[ebikelaw]

You have to be kidding, right? How much do you think it would cost, per mile, to build roads capable of moving 100k people per hour? That's a 100-lane freeway. California High Speed Rail is being built because of all the alternatives studied it was, by a large margin, the cheapest. Freeways and airports are much more costly for the same capacity.

[akozak]

This is where citing studies would be helpful instead of arguing on instinct. But also remember: with cars you push a lot of the costs to riders (vehicle capex, maintenance, fuel) and there is interoperability with "last mile" infrastructure (city roads). With trains you build the entire infrastructure for the long haul, and then still end up relying on other modes of transport at the end. Imagine if in building a new freeway you also needed to buy all the cars on top of it...

[khuey]

Even the most optimistic published ridership projection for CAHSR is 200k riders per day, not 100k per hour.

[chipotle_coyote]

Well, to be fair, the estimated average annual daily traffic for the most traveled LA freeways isn't anywhere near 100K per hour, either. It's around ~400K vehicles per day, and assuming 1.5 average riders per vehicle, that's 600K people. So if 200K riders per day is the most optimistic published ridership projection for CAHSR, it's not at all a bad number. (Acela's daily ridership appears to be closer to 30K, though, so I would be really surprised if the CA system is that high.)