies?
  - mudetroit 10y ago
    High speed rail cannot come close to replacing highways though. It deals with a fraction of the overall traffic that the highway system supports without near the flexibility. This is why even the countries that are making extensive use of high speed rail still have extensive highway systems. Please note, I am in no way trying to imply that our current highway system works well, but that is a far different discussion.
    - Symbiote 10y ago
      The proposed high speed line north from London is supposedly the alternative to building a new motorway. The high speed live won't carry freight, but it will free up space on the slower railway, and the motorway.
    - ojbyrne 10y ago
      Fair point in the first paragraph. It's the "far different discussion" I'm more interested in though. Starting with the loss of life caused by driving.
  - cjensen 10y ago
    I was not stating an opinion on whether it is reasonable to subsidize HSR; rather I was just pointing out the discrepancy between the claim in the comment here versus the multiply-sourced claims in the article. Additionally, the HSR proposal explicitly promised not to require ongoing subsidies. I think that was foolish: HSR would have passed without making silly promises.
namlem 10y ago
I think high speed rail is a bad investment for most of America. Instead, we should focus on accelerating the development of self-driving car fast lanes. Autonomous cars could easily form convoys that go 120 mph or more, drastically cutting down commute times while costing only a tiny fraction of what high speed rail costs. Yes, it would be significantly slower than high speed rail, but it would still be a lot faster than currently available transportation.
- akshayn 10y ago
  This would encourage sprawl-y and inefficient land use.
  - baq 10y ago
    the problem is that's already the case and the reason why HSR won't work that well in the first place. imagine though that there's a fleet of self-driving cars ready to take you to HSR stops. best of both worlds?
    - akshayn 10y ago
      Fair enough. Ultimately, HSR has far higher bandwidth than self-driving cars - density could be achieved either by efficient land use or by a feeder network (local transit or self-driving cars). Presenting self-driving cars and HSR as mutually exclusive is a false dichotomy.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
- LanceH 10y ago
  I imagine light rail that with smart cars that can combine/merge/release so that they can run on a web rather than a mere lines.
- astrange 10y ago
  It would only be twice as fast as current transportation, and if it succeeds it'll still get stuck in traffic, because a 5 person car with 1 person in it is a total waste of space.
foolfoolz 10y ago
we have the best roads in the world. go to any other country, you will not find 4, 5, 6+ lane freeways that are free, have excellent signage, interconnect without stoplights or city streets, that extend for thousands of miles. i can drive to any region in the country for free on uninterrupted highway. if i drive to go skiing, i know the roads will be plowed, i can even check on the status before i drive. our roads have dividers in the middle, we have shoulders on the side, we have lines and botts dots between lanes. many larger freeways in cities now have lights. this country has modern infrastructure
- twblalock 10y ago
  The quality of our roads is quite low compared to those in Europe.
  - vvanders 10y ago
    Was just coming here to post that, there was an article recently about the new MB E-Class'(I think) lane keeping that wouldn't work on the majority of US roads since it was trained on better European roads.
    - twblalock 10y ago
      The road builders there know how to paint straight lines and place the reflectors on the lines, unlike ours, who seem to have been drunk on the job.
  - adventured 10y ago
