Work is set to begin Monday on a $12 billion high-speed passenger rail line between Las Vegas and the Los Angeles area, with officials projecting millions of ticket-buyers will be boarding trains by 2028.
Brightline West, whose sister company already operates a fast train between Miami and Orlando in Florida, aims to lay 218 miles (351 kilometers) of new track between a terminal to be built just south of the Las Vegas Strip and another new facility in Rancho Cucamonga, California. Almost the full distance is to be built in the median of Interstate 15, with a station stop in San Bernardino County’s Victorville area.
In a statement, Brightline Holdings founder and Chairperson Wes Edens called the moment “the foundation for a new industry.”
Brightline aims to link other U.S. cities that are too near to each other for flying between them to make sense and too far for people to drive the distance, Edens said.
Stopping in Rancho Cucamonga? Awesome. Now instead of driving 4 hours to Vegas from the West side of LA, I can drive an hour to Rancho Cucamonga, find parking, wait for the train, sit on a train for 1.5 hours (total guess assuming 150mph), then take a shuttle or taxi or uber to the hotels.
This will be great for people on the East side of LA who don’t want to drive 3 hours or drive 1.5 hours to LAX (with traffic), but stopping in downtown LA would have allowed me to get on the Metro to downtown and transfer to the Vegas line. I’ve been wanting high speed rail to Vegas from LA for decades, but stopping so far from downtown sucks for 75% of the city.
At least it’ll take tons of cars off the road for those common use cases.
Yeah, it would be great for it to go into LA itself. I hate it when transport hubs are on the edge of the city.
I’m not familiar with LA, but it looks like there’s existing rail service to Rancho Cucamonga? Hopefully the terminal is also a station for one of those services so that changing is easy (though really I’d want them to just continue on that track right into LA).
Yeah I saw a YouTube video explaining that it connects with Metrolink regional rail at Rancho Cucamonga.
Also I see this on their website:
Yeah, that’s not really LA. Optimally, the train should go to Union Station. Seems to make the most sense to end there.
Phase 2?
Exactly. The cost from Rancho to the station is nearly the same as the rest of the line. It’s a huge last mile problem.
Of course it should go into downtown LA, but it’ll take a long time to align, secure, and slowly build it without disturbing the city (Americans are wusses about construction). In the mean time, trains can be serving the East side of the city.
I wouldnt say Americans are wusses about construction, its moreso that American cities are a lot like Roman bureaucracy and insane 4d ouroboros where if ya cut one area half the system grinds to a halt. Kinda like when ya dont plan out a city in City skylines and the highway expansion nukes half the economy.
the goal is to Strategically place the intermodal points and help the other travel mediums (media) find their own way. Sometimes it works, and we have passenger ferries right where the subway lets out. Other times it fails, and we have really inefficient links to terminals.
They’re spoon-feeding justification for a decent transit system AND avoiding plumbing their own larger and more complex routes through trickier areas. You don’t want high-speed going through the middle of an American town, unless it’s 100% underground like the amtrak (a non-high-speed) going into Penn/Moynihan in NYC. The same shitbags with too many fingers shining lasers at airplanes will drop bricks from overpasses.
While I want to counter your argument with saying nearly every European major city has above ground high speed rail going through the city, Europe doesn’t seem to have the same number of bricks from overpasses per capita as the US.
They’re planning timed transfers with metrolink. Something like arriving 20 minutes before the brightline departs IIRC. Seemed like a bigger gap than I’d like but not too terrible.
At this point, we need to start somewhere. Boring under the city would be insanely expensive. Especially since this is a private company. Someday, we will have a politician with the balls to lay out a vast plan like the highway network of the 50s or the space program of the 60s. However, even babysteps like this are good.
Gotta take the W where you can and prove that HSR is a completely viable option in this country, just like literally everywhere else, haha.
A smart man will build a casino next to the exit from the train.
This could be a clever ploy by RC to incentivize the financing of Metro service to Downtown.
I’m sure RC stands for something relevant, but I can only think of the off brand soda and am trying to figure out why Big Cola is getting involved with highspeed rail.
Just didn’t have time to type Rancho Cucamonga!
Although Big Cola is pretty nefarious…