Reports of the death of California High-Speed Rail have been greatly exaggerated

this is actually exactly what has been happening over the past few decades, and with the current proposal, for HSR from Toronto to Montreal, two of the largest cities in terms of both population and economy in Canada.

Ottawa felt excluded, and is where the federal govt is based, so instead of going along the 401, a straight highway that follows a river valley and lake and has existing rail corridors, it has to go from Montreal to Ottawa (a short stretch also along a river) and then cut from Ottawa to Toronto via Peterborough, which requires new track, fixing old windy track to allow HSR, some sections have to be speed limited, and has to build through hills and dense forest.

Also, Quebec feels that they don't get "enough" out of the project connecting their largest city to another economic powerhub, so it of course also has to be extended the extra 250km to Quebec city (luckily along a river)

The logical method would be to build Toronto to Montreal 30 years ago, then build a branch to Ottawa one day, and an extension to Quebec another day. The Canadian economy would probably be much stronger if that was the case.

Or we can just wait 30 more years and have this project not be implemented.

Even if you insist on going through the cities in the valley they chose a construction sequence that takes the longest time to show any process. If they fast tracked LA-Bakersfield they could have extended the Amtrak San Joaquin service to LA by now. Concentrat on the SF-Merced section next and then you can work on the Merced-Bakersfield piece meal.

Take a look at the voting data for Prop 1A. It is very likely HSR would not have been approved in the first place if the central valley had been excluded. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_California_Proposition_...

The operating speed on the fast stretch is actually one of the fastest in the world at 350 km/h, it's just that it has to waste half an hour on the Caltrain tracks from San Francisco to Gilroy and from Burbank to Anaheim. It's kinda like how the TGV from Paris to Nice goes from Paris to Marseille super fast but then has to spend hours to go from Marseille to Nice even though the latter part is a small fraction of the distance.

And yes, I agree that this "blended" design that has a lengthy slow section is very lame and bad. If only Caltrain could be quad tracked elevated viaducts.

>Instead we're spending billions to build a slow, circuitous route to Fresno.

Because with a big project like this, everyone wants to claim some slice for themselves. The optimal route crosses counties like Fresno, which means they can veto the project (or at least delay it). They use that as leverage to extract benefits for themselves, like changing the route so it passes through their county seat.

Fresno / Central Valley is not the circuitous route, which is quite close to the I-5 near Bakersfield. The true circuitous detour is between Bakersfield and LA, where the route is planned to go East through the Antelope Valley with a station at Palmdale.

Once you count airport time, 2:40 is about on par with what it’d take to fly from SF to LA. It’s about half what it takes to drive between them, even without traffic.

Article states that I-5 corridor skips all major towns in central valley which kinda kills the purpose of HSR connecting SF to central valley towns to LA

It would be one thing if they were just going to Fresno. There are three major cities in the Central Valley: Bakersfield, Fresno and Sacramento. You get Bakersfield for free; Sacramento is north of SF and has existing commuter rail. Fresno is big enough to justify a stop; it has room to grow, too. You could put a stop that's ten miles outside of Fresno, and you don't have to cut through the city too much. That's what they do with airports. Throw in a LRT while you're at it.

But the plan also calls for Tulare and Madera to have stops. Now you're doing three times the work for a 20-40% increase in the population served. Then they want a line to Sacramento that goes through Merced and Visalia At this point it looks silly. Fresno is larger than Tulare, Madera, Merced and Visalia combined. Stockton already has the Altamont Commuter Express line to San Jose.

CA HSR actually is "high speed."

The distance from LA to SF is about 665 km (following the planned HSR route). A travel time of 2:40 means the train has an average (not top) speed of 250 km/h, which is very competitive internationally. Even if we use the shorter I-5 route as the baseline, the average speed is still 230 km/h.

That's competitive with the fastest French TGV lines, and much faster than most European HSR lines. For reference, the fastest lines in the world run at an average speed of about 290 km/h (e.g., Beijing - Shanghai).

Calling this a "slow, circuitous route" is really not accurate at all. If CA HSR gets built as originally planned, it will be one of the faster systems in the world, and nearly as good as the best systems in Europe.

The CAHSR "peer group" which issued that quote is a political commission full of axe-grinding losers, specifically created by state politicians who want to kill the project. Nobody with a clue thinks that the 2h40m target is unattainable.

It’s structurally impossible. The half of the political coalition that contains virtually all the people who want to build any sort of urban infrastructure is too fractured into groups that each have their own distinct priorities unrelated to infrastructure or good governance. And of course the other half of the polity hates the government.

If you’re a democrat in california, where does infrastructure fall on your list of priorities? What big voting bloc does it get you?

Here in Maryland, we’ve been building a 16 mile above ground, mostly non-grade-separated light rail for a decade already and it’s nowhere near done: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purple_Line_(Maryland). I don’t know a single person other than myself who is motivated to make it happen. Nobody is agitating to get our miserable commuter rail system to run more timely. Road construction is the only thing that ever penetrates into the public consciousness. Making anything better is very low on everyone’s list of priorities.

Other countries can build entire rail lines entirely on viaducts for the same cost as it takes to grade separate a single Caltrain station. For example it was recently estimated that grade separating Broadway Station with a center platform would take $889 million and 5-5.5 years [1]. This is mind boggling.