    > The quality of our roads is quite low compared to those in Europe. That's incorrect. You mean a select few countries in Europe (Germany, Sweden and Switzerland != Europe). You're very clearly ignoring that Europe also consists of Russia, Belarus, Bulgaria, Romania, Croatia, Moldova, Serbia, Macedonia, Ukraine, Albania, Hungary, Poland etc. 3/4 of Europe has a lower living standard than the poorest US states do and they have terrible infrastructure to go along with it. Greek and Italian infrastructure is piss poor as well. The Eurozone for example is now spending significantly less on infrastructure than the US (how long will those roads hold up as infrastructure spending continues to decline?): "Infrastructure spending in the euro zone has dropped to an average of 2.7 percent of gross domestic product, compared with 3.4 percent of GDP for the U.S. and 3.6 percent for Japan." https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2015-11-27/europe-has-squandered-its-savings-now-is-the-time-to-invest https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2015-11-27/europe-ha... And: "The dilapidated state of infrastructure in Belgium, home to the European Union’s main institutions, has become emblematic of a lack of investment that blights the whole continent and, according to the EU itself, is creating 'lasting bottlenecks that undermine productivity growth.'" "Anyone taking even a short trip to Brussels would see evidence of this. Due to lack of maintenance over the last 20 years, all the city’s major tunnels have been closed on public safety grounds, creating the biggest traffic jams the city has ever experienced." https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2016-05-11/europe-needs-new-rules-for-investment-spending https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2016-05-11/europe-ne...
Shivetya 10y ago
In all the world there are only three high speed rail systems which pay for themselves. All the rest are subsidized and some heavily. with the price of air fares why would you not fly other than for the TSA? it was air travel that did them in the US simply because it started here faster and there weren't borders to worry about for the majority of travelers. Rail is a romance that too many people never look past the haze to see the truth. Sadly even light rail is a boondoggle and the tens of billions if not a hundred or more in deferred maintenance is going to bite a lot of local transit authorities in the butt (it already smacks the Washington DC Metro) What is really sad is this warning appeared on cato awhile back about the change to the contract presentation and most places blew it off because of the source
- rayiner 10y ago
  > with the price of air fares why would you not fly other than for the TSA? 1) You can't build airports in downtown cores, which unavoidably adds 30 minutes at each end. 2) Boarding an airplane with one door is intrinsically slower than boarding a train with many doors. Again, that adds time at embark/disembark. 3) Extra weight on an airplane inherently costs a lot of money, which means that trains will always be more spacious and comfortable.
  - crzwdjk 10y ago
    Unfortunately, Amtrak is desperately trying to give away its advantage on point 2. At many stations, passengers are not allowed to just wait on the platform and are instead funneled through a ticket check one at a time. This results in the predictable long lines, though the actual boarding process is still somewhat more efficient than on a plane.
flubert 10y ago
>We're already heavily subsidizing airlines to schedule flights to nowhere. Can you expound upon this, or give examples of taxpayer dollars subsidizing flights to "nowhere"?
- niftich 10y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Essential_Air_Service https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Essential_Air_Service
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- ubernostrum 10y ago
  Essential Air Service is the usual thing meant here. In a country with the size/spread/population density of the US, it's generally not possible to have a single-mode transportation network which reaches everybody (or to within reasonable distance of everybody) without subsidizing some routes that would be unprofitable due to low demand.
protomyth 10y ago
> And as of last time I researched it, a few years ago, there wasn't an HSR line in existence that didn't net revenue for the state. There are only two HSR lines that are profitable (one line into Tokyo and the Paris - [edit]Cannes line). The rest are all subsidized include the Acela Express (search for all the references on HN throughout the years). The US decided to build cargo rail which has given us part of an amazing logistic infrastructure. In other words, the US picked cargo over humans.
- kgwgk 10y ago
  Paris-Cancun?
  - HillaryBriss 10y ago
    must have meant: Paris - Cannes
    - protomyth 10y ago
      Autocorrect at least stayed with a resort town theme - thanks
