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Comment by helthanatos | Hacker News Reader

High speed trains are much better than flights for small commutes, after the expenses are payed, it will be cheaper, it's easier to get on a train than wait hours for flights to take off. High speed rails are the future; flights are the past. Why would you not want to see this work out? Flying is quite annoying because it has constant delays, TSA, and hours of waiting in between.

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It's not that I don't want to see it work out, or that I don't expect people would enjoy the ride more than flying. It sounds perfectly pleasant and nice.

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?

While I tend to agree, on the right routes, planes can easily run on an hourly shuttle schedule. As happens for some city pairs. And we're one attack away from potentially having increased security for trains.

Delta and Southwest both run between SF and LA nearly, if not, hourly.

Not just SFO and LAX either, you have OAK, SJC and SFO up here, and ONT, BUR, LAX, LGB, and SNA down south. There are flights between any of those combinations many many times per day, and the locations involved are often much more convenient than the HSR depots will be.

The HSR depots are going to be downtown San Francisco, which is a lot more convenient than the pain in the arse SFO is, and LA Union Station, which is rapidly becoming a hub for rail lines going to Orange County, Santa Monica, Pomona, the South Bay, East LA, etc. LA Union station is rapidly becoming a rather good transit hub.

You really think the TSA isn't going to want a piece of this?

The TSA's primary mandate is just to socialize legal liability for terrorist attacks away from the airlines.

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.

The airlines never asked for TSA. In fact the airlines would prefer doing their own screening like the old days. And 'crony capitalism?' That makes no sense.

The airlines asked for both retrospective and prospective relief from liability for the actual past (retrospective) and potential future (prospective) security failures in the wake of 9/11.

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.

Leaving aside excessive and largely ineffective security screening for flights in the US (and pretty much everywhere else), a lot of European high speed trains absolutely have metal detectors, luggage inspection, and document inspection. As do many buildings.

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.

As a European, I've never seen high speed trains that require metal detectors and/or luggage inspection. Which country was that?

Eurostar's the obvious one, but I've seen scanners at Gare du Nord for TGV/Thalys as well, and when we caught TGV from Barcelona Sants to Paris (Gare de Lyon, I think) we got marshalled into some sort of departure lounge at Sants. Only time I've ever seen that in Europe though. Oh and changing from Eurostar to ICE in Brussels we had our ID's checked before being able to get to the platform (this was on the 23rd of December though).

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