> whats stopping the price of flights from being halved in the next couple of decades and killing this train service too?
The construction of the high-speed rail system is/will be heavily subsidized by the government. So presumably, the government will have a vested interest in keeping the train service running and will subsidize operating costs if airlines cut prices in that manner.
> the government ... will subsidize operating costs
By which you mean taxpayers will subsidize operating costs.
I wonder exactly how regressive the wealth transfer from the average middle-class California taxpayer to the California weekly-commute bullet-train businessperson will be, in practice.
This is my big reservation about HSR even as a huge proponent of rail transit. I live in a working class area of south LA and there is huge demand here for local/regional rail and other transit. Neither LA, despite its improvements over the last decade, nor the Bay Area, have anywhere near the needed levels of regional mass transit.
My big fear is that HSR will ultimately be subsidized by middle class Californians so business people and wealthy vacationers can travel between SF and LA at the expense of more regionally focused transit that has a greater impact on the lives of working/middle class people.
> By which you mean taxpayers will subsidize operating costs.
Yeah, exactly.
> I wonder exactly how regressive the wealth transfer from the average middle-class California taxpayer to the California weekly-commute bullet-train businessperson will be, in practice.
Yeah. And a lot of the funding for the rail project is already coming from Federal and State coffers (via taxpayer money or deficit spending), so this wealth transfer is already happening. There's at least $6 billion already allocated from Federal funding programs (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_High-Speed_Rail#Fin...) and the Proposition 1A required Federal Funds matching the $9.95 billion approved by bonds (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Proposition_1A_(200...). I don't know if the $6 billion in stimulus money "counts" towards the $9.95 billion in matching funds, nor do I know if the funds have been fully matched.
The subsidies are qualitatively different: If roads had to be paid for entirely from user fees in the form of gas or mileage taxes, they could be for effective rates not much higher than fuel prices of a few years ago. Capital and maintenance.
If you tried to charge passengers adequately to fund rail, the system would go into a death spiral, absent radical changes in consumer preferences.
Europe has significantly higher taxes on fuel yet still needs to subsidise roads from general taxes so I think if roads were properly funded it would be higher than fuel prices a few years ago.
Also if both rail and roads were funded only by users then rail would be the more attractive option.
Cost per passenger per mile is cheaper by rail than by road. It is just much more efficient.
If we then start to take into account the other costs such as pollution, land wasted on parking and wider roads, the increased area of municipal services that have to be covered because of the much lower density require for cars, and the massively increased health costs associated with a car lifestyle and trains not only are more cost efficient than cars they're an order of magnitude more cost efficient.
Trains are wildly efficient, they only use energy to overcome air and rolling resistances as energy used to accelerate is put back into the system during deceleration. They can pack many more people with much higher throughput. For example Crossrail in London is designed to have 24 1500 person trains an hour on a single track.
Highway costs less per lane than a single line of rail but considering most highways are 3 lanes either side the cost factor starts to become favourable to railway lines.
Folks down-voting: I know "subsidized by the government" == "subsidized by the taxpayers". My phrasing wasn't intended as a judgment on the merits of such action, just as a possible scenario in response to the GP's question.
The construction of the high-speed rail system is/will be heavily subsidized by the government. So presumably, the government will have a vested interest in keeping the train service running and will subsidize operating costs if airlines cut prices in that manner.