First, it would be great to have a terminus at Rancho Cucamonga because it's fun to say "Rancho Cucamonga," especially if you belt it out as the TV announcer would on Lucha Libre night.
"Instead, Brightline’s high-speed trains will terminate in the suburb of Rancho Cucamonga, where riders will be able to transfer to regional Metrolink trains bound for LA. The system would undoubtedly be better if it went those additional 50 miles to LA Union station. But that would be exceedingly expensive and politically challenging." There is so much that I don't understand about relative cost. What are the cost differences between engineering for conventional passenger rail and HSR, and are these differences magnified within populated areas? What speeds can HSR trains operate safely within populated areas? What are the passenger loads of an HSR train at Rancho Cucamonga compared to the passenger capacity on MetroLink?
Definitely a victory for those of us who enjoy the name Rancho Cucamonga.
As for going the final stretch to LA Union Station, the most immediate issues would be electrifying the track and negotiating track time with existing passenger and freight services. It's a busy line, which means if Brightline wanted to use it, they'd probably need to add track. If BLW were to run at anything close to HSR speeds, they'd need to eliminate all grade crossings and smooth out curves, both of which could require some use of eminent domain. All of that would be very expensive and politically fraught.
I am familiar with a similar issue with a HSR plan in Texas. I am also somewhat familiar with the geography of Greater LA, and Rancho Cucamonga is far east of central LA, which is why many logistics nodes are located in the eastern San Gabriel Valley and Inland Empire: to prevent them from getting caught up in LA traffic. Yet these congested areas, that would benefit from modal replacement with rail, are also the politically and economically most expensive locations to redevelop fixed-guideway infrastructure. The HSR intermodal center planned for Houston is central compared to RC, at a dead shopping mall just outside Loop 610. It would be much more costly to run it an addition four miles into the former Texas and New Orleans RR yards. But what makes every plan problematic is the lack of high-volume, local fixed-guideway service. Even if there were a seamless connection to a local transit center at NW Transit Center, it serves only buses and adding light rail would be insufficient to handle the intermodal volumes of intercity passenger rail. That's why I say fix local transit first.
I've been thinking of these kinds of things as the impossible bargain of feel good politics that leads to nothing at all. Very frustrating. Great article!
All valid and true, but not sure it's exactly relevant to the core of Klein's argument: CAHSR is Exhibit A in the case for why "blue" cities and states need to get a lot better at getting things built or face endless trips into the political wilderness.
The one thing I think many people are forgetting here is that without the Valley vote, the Safe, Reliable High-Speed Passenger Train Bond Act for the 21st Century (Proposition 1A) in November 2008 would not have passed. As it was, the bond measure passed but only by a narrow margin. It’s no coincidence that Bakersfield, Fresno, Madera and Merced are all getting high-speed-rail train stations. I’m pretty sure each of these cities voted in favor.
As to the two-hour-forty minute time schedule specified in Prop. 1A for a San Francisco-to-Los Angeles run, this is only for express, non-stop trains, not for end-to-end all-stops trains. As spelled out in the original Prop. 1A language, this was to be over a distance, I believe, of 520 miles. To meet that kind of schedule, average train speed needed to be 195 mph. However, with that distance now whittled down to 464 miles for LA-SF, meeting that should now be an even more likely proposition.
<blockquote>The company’s next project, the under-construction Brightline West system connecting Southern California and Las Vegas will go the French route, stopping short of the urban core of Los Angeles.</blockquote>
No, that definitely is not the French strategy for HSR. <i>Bypass</i> intermediate cities, yes, but always arrive in the heart of the destination city, not its periphery. SNCF's first, and Europe's first, high-speed line, the LGV Sud Est linked Paris to Lyon. It saved 87km by bypassing Dijon which was on the existing rail route, promising that the city would get its own TGV linking to the same LGV into Paris, which it did. Even though the line through the SE suburbs of Greater Paris was slow to begin with, using lines shared with regional rail, it terminated at Gare de Lyon in the heart of Paris (interchange with RER A & D and Metro lines 1 & 14). From memory the trip took about 2h10m initially but now the average time is 1h58m to cover the 409km. Subsequently the LGV Mediteranée linked Lyon to Marseilles, though again to achieve the fastest times the Paris to Marseilles trains bypass Lyon to achieve a remarkable 3h00m to cover the 750km (470 miles) to Marseilles, city-centre to city-centre. (There are separate TGVs that connect Marseilles to the heart of Lyon.)
