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Help wanted: CEO for CA high speed rail project. High pay, sleepless nights
- randyrand 9y agoI feel like more international airports in SF and LA would be much more useful. More locations to touch-down in, less crowded airports. Getting from LA to SF is already quite easy travel wise - a 1 hr flight. It's getting to and from the airport and how crowded they are that's most annoying. More airports would help solve both of those.
- whyenot 9y agoThere aren't a lot of good places to put them, at least in the Bay Area.
- JumpCrisscross 9y ago> There aren't a lot of good places to put [airports] The Bay Area is mostly low-density sprawl. Pretty much anywhere is a fine place to put it. The problem is the veto rights small groups of people have over projects with regional utility, i.e. there's no way for 9 cities to over-rule 1 city for something that benefits them all.
- mchannon 9y agoConcord has an airport that used to have daily nonstops. A plane crash into a mall and assorted NIMBY's have closed it to daily scheduled commercial traffic, but it's still perfectly capable. Watsonville has an airport with plenty of room to better serve south bay and Santa Cruz. Moffett, of course. Even San Carlos has an airport with a fair amount of general aviation traffic. Hayward Executive always looms when I fly into Oakland- it looks more than big enough. Livermore, Novato, Palo Alto (busiest general aviation airport in the country), the list goes on. Frankly just getting Concord back into the act would be tremendously difficult. My definition of "good places" differs somewhat from those in power, but that may slowly be changing.
- acchow 9y agoAll of your suggestions are further from San Francisco than SFO is...
- randyrand 9y agoIt would still make SFO less crowded.
- acchow 9y agoWhat part of SFO crowds makes SF<->LA slow? I've always sped through security in 15 minutes at any time of day. Surely there must be security clearance time data available somewhere.
- mchannon 9y agoWhen SF fogs in (which is far more often than you'd expect), they close a runway. As a result, you experience crowding in SF even before your SF-bound plane leaves the gate or takes off due to air traffic control ground holds. Epic delays then cascade through the rest of the air traffic system, delaying wherever that plane was supposed to go next. This could all be alleviated if they moved one their runways further apart. I get that NIMBY's won't let them fill in more of the bay to achieve this (c'mon guys, what's another 40 feet or so?). What I don't get is how it doesn't seem to occur to anyone to move the terminal and gate structures back "west" to make this space. After substantial renovations on Terminals 1 and 2 for what is still mostly a ranch-style airport, you'd figure they could do something to free up some space. And don't get me started on SF's slowmobile, taking you to the rental car center in 10 minutes or more.
- ZanyProgrammer 9y agoDo you know how long it'd take to drive from Watsonville to Market Street?
- rollingpebbles 9y ago
- valuearb 9y agoBoth high speed trains and airports have the same problem, land rights. If it's solvable for trains it's far more easily solvable for airports.
- joelrunyon 9y agoI feel like that wouldn't fix the issue in such close proximity locations. Flying isn't optimal for that type of distance (less than 400 miles). You could lay track and get more volume on some high speed trains with comparable times (if you take into account the time for arrival / security clearance / etc at airports), the train could even be faster. Land rights are obviously the issue (esp in california), but adding more airports as a transit option for end points that are less than 500 miles doesn't seem ideal at all.
- randyrand 9y agohow is it not optimal? its 1/3rd the travel time and $75 each way.
- ingenuous2 9y agoFlying is a lot more time spend on overhead.
- randyrand 9y agoit doesnt have to be that way.
- ingenuous2 9y agoAgreed, but now we are talking political problems. And when we talk political problems, it's important to consider the base economic cost, all included.
- valuearb 9y agoSecurity overhead should be the same for high speed trains.
- serhei 9y agoGod, I hope not. It makes zero sense to have TSA theater for high speed intercity trains but not local public transportation, because the latter has far greater passenger volumes. If terrorists wanted to cause mass chaos using a public transit system, they would go for local subway and commuter train lines.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- dajt 9y agoAirports take a lot more space than train stations. Living near an airport is horrible due to noise. Trains are a lot quieter than planes. You can fit more people on a train than on a plane. You can load that train with more people a lot more quickly than a plane. Train stations can be underground if necessary. You'll have less pollution from the train. One downside pointed out below, it seems there is a problem with building the rail line. You need to train up high speed rail engineers, create the manufacturing base to make the thing and maintain it, and probably won't have another in the whole country. Or maybe one other in the north east.
- humanrebar 9y agoThere's effort to build high speed rail in Texas as well: http://www.texascentral.com/project/ http://www.texascentral.com/project/
- mistursinistur 9y agoHSR and "more airports" are not substitutes. Airports don't address the need for capacity on trips shorter than the SF-LA route (e.g. Fresno-SJ or Bakersfield-LA). Rail lines do address this kind of infill transportation. More airports by themselves don't make it easier to get "to and from the airport" -- for this, you need more highway capacity. Most calls to build more airports tend to ignore this fact and its associated costs. (Rail stations, on the other hand, are distributed along a line and don't induce the kind of traffic congestion at a single point that you'd see with an airport node.) The real alternative to HSR is a massive expansion of the highway system, including I-5, and more airports. I would like to see critics of HSR propose a plan that addresses both needs.
