I would rather see $100 billion spent on local rail projects within our severely congested cities.

But Livermore, Freemont and Redwood City can serve the area just as well, plus they add in better access to Alameda and Contra Costa Counties. DTSJ isn't a big enough node on its own to warrant a HSR diversion. Besides, Altamont allows for 120 MPH regional rail from Stockton/Modesto-Tracy-Livermore/Pleasanton-Fremont-RWC/DTSJ, which arguably brings more benefits to the area than not having to take BART to Freemont HSR.

We might see a complete reversal to the original Schwarzernegger-era plan, sans the Central Valley, which is already set-in-stone.

We also might see the HSR approach to SF built parallel to the 101 instead of the blended Caltrains service.

If you want to go full-on conspiracy theory, the current plan is definitely feasible, but it's almost as-if it was designed by LA interests who wanted HSR to LA first by making the SF service level poor. Then SF interests retaliated with the horse-spooking BS north of Burbank to force most of 20 miles between the airport and Palmdale underground.

Lots of words wasted on fake news.

Anyone who has actually been following the project knows that nothing has changed

He simply reiterated what the last business plan said. Focus on finishing the IOS, look for fed funding for the rest

Why? It’s still being built. Did you not read the articles? People are way overblowing this. I haven’t seen this many drama queens since Ru Paul Drag Race All Stars.

The average person will support transportation if they think one, or a combination of the following things(in no particular order):

1. The transporation plan will reduce traffic
2. The plan will significally reduce pollution
3. The plan will be met with strong budget constraints and oversight
4. The plan will be used by their friends/co workers
5. The plan will actually either aid their commute by them using it or reducing traffic or simply giving them an option they didn't have before
6. The plan will help the poor move around quicker and cheaper
7. The plan will encourage economic growth
8. The plan will be a significant time saver

1. CHSR will not do this. Its competition was with planes, not cars.
2. CHSR would meet this to some extent.
3. CHSR did not and has shown it cannot be done responsibly.
4. CHSR has not shown that this would be true, even if this is rather vague on my part, which I admit.
5. CHSR would not help anyones commute to work. No one would use this for that purpose.
6. CHSR does not meet these criteria at all. Poor people don't travel city to city often and if they do it will be by car or bus.
7. CHSR could do this, but I think its impacts would be so dissipated that it could be overlooked. Compare this to say the local economic impact of a LR line, its much harder for the taxpayer to grasp at its value. 40 million people in a large state or say 4 million in a large city, which one do you think would be easier to show the economic growth brought on by a transport project? Which would you think would actually impact someone's life more as for an economic impact?
8. Barely.

Note, this is obviously my opinion and I based it on what I personally think, and what I think the average voter thinks.

The concept was flawed from the beginning. They basically ignored the actual travel patterns in favor of an influencer-driven model to connect LA to Silicon Valley. The distance and physical barriers to make that happen escalated the costs beyond it's justification. Opinions which are only given to bolster one's political/worldview aren't worth reading. IMO a better plan would be to first create two HSR lines, one connecting San Diego, Orange County and Los Angeles in the south, and the other connecting Sacramento, San Francisco and San Jose in the north.

Is there any reason the high-speed trains couldn't switch onto the regular passenger tracks at Merced to go to Sacramento and Oakland at standard speeds? There are over 3 million people living between Merced and Bakersfield, increased speed to get them to major cities is still a major accomplishment.

They could operate standard diesel passenger trains on the HSR tracks.

What about Acela-level speeds?

Of possible interest-- the Eno Foundation is holding a webinar tomorrow about the decision to scale back California's high-speed rail construction.

Rapid-Response Webinar: What Went Wrong with California High-Speed Rail?
https://www.enotrans.org/events/rapi...68ae-357757909

I think this plan is the best-go for the shorter more doable approach..

Yes, it would have been. But those locations are not where CHSR decided to build their first HSR tracks.

