The LA Times reports that California's Central Valley residents are excited that they'll soon have access to high speed rail. For example, here's Domaris Cid, a student at Fresno City College:
“It kind of sucks how I would have to move out of the valley to ... have an education that I want,” said Cid, 18. The high-speed rail, she said, could give her access to UC Merced or UC Berkeley to continue her political science studies. “I wouldn’t have to leave a place I really do like.”
This is nuts. It's less than 60 miles from Fresno to Merced on Highway 99. It's an hour by car or train. HSR will cut that down to.......45 minutes, and it won't get you anywhere near Berkeley.¹
The entire stretch of HSR from Bakersfield to Merced will cut a 3-hour trip to 90 minutes. Add in commuting time to and from the stations plus waiting time and it's barely better than driving.
This whole plan is nuts. HSR all the way from LA to San Francisco is a bad idea that's never likely to happen, but at least it's defensible with a few heroic assumptions. But the Central Valley leg all by itself? There's no credible justification for it at all. It's just a pointless money pit.
¹And for what it's worth, Fresno may not have a UC campus, but it is the home of CSU Fresno. It's not completely devoid of higher education.
Remember, the HSR is happening because of a ballot initiative, not because of legislation.
True but
- TONS of additional funding that was not part of the ballot initiative
- good government reacts to events and makes decisions based on new information.
- What is being built looks nothing like (scope, cost, timelines) what was detailed in the initiate. I highly doubt, the current project would get 25% support if you re-ran the initiate.
Right. What they needed to do was kill it when Kevin started writing about this 10 years ago. They didn't and now we are sinking more and more money into a fast version of the San Joaquins that nobody will ride.
The HSR that I voted for is not the HSR that’s being built. If you have a subscription to the New York Times you can read this article which is really good and shows how the project went off the rails:
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/09/us/california-high-speed-rail-politics.html
Even when I voted for it I figured it would cost more and take longer than planned. But this thing will never be fully built. And even if it was, say by 2050 who will need it. I don’t think autonomous cars are coming as quick as Kevin does but I do think they will be around before this train is built.
You're right, there's the barest chance this isn't a complete and utter waste.
They should immediately engage Elon "Corporate Welfare" Musk to promise to dig an underground race track instead.
Don't give him any ideas. Please.
15 minutes each way is a half hour a day, three and a half hours a week, 150+ hours a year.
And you get to read, work, chat, walk around on a train, and don't have to deal with the other jerks on the road.
And if the railway takes enough people off the roads then the roads will be clearer and maybe those commute times will fall, as well.
That said, there are much better places to do this and spend the money.
Kevin is such a Southern Californian. The cost of widening, not constructing, 101 between Santa Barbera and Carpentaria a distance of 11 miles is projected to be almost $1B. But Kevin doesn't complain about this obvious waste. Who the heck wants to go to Carpentaria? There is no UC there or CSU. Here in NorCal, it has taken 30+ YEARS and god knows how much money to widen 101 from Novato to Windsor, a distance of about 50 miles. But Kevin probably doesn't even know about that. We could as a national transportation strategy say that's it, we aren't widening any more roads. If you want to live one place and drive 50 miles on a regular basis to another place, you are going to have to figure in the congestion. We don't because people like Kevin think that spending 100s of billions to temporarily reduce congestion is good and proper, whereas spending it to almost permanently reduce congestion is waste.
basically there's an extremely stupid species of Californian who is so brain-poisoned by cars and the dream of living in a large single-family home that they are attracted to HSR for the worst conceivable reason: that HSR will allow them to live in a huge cheap house in greenfield development in Fresno while commuting hundreds of miles daily into the Bay Area or even LA. there's really no good reason for media to amplify these fools, but California is so addicted to this general commute-everywhere, never-ever-densify mindset that they do it frequently whenever a transit technology like HSR is in the news.
making the Central Valley the first segment of California HSR was a dumb idea policy-wise but there was virtually no other way to actually get the project done without doing it that way. the whole problem was that legislators from the Central Valley demanded that their votes be bought off with stations in CV cities, or they'd kill the whole thing. since the CV is also the flattest part of the project it's logistically much easier to finish that segment first, so now we're seeing the resulting media milieu of all of that - coverage that gives center stage to the silliest arguments for the silliest part of the project.
"Add in commuting time to and from the stations plus waiting time and it's barely better than driving."
This is true of airports too... few people literally live across the street from an airport, and there's a lot of waiting and hassle to using an airport... and yet people still fly between city pairs that are an hour or two or three apart. Perhaps a Southern Californian can't understand this, but there is some benefit to not having to drive yourself... including the time to do something else instead during that travel... and even if that time includes "waste" like waiting around for your departure or having to ride a bus from your front door to the airport/train station/rapid transportation facility.
Here on the east coast, I routinely prefer to take Amtrak or fly from DC to Philly or NYC rather than drive myself so I can read the whole time and enjoy a beer or two. This is even though flying or taking the train isn't cheaper or faster than driving, once wait time and commute time from my house to the station/airport is factored in. I guess Kevin can't imagine upper middle class people like me exist, but we do. (The key is: you need to have high speed rail endpoints where you don't need a car to function. Both DC and Philly/NYC meet that requirement. LA, San Diego, Merced, Fresno, Bakersfield, etc. do not.)
