7 ms·

If I had known that they were going to run this through the Central Valley instead of down the coast where it belongs I never would have voted for it. It should

If I had known that they were going to run this through the Central Valley instead of down the coast where it belongs I never would have voted for it. It should have gone straight from la to Oakland or emeryville, turned and gone straight to Sacramento. Instead we have a convoluted mess of rail connections that take people places they don't even want to go (no offense to Bakersfield buts it's hardly a holiday destination). It's a farse because of how it's getting implemented, and nobody is under any illusions this isn't going to turn into another bay bridge budget monster in California. Still a rail proponent, but bitterly disappointed in the implementation choices of this project.

scythe 10y ago
Nah, the coast is too expensive; you have to go over a bunch of hills and deal with steep terrain and thick forests. The correct option is to go for the cheapest land available, which any private company (not sure this kind of thing should be privatized but it's a useful comparison imo) would have obviously gone for. That would be just west of I-5, up the eastern edge of the Central Valley. Throw in a few improvements to the E-W roads between [Modesto/Bakersfield/Santa Cruz/etc] and the train corridor (which can be put off a few years to raise money) and you end up with nearly the same level of service to those areas anyway. But because it's political and activists want train service to their towns because [ideology] or just for the property values, we get cost overruns while delaying the big prize: service from SF to LA.
- acchow 10y ago
  > while delaying the big prize: service from SF to LA. I don't think that's the biggest deal here. I'll refer you to this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13630341 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13630341
  - scythe 10y ago
    The inner areas will be more likely to want transit to the endpoints than to each other. Of course having only two stops wouldn't pay for the train but it's probably easier to drive from Bakersfield to Fresno eg and you need a car both places whereas going to LA/SF without a car doesn't present a hassle. If you look at page 43 here on the ridership projections: http://www.hsr.ca.gov/docs/about/business_plans/2016_Business_Plan_Ridersihp_Revenue_Forecast.pd http://www.hsr.ca.gov/docs/about/business_plans/2016_Busines... It looks like about 2/3 or so of the revenue is to either the MTC or SCAG regions, with the remainder dominated by the San Joaquin Valley. So while traffic may not be entirely between the endpoint it is highly concentrated in trips going to and from the endpoints, and for this purpose, driving 30 minutes down a freeway to the train might not be too much of an inconvenience for the residents of Modesto who despite technocrats' brainwashing ambitions will probably still like to drive cars in 2030. Plus they won't complain about a cheaper fare, even if road improvements take another ten years to get in place (the train is the important part).
    - saosebastiao 10y ago
      I don't quite get how you're coming to 2/3 of revenue between MTC and SCAG regions (Its not adding up to that for me). It also isn't very clear: MTC has a projection for ridership to SCAG, but SCAG doesn't have projections for ridership to MTC but they do for the SJV? I'm also not sure where this newer forecast model came from, but it seems highly subject to politicized biases: they basically asked individual regions to forecast their ridership and revenue to other regions, and then added it all up. The original forecasts [0] were built off of SNCF forecast modeling expertise, which is one of the best in the world and also from a country with very similar geodemographic characteristics as California. For just the subsegment of LA-SF, less than 50% of revenue is between SF and LA, and the ridership between SF-SJV and LA-SJV adds up to approximately the same amount as LA-SF. In other words, going through the valley doubles revenue potential. This isn't a new phenomenon. It has been noted by and (if necessary) relearned by railroad capitalists going all the way back to the foundation of railroads. For an example, read chapters 16-20 of this economic history of Railway Mania [1]. Railway demand between termini has almost always been overforecasted by railroad capitalists, and they either figure it out and start serving intermediate destinations or they go bankrupt. If they build the line from the very beginning by bypassing intermediate population centers, their overestimates of ridership will doom them to a fate they can't recover