Quote:
Originally Posted by SFBruin
Personally, I'm not super worried about the high costs of a ticket. High speed rail has generally shown to have a high market share in other parts of the world, even when the price of a ticket is high (no source for this).
I am worried, however, about the high capital costs. I hate to be aspirational (JK, I don't), but isn't it indulgent to spend $60B + on a high speed rail project on a medium-density corridor when the country as a whole is facing a debt crisis?
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Unfortunately the ticket prices will tend to be high because they are not building the 2x platforms. The capacity of any HSR line is limited by the amount of space necessary to stop a train. It doesn't matter how large that train is. A faster system (300mph) actually has a *lower* capacity because of the longer distance (more time) necessary to stop a train. So all of these calls for Maglev, etc., don't make any business sense.
If the system can operate 12 trains per hour per direction, and each train has 500 passengers instead of 1,000, well then do the math on fares. The higher the capacity, the more the operator is incentivized to fill trains with lower-priced tickets.
24 trains per hour x 1,000 passengers = 24,000 people departures between, say, 5pm and 6pm on a Friday. So 12,000 people headed from SF to LA and 12,000 people headed from LA to SF. If they each pay $100 that's $2.4 million in gross revenue in a single hour.
Halving the train sizes means half the potential gross revenues, if the fares remain constant. So a $200 one-way fare to collect the same gross revenue.
Part of the goal of California HSR should have been cheap fares, and running a bunch of huge trains would have enabled them to do very cheap fares in order to fill the off-peak trains.