

California Isn’t Backing Off Bullet Train  - danso
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/27/us/california-rail-project-advances-amid-cries-of-boondoggle.html?hp

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uuilly
For the last two years I worked on autonomous cars. The one thing everyone in
our company agreed on, regardless of political persuasion, was that robo-cars
were going to thunder fuck the high speed rail. A 2033 deadline makes this all
but certain.

~~~
necubi
They seem to have little in common, aside from the fact that both get people
from A to B with relatively little attention required on the part of the
people.

High speed rail is:

(a) Vastly more efficient

(b) Much faster (SF -> LA in < 3 hours, versus ~6.5 for a car)

(c) Not subject to traffic (which can greatly increase the latter time)

(d) Much more comfortable (compare Amtrak to a private automobile)

How do autonomous cars overcome these deficiencies?

~~~
mkramlich
Trains and buses suffers from last mile problems on each end. And you
sometimes/often have to share an air space with rude, dirty, sometimes crazy
people. Not so with individual vehicles. Now make them electric (to reduce
pollution and enabling the getting off of fossil fuels) and automated (to
reduce frequency of accidents, and wear-and-tear caused by aggressive driving,
etc, etc.) and the trade-offs can look attractive.

~~~
bsimpson
Admittedly, I'm no expert on electric cars, but they always make me feel like
the emperor isn't wearing any clothes.

Electricity is frequently generated by fossil fuels like coal. Electric cars
don't reduce pollution, they just move it to wherever the coal is being
burned.

You have to get the electricity to the car from the far-away power plant,
which means you're going to suffer from transmission loss (e.g. not every watt
that is generated is going to make it to your drivetrain).

Finally, we suck at making batteries. They're still big heavy lumps of highly
toxic materials that wear out in relatively short amounts of time. What do you
do with all the exhausted batteries?

Like everyone, I'm all for making our infrastructure more environmentally-
friendly. Sadly, I'm not convinced electric vehicles are anywhere close to
where we'd need them to be. I feel like we have a lot of misplaced enthusiasm
from people who want to clean up the industrial age a lot sooner than we
realistically can.

~~~
georgieporgie
_Electric cars don't reduce pollution_

They most certainly do. Even the latest, most wonderfully advanced gasoline
engines are positively filthy compared to a modern coal plant, which is
positive filthy compared to a nuclear plant, which is positively filthy
compared to a solar/wind/wave plant.

~~~
ars
You have that last one backwards, nuclear is cleaner than solar/wind/wave,
because you are forgetting just how much land those need.

~~~
georgieporgie
How does land use have anything to do with pollution?

~~~
ars
Because you have to construct them, and it takes a ton of energy to do so. The
construction process also produces a lot of waste.

~~~
easp
You aren't taking into consideration the vast amounts of concrete and steel
that go into a nuclear plant, nor the mining and refining of the uranium, nor,
for that matter, it's disposal.

Further, I think you are overestimating the impact of building and deploying
wind turbines. They may require a lot of land, but their physical footprint is
pretty small, and most of the land around them can be used for other purposes,
like agriculture.

~~~
ars
I am taking those into consideration. A nuclear plant produces a tremendous
amount of energy for the materials it's made from.

I was doing the math, and this document popped up as a search:
[https://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&q=cache:UjtsvTfrOgQJ:...](https://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&q=cache:UjtsvTfrOgQJ:www.ecolo.org/documents/documents_in_english/wind-
concrete-
steel-07.doc+&hl=en&gl=us&pid=bl&srcid=ADGEEShS9RRktG_eNeqbnoTZa_JCkPBNZdqboYOE6i7beemDjgYK4GJc5ZryJJ8i4MxfiO2YK7R87bOBIySvVayW7VC2GcwnxUWIM4zVwVP7LPYJ6blgXqoGy4Ub8FUQv_pkbIdPcYnp&sig=AHIEtbSQTCLuYOK3u4CG37_QbqZXH6EdLw)

So they did the math for me - wind turbines require 60 times as many resources
as nuclear. The amount of uranium needed is tiny, very very tiny. And all the
uranium ever made can be disposed of in one site, it's not really a lot.

They also require far far more land. I don't just mean how much air space, but
the actual tower.

Wind turbines are better than coal, and since we are building lots of coal
plants I am all for wind. But they are not better than nuclear - not even
close.

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fragsworth
As a resident of Los Angeles, I don't see why we are funding this project
ahead of advancing L.A.'s pathetic rail/subway system.

Traffic in L.A. is so bad during rush "hour" (which lasts several hours) that
you can't travel by car faster than walking speed. It routinely takes 30+
minutes to travel 3 miles or so. Car is your only option in most locations.

The state would benefit from a solid metro system in L.A. FAR more than one
between L.A. and S.F.

I can only hope that this metro will link Downtown L.A. to West L.A. and spur
local metro development.

~~~
hemancuso
> Traffic in L.A. is so bad during rush "hour" (which lasts several hours)
> that you can't travel by car faster than walking speed. It routinely takes
> 30+ minutes to travel 3 miles or so. Car is your only option in most
> locations.

