Quote:
Originally Posted by pesto
hammersklavier: I agree with most of your comments but not on ordering.
Ca HSR believes 85 percent of its riders will come from cars. The problem is that it’s 350-450 miles by car and 430-600 miles by HSR from the Bay Area to LA/SD and the roads are excellent and uncrowded except on the busiest holidays. If an electric car is going to make that run for about .10/mile, we have roughly a $70 RT. Putting 2 adults and 2 kids on HSR will cost $400-600RT and you will need to rent a car when you get there (90 percent of the Bay Area does not live in SF and 95 percent of LA does not live in DT core).
The efficient uses of HSR are within the Bay Area and within LA/SD, where traffic is bad much of the time, will get much worse and freeways are about at their limits. My suggestion is to build-out Palmdale, Riverside, Irvine to DT LA, and (as you suggest) Sacto-Oakland-SJ with a BART connection into SF. The Peninsula already has excellent, heavily-used train service from SJ to SF and there is considerable opposition to HSR at the moment.
As PI notes, the OC to SD corridor is jammed much of the time. But HSR isn’t going to help this since it loops north to LA, east to Riverside, and back south to SD. This may serve the IE nicely, but makes the OC-SD connection useless. It goes on hold until a path through the OC is do-able. Everything in the Central Valley (except Sacto.) goes on hold until it’s clear the demand exists (HSR concedes that this is a very small piece of the projected ridership).
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The 85% is likely political. It appeals to staunch car drivers (hey, less traffic), to environmentalists (hey, it's saving the planet), to price-conscious people (hey, they're targetting drivers... so it'll be cheap).
In reality, I doubt it will be that high for the whole trip. However, it will be used a lot more for shorter trips into the city from the exurbs as a way of avoiding the traffic for occasional trips in.
SF-LA traffic will be mostly previously airplane passengers. In fact, if it's done right, airline travel between those two cities will almost disappear.