Most contractors, both public and private, start building what takes the longest to finish first. For CHSR,that would be the tunnels in the mountain passes. Yet CHSR decided to do them last.
Now we will have over $10 billion spent building a grade separated double track railroad corridor in the Valley, probably using for the near future the same rolling stock going at slightly higher max speeds that they do now. There are already two railroad corridors paralleling this brand new one.
If they had started building the tunnels first through let’s say the Grapevine, the existing Amtrak California trains could breach the Bakersfield to LA gap through these brand new tunnels. Now we have new tracks where they are not immediately useful instead.

It took WDOT two to three years to tunnel 2 miles under the Alaska Way Viaduct, how long do you think it would take CHSR to build at least one 20 mile tunnel? FYI, It took Switzerland 16 years to build a new 35 mile long tunnel recently.
Therefore, it should be safe to assume proceeding at 2 miles of tunneling per year. Yes, it will probably take 10 years to dig the new tunnels under and through the Grapevine. Why wait to do it last? It should have been done first!

Yes, the incompetence on this project has been obvious from the start. The reason they didn't start with the tunnels is because there was never enough money to build anything more than a small fraction of this design. The goal was to use a "foot in the door" approach hoping to later use the sunk cost fallacy to goad the citizens of California into shelling out more and more money for completion. This strategy wouldn't have worked if tunneling had started first because there would be virtually no visible progress so it would be impossible to show the people of California that they were actually getting something for their money.

^Exactly. They're currently building HSR in the most rural, flattest and generally the easiest place to construct it.

The whole problem with starting in the cities and moving outward is that there would have been intense pressure to dilute design speed in order to maximize track length from a particular bond issue.

The language of Prop 1A dictated a specific travel speed from LA to SF for this reason -- to prevent a lesser railway from being built.

The central valley is the only area where the trains will actually travel at 200+mph, except for a brief run west of the Pacheco Pass Tunnel.

If the Pacheco Pass alignment is dropped in favor of a return to Altamont, then there will be more 200mph operation in the Valley north to the point where the line enters the hills somewhere near I-580, but still no speeds above 125mph approaching the East Bay or approaching Los Angeles.

Absolutely, starting it between Fresno and Bakersfield or whatever was a terrible idea.

If you are thinking about just the cheapest portion first, part of the reason that is the cheapest is it will be the least used segment.

The whole project was ill conceived.

No it would mean California embarked on a ridiculous and unnecessary project that fell on its face.

The fact is 95% of the USA has no need or desire for a high speed rail system.

What this shows, if anything, is that the USA is so massive and rich it can have independent states embark on wild and ambitious rail projects that would bankrupt other nations, but we can play with them with little concern for it being a problem for the country overall.

If this project and failure occurred in Norway, there would be major fiscal and political consequences, in the USA its a funny joke :haha:

Get real. There's no room along the 101 unless they remove freeway lanes or build 40 miles of elevated structure over the median. And you thought the Caltrain corridor had legal opposition, hoo boy. 280 has a little more breathing room (would only require 10 miles of elevated structure before entering open space in the foothills) but the alignment is too curvy to actually let out the throttle on high speed rail, and you'd still need to use the Caltrain corridor north of San Bruno in any case. There are only two semi-reasonable ways to bring HSR to SF: the Caltrain corridor or the East Bay with a new Transbay tunnel. Caltrain had the advantage of being a popular commuter corridor already, so any money spent on infrastructure there would count for double.

Also, if you look at HSR overseas it often uses legacy rail corridors through urban areas, because there's no other place to put it without insanely long tunnels. The big time savings comes from barreling through the countryside at 220mph.

Honestly, some private company should just build between LA and San Diego. Imagine the use that would get, with thirty minute end to end times.

Excellent news! Now we need to work to ensure the Valley portion is canceled as well. This project was awful from the beginning in every way.

If anyone knows me, they'll know I truly support rail and access to alternative transportation. Likewise, I do support an HSR connection between SF and LA. I even advocate for MagLev between LA and SD. But we need to reform the way we build infrastructure by finding ways to cut red tape where it isn't needed and other ways to reduce costs so we aren't paying 10x what other countries are for the same of type of infrastructure.

They would need to work with state DOT to make it happen. If a massive viaduct were built along I-5 containing six tolled lanes from DTLA to Irvine and HSR to SD, I suspect it would make a full return on the cost much sooner than one might think.

Hang on a minute, you are starting to make sense; be careful.

