[buxtehude]

I love fast trains but we need them much more inside our metro areas than between distant parts of the state.

Commutes within the major metro areas in California (SF bay area, Los Angeles, Sacramento) are horrendous and just imagine how much good $77bn could do for those.

A well designed and fast transportation network within metro areas would do much more to improve the lives of Californians and the environment, as well as make our cities much more livable.

[slg]

I would even argue that transit systems within a city are somewhat of a prerequisite to high speed rail adoption. It is the last mile problem. If you are planning a trip from San Francisco to Los Angeles, one of the major reasons to drive is so you have a car in LA. If you could reasonably get around LA without a car, taking a train from SF to LA becomes much more appealing.

That is one of the big advantages for high speed rail in Japan. The high speed rail service is closely integrated with the local rail network of the cities it stops in. You get off the high speed rail, walk two minutes, and you are on a subway to your final destination.

[iaabtpbtpnn]

It surprises many people to learn this, but LA actually has metro rail, which you can catch from Union Station. It services almost double the number of stations that BART does. My experience with the express buses on the west side is also far superior to MUNI.

[simonbyrne]

It's also a matter of integration (common ticketing, timetabling of connections, sharing stations): the Bay Area is atrocious for this. LA is slightly better, but still leaves a lot to be desired.

[inferiorhuman]

LA is a LOT better with this, and that's why they're actually building rail out. They've consolidated administration whereas the Bay Area is a fragmented rat's nest with BART being the best example of how toxic and provincial transit politics can be.

[TheHwangover]

Honestly, one of the most underrated parts of LA. Granted, it's not well connected yet but if I could I would use the metro everyday.

[hunter23]

I don't think the process is any different from flying. You get out of your transport and take a shuttle to the closest car rental agency. There are tons of car rental agencies in LA and if there was a high speed train they would open up outlets near the train.

[barsonme]

OTOH, somebody commuting via train doesn't want to rent a car every day.

[chewz]

Additionally your shinkasen (fast train) ticket allows you to travel anywhere within metro area at destination (on JR lines).

[dwd]

This might now be an opportunity for a hyperloop alternative. Musks investment in cheap tunneling with the Boring Company could turn out to be one of his best bets yet.

[nihonde]

Currently, a person living in Nagoya, Japan would have a one-way commute to central Tokyo of about 100 minutes. That’s almost too long to live in one city and work in the other. But after the Linear is completed, that commute time drops to 40 minutes each way—much more reasonable. Tokyo-Osaka drops to 67 minutes.

Daily commuting may still be cost-prohibitive, but the distance between business people who want to hold a meeting is basically negligible at that point.

Linking three major cities that are 250 miles apart as the crow flies, with about one hour of commute, and on time. If they can do it in Japan, why can’t we?

[jonathankoren]

Because the US has a uniquely mismanaged procurement process, construction unions that insist on 4x the number of workers, and myopic regulations. The whole system has become warped to slow down and prevent construction, while at the same time maximize costs. It’s absurd.

Let’s take California HSR for example. Multiple environmental impact studies and appeals, and even afterwards, every city on the peninsula demanded a different system to install the tracks. One wants elevated tracks, another wants a trench, another insists the train be at grade, yet another wants it moved miles away, finally someone wants a commuter rail stop.

We can’t build anything in this country. It’s disgusting.

https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2018/01/why-its-so-ex...

https://theweek.com/articles/449646/why-expensive-build-brid...

[jackcosgrove]

Don't forget that Japanese politicians are addicted to public works spending and have been for generations. Great infrastructure is nice, but is it worth having a public debt that is 260% of GDP? Japan's population is also shrinking so a lot of the infrastructure will be fallow in the future. Both the USA and Japan have political problems with infrastructure procurement, just in completely different ways.

[jonathankoren]

The amount of relative debt is irrelevant here. What is important, is that the US consistently pays more, and gets less.

Regardless of its merits, Spain spent 40 billion euros and got a functioning nationwide high speed train network.[0] California was looking to spend twice that and get a single line, and probably would have ended up spending even more if it was completed.

[0] https://elpais.com/elpais/2015/03/26/inenglish/1427383199_99...