  - WildUtah 10y ago
    "On that train all graphite and glitter Undersea by rail Ninety minutes from New York to Paris" http://genius.com/Donald-fagen-igy-lyrics http://genius.com/Donald-fagen-igy-lyrics
mr_tyzic 10y ago
> It's ludicrous that we in this country can't have modern infrastructure. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gkf2MQdqz-o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gkf2MQdqz-o is a survey of American domestic and foreign policy that goes into this question. The speaker is a distinguished US diplomat of the post-war era, who also served as Nixon's Mandarin interpreter when he first went to China. His short answer is that for interlocking reasons that make it hard to change, military spending is the only kind of stimulus spending that's politically feasible in the US, and infrastructure spending hasn't yet been able to break that lock, though it needs to.
pzone 10y ago
The article and data flatly contradict what you're saying. HSR often loses money. In this case, any reasonable belief that it will run without subdies has completely vanished. The data say it will not be used, it will cost too much, and is a waste of everyone's money. You want to pay 68 billion dollars for some symbolic money pits just because you want to beat Japan and China? This isn't about elites beating down everyone else. Elites, like the HN crew here, are the people who care the most about regularly traveling back and forth between SF and LA. Everyone else would just be subsidizing them.
bradleyjg 10y ago
I'd love if we had some high speed inter-city rail in the US. Acela is a joke and it's the best we have. But building decent intra-city integrated mass transit systems in our major metropolitan areas ought to be a higher priority. Right now we have only one in a country with fifty-three metropolitan areas with more than one million people in them. Of course one needn't preclude the other, but give that both ends of the mooted HSR line would terminate in cities with terrible and barely mediocre mass transit systems respectively, it is pretty clear that there are higher priority needs which those dollars should be allocated towards.
- dragonwriter 10y ago
  Improving local and regional mas transit throughout the state, especially around all four of the long term proposed termini (SF, LA, Sacramento, and San Diego.)
gameofdrones 10y ago
It's ludicrous that it can't be something like Hyperloop, not for hundreds of billions and not take 50 years. PS: I'm from Silicon Valley, and I've heard about the mythology high-speed rail for over 25 years during the construction of the marginal-utility Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority light rail, which is demonstrably worse and far more inflation-adjusted expensive per mile than the municipal trains of the turn of the century that were ripped up previously. Tangentially interesting: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_conspiracy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_consp...
WildUtah 10y ago
The USA is an extremely expensive place to build infrastructure. [0] Building subways and high speed rail costs about ten times as much as it does in first world countries with the best constructions practices, particularly Spain and Korea. And HSR at 10x the market price is never going to be a viable transportation option for California. It's best either to accept that HSR will never work there or to try to change the procurement and construction culture on smaller projects before trying to build. The reasons for high prices in the USA are myriad and complicated. Spain and Korea have high wages for workers and stronger labor unions. Neither country is known for particularly effective anti-corruption practices. The simple answers people reach for first are not the key drivers of cost difference. Instead, at every level of operation the USA system fails to use its resources wisely and there is no responsible party that drives efficient construction and operation. Agencies and governments work at cross purposes impeding each other's progress and everyone with authority in the system uses it to extract concessions by blocking the others instead of cooperating. Until that changes, trying to build HSR in the USA is foolhardy. [0] https://pedestrianobservations.wordpress.com/category/transportation/construction-costs/ https://pedestrianobservations.wordpress.com/category/transp...

