It’s also less than that in travel time, since CAHSR goes at its full 350 km/h on the Central Valley vs just 130 km/h on the Caltrain corridor from SF to Gilroy. It adds about 10 minutes to non-stop travel time.
The real benefit is opening the Central Valley to commuter development. San Jose to Madeira on CAHSR is around 45 minutes, not much more than commuting from Palo Alto with current traffic on 101, and so it’d open vast tracts of land in the Central Valley to housing. It might actually be practical to work in the Bay Area on something non-tech, live in a SFH, and commute less than an hour again.
They are running multiple trains. SF to LA non-stop trains won't even stop at stations like Gilroy or Madeira. The all-stop trains will preference commute hours. The seats are non-rivalrous: Central Valley commuters aren't even going to be on the same train as a SF to LA business traveler. It seems reasonable that fares would differ, and that traveling just 1-2 stops from SJ to the Central Valley will be a lot cheaper than going from SF to LA.
This really depends on how it ends up being priced.
In Germany, you can pay for a year-long high-speed rail all-you-can-ride pass. It costs just under 5000 Euros, which is very reasonable if you're using it every workday.
This is a bit like AWS pricing. If you book an entire year of usage up-front, you get a much lower price. Casual users pay much more per use.
the opportunity cost isn't a 7% increase in length, it's the tens of billions in extra infrastructure to build 350km/h right of way straight through the middle of every town all the way down the central valley, and the massive hit to SF-LA run time that will come with that. beyond the stop penalty, HSR just doesn't run at full speed through city centers anywhere in the world. doesn't happen.
> HSR just doesn't run at full speed through city centers anywhere in the world. doesn't happen.
Wrong. It's most definitely a thing in quite a few mid-sized Japanese cities. Here's a compilation video taken at Fukushima Station (https://youtu.be/K-wkX3vFU_A?t=403) on the fastest 320 km/h line for example. You can check for yourself that the station is dead smack downtown in a city of 275,000.
At the world level it doesn't tend to happen because existing developments in cities usually strongly inhibit the construction of straight rail alignments that can support high-speed operations. But that's not a problem in the Central Valley – they're blessed with excellent existing rights-of-way.
As I wrote elsewhere, the average speed of CA HSR (as planned) is 250 km/h, which is very competitive, internationally. It's about as fast as the fastest French TGV routes. It only really lags behind the fastest Chinese routes, which run at average speeds of about 290 km/h.
If CA HSR can go through the cities in the Central Valley and still achieve an average speed of 250 km/h, that's well worth it.
SF-LA ~380mi is actually a real sweet spot for HSR.
Flight time of 90 minutes but the hassle of getting out to airport, check-in, boarding.. and then the opposite on the other end makes your all-in travel time about 4~5 hours. With HSR you are generally going city center to city center, and 380mi is achievable in 2~2.5 hours all-in.
I took a 700mi HSR in Japan that was probably on the very far end of being competitive time wise with flying and was still great. 5hr train vs 2hr plane segment, but all-in door-to-door travel times were comparable (5h45m vs 5hr).
Train 5hr45m door to door with majority of time sat in a comfy quiet train with big comfy seats and high speed internet. A flight which is 5hr door to door is mostly a ton of hurry-up-and-wait with small blocks of 30-90min here or there you can read a book.
Going through the two biggest cities in the Central Valley is worth a 7% increase in track length.