[rakkhi]

But the USA has $22T govt debt although "only" 105% Govt debt to GDP as of Jan 2019 (excluding unfunded liabilities like social security) and projects like this where infrastructure is not built. Neither situation is great but I think as a tax payer I would rather have the fast trains in Japan

[njarboe]

Well, with negative interest rates, the more you are in debt the more you earn. Have interest rate go back up to 5% and things get very bad quickly.

[mars4rp]

I really don't know anything about Japan, but the way government contractors work in this country is they are milking the cow to the max that they can.

I know of a 150 page front end app that was charged at least $40M.

accomplishing anything serious with this attitude is not possible.

[winrid]

Well, that could be a very complex application... Maybe number of pages isn't the best metric.

[mars4rp]

You might think, but it is not that complex.

I could have wrote that app in less than a year.

The contractors just made it complex to justify the tag price.

A simple change of address logic was 5000 line of java code !!

[kristianp]

It's still going to cost 9 trillion Yen (about 81 billion USD) though for the maglev.

https://www.japan-rail-pass.com.au/japan-by-rail/travel-tips...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ch%C5%AB%C5%8D_Shinkansen

[traek]

> Currently, a person living in Nagoya, Japan would have a one-way commute to central Tokyo of about 100 minutes. That’s almost too long to live in one city and work in the other.

I don’t know, I have friends with one-way commutes longer than that from SF to the peninsula.

[nostrademons]

The challenge with fast trains in cities is the acceleration. If you ride BART, for example, you are basically spending all your time either speeding up or slowing down, and yet BART stations are still spread about as far apart as they can be and realistically cover the city. Actually, they don't even do a very good job at that - much of the city is not within easy walking distance to a BART station.

We need the equivalent of offramps for trains. Some mechanism that would transport you for the last mile at 10-15 mph (scooters? pods?) while allowing trains to never come to a complete stop and wait for people to board.

[CydeWeys]

The proven solution here is to have long-distance trains and short-distance trains running on separate tracks. No need to go crazy with anything way more complicated (and thus pricier and more prone to failure).

Like, in NYC, we have the subway, which has normal trains and express trains (on separate tracks), and then we've also got regional rail like MetroNorth, LIRR, and NJT, and then we've also got long distance rail like Amtrak to DC, Baltimore, Philadelphia, Boston, and others.

[inferiorhuman]

New York also separates the different lines on to different platforms. BART and Muni shove 1-5 routes on each platform and chaos ensues.

[buxtehude]

In many countries around the world they build more than two parallel tracks - at least 3 or 4 - so you can have fast lanes as well as slower local lanes.

The problem with BART is that it's all a local train - stopping at every station on your way. If you are going from SF to Oakland - probably not a big deal - but if you live on the ends of the lines, quite annoying and very time consuming.

These systems really need to change their mindset to compete with cars. It should be fast and efficient - preferably much faster than cars - so there is a strong incentive for the public to use them.

[mjevans]

Not just faster than cars; faster than cars under ideal circumstances for cars.

[briandear]

Is waiting 30 minutes for a train faster than just driving directly? Generally not. So trains aren’t necessarily faster.

[inferiorhuman]

BART is not a fast train. It tops out at 80 mph, which it a speed it can't reach between most stations. Where it can reach that speed it often didn't because the motors on the older trains suffered from dramatically increased wear at those speeds.

[pvg]

BART wasn't really intended to help you get around the city, though. Lots of places have transit systems that include both rapid and local rail transit.

[yellowapple]

I rather strongly disagree. Connecting the smaller metro areas to the bigger metro areas opens up a lot of opportunities for both ends. The smaller metro areas become more accessible and thus amenable to growth. The larger metro areas get to relieve the pressure on housing costs as people can move to more affordable areas (thus paving the way for them to in turn grow even further).

A statewide high-speed rail system is ultimately going to be a hard dependency on California continuing to grow and prosper for another century in the same way it has for the previous century. The approach to doing that needs a major rework, of course, but such a rail system is in the best interests of the state as a whole.

[phil21]

Interconnecting the smaller cities in the region is entirely pointless until you achieve usable mass transit within the major city cores themselves. Otherwise great - you can take HSR from your sleepy small town exurb, but have no usable way to get to your final destination on either end so it ends up mostly being a novelty and serving a tiny handful of commuters. This pattern is observed in almost the entire US except a tiny handful of east coast cities and perhaps Chicago.

