Comment by reaperducer | Hacker News Reader

Comment by reaperducer | Hacker News Reader

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As a fain of rail travel, and someone who sometimes needs to travel this corridor, I was really looking forward to riding this line.

I noticed a lot of the California headlines about this have painted it along the lines of "Evil Trump administration killing California high speed rail!"

The reality is, though, that California botched this project. The Federal funding was contingent on California making progress, and the amount of funding was sized for the size of the project.

California has made little progress, and the size of the project has been reduced. It's only fiscally responsible for the feds to take back the money. Just like if you promise a VC a million users in the first year, but only deliver 10,000 they're going to look at you sideways.

FTA: Federal Railroad Administration (FRA), said on Thursday it had canceled the funding awarded in a 2010 agreement after it said the state had “repeatedly failed to comply” and “failed to make reasonable progress on the project.”

Fortunately, high speed rail is making (slow) progress in other states like Florida, Illinois and Texas. Hopefully the money can do some good in those places.

>In March 2018, the state forecast project costs had jumped by $13 billion to $77 billion and warned costs could be as much as $98.1 billion.

I love train travel as well but that is an obscene amount of money. I wish they would upgrade the existing tracks so that traveling from Emeryville-LA Union station goes from 10 hours to 4-5hrs (and runs multiple times a day)

An Acela-like train probably wouldn't be that fast. On the Northeast Corridor, the Acela is only around an hour faster than the regional and part of that is just making fewer stops. My guess is you'd still be looking at 7+ hours in CA, at which point most people would just fly.

(Very few people actually take the Northeast Corridor from Boston to DC because it's pretty much a full-day trip. But New York is in about the middle so there are two popular sub-sections--unlike the case with CA.)

The Acela is only that slow because the rail infrastructure can't support the maximum speed of the train's rolling stock. The purchase of the rolling stock was supposed to spur the redevelopment of the tracks, but that never happened.

My comment was mostly in the vein of wondering what a "cheap" (relatively) not-really HSR could have looked like and the answer is probably "not fast enough to get from Emeryville to LA in a timeframe where people would really use it."

And, of course, the rolling stock had various problems so I'm not sure what the theoretical top speed ended up being.

Still cheaper than widening I-5, which is the primary alternative.

It's been reduced and it goes from nowhere to nowhere. Seriously, Merced to Bakersfield?

Isn't the majority of soul crushing traffic happening inside the LA and Bay Area regions?

yes. exactly right. the first leg should have been somewhere near the Santa Ana Freeway from LA to Orange County -- or somewhere else near a large component of California's population.

I think the right of way/real estate issue is one of the things that makes it incredibly expensive, and why it's much easier and cheaper to build a useless line from nowhere to the outskirts of nowhere.

Maybe the rail line could somehow reuse the freeway right of way, but I'm not sure how that could work while retaining the roads for cars and trucks.

> Illinois

To the surprise of no one, things are going slower than expected: http://www.chicagomag.com/city-life/February-2019/What-Happe...

>Illinois

It would be nice if in Minnesota we didn't have Wisconsin between us and Illinois so we could do something there.

You could cut south through Iowa. The distance is longer, but for MN it means you can pick up some southern cities along the way (Minneapolis is so close to Wisconsin that you could put the MN end in Wisconsin and still get most of your riders from Minneapolis). I expect a couple of the tiny cities in Iowa along the way would like service.

Maybe, but I'd worry about more places to possibly stop would mean ... lots of requests for stops.

One thing watching folks talk about rail locally is that all these little towns that down't want it ... unless you're going to stop a 10 times a day at their town.

At some point it all stops making sense then.

True, but having trains stop in Rochester MN and Waterloo IA makes sense if the track is already close. (Note I didn't say the same train - scheduling is more complex as is the track which now needs switches, but express trains that bypass the small towns make sense)

You wouldn't do the track across WI without looking that the bigger cities in the way and deciding where to stop. You wouldn't stop in every small town, but the bigger towns...

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