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California Going Ahead With Bullet Train
An anonymous reader sends this excerpt from the NY Times:
"[California state leaders] have rallied around a plan to build a 520-mile high-speed rail line from Los Angeles to San Francisco, cutting the trip from a six-hour drive to a train ride of two hours and 38 minutes. And they are doing it in the face of what might seem like insurmountable political and fiscal obstacles. The pro-train constituency has not been derailed by a state report this month that found the cost of the bullet train tripling to $98 billion for a project that would not be finished until 2033, by news that Republicans in Congress are close to eliminating federal high-speed rail financing this year, by opposition from California farmers and landowners upset about tracks tearing through their communities or by questions about how much the state or private businesses will be able to contribute."
The first transcontinental railroad took less than 10 years to build -- considerably less. Before doing something like this, figure out why the hell it's going to take 30 years, and fix that first.
Between the x-ray powered strip searches, the paranoid interrogations, and sexual molestations by abusive, angry pedophile wannabe mall cops, only masochists and boot lickers will want to ride in what could have been a beautiful piece of engineering. I'd rather drive in relative freedom than take a bullet train and be humiliated, brutalized, violated, and treated like an inmate. To quote the Elephant Man, "I am not an animal!".
If the TSA could be kept away, then it would be great. But that isn't going to happen.
Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.
The bond, Prop 1A from 2008, approved roughly $8.5 billion to begin the project, with a total budget of $33 billion to be used if the project could be shown to be able to run without subsidies from the government. The most recent estimates, which still show a ludicrously high number of riders (between 60 and 90 million per year) show that the budget will need to be $98, which is roughly triple the $33 billion original allocated for the project.
The project is in no way feasible for a state as deep into the red as California. The *only* logical explanation of why this is still going through is to allow those already riding the $8.5 billion gravy train to keep it going for another $90 billion.
There's a reason there is no "Disagree" mod...
In twenty years, California will have swollen to perhaps 50million people, many of them taking the I-5 or US101 route from LA to the Bay area. I-5 is pretty much clogged now: imagine what happens if you have to continue to resize Oakland, San Jose, SF, Burbank, LAX, John Wayne, Palm Springs, Sacramento, and all of the other regional airports to accommodate grown-- along with the freeways. Something's going to give. Invest now, and the infrastructure is there. Don't invest, and it's going to get uglier than it is now.... much uglier.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
You can object to TSA practices - the violation of privacy, the ineffectiveness, and the rare but flagrant acts of sadism or molestation - without the pointless exaggeration. To hear you talk I'd be much safer and more comfortable wearing a "Democracy Now!" through Pyongyang Station than I would be boarding a California bullet train.
Blathering about pedophilia, fascism, and interrogations just makes your objections sound like paranoid ravings. Yes, you must be persistent, passionate, and creative in protecting your rights and protesting their violation, but above all you must be rational.
Your words are nothing but a disservice to anyone fighting for the Bill of Rights: it makes their job much harder when their rational objections become conflated with the rampant hyperbole and absurdly loaded language of people like you.
This doesn't make sense. A rider arriving in LA is going to need a car when they get off the train, unless they fancy spending a lot of time waiting for on Metro (formerly known as the RTD - Rough, Tough, and Dangerous.) Total boondoggle.
It would make a hell of a lot more sense to link the Portland-Seattle-Vancouver, BC corridor with high-speed rail, since these are all cities where one can actually get around reasonably well without a car. It'd be a game-changer to have TGV-speed rail on that corridor - one hour between the downtown cores of Portland and Seattle, or Seattle and Vancouver? I've had regular, daily intracity commutes longer than that.
Oh well.
-Isaac
I am not a lawyer, and this is not legal advice. For Entertainment Purposes Only.
Amen.
before I was forced to retire due to ALS I had need to go down to a remote office in LA multiple times per month from the SF Bay area. Airplanes are quick once you leave the ground but the absolute living hell that is air travel made me dread the trip. Having a fast train is something I dreamed about since the month I spent in Europe on business. Totally stress-free "commute". Tie the fast line into municipal light rail like the widely used BART and San Jose light rail and you have a very successful merger of two huge metropolitan economies.
I have something in common with Stephen Hawking...
As a proud native Californian, I say get the fuck out. You probably took that job from a Californian because you are cheap, and now you're just one of those inbred, cornfed assholes driving up the property costs.
U.S. out of California!
Yes, high speed rail is going to be expensive. Yes, it's now projected to cost much more than the original estimate. (The cost has largely increased due to delays (the longer it takes to build a project, the more it costs), particularly fuelled by NIMBY appeasement ("We don't want the train passing near our house!" "But it is much quieter than standard trains and will increase your property values by being near an HSR station." "Build a tunnel!" "Okay, we'll build a tunnel." "The costs on this project are ballooning!").)
But you have to compare the cost to the alternatives. California's freeways and airports are jammed. With increasing population and mobility, something to move people around will have to be built. And the estimated costs to add volume to airports and highways is estimated to be $100-billion as well.
And, to top it off, high speed rail runs on an operational profit. (This means that yearly revenues are higher than yearly costs.) Everywhere. Yes, high speed rail lines run an operational profit in Japan and France, Spain, Russia, Taiwan and car-loving-and-train-hating America. In Britain all rail is private, and for-profit companies are in fierce competition to pay for the rights to run rail services, which are barely at HSR levels if at all. It's a strongly held misconception that rail travel is unprofitable: HSR makes a profit all over the world, and it usually subsidizes local and regional rail transport (which the US has much of).