from, barring major track realignment. A background in Operations Research gives me a professional social network of people across pretty much every industry, all of whom understand some of the hardest business and technical problems of their industry. Some of my contacts work on schedule optimization in Germany and Spain. One of the quotes that constantly gets spouted in their conferences is that HSR is politically successful because of its top speed, but it is commercially successful because of the first derivative of its speed. Top speed gets votes, but the ability to start and stop very quickly allows them to obtain very significant ridership boosts with very little degradation in average speed. This is a very distinct competitive advantage...they can do something that no airline could ever do. Between major termini, there will always be some form of competition with airlines, but intermediate stations will always be a veritable monopoly for rail. [0] http://www.hsr.ca.gov/docs/about/ridership/ridership_revenue_source_doc5.pdf http://www.hsr.ca.gov/docs/about/ridership/ridership_revenue... [1] http://www.dtc.umn.edu/~odlyzko/doc/hallucinations.pdf http://www.dtc.umn.edu/~odlyzko/doc/hallucinations.pdf
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
shiny 10y ago
Another potential concern is that it runs through some good farmland, which CA has some of the best of in the world. I would love to have an HSR along the coast however. When I was in Taiwan it was amazing being able to get to the bottom of the island in a couple hours.
- milesrout 10y ago
  >some good farmland, which CA has some of the best of in the world. Is that a joke? California is a terrible place to be farming. Farming in California is only viable because farmers are allowed unfettered access to water, depriving it from residents (who are told they should turn off the water in the shower while farmers are pouring untold millions of gallons on crops that could be grown somewhere actually suited to farming).
  - hexane360 10y ago
    Not just residents, but also states around it, as well as Mexico.
  - superbaconman 10y ago
    Wine yo. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_wine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_wine
    - milesrout 10y ago
      80% of California's water is used by agriculture.
      - WillPostForFood 10y ago
        This is false. I don't blame you because it is often repeated. But agriculture only accounts for about 40% of California's water use. In an average year, about 39% of California's water consumption, or 34.1 million acre-feet, is used for agricultural purposes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_in_California#Uses_of_water https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_in_California#Uses_of_wa...
jwatte 10y ago
The coast is already full of private property and protected areas. No way to run a train there (unless you bury it all the way.) SF/LA commuting is still a thing, though, and will be great!
capkutay 10y ago
It is really disappointing that it doesn't at least go near the coast. I doubt they'd be able to eminent domain coastal lands now that california homeowners are so politically powerful now, but they at least could have tried to build it along the 101 so it was driving/bus distance to the coast. If you want to take a beautiful coastal train ride, nothing beats the Amtrak from LA to San Diego.
- Justin_K 10y ago
  Which takes longer than a drive in traffic.
  - arrosenberg 10y ago
    Usually only by 30-60 minutes if there is any amount of traffic, and it's substantially less stressful.
- solstice 10y ago
  With climate change and rising sea levels those coastal areas arent going to be long-term habitable anyway
snomad 10y ago
I always thought they should have gone LA - Las Vegas - Reno, but that takes a more regional approach.
- thinkcontext 10y ago
  There is such an effort for LA to Vegas. Its been setback as it was a joint venture between a US firm and a Chinese partner. The Chinese pulled out, however, because of the requirement that high speed trains be manufactured in the US (there are currently no such manufacturers). http://www.latimes.com/world/asia/la-fg-xpresswest-rail-line-20160608-snap-story.html http://www.latimes.com/world/asia/la-fg-xpresswest-rail-line...
pm24601 10y ago
