The rail authority has a plan to straighten out track and add passing tracks in the phases through Silicon Valley.
Until those improvements are completed, trains would operate at 79 mph, Vacca said. Some day, the authority has hopes of even going mph through the area. The computer simulations also assumed that trains would stop and start in San Francisco at a station located at 4th and King streets, rather than the downtown Transbay terminal identified in the bond act as terminus of the system. The authority would need to dig a curvy 1.
Vacca noted that the bond act does not specifically say the trip must go to Transbay. Through the years, the train authority has remained committed to competing with airlines. By , it projects bullet trains will carry 40 million passengers, including 5 million captured from airlines and 32 million from cars.
Robert Poole, a transportation expert at Reason Foundation, a libertarian nonprofit, said competing with airlines in California will be fraught with risk, since so many potential travelers live closer to airports than the future train stations and the air market is so highly developed. Poole notes that Florida is building its Brightline passenger rail system, which will be operational from Miami to Orlando by , at much lower cost with 79 mph to mph speeds.
The aim is to divert motorists from crowded highways. Follow me on Twitter rvartabedian. Ralph Vartabedian is a former national correspondent at the Los Angeles Times and became a special contributor in April He joined the newspaper in and has covered many technical subjects, including aerospace, auto safety, nuclear weapons and high speed rail.
He has won two Loeb awards and was a Pulitzer finalist, among many other career recognitions. The L. Times holiday gift guide. Colonialism, power and race. Inside California ethnic studies classes. Three public inquiries were held, and the findings handed over to the High Speed Rail Authority, which is capable of implementing the work needed for the project. The main project under planning is the San Francisco-Los Angeles high-speed line, which could connect the two cities in just two hours and 30 minutes.
This express service is expected to average about mph during the approximately km trip, making it the second-fastest average speed run train in the world after the mph TGV-Est Paris to Champagne Express. Residents of the Los Angeles and San Francisco areas are also too conscious of other possible major factors that affect existing modes of transport, but from which rail travel is less likely to suffer.
The region is prone to dense fog, making travel on the already congested roads even more hazardous. The area is a well-known earthquake zone, and the promoters of the scheme are keen to point out that it would offer an alternative means of transport in the event of such a natural disaster. Supporters of the campaign to build the high-speed line have said that without it, California could need up to 4,km of new highway, 60 new airline gates and five more runways at the projected population growth.
The trains would carry up to , passengers a day along the 1,km route. Consideration is already being given to how the new high-speed line would fit in with other transport systems. Most of the line is expected to be built alongside existing roads and railways and the two-track line will have 20 times the capacity of the neighbouring road, with 20 trains an hour in each direction.
At certain locations the high-speed line is expected to use viaducts and tunnels, in a similar manner to other high-speed rail projects worldwide. The electric-powered, high-speed train system would draw electric power from overhead wires connected to the commercial power grid. In braking, it would regenerate electricity back to the grid, conserving power and reducing costs. Even though the final funding was not in place for the project, consideration was given to the types of train that could be developed for the new high-speed line.
Technology will be based on already proven high-speed trains from similar systems in Japan, Germany and France. Each train will be up to 1,ft-long and capable of carrying 1, passengers. It is expected that intercity trains will operate through the line each day. And even if the bullet train eventually reaches Los Angeles and San Francisco, some legislators are skeptical that car-centric Californians will become train riders without more exposure to public transit in their daily lives.
Until then, she is reluctant to pump more money into a train through the sparsely populated Central Valley. The Newsom administration says high-speed rail construction is at a critical point. Money is needed now to complete the final piece of the Central Valley portion, according to Brian Annis, chief financial official at the California High-Speed Rail Authority.
Without this funding, the Newsom administration argues, fewer workers will be needed and layoffs could start as soon as next summer. For one Central Valley carpenter, working near home for more than three months at a time had been uncommon. But the Newsom administration is having a hard time convincing the Legislature that the investment now is worth it. A poll funded by the Assembly Democrats found that Californians are evenly split between killing high-speed rail or continuing it, but that support for the project is far higher among Democrats , the San Francisco Chronicle reported.
They want to enter into a contract next year for a firm to design and construct an electrified track and system and to maintain it for 30 years, effectively locking in the state for the long haul. Current plans call for the first rideable leg to go from Bakersfield to Merced, where passengers would ideally be able to hop on another transit line to head into the San Francisco Bay Area in a roundabout way.
Rail officials and local transit agencies plan to partner to create a single station in Merced, where riders could get off the high-speed train and onto another system, but the construction of it is not fully funded. The state Senate has not shared any spending proposals. The ambitious project has been closely watched nationwide as a test of whether the United States can move away from its car culture and catch up with other nations on high-speed rail.
Supporters say the completed project would radically change how people travel, while cutting down on carbon emissions.
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