Unfortunately there simply isn't enough demand between SF and LA alone to justify the insanely long stretches of a direct rail project.
A better way would have been to build it out from the city into the suburbs first as a commuter rail project. There isn't a ton of intercity demand for this rail, but there is tons of traffic in and out of each singular city to justify even medium speed rail.
"Unfortunately there simply isn't enough demand between SF and LA alone to justify the insanely long stretches of a direct rail project."
I will stipulate that that is correct at this very moment.
However, it is my contention that a truly high speed rail link (sub two hour) between SF and LA would have manufactured demand as an entirely new set of trips, activities and lifestyles would have been enabled by the ability to step on a train in LA and step off at the salesforce tower 1:55 later ...
This could be absolutely true if people adapt to it, but that wouldn't happen overnight.
I would also strongly doubt that even after full adoption, Bakersfield to LA in 30 minutes is going to be much more useful and heavily trafficked on a daily basis than SF to LA in 2 hours would.
Even in Europe, their marquee city-to-city rail routes contribute a small share of overall rail traffic compared to their daily commuters.
Nothing happens overnight. Except governmental upheaval, I suppose.
And yes, SF to LA would be in much more demand. Not as a commuting option, but it'd make for some great weekend commerce. In a world of increasing work from home, I don't think many people would care for commuting to LA from Bakersfield.
LA to Bakersfield is 110 miles. That's about an hour, certainly plenty of people do that journey in the UK multiple times a week. Tamworth for example is exactly 110 miles from Euston. In peak times the fast trains stop there for the commuter traffic and it takes 67 minutes. Peterborough, Gratham, Newark (100-140 miles) are all common commuter places,
If we ever got HSR I'm not saying the is unviable. People commuting from suburbs to downtown LA have a 60-79 minute commute, a commute they can't sleep or be productive through. That's no issue.
I'm just saying the hubs are completely incompatible in both culture and market. Bakersfield is an energy/agriculture hub and LA is an entertainment hub. The utility here isn't exactly efficient if people are traveling that far every day to work as a cashier. Probably wouldn't stimulate much in that regsrd
Likewise, there's not going to be a lot of people in LA who willingly want to go to Bakersfield if given an option. At worst they are forced there as another suburban option if the city prices them out.
You don't need HSR, just a normal 125mph train line.
Imagine you are born in Bakersfield, your family is from Bakersfield, perhaps they are agricultural workers, but you don't want to be a farmer, you want a job in a big city, perhaps an accountant, or a civil engineer, or a whatever. It's a typical modern desk job, for whatever reason you need to be in an office a few times a week, maybe not 5 since covid, but certainly 2-3.
You can either move a long way from your home, family, support network and live near your work, or you can maintain that community and support network but have a limited access to jobs. Or you can do both - stay living close to family so you can pop round in 10 minutes for a chat, but also have an increased choice of jobs and careers that a large city provides.
Nobody is commuting 100 miles a day for a minimum wage job sure, but there's far more jobs than cashiers - I assume LA has decent jobs somewhere between the "Holywood A-Lister" and the "$10/hour cleaner" scale, and due to its size it likely has more opportunities than Bakersfield alone.
>You can either move a long way from your home, family, support network and live near your work, or you can maintain that community and support network but have a limited access to jobs.
Is there enough people with that mindset in Bakersfield?the population is 400k, and the opposite narrative of commuting out the city to work the oil rigs probably isn't as common.
From a political point of view, LA doesn't exactly in need of even more starry-eyed youth to compete with trying to make some career in the entertainment sector.
>I assume LA has decent jobs somewhere between the "Holywood A-Lister" and the "$10/hour cleaner" scale, and due to its size it likely has more opportunities than Bakersfield alone.
Definitely not in 2025. I guess we'll see if we're still in one piece in a decade.
It's not just speed that's critical, it's frequency. I believe that they're only proposing one train per hour, or 18 per day? Feels low for such a long piece of dedicated track.
In the UK the existing West Coast mainline has about 170 trains a day on the fast lines (between Milton Keynes and Rugby avoiding Northampton), the longest of which run about the same distance (London-Glasgow) as LA to San Francisco - albeit a 4.5 hour journey.
The original plans for HS2 were I think 18 per hour between London and Birmingham.
Fresno has a population of 500k, and is about 180 miles from LA from and 180 miles from San Francisco.
Liverpool has a similar population and is a similar distance from London and currently gets an hourly train, with arguments for 2 trains per hour. that's in addition to the more local services (Liverpool-Birmingham for example).
London frequencies on the fast non-stop trains are currently
Birmingham: 3tph
Manchester: 3tph
Glasgow: 1tph
Liverpool: 1tph
Trent Valley: 1tph (fast for the first 80 miles then local stopper at towns of upto 100k, like Tamworth, Lichfield, Rugeley
And typically
Lancashire (Blackpool): 1tph
North Wales: 1tph
Looking at cities like San Francisco an environms, Sacremento, Bakersfield, Fresno etc I don't see why you wouldn't send 2tph from LA to SF, and another 1tph to each of those locations, meaning 6-10tph heading north out of LA, and probably 3tph out of San Francisco, based on the population and distances. Not all services would stop at every station (you don't need a 3tph service from Bakersfield to Fresno, just 1tph would be fine)
I guess the lack of local public transport limits the benefit though, if you need a car to get to/from the station (especially if it's at both ends) then you might as well drive the whole way.