The Central Valley is to be the most-used section.

You get about 18 miles of high speed travel parallel to I-5 along the Camp Pendleton beachfront. Other than that you're rebuilding the Metrorail corridors in LA, which is part of CAHSR Phase 1, and then somehow widening the freight corridor from Camp Pendleton down to San Diego, which will mean taking some of the most expensive real estate in the United States to widen that ROW to 100 feet and built a miles-long concrete barrier wall between the existing fright tracks and HSR.

Or you could dig a 40~ mile tunnel under LA and Orange County and then a 25~ mile tunnel from Camp Pendleton down to San Diego, which is more than the total amount of tunneling currently planned for the LA>SF run.

So at least $50 billion to build a straight-shot LA>SD high speed rail line.

Not on its own. That is only contingent on the other sections being built.

Oh please.

Only wen considering pass through traffic between the Bay Area and L.A Which wasn't going to happen for many many years.

Traffic on phase 1 from Bakersfield to Merced was going to be nothing

I heard the news about the cancellation of this project while listening to a conservative talk radio show last night and they were just gloating over the failure of this project. They seemed overjoyed about it saying that the liberal / communist agenda is failing even in the 5th. largest economy in the world.

My heart sank hearing this news. It's a one-two punch for me because first we here in Florida lost our chance to build HSR but then I had high hopes for CA and thought that if any state can pull this off it would be CA.
They would be the role model for future HSR projects across the nation and now this.
This is just so damn depressing.

Yeah, everybody knows that.

The interstate highways were generally built in the open countryside first, with the city sections taking longer to build, and many gaps for 15+ years.

Guess we should have just given up since there were service gaps that took awhile to fill.

People its not that depressing, The places where high speed rail is built are vastly more densely populated than the USA.

If you want express trains in specific metro areas that makes sense, a statewide Cali bullet train through the central valley and hundreds of miles of rural or even empty land.

Pop per square mile:

Japan 339
UK 650
Netherlands 491
China 142
Germany 235

USA: 84

Building a bullet train across hundreds of miles of rural California was a BAD IDEA from the get go.

Highways are significantly less expensive to build and maintain and useful for far many more people and far more use (Cargo) than Trains.

I like trains, they are cool but unless its going to be from Boston-DC its useless in the USA.

And thats not even getting into how the USA is going to have low and stable gas prices for decades thanks to shale oil technology making the demand for trains even less than 10 years ago. Its a matter of straight economic and geographic reality

California: 251

It's a completely different dynamic. If a highway goes 80% of the way you need it to go it just means you have to take surface streets for the other 20% of the way. You can still drive from A to B. If a train only goes 80% of the way it's basically worthless because you have to switch transportation modes twice which means big delays and extra cost.

Well them I suppose the state of California is laughably incompetent.

This is a total fallacy because you're comparing different units.

PPSM
Japan: 865
Germany: 601
Italy: 518
Mid-Atlantic: 417
China: 375
Florida: 365
France: 319
California: 246
Spain 238
New England: 233
Piedmont-Atlantic States: 233
Great Lakes States: 192
Europe: 188
Texas: 101
USA: 87
Certainly, if you break the USA down into European country-sides chunks, there are areas which can warrant HSR. Not at Japan levels, but certainly like that of France and Spain.

They are, but that's beside the point here. When looking at whether HSR makes sense you can't just look at country wide density metrics. You have to look at the number of transit connected individual at each node and how far apart the nodes are. LA and SF are pretty far apart for HSR and neither has a very good transit network by the standards of the rest of the world. HSR could still work if done right since the whole Central Valley portion should be dirt cheap to build by HSR standards, but there is just not political will in California to actually build this project. People can post on this forum that people in SF support it heavily and they might be right on paper. However support on paper doesn't matter, what actually matters is whether they're willing to make the less politically correct decisions like talking a bunch of people who complain the trains might look ugly or spook their horses to shove off and doing the same to all the people refusing to sell their land. People keep bringing up the interstates, but back in the day nobody gave a flying fuck about the NIMBYs. They'd build a highway straight through a fucking neighborhood if they had to. That's the sort of political will that's needed.

