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Comment by Johnny555 | Hacker News Reader

Newsom said the state will complete a 110-mile (177 km) high-speed rail link between Merced and Bakersfield

I suspected this would happen -- the project would get canceled and we'd end up with a small segment of rail that few will use. Merced -> Bakersfield is only a 2.5 hour drive and you almost certainly will need a car when you get there.

They should have started with a corridor that would see real usage, like SF (or even Oakland/emeryville) -> Sacramento (but afaik, the proposed route didn't even include a direct SF to Sacramento segment)

Then as (if?) that route demonstrated the technology and had good ridership, they could expand from there.

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Or LA to San Diego. There's already a rail line.

I think the key word there is "a rail line." Much of the LA to San Diego route is currently single-tracked -- trains traveling in both directions share a single physical track and have to be scheduled so that only one train occupies the track at a time. If your train falls even a few minutes behind schedule (and this seems to happen a lot), it starts missing its slots and ends up spending time stopped on sidings waiting for trains going the opposite direction to clear the track. Now your 3-hour trip turns into a 5 or 6 hour trip.

But yeah, if you wanted to start building high-quality inter-city rail in California, LA/San Diego seems like an obvious place to start. They're the 2nd and 8th largest cities in the US and only 120 miles apart. You wouldn't even need "high-speed" rail to make it work. A train that reliably averaged, say, 80 mph could make the trip in 90 minutes, which is a lot faster than driving most of the time.

On the other hand, I guess "reliable rail that's not terribly slow" doesn't get people excited like "high-speed rail" does.

They aren't able to re-use existing rail lines, which is part of the issue. They have to construct all new track on a new easement.

SF-Sacramento or other urban corridors require new rail lines through some of the most expensive real estate in the country. Additionally, there are significant geographic challenges to building new high-speed capable tracks such as the Tehachapi Pass and the Altamont Corridor.

Yes, but it's also a corridor that will have high demand. Building a cheap train where no one will use it seems worse than building an expensive train where many people will use it.

Having the bay area terminus in the east bay was always a better idea than getting to San Francisco. Connect to BART in San Leandro, or for extra credit, get to the port of Oakland before connecting to BART. Going up the peninsula seemed like a vanity effort.

SF to Sacramento would require a bridge across the bay. Instead the route connects SF to San Jose, which probably serves more people. Then cuts across to the Central Valley where right of way is simpler and the the terrain better for a north south line.

http://www.hsr.ca.gov/Newsroom/Multimedia/maps.html

SF to San Jose is already well served by Caltrain, they already have limited service trains that do the trip in about an hour (electrification will likely shave a few minutes off that time) -- due the need to run at reduced speed along the Peninsula, even HSR would take around 47 minutes for the same trip.

San Francisco -> Gilroy -> Merced -> Sacramento is not a substitute for a SF -> Sacramento route.

They don't need to bring the train across the Bay, it could stop in Oakland or Emeryville with a connection to BART.

I don't disagree. All those "last thirty mile" possibilities are why the Bakersfield to Merced route makes sense. It's the trunk line. Similar options involving metropolitan rail networks exist at LA. And we could have the same discussion about options at that end too.

Bakersfield to Merced is the part everyone agrees on (more or less) and is about in the ballpark of the available funds. Sacramento, SF Bay, LA, and San Diego are all big enough to solve the last thirty miles themselves politically and financially. The Central Valley is the area where it won't happen without state money and where the politics are more ideological than local. The Central Valley is also the part of California where major transportation infrastructure can be justified under "Uniform level of service" approaches (the area is 'underserved'). It's where high speed rail is a plausible alternative to a new Interstate and a new Interstate is likely. Since I5 bypasses all the Central Valley cities.

We could turn it into the worlds longest roller-coaster ride and sell it to Disney and recoup the tax payer money.

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