I'm not convinced. The train is not competing with driving to SF, the train is competing with flying to SF. LAX -> SFO is 1.25 hours. There's time to the airport, time to check in, time through security of course, but there's going to be similar issues at the train station so the customer has to be convinced that the train is a time savings.
Plus, of course, SWA has 4 direct flights to SFO, 6 to Oakland, 4 to San Jose. If you miss your flight you get on the next one. It is going to be really hard for a high speed train to complete with that.
Sounds like you've never taken a train. Time through security? There's basically no security in American train stations (or French TGV stations). I've only experienced Chinese train stations with security but with wait times far less than American airports. Time to the airport? Well yes because the airports are inconveniently located. Train stations are right there in the downtown.
International HSTs with passport required border crossings (ie Schengen-UK) have passport control and security - I think the security checks are to minimise the risk of terror attacks in the channel tunnel though.
But yeah, for intra-Schengen you just go to the platform a few minutes before departure, find where your carriage will be, and step in once the train comes to a stop.
So much less faff than air travel, and I’ve noticed better pubs at major stations meaning waiting for your train isn’t as boring as it used to be…
Security theatre. What's the point of metal detecting you on eurostar? You going to hijack the train with your knife?
Cars and vans in the tunnel don't go through metal detecters, and you can smuggle a far larger bomb that you can in a suitcase.
But eurostar is the exception to the rule with security. I tend to aim to arrive at my mainline station about 5 minutes before the train leaves incase I get delayed on-route, but that's because I live in a small town which only has 1 train per hour. When I take a route with 3tph I don't bother looking at the times, just go when I'm ready and accept on average I have to wait for 10 minutes.
I agree. But I just looked at Le Shuttle’s pages on security and they claim to put 100% of trucks through millimeter wavelength scanners (presumably to detect unauthorised travellers) and x-ray systems that are supposed to detect arms and explosives.
The SF one would apparently be near union square. Having been there, that seems easy enough to get to, insofar as anywhere is easy to get to in SF (it does not exactly have the greatest public transport in the world).
The train stations have connections to other transit - hard to see them as any less convenient than airports (LA's famously had no train connection until recently).
Station location of course plays a role (i.e. if it gets stuffed somewhere out of town with crappy transport links its no good, and rail links into the middle of an existing city are expensive), but I don't know a major airport where people would routinely trust less than 45 mins for checkin and passing security. Whereas for a train station its 10 mins.
> If you miss your flight you get on the next one. It is going to be really hard for a high speed train to complete with that.
Why would you bother to build a fancy new HSR line and then not run trains every hour, or more if demand is there? Running trains is not that expensive once you've got the infrastructure.
Forget security; I used SFO last week and just going from long term parking to where security is took 20 min, and the reverse (around midnight) took 30+ min. A train starting in downtown SF could as well be past San Jose at that point.
To be fair long-term parking at a train station would also be inconvenient (although at least in this case you'd not share facilities with all the international travelers), and honestly didn't even register as an option to me, so I was assuming local train/shuttle bus/cab/uber dropping off in a convenient central location.
I think the differentiating factor is that a rail station is more likely to be in the city center, where you can get to by other means (bus, BART, whatever), while going to SFO is much less convenient.
After a potential 30 minute commute (even if you live downtown already) and some 2 hours of checking, yes. Only 1.25 hours.
>there's going to be similar issues at the train station
I suppose it will vary on popularity, but train parking lots tend to be relatively empty compared to navigating LAX and the lag time of the worst case scenario of "buying a new train pass" was 10 minutes, after maybe a 5 minute walk from parking lot to station.
Airlines are simply too politically charged to ever be more efficient than a potential high speed rail. Even if it takes an extra hour, it's a time save taking the train.
> After a potential 30 minute commute (even if you live downtown already) and some 2 hours of checking, yes. Only 1.25 hours.
HSR stations are no different.
45-60 minute uber from Berkeley or Cupertino to the SF HSR station? Then another 45-90 minutes on the LA end?
You’d rather just fly SFO (or SJC, OAK) nonstop to Orange County or Ontario or Burbank or Palm Springs or Long Beach or …
Not to mention if you are an experienced flyer, it’s not unreasonable to arrive at the airport curbside 15-30 minutes before your flight boarding door closes and comfortably make the flight. Fuck the lounges.
I've been on multiple other kinds of subways and trains across the state, and I can't say there's ever been more than the 10 minute lag needed to purchase a tram pass (a one time act). I don't know how even the strictest HSR would compare to the TSA process and the sluggish seating process of a plane.