Seriously - trains should go where the people are. The people are in the central valley. Between Santa Barbara and Santa Cruz the population is very light and the terrain is very difficult. It wasn't until the 20th century that access to the Big Sur area was possible. And even today for over a hundred miles highway 1 is the only access. Fresno - 509,000 people Bakersfield - 363,000 people The first segment connects 1 million people with a high quality dedicated rail connection. Take a trip on the San Joaguin train - that train slow as it is, is very popular. Next take a look at a map. Los Angeles is due south of Lake Tahoe. So going to central valley is not a detour or some other political game. The real political mess is the choice of Pacheco Pass (hwy 152) rather than the Altamont Pass.(I-580) Once again Altamont Pass - a lot of people. hwy 152 - crickets in comparison.
- WillPostForFood 10y ago
  trains should go where the people are That's why the money would be better spent on local transit improvements inside the Los Angeles area and the Bay Area, not connecting them.
  - mikekchar 10y ago
    Making trains go where people aren't relieves the pressure on ever increasing prices in populous areas. People will have a realistic option of living in cheaper areas. AND it allows real estate speculators to get a much higher rate of return when they build up cookie cutter neighbourhoods in cheap land that is soon to be linked up by rail. Both a good and a cynical reason for this behaviour, which is why I don't think you'll ever see it change (no matter where you are).
  - dragonwriter 10y ago
    Money is being spent on local transit improvements in the LA and Bay Area as part of the High Speed Rail project.
  - jmalicki 10y ago
    It's not an either-or proposition - the local subway systems in both LA and the Bay Area are undergoing very large expansions at the same time.
txdv 10y ago
In germany they have a similar problem, if you want to build a train rail through some unimportant backwaters, these backwaters will want you to make a stop in their little cities.
- belorn 10y ago
  There is a relative easy solution to that problem, one that I suspect has happened quite a few times in history. The budget to staff and maintain the stop is put on the local budget of the backwater, and sooner or later a local politician will want to reclaim those costs.
- TeMPOraL 10y ago
  Sometimes the rail can reinvigorate those backwaters. Case in point: Montabaur, Germany.
dragonwriter 10y ago
> If I had known that they were going to run this through the Central Valley instead of down the coast where it belongs I never would have voted for it. The coast would be a stupid place to run high speed rail; it would be both more expensive to the lay the track there and less useful.
rebootthesystem 10y ago
> If I had known that they were going to run this through the Central Valley instead of down the coast where it belongs I never would have voted for it. Do everyone a favor. In the future, when such projects come up for vote, assume the politicians are lying to you and, most importantly, they are as incompetent as a truck driver attempting open heart surgery. That's a good start. Then do some research and see if in the last fifty years they have ever completed any project on time, on budget and without major problems. Armed with that reality, please don't vote to give incompetent liars the ability to create another mess and screw us all, again.
cr0sh 10y ago
> no offense to Bakersfield buts it's hardly a holiday destination No, it's not. I was born in and grew up there, and I'm glad I left (though as a kid, I thought it was a nice place to live). But it (and Fresno, and the CV in general) does have something that the coast and SF/LA doesn't have: Low-cost housing/property. Imagine being able to live in Bako, Fresno, etc - and commute quickly to SF or LA. By high-speed rail, it'd probably only take an hour or two each way. Provided that it didn't cost a lot (or you could get monthly 2-way passes), it would be a great way for those who want to work in SV or such to do so, and be able to afford to live comfortably in a home with a family. In fact, the idea is interesting enough to me to consider moving back to California (I'd love a tech job in the SF area, but the cost of living - mainly housing - just blows that idea out of the water).
- prostoalex 10y ago
  > Provided that it didn't cost a lot Seems to be the kicker with using these trains for commuter purposes. Everywhere you look - Switzerland, Japan, Spain, Eurostar - the prices seem to be at either high double digits or low triple digits one way. The way it was sold to voters in California is that it would become a revenue generator, so some additional padding is needed for profit margins.
redwood 10y ago
If you look carefully at a map, LA is actually as far East as Lake Tahoe. It's confusing but what this means is essentially going through the Central Valley is not really particularly out of the way. In fact that's why the fastest way to drive to La is on I5. It was also important to incorporate all major metropolitan areas in the state for political reasons.

