Being in the east of France, it's a bit sad how misconnected we are with the west of France. (Lyon <-> Bordeaux you'd think can be done in 2 hours, but no it'll take like 6 hours).
I wish we had this attitude in California! Bordeaux is a city of roughly the same population and economic activity as Fresno, but there are many in California who still argue that Fresno should not be connected by high-speed rail to any place.
California's cities are all arranged in a line, it should be the easiest high-speed rail project ever, but it languishes due to lack of imagination.
We're of completely opposite minds on this. A stop in Fresno should have been sacrificed so that California High Speed Rail could still happen for the majority of the state. Routing through the Central Valley was practically required for political reasons, and now the entire project has collapsed into a parody of itself.
California's cities are not all arranged in a single line. They are in two roughly parallel lines, separated by up to hundreds of miles and across mountains. There are the coastal cities of SF, SJ, SLO, LA, and SD (follows highway 1) and the Central Valley line of Sacramento, Stockton, Merced, Fresno, Bakersfield, Lancaster/Palmdale (follows highway 99 mostly). The 5 is a compromise interstate that runs in between these two, and there is very little development there. If you've ever driven the 5, you know what I'm talking about. Even most towns "on" the 5 are a few miles away.
The HSR line could have been drawn from LA to SF more or less following the 5, stopping at the outskirts of Bakersfield and then zooming straight through to a fork that stops next in either Gilroy (en route to the Bay Area) or Modesto (en route to Stockton and Sacramento). This would have been cheaper, shorter, and less encumbered by the need to get permits, approvals, easements, and the like from everyone in the Central Valley. Meanwhile, the chosen HSR route through the Central Valley runs through dozens of different counties, cities, tax districts, and regional planning agencies.
Also, Fresno is far less dense than Bordeaux, and has a population that generally considers a mile to be a "long walk."
> A stop in Fresno should have been sacrificed so that California High Speed Rail could still happen for the majority of the state.
Sacrificing the stop in Fresno (and the other Central Valley cities) would not have enabled HSR for the majority of the state. If anything, it would have made it less viable, not only politically (both in terms of federal and state politics), but also in terms of meeting the actual official goals of the project.
The problem with this logic is that an SF-LA line that serves nothing else actually fails to serve most of the state. The median Californian lives in Ventura, so if you just want to serve a majority you can do LA-SD and call it done. Or, you can do Bakersfield-Chico with a spur to SJ and Oakland, you’re also serving the majority of the state that way.
The latter is way easier to build in particular the spine through the Capitol.
> The problem with this logic is that an SF-LA line that serves nothing else actually fails to serve most of the state.
LA plus the Bay Area is most of the State, but travel between those two endpoints is a lot less than that plus travel between each of them and the Central Valley, and along the Central Valley’s North-South axis.
We're missing a high-speed connection here. The Bordeaux-Sète line is relatively slow (130-160 km/h) and handle a lot of different traffic (freight, regional, TGV, intercity). If the Bordeaux-Toulouse high-speed line is done (planned 2032), that travel time would be shortened.
