[trthomps]

It was the right choice in the end though IMO, it avoids an even harder to pass set of mountains and serves yet another high population town (175k people) and provides a potential transfer station for getting to Las Vegas bypassing LA for people in Northern California once Brightline West comes down I-15, only needing to build a branch line between Palmdale and Victorville.

[andbberger]

no, palmdale is insanity. at 550km SF-LA is already marginal for high speed rail, that plus going out of the way to go through every single town in the central valley on the way down and then doing a huge zig zag to hit palmdale is going to cripple service. and also cost a lot of money. should have just followed I-5

[trthomps]

Really going to have to disagree with you on that one, 3 hours SF to LA is well within HSR times (4 hour is considered the max), and will still be time competitive with flying because of how long it takes to check in and what a nightmare LAX is. Serving more people is absolutely higher value then the 50 total minutes lost going the route it's going.

Look at any HSR map in Europe and you'll see the same thing, the major city service is great, but it's the smaller regional service that makes the system and drives ridership. With remote work on the rise, people already are moving to smaller towns in between SF and LA, this gives them an alternative to driving when they need to go into the office. Once SJ to Merced service is operating, you could even reasonably do a daily commute, <1 hour.

[skellington]

Nobody is going to use this thing. The number of people moved by HSR in this route will be comical if they ever finish it which is also unlikely.

[andbberger]

the ridership will be very high. the capacity will be shit because it's managed by a consultant mafia and criminally incompetent politicians who have gone out of the way to deliver the least train for the highest amount of dollars. the transbay terminal is nigh unusable as a train station [1], and instead of leaving the caltrain right of way as soon as possible (ie south of redwood city across the dumbarton through altamont) it's going to run in mixed traffic for caltrain's entire route, operationally crippling both caltrain and CAHSR and requiring huge investment in unnecessary quad tracking to claw back some of the capacity that would have come for free if altamont was built. all because san jose politicians have an inferiority complex and demand that diridon is served on the mainline, when it isn't even important enough to be served on a branch.

a great idea, ruined by the transit industrial complex

building pacheco instead of altamont is going to go down in history as the greatest failure of all time in bay area transit, surpassing even the impressively cursed BART SFO extension

[1] see richard mlynarik's writing on this