I would much rather get to the airport too early, breeze through security and relax with a good book at the gate, than try to time things down to the minute, get stressed-out and be far more likely to miss my flight.
Yes, people have different preferences. I feel stressed all the time I’m in an airport. I’m stressed by “hurry up and wait”, I’m stressed by roving security, and I’m stressed by the inevitable gate change that happens if you arrive too early. I’ve come very close to missing my flight because i got to the airport too early, and allowed myself to relax and read a book or watch a video. Once, they had to call my name a few times. A few times, I’ve had to race from one gate to a distant one, sometimes even in a different terminal.
If you arrive close to the flight, you walk up to your gate, and that’s your gate! Find a seat, pay attention until the group before yours is called, and everything is fine.
How this worked when I was in China was China Rail allowed for one free change of itinerary. You book the latest train that you anticipate you would take, then when you get to the train station, you ask them to put you on the next available train with open seats. Outside of certain busy holidays, 95% of the time, they put you on the next train or the train after at worst.
Why pick the most expensive one in the most highly-regulated state to extrapolate to the whole rest of the country?
And what would that achieve? The highways would still be limited to 70-ish MPH, and most of the tens or hundreds of billions of dollars we already spend per year on them is in high-cost urban corridors to support daily commuters, not long-distance travelers. Few people want more airports and their associated noise, traffic, pollution, and expense either. Airplanes are already close to the practical limit of speed and efficiency. More planes just means more noise more pollution and more people crammed into unpleasant sardine cans. There’s no more low-hanging fruit to pick. Doubling down on car and air travel would just be a waste of all that money for little or no actual benefit.
The base problem remains that the cars are still limited by speed, and you’re limited in what you can and can’t do in a car. In a train you can actually get up and walk around to stretch, go the bathroom, or get some cooked food, all while the train is moving.
It’s the medium-distance trips of say 300-1,000 miles where trains make sense, but you’re forced to either drive or fly, with similar door-to-door times because there’s too much overhead in air travel and not enough speed in car travel. Fast trains have more overhead than driving, but less than airplanes, and they’re faster than cars.
I saw a documentary or YouTube video on the California high-speed rail project that said part of the reason for the insane expense is the chosen route, and that it would have been cheaper and easier had the route just followed I-5.
And much faster to build. The politicians who compromised the line to go through the Central Valley should have just promised that the second line would go there. Everyone with a grain of sense can see that the best first route is directly from the Bay Area to LA. No side routes to other cities, no stopping along the way.
San Francisco to Los Angeles is on the long side. San Diego to Los Angeles is a long drive but too short to fly.
I’m not sure why you’re seeming to agree with @Dewey_Finn about following Interstate 5’s alignment in one breath, then advocating for Bay Area to LA directly with a second line through the Central Valley. Interstate 5 GOES THROUGH the Central Valley.
Anywho, following the I-5 alignment would seem to make a lot of sense, but there are practical and engineering considerations that worked against it. First off, and I’m not saying this is what you’re advocating, but many have suggested putting HSR in the I-5 median. That presents a lot of issues. First, it means making changes to every single structure over the freeway to accomodate the rail line. Many (most?) of those structures have piers in the median, so they’ll have to be re-engineered and retrofitted. Construction down the median would have a significant adverse impact on existing traffic, creating miles long traffic jams for the duration of construction. Literally years of bumper-to-bumper traffic. The vertical alignment of the existing route would not be conducive to a rail line for significant portions of the route: too much elevation change in too short a distance.
California’s HSR was a great idea spoiled by amateurs from the beginning. Cost estimates were not realistic. The support expected by the owners of existing rail rights of way was vastly overestimated. Engineering problems were not given sufficient analysis. Politicians promised too much to too many. I wanted high speed rail in California. I do not want what the project has become, but I don’t see an easy way out. Even walking away from all the work done thus far will hurt.
But it doesn’t go through all the cities in the Central Valley. And yes, not down the median. Run it over to the west a bit, far enough away to avoid the interchanges. The second line could branch off near Bakersfield and run up through Fresno and Stockton to Sacramento.
This is where I am as well. They chose the Central Valley to start the project because that was supposed to be the “easy” part, and the project has delivered zero service in spite of being way over budget and way behind schedule. It’s just miles of flat, cheap farmland, right? Those poor farmers will be lining up to sell their land to us, amiright?
What happens when(if) they complete the “easy” part and they have to tackle the hard parts of going over the mountains into Los Angeles and SF Bay Area, where there are enormous technical challenges, more restrictive land use regulations, more people to please, as well as much more expensive land?
If they had started in one of those areas, there might already have been a short route through a heavily populated area, such as up the peninsula from San Jose to San Francisco. Or perhaps from San Francisco to Sacramento.
Thanks for the laugh.
That route is already covered by BART. Wouldn’t add anything to the transit situation. Also hideously expensive real estate there.
I was thinking the first leg would start from the San Jose BART station and go to LA. They can extend it to SF or East Bay later if there’s a need.
An engineering report came out several years ago. At the time, the cost estimate had gone from the original $10 billion to $30 billion. It has been a while. It’s up from that now.
The report was ten separate pdf files of a little more than 100 pages each. It would have been really tedious to read the whole thing. For each segment of a mile or two, there was a decision to make. The tracks could be at grade level. They could be below grade level in a big trench. they could be above grade level on concrete structures or on a pile of dirt.
Every place where something crossed the route it had to be considered. That could eliminate one or more of the options for how high to make the tracks. There could be streets, main or local. There could be gas, seweer, or mater mains. Flood control ditches were another concern.
They could run the tracks down the middle of a major road but, the curves would require reducing the speed of the train and adding to the time for the trip. They could build big sweeping curves that would let the train run at full speed but, that would require tearing down some number of houses.
Skipping through this thing looking here or there, it looked like the four options were generally reduced to two. It seems like you need to narrow each choice to one before you can make any kind of reasonable cost and schedule estimate. It sounds like it would take a lot of meetings to reach that kind of consensus.
A first leg from San Jose to Los Angeles? Sure, that’s only 340 miles or so.
BART does NOT go up the peninsula from San Jose to San Francisco. That’s Caltrain, a commuter rail service. You can get from San Jose to San Francisco on BART, but you have to take it through the East Bay and then under the bay itself.
Yes, but it’d be the one that’s used more than any others. Just look at all the traffic on I-5. Putting it west of I-5 would be easy, since as I recall, there’s very little there except range and farmland, and they could probably go around the farmland. Not even very many roads. The main problems would be the mountains at either end.
Sorry. I don’t live in the Bay area and got the transit systems mixed up.