Once you have a workable transit network on at least one side of the connection, branching out high speed rail to smaller "feeder" cities can induce demand and start creating denser development in those feeder cities to make the transit even more useful.

The Netherlands is a great example here in my opinion. Lots of smaller suburbs/towns within 40 minutes on the high speed trains, typically with a walkable community on the "feeder" city side and either a walkable destination or a tram ride on the Amsterdam Centraal side.

I cannot see a point to point HSR line being very useful if all it connects are essentially two train stations to nowhere.

Basically I don't see a point in building HSR or commuter rail if the citizens of the major city it's built into require car ownership to realistically get around. This means there isn't a network robust enough to support bringing feeder traffic into. Or put another way - it'd be pretty silly for an airline to create a route between two cities, but have no connecting flights on either end. Sure, it's useful for a very few - but not really economically viable at scale.

[yellowapple]

There's no reason why we have to wait for the intra-city transit to develop before developing the inter-city transit, though. Ideally they'd happen in parallel, with the inter-city rail fanning the flames of demand for robust intra-city mass transit.

And we should be clear here that "mass transit" within a city (especially one the size of Merced or Bakersfield) doesn't necessarily mean a full-blown metro network. Even a decently-sized bus system would be a step in the right direction (and in fact might be all that's practical or necessary for the smaller cities). On that note, both Merced and Bakersfield do already have bus networks, and the rail connection between the two would be a good way to spur further expansion.

The "two train stations to nowhere" are - from what I can gather - a temporary situation while we rejustify the rest of the network. Those stations are likely already in-progress and too late to cancel (probably because they were the easiest).

[YeahSureWhyNot]

you would be surprised how easy it is for a major city government to spend 77B and not achieve anything substantial

[dcosson]

The SF Central subway project cost about $920M per mile, at those rates this $77B could be used for 84 miles of underground subway lines in the densest parts of SF and LA. That could be very substantial. (And not saying that's even the best way to improve transit, but it is probably the most expensive way and even still the money would go pretty far).

[jonathankoren]

Meanwhile, in Europe a subway will cost you somewhere between 200 and 500 million dollars per mile.

https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2018/01/why-its-so-ex...

[thorwasdfasdf]

The US has 2 big problems: 1. “as a result of existing union agreements covering the eastern seaboard area of the United States, underground construction employs approximately four times the number of personnel as in similar jobs in Asia, Australia, or Europe.”

Holy crap, that means 75% of the personell are just sitting around not doing anything. Must be a very powerful union.

2. Regulation: But the problems are not just to do with labor. Working alongside active commuter or intercity rail lines brings a slew of new requirements and regulations.

[maxxxxx]

It seems that construction companies have learned from the medical industry how to be f...ing expensive.

[jonathankoren]

And the defense industry. The defense industry has the advantage of not only maximizing cost, but also maximizing states. For instance, I believe Alaska is the only state without an economic impact from the F-35, the most expensive fighter jet ever made.

https://www.f35.com/about/economic-impact-map

[YeahSureWhyNot]

A relatively small construction/infrastructure project (920M) will not maintain the same cost efficiency when the project is 80 times larger.

[ummonk]

Right. It will be cheaper per mile with a larger project.

[dkislyuk]

SF Central subway cuts through one of the densest parts of SF (including crossing a BART line and an existing MUNI line), which substantially increases costs. Further away from the downtown core, costs per mile should be lower.

[Ericson2314]

If anything it would be more efficient.

[buxtehude]

this is unfortunately true - however in this case it might be a municipal metro area body that comprises of one or more counties and multiple cities

the process of awarding projects to developers by government entities is very flawed and seems to guarantee substandard results and cost overruns.

edit: still having said this - it shouldn't be a reason to not try - we desperately need (and imo deserve) these improvements to our cities (as well as better municipal spending oversight as well as better planning)

[ummonk]

Yes, we could build a proper subway / el in SF for 30 billion.

[remarkEon]

The only thing that could get a proper subway/el built in SF is $30B and a brutal, authoritarian government to do so. With today’s governance it would be 2049 before it’s complete and I’d be skeptical that all the lawsuits allowing construction would be settled before 2030.

The lesson for everyone to learn here is this: direct democracy and grand vision public transit do not mix.