The Brightline Las Vegas train will stop at Rancho Cucamonga which is 41 miles (66km) to LA Central on Metrolink with average transit time of 1h16m thus making the LA-LV total time 3h26m not counting any wait time between the two trains. It may well still attract plenty of passengers however this points to the reason why HSR has been built exclusively by the state around the world; only the state can make the decision to spend the money, fight the political battles including eminent domain land resumptions, for the expensive, difficult route of HSR into cities to achieve the long-term goal. The Brightline plan acknowledges this with its long-term plan to link to Palmdale so as to use the proposed state-built HSR route into central LA, ie. a one-seat HSR ride all the way LV to Central LA.
Most people in Southern California contemplating a weekend in Las Vegas don't necessarily live in Downtown LA. They might live in Encino, Pasadena, Santa Monica, Fullerton or Newport Beach. The scenario of multiple transit connections (carrying luggage!) just to get to the Brightline station in Rancho Cucamonga will have to compete with a short Uber ride to the nearest airport or just get in the car and drive.
That is an argument for better city transit for LA. But even in its poor coverage, compared to equivalent cities elsewhere in the world, the Metro lines that converge on Union Station are covering a fair proportion of the city and more than any other single point. Obviously you are right that travellers want a single seat ride and that will always be a challenge in such a sprawl as LA + OC. OTOH Paris, if not sprawled, is not dissimilar in the vast area that its transit serves, ie. the 12m people who live in Ile de France, some at the far end ≥50km of an RER line. To be fair, a lot ≈8m live much closer in the Petite Curonne (inner ring, within ≈15km of the centre of Paris). The 66km to Cucamonga is way too far to expect many Los Angelenos to get to, especially by slow regional rail with many stops en route (Metrolink) and I'd say Brightline are taking a big risk, or perhaps planning on some other intervention/solution?
What I don't quite understand is that Metrolink apparently has its own ROW of standard gauge then why can't Brightline negotiate to use it? (I see that management is passing from Amtrak to Alstom this year; Alstom is the French company that builds the TGV--and the NEC's Acela trains.) It would be very slow but vastly better than their current expectations of what Americans will do. Answering my own question, probably a mix of: 1. non-electrified; 2. Metrolink share with freight trains and 3. ridiculous FRA rules (and potentially 4. level crossings?). Of course it is the proposed route for CaHSR Phase 2 but that is very complex, hyper-expensive and frozen for foreseeable future. As I said in my first post, I am pretty sure the Paris-Lyon TGVs shared the line for the last 50 or so kilometres into Paris with regional rail* but the wild success of the line meant it was easy politically to improve the ROW and perhaps some track straightening to speed up that last bit. (*Just checked and it still shares with RER into Gare de Lyon but perhaps it uses passing-loops for the suburban stations; don't know. Euro cities do have the big advantage of lots and lots of tracks into their 19th century central terminals though even London has had to build extremely expensive tunnels for HS1 & HS2 for the final ≈10km.)
Despite all these issues, like many who love using HS trains, I continue to believe that once Americans have actually experienced what true HSR travel is like, they will embrace it. All the blather fades into nothing when you can have a smooth relaxing trip even having a sit-down lunch in the restaurant car, compared to the emiserating horror of current air-travel (and which is worse in the USA than anywhere I know of).
If HSR became wildly popular, wouldn’t the stations and trains become as crowded and chaotic as airports and airplanes? And wouldn’t a crowded high speed train be a tempting terrorist target requiring TSA screening?
One doesn't need to know much about either trains or TGVs to know none of that is true.
Your last question first. HSR has been around since the 60s in Japan and since the 1981 in Europe. Have you ever heard of a large-scale terrorist event on such a train? No. Train stations yes, like the Madrid bombing.
