California High Speed Rail Thread

[TWAK]

The train from Martinez to LA along the coast takes 13 hours (about), and then the other train you have to use the bus bridge from Bakersfield to Union Station in LA.
I'm totally cool with stops in Merced and ect, since that's an opportunity for them to grow. Think of the TOD around BART stations...now Merced and Modesto can have some good development. I'm saying this as somebody that will never be served by HSR or Rail (no lines up here), but I'm not salty about it.
-some of the opposition to HSR is based on saltiness.

[Busy Bee]

I found a crystal ball in my attic. It showed this entire contentious debate about route being completely meaningless once everyone saw how amazing this system was upon completion.

[jmecklenborg]

Originally Posted by craigs

Doesn't current express service (max. 79 mph) already make the SF-SJ run in 40 minutes?

Per the current timetable, it's 66 minutes, but the express includes five intermediate stops: https://www.caltrain.com/?active_tab=route_explorer_tab

HSR will only have one intermediate stop, at SFO, but it will also eventually terminate at Transbay, not 4th/King, which will add an unknown amount of time to the approach. 4-6 minutes? I haven't seen an estimate.

[Crawford]

Looking at the peninsula line, it appears to be entirely at-grade, with grade crossings everywhere. Kind of amazing considering it's, by far, the busiest commuter line outside of the Northeast and Chicago.

I cannot imagine you could eliminate grade crossings between SF and SJ for less than $5 billion. And that would be eliminating all the minor crossings, and just burying the major roadways.

On Long Island, they just spent $2.5 billion mostly to rebuild/widen a few existing underpasses as part of a track expansion project. Bay Area costs have to be similar, and this project would be vastly wider in scope.

[ardecila]

Originally Posted by Crawford

Looking at the peninsula line, it appears to be entirely at-grade, with grade crossings everywhere. Kind of amazing considering it's, by far, the busiest commuter line outside of the Northeast and Chicago.

I cannot imagine you could eliminate grade crossings between SF and SJ for less than $5 billion. And that would be eliminating all the minor crossings, and just burying the major roadways.

On Long Island, they just spent $2.5 billion mostly to rebuild/widen a few existing underpasses as part of a track expansion project. Bay Area costs have to be similar, and this project would be vastly wider in scope.

Bay Area costs are ludicrous by global standards, but NYC costs make the Bay Area look like a bargain.

There are ongoing projects to separate various grade crossings on Caltrain, these are proceeding independently of HSR and on a piecemeal basis. For most intents and purposes, the HSR project ends at Diridon except for a yard in Brisbane. Even the tunnel extension to Transbay is being advanced as a separate project from HSR, which means there's a possibility HSR trains will stop at 4th and King.

[Crawford]

Originally Posted by ardecila

Bay Area costs are ludicrous by global standards, but NYC costs make the Bay Area look like a bargain.

Maybe, but take a look at the route. There must be a few hundred crossings. It would be megabillions even if this were Alabama.

The nice thing, with the coastal CA weather, you need to spend a lot less to get a functional station. The stations don't have covered canopies (I guess bc no rain), they don't have enclosed waiting areas (mild weather) and with all the grade crossings, they don't appear to have pedestrian tunnels or bridges (which are climate controlled, massively overengineered and absurdly expensive in the Northeast). I guess people just cross the tracks.

[homebucket]

The SF-SJ portion of the line has 113 crossings. Of those, 71 are grade separated (63%). So there's 42 at grade crossings left. If we use a conservative estimate of $350 million per crossing that's about $15 billion at minimum to grade separate the entire SF-SJ line.

Then there's the southern portion that connects to Gilroy, which is owned by Union Pacific. Only 12 of 30 crossings are separated (40%).

[LAsam]

Originally Posted by Busy Bee

I found a crystal ball in my attic. It showed this entire contentious debate about route being completely meaningless once everyone saw how amazing this system was upon completion.

Does it also show what the final cost winds up being?

[jmecklenborg]

Originally Posted by ardecila

For most intents and purposes, the HSR project ends at Diridon except for a yard in Brisbane.

That's a good way of putting it. San Francisco is getting the short end of the stick. There's no way to avoid that fact without building the second Transbay tube and a tunneling project of almost unprecedented scope between Oakland and the Altamont Pass.

I recently got to tour the LIRR's control room for the East Side Access project. They will have more than one guy working full-time just to manage the tunnel's fire suppression and ventilation system. They've got a control board and space in the office that is as large as the guys who manage train movements. The whole thing had to be built in an overly-cautious fashion per requirements that didn't exist until relatively recently (not sure of the year). The tunnel between 4th/King and Transbay won't be as big or complicated as East Side Access, but it's really discouraging to see how much is involved to do something big in the United States due to our overly-cautious regulations. It's great that we won't have 5,000 people burn to a crisp in the new Grand Central Madison or the 63rd St. Tunnel, but nothing like that has ever happened in Penn Station or Grand Central or any of the NYC Subway's hundreds of miles of tunnel, after 100 years of non-stop use.

Also, SF people won't like hearing this, but the city is a minority of the Bay Area's population, and employment is widely dispersed throughout the region. If it costs $25 billion to dramatically improve DT SF's HSR service, wouldn't that same $25 billion go much further improving mobility for the Bay Area's many other...areas? None of which will require a second transbay tube or exotic megaprojects?

I think people are underestimating the three-legged stool that will soon prop up San Jose - Caltrain upgrade, HSR, and BART will soon converge at Diridon. DT San Jose is going to experience a significant increase in prominence.

