[lbo-talk] California rail project

michael perelman michael.perelman3 at gmail.com
Sun Nov 27 21:25:51 PST 2011


You are making good sense. A friend does consulting on high speed rail, who says that the passenger demand is concentrated at specific times; the plan assumes that the system will be heavily used at all hours. Your answer below makes a lot of sense.

On Sun, Nov 27, 2011 at 9:08 PM, Jordan Hayes <jmhayes at j-o-r-d-a-n.com> wrote:
> michael perelman writes:
>
>> The idea of using existing connections could work, but it
>> would make more sense if BART or Caltrans could ensure connections
>> with short wait time.
>
> I'm sure that could get worked out.  But the real issue is very few of the
> projected passengers would be going to an area that's close to downtown San
> Francisco, anyway.  San Francisco is not Paris[1]: the vast majority of
> people in the Bay Area live in the location called "not San Francisco" -- so
> if you arrive in downtown San Francisco, chances are very good you have to
> connect to some other transit anyway.  Why not transfer early, to an
> integrated grid, at the periphery?
>
> We're not talking about going to Hoboken because you can't afford to build
> the final 2 miles of track to penn Station; Livermore is 40+ miles from San
> Francisco; San Jose is 50 miles.  Go 50 miles from Paris and you're way
> outside Ile-de-France, in the sticks.
>
> /jordan
>
> [1] The Department of Paris (75) is about 40 square miles and contains 2.1M
> people; the City of San Francisco is about 50 square miles and contains less
> than 800,000 people.  Paris and the "inner ring" is about 300 square miles
> and contains 6.5M people; the Bay Area is commonly referenced as ~7000
> square miles with a total of slightly more than 7M people.  Paris is one of
> the most densely populated cities in the world: it is the largest-densest
> city outside of India (which has four cities that are larger and more dense:
> Delhi, Kolkata, Chennai, and Mumbai). San Francisco is nothing like it.  San
> Francisco isn't even the largest city in the Bay Area: San Jose is.
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-- Michael Perelman Economics Department California State University Chico, CA 95929

530 898 5321 fax 530 898 5901 http://michaelperelman.wordpress.com



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