On the other issues, trains can get crowded like they do from time to time in Japan, though they run 3 classes of service that reduces the likelihood on the fastest intercity services. It can't happen on French TGVs or the Eurostar (London-Paris) because everyone has to have a seat (reservation automatic upon buying a ticket, even at the last minute). However trains have large capacity. For example the TGV has 16 cars in duplex that allows 1016 seats (with a restaurant car) while the Japanese N700 has no restaurant car and 2+3 seating for total of 1322 passengers. It doesn't need many such trains per hour to exceed most demand.
When Paris-Lyon TGV opened, air service between the two cities almost died in the first year; today the train carries 20m p.a. When London-Paris/Brussels Eurostar began it likewise took about 70% of passengers and flying options were greatly reduced; today Eurostar has about 10m p.a. Paris-Bordeaux (522km in 2h00m) is its second busiest with almost 20m p.a. (pre-Covid). Why would anyone fly these routes? The airlines continue on these routes partly from hub traffic, ie. airlines selling multiple-leg tickets; however even this is changing in that high-speed train sectors out of Amsterdam-Schiphol, Paris-CDG and Frankfurt are labelled as “flight numbers” for Air France, Lufthansa and KLM, ie. as code-share option for international flyers.
These days it takes almost as long to get to the airport then progress thru all the check-in and security-theatre drudgery. Even the longest TGV route between Paris - Marseilles (660km, 3h07m) took over 50% of air pax. And it may surprise you to know that there is no city-pair in the US with more than 10m pax p.a. The top US pair is NYCJFK-LAX with 3.8m (though one would have to add in NJ-EWG which is under 2m pax for that route). LA to LV isn't in the top 10 city pair air routes. The busiest Amtrak route of the NEC could easily handle many fold more pax especially if they could actually run at high-speed. So crowding is not an issue.
Brightline’s Las Vegas train got I think a couple billion in federal subsidies. Why shouldn’t the casinos pay for infrastructure that brings in their customers?
First, it would be great to have a terminus at Rancho Cucamonga because it's fun to say "Rancho Cucamonga," especially if you belt it out as the TV announcer would on Lucha Libre night.
"Instead, Brightline’s high-speed trains will terminate in the suburb of Rancho Cucamonga, where riders will be able to transfer to regional Metrolink trains bound for LA. The system would undoubtedly be better if it went those additional 50 miles to LA Union station. But that would be exceedingly expensive and politically challenging." There is so much that I don't understand about relative cost. What are the cost differences between engineering for conventional passenger rail and HSR, and are these differences magnified within populated areas? What speeds can HSR trains operate safely within populated areas? What are the passenger loads of an HSR train at Rancho Cucamonga compared to the passenger capacity on MetroLink?
Definitely a victory for those of us who enjoy the name Rancho Cucamonga.
As for going the final stretch to LA Union Station, the most immediate issues would be electrifying the track and negotiating track time with existing passenger and freight services. It's a busy line, which means if Brightline wanted to use it, they'd probably need to add track. If BLW were to run at anything close to HSR speeds, they'd need to eliminate all grade crossings and smooth out curves, both of which could require some use of eminent domain. All of that would be very expensive and politically fraught.
I am familiar with a similar issue with a HSR plan in Texas. I am also somewhat familiar with the geography of Greater LA, and Rancho Cucamonga is far east of central LA, which is why many logistics nodes are located in the eastern San Gabriel Valley and Inland Empire: to prevent them from getting caught up in LA traffic. Yet these congested areas, that would benefit from modal replacement with rail, are also the politically and economically most expensive locations to redevelop fixed-guideway infrastructure. The HSR intermodal center planned for Houston is central compared to RC, at a dead shopping mall just outside Loop 610. It would be much more costly to run it an addition four miles into the former Texas and New Orleans RR yards. But what makes every plan problematic is the lack of high-volume, local fixed-guideway service. Even if there were a seamless connection to a local transit center at NW Transit Center, it serves only buses and adding light rail would be insufficient to handle the intermodal volumes of intercity passenger rail. That's why I say fix local transit first.
