The best way to avoid that is probably running the RR mostly through the state and national parks in CA. No problem with HOA as there are no homes there.
AHC: The US with a high speed rail system as prolific as in East Asia or western Europe
- Thread starter Mitchell Hundred
- Start date
Case in point - JP Morgan, who treated the NYNH&H as another investment vehicle instead of as an actual company, which was why the railway was in such financial distress.
This is vastly overestimating the velocities in day to day operation. The TGV did indeed set a speed record of 574.8 km/h or 357 mph, but that was with a highly modified unit on a modified line. Standard operating speeds of the TGVs are between 270 km/h or 168 mph and 350 km/h or 220 mph, with one of the fastest (non-stop) connections being Paris Gare de Lyon - Marseilles-St-Charles in 182 minutes for 751.4 km, i.e. 247,7 km/h or 154 mph. With two in between stops travel times go up to 198 minutes, connections with all in between stops to 236 minutes.
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It would be a tiny percentage of the park. You are talking a strip what? 50 or so feet wide in a park 10s if not 100s of miles wide. You want to keep costs reasonable you are going to have to make choices. HSR enthusiasts don't want to make tough choices even though real life is full of them.
In the end I doubt a single passenger will go from LA to SF in our lifetime. At best we will have the "train to nowhere" run for a while , have people post videos on YouTube on how few passengers will actually take it and it becomes a meme, CA HSR becomes even more of a laughingstock than it is now.
Choices have to be made. Do you want pristine parks or do you want HSR? You can't afford both. There is a decent question if you can afford the latter at all even if you build the rails right straight through the park. The estimate is $100 billion now and the only question in my mind is when it will hit $125 billion and $150 billion in estimates. Costs will have to be cut somewhere.
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I am sure you would. Right now it is fending off tons of lawsuits from various property owners, community activists (the communities its going through don't want them), and local governments which is one reason they spent a decade spending billions and accomplishing virtually nothing. If anything it would reduce the number of lawsuits and massively. You would get Green groups suing (They are never willing to look at costs or face the fact they have to make choices) them but all the property owner lawsuits would be dropped. They would no longer have any say as it is not their property.
Of course, it's the rule of cool. There is a suggestion in another thread that Turkey and Iran, virtually landlocked countries, get aircraft carriers.
Not to mention the fact that no one lives in the national and state parks (meaning that there's no intermediate customers or long-distance commuters), none of the state or national parks are actually on any kind of sensible route from Los Angeles to San Francisco (or Los Angeles to San Diego, or Sacramento to San Francisco or...you get the idea), and that nearly all of the state and national parks are in rugged, mountainous terrain or deserts that would be even more expensive to build through than the Central Valley for physical reasons. It's a great way to ensure failure, though.
And yet people do not, in fact, "drive all the way" just because "they have to rent a car." Just look at how many people in fact fly from, for example, Houston to Dallas every year (over 3 million--granted, about 4 million automobiles but that still means that 3 out of 7 travelers take a plane), or how popular many other air corridors are that are short enough to drive in principle (about a fifth of the top fifty air corridors in the world are under 500 km, although one of those, Seoul-Jeju, connects to an island). A lot of people are willing to "rent a car" if it means getting to their destination faster.
Additionally, if you look at actual HSR systems, often they do successfully connect to cities with much smaller and less expansive metro systems than you seem to imagine. Lyon, for instance, the destination of the very first French HSR line, had a mere two metro lines (along with a rack railway line) when the LGV Sud-Est connected to it in 1981, which only covered the city center at that time (since then they have greatly expanded the system and built a parallel light rail system). Other cities connected to other parts of the LGV network, like Le Mans and Tours, didn't have any kind of rail transit when they were linked up (they did both eventually build light rail systems, opening about a decade after the LGV Atlantique that connected them up). It's true that Paris has quite a large and extensive metro system, but most other French cities don't. In short, while a good metro system (or public transit in general) may be helpful for the success of an HSR line, it is very far from a prerequisite. Which makes sense, because HSR is more like an airplane than a bus, and like I said earlier plenty of people are willing to fly to destinations with poor or no public transit even if it means having to rent a car.
That they don't have anyone living in them is a bonus. There is no one there to sue you and you don't have to make stops in places where no one will board the train. You can just chug on through without slowing down or stopping when you go from LA to SF
There is practically zero interest in it in the Central Valley. How many do you think will actually use it? Hell, there will probably be a lot of social pressure in the area NOT to use it. If and when CA actually builds their trains to nowhere (Instead of starting where people will actually use it like SD to LA) they will find them near empty. I have zero doubt that the either tiny or nearly empty trains on that route will be videotaped by iPhones . loaded up to YouTube and become an internet meme.
Deserts are easy to build in. They usually are flat and the only thing you have to worry about is the very occasional sandstorm and you can build barriers against them. Water is cheap and easy to transport these days and I am sure they will have plenty at hand.
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Im sure this has all been said before, but I'll give my thoughts.
There are very few areas in the US where I think HSR could work. The Texas triangle happens to be one of them. The problem with a broader national system though is that by the time you drive into Indianapolis for example, park, get on your train, ride to Columbus or Cincinnati or Chicago, and rent a car to get around it would've been faster just to drive. Inside the US (assuming bad public transport), I think it takes a very narrow range of distance to make HSR work. Its got to be close enough where flying is costly and not worth it time-wise, and far enough away where most people don't want to drive. The Texas triangle fits that description, so does the LA-SF route IMO. However in a system with good public transport in our major cities, I think a much larger network would make sense, particularly in the midwest and southeast.
Some places where I think HSR could work as of rn based solely off the distance (ignoring the economic issues or lack of density) would be the Texas Triangle, SF-LA, Seattle-Portland, LA-LV, LA-Phoenix , and then of course the Northeast corridor. Now, if we're actually taking into account the population density and frequency of travel, and other issues, then I don't think Seattle-Portland, LA-LV, or LA-Phoenix would be viable as of 2021. That leaves the California area, Texas, and the Northeast. The California project already has a ton of problems that are well documented on this thread. Texas would be doable but im skeptical if this would be approved by the state government.
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Texas’ stance had been more of a, “don’t expect us to help out; this is between the rail companies and the owners of every patch of land it could touch.” A lot of people (I wouldn’t be surprised if it was a majority) in the state want better rail systems and a HSR but no one wants it on their property or to deal with the construction while it goes up. The only times you see rail getting an expansion is in new development or areas being gentrified.
Just going to point out that the Pacific Northwest HSR is being planned for construction ~10-15 years down the road, not now. Projections look decent enough, and all three cities (maybe not Portland) have decent transit.
If these cities continue to grow then I imagine it could very well work, but as of rn I just don't know if the population is there for the demand to be sufficiently high. That could just be a lack of knowledge on my part, as I don't know how regularly people travel between Seattle and Portland.
Let's just say it's enough to keep the Cascades service well-used, even (pre-pandemic) as far up as Vancouver, BC. So in that case HSR would be building up from an already good service (which became what it is since the existing Amtrak services were replaced by a single one using Talgo sets as the centerpiece).
@TheMann How well would this work for the former New York Central Water Level Route? Personally, I think it's the best candidate for a Chicago - Northeast rail line if we just electrify it for high capacity, 100 - 125 mph services.