Bicycles? Have you heard of'm?

~~~
bravura
Have you tried to bike from Venice Beach to Silverlake? 90 minutes. Santa
Monica to Hollywood? 1 hour.

For long journeys, public transportation.

~~~
benjiweber
If only there were some way to combine them <http://www.brompton.co.uk/>

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curt
There are only two profitable high-speed rail lines in the ENTIRE WORLD. One
in Japan and I believe the other is in France. High speed rail just doesn't
make sense especially in the spread out urban centers that make up the US. The
last mile problem is huge.

Someone commented on the airports being near capacity. That's only because our
air traffic system is horrible. If they updated the system and automated much
of it, we could drastically increase capacity since the planes could fly
straighter routes instead of the current zig zap pattern and fly much closer
together safely. Sadly the air traffic controllers union won't allow the
changes since they'll lose jobs in the productivity increase.

~~~
wiredfool
No, right now the big constraint on air travel is runways.

You need 3,5, or 7 miles between planes depending on size, and that works out
to one flight every minute or two per non-conflicting runway. Seattle just
completed a third parallel runway, that gives them three simultaneous ops in
good weather, and two in bad. Atlanta has 5 or 6 now.

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VladRussian
>But for many Californians, struggling through a bleak era that has led some
people to wonder if the state’s golden days are behind it, this project goes
to the heart of the state’s pioneering spirit, recalling grand public
investments in universities, water systems, roads and parks that once defined
California as the leading edge of the nation.

well, why don't we return the golden days and invest these billions in the
universities, water systems, roads and parks ... And if there some money left
- for healthcare and basic school education. That would definitely put CA back
on the leading edge of the nation.

~~~
nobody314159265
Invest in roads - presumably for cars powered by oil to drive on?

Now that's a long term vision of the future!

~~~
VladRussian
>Invest in roads - presumably for cars to drive on powered by oil. Now that's
a long term vision of the future!

roads are presumably for wheeled vehicles. Until you can show a good prospects
for flying cars, we need roads.

Edit: Despite the lobby and being favored by the political system, the use of
fossil fuels in cars is going away. Even today, the 30KW batteries weighting
500kg will get you 150mi range at the price $10-20K - about the price and
weight of ICE engine + transmission. The avalanche is starting ... The
argument that there is no infrastructure to fill-up the electric cars is BS -
the electricity is everywhere, including existing gas stations. Some upgrades
may be necessary though - this is exactly minor (compare to the rail system)
investment that would provide huge return.

~~~
nobody314159265
To be pulled by horses or mexican immigrants ?

Edit: well you might get the range if you want to drive tiny little Honda golf
carts at 30mph. But what about real men that want to drive a 5000hp electric
train at 300mph

~~~
stretchwithme
apparently.

------
leoh
It's not a terrible idea, but our Public university system is crumbling on 3
billion a year and Brown wants to invest 98 billion (an average of roughly 4.6
billion a year) on a train.

Sounds like a bad long term strategy to me. Then again, epic public projects
are huge sources of pride and tell the world "California is not falling into
the past," unlike so many other aspects of a country in mature decline.

I think that free or 1980's level-priced UC education would easily be on par
with a train, if not even better; especially what's been said about autonomous
driving. For all we know, if states play their hand right, there could be a
ton of never-before-seen widespread private fundin for road systems, if this
whole autonomous thing takes off.

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mkramlich
Public transit: more efficient on the macro scale, but less on the micro
(individual) scale. Close that gap and you'll have me, and probably a lot of
other folks, and not before. As others have mentioned in this thread, perhaps
robo-cars can fill that role.

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callmeed
My family owns a 320 acre ranch in the valley and one of the proposed rail
routes runs right through it. I've yet to hear details on how the state plans
to handle compensation.

~~~
Anechoic
IME the state won't start talking compensation until after the Final
Environmental Impact Report has been accepted for your segment.

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vacri
I visited California in 2009 and found it very strange that there wasn't a
daily direct train between the two largest cities. Every second day there was
a connecting bus between LA and Bakersfield.

Two largest cities in the world's eigth largest economy, and there's no daily
train between them. Very odd.

~~~
Sanddancer
San Francisco is not the largest city in the area (San Jose has about 200,000
more people), let alone the state (San Diego has more than San Jose), and has
a number of geographical problems with any associated train system between Los
Angeles and San Francisco. Because it's at the edge of a peninsula, getting
from anywhere else requires fairly significant engineering feats, and due to
the slowness of Amtrak, most people don't want to take an 8+ hour train trip;
both flying and driving are faster than the train.

~~~
vacri
We may measure city populations differently - where I am, we go by the
metropolitan area. Wikipedia lists SF as a metro population of 4 million, San
Diego 3, and San Jose only 2.

The bulk of the trip is outside SF though - that 8+ hours has little to do
with the very end of the trip... something a bullet train might help with.