[Busy Bee]

Originally Posted by LAsam

Does it also show what the final cost winds up being?

People wont give a shit. This state is rich as f*** and it would have cost twice as much to futureproof the highways and airports.

[sammyg]

Originally Posted by Crawford

Looking at the peninsula line, it appears to be entirely at-grade, with grade crossings everywhere. Kind of amazing considering it's, by far, the busiest commuter line outside of the Northeast and Chicago.

I cannot imagine you could eliminate grade crossings between SF and SJ for less than $5 billion. And that would be eliminating all the minor crossings, and just burying the major roadways.

On Long Island, they just spent $2.5 billion mostly to rebuild/widen a few existing underpasses as part of a track expansion project. Bay Area costs have to be similar, and this project would be vastly wider in scope.

One of the reasons people in Palo Alto and Atherton oppose HSR is that they want to keep their at-grade crossings rather than build "ugly" crossovers like the ones in Mountain View and Sunnyvale.

[Crawford]

Originally Posted by jmecklenborg

I recently got to tour the LIRR's control room for the East Side Access project. They will have more than one guy working full-time just to manage the tunnel's fire suppression and ventilation system. They've got a control board and space in the office that is as large as the guys who manage train movements. The whole thing had to be built in an overly-cautious fashion per requirements that didn't exist until relatively recently (not sure of the year). The tunnel between 4th/King and Transbay won't be as big or complicated as East Side Access, but it's really discouraging to see how much is involved to do something big in the United States due to our overly-cautious regulations. It's great that we won't have 5,000 people burn to a crisp in the new Grand Central Madison or the 63rd St. Tunnel, but nothing like that has ever happened in Penn Station or Grand Central or any of the NYC Subway's hundreds of miles of tunnel, after 100 years of non-stop use.

Right, a huge part of the extreme cost differentials between U.S. and other first world nations is the absurdly overcautious design requirements. I don't know how this gets fixed.

Very cool you got to see Grand Central Madison, BTW. Excited to see it open to the public.

Originally Posted by jmecklenborg

Also, SF people won't like hearing this, but the city is a minority of the Bay Area's population, and employment is widely dispersed throughout the region. If it costs $25 billion to dramatically improve DT SF's HSR service, wouldn't that same $25 billion go much further improving mobility for the Bay Area's many other...areas? None of which will require a second transbay tube or exotic megaprojects?

All true, but, again, SF is the grand prize. Excepting maybe Seattle, it's the only American city west of Chicago with a strong, traditional, transit-oriented core. Building HSR in the West while largely ignoring the most transit-oriented Western environment seems foolish.

Originally Posted by jmecklenborg

I think people are underestimating the three-legged stool that will soon prop up San Jose - Caltrain upgrade, HSR, and BART will soon converge at Diridon. DT San Jose is going to experience a significant increase in prominence.

I'm highly skeptical downtown SJ ever becomes a major urban node, no matter how much investment you throw at it. It more or less sucks, from an urbanist perspective.

[ardecila]

Originally Posted by jmecklenborg

I think people are underestimating the three-legged stool that will soon prop up San Jose - Caltrain upgrade, HSR, and BART will soon converge at Diridon. DT San Jose is going to experience a significant increase in prominence.

Great - a place that is height-restricted due to airport flight paths, and can't grow horizontally due to NIMBYs. There's still some room for growth, but not nearly enough given the transit that will converge at this place.

[TWAK]

The peninsula NIMBYs brutalized the route and their actual goal was to derail it in the first place, instead of adapting it to their stupid (fake) wishes.

[jmecklenborg]

Originally Posted by Crawford

Very cool you got to see Grand Central Madison, BTW. Excited to see it open to the public.

It's pretty impressive. They layout is completely different but the overall scale is what I imagine Transbay will be when it is activated...albeit without Grand Central immediately above it.

The ventilation and fire suppression is pretty amazing. It's integrated into the mezzanine design of the station box in a really clever way. I'm not sure that Grand Central or Penn have anything at all like what has just been built, which now makes me a bit nervous when using them.

[jmecklenborg]

Originally Posted by TWAK

The peninsula NIMBYs brutalized the route and their actual goal was to derail it in the first place, instead of adapting it to their stupid (fake) wishes.

In a better world the state would have taken most bordering houses by eminent domain, constructed a new 4-track rail corridor (two tracks for HSR, two for shared Caltrain/Amtrak/freight), and covered trenched portions with apartments and public housing. It would have been way less expensive and had higher performance than what is being built. But such a move was politically impossible, so it's not worth grumbling about.

[Crawford]

Is the Bay Bridge engineered to allow rail? If the goal is SF, wouldn't it ultimately be cheaper to just ignore the peninsula, and run it up the less congested, less ultra-NIMBY, direct connection to downtown SF? Bullet trains have nothing to do with commuter service anyways.

[homebucket]

Originally Posted by Crawford

Is the Bay Bridge engineered to allow rail? If the goal is SF, wouldn't it ultimately be cheaper to just ignore the peninsula, and run it up the less congested, less ultra-NIMBY, direct connection to downtown SF? Bullet trains have nothing to do with commuter service anyways.

The western span (double decker - trains used to run on the bottom deck) is but the new eastern span is not.

[homebucket]

https://www.foundsf.org/index.php?ti...ch_of_Progress

[Crawford]

Ah, so that was the precursor to BART. The new BART tube was the justification for ending the bridge rail service.