Discussion on:

California's high-speed rail as an energy lifeline

...even the sheeple are now against it, now that it's obvious to even grade-school dropouts that the math simply doesn't work. (Recent polls have support below 40%) It's the political establishment that is going ahead with the scam in defiance of the people, and the requirements of the bond referendum that started it.

so I haven't kept up much with the goings-on there. Good to know that some of them are waking up (hopefully) from their idiotic celebrity worship (a problem which infects the rest of the country as well) and paying attention. Nothing new about the political establishment going against the will of the people. They've pretty much been doing that the entire 27 years (over three different periods) that I lived there. It's been steadily getting worse (they actually returned Jerry Brown to the governorship, I guess they didn't learn the first time or from his experience as Oakland's mayor). That's partly why I left.

...just before "rolling blackout" became part of the lexicon.

And they shouldn't have needed Brown's tenure at Oakland; his governorship 2 decades earlier that left the state billions in debt (suppressed and revealed the day after his failed re-election bid) should have been enough.

The good old USA is sucking hind ***. Ware not much of a world leader now. We are behind on any thing exept Space. we need to move on. We need high speed rail yesterday .

...bankruptcy, alibet not by much.

The USA is number 1 in fracking, by a long long way.

We're number 1 in producing natural gas.

We're number 3 in oil production (number 1 in democratic countries, since numbers 1 and 2 are Saudi Arabia and Russia).

And obviously the US is number 1 in software and high tech. FB, MSFT, AMZN, IBM, AAPL, etc. (This was the field Nelder was run out of before he became a self-styled energy analyst).

I'm not obese (far from it, I'm sure I could dust Nelder on a mountain climb) but I have a few friends who are both large, and lovely to be around. Can we dispense with the phrases like " odiously huge " when referring to them?

Actually, we can. I guess the question is, can Nelder? It makes his writing not only shallow, but callow as well.

The savings seem like pie-in-the-sky, and experience tells us that construction costs go way out of bounds, especially since we have no experience actually building these projects.

And we always talk about personal savings, but once you have to pay for more than one ticket, your savings disappear. I don't know what the price of the rail ticket will be, but I suspect that taking a family of 4 on a trip will still be less expensive in the family car.

Regarding the airlines being optimized for $40/bbl oil, those planes get roughly twice the mileage they used to, as I understand, so $86/bbl isn't that bad. $100/bbl is, though!

That said, I agree that we ought to have high speed rail in a lot of places. Houston to Dallas would be great. As of now, it's quicker to drive that route than to fly when getting to the airport and waiting are factored in.

I'm not even sure that things like savings based on current energy use makes sense. What we're talking about is being able to keep up with increased population 20 years from now, and there simply may be no other choice. Someone mentioned using larger airplanes as number of passengers increases, but extra cars can be added to the trains as well.

Somebody needs to come up with a comprehensive and truly realistic set of numbers.

But we do have experience...look at the non-functionality of the east cost line and the $$ wasted, look at the waste of the RTD Denver's FasTraks...how many examples do we need? The LA-Las Vegas line makes sense, maybe Las Vegas/Albquerque/Dallas, etc..all through very lightly populated areas.

- but no one has mentioned that the overwhelming majority of California's traffic demands (and therefore the root cause of nearly all congestion) relate to East/West and not North/South-bound traffic, as this iteration of HSR would supposedly address.

One can only wonder who stands to benefit from this project (and why proponents had to lie about the true costs at the time of the ballot proposition). As usual, the losers will be current and future generations of those tax payers still willing to reside in this politically dysfunctional state.

Googles self-driving cars are on the road right now.

Designate some "self-driving car only" lanes, charge an extra toll for access, and then self-driving "platoon driving" (with no rubber necking) will solve quite a bit of the congestion we have now. With the extra toll and the reduction in accidents, it will be a net win financially.

CA should lead the way with self-driving cars, instead of taxpayer boondoogles.

