If you were given $77 billion to improve California, is this really how you would spend it?

I'd think that for half that much money you could greatly upgrade BART and more importantly extend it into the central valley.

Killing it would be far sighted. Technology is improving transportation methods, we have buses and planes that can do the same thing as this train at much cheaper rates and without tax dollars to construct or maintain.

There is no bus or plane that can do anything like what HSR can do. That's the entire point of the project. It will triple the capacity of our north-south transportation system at a fraction of the cost of equivalent airport capacity.

This is something that people don't understand when they haven't travelled enough to experience good rail systems. Rail has massive capacity, 100k people per hour per track direction. That's 500 lanes of theoretical freeway capacity, or 1000 lanes under realistic operating conditions, and it's more than the total capacity between all Bay Area and all L.A.-area airports, even if you operated that route solely with widebody jets, which we don't.

> It will triple the capacity of our north-south transportation system at a fraction of the cost of equivalent airport capacity. > This is something that people don't understand

You may be confusing a lack of understanding with straight up apathy.

Put another way, I don't think people care if the capacity is tripled. They're not interested in traveling with 100,000 of their closest friends that hour. They're interested in getting where they want to go, faster/cheaper/easier.

Pushing system capacity as a feature has a bit of a socialist bent, and that's a hard sell in the US.

>That's 500 lanes of theoretical freeway capacity, or 1000 lanes under realistic operating conditions

Also, I think your calculation are off by at least an order of magnitude. I thought that freeways can carry about 2000 vehicles per hour (on modestly congested urban freways). Assuming at least dual-occupancy vehicles, that's only 25 lanes.

> more than the total capacity between all Bay Area and all L.A.-area airports, even if you operated that route solely with widebody jets, which we don't.

This is an excellent argument against all that extra capacity being some kind of critical feature. If (you may be arguing "when" not "if", but that's not a given) we really need it, we could upgrade airport capacity to use more widebody jets.

In essence, we already have spare capacity (which could, by the way, be used to go other places), and you're suggesting it's critical that we take the opportunity to greatly increase the spare capacity just to go between the Bay Area and LA. I disagree.

  100k people per hour per track direction

Your source for this statistic?

I don't have any primary sources offhand, but the closest thing I last looked at was https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light_rail which has a number of 25k/h for light rail (pretty low speed, single-deck, presumably short trains).

I'd say 4x that amount for a full-sized HSR train is credible. It's just that that's a maximum. I don't believe that ridership will ever be high enough to approach that number, unless air travel is outlawed.

> I don't believe that ridership will ever be high enough to approach that number

Trains in the rush hour in the UK are pretty much always full, with people standing up. The tube at rush hour looks like this:

https://static.standard.co.uk/s3fs-public/thumbnails/image/2...

If it's not too expensive or infrequent I imagine it will be very popular.

> Trains in the rush hour

Especially given the picture you provide, I think you're talking about intra-urban rail (subway, metro, even suburban commuter).

That's a far cry from a 350-mile, 3-hour inter-city link.

Show me the picture for the London-Edinburgh "rush hour".

Done: https://i2-prod.mirror.co.uk/incoming/article158562.ece/ALTE...

Southend to Liverpool is 3-4 hours on the train.

Not done.

That's only, what, 240 miles? Which means it's not exactly high speed, is it? It could probably reach the 25k/hr that my sibling commentor is asking for, but not the 100k claimed for HSR.

Additionally, if it's Southend-on-Sea, that's not a major urban area. At 25k/hr, you could move the entire population to Liverpool in a little over 7 hours. I smell a contrivance.

Lastly, the name of that picture describes the train carriage as "busy" not something like "typical", so even then I'm skeptical.

Try again. London to Edinburgh. High speed. Typical rush hour.

How close does it get to the stated 25,000 passengers per hour throughput metric?

Keep in mind that's for light rail, only 1/4 of what the commenter claimed for HSR.

With 3 occupants per vehicle, 4 freeway lanes could carry 25k, not as outlandish-sounding as 25.

> we have buses and planes that can do the same thing as this train[...]without tax dollars to construct or maintain.

Tax dollars pay for road construction and maintenance. Tax dollars also subsidize airport construction and operation.

How do buses and cars accomplish the same thing?

Getting buses and cars to 180 mph even if they’re self-driving sounds a bit crazy.

Trains can move tens of thousands a people an hour at much faster speeds.

I suspect that tech could do a better job at building it.

I would argue that there's value in collaboration between innovators and an experienced group of civil engineering contractors operating under an accountable and transparent consortium arrangement.

Less Boston's "Big Dig" [1], more Hallandsås tunnel [2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Dig#Problems

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hallands%C3%A5s_Tunnel

"Moving fast and breaking things" is not acceptable in infrastructure.

"Moving slow and never breaking ground" isn't really either.

(Not literally true. Nominally, ground has been broken on the project. But it's a symbolic act without much referent in the real world so far.)

I can't wait for a public beta on a bullet train.

A lot of the money in tech is as liquid as Monopoly currency.