CAHSR was killed decades ago by politics and corruption. whether or not choosing the valley route over I5 doomed the project is debatable, but choosing pacheco and tehachapi over altamont and tejon certainly did.
your guess is as good as mine as to why things like water infrastructure and telecoms are quietly built to requirements in the background while rail infrastructure is opened to the public forum, but the inability or unwillingness of the state government to go full climate stalin on this project and design it without compromise killed it.
Outside of work reasons I don't know many people who actually travel between these cities on a regular basis. Maybe once or twice a year for that?
I would argue the east coast works much differently. The traffic patterns are not so much between NYC and DC, but most people moving in and out of dense areas. Much of the Acela is M-F commuter traffic.
If it actually worked like Japan (and China?) maybe? In Japan, if I want to go from Tokyo to Osaka, I just take a local train/subway to the station and buy a ticket for the next bullet train. I can get the tickets on my phone as I'm on the subway (or buy them at the machine at the station). There is always a train within 5-10 minutes. There are trains pretty much every 5 minutes, some are express (5 stops to Osaka), some less express (~12 stops), and some go all they way to Kyushu. The only time this isn't true is the 3-4 weeks a year when everyone travels and the trains are full. On those weeks you need to get tickets in advance.
The point being, it's so convienent I can decide to visit my friends for a picnic and come back the same day (yes I have done this) with no pre-planning. I have not pre-purchased a ticket in years.
I don't expect California to have trains every 5 to 10 minutes. I also expect they might fuck it up like Spain and require baggage inspection. I do expect that if they finish building it (I don't think they will) that by the time they do, Waymo and similar services will be ubiquitous and so it might actually be useful.
the opportunity cost isn't a 7% increase in length, it's the tens of billions in extra infrastructure to build 350km/h right of way straight through the middle of every town all the way down the central valley, and the massive hit to SF-LA run time that will come with that. beyond the stop penalty, HSR just doesn't run at full speed through city centers anywhere in the world. doesn't happen.
> HSR just doesn't run at full speed through city centers anywhere in the world. doesn't happen.
Wrong. It's most definitely a thing in quite a few mid-sized Japanese cities. Here's a compilation video taken at Fukushima Station (https://youtu.be/K-wkX3vFU_A?t=403) on the fastest 320 km/h line for example. You can check for yourself that the station is dead smack downtown in a city of 275,000.
At the world level it doesn't tend to happen because existing developments in cities usually strongly inhibit the construction of straight rail alignments that can support high-speed operations. But that's not a problem in the Central Valley – they're blessed with excellent existing rights-of-way.
As I wrote elsewhere, the average speed of CA HSR (as planned) is 250 km/h, which is very competitive, internationally. It's about as fast as the fastest French TGV routes. It only really lags behind the fastest Chinese routes, which run at average speeds of about 290 km/h.
If CA HSR can go through the cities in the Central Valley and still achieve an average speed of 250 km/h, that's well worth it.
SF-LA ~380mi is actually a real sweet spot for HSR.
Flight time of 90 minutes but the hassle of getting out to airport, check-in, boarding.. and then the opposite on the other end makes your all-in travel time about 4~5 hours. With HSR you are generally going city center to city center, and 380mi is achievable in 2~2.5 hours all-in.
I took a 700mi HSR in Japan that was probably on the very far end of being competitive time wise with flying and was still great. 5hr train vs 2hr plane segment, but all-in door-to-door travel times were comparable (5h45m vs 5hr).
Train 5hr45m door to door with majority of time sat in a comfy quiet train with big comfy seats and high speed internet. A flight which is 5hr door to door is mostly a ton of hurry-up-and-wait with small blocks of 30-90min here or there you can read a book.
well just piping for hot water system is more expensive then PV panels.
But biggest expense is instalation costs(humans) so it depends how you calculate. But PV system can be used for hot water, tv, car, charging kids bikes, lawnmower etc. Solar thermal can be used only for hot water (or cooling if you use multistage heat pump but that is viable only in office buildings or hockey stadiums and such).
You're probably right, but do you have some idea how much the piping costs for a solar thermal hot water system? Because that's what I was asking about.
When you talk about coops, there is a distinction between a consumer coop and a worker coop. A consumer coop is generally where consumers band together to get better prices on consuming some product or group of products. A worker coop is where workers have ownership and make business decisions together. There are actually other coops too - e.g. farming coops are generally capital equipment sharing arrangements - think sharing ownership of the processing center for some crop. (Also ESOP worker coops - but I would say they generally are very weak on workers making significant decisions).
The REI workers are basically employees of a retail company that happens to be a coop. The coop part is for shopper/consumer members of people who buy things at REI.
i see thanks for explaining. i wish they were a bit more clear about that upfront. i had assumed the workers received some of the dividends as well, given their personal investment in the firm.
REI is routinely rated one of the best places to work. When I was there, we had both a pension plan and a 401k with match. Part time employees got PTO and (really good) insurance. They have mandatory paid sabbaticals on top of PTO. But as an employee you get no dividend, as the dividend is based on purchases, and the discounts available were far greater than the 10% back. Still, I wish I had stayed and moved into a technical role as I have never been treated as well as an employee as when I was there.
According to their Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/REI), REI is a "consumers' co-operative". This is a different thing than a "workers' cooperative". My understanding is that most grocery co-ops are organized as consumers co-ops, or something close to it.
The grocery co-op near me has occasionally faced the prospect of the formation of an employee/worker union. I imagine that unionization is a thing that doesn't happen (or get seriously discussed) in a workers' co-op.
I find this distinction vaguely fascinating, but (apparently) not enough for me to actually get informed about it.
name some nations that maintain healthy weight without drugs? your dogma isn't supported by the data. obesity is a public health problem and it's not caused simply by junk food
Japan and South Korea. Much of southern Europe. It depends how you define healthy, but most of Europe has obesity rates below 20%. And that's just if you're counting rich countries.
Literally just replaced the flimsy clip-on vent mount charger in my car with a ProClip custom fit mount and a Qi2 charger that ran me ~$115 all-in. I wanted longevity with this solution.
your guess is as good as mine as to why things like water infrastructure and telecoms are quietly built to requirements in the background while rail infrastructure is opened to the public forum, but the inability or unwillingness of the state government to go full climate stalin on this project and design it without compromise killed it.