I agree that city center-to-city center is not as relevant for California, but that only *increases* the appeal of rail vis-a-vis air. LGA, DCA, and BOS are, for all of their problems, relatively close to the city centers. LaGuardia is 5 miles from Midtown Manhattan, National is 3 miles from Metro Center (DC), and Logan is 2 miles from Downtown Crossing (Boston). So the “city-center” advantage of Acela is not quite as big as one might first think.

Now consider the California case. HSR has the advantage that various trains can make various stops, and all stations can receive frequent service (at least as frequent as air service). Take the Bay Area, for example. Because there would be stations at SF, Millbrae, Redwood City, Palo Alto, SJ, Morgan Hill, and Gilroy, anyone between Mill Valley and Salinas will find it substantially quicker to get to an HSR stop than to get to SFO/SJC, save those who live between South SF and Burlingame and those who live in the Santa Clara/SJC area. Ditto for the East Bay (if that spur gets built) – the only ones for whom OAK will look very attractive are those living in Fruitvale/Hayward. It’s more of the same down in LA. Yes, those in Santa Monica, Inglewood, Hawthorne, Torrance, and Long Beach will be closer to LAX or LGB, which is nothing to sneeze at. But pretty much everyone else in the entire Santa Clarita-Irvine-Riverside triangle (including most of the city of Los Angeles) will be significantly closer to an HSR station than they are to a major airport.

It doesn’t take a lot to make the train more attractive. SFO-LAX is scheduled at 1’30″ average (ignore for the moment the fact that about 1/3rd of flights are late). If you add on 45 min for check-in, security, and boarding, then all you need is an extra 15 min on each side to make an on-time flight take longer than a 2’45″ HSR ride. And that is ignoring the vastly superior reliability and comfort of HSR. Or the fact that you can actually do work on the train, whereas I have yet to figure out how to do any work while checking in, going through security, boarding, taxiing, or landing and taking off.

I would bet good money that a properly designed HSR system would take a minimum of 70% of the SF-LA air market. We’ve seen it happen time and time again wherever it’s been built.

But we’re talking about Southern California, where the idea that the train is bringing you “downtown” is somewhat laughable. What if your destination is Warner Center? If you’re going to West Los Angeles or Santa Monica, you’ll do much better flying into LAX, even if the plane was as slow as the train.

As it happens, jet aircraft travel three times the speed of HSR, which wins even on a bad security and/or baggage reclaim day. With either mode, you will probably still need to find your way to and from the airport/train station with a rental car, public transit or cab.

I do believe you’re right about capturing those ridership markets, however. I think the trains will fill up relatively fast with a lot of help from isolated communities the thing will run through.

HSR doesn’t need to “turn around” an entire cultural dynamic to be successful. All it needs to do for corridors on which it is competing is capture a majority of the air travelers (which is basically a given – that has happened with basically every single 300 km/h HSR system ever built on a sub-500 mile corridor), 1 in 4 auto travelers on 4+ hour trips, and 1 in 8 auto travelers on 2+ hour trips. Just doing that would make it one of the top 5 HSR systems worldwide.

But let’s be honest about what your true concern is: You’re worried that there will be more, faster trains running by your house in Menlo Park. And it’s true – track speeds will increase from 80 mph (currently) to 125 mph, and total train frequency (HSR + Caltrain) would probably double vis a vis 2020 Caltrain frequencies. However, total noise will likely decrease because all trains will be electrified (much quieter than diesel) and the street crossings at Encinal Ave and Watkins Ave will be eliminated (no more blowing horns ever!). And let’s not forget that you’d benefit from the general rise in property values as the rail commute time from Redwood City/Palo Alto to the SF FiDi dropped from 45 minutes to 25 minutes (track speed improvements + moving Caltrain terminus from 4th & King to downtown). HSR wouldn’t be nearly as bad for you as you think it would be.

Nobody needs to tell me about CA’s car culture. I’ve lived it. I was born and raised in Orange County’s endless suburban sprawl, where you drove the two blocks to the grocery store. Everything was built around driving. Since then I’ve been trained as a historian, with a specialization in 20th century California, and have come to see how fundamental the car culture is to our state.

But that doesn’t mean it will always be there. The car culture emerged at a specific point and time in history, and under certain conditions – cheap oil being first among them. Those conditions are now disappearing, and the car culture WILL disappear with it.

The car culture will die hard, there’s no doubt about it. But it will die, just as the horse and buggy died. A cultural practice that can no longer be sustained by resources or financially supported will die. That is the way of things.

Already Californians have been buying less gas, and using more trains and buses. Urban infill density, and a walk/bike commuter culture, are spreading. And as oil production peaks and its cost continues to rise, suburban sprawl will become untenable, and people will decide that it’s more important to eat and have a home and have savings than to have a car.

In such a situation, HSR is vital to this state’s future. Just as the bay bridges were vital to the 20th century, just as the California Aqueduct was vital. Train ridership is rising on every available service in the state. Californians are demanding alternatives to the car. HSR is that alternative.

A view of the United States from another planet in 1800 would have revealed how deeply slavery was embedded in our society. Few would argue that changing that situation was a bad thing. And that change was hardly easy, and cost the country a lot more than building a train.

Your theory – the car will be here until something superior comes along. The problem – the direction today is not of something else better coming along, the direction is that of the car becoming not all that it was cracked up to be. In 1965, a car was an amazing thing and you really didn’t hear many people complaining about the automobile destroying society.

Now you have stories on a daily basis about people whining about the cost of gas. Car insurance is up. Car fatalities are up. Traffic is worse. Smog is worse. The car contributes to global warming. We are spending some large amount of money on a war that can be argued has at least something to do with securing oil supplies. Housing in far flung suburbs like Antioch is crashing in part because people can’t afford to live there and drive to work – you don’t note prices plummeting in San Francisco, Marin, San Mateo counties.

As it stands, the car culture is becoming progressively more problematic, just from a natural progression of oil fields drying up and it being harder to get more oil, from roads hitting capacity and not being expandable without knocking down rows of houses or building extra bridges/tunnels. This does not include more dire situations if there is a major disruption of oil supplies or the whole global warming thing turns out to be not only real but have consequences we might not have seen yet.

If we do not plan for alternatives, we are screwed. BART has been a boondoggle of monstrous proportions over its lifetime, but I don’t think anyone can debate that without it, the Bay Area would be a much more difficult place. Ditto for Caltrain.
The Capitol Corridor sucks – yet it is attracting ridership. If we had the will to put the capital into it, and yes HSR, people would take it. I don’t buy the counter argument because I have lived my argument, riding the Caltrain every day and seeing the trains carry more people than ever.

John Murphy

If you look simply at the energy-efficiency of rail in general, especially high-speed rail, I see no reason why it would be expensive to ride, since it is, as I recall, several dozen or hundred percent more energy-efficient than driving or flying. Not to mention the far greater capacity which rail lines have over road or air. Plus the building of HSR would help regional transit as well, for example by helping to fund the electrification of Caltrain, which will reduce local air and noise pollution, as well as speeding up transit times. I’ve also heard rumor that it would provide similar benefits to Metrolink in LA.

So as I’ve said, I’d be interested in hearing your theories as to why it’d be a “luxury train”, and if you have any economic or engineering data to back this up.
Cheers,
-Simeon