I've been thinking of these kinds of things as the impossible bargain of feel good politics that leads to nothing at all. Very frustrating. Great article!
All valid and true, but not sure it's exactly relevant to the core of Klein's argument: CAHSR is Exhibit A in the case for why "blue" cities and states need to get a lot better at getting things built or face endless trips into the political wilderness.
The one thing I think many people are forgetting here is that without the Valley vote, the Safe, Reliable High-Speed Passenger Train Bond Act for the 21st Century (Proposition 1A) in November 2008 would not have passed. As it was, the bond measure passed but only by a narrow margin. It’s no coincidence that Bakersfield, Fresno, Madera and Merced are all getting high-speed-rail train stations. I’m pretty sure each of these cities voted in favor.
As to the two-hour-forty minute time schedule specified in Prop. 1A for a San Francisco-to-Los Angeles run, this is only for express, non-stop trains, not for end-to-end all-stops trains. As spelled out in the original Prop. 1A language, this was to be over a distance, I believe, of 520 miles. To meet that kind of schedule, average train speed needed to be 195 mph. However, with that distance now whittled down to 464 miles for LA-SF, meeting that should now be an even more likely proposition.
<blockquote>The company’s next project, the under-construction Brightline West system connecting Southern California and Las Vegas will go the French route, stopping short of the urban core of Los Angeles.</blockquote>
No, that definitely is not the French strategy for HSR. <i>Bypass</i> intermediate cities, yes, but always arrive in the heart of the destination city, not its periphery. SNCF's first, and Europe's first, high-speed line, the LGV Sud Est linked Paris to Lyon. It saved 87km by bypassing Dijon which was on the existing rail route, promising that the city would get its own TGV linking to the same LGV into Paris, which it did. Even though the line through the SE suburbs of Greater Paris was slow to begin with, using lines shared with regional rail, it terminated at Gare de Lyon in the heart of Paris (interchange with RER A & D and Metro lines 1 & 14). From memory the trip took about 2h10m initially but now the average time is 1h58m to cover the 409km. Subsequently the LGV Mediteranée linked Lyon to Marseilles, though again to achieve the fastest times the Paris to Marseilles trains bypass Lyon to achieve a remarkable 3h00m to cover the 750km (470 miles) to Marseilles, city-centre to city-centre. (There are separate TGVs that connect Marseilles to the heart of Lyon.)
The Brightline Las Vegas train will stop at Rancho Cucamonga which is 41 miles (66km) to LA Central on Metrolink with average transit time of 1h16m thus making the LA-LV total time 3h26m not counting any wait time between the two trains. It may well still attract plenty of passengers however this points to the reason why HSR has been built exclusively by the state around the world; only the state can make the decision to spend the money, fight the political battles including eminent domain land resumptions, for the expensive, difficult route of HSR into cities to achieve the long-term goal. The Brightline plan acknowledges this with its long-term plan to link to Palmdale so as to use the proposed state-built HSR route into central LA, ie. a one-seat HSR ride all the way LV to Central LA.
Most people in Southern California contemplating a weekend in Las Vegas don't necessarily live in Downtown LA. They might live in Encino, Pasadena, Santa Monica, Fullerton or Newport Beach. The scenario of multiple transit connections (carrying luggage!) just to get to the Brightline station in Rancho Cucamonga will have to compete with a short Uber ride to the nearest airport or just get in the car and drive.
That is an argument for better city transit for LA. But even in its poor coverage, compared to equivalent cities elsewhere in the world, the Metro lines that converge on Union Station are covering a fair proportion of the city and more than any other single point. Obviously you are right that travellers want a single seat ride and that will always be a challenge in such a sprawl as LA + OC. OTOH Paris, if not sprawled, is not dissimilar in the vast area that its transit serves, ie. the 12m people who live in Ile de France, some at the far end ≥50km of an RER line. To be fair, a lot ≈8m live much closer in the Petite Curonne (inner ring, within ≈15km of the centre of Paris). The 66km to Cucamonga is way too far to expect many Los Angelenos to get to, especially by slow regional rail with many stops en route (Metrolink) and I'd say Brightline are taking a big risk, or perhaps planning on some other intervention/solution?
