Re: Brightline West Groundbreaking
Author: GUDNEWZ
Date: 04-21-2024 - 05:56

I don’t know that area and never lived around there. Just wonder if Rancho C will work OK as the terminus. Will lots of people be willing to go there by car or transit to take the train.

What’s the draw for Vegas anyway? Entertainment destination pretty much, right?

Tens of thousands of entertainment and hospitality jobs, tens of thousands in conventions, and events, tens of thousands more in logistics, tens of thousands of folks to suppor those folks, and tens of thousands of folks in services, sales, manufacturing, construction, education, and health care, it's a pretty good sized city these days... And plenty of folks who do it in LA, who need to go do it in Las Vegas, based on the airport and traffic counts on I-15...

If you were from LA, or Orange County, or Rancho Cucumongna, and had ever experienced a six or seven hour trip from LA/OC to Las Vegas on Sou Cal freeways and the I-15, on a Friday afternoon, you'd understand just how nice a two hour trip over gridlocked Cajon... Not having made that journey, on a not atypical Friday night (or back on Sunday afternoon...)you would not have experienced the amazing experience of hundreds of miles of stop and go traffic congestion, in the middle of the Mojave Desert...

There is also a fair share of aviation traffic that currently comes out of LAX, Burbank, OC, and Ontario to LV, that could even find the train time/cost from RC or the IE to Vegas very competitive.

Brightline seems to be able to do pretty good planning, based on some pretty sound travel demand analysis, and finding an investment and operational scenario that can attract sufficient riders, at an affordable price point, to fill trains, and hopefully make a "profit" from those trains. Brightline will operate at speeds up to 200 mph. on wide open sections, and will slow down to only around "80 mph." on the steeest segment of grade through Cajon, next to the I-15, which will have saved them "billions" in "superspeed" HSR construction costs, with the goal of an affordable/competive travel time of 2 hours from RC to LV.

Brightline has "delievered" in Florida, and it seems to have done a pretty good job on market analysis, planning, due dilegence, and design for Brightline West. Which is just another reason why Brighline looks so competently thought through and well managed. Especially when one compares it to the incompetently planned, utterly wasteful, and "gold plated" "cost is no object" (to both build or ride....) fiasco that we have se nd experienced at the CAHSRA's "runaway money train"...

You don't see Brightline announcing that their next priority is the building of "billion dollar stations", like the CAHSRA, either......
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