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WA Democrats ask Buttigieg for $200M to plan B.C.-Seattle-Portland bullet train
(www.seattletimes.com)
this post was submitted on 15 Aug 2023
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The whole point of this project is to connect San Francisco with Los Angeles, so you are going to need to build through the Central Valley to do so. I don't see SF and LA giving up on the project after they get better commuter rail. It is really more trying to build more useful initial operating segments first.
And the Central Valley cities are car dependent cities with poor mass transit. There is a good reason to take the train into SF or LA, but why take it into downtown Fresno? Even when you get to the train station, are you going to be able to get to the building you want to go to? I can easily see operations start on the first segment and there are tons of stories of empty trains used to try to kill the rest of the project.
And as for the politics, it seems like it would be a better political sell to Fresno to get them to agree to a train going to San Francisco than it would be for a train to Bakersfield.
And if the project stalls, it is better that it stalls out with useful track.
Well, the Bay Area is using CAHSR money to upgrade Caltrain already. That project should be done in a year or two.
What Rendon wanted to do in Socal with Metrolink was to use the money to not do any electrification and use battery-electric trains, which would have been useless.
I agree that battery trains would be useless.
Better urban environments is a fight that's going to have to happen (and currently IS happening under Newsom) all along the HSR alignment, including LA and SF. Central valley cities tend to look like a bomb went off that decapitated any building taller than two stories, but that's something that can be changed with consistent effort over time, and I believe that it will. One of Newsom's top priorities right now is housing affordability and homelessness, and his administration's been fighting with (mostly bay area) NIMBY cities that are desperate to keep their densities low and their housing supply slim. YIMBY movements are starting to spring up all around California, and I've got hope that reforms to promote better, denser urbans are coming down the pipe. What's more is that CAHSR, in addition to several other bills, are helping to find more robust transit and transit oriented development across the state.
As-is, yes, travelling by public transit in central California blows ass. The only saving grace, really, is that CAHSR actually goes THROUGH the cities (for the most part, I think Visalia is the exception), so that you're automatically at your destination when you step off. This is compared to riding the San Joaquins, where it's a total crap shoot whether you'll get dumped in the middle of nowhere (Turlock, Modesto, Madera I think, probably a few others) or somewhere actually kind of useful. So, if our cities can get their shit together, and I think they can in time before the rail opens, then it could actually be a pretty nice experience.
Yeah, if.
I get that HSR will be a benefit to those cities over time, but a lot of that initial benefit would come from connecting a car dependent area to a car hostile area to encourage people to start to take the train. Being close to the train could then spur increased density in housing, which could provide a nucleus for mass transit.
I would definitely go south of the Merced Y before going north, but I feel like the value of HSR to those communities is connecting them to either Los Angeles or San Francisco, not to other Central Valley cities.