seanp2k2 10y ago

Yeah, this makes me super upset. I honestly have no problem subsidizing it with my tax dollars. I would honestly use the LA <-> SF route, even though that wouldn't be built until I'm middle-aged. It's also ridiculous that we never built out BART to the original plans, since that could have done so much to improve the traffic situation, the housing situation, and increase property values. I never understood why wealthy land owners don't want trains; in every case I've seen, land by a train station goes up hugely in value.

jclulow 10y ago
Trains allow more people from a more diverse spectrum of socio-economic conditions to work or live in and around an area. If you're a keen isolationist, whether for more or less discriminatory reasons, you almost certainly will vote to avoid useful public transport. Besides, wealthy land owners have drivers on staff. Or don't have to commute to work on a schedule, so an occasional small ferry is good enough (cough... Marin). It's all pretty awful, but not that hard to understand once you look at the more tacit end of public behavior.
x0x0 10y ago
My problem with this project is: 1 - if you want to spend $80B on public transport infrastructure, there are productive places in CA to do that. This project is not in the top 20. You could, alternatively, build out bart/muni/caltrain/vta/LA metro. I'm sure San Diego also has transit projects available. 2 - the ridership numbers for this project are created in what can only be described as a crack-aided manner. It's already $80/pp, up from $50/pp. By the time it's actually built, I'd guess tickets will be well over $100/pp. If you have even two people, you may as well drive. How many people need to commute between LA and SF? The HSR estimates are between 18m and 31m passengers annually [1] which seems unlikely. Also note the $86 far comes to about 20c/mi, while amtrak on the east coast charges 50c/mi and most european long haul trains charge 45+c/mi [1]. Which should make you suspicious that tickets will cost far more than $86, or the ridership numbers are farcical. 3 - when these projects are sold with transparently fake numbers, it poisons public support for all transport infrastructure projects. Currently the part of the project under construction is pure bait and switch rail construction for amtrak, which will use the track until at some unnamed date HSR starts using it. 4 - the local transit projects in sfbay, san jose, LA, or probably san diego have much less risk: we can reasonably project usage. [1] http://www.latimes.com/local/politics/la-me-adv-bullet-fares-20150510-story.html http://www.latimes.com/local/politics/la-me-adv-bullet-fares...
- npunt 10y ago
  Spot on. Local travel is where majority of need is, and in most places in CA it's sorely lacking and could benefit a great deal from state funds. Time waste there FAR exceeds that between HSR stops. HSR is a bet on people commuting more between city centers, which - if true - would only increase the local transport problem that city centers have today (as people arrive sans cars), and if false, would remain underutilized. Isn't a win either way.
- dragonwriter 10y ago
  On #1, part of the HSR program of making improvements to local and regional mass transit networks connecting to HSR. They aren't competing alternatives.
  - x0x0 10y ago
    Of course they are. Every dollar wasted on building high speed rail on, eg, merced to bakersfield could be used to build public transport lots of people will regularly use, in population centers of California.

cjensen 10y ago

"last time I researched it, a few years ago, there wasn't an HSR line in existence that didn't net revenue for the state". The linked article says that only 3 of the 111 systems worldwide run without subsidies. That claim comes from the construction company which benefits if HSR goes forward.

ojbyrne 10y ago
How many highways run without subsidies?
- mudetroit 10y ago
  High speed rail cannot come close to replacing highways though. It deals with a fraction of the overall traffic that the highway system supports without near the flexibility. This is why even the countries that are making extensive use of high speed rail still have extensive highway systems. Please note, I am in no way trying to imply that our current highway system works well, but that is a far different discussion.
  - Symbiote 10y ago
    The proposed high speed line north from London is supposedly the alternative to building a new motorway. The high speed live won't carry freight, but it will free up space on the slower railway, and the motorway.
  - ojbyrne 10y ago
    Fair point in the first paragraph. It's the "far different discussion" I'm more interested in though. Starting with the loss of life caused by driving.
- cjensen 10y ago
  I was not stating an opinion on whether it is reasonable to subsidize HSR; rather I was just pointing out the discrepancy between the claim in the comment here versus the multiply-sourced claims in the article. Additionally, the HSR proposal explicitly promised not to require ongoing subsidies. I think that was foolish: HSR would have passed without making silly promises.

namlem 10y ago

I think high speed rail is a bad investment for most of America. Instead, we should focus on accelerating the development of self-driving car fast lanes. Autonomous cars could easily form convoys that go 120 mph or more, drastically cutting down commute times while costing only a tiny fraction of what high speed rail costs. Yes, it would be significantly slower than high speed rail, but it would still be a lot faster than currently available transportation.

akshayn 10y ago
This would encourage sprawl-y and inefficient land use.
- baq 10y ago
  the problem is that's already the case and the reason why HSR won't work that well in the first place. imagine though that there's a fleet of self-driving cars ready to take you to HSR stops. best of both worlds?
  - akshayn 10y ago
    Fair enough. Ultimately, HSR has far higher bandwidth than self-driving cars - density could be achieved either by efficient land use or by a feeder network (local transit or self-driving cars). Presenting self-driving cars and HSR as mutually exclusive is a false dichotomy.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
LanceH 10y ago
I imagine light rail that with smart cars that can combine/merge/release so that they can run on a web rather than a mere lines.
astrange 10y ago
It would only be twice as fast as current transportation, and if it succeeds it'll still get stuck in traffic, because a 5 person car with 1 person in it is a total waste of space.

