It gets better: the “first mile” of this route out of Chicago is Union Station to Grand Crossing, which is needed by *every* train headed to Michigan, northern Indiana, or northern Ohio. And which is very straight, very flat, and has spare right-of-way — a rarity in downtown Chicago!

In contrast, the “first mile” of the existing Amtrak route is a snaking riverside route which is of no use for travel to any destinations other than Joliet, Springfield, and St. Louis.

One of the implicit hopes of the Central Valley cities is that HSR would be a commuter line convenient enough to make the Valley north of Fresno be a Bay Area exurb, and the Valley south of Fresno be Southern California’s.

The interesting part of the eastern route shown in the map is that the portion from Chicago to Champaign could be a trunk line for a much larger network linking to Carbondale, Indianapolis, Louisville, Cincinnati, Columbus, etc. The current plans have so many mediocre lines extending from Chicago, it always begged the question to me: why not construct 3 or so true HSR lines and branch out from there? This could be the southern route, the route to Milwaukee could be the northern route and the route to Toledo would be the eastern route..

Train ridership does not hinge upon the business traveler use-case profile, a small makeup of the broad market.

There’s another advantage rail has for medium-length travel and one disadvantage to air travel.

Passenger aviation is trapped to a hub-and-spoke, point-to-point service format.

Airlines cannot fly their planes like Greyhound buses. The Los Angeles-to-New York market supports many nonstop flights, but you’ll rarely see a plane stop at Las Vegas, Denver, Kansas City, Chicago and Pittsburgh along the way.

Ground-based transport can do this, but not over such vast distances. Rail’s effectiveness is probably in the range of 300-500 miles.

If you take the California high-speed system, everyone seems to be stuck on the question of “Why would anybody want to take a train between L.A. and San Francisco when you have flights every half hour between the cities?”

People seem to forget that Southwest et al, don’t do LAX-Bakersfield-Fresno-Modesto-Stockton-SFO flights.

There are so many city pairings that the HSR system has that planes will never be able to serve effectively. And the Central Valley is not the flyover country people commonly think.

There’s about 5 million people, in addition to the 15 million in SoCal and the 12 million in the Bay Area and Sacramento megalopoles.

There are four-year universities in Bakersfield, Fresno, Merced, Modesto (Turlock) and Stockton — these are all major economic components in the area. And existing San Joaquin service is used reasonably well.

Much of the Bay Area traffic will be from Fresno and points north, while much of the Southern California traffic will be from Fresno and points south.

The airlines wouldn’t worry much about losing the L.A. to San Francisco market, but what may have them worried is a crisis of confidence. The airlines may be punished for not capturing the upside of a market that rail served, and this shakes confidence in the business model. Think of what the newspapers are going through right now.

It appears that the western alignment is straighter because at the scale of the map, small curves don’t show up. But the eastern alignment may allow real straightaways.

To get the best speeds, HSR needs long stretches as straight as possible. Any curvature presents a problem as speeds increase. So if a close-up of the routes would show the eastern line with more long, straight stretches, that is the way to go. Going fast on straight tracks for long enough means a small detour to Champaign won’t matter.

As for the apparent zig zag, no problem. The train stops at Champaign, then it can easily zig to the west leaving there. Stop at Springfield, then zag due south to avoid built-up areas along the Mississippi River. Then zig again into St Louis. (My guess is it will take that last zig to avoid the Mississippi whether the eastern/Champaign or the western/Bloomington alignment gets chosen.)

If TGV service led to trams over there why not the same here? Especially since St. Louis ALREADY has a light rail system in place. HSR will lead to local support to expand the light rail system and to greater ridership of it.

In CA I can see HSR leading to Fresno and Bakersfield finally pulling the trigger and reinstating either a light rail or streetcar system.

That’s because air travel’s main selling point is that airport-to-airport flight time is far less than what’s achievable with any other mode of transportation. Trains, whose main selling point is faster downtown-to-downtown travel, have to discharge people close to downtown.