What I don't quite understand is that Metrolink apparently has its own ROW of standard gauge then why can't Brightline negotiate to use it? (I see that management is passing from Amtrak to Alstom this year; Alstom is the French company that builds the TGV--and the NEC's Acela trains.) It would be very slow but vastly better than their current expectations of what Americans will do. Answering my own question, probably a mix of: 1. non-electrified; 2. Metrolink share with freight trains and 3. ridiculous FRA rules (and potentially 4. level crossings?). Of course it is the proposed route for CaHSR Phase 2 but that is very complex, hyper-expensive and frozen for foreseeable future. As I said in my first post, I am pretty sure the Paris-Lyon TGVs shared the line for the last 50 or so kilometres into Paris with regional rail* but the wild success of the line meant it was easy politically to improve the ROW and perhaps some track straightening to speed up that last bit. (*Just checked and it still shares with RER into Gare de Lyon but perhaps it uses passing-loops for the suburban stations; don't know. Euro cities do have the big advantage of lots and lots of tracks into their 19th century central terminals though even London has had to build extremely expensive tunnels for HS1 & HS2 for the final ≈10km.)
Despite all these issues, like many who love using HS trains, I continue to believe that once Americans have actually experienced what true HSR travel is like, they will embrace it. All the blather fades into nothing when you can have a smooth relaxing trip even having a sit-down lunch in the restaurant car, compared to the emiserating horror of current air-travel (and which is worse in the USA than anywhere I know of).
If HSR became wildly popular, wouldn’t the stations and trains become as crowded and chaotic as airports and airplanes? And wouldn’t a crowded high speed train be a tempting terrorist target requiring TSA screening?
One doesn't need to know much about either trains or TGVs to know none of that is true.
Your last question first. HSR has been around since the 60s in Japan and since the 1981 in Europe. Have you ever heard of a large-scale terrorist event on such a train? No. Train stations yes, like the Madrid bombing.
On the other issues, trains can get crowded like they do from time to time in Japan, though they run 3 classes of service that reduces the likelihood on the fastest intercity services. It can't happen on French TGVs or the Eurostar (London-Paris) because everyone has to have a seat (reservation automatic upon buying a ticket, even at the last minute). However trains have large capacity. For example the TGV has 16 cars in duplex that allows 1016 seats (with a restaurant car) while the Japanese N700 has no restaurant car and 2+3 seating for total of 1322 passengers. It doesn't need many such trains per hour to exceed most demand.
When Paris-Lyon TGV opened, air service between the two cities almost died in the first year; today the train carries 20m p.a. When London-Paris/Brussels Eurostar began it likewise took about 70% of passengers and flying options were greatly reduced; today Eurostar has about 10m p.a. Paris-Bordeaux (522km in 2h00m) is its second busiest with almost 20m p.a. (pre-Covid). Why would anyone fly these routes? The airlines continue on these routes partly from hub traffic, ie. airlines selling multiple-leg tickets; however even this is changing in that high-speed train sectors out of Amsterdam-Schiphol, Paris-CDG and Frankfurt are labelled as “flight numbers” for Air France, Lufthansa and KLM, ie. as code-share option for international flyers.
These days it takes almost as long to get to the airport then progress thru all the check-in and security-theatre drudgery. Even the longest TGV route between Paris - Marseilles (660km, 3h07m) took over 50% of air pax. And it may surprise you to know that there is no city-pair in the US with more than 10m pax p.a. The top US pair is NYCJFK-LAX with 3.8m (though one would have to add in NJ-EWG which is under 2m pax for that route). LA to LV isn't in the top 10 city pair air routes. The busiest Amtrak route of the NEC could easily handle many fold more pax especially if they could actually run at high-speed. So crowding is not an issue.
Brightline’s Las Vegas train got I think a couple billion in federal subsidies. Why shouldn’t the casinos pay for infrastructure that brings in their customers?