As I see it, the price of rail tickets will be pretty high.whats stopping the price of flights from being halved in the next couple of decades and killing this train service too?
Airports in California coastal cities are near max capacity. And expansion is either very expensive[1] or near impossible. And would face even more community objections than the high speed rail project. So the airlines likely wouldn't try to compete with high speed rail. Instead they would try to attract more national and international travelers. Paradoxically to high speed rail would increase the airports area of service. Because one could then take the train + cab to the airport rather than drive 100 miles or take a puddle jumper.
[1] I offhand remember, between 500 million to 2 billion _each_.
Right now most SFO-LAX flights are on nothing larger than a 737 or A320, and on LAX-SJC I seem to wind up on some abominable regional jet.
There's a lot of room to increase capacity by flying wide bodies if the demand exists. Compare to the SYD-MEL route, a similar distance, where you're likely to wind up on an A330 or 767.
But it has a pricetag of $64 billion. How much more exactly are they going to enjoy it, in dollar terms? How much is it worth sticking taxpayers so that wealthy SF<->LA commuters can have a slightly more pleasant experience?
Their secondary mandate is crony capitalism.
Their tertiary mandate is to acclimatize the population to the trappings of the unconstitutional American police state.
Only the latter would be substantially aided by encroachment onto rail, so I'm not too worried about it for now.
Nationalization of the security function was the mechanism for the prospective portion of that relief; since they no longer controlled the function, they would no longer be liable for any failures.
Now, they would have preferred immunity from liability while controlling the function, but even their allies in Washington couldn't sell that open-ended a handout publicly. But TSA security theater made adequate political cover for the real purpose.
It doesn't take long to go through most of the time but then going through Pre-Check probably averages me 10 minutes. But I do leave a good buffer.
It's probably a bad idea to predicate travel time estimates on arriving at the train 3 minutes before it leaves and getting on.
London presently needs more runways and one of the serious proposals (now declined) was to build them in the Thames like the above.
It's bad enough having Heathrow where it is, with all the planes over London.
One good thing about the "Boris" island idea was that planes wouldn't have had to fly over London itself, which would have probably helped noise and pollution.
* more days when it would be fog bound
* interfere's with existing flight paths for AMS and BRU
* wrong side of London for most people
* ship full of high explosive not too far away
* higher likelihood of bird strikes as it's in the middle of area that's key for migratory birds
It currently serves as many passengers each year as the vastly larger Washington Dulles airport. It's quite the anomaly due to being in the capital. Despite many security and noise concerns, it all the Congress-folk love using it to get home, so it enjoys a great deal of political protection.
I don't think there's any hope of building new airports anywhere near city centers now. Some that already exist may hang on, but the security and noise concerns would easily NIMBY any new construction, not to mention the absurd expense of buying the land.
However, a lot of things could happen, which would derail these plans.
The construction of the high-speed rail system is/will be heavily subsidized by the government. So presumably, the government will have a vested interest in keeping the train service running and will subsidize operating costs if airlines cut prices in that manner.
By which you mean taxpayers will subsidize operating costs.
I wonder exactly how regressive the wealth transfer from the average middle-class California taxpayer to the California weekly-commute bullet-train businessperson will be, in practice.
My big fear is that HSR will ultimately be subsidized by middle class Californians so business people and wealthy vacationers can travel between SF and LA at the expense of more regionally focused transit that has a greater impact on the lives of working/middle class people.
If you tried to charge passengers adequately to fund rail, the system would go into a death spiral, absent radical changes in consumer preferences.
Also if both rail and roads were funded only by users then rail would be the more attractive option.
Can you elaborate? This is the first time I've heard this claim – I'm curious about the details.
If we then start to take into account the other costs such as pollution, land wasted on parking and wider roads, the increased area of municipal services that have to be covered because of the much lower density require for cars, and the massively increased health costs associated with a car lifestyle and trains not only are more cost efficient than cars they're an order of magnitude more cost efficient.
Trains are wildly efficient, they only use energy to overcome air and rolling resistances as energy used to accelerate is put back into the system during deceleration. They can pack many more people with much higher throughput. For example Crossrail in London is designed to have 24 1500 person trains an hour on a single track.
> Cost per passenger per mile is cheaper by rail than by road. It is just much more efficient.
Is this still true if one also considers the infrastructure investments that need to be made, both in terms construction and maintenance?
Yeah, exactly.
> I wonder exactly how regressive the wealth transfer from the average middle-class California taxpayer to the California weekly-commute bullet-train businessperson will be, in practice.
Yeah. And a lot of the funding for the rail project is already coming from Federal and State coffers (via taxpayer money or deficit spending), so this wealth transfer is already happening. There's at least $6 billion already allocated from Federal funding programs (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_High-Speed_Rail#Fin...) and the Proposition 1A required Federal Funds matching the $9.95 billion approved by bonds (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Proposition_1A_(200...). I don't know if the $6 billion in stimulus money "counts" towards the $9.95 billion in matching funds, nor do I know if the funds have been fully matched.
Just as we subsidize operating costs for freeways, city streets, buses, subways, and virtually all other forms of transportation infrastructure.
It has long been an aviation joke that it is easy to make a small fortune running an airline...As long as you start with a large fortune.