foolfoolz 10y ago

we have the best roads in the world. go to any other country, you will not find 4, 5, 6+ lane freeways that are free, have excellent signage, interconnect without stoplights or city streets, that extend for thousands of miles. i can drive to any region in the country for free on uninterrupted highway. if i drive to go skiing, i know the roads will be plowed, i can even check on the status before i drive. our roads have dividers in the middle, we have shoulders on the side, we have lines and botts dots between lanes. many larger freeways in cities now have lights. this country has modern infrastructure

twblalock 10y ago
The quality of our roads is quite low compared to those in Europe.
- vvanders 10y ago
  Was just coming here to post that, there was an article recently about the new MB E-Class'(I think) lane keeping that wouldn't work on the majority of US roads since it was trained on better European roads.
  - twblalock 10y ago
    The road builders there know how to paint straight lines and place the reflectors on the lines, unlike ours, who seem to have been drunk on the job.
- adventured 10y ago
  > The quality of our roads is quite low compared to those in Europe. That's incorrect. You mean a select few countries in Europe (Germany, Sweden and Switzerland != Europe). You're very clearly ignoring that Europe also consists of Russia, Belarus, Bulgaria, Romania, Croatia, Moldova, Serbia, Macedonia, Ukraine, Albania, Hungary, Poland etc. 3/4 of Europe has a lower living standard than the poorest US states do and they have terrible infrastructure to go along with it. Greek and Italian infrastructure is piss poor as well. The Eurozone for example is now spending significantly less on infrastructure than the US (how long will those roads hold up as infrastructure spending continues to decline?): "Infrastructure spending in the euro zone has dropped to an average of 2.7 percent of gross domestic product, compared with 3.4 percent of GDP for the U.S. and 3.6 percent for Japan." https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2015-11-27/europe-has-squandered-its-savings-now-is-the-time-to-invest https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2015-11-27/europe-ha... And: "The dilapidated state of infrastructure in Belgium, home to the European Union’s main institutions, has become emblematic of a lack of investment that blights the whole continent and, according to the EU itself, is creating 'lasting bottlenecks that undermine productivity growth.'" "Anyone taking even a short trip to Brussels would see evidence of this. Due to lack of maintenance over the last 20 years, all the city’s major tunnels have been closed on public safety grounds, creating the biggest traffic jams the city has ever experienced." https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2016-05-11/europe-needs-new-rules-for-investment-spending https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2016-05-11/europe-ne...

Shivetya 10y ago

In all the world there are only three high speed rail systems which pay for themselves. All the rest are subsidized and some heavily. with the price of air fares why would you not fly other than for the TSA? it was air travel that did them in the US simply because it started here faster and there weren't borders to worry about for the majority of travelers. Rail is a romance that too many people never look past the haze to see the truth. Sadly even light rail is a boondoggle and the tens of billions if not a hundred or more in deferred maintenance is going to bite a lot of local transit authorities in the butt (it already smacks the Washington DC Metro) What is really sad is this warning appeared on cato awhile back about the change to the contract presentation and most places blew it off because of the source

rayiner 10y ago
> with the price of air fares why would you not fly other than for the TSA? 1) You can't build airports in downtown cores, which unavoidably adds 30 minutes at each end. 2) Boarding an airplane with one door is intrinsically slower than boarding a train with many doors. Again, that adds time at embark/disembark. 3) Extra weight on an airplane inherently costs a lot of money, which means that trains will always be more spacious and comfortable.
- crzwdjk 10y ago
  Unfortunately, Amtrak is desperately trying to give away its advantage on point 2. At many stations, passengers are not allowed to just wait on the platform and are instead funneled through a ticket check one at a time. This results in the predictable long lines, though the actual boarding process is still somewhat more efficient than on a plane.

flubert 10y ago

>We're already heavily subsidizing airlines to schedule flights to nowhere. Can you expound upon this, or give examples of taxpayer dollars subsidizing flights to "nowhere"?

niftich 10y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Essential_Air_Service https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Essential_Air_Service
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
ubernostrum 10y ago
Essential Air Service is the usual thing meant here. In a country with the size/spread/population density of the US, it's generally not possible to have a single-mode transportation network which reaches everybody (or to within reasonable distance of everybody) without subsidizing some routes that would be unprofitable due to low demand.

