mgescuro

BUt air travel and car travel have a number of hidden costs. Gas, tires, not to mention the time expense. So what if a "Palmdale" airport is built to alleviate traffic? How do you get to downtown LA? Taxi? rental car? What's teh addiitonal time to downtown LA? 1-2 hrs? SF to LA on high-speed rail would be 3-4 hrs. Let's see... u need to arrive 2 hrs before your flight + 1 hour in air... already 3 hours. Then road time. Oops. Well, what's faster? Plus the author complains about the cost, yet the expansion of LAX costs $8-12B!!??? For what? So it can handle the A380? Plus does nothing for road traffic at all! Furthermore, LA doesn't have the "mass transit mentality" that SF has. LA is the definition of sprawl. SF is the definition of density. If you want to get somewhere in LA... you drive. Period. No ifs ands or buts. There's no "downtown core" like SF or NYC, where there is hustle and bustle. Mass transit will get you anywhere you want to go in SF, whereas in LA, even with the added lines, you're still not going to get anywhere because everything is too far spread out. LA doesn't promote foot traffic. It promotes driving. High speed rail will work best in CA, but the mentality of driving vs mass transit in CA needs to change.

Well, that's all fine and dandy, but LA's mentality regarding such things is completely bass ackwards. Plus in LA, you need a car to even get around, so a train from SF to LA will have a disconnect in LA, because what do you do in LA without a car? Arrive in SF, and you're in the heart of downtown at the new Transbay Center. You connect to BART, CalTrain, Muni, and dozens of bus lines. Or just walk to your destination. SF Bay Area's 9 counties population of 11M+ plus Los Angeles and San Diego's millions more, you simply cannot keep building multiple airports. What happens to ground traffic? SF Bay's BART system is pretty taxed as it is. THey can't squeeze anymore trains through the Tube. Build an airport in Palmdale, how long will it take to get to Downtown LA? How about from John Wayne? Ontario? High speed bullet train is a smart choice for California. The population growth and density requires alternatives to cars and planes.

Yeah.. Amtrak's Acela. It also has that novel tilt feature, so it can handle curves, but that also means it can't go very fast. I think the proposal was for a 200+mph high-speed train. IT owul dhave to be straight and have a fully graded and separated throughout the majority of the run. Most likely, it would run throught the valleys -- Sacramento, Bakerfield, stockton, Palmdale. But the point would be to connect SF, LA, and SD. I don't have to tell you that making its way into SF would be pretty sticky, since it has to run through the heart of Silicon Valley... or run over a bridge.. or run through another Transbay Tube.

The US only has one high-speed line... and it's not very fast. California is in the process of trying to establish a true high-speed rail line. When that will be completed is anyone's guess. But San Francisco has already begun planning the new Transbay Terminal to handle said high-speed train.