5 ms·

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 cheapes

by 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

by scythe 10y ago

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