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I agree with you, but infrastructure is often built to expand future regions. Before the Golden Gate and Bay Bridges, there was a lot less commuting to SF. They
by blackguardx 1y ago
I agree with you, but infrastructure is often built to expand future regions. Before the Golden Gate and Bay Bridges, there was a lot less commuting to SF. They only had ferries. Building the bridges allowed the broader region to expand and prosper.
- stephen_g 1y agoExactly, as people are priced out of the cities, having good HSR connections to SF and LA would be able to spur a lot of regional growth. This is a pretty common kind of blindspot for people to have, talking about how crazy it is to build transit to places with or lower populations or less population density, but forget that a lot of well-connected, dense places with good transit weren't very dense before good transit was built!
- trollbridge 1y agoTransit to... Bakersfield? It's 112 miles from Los Angeles. Dumping high-speed rail (which in the current plan won't be high speed at all between Bakersfield and LA, but is going to be a slow, circuitous route going through Palmdale and Lancaster) is not really going to be realistic for any kind of commuting to LA. There is a reason these cities never got developed more than they are. It's kind of flat, unappealing scenery and it's boiling hot in the summer. People would rather live in LA. California has huge swathes of land with very, very low population density because nobody wants to live there.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- steamrolled 1y ago> It's kind of flat, unappealing scenery and it's boiling hot in the summer. Several decades ago, you could have levied the same criticisms against South San Jose, Morgan Hill, and so on. But people now want to live here. There are basically two ways to sustain the growth in California. One is to greatly densify places like the SF Bay Area, another is to improve the infrastructure elsewhere. And I don't expect see residential high rises in Palo Alto any time soon. Up north, there's plenty of places that are more desirable in terms of weather, but they're not gonna get developed for environmental reasons. So what's left?
- saagarjha 1y ago112 miles at 200 mph?
- trollbridge 1y agoWell, Bakersfield at al is not exactly a "future region" - it's been there for a long time with a giant freeway into it (and railroads, too, including rail service from Bakersfield all the way to Stockton with connections to San Francisco and Sacramento) and it has remained a sleepy agricultural corridor. The weather is awful and it's just not where most people in California want to live.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- golemiprague 1y ago[dead]