I wonder how the guy who wrote this would respond:
The United States, despite polarized politics and one major party that's all but insane, has been cruising along and solving problems at a remarkable clip for the past couple of decades.
Cherry picking, I hear you say, and from both sides of the aisle. Because, really, at the end of the day it has to be all black or so white, right?
If the US had not already committed to federal support of highway transportation instead of rail (a major decision made in the 50's) and if everybody didn't have to support one or more cars and if there were better local transportation HSR would make a lot of sense. But then we would probably already have it.
America's passenger rail system may be a joke, but it is worth remembering that our freight rail system is one of the best in the world, more efficient and reliable than almost anywhere else. Probably the result of another policy decision by previous generations . . . .
True but not quite true. Freight trains carry indeed a larger percentage of transported goods in the US than in Europe (in part because their network does not have to accommodate passenger trains).
However, our freight rail is also the most accident prone in the world our at least in the developed world.
I'm not sure I'd praise the freight rail system in the US too much. They've been steadily degrading train crew sizes, cutting inspection times, and made other tradeoffs in favor of speed over safety. A few years ago we had a major derailment and fire in Whatcom county. And it turned out BSNF had been completely ignoring required limits on train length that they had agreed to follow at the insistence of t he native nations. I'm hoping to hear what happens if it gets to the courts.
A predictable result of starting the project the wrong way around, meaning with lowest-value segment first. It should have begun with parallel efforts to get HSR working from LA to San Diego, and from San Francisco to San Jose.
Even at reduced "blended service" speeds, that would have provided significant value to a large potential ridership, both north and south, even without additional segments being built--while also making it much more likely, for that same reason, that the project would indeed continue to be supported through to completion.
Part of the HSR project ,which Kevin always ignores, is the electrification of the Caltrain tracks from, wait for it, San Francisco to San Jose. HSR, if it ever gets built, will run on those tracks as well as the commuter trains. That part of the project is about 99% completed. I doubt the trains will ever run at high speeds on those sections though as there are many at grade crossings and the commuter line already has a train assisted suicide problem.
https://www.caltrain.com/news/caltrain-unveils-electrified-service-vision-2024
As a regular rider on Caltrain up and down the Peninsula I applaud the electrification project.
HSR, not so much.
To my mind, the reason that the HSR has started in the Central Valley is for political buyin. You might scoff and say that's not a real reason, but it is a real reason.
I think a train to LA from SF would be very nice. It would avoid so much of the trouble of getting on an airplane that we have these days, not to mention driving.
The problem is that it was exactly that buy-in that caused most of the problems we are having now. A high speed rail in the central valley (where the lines are so straight that even conventional rail travels at very respectable speeds) can not possibly be economically justified.
The other problem was that the whole project was an exercise in re-inventing the wheel. If you want high speed rail in an underdeveloped country (which we are in railway terms, even conventional railway is technologically far behind almost any other country) you buy them from France or from Japan. You don't try to come up with it by yourself.
I think you are right, with a caveat. When the sponsors of the HSR were trying to get support, lots of Central California cities were willing to sign up...if the train would stop at their town. Once rights of way were being determined, those same towns and cities that demanded to be on the route got cold feet.
It is occasionally satisfying to see the rare thing that Kevin Drum thinks is a huge annoying pain in the ass that nobody else really cares about.
I will say' as a person who lives in Bakersfield and has a granddaughter at UC Merced, it's more like 2 1/2 hours. I do live at the northern part of Bakersfield and she's in south central Merced (moved away from the campus to be closer to downtown), but still. People don't drive the speed limit on Highway 99. (There can be slowdowns in Fresno.)
I'm willing to believe the HSR is not going to pay off for quite some time. On the other hand, a right of way has been secured and some of it built. There was no way it was going to get to terminal in a dense part of Los Angeles or San Francisco in the current political climate, but in 20-40 years, things may have changed. It might be possible to do that extension. It might involve more advanced tunneling technology or new approaches to assembling the right of way, but the right of way already assembled isn't going anywhere.
Help me out here. WHY is LA to San Fran by HDR a bad idea? It works all over Europe, why not here? As a midwesterner I know I’d love HSR between Minneapolis and Chicago. This seems like it would be similar.
it's really a no-brainer in principle, but Kevin is obsessed with the belief that everyone in the state is just like him, and doesn't want to leave their house pretty much ever, and thus there won't be any riders for the thing. he augments this belief with the actual risk involved with LA-to-SF: that it will be a wildly expensive engineering challenge to build the crucial section over the Tehachapi Mountains in a seismically safe way, especially given the state's questionable decision to manage the whole thing in-house rather than bring in experts from Japan or France who have decades of experience with building fast passenger rail.
Wait. People still go to college to study political science?
lol
so, we're just supposed to let the Chinese have all the HSR? The Russians just launched Sputnik and we have to show that we have the technological prowess to grind them down.