HSR is meant to compete with inter-city air travel, not urban freeway congestion. Building this fraud will not solve LA's traffic. If anything, it will make it worse by diverting resources from solving those problems.

That this confusion keeps coming up is just a demonstration of the fact that most people pushing for HSR do not have a clue as to what they are talking about.

I agree, HSR will do nothing to address the congestion problem.

The advocates of HSR are behind some "car free" utopia of their own choosing. When really, the pain reducer most people want is self-driving cars, so that traffic jams become some combination of "less common, less painful".

Seriously, self driving cars are legal in NV? But not CA? That's stupid.

Even if I can't (legally) text or drive while my car manages the stop-and-go for a half hour, I'd prefer to just daydream a bit.

(In reality, I'll whip out my Kindle and read while my self-driving car slugs through the traffic jam. I'll put the Kindle away for normal driving, done by me or the car).

What's stopping this from happening right now? The tech? No, the tech is there. The cost? No. Google estimates this is a 5K feature, at most.

The government? Yes. The government is stopping me from purchasing and using a technology that would make my life more pleasant and safer for all parties. Lovely counterpoint to the HSR boondoogle, where the government is taking my money and spending it on an elaborate scheme that almost no-one wants.

I want to see high speed trains to Las Vegas

...do you want to pay for it?

This will be a millstone around the necks of California taxpayers. I've been on Spain's HSR lines, and yes, they are nice, but also highly subsidized by sky-high fuel taxes. They also overcame the NIMBY crowds that California didn't, and their HSR lines go into central Madrid, Barcelona, Sevilla, etc. California HSR is starting in the middle of nowhere almost 75 miles from 'Frisco, and it is going to end in the desert near Barstow, about 75 miles from LA. Start = end = nowhere, and the connectors to SF and LA will never get built means California HSR = boondoggle.

The biggest drawback with any rail transport is that they are spinal, in that they go in one direction in a serpentine or in a sinuate run and connect only a few places. They lack sprawl. Railways can never form a network. When railways ran on steam there were frequent stops for water & coal and these stops became nucleus for the growth of small towns where people built houses very close to the stops. Some of these towns became cities and now most people live far away from these stops which became stations with the advent of diesel & electric trains. For people living far away from stations individually owned cars are a blessing since they enjoy doorstep delivery and also enjoy the freedom of personal travel schedule. High Speed Trains are a great privilege for a selected few who live close to the stations but for those who have to surrender their land for building this luxury have only the pleasure of seeing the High Speed Trains whiz past their houses with no hopes of ever enjoying a ride on this White Elephant. It is robbing Peter to pay Paul. HST is the work of modern day Robin Hoods. HST will make contractors, politicians, trade unions & government officials rich. Agricultural land will be wasted and thousands of trees will have to chopped down. Any new transport system which focuses on Green Design needs to have the quality of encouraging cars owners to give up their addiction to personal cars and this is possible only when the transport system replicates the Network or Sprawl of the roads and also when the system has the design capability to provide individual transport without dependence on time table or schedules or routes. Any new transport system must guarantee the same autonomy which the personal car gives - personal mobility. A paradigm shift in thinking and a quantum leap in technology is needed to make a safe, green and cost effective personal mobility system available. In this connection a new technology is being developed which addresses all the problems of modern day transport especially safety and prevention of accidents. With this new technology the entire 880 mile project can be completed in 5 years instead of 20 years, $10billion instead of $68Billion, with offline stops at every quarter mile instead of 200 miles (giving everyone the opportunity to avail the facility and increasing ridership and also economic viability), with 1% energy consumption of the HST, suitable for short distance travel as well as long distance travel (increasing capacity utilisation with revenue addition). With no waste of agricultural land. No need to destroy forest cover. No land acquisition issues.Ofcourse the speed will be less (100/mph). But does speed matter when you have the choice of personal mobility and do not have to depend on the HST time table. The new technology is accident free (China already has had two major accidents in just two years). It enables zero pollution. This technology will be soon be available for commercialisation.