Yeah, the Chunnel is useless because nobody lives in the English Channel.

The different dynamic is that nobody really cares when a road or bridge or highway or whatever is built piecemeal. Rail projects of any kind are held to an impossibly high standard while road boondoggles are shrugged off.

1. No, road boondoggles are not overlooked. The Big Dig is probably the poster child for infrastructure boondoggles.

2. The problem isn't the piecemeal nature of the construction it's the order the pieces were to be constructed. If it had started in either LA or SF then each section opened would at least allow people to commute into and out of that city. But in the Central Valley all it does is connect a lot of small cities that presumably don't have much demand to take a train to the next town over.

The tunnel going under the English Channel is around 30 miles long. Hardly a comparison to hundreds of miles.

Thats entirely different. And if you cannot see the benefit of connecting 60 million people to the continent across a historically major barrier up to and including WW2 then I suppose your confusion with the failure of HSR in America makes sense.

I didnt break down individual states but that still doesn't take into account where HSR makes sense.

It works in the Low Countries and Japan and parts of Germany, it would work between the Bay and Sac, or the Northeast, Maybe Seattle-Vancouver, Possibly Chicagoland and maybe (BIG MAYBE) Dallas-Houston or Florida.

But HSR between the Bay and LA doesn't work. Within the Bay or Socal it would but between the two through major mountain ranges and rural land? Nope.

No major country has built HSR across the kind of territory and low density areas that California attempted to do.

And this isn't even getting into the economics of the cost for people to drive cars int he USA vs take trains or planes. Unfortunately we are blessed with extremely inexpensive and abundant sources of energy, the majority of the country east of Denver is relatively flat and easy to get around on cheaply and efficiently and at densities a fraction of the territory HSR is built in Asia and Europe.

There is a myriad of reasons why HSR does not work in the USA, and why the Cal plan was foolish from the get go. Not that HSR is bad in general but it only makes sense to do in the right circumstances.

And that sort of political will destroyed minority and poor neighborhoods and created massive barriers across our cities that we bitch about endlessly today .

Want to make the same mistake of urban renewal again because you are as into trains as they were into highways:shrug:

We just had pages of people claiming that nobody would commute via HSR. Now we're not capturing all of those commuters.

So High Speed Rail should only be built within cities? Like from one neighborhood to another? If there is a body of water or hills or farmland or desert in between them, it shouldn't be built?


The internet is an amazing place.

Why would anyone use HSR to go from bakersfied to Merced when its cheaper and not much slower and vastly more expensive?

why would you pay for a 5 hour trip between LA and san Fran via train when you can take a plane for under 100 dollars.

Take into account the infrastructure cost (77 billion dollars) / 40 million Cali citizens= $1925

You can pay for many tanks of gas and many plane tickets for every citizens to get them between LA and San Francsico.

The project was totally unfeasable.

No high speed rail should be built in places like this:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikiped...Hslbenelux.png

not this:

https://www.mercurynews.com/wp-conte...9-90.jpg?w=620



Do you have any concept of how much more compact, population dense and FLAT the netherlands is than the proposed system in california.

Do you have any idea how slow a train must go through mountains, how innificient they become when they hit grade in the track? Why do you think train routs through mountains TO THIS DAY are rare and slow?

You really have no idea what you are talking about do you?

It will be revived when a Democratic, hopefully “far left” (but centrist by international standards) president is elected along with majorities in the senate and House, next year.

I wasn’t a fan of Newsom but he’s growing on me. I admire his practicality at looking at the current major shortcomings of the current HSR plan and lack of funding (along with squandering of it).

If the dotard can waste billions on a useless monument, surely we can “waste” billions on an HSR system.

No, you don't. The HSR in the Netherlands isn't used for intra-Netherlands travel: it's used to get to places a few hundred miles away: like Paris. SF-LA is 2:40 HSR, 4:00 door to door. Plane door to door is something like 4:20, whereas driving is about 8:00 door to door. Obviously the train, with ~$60-$80 fares, is the best option. Also, electrified HSR trains have no problem going through mountains at >180MPH, it's just that there haven't been many opportunities to build HSR through mountains yet in the USA; hence, not many routes. It's done all the time in other countries.