And though only the Tokyo-Osaka and Paris-Lyon line have paid off all their construction costs, that's because they're the oldest HSR lines; others are on track to in the future. Which modes of transportation don't pay off their construction costs? Oh, that's right, nearly all roads. Remember Carmageddon/The Carpocalypse, when an overpass outside LA was torn down, shutting traffic for the weekend? That was all so they could widen the highway through a mountain pass. Were the anti-HSR people asking for ridership studies for the Sepulveda Pass? Were they asking for the expansion to run an operational profit, let alone an overall profit? Of course not; only rail is subjected to such standards.
Add to this that a train is much more efficient in transporting this number of people, from an energy, environmental and economic perspective, and this is using studies that are assuming that gas prices will be relatively stable over the next few decades.
Obviously there still has to be overview of the project, making sure money is being spent efficiently and for best value. But the entire transportation sector needs to be looked at from this viewpoint. Airlines can work with rail to transport their passengers on their "last mile", freeing up their planes for more profitable medium- and long-haul routes, like done in Germany (Frankfurt Airport has two train stations). Road funds can be diverted to repairing our existing infrastructure as opposed to building more asphalt that needs to be maintained. And everyone will get to where they are going sooner. If this is done, North America will look back 20 years from now, not wondering "How could they do this?", but instead "How did they wait so long?"
Right, that's exactly why no one would ever build a high speed rail system somewhere like Japan where they are also prone to earthquakes. Obviously a train getting derailed is the biggest concern in quake prone areas.
We hope your rules and wisdom choke you / Now we are one in everlasting peace
As a Californian transplant, I say you should get the fuck out. You haven't done a fucking thing with this place in decades. Make way for those of us that will, you lazy asshole.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Exactly, California all by itself is the 8th most productive economy in the world..
California suffers from 2 things, the money that goes out through taxes to help the other 49 states (shouldn't someone scream communism ? ^_^), and stupid voters that want to pay less taxes all the while keeping the level of public services intact.
The first one can't be fixed short of a new civil war, the second problem on the other hand can be fixed. There just is no political will to do it.
Something tells me that the state government of California isn't particularly interested in building a railroad for Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
Various reasons - energy efficiency, trains are more likely to be able to go _right where you want to be_ rather than some flat spot 30 miles out of town, etc. And if we assume that one more transport-class airport would have to be built, that's more land area than the entire rail system required. (Case in point - Dallas/Fort Worth Airport is, IIRC, more acreage than a four-lane freeway from Dallas to Washington DC. Same with the big one in Montreal.) Also trains are more comfortable by at least an order of magnitude.
It's easier to be a result of the past, but more fun to be a cause of the future! http://www.spacefinancegroup.com/
"A Nation Derailed", Lewis McCrary
The above quote was written by a conservative arguing for rail. Your "Damn those liberals and their lying propaganda!" line is, I'm afraid, very often accurate. It is sad that so many on the right are so ready to defend the federal highway systems and automobiles against all other alternatives. Certainly, there are many things to recommend cars and good highways, but currently the funding of these systems is a subsidy for corporations who rely on externalizing the cost (on taxpayers) of long distance transportation, e.g. Wal-Mart, to the detriment of local businesses and small competitors. I call this sad because conservatives, and on this account I will accept the appellation myself, claim to favor traditional patterns of life and to be skeptical of the kind of federal subsidies which support business models which might otherwise fail. The loss of rail and the rise of cars was a blow to small town civic life. Thereafter, the bypass ("It's a bypass. You've got to build bypasses!") and the big box stores, always by externalizing their costs and frequently with the help of imminent domain laws, further eroded civic life and economy.
This doesn't make sense. A rider arriving in LA is going to need a car when they get off the train, unless they fancy spending a lot of time waiting for on Metro (formerly known as the RTD - Rough, Tough, and Dangerous.) Total boondoggle.
That also means that all flights between SF and LA don't make any sense because any airplane traveler arriving in LA is going to need a car when they get off the train, unless they fancy spending a lot of time waiting for on Metro (formerly known as the RTD - Rough, Tough, and Dangerous.) Total boondoggle.
HSR is an investment to the post peak oil future. When Jet A1 fuel costs $5 per liter only the extremely wealthy can afford to travel by air. I hope you Americans are not counting on that, everybody is rich in future? :) Meanwhile the others (and you!) are landlocked either to low speed electric-hybrid cars or low speed trains, that is if you don't start building HSR now . The question here is that do you Americans want to continue your lifestyle of affordable travel after the fossil fuels are out of question, or do you want to isolate yourselves and remove the last of your competitive features: affordable movement of people and goods?
But then again - "Americans, yes they are that stupid".
What would happen if USA neglects building heterogeneous transport networks and stays on the current trend of fossil fuel automobiles and planes? It is not the end of the world after the oil gets too expensive for transportation. If only you can keep the agriculture running you will not starve and private enterprises will built HSR and electric induction roads very fast. The bad thing is that at that time the rest of the world have those and you are late, so very late that I am afraid someone else has the technological and political leadership in this world. As a North European I wouldn't like to see that happen. America(USA) means a lot to me and I want see you leading the world in the future too.
What about us brain-dead slobs?
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