You know most of these are business travelers right?

The last thing I want (as a former consultant who did like 400k plus miles flying) is to spend more time traveling.

Not to mention flights booked out in advance are like sub 200 bucks, or even 100-150. It takes like 2-3 hours from leaving home to arriving at destination.

Have you flown between SFO and LAX? SFO is easy to get to, no real headaches. So is San Jose and Oakland. LA is a hellhole when it comes to getting to an airport regardless of where you are in that sprawl. LAX is a nightmare unless you’re already working in El Segundo. Otherwise you’ll fly out of Burbank or the other one I forget the name now depending on where you are.

Once you have flown like 4-5 weeks in a row you learn how to board your flight just-in-time. I’d almost always arrive at the gate like 5-10 minutes before departure and never missed a single flight.

The train is slow AF and from experience riding Amtrack (daily for over a year) if it’s anywhere similar to that the train will be delayed more often than the flight.

You should try riding real HSR, like Madrid to Barcelona. Superior to flying in every way.

I live in America.

I’m sure Europe has nice trains. I’ve rode the best trains in the world in Japan.

America is a completely different dynamic and is not at all comparable to Europe nor Japan.

The culture here has always revolved around cars (objectively better IMO for ME, I don’t like tiny cramped cities like in EU or Japan), and our roads are big and our buildings are large and really nice. New builds especially in cities like SF or LA.

SF to LA is about 400 miles. Going from LA to SD is another 120 miles. Spain by itself is like 150 miles wide and 500 miles long. It’s about the same distance, sure, but totally different dynamics. It’s hard to explain unless you’ve been here.

Besides, nobody really has a need to travel between LA and SF that regularly unless it’s for business. People might visit their families every month or two. But most of the travel is for business.

Comparing Europe and America is apples to oranges.

I live in America. I have all my life. I've ridden on nice trains in Europe and Japan. The culture in the last 80-100 years has revolved around cars, but before that relied heavily on trains.

I much prefer riding a spacious train to riding in a cramped airplane. I like to be able to get up and walk around while the train is traveling. I prefer the minimal security processes on a train to an airplane.

Driving 6-10 hours is pretty miserable. I would much rather take a train or fly unless there are specific reasons why I need to drive.

It may be like comparing apples and oranges, but some people prefer apples. The good thing is that you can still eat oranges if you like.

Right but have you flown for business every few days like that? It seems like you’re still thinking about leisure travel between LA and SF.

My whole point was about business flight. Sure for leisure I’ll take a train. But if I’m flying for work I’d rather deal with a consistent (mostly, compared to any rail I’ve taken) experience.

I would not describe LA to SF as a consistent experience. I had an 8:30 PM flight delayed until 1:30 AM. Actually, the only consistency I've had with those flights is that they are consistently delayed.

I've heard that the flight delays cascade throughout the day. So if the first flight is 10 minutes delayed, all SF-LA flights are delayed for the rest of the day. Since SFO has a lot of fog, my understanding is that it's often delayed.

Maybe it's okay coming from Burbank, but I live on the Westside so I have to take LAX.

I would love to have another option. Ideally, a train would decrease the load on the airlines so that they could handle delays better.

To answer your question directly, no I don't have to do work trips every couple of days, but I do have work trips from LA to SF every couple of months.

> You should try riding real HSR, like Madrid to Barcelona

Within countries, yes. Between countries, never again. Italy <> France sort of worked, but the UK and Germany consistently ruined everything.

Thankfully California is, last I checked, in one country.

> Thankfully California is, last I checked, in one country

You can replicate the experience between Caltrain and BART.

To my knowledge, the HSR will share tracks with other trains. That makes the sort of scheduling problems that make Amtrak a pain more of a possibility. Not a reason to shoot down the project. But a decent reason to take OP's concerns seriously.

Caltrain and BART are rarely delayed by a significant amount, and they run frequently enough. Not as much as I'd like, but frequently enough that you're not ever going to be waiting more than 30 minutes. I don't think it's comparable at all to a cross-country journey that may require switching trains and different jurisdictions. Heck, Caltrain shares its own track already and it does just fine, and HSR will mostly have its own track except when it needs to share with Caltrain.

30 minutes is a lot between just the Bay Area when the entire flight between LA and SF takes 90 minutes.

Not to mention, you have to get to and from the train station or airport.

For example from where I live in SF, it takes about 20 minutes (depending on traffic) to get to King St station. It takes about 30 minutes to get to SFO. If I was taking MUNI to king street, looking at like 40+ minutes plus walking.

I’m a seasoned traveler so I’ll get there JIT for my flight.

In LA, if I’m going to El Segundo or Santa Monica, it’s like 10-30 minutes uber. If I was going to Pasadena or La Canada I’d fly to Burbank.

So yes the train is a silly idea to start with, unless it would be direct from heart of LA to SF, going like 300 mph (it is not). Not to mention once you’re in LA you have to get to your final destination which might take anywhere from 10 minutes to an hour or more. And LA has horrible public transit

It’s far more convenient to fly.

This is of course a personal choice but I really can't understand people's insistence that a train that takes a single minute longer than a plane ride is inferior. I actually like planes, especially going down the California coast, which is pretty much every day of the year. But plane seats are cramped, and half the time you can't use your computer even if you wanted to. I usually fly from SJC if I want to go to LAX, and I think SFO and SJC are two of my favorite airports, but even then it's a bunch of walking to get to your terminal, and you're still going to be going through security. They're nothing like LAX, which is miserable in comparison, but an airport can only be so good.

But if we're going to talk about time: I don't agree with your numbers. SFO to LAX is like 50-60 minutes in the air. I feel like your 90 is a reasonable number for gate-to-gate. Arriving 30 minutes before departure at SFO will probably just get you to do your gate on time for last call on boarding. Add another 15 minutes to get out of LAX. Then, on both sides, whatever transportation you need to get to and from the airports, which I think is reasonable to cancel out when compared to the train.

For a train they're targeting a little over 2.5 hours for the journey. I can be outside in 5 minutes, and I can also feel comfortable arriving five minutes early. Let's be generous and say it takes 3 hours, curb to curb. The plane does the same in like 2-2.5 hours. I don't really see this being significantly different.

The train will use shared tracks. I will bet one million dollars it will run into scheduling issues and when you’re stuck on land it will suck. Source: former Amtrack customer. Same story, and I doubt a project that’s been mismanaged so far will fare any better if actually realized.

I take the Caltrain to work almost every day and it's on shared tracks (in fact it will the same shared tracks that HSR uses). It's rarely late by more than a few minutes.