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How many potential riders live along each respective corridor? How many people want to travel between San Jose and Bakersfield vs Taipei and Kaohsiung? I’d gue
by WiseWeasel 7y ago
How many potential riders live along each respective corridor? How many people want to travel between San Jose and Bakersfield vs Taipei and Kaohsiung?
I’d guesstimate an order of magnitude lower as proposed; the California plan doesn’t make much sense to me without extending the line 100 miles further from Bakersfield to LA.
- _delirium 7y agoWell, the original proposal that voters passed was SF–LA, which has very large populations at both ends, and makes a bit more sense (this is also what I was counting as 400 miles). The (maybe temporary, maybe not) scale-back seems to be due to rapidly ballooning estimates of construction cost. I agree that a Merced–Bakersfield line is less compelling, to put it mildly. Which points to what I think is the main issue, both here and with most other US transit projects: US rail construction costs are very high, even compared to other high-wage countries. If we could get subway and rail projects done at the per-mile costs that Japan, Denmark, France, or Germany manage, I think we'd both have more things already successfully built, and more public appetite to fund more. There's some digging on that question on this blog: https://pedestrianobservations.com/construction-costs/ https://pedestrianobservations.com/construction-costs/