The commute may not be different in the long term, but as of now LAX's traffic is legendarily bad, even by LA traffic standards.
> There's time to the airport, time to check in, time through security of course, but there's going to be similar issues at the train station
... Eh? You get to the station (generally well-located), you walk through a turnstile or similar, you get on the train. There's no check-in or security on most intercity trains. Or walking for miles in sprawling airports, for that matter. In a big intercity station, you go in the door, there are some shops, there are a row of platforms, you go to your platform, you get on your train. That is it. Also, you probably get there on public transport which goes either into the station itself, outside the door, or to the local station beside the intercity station, depending on local taste (this really does seem to be a very regional thing).
I can't help feeling that a lot of the people who object to this concept have never actually been on an intercity train at all. Or, er, seen a film or TV show where someone goes on a train. It's kind of bizarre, really.
With Amtrak, you just show up at the train station a few minutes before departure time.
I took Amtrak from Richmond VA (well, Ashland, VA) to NYC once precisely to avoid the song and dance with getting around NYC airports. I showed up a few minutes before departure at the Ashland station (saving a drive to Richmond), relaxed on the train for 5 hours, arrived in Penn Station, and then took a short walk to the Roosevelt Hotel where my business meeting was.
High-speed rail can have multiple trains per day. If you miss one, you get on the next one.
I think it's actually the opposite. The latent demand is only present in LA and SF. Fresno and Bakersfield are not car-less cities. Taking a train between them makes no sense (you're gonna have to rent a car on either end).
While connecting the LA Metro and SF BART with a high speed rail line makes the most sense. Regardless of the construction inefficiencies this is really the original sin beating at the heart of this project.
It's hard to know for sure, but the majority of these flights are probably going to be transfers. I've never set foot in LA but I've taken that flight several times.
Even so, there are only ~20k daily seats between the two cities. The ridership on successful high speed rail lines elsewhere in the world are measured in the hundreds of thousands per day.
Why couldn't one part of the journey be by rail, and the other by air? There is a already a lot of shared planning to allow this to happen, with some railway stations even having IATA codes.
I agree this is the ideal situation, but as it stands CAHSR is planned to terminate at union station in LA, quite far from LAX. Ideally LA metro or metrolink would build a direct connection between union station and LAX, but that hasn't begun to be planned and unfortunately it's very difficult to get transit built in LA. For instance the Sepulveda line— one of the most important lines for LA— is at risk of being killed because ticket master's ex-CEO doesn't want a train line running under his house.
I don't agree. There are around 145 flights a day between metro LA airports and metro SF airports (based on a quick Google Flights search for a random Friday). Assuming there's 75 seats on each plane, that's 10,000 seats a day. That's a lot of trains. A typical TGV is 500 seats. (If I add San Diego to SF, that's another 50 flights or 3,700 seats...)
The market is there and exists, and that's with the gigantic hassle of having to get to and from the airports, as opposed to a convenient downtown train station
Commuter rail is also a good idea but it's not the same thing as high speed rail. And commuter rail already exists: COASTER in San Diego, MetroLink in LA.
Currently you either have an almost 11-hour trip on Amtrak, a 6 ½ hour drive, or a flight between LA and SF. The ridership is clearly there. (Believe it or not the Amtrak trains are often sold out.)
I mention it elsewhere, but it looks like about 20k people fly each way between the Bay Area and LA every day. That's enough, and if this thing actually existed very few people would fly.
This claim is unfounded based on the amount of direct flights alone, and then on top of that you have to add the car traffic going between the cities as well, and trips that now become viable when the travel time is faster and more convenient.
Outside of work reasons I don't know many people who actually travel between these cities on a regular basis. Maybe once or twice a year for that?
I would argue the east coast works much differently. The traffic patterns are not so much between NYC and DC, but most people moving in and out of dense areas. Much of the Acela is M-F commuter traffic.
If it actually worked like Japan (and China?) maybe? In Japan, if I want to go from Tokyo to Osaka, I just take a local train/subway to the station and buy a ticket for the next bullet train. I can get the tickets on my phone as I'm on the subway (or buy them at the machine at the station). There is always a train within 5-10 minutes. There are trains pretty much every 5 minutes, some are express (5 stops to Osaka), some less express (~12 stops), and some go all they way to Kyushu. The only time this isn't true is the 3-4 weeks a year when everyone travels and the trains are full. On those weeks you need to get tickets in advance.
The point being, it's so convienent I can decide to visit my friends for a picnic and come back the same day (yes I have done this) with no pre-planning. I have not pre-purchased a ticket in years.
I don't expect California to have trains every 5 to 10 minutes. I also expect they might fuck it up like Spain and require baggage inspection. I do expect that if they finish building it (I don't think they will) that by the time they do, Waymo and similar services will be ubiquitous and so it might actually be useful.
A better way would have been to build it out from the city into the suburbs first as a commuter rail project. There isn't a ton of intercity demand for this rail, but there is tons of traffic in and out of each singular city to justify even medium speed rail.