high speed rail
Which means considerably more $.
The alternative to providing the same capacity as high-speed rail is to add 2,300 highway lane miles, four new airport runways and 115 airport gates
Don't confuse capacity with actual usage. Not only do you have less (often a lot less) than 100% utilization of the trains, but the tracks are unlikely to carry the highest possible number of trains
That having been said LA to SF could be one of the few places in the US (another being the northeastern corridor) where high speed rail could theoretically make sense. Probably not though considering the inflated costs of building things in CA, and the inflated cost of high speed rail even outside of CA
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California’s system won’t even be very high-speed for a long time. While the state is building a short (25-mile) stretch of high-speed rail tracks from Fresno to Madera, for the rest of the distance trains will share tracks with Amtrak and freight, which means speeds will be limited to 79 or, at most, 90 mph.
Moreover, so long as high-speed trains share tracks with conventional trains even for only short distances, they will have to meet federal safety standards to deal with crashes, which means they will be very heavy relative to, say, the Japanese trains that exclusively use their own tracks. Heavy trains mean energy-intensive trains, thus eliminating any of the supposed environmental benefits.
The low end of the latest (meaning three-years-old) estimated cost of building exclusive high-speed rail tracks from Anaheim to San Francisco is $98.5 billion, which works out to about $3,000 per inch. By 2040, when the system might be completed if funds were available, which they aren’t, this cost is certain to rise even more.
To architecture critics, it may seem perfectly appropriate to spend $2,764 per square foot on stations designed to serve $3,000-per-inch rail lines. To the taxpayers who will have to foot the bill–most of whom will never ride the trains–neither expense makes any sense at all.
ti.org
Also it seems even the capacity claims are exaggerated
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At the rail-signing ceremony, Federal Railroad Administration director Joseph Szabo brought up the hoary old claim that one two-track rail line can carry as many people as a sixteen-lane freeway. Let’s check his arithmetic. One freeway lane can move 2,000 cars an hour. Each car can hold an average of 5 people, for 160,000 people an hour. One subway line can move about 30 trains an hour. If the trains are ten cars long and each car is stuffed with 150 passengers, each track moves about 45,000 people, or 90,000 for two tracks.
But high-speed trains aren’t subways. They typically have 80 seats per car and no standing room. Nor can they safely operate every two minutes at 200 miles per hour; the highest frequency high-speed rail line I know of can run fourteen trains per hour. Assuming ten-car trains, two tracks can move 22,400 people an hour, slightly more than two freeway lanes. Thus, Szabo’s claim isn’t true for any rail line, and it is no where near the truth for high-speed trains. (Of course, the cars in freeway lanes aren’t all full, but neither are trains.)
ti.org
True the average car won't have 5 people (but then buses on the same highway typically have more and can carry a lot more), but CA HSR is unlikely to run anywhere close to 14 trains per hour, and probably won't average anywhere close to 80 people per car per trip. |