scythe 10y ago

Nah, the coast is too expensive; you have to go over a bunch of hills and deal with steep terrain and thick forests. The correct option is to go for the cheapest land available, which any private company (not sure this kind of thing should be privatized but it's a useful comparison imo) would have obviously gone for. That would be just west of I-5, up the eastern edge of the Central Valley. Throw in a few improvements to the E-W roads between [Modesto/Bakersfield/Santa Cruz/etc] and the train corridor (which can be put off a few years to raise money) and you end up with nearly the same level of service to those areas anyway. But because it's political and activists want train service to their towns because [ideology] or just for the property values, we get cost overruns while delaying the big prize: service from SF to LA.

acchow 10y ago
> while delaying the big prize: service from SF to LA. I don't think that's the biggest deal here. I'll refer you to this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13630341 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13630341
- scythe 10y ago
  The inner areas will be more likely to want transit to the endpoints than to each other. Of course having only two stops wouldn't pay for the train but it's probably easier to drive from Bakersfield to Fresno eg and you need a car both places whereas going to LA/SF without a car doesn't present a hassle. If you look at page 43 here on the ridership projections: http://www.hsr.ca.gov/docs/about/business_plans/2016_Business_Plan_Ridersihp_Revenue_Forecast.pd http://www.hsr.ca.gov/docs/about/business_plans/2016_Busines... It looks like about 2/3 or so of the revenue is to either the MTC or SCAG regions, with the remainder dominated by the San Joaquin Valley. So while traffic may not be entirely between the endpoint it is highly concentrated in trips going to and from the endpoints, and for this purpose, driving 30 minutes down a freeway to the train might not be too much of an inconvenience for the residents of Modesto who despite technocrats' brainwashing ambitions will probably still like to drive cars in 2030. Plus they won't complain about a cheaper fare, even if road improvements take another ten years to get in place (the train is the important part).
  - saosebastiao 10y ago
    I don't quite get how you're coming to 2/3 of revenue between MTC and SCAG regions (Its not adding up to that for me). It also isn't very clear: MTC has a projection for ridership to SCAG, but SCAG doesn't have projections for ridership to MTC but they do for the SJV? I'm also not sure where this newer forecast model came from, but it seems highly subject to politicized biases: they basically asked individual regions to forecast their ridership and revenue to other regions, and then added it all up. The original forecasts [0] were built off of SNCF forecast modeling expertise, which is one of the best in the world and also from a country with very similar geodemographic characteristics as California. For just the subsegment of LA-SF, less than 50% of revenue is between SF and LA, and the ridership between SF-SJV and LA-SJV adds up to approximately the same amount as LA-SF. In other words, going through the valley doubles revenue potential. This isn't a new phenomenon. It has been noted by and (if necessary) relearned by railroad capitalists going all the way back to the foundation of railroads. For an example, read chapters 16-20 of this economic history of Railway Mania [1]. Railway demand between termini has almost always been overforecasted by railroad capitalists, and they either figure it out and start serving intermediate destinations or they go bankrupt. If they build the line from the very beginning by bypassing intermediate population centers, their overestimates of ridership will doom them to a fate they can't recover from, barring major track realignment. A background in Operations Research gives me a professional social network of people across pretty much every industry, all of whom understand some of the hardest business and technical problems of their industry. Some of my contacts work on schedule optimization in Germany and Spain. One of the quotes that constantly gets spouted in their conferences is that HSR is politically successful because of its top speed, but it is commercially successful because of the first derivative of its speed. Top speed gets votes, but the ability to start and stop very quickly allows them to obtain very significant ridership boosts with very little degradation in average speed. This is a very distinct competitive advantage...they can do something that no airline could ever do. Between major termini, there will always be some form of competition with airlines, but intermediate stations will always be a veritable monopoly for rail. [0] http://www.hsr.ca.gov/docs/about/ridership/ridership_revenue_source_doc5.pdf http://www.hsr.ca.gov/docs/about/ridership/ridership_revenue... [1] http://www.dtc.umn.edu/~odlyzko/doc/hallucinations.pdf http://www.dtc.umn.edu/~odlyzko/doc/hallucinations.pdf

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

shiny 10y ago

Another potential concern is that it runs through some good farmland, which CA has some of the best of in the world. I would love to have an HSR along the coast however. When I was in Taiwan it was amazing being able to get to the bottom of the island in a couple hours.

milesrout 10y ago
>some good farmland, which CA has some of the best of in the world. Is that a joke? California is a terrible place to be farming. Farming in California is only viable because farmers are allowed unfettered access to water, depriving it from residents (who are told they should turn off the water in the shower while farmers are pouring untold millions of gallons on crops that could be grown somewhere actually suited to farming).
- hexane360 10y ago
  Not just residents, but also states around it, as well as Mexico.
- superbaconman 10y ago
  Wine yo. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_wine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_wine
  - milesrout 10y ago
    80% of California's water is used by agriculture.
    - WillPostForFood 10y ago
      This is false. I don't blame you because it is often repeated. But agriculture only accounts for about 40% of California's water use. In an average year, about 39% of California's water consumption, or 34.1 million acre-feet, is used for agricultural purposes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_in_California#Uses_of_water https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_in_California#Uses_of_wa...

jwatte 10y ago

The coast is already full of private property and protected areas. No way to run a train there (unless you bury it all the way.) SF/LA commuting is still a thing, though, and will be great!

capkutay 10y ago

It is really disappointing that it doesn't at least go near the coast. I doubt they'd be able to eminent domain coastal lands now that california homeowners are so politically powerful now, but they at least could have tried to build it along the 101 so it was driving/bus distance to the coast. If you want to take a beautiful coastal train ride, nothing beats the Amtrak from LA to San Diego.

