edit: grammar
As an aside, I work for one of the main consultants on this project (wrote the state EIR, design criteria, program delivery, etc)… and I’m really glad my work has nothing to do with this project!
Also, Central valley is not just an agricultural place: "On less than 1 percent of the total farmland in the United States, the Central Valley produces 8 percent of the nation's agricultural output by value: US$43.5 billion in 2013." From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Valley_(California)
Also the California HSR project includes modernization of connecting services. Do you consider Caltrain to be public transit?
It does not mean “available to the public.” You can also buy a plane ticket at Haneda and be in Kansai in less than 90 minutes. Japan Rail isn’t any more “public transit” than ANA.
Most other uses of the qualifier “public” are not this limited. e.g. public infrastructure, public art, and public libraries only requires that it is available to the public without major hurdles or restrictions, not who operates it and for what purpose. In my books, transit is no different. If a transit is available to the public it is public transit.
In fact there are many airlines which I consider public transit. Including domestic air travel in Iceland and Greenland (and even between Iceland and Greenland) is public transit.
"a system of trains, buses, etc., that is paid for or run by the government"
The area around the current Amtrak station is actually quite walkable, with some transit serving it (I’m not so sure about the planed HSR station north of downtown, though hopefully they’ll make some improvements before it opens in 2030).
And if you live in SF or LA and are going to Bakersfield to visit friends or family, that won't be an issue at all. And Bakersfield will likely densify a bit with HSR. And maybe it'll cause higher ridership on the currently limited local transit options, allowing them to expand routes and increase frequency, increasing their usefulness to the local area.
> one of the most productive agricultural regions
And since when farmers relied so heavily on trains for their commute?
Until gen z gets their polyculture garden cities with a large variety of crops for each season, I don't see that changing
Also, a vast majority of the people who work in agriculture aren’t “farmers” who walk out of their house and till their own land. They are laborers, who often live far away from their work sites, which shift with the seasons.
It will also allow people in those places to work other jobs besides “grape picking.”
To be able to do LA-SF without the possibility of a road accident causing you a multiple-hour delay is a huge benefit.
Intra-state would be even better. Link the entire West coast with high-speed passenger rail.
Many east coast cities have the advantage of being planned out before cars so they are structured for high urban density. It is different in cities like LA or SF where it's all about urban sprawl.
California is living with sprawl therefore you can never do anything to fix sprawl. That the worst possible thing you can do for LITERALLY every metric, water use, energy use, noise pollution, living cost, housing cost and the list goes on and on.
You will not fix any of the problems if you continue to use that excuse. And despite what people seem to think, you can actually fix city design and sprawl. Having a decent train-station that connects you to other places is a good start. From the there you have trams and buses going out. And then you do higher density infill development along all those routes.
This has been argued by city planners for 30+ years and its not that difficult.
[a] So called because the Huntington street car system used to go there!
This is what the entire rest of the world does. It actually isn’t hard at all.
"The Civilization of Europe in the Renaissance" by John Hale is a great, lengthy reference here.
What exactly stops LA from having any working public transit in the first place?
San Francisco is the second densest city of its population or larger in the United States (behind NYC), and has about 50% greater density than the third, which is Chicago, not an East Coast city.
Also the LA-Long Beach-Santa Anna metro is the densest metro area in the US, and San Francisco-Oakland-Fremont is the fourth.
The science is settled, we can’t all drive cars, let alone all fly. We have to stop burning gas to get around. HSR enables that and enables more sustainable urban development.
There’s nothing dramatic about this. These are plain facts. If we don’t act now future generations will suffer.
HSR will make California a more hospitable and sustainable place to live.
But the more I think about it the more important I think it is to tie the Central Valley into SV, SF, and the LA basin. It will reduce housing pressure, move some industry into the Central Valley, and tie a red place together with a blue and a purple area.
And it was smart to start in the reddest part of the state and give them any benefit first.
Instead the debates get reduced to "we should build this no matter what the cost" and "we should cancel the project entirely." There doesn't seem to be much interest in digging into why the costs of the project are so out of line with other countries. (Which, to be fair, is a hard question to answer).
But the reasons for the dysfunction are pretty straight forward: there is group of engineering consultancies and construction firms (Parsons, Bechtel, HNTB, AECOM, and other non-household names) that have captured the system and profit handsomely from the status quo. All those billions of taxpayer money is going somewhere, and it's their bank accounts.
The high speed rail from Grapevine to the San Fernando Valley isn't going to happen because of geology + money. Which leaves Bakersfield, Tehachapi, Palmdale as the viable route.
Gilroy to Bakerfield is the same distance whether you go down I5 or HWY99.
And the current rail corridor needs a bunch of grade separation work done. It would be dumb to build grade separated high speed rail on the west side of the valley. And at the same time also build duplicate grade separation on the east side.
If you look at the current work being done about half if it is the above mentioned grade separation.
I'll also mention the point of high speed rail was to carry passengers quickly but not as fast as possible from SF to LA. Really there are four goals. Connect the northern and southern passenger rail lines. Grade separation in the central valley. Commuter rail in the Bay Area and Socal. And avoid having to upgrade airport capacity.
