What's the point of an airport? It is hard to get there, you have to rent a car, parking is expensive, too much trafic, busses are not that often... etc... etc..
Build the train, and have stations close to downtown, while local government can start/extend local transportation as well.
Ideally you have both local and inter-urban rail at the same time, but if you don't, then you have to start somewhere. It is harder to build a major station, then several small tram station. Start with the harder part, and let the local government fill out the smaller parts.
The beauty of the train, that it can get very close to downtown, or even in the center of it with minimal disruption (if built underground). You just can't do that with an airport.
This train would be to replace a single short flight route.
So most of those flights would probably stay, because why take the HSR if you still have to drive an hour on each end?
Also, who cares about actually going to an airport? It's only a means to getting where you need to go, which is probably downtown SF or LA
> the airlines hate running those routes. They're highly competitive and thus terrible uses of very expensive assets.
So why exactly should California spend 20 billion dollars so they can remove those flights? Sounds like we already have a system that works and is subsidizing other flights as well.
Because adding comparable capacity to SFO and LAX would be $100B+
Have you used LA rail recently? It's a lot more functional than it used to be: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Los_Angeles_Metro_Rail although it still has a ways to go.
> Taiwan’s high-speed rail system proved reliably profitable — and popular, with 64 million riders last year.
Aside from talking about the (potential) cost, you didn't make any other point for why there shouldn't be a HSR. It's fine if you don't think we should have one because it's becoming too expensive, but I don't see any argument for why it wouldn't be useful.
Plus, Taichung is building a metro which will open mid-next year...
Hell, my first ever car rental (to go from DC to Harrisburg because that leg of my flight got cancelled) was a walk-in with Hertz, and the slowest part was picking out a car.
Re: getting to the car in the first place, just about every airport I've been to has a bunch of rental agencies onsite (either walkable or via a shuttle bus), and I suspect HSR stations would be no different.
It's a security feature. It's more secure for them to retype everything then to try and verify that everything you typed matches the ID you put in front of them.
When you have status they've already done all that once and they trust you because you've successfully rented from them before. Without status, they have no reason to trust you, so they have to verify everything.
It's a risk/reward trade off for them.
Firstly, once you get from San Jose to Bakersfield, then what? We don't have good public transit in LA, much less to Bakersfield. But even if the train went all the way to Union Station in Los Angeles, you'd still need to rent a car to get anywhere useful, or take Uber/Lyft. And same thing on the other end. What happens when you get to San Jose? You still need a car or another slow train.
If you want to get from San Francisco to Disneyland via HSR, the entire trip would probably take you about six hours with all the train changes and car rides and waiting. You could do the drive in six hours too and then have your car at the other end.
Even today, if I want to visit my parents in the suburbs of LA coming from the suburbs of San Jose, I can make the drive in five hours, or spend five hours getting there by plane, assuming someone picks me up at the other end. The only reason I fly is if I happen to be going somewhere right near the airport or it will be rush hour at one end or another when I arrive because I don't have scheduling flexibility.
Secondly, the original proposal was to build Stockton to Fresno first. That would be the least used section of the line. Not a lot of people move between Stockton and Fresno. The train would be bankrupt before it ever got to phase two. At least they finally changed their mind on that, but not for a much better route.
To be remotely viable, they need to build the most trafficked parts first -- San Jose to Stockton and Bakersfield to Los Angeles. But even those lines would still suffer from problem one unless/until the local transit was vastly improved.
I would love to see a viable HSR in California, but the current proposal is not that.
Let's build up our local transit first in LA and the Bay Area so that when we connect them with a high speed rail, the rail is actually useful.