Justin_K 10y ago
Which takes longer than a drive in traffic.
- arrosenberg 10y ago
  Usually only by 30-60 minutes if there is any amount of traffic, and it's substantially less stressful.
solstice 10y ago
With climate change and rising sea levels those coastal areas arent going to be long-term habitable anyway

snomad 10y ago

I always thought they should have gone LA - Las Vegas - Reno, but that takes a more regional approach.

thinkcontext 10y ago
There is such an effort for LA to Vegas. Its been setback as it was a joint venture between a US firm and a Chinese partner. The Chinese pulled out, however, because of the requirement that high speed trains be manufactured in the US (there are currently no such manufacturers). http://www.latimes.com/world/asia/la-fg-xpresswest-rail-line-20160608-snap-story.html http://www.latimes.com/world/asia/la-fg-xpresswest-rail-line...

pm24601 10y ago

Seriously - trains should go where the people are. The people are in the central valley. Between Santa Barbara and Santa Cruz the population is very light and the terrain is very difficult. It wasn't until the 20th century that access to the Big Sur area was possible. And even today for over a hundred miles highway 1 is the only access. Fresno - 509,000 people Bakersfield - 363,000 people The first segment connects 1 million people with a high quality dedicated rail connection. Take a trip on the San Joaguin train - that train slow as it is, is very popular. Next take a look at a map. Los Angeles is due south of Lake Tahoe. So going to central valley is not a detour or some other political game. The real political mess is the choice of Pacheco Pass (hwy 152) rather than the Altamont Pass.(I-580) Once again Altamont Pass - a lot of people. hwy 152 - crickets in comparison.

WillPostForFood 10y ago
trains should go where the people are That's why the money would be better spent on local transit improvements inside the Los Angeles area and the Bay Area, not connecting them.
- mikekchar 10y ago
  Making trains go where people aren't relieves the pressure on ever increasing prices in populous areas. People will have a realistic option of living in cheaper areas. AND it allows real estate speculators to get a much higher rate of return when they build up cookie cutter neighbourhoods in cheap land that is soon to be linked up by rail. Both a good and a cynical reason for this behaviour, which is why I don't think you'll ever see it change (no matter where you are).
- dragonwriter 10y ago
  Money is being spent on local transit improvements in the LA and Bay Area as part of the High Speed Rail project.
- jmalicki 10y ago
  It's not an either-or proposition - the local subway systems in both LA and the Bay Area are undergoing very large expansions at the same time.

txdv 10y ago

In germany they have a similar problem, if you want to build a train rail through some unimportant backwaters, these backwaters will want you to make a stop in their little cities.

belorn 10y ago
There is a relative easy solution to that problem, one that I suspect has happened quite a few times in history. The budget to staff and maintain the stop is put on the local budget of the backwater, and sooner or later a local politician will want to reclaim those costs.
TeMPOraL 10y ago
Sometimes the rail can reinvigorate those backwaters. Case in point: Montabaur, Germany.

dragonwriter 10y ago

> If I had known that they were going to run this through the Central Valley instead of down the coast where it belongs I never would have voted for it. The coast would be a stupid place to run high speed rail; it would be both more expensive to the lay the track there and less useful.

rebootthesystem 10y ago

> If I had known that they were going to run this through the Central Valley instead of down the coast where it belongs I never would have voted for it. Do everyone a favor. In the future, when such projects come up for vote, assume the politicians are lying to you and, most importantly, they are as incompetent as a truck driver attempting open heart surgery. That's a good start. Then do some research and see if in the last fifty years they have ever completed any project on time, on budget and without major problems. Armed with that reality, please don't vote to give incompetent liars the ability to create another mess and screw us all, again.

cr0sh 10y ago

> no offense to Bakersfield buts it's hardly a holiday destination No, it's not. I was born in and grew up there, and I'm glad I left (though as a kid, I thought it was a nice place to live). But it (and Fresno, and the CV in general) does have something that the coast and SF/LA doesn't have: Low-cost housing/property. Imagine being able to live in Bako, Fresno, etc - and commute quickly to SF or LA. By high-speed rail, it'd probably only take an hour or two each way. Provided that it didn't cost a lot (or you could get monthly 2-way passes), it would be a great way for those who want to work in SV or such to do so, and be able to afford to live comfortably in a home with a family. In fact, the idea is interesting enough to me to consider moving back to California (I'd love a tech job in the SF area, but the cost of living - mainly housing - just blows that idea out of the water).

prostoalex 10y ago
> Provided that it didn't cost a lot Seems to be the kicker with using these trains for commuter purposes. Everywhere you look - Switzerland, Japan, Spain, Eurostar - the prices seem to be at either high double digits or low triple digits one way. The way it was sold to voters in California is that it would become a revenue generator, so some additional padding is needed for profit margins.

redwood 10y ago

If you look carefully at a map, LA is actually as far East as Lake Tahoe. It's confusing but what this means is essentially going through the Central Valley is not really particularly out of the way. In fact that's why the fastest way to drive to La is on I5. It was also important to incorporate all major metropolitan areas in the state for political reasons.