re: #60 freetoken

A few years back, on this forum, I ranted a bit about the high-speed rail proposal.

Sure, I love the idea, rode trains all the time in Japan.

But high speed trains work in Japan because they are connected to local networks of trains, on which people ride daily for their livelihood.

California’s high speed rail is going first to… the middle of the state, surrounded by farmland, where no one rides mass transit, much less trains.

That had to do with cost and land availability, sure, but it leaves out the only connections in the state that would have enough riders to pay for the thing, and that would be the LA-Vegas-SD triangle.

But the southern part of the state is mountainous and hard to traverse (it took a while to figure out how to get trains to San Diego and the idea that was used was going through Mexico.)

Connecting Sacramento to SF is a good idea, too, but I wonder why that hasn’t been accomplished yet (with high-speed rail.) There is a lot of intransigence when it comes to doing these sort of things in California, no matter how “liberal” outsiders like to think Californians are.

Well, there’s the Bay. How do you get the train from SF to Oakland? BART goes under, but I don’t know if that’s appropriate for HSR. The Bay Bridge, when first built, gave the lower deck over to trains, but long ago it was given over to cars. You need a new bridge. Remember how long it took, and how expensive it was to build the Eastern Span?