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I didn't say anything about roads, but it's not true that roads are unprofitable. Roads are paid for by fuel taxes and vehicle registration fees. California's gas taxes raise $8 billion per year. The state's registration and licensing fees collect another $12 billion per year. The state spends $18 billion per year on Caltrans, meaning that vehicles provide $2 billion in revenue for other state programs.

BART takes 30 minutes to get from Civic Center to SFO. Even without TSA pre-check, it takes less than 15 minutes to get through security. If you get through security 15 minutes before the plane leaves, that's 2.5 hours total travel time to LAX. From the same place in SF it takes 20-25 minutes to get to 4th & King. (Yes, Muni is that bad.) Let's say the train leaves 15 minutes after you arrive at the station. Then it will take 2 hours and 40 minutes to get to Union Station in LA. Total travel time: 3.25 hours. And again, the train cost is 5-10x that of a flight.

Edit: If you think my math about the long-term profitability of California High Speed Rail is incorrect, I'd love to see some numbers showing how it could be priced similarly to air travel. I was agnostic about CA HSR for a long time. I even voted for Proposition 1A back in 2008. But no matter how I crunch the numbers, it really seems like CA HSR is a boondoggle.




So in your best case scenario, it's taken you 2.5 hours to get to LAX, how long from there to LA itself? What if you checked bags and need to wait for them to show up? (Not a thing on trains, just take your suitcase with you.)

Also, your best case scenario of 1 hour from SF to plane is hysterically optimistic. BART headways are 20 minutes in theory and often delayed in practice. If you have bags to check, that'll chew up another 15 min easy. TSA is 15 min on a good day but many days are bad. Gates close 15 minutes before departure, so you need to get through TSA another 15 min earlier so you can walk to your gate. I would leave at least two hours before my flight, and most airlines recommend arriving at the airport two hours before.


I've never gotten to an airport two hours ahead of my flight, not even for international travel. For a short, frequent flight like SFO-LAX, I arrive at the airport 15 minutes before boarding starts. I'm not at all worried about missing my flight. Worst case I'll get on the next flight.

The reason I didn't add travel time from LAX to Union Station is because LA is incredibly spread out and most destinations are not downtown. To get to where you want to go in LA, you'll need a car.

And don't forget that this is a comparison of a trip you can take today versus a hypothetical train that will cost you several times more. In real life the train is unlikely to run as frequently or to be as fast as claimed. Honestly, I'm not sure if anyone will ever take high speed rail from SF to LA. The current plan is to finish Merced to Bakersfield some time between 2030 and 2033. Will the political willpower to continue the project still exist a decade from now? I don't know.

We can go back and forth arguing about which is faster all day long, but the real problem is the finances of CA HSR. I've yet to see any figures that show it being financially competitive with air travel. Is the plan to increase taxes on everyone to subsidize ticket prices? Considering the clientele of high speed rail, that seems rather regressive.

What would change your mind about this? I'd be in favor of CA HSR if costs were significantly lower. (I naively assumed government competence when I voted for prop 1A.) It looks like that's not an option, so the best course of action is to stop wasting money on this boondoggle.


You might consider the climate and carbon impact of those flights vs rail.

Many of the rail lines are subsidized in countries with extensive rail travel. So they don’t have to be economically viable, it’s viewed as a public good, contributing to general economic development.


Air travel is 2% of global CO2 emissions. Making air travel carbon neutral (by capturing carbon) would increase ticket prices by around 20%. That would be much cheaper than switching from planes to high speed rail.

I'm not saying that countries with lots of rail are wrong. I'm saying that passenger high speed rail doesn't make sense in the US (at least, not outside of the northeast). We're too spread out.


I’m not an expert on this, but China seems huge and also spread out, and they have much better HSR coverage than basically anyone else.

Air travel is a problem when it comes to emissions because there really aren’t any viable alternatives, where as you could pretty much sub in nuclear + renewables for anything else energy/transportation wise and the math makes sense after a large investment. Knocking overland air travel out and replacing it with high speed rail cuts down a ton of air travel, and replaces it with something that is almost trivial to run on cleaner energy.

Another part of that comment you were responding to dealt with comfort and convenience, and having ridden HSR in Japan and Europe, I much prefer it to air travel. Air travel sucks and it’s only getting worse as fuel costs more. If you’re not flying business, you’re basically treated the same way livestock is treated, with a multi-hundred dollar or thousand dollar price tag to add to the insult. I’ll vote for my tax dollars going to HSR all day, “boondoggle” or not. I remember in Massachusetts the big dig was marked as such, but man has it worked. Tunnels under the city where you can drive 45 rather than elevated roads or no roads or surface streets, yep it was expensive but it’s so much better. I’m willing to bet with my tax dollars and ballot measure votes HSR will be the same.


China is the same size as the US but has four times the population, and most of them are in the east. This means they have much higher population density. Another important difference is that they can build rail for much cheaper than the US because their government doesn’t have to respect property rights or follow stringent environmental regulations.


About the 2% figure: many things are insignificant in terms of climate change if you narrow down on them. Also, this 2% figure of the share of air travel is projected to increase, because the number of revenue passenger kilometers flown is quickly increasing (doubled in the last 10 years), cf https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/airline-capacity-and-traf....

And unfortunately carbon offsetting is rather unreliable (companies buying offsets don't have any incentive for the offsets to be actual savings). I'd be wary of climate change solutions that consist of continuing business as usual and assuming that decarbonation will happen in some other sectors. I also suspect the 20% price increase estimate works for a specific price of carbon, but that price could increase if carbon offsets started becoming widely used (and the demand increases).

Anyway, I don't know what's the right way for the US to reduce travel emissions, whether that's electric coaches, cheaper rail, taxation to increase prices and reduce demand... But I don't think the solution can be "just keep planes and add carbon capture".


Sorry, it takes at least an hour to get from lax to central LA. Once it even took two! You also woefully underestimate airport bs. 15 mins haha ha. Just an unobstructed walk to/from the gate takes that long.

Last time we arrived it took an hour to (get bags, wait for shuttle to rideshare park two miles away, and get paired), then another 45 minutes drive in heavy traffic to east Hollywood.

Train to union station would have been much more comfortable.




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