[1] https://burlingameca.granicus.com/DocumentViewer.php?file=bu...

California will need to hit Rock Bottom hard more than once before replacing CEQA with something sane becomes possible. And that's just one of several wet moldy blankets blocking progress.

More young people need to actually start voting to get all the NIMBYism out of the government, and then change can happen.

Unfortunately our country has no motion any longer and the crumbling infrastructure is a good sign of prolonged decay that has started.

I think this whole article/title is ragebait at best.

Why?

It's taken longer than WW1 and WW2 combined. Time to kill it.

Yeah. Reports of its death may have been exaggerated, but reports of its life are a bit flimsy.

It probably helps when you can simply take the land you need. One major issue with the California project has been the difficulty in securing land rights. Additionally, California’s strict environmental laws have made construction even more challenging. In contrast, China can largely ignore these obstacles.

If by agile you mean "exploiting sunk cost fallacy", sure

The problem is that it takes a long time to bore tunnels. If anything they should have started that early.

this statement has little bearing on how this project is actually playing out, but if it were true - why would we want to manage massive infrastructure projects in the same way bad software projects are managed? via a method regarded by everyone except middle managers with a massive eye roll and a sigh

Caltrain has passing tracks at Sunnyvale and Brisbane. There are joint plans with CAHSR to add 4-track segments at Millbrae, San Mateo (between Hayward Park and Hillsdale), Redwood City, and Palo Alto (California Ave).

The Millbrae tracks are part of the new station design: they are removing one of the 3 BART tracks (superfluous because BART terminates at Millbrae) and using the space to construct two dedicated HSR tracks on the inside of Caltrain, as well as a HSR platform.

The San Mateo area is relatively straightforward: Caltrain already owns the land, it is currently surface parking lots for the Hillsdale station as well as the land used for the old station (which was moved a few years ago).

Redwood City is elevating the entire Caltrain/HSR track above the city as part of their grade separation strategy. The new viaduct will be built with 4 tracks instead of 2.

The only major sticking point is Cal Ave, where there is limited space and an unfriendly city.

5-6 passing track sections should be plenty for running blended service.

It is an advantage that HSR uses Caltrain track to get to SF. It would be super expensive to build a separate high speed line, and it wouldn't be worth the time savings. Caltrain should spend money grade separating the whole line, adding passing lines where possible, and increasing the speed to 125mph or 150mph since it would be good for Caltrain service. At 125mph, HSR (250mph) would save 10 minutes, and 150mph would save 6 minutes.

Caltrain has sections with four tracks. At these sections express trains overtake local trains. They did this improvement long time ago and called the service "baby bullet" back then.

The ironic thing is it probably will be an (extremely expensive) boon to Merced -> Bakersfield.

Where are you getting $400 from?

Not prioritizing the linking of two major cities (SF <-> LA <-> SD - take your pick) is a major mistake. If this project does end up cancelled then we will end up with a "High[sic]-Speed-Rail" that only joins California's interior cities with a ridership level that will never justify the cost.

Yeah, I had the exact same reaction to this that you did. One of Klein and Thompson’s primary arguments is that we are failing by letting the perfect be the enemy of the good. This article’s thesis seems to be ‘yeah but perfect is better than good, so we should do that.’

It's a similar distance to Paris to Marseille, a 3 hour journey. Price for that seems to vary between 29 and 80 EUR depending on time of day.

That's "get on the train, get off the train three hours later", so in practice is much faster than a 90 minute flight, which is "get to airport, go through security, walk seemingly endlessly to gate, fly, walk seemingly endlessly through baggage claim etc etc, get out of airport". The train is, of course, also _far_ more comfortable than a plane. Personally, I'd opt for the train...

I suspect if the damn thing ever gets built, flying between SF and LA will more or less become a thing of the past. Like, why would you?

Having a high-speed train be less expensive to operate than a bus isn’t unrealistic, as long as the train is packed. You have to pay the bus driver, while the train amortizes operational salaries over many more people.

Trains are routinely competitive with flights on corridors like this. Thats why its being built in this stretch

90 minutes in the air + 1 hour on each end at the airport.

On a train I can work the entire time with internet.

The flight doesn’t include the time to get to and from the airport plus TSA screening.

I greatly prefer taking a train because I can just show up and go.

That's 90 minutes in the air, not total trip time.

The HSR is 160 minutes from downtown to downtown. There's no check-in, no security check, no arriving 1-2 hours early, no travel to and from the airport. When you count all of that, HSR will be faster than flying. It's also far, far more comfortable - there's no comparison there.

The Florida Brightline is limited to 125 mph. Also no grade separation which is needed for higher speeds. Generally countries use grade separation when speeds exceed 110-120 mph. California really needs the 200-220 mph to make the trip worthwhile so it needs to be grade separated. A lot of the work done so far in California is the overpasses over freeways and roads its crossing.

Brightline has had a lot of fatalities due to lack of grade separation.

https://www.miaminewtimes.com/news/death-train-a-timeline-of...

It's actually doing really well but it has not much to do with them being a red state and everything to do with them having an aging or tourist transit population that needs to get between cruise lines and theme parks.

Besides those cases there are not a lot of reasons to be transiting that route, or at least not nearly compared to the number of folks that would want to transit SF <-> LA. Totally different needs that are easier to address, and less pressure to prove out value / fewer digestible alternatives.