> Namely, they wanted to make a straight shot from LA to San Francisco by running along the flat, government-owned I-5 corridor with spurs out to the eastern Central Valley, whereas the California High Speed Rail Authority (CHSRA) and state politicians wanted the main line to go through every little town in the Central Valley, directly.
For Germans, this is nothing new. Local/regional politicians always want to have the ICE (Intercity Express, our version of high-speed rail) stop in their more or less tiny village.
The problem is almost always that the villages lack adequate rail connections to the next hub, and I imagine that this problem is even more expressed in the US, given the near total lack of passenger rail...
This is a classical example of American "worst of both worlds" governance. People in Bakersfield aren't going to take the HSR to LA, at least not in enough numbers to justify connecting Bakersfield to the HSR. It'd be better to just build a straight-shot HSR and take all the money you save and give a tax break to folks in Bakersfield, or something. But our political system isn't able to achieve that result.
How do European countries deal with it? It's not like Germany and France don't have rural areas versus urban areas (vast swaths of both countries are farmland).
"take all the money you save and give a tax break to folks in Bakersfield"
I'd like to see HSR critics back up their claims with the ridership forecast model and public benefit accounting that you'd need to compute this tax break.
In Germany the ICE train mostly runs on existing routes, for newly build routes you have to make the trade off between connecting cities and travel time.
But not connecting a city of almost 400,000 people is odd, it should get a stop. I don't think the Deutsche Bahn oder SCNF would be allowed not connecting those cities in their home markets.
I know quite a few folks living out there in the central valley, they are very conservative. They hate the idea of costly train being built with their tax money.
That doesn't mean they wouldn't grow to like it eventually, but it wont help ridership in its early and fragile years.
I guess that would be a sensible argument except those people aren't exactly carrying the state on their backs. Santa Clara County has only twice the population of Fresno County, but it pays 15x more in state income taxes. State revenue in general depends almost wholly on the Bay Area, LA Basin and San Diego counties.
Never underestimate the ability of "very conservative" people, who hate tax-funded infrastructure, to nonetheless be heavy users of that infrastructure.
Remember, even Ayn Rand accepted payments from entitlement programs she hated.
It's not a question of liberal versus conservative. The main value of HSR is allowing people to rapidly move between city centers for business or pleasure. How often do people in Bakersfield need to go to LA or SF?
> How often do people in Bakersfield need to go to LA or SF?
When I lived I Fresno, people in my household needed to go to somewhere in the LA or SF area (mostly the latter) more frequently than we needed to go to LA when we lived in the SF Bay Area.
As someone else noted in this discussion, the train doesn't just stop in LA, Bakersfield, and San Francisco. Journeys between other cities on the route are also important.
It’s no rose garden over here either. The Lorraine TGV station is built in the middle of nowhere, halfway between Nancy and Metz, because both cities wanted a train station.
We've asked you before to stop posting ideological boilerplate, which this is. The effect on the discussion is predictable and not what we're here for, and we ban accounts that refuse to stop.
The route is literally written down in a constitutional amendment that passed a plebiscite with a supermajority. It is entirely fatuous to claim that the route "doesn't matter".
When the rebuttal letter literally says "I am aware that there was significant controversy over SNCF in 2010, emanating from their role in deporting French Jews to death camps during WW II", I suspect the reasoning is more political bickering than anything else.
Even if the company did literally support the Nazis during the French occupation over 70 years ago, that's no reason to boycott them now.
Note that neither I nor SMCF had suggested the cities on SR-99 would be excluded from the HSR service area, but that transportation "spurs" would be created at some point in the future to connect those towns to the HSR conveniently. This concurs with projected trip data (linked and discussed in above thread) suggesting that most trips from the CV cities end north of the Gilroy or south of Palmdale, i.e. Bakersfield to Fresno even with direct-to-city HSR has difficulty competing with the convenience of cars (which are going to get cheaper as battery technology improves). As such it's my opinion that HSR on the I-5 corridor would not really underserve those towns, although they would (correctly IMO) no longer be the first to get rail connectivity.
I also think that people get way too hung up on the SF to LA bit. Where the California HSR is about a lot more than just that. The SF -> LA -> San Diego part is actually mostly about freeing up airports to handle longer distance national and international traffic.
The central valley part is to tie the central valley cities to the each other and to the coastal cities. I think another part to is try to reduce future sprawl of the central valley cities. Much as people in Bakersfield and Fresno may hate that, it's the right thing to do going forward.
Other part that is totally ignored is that most of the riders will be commuters similar to BART. They won't go from SF to LA, but from SF to San Jose, or Morgan Hill to San Jose, etc.
The project can make sense for the State of California in ways that are impossible for private investors. For example, providing fast convenient transport to places people want to go generally increases the value of land. The state can benefit from this passively via its taxing authority while a private investor would have to purchase land outright with an enormous capital outlay (if it were possible at all). HSR is also a substitute good for short-haul air travel, which is typically provided with government subsidy (in the form of airports).
HSR is a great example of what happens when a bunch of coastal elites look at the countryside ("flyover country") and assume it's empty and worthless so nobody will object if they run a bulldozer through it for a big government project.
On the contrary, California's Central Valley is one of the most vibrant and important areas of the state with property claims going back to the homesteading period. So shocking that these people aren't happy with a bunch of LA and SF people wanting to tear up their back yards for a boondoggle they will never use or care about.
The amount of land needed for HSR is much less than that needed to transport current and future population by either air or road. Just look a how much prime land SR-99 and of course many HSR opponents want to widen it.
Nice talking point. Locals actually use roads. They will never use this "bullet" train to go to cities hundreds of miles away from where they live and work.
> HSR is a great example of what happens when a bunch of coastal elites look at the countryside ("flyover country") and assume it's empty and worthless so nobody will object if they run a bulldozer through it for a big government project.
If you look at the prop 1A results map, most of the counties (inland or coastal) it would serve with stations tsupported it, while most of the rest opposed it. Though coastal/inland split might explain the non-secret counties that supported it, and the smaller number of served counties that opposed.
For Germans, this is nothing new. Local/regional politicians always want to have the ICE (Intercity Express, our version of high-speed rail) stop in their more or less tiny village.
The problem is almost always that the villages lack adequate rail connections to the next hub, and I imagine that this problem is even more expressed in the US, given the near total lack of passenger rail...