- philipov 9y ago> (Rail stations, on the other hand, are distributed along a line and don't induce the kind of traffic congestion at a single point that you'd see with an airport node.) Ever been to Grand Central Station in NYC at rush hour?
- TheCoelacanth 9y agoGrand Central Station handles close to three times the number of passengers that the busiest airport in the world handles while taking up less than a third of the land area.
- rabboRubble 9y agoAirports might be more useful if the security theater were eliminated. The shorter the flight the greater proportion of time I spend not traveling anywhere (i.e. standing in the TSA line). If I can avoid the TSA, god help me I will.
- rollingpebbles 9y agoFor major airports, LA has Burbank and LAX. In fact, avoid LAX where possible. The other issue is LA is so spread out that that's its fundamental problem; it needs much faster, more pervasive and efficient public transport that ties into national and international travel.
- atarian 9y agoWould love to see Elon Musk take over and build the Hyperloop.
- yadongwen 9y agoJust curious..if China could help build it with half cost and half time, would CA accept? If not, why?
- mozumder 9y agoKinda amazing that the Chinese could help build our railroads again...
- sjg007 9y agoUnions, regulations, politics. Also quality issues maybe.
- 1024core 9y agoIIRC, SNCF, the French consortium, had offered up a plan to build the HSR from SF to LA. They asked for no public funding. http://marketurbanism.com/2012/07/10/what-i-learned-today-about-sncf-and-california-hsr/ http://marketurbanism.com/2012/07/10/what-i-learned-today-ab...
- gsnedders 9y agoBut, vitally, they didn't want to deal with all the politics of the routeing. Large infrastructure projects are always in large part down to politics, potentially to their detriment (in this case, the business case being weakened by higher construction costs and slower end-to-end journeys leading to less keen private investors).
- ZanyProgrammer 9y agoThey can't even get interoperability with Caltrain settled out, and building miles of useless track in the Central Valley is all they've done so far (from what I remember, could be wrong there).
- rayiner 9y agoWe're like the Yahoo of countries.
- acchow 9y agoBased off our inability to build infrastructure? Boeing still builds a ton of airplanes in America. Tesla is founded and manufactured in America. In 20 years we've created the empires of iPhone, Google and Facebook. Wasn't CRISPR discovered in America as well?
- peterhadlaw 9y agoI don't understand this behavior with some people being so defeatist about America. It's by no means perfect, but there is much innovation, growth, and development shown by her people.
- a13n 9y agoYeah maybe the trick to incredible innovation is just offering the shittiest transportation infrastructure and outrageously expensive healthcare. /s The US is extremely great at some things and extremely terrible at others.
- justicezyx 9y agoI think US infrastructure and health care are areas: 1. Real needs exist for renovation. 2. Real examples outside US that works better and cost less. It's just that the people somehow manage to still fail to achieve the desired results with reasonable investment. What went wrong? I cannot say for sure. Democracy does not mean that "you have to screw in some areas". If there is a way to do it better, just do it that way. There is no inherent limitations of democracy which make it unable to learn, right?
- rayiner 9y agoI'm more referring to the dysfunction of our government and institutions. But in a democracy, dysfunctional government is a manifestation of dysfunction in the people.
- kilroy123 9y agoI really don't get this project. The math just doesn't add up. It's going to cost ~$67 billion dollars and there are ~39 million people in California.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- maxerickson 9y agoWhat's the proper per capita cost of public transportation infrastructure?
- Gibbon1 9y agoPretty easy actually. $67 billion /39 million people / 30 years => $57/year-person. or 1.5 million trips per day X 365days/year X 30 years => 15.4 billion trips. $67 billion / 15.4 billion trips => $4 trip
- pkaye 9y agoThen why does BART rides from Oakland to SFO cost $10.
- marze 9y agoMoney down the toilet. It will never be finished. In ten years, ubiquitous communication and virtual presence will seriously impact business travel demand.
- kryptiskt 9y agoI first heard that in the 80s. I'm not holding my breath.
- kermittd 9y agoSo Elon Musk is running a 4th, 5th organization now?
- madebysquares 9y agoCan't Elon just dig a tunnel for them at half the price.
- rollingpebbles 9y agoCalifornia business people have been wanting for more tha 4 decades to bleed the state dry on an over-priced "high speed rail" system that would likely suck.
- TheAmericanWay 9y agohttp://www.fresnobee.com/opinion/editorials/article154096449.html http://www.fresnobee.com/opinion/editorials/article154096449.... The above link takes you the Fresno Bee editorial board's justification to continue building moonbeam's legacy with total disregard for the California taxpayer accountability from our executive and our legislative areas of government. What is even more troubling is that the editorial board believes there is tons of money in the California and Federal Treasuries. Last check, CA has a total debt obligation funded and unfunded climbing past $1.3 TRILLION DOLLARS. And now these esteemed supposedly (?) business board types think that addition of $300 to $500 billion or more to the state debt is a solid move. First off we are talking about 1800’s technology in the 21st century. Furthermore, no one is talking about the pending $400 billion-dollar healthcare debacle coming our way and again, I repeat, there is no money in the bank to fund even this liberal dufus disaster. Then, of course, we have BART with 4-janitors who have collected over 1/2 million dollars in overtime last year. I think the editorial board needs to go back and write an editorial that requires competence and fiscal acumen from these two groups. On then would a totally prefunded project get the green light.