Right Wing Blog Evicerates High Speed Rail.

Sam.I.Am

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Sam.I.Am
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Apr 2, 2009
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If you're talking about the high speed rail in California, I agree that it's an expensive boondoggle. Too much money to go not enough places. The amount they're sinking into the first train-to-nowhere segment near Fresno is just stupid expensive.

I wonder if we'd be better off figuring out how to extend the current conventional coastal rail line all the way to the bay area. What's the price differential to put a few bridges and tunnels to the central valley from the SLO area, versus an entire new right of way?
 
Okay then. So who in government is actually in favor of infrastructure repairs and improvements on these transportation systems we already have?
 
I'll settle for the transportation system the way it is now, thanks.

The money would be a waaay better investment if spent on Desalinization plants. I'd sure rather that than Toilet-to-Tap and a Bullet Train to no where- on both ends.
 
The issue with the HSR in Ohio was that they planned to buy land for the stations where land is cheap. Sounds good to accountants, but the problem comes from actual implementation--the land is cheap because no one wants to be there. It was far from anything anyone had any business going to. Which means that in addition to the cost of a train ticket, you would have to shell out funds for a taxi ticket (not something there are a lot of in Columbus, Ohio, at least not in the parts they were going to put stations in). If you had to transport....well, anything, this becomes a HUGE pain in the neck. It also becomes a scheduling nightmare, because you have to factor drive time into it. You also have to factor parking into the cost--you've got to get to the HSR station somehow, meaning either someone drops you off, you take a cab, or you drive and park your vehicle (more expense).

Oh, and there were issues regarding right of way for the train, which made it slower than driving. Going from Cincinatti to Columbus would take about an hour to an hour and a half longer by HSR than by car. On a good day.

My dad (civil engineer) was in a meeting where all of this was discussed, and I got my inforamtion from talking to him and my grandfather (another civil engineer). He was making fun of me, because I was working on the CA HSR at the time. But that's the mentality of the people pushing this system: they simply are not looking at the real-world applications of it, and instead are trying to make reality comform to their wishful thinking.

As for the CA HSR.....I'll just say that the blind leading the blind would be orders of magnitude more efficient and leave it at that.

If you want to build an effective HSR system, you need to look at what routes get the most travel. Put a station on one end of the route, and a station on the other. Have it go from one station to the other as fast as possible, on a dedicated line that does not interfere with other transportation systems. Have the stations be close enough to the people that they can get from the stations to their destination reasonably quickly, or have a shuttle system integrated into the HSR system to compensate for the distance. Maybe something like, you can add being picked up by the HSR shuttle for a fee when you buy your ticket. An HSR line from New York to DC would be fantastic. An HSR line from San Diego to LA to Sacramento would be a fairly good thing. But in most places the inconvenience of public transit overwhelms any other benefits--traveling by car is the most time- and cost-effective way to get around.
 
ehcks said:
Okay then. So who in government is actually in favor of infrastructure repairs and improvements on these transportation systems we already have?
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Apparently not enough, it's just not sexy and doesn't lend itself to gold-shovel photo ops for the pols.
 
Dinwar said:
If you want to build an effective HSR system, you need to look at what routes get the most travel. Put a station on one end of the route, and a station on the other. Have it go from one station to the other as fast as possible, on a dedicated line that does not interfere with other transportation systems.
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Problem is there are lots of towns along the route represented by pols who will refuse to vote for it unless they get a station too. Then your non-stop somewhere-to-somewhere really fast train becomes somewhere-to-nowhere-to-nowhere-etc etc-somewhere really slow you might as well drive or fly train.
 
HSR from San Diego to LA would be pretty awesome--if it was truly high speed, and had integrated shuttle service at either end.

I can do the bulk of the drive in about 3 hours. I'd trade that any day for a 1-hour train ride and a 30-minute shuttle at each end.
 
Sam.I.Am said:
http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2015/01/california-high-speed-rail-waste-time-and-money

Finally someone recognizes what a mistake this is going to be. Too little, too late maybe but Democrats have never been what I would call... timely... when it comes to budgets and paying for stuff.
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I would just like to point out that the article you link to has links to several previous articles critical of HSR going back to 2011. They didn't just "finally" realize it was a bad idea yesterday.
 
WildCat said:
Problem is there are lots of towns along the route represented by pols who will refuse to vote for it unless they get a station too. Then your non-stop somewhere-to-somewhere really fast train becomes somewhere-to-nowhere-to-nowhere-etc etc-somewhere really slow you might as well drive or fly train.
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Yup.

