Great Minds Think Different

I’m skeptical about this proposal for a high-speed rail system in California. The proposal’s cheerleaders point to the success of high-speed rail systems in other countries, most notably Japan, France and Germany. I think there are fundamental differences between the two areas that will mean a HSR system in California won’t be as successful.

The reason ultimately stems from the fact that the distributions of population in these areas are fundamentally different. Let me elaborate.

• First, it’s pretty clear that high speed trains need to travel long distances between stops in order to be effective, otherwise they never get a chance to attain high speeds, thus defeating the whole purpose. So stations need to be pretty far apart.
• Given that stations need to be far apart, it’s likely that, in order for a given person to get to a station, they’ll need to use some other form of transport, such as other public transport, or a car.
• In California, especially in the corridor where the HSR system is proposed, the population tends to be concentrated in a few dense urban centers, with some gaps filled by vast uniform areas of suburbs, and other gaps filled with unbuildable nothingness. For example, the path between San Francisco and San Jose is a big strip of relatively high-density suburb, and the path between Santa Ana (part of the Los Angeles conurbation) and San Diego is very sparsely inhabited. So how will HSR riders get to the train station? The public transport in suburban areas of California tends to be so sparse as to practically be nonexistent, leaving driving to the station as the most attractive option. Then this leaves the traffic congestion problem.
• In Japan, HSR stations are located in the ludicrously dense urban centers, which are linked by swaths of merely extremely dense “suburb”. So there are huge numbers of people who would have to travel fairly far to get to an HSR station. It works out because Japan has such fantastic auxiliary public transport. Most people live within a short distance (or at most a short bus ride) of a (conventional, low-speed) train station, and the quality of Japan’s train system is unparalleled in all the world.
• In France and Germany, HSR stations are located in the dense urban centers, which are linked by swaths of very sparsely populated countryside. Suburbs as they exist in the US mostly don’t appear in Europe. Any non-urban area that is dense enough to have a significant population and doesn’t have a HSR station is generally well enough served by the nearest city’s public transport that getting to the HSR station via public transport is viable.

Imagine me, for instance. I’m going to be living in Palo Alto pretty soon. Suppose this Californian HSR system exists, and I want to go to Irvine. How am I going to do that? First of all, here’s the map. Apparently there’s a Redwood City/Palo Alto station, so I could hopefully get there by bus (crap though the VTA bus system is). So that’s good. But then the problem arises at the other end of the trip: the only reason I’m going to Irvine is to visit somebody who lives in one of those heinous, abominable suburban subdivisions where the nearest public transport stop is in a different zip code. (This is potentially a real scenario, since I do know someone there, and he lives in a subdivision whose name is, no joke, “Meadowood”. When I think about it I throw up in my mouth a little.) He lives so far out into the suburban sprawl that there’s no hope of getting there other than by car. If this were pretty much any of the world’s other major HSR systems, I could take public transport end-to-end.

So we’ve encountered a failure of the sort that happens with far lower probability in the European systems (needing to get somewhere beyond the reach of public transport). At the beginning of that hypothetical journey, suppose the Palo Alto station doesn’t exist and the nearest HSR station is San Jose. Then we have a failure of the sort that couldn’t happen in Japan: I’d have to take public transport to the San Jose station, and the public transport would suck. The most reasonable way would be the laughable Caltrain.

In sum: much of the population area served by the HSR system has either poor or nonexistent public transport coverage, leaving driving as either the preferable or only option for getting to an HSR station. If the HSR system is as heavily used as people expect it to be, this could actually end up increasing traffic congestion in the areas around HSR stations, as people drive to the station to board. If they were driving to their actual destination instead of taking the train, they’d be getting on the nearest highway, which would at least keep traffic more even.

The ultimate cause of California population centers’ poor or nonexistent public transport coverage is the fact that a good deal of it is suburban sprawl. I can’t think of any successful high-speed rail system in existence which operates in an area with similar population distribution. Even the US’s existing high-speed rail system, Acela, operates in the Northeast, along a route which is a series of dense urban centers. There is some sprawl with poor public transport coverage, to be sure, but not to the degree there is in California. Besides, it’s very debatable whether or not Acela is successful in the first place; the unfavorable population density and poor public transport might be why it’s not doing so well (and why intercity rail in general doesn’t work well in the US).

So it’s a problem to which there’s no good solution. California has suburban sprawl, and that’s neither going to go away nor get decent, viable public transport coverage anytime soon. Even if good public transport could magically be willed into existence in the suburbs, I highly doubt it would see much ridership, since car culture is basically one of the pillars of suburbia.