protomyth 10y ago

> And as of last time I researched it, a few years ago, there wasn't an HSR line in existence that didn't net revenue for the state. There are only two HSR lines that are profitable (one line into Tokyo and the Paris - [edit]Cannes line). The rest are all subsidized include the Acela Express (search for all the references on HN throughout the years). The US decided to build cargo rail which has given us part of an amazing logistic infrastructure. In other words, the US picked cargo over humans.

kgwgk 10y ago
Paris-Cancun?
- HillaryBriss 10y ago
  must have meant: Paris - Cannes
  - protomyth 10y ago
    Autocorrect at least stayed with a resort town theme - thanks
- WildUtah 10y ago
  "On that train all graphite and glitter Undersea by rail Ninety minutes from New York to Paris" http://genius.com/Donald-fagen-igy-lyrics http://genius.com/Donald-fagen-igy-lyrics

mr_tyzic 10y ago

> It's ludicrous that we in this country can't have modern infrastructure. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gkf2MQdqz-o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gkf2MQdqz-o is a survey of American domestic and foreign policy that goes into this question. The speaker is a distinguished US diplomat of the post-war era, who also served as Nixon's Mandarin interpreter when he first went to China. His short answer is that for interlocking reasons that make it hard to change, military spending is the only kind of stimulus spending that's politically feasible in the US, and infrastructure spending hasn't yet been able to break that lock, though it needs to.

pzone 10y ago

The article and data flatly contradict what you're saying. HSR often loses money. In this case, any reasonable belief that it will run without subdies has completely vanished. The data say it will not be used, it will cost too much, and is a waste of everyone's money. You want to pay 68 billion dollars for some symbolic money pits just because you want to beat Japan and China? This isn't about elites beating down everyone else. Elites, like the HN crew here, are the people who care the most about regularly traveling back and forth between SF and LA. Everyone else would just be subsidizing them.

bradleyjg 10y ago

I'd love if we had some high speed inter-city rail in the US. Acela is a joke and it's the best we have. But building decent intra-city integrated mass transit systems in our major metropolitan areas ought to be a higher priority. Right now we have only one in a country with fifty-three metropolitan areas with more than one million people in them. Of course one needn't preclude the other, but give that both ends of the mooted HSR line would terminate in cities with terrible and barely mediocre mass transit systems respectively, it is pretty clear that there are higher priority needs which those dollars should be allocated towards.

dragonwriter 10y ago
Improving local and regional mas transit throughout the state, especially around all four of the long term proposed termini (SF, LA, Sacramento, and San Diego.)

gameofdrones 10y ago

It's ludicrous that it can't be something like Hyperloop, not for hundreds of billions and not take 50 years. PS: I'm from Silicon Valley, and I've heard about the mythology high-speed rail for over 25 years during the construction of the marginal-utility Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority light rail, which is demonstrably worse and far more inflation-adjusted expensive per mile than the municipal trains of the turn of the century that were ripped up previously. Tangentially interesting: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_conspiracy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_consp...

WildUtah 10y ago

The USA is an extremely expensive place to build infrastructure. [0] Building subways and high speed rail costs about ten times as much as it does in first world countries with the best constructions practices, particularly Spain and Korea. And HSR at 10x the market price is never going to be a viable transportation option for California. It's best either to accept that HSR will never work there or to try to change the procurement and construction culture on smaller projects before trying to build. The reasons for high prices in the USA are myriad and complicated. Spain and Korea have high wages for workers and stronger labor unions. Neither country is known for particularly effective anti-corruption practices. The simple answers people reach for first are not the key drivers of cost difference. Instead, at every level of operation the USA system fails to use its resources wisely and there is no responsible party that drives efficient construction and operation. Agencies and governments work at cross purposes impeding each other's progress and everyone with authority in the system uses it to extract concessions by blocking the others instead of cooperating. Until that changes, trying to build HSR in the USA is foolhardy. [0] https://pedestrianobservations.wordpress.com/category/transportation/construction-costs/ https://pedestrianobservations.wordpress.com/category/transp...