If we REALLY want an HSR system we need to convince people that it's going to be fundamentally different from normal rail systems. It won't--cannot--stop at all the towns along the way. It would go from population center to population center. So, for example, from San Diego to LA to Sacramento, with only those three being stops. You get from there to the smaller areas some other way. It's more akin to air travel than to trains or cars in that sense. Perhaps as a compromise a slower rail network could be established from the HSR stations to outlying areas? So, for example, you get to LA, then can hop on a train to go to Tehachapi.

On the other hand, the HSR folks need to understand that they're going from population CENTER to population CENTER. If you're five miles from anything anyone wants to do, you're too far away--I'm willing to hike five miles, but not many are. That means buying land in the expensive parts of big cities.

One reason Europe has HSR systems and the USA doesn't is that Europe integrated rail systems into their city designs a long time ago. The USA built its cities around cars, and some people are now trying to re-vamp the cities for rail travel. Doesn't work as well; there are too many hurdles to jump, both politically and financially.
 
Dinwar said:
One reason Europe has HSR systems and the USA doesn't is that Europe integrated rail systems into their city designs a long time ago. The USA built its cities around cars, and some people are now trying to re-vamp the cities for rail travel. Doesn't work as well; there are too many hurdles to jump, both politically and financially.
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IMO one of the reasons why TGV has been so successful is that it largely avoids city centres with the exceptions of terminii. TGV stations are often outside the city itself so it does't have to deal with running new lines through the city and sharing lines with slower rail services. Decades ago a similar approach was adopted in the UK with the "Parkway" stations on mainlines but out of town.
 
I'm not sure that would work in the USA. The slower rail lines run outside of cities--for example, in Ohio there are extensive rail systems between cities (used to carry stuff when Ohio was involved in manufacturing), which is what causes the slowdown I discussed earlier. It's not inside the cities that's the problem in the USA, it's between the cities that you run into slower rail lines. Plus, US cities don't have extensive internal rail systems, or at least not systems that are worth much (the LA region had one, but few people I met used it).
 
Francesca R said:
If successful means profitable (to the state), that has worsened a lot for TGV in the last few years
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My dad actually brought that up. The response was that we should think of the HSR system as a public utility. The point isn't to make money, but to provide transportation! Which, in practical terms, means that the person confessed that people don't want to use the system--if they did, the system would make money.
 
Dinwar said:
we should think of the HSR system as a public utility. The point isn't to make money, but to provide transportation!
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Not making money just implies that the population at large is taxed to pay part of the rail fares of the people that use high speed trains.

That's a tenuous case for HSR in my view.
 
Dinwar said:
One reason Europe has HSR systems and the USA doesn't is that Europe integrated rail systems into their city designs a long time ago. The USA built its cities around cars, and some people are now trying to re-vamp the cities for rail travel. Doesn't work as well; there are too many hurdles to jump, both politically and financially.
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Actually, you're right that Europe had to take steps to design-in their rail systems as their cities are so old that rail wasn't an original part of the design. But in the USA, it's not that we built our cities around cars so much as we expanded our cities knowing that the car was now king. There are numerous cities around the USA that got their starts from the railroads (neither Denver nor Atlanta, to name two of the best known, would be more than small towns if not for the growth provided by the railroads). The rails have been torn out in many cases, or are dedicated to slower moving trains and no one has the will or the finances to upgrade the whole country en masse. In Thailand, they're dealing with a totally dysfunctional rail system, so they're going to rip it out as they replace it with parallel high-speed tracks. The US would have to do the same.... either that or be willing to wait a generation for people to move out to the rail hubs... or move their businesses out there.

There's a question I always want to ask Californians..... Just where in L.A. would the terminus need to be to satisfy the "city center to city center" ideal? The whole area is huge and it's completely at mercy of the automobile. I suspect the Los Angelinos would all answer "Duh. Near my house!"
 
Foolmewunz said:
There's a question I always want to ask Californians..... Just where in L.A. would the terminus need to be to satisfy the "city center to city center" ideal? The whole area is huge and it's completely at mercy of the automobile. I suspect the Los Angelinos would all answer "Duh. Near my house!"
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Not a Californian, but I would think really close to the transit center at 7th and Flower would be ideal.

That said, I have no idea of the practicality of that.


Some
 
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