Most housing needs to be fixed with infill, not continuing sprawl around more cities.
Wrong priorities here. You cannot continue agriculture in a desert.
https://calmatters.org/environment/2022/08/colorado-river-wa...
Instance in point: Brisbane Cross River rail. The economic impact statement is spectacular for land, rent, rate and building income. Same for intercity rail Sydney Brisbane Melbourne. For Brisbane, a state minister lost her job over a house purchase near a significant rail development (rightly or wrongly) but it's even explicit in economic modelling: they bank the future economic impact.
This is a bit of a disingenuous take. There is a significant amount of work to be done before tracks get laid. There are dozens of active construction projects right now including building bridges, viaducts, overcrossings and grade separations. Actually laying the high speed track is probably one of the last things they'll do (there's no value in having tracks laid until a substantial section can be laid without gaps).
The stupidest part is that now we have politicians campaigning on not doing big infrastructure projects instead of fixing the things that make them fail.
There is perhaps a very probable risk of rising energy costs this decade, which might make such models unfeasible.
In that light, your comment makes a lot of sense to me.
By contrast, the CA HSR is connecting two dense areas with not much in between. Because of all the “stakeholder” negotiations, it is not straight, and there are far too many stops. There is no need for a stop in LA and Burbank and Palmdale. The Palmdale stop is a bit mindblowing. There are 170k people in Palmdale. You don’t need a stop in Anaheim and Fullerton and Norwalk. I could keep going
This was a real lost opportunity. There should have been 4 stops total: Anaheim-LA-SJ-SF. The result of all this is that the trip is going to take too long to make sense vs a 45 minute flight
California HSR is forward looking. Every state in the nation should be building and expanding public transit infrastructure. It’s an existential necessity.
improving the LA metro would have provided better bang for buck, but it doesn't spread the wealth nearly as much, and we're already building metro rail here as part of the run up to the '28 olympics (but not nearly enough, given that the LA region extends roughly 100 miles along the main axes).
the main problem with this HSR is that it doesn't beat air for time or price between LA/SF, and that accounts for the majority of the projected trips (and purported benefit) of this rail line. i've done the air trip many times, and door-to-door times are about 4-5 hours, while this train will take that long without the door-to-door part (though city center to city center is nice, if they ever complete that part).
If you want to be serious about rail, having a such a backbone makes sense.
Of course, you need to continue improving regional rail as well. And as far as I know, California has been trying to do that too.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S0dSm_ClcSw
tl;dr: US regulation makes it too easy for individuals to sue and stall megaprojects like this into nonstop litigation
Yes, there's a bit of a spurious correlation between the UK house building, and the high speed line, but there is a direct and indirect economic correlation.
Regarding 'personal safety' on the service. Trains in the UK are typically pretty safe, but the HS1 route in particular, they're obsessive about catching fare dodgers, so the trains are staffed with 'revenue protection officers', and often British Transport Police (and branch of the police force peculiar to the railway).
And then there's Canary Wharf, reachable from... Stratford on the HS1 route. The former London Docklands that since the late 80s/early 90s has gone from being acres of empty docks, to skyscraper offices and skyscraper apartment blocks (pretty uncommon in London).
My point being that there's a virtuous circle of 'build it and they will come'. Planning is everything in making it successful. In fact, any large infrastructure project in the UK is government planned (federal - in the US?), and the cost/benefit value is calculated, and explains why the south and south-east of England gets a disproportionate amount of investment, because the economic returns are so high. California high speed rail would have money thrown at it if it were in the UK.
I really hope California's high speed rail works. But people need to be patient. It really is going to be 20 or 30 years before the economic and social benefits become obvious to everyone.
In the UK if there's a mainline station in a city, we typically build many high rise office buildings in and around that station wherever possible, and then the outer stations often become 'dormitory towns'. I'd envisage something similar in California. The areas around the terminal stations in particular will grow offices, and the other stations, will see more housing and commuters. If, of course, working from home doesn't kill it.
> In fact, any large infrastructure project in the UK is government planned (federal - in the US?)
California the state is more comparable to the UK than the UK is to the US.
California is about 60% of the population of the UK in 170% of the land.
California: 40,000,000 people in 163,000 square miles
UK: 67,000,000 people in 94,000 square miles
US: 330,000,000 people in 3,800,000 square miles
So I think UK rail modernization is probably actually pretty comparable to California HSR.
Federal dollars and regulators are involved in California HSR but it’s a necessity in the United States that the states do a lot of this for themselves.
Reminder that the initial plan was 130 miles of track laid by 2018. They are at 0.0 miles. The initial intended section they planned to finish wasn't even touching SF or LA, its in between with two fairly small cities (Merced to Bakersfield, populations 84K and 380K).
Is it even needed, for all this money? High speed rail between SF and LA would be neat for a bunch of upper-middle class people, but I would think > 90% of inhabitants would be better served simply by having better intra-metro-area rail. In other words it seems like LA would be better served by spending the billions on strong hub and spoke public transport in the ~20-40 mile area around LA far more than it needs a faster way to get to San Francisco.
But I'm far away on the outside looking in, maybe there's something crushlingly obvious to locals that I'm not seeing for why this is actually a great idea.