The Great Train Robbery: High-speed rail is like Solyndra on steroids.

American Spectator ^ | May 2013 | John Fund

[neverdem]

NOTHING FITS the Obama administration’s economic project better than high-speed rail. It’s based on visions of a utopian future, employs gobs of union labor in its construction, can be used to reward political allies and donors, and makes use of analysts eager to churn out dubious studies justifying it on economic grounds. Call it Solyndra on steroids.

The poster child for high-speed rail is California’s proposed 500-mile bullet train from Anaheim to San Francisco. Since it would begin at Disneyland and end at cultural la-la land, critics can’t resist snarking that the train would be on a fast track from “Fantasy to Delusion.”

--snip--

Even in California, several staunch supporters of high-speed rail are having second thoughts. In order to avoid environmental opposition, the high-speed rail authority has abandoned plans to lay the entire route with new track. Instead, in the Bay Area, the new trains would share tracks with local commuter lines. This so-called “blended system” jeopardizes the legal commitment made to California voters in the 2008 bond measure they approved: that a trip between Los Angeles and San Francisco would take no more than 2 hours and 40 minutes. In addition, money given to local commuter systems by the high-speed rail authority violates pledges that no bond money would be diverted to such purposes.

Quentin Kopp, a former San Francisco state senator and judge who served on the rail authority, has turned against the current plan. “They have just mangled this project,” he told the Los Angeles Times. “They distorted it. We don’t get a high-speed rail system. It is the great train robbery.” He is joined in his skepticism by Jim Mills, a former state senate leader who once ran the rail authority, and Lynn Schenk, a former San Diego congresswoman who currently sits on the board...

[dalereed]

Maybe a muslim terrorist attack could derail it!!!

[Carry_Okie]

There isn't a high speed rail system that can compete with airlines, primarily for reasons of flexibility. Yet in addition, unless we get every last Muslim out of the country, rail traffic will pose unacceptable hazards as well.

Rails are for freight, not people. Those days passed a century ago.

[Vendome]

There is no way I would take an idiotic joy ride on a “supposed High Speed” train. The people fleecing us are the one’s that are high.

Hell, a party bus takes anywhere from 5-6.5 hours and only costs ....Wait for it... $38.00 to $52.00!!!! Round Frickin Trip!!!That’s on Megabus and no drinking allowed.

On Greyhound(sucks) It’s $38 bucks round trip and still sucks.

There is suppose to be some other party type bus that has a bar and travels from San Jose to LA and then to Vegas for sumpin like $65 bucks!!!!

Freaking KuhRayZee!!!

Well, the high speed train, to be viable(what a joke), is going to have to make several stops along the way and the time from San Jose to Los Angeles will be comparable, if not longer but, it will absolutely cost more.

I’m basing that on 4 years of living on the East Coast and taking the train.

Or I can take my car, since I will have to rent a car when I get there and it’ll only take me about 4.5 hours from my house to my actual destination and round trip it’ll cost me about $120.00.

However, I won’t be waiting in line to get on a train, waiting at each stop hoping we leave on time, waiting some more to disembark, then walk with all the people who move slower than a herd of turtles with emphysema and adled by arthritis, then wait in line to get a car, then wait to get out of the parking lot, with the same old turtles who don’t know where they are going and don’t want to make a mistake so ..... They just start driving real slow and stopping real long. By then, I am about to blow a cork and I probably still have to drive 45 minutes to get anywhere in Los Angeles if I’m lucky.

Hell, that’s an all day job and no over time.

I’d rather drive.

[Vendome]

LOL

Hell, I don’t know if I’d want to be on a train traveling very fast, running parallel to 15.

Them winds is terriblz...

[kenavi]

Like the way you think.

[cripplecreek]

Rails are for freight, not people.

Yup. Most freight doesn't mind traveling cross country at 40mph or sitting for hours or even days. Its actually a very efficient means of moving freight long distance.

[Jubal Harshaw]

They wouldn’t use the BART tracks in a “blended” system; they’d use the Caltrain tracks. Caltrain currently runs passenger trains in the day / freight at night on a standard gauge rail from Gilroy through San Jose to San Francisco.

[freedumb2003]

>>Hell, I don’t know if I’d want to be on a train traveling very fast, running parallel to 15.<<

Well, what if that train started in Yonkers at 6:00 AM travelling at 55MPH and another train started in Chicago at 7:05 AM and...

[neverdem]

Thanks for the link.

[Vendome]

Chris Christie could outrun that scenario ...

[freedumb2003]

>>Maybe a muslim terrorist attack could derail it!!!<<

If I was them and REALLY wanted to perform economic carnage on California (and the USA) I would just encourage this project and try to even accelerate it.

God knows it must have been the USSR’s plans that resulted in the California “education” system.

[stilloftyhenight]

LOL By the time that “utopian future” arrives that system would be so outdated it would be sitting in a bone-yard.

[mowowie]

Leftists LOVE public transportation and their leaders (gods) sure as well damn know they love it.
what better and easier way to milk MILLIONS of dollars from the unsuspecting taxpayer?

[American in Israel]

shhhhhh, that is next years grant study.

[Olog-hai]

The plan is to use the same tracks as Caltrain, which is 4’ 8½” gauge.

BART’s gauge was the result of more useless government testing, which claimed that the wider track gauge (the only equivalent being in India, for the record) would result in better ride quality in crosswinds on elevated structures. Of course, what with plenty of trains running at much higher speeds on 4’ 8½” gauge traversing all sorts of structures, that absurdity has been long debunked.

[American in Israel]

You are not kidding, some sections down there move so much and so often they run the pipes above ground. No way a rail bed will remain level.

The whole thing is simply a way to launder money through the government. Pour a few billion in at the top and watch a couple of million dollar construction projects trickle out the bottom. (And lots of Politicians buying fifty million dollar houses.)

[Brad from Tennessee]

To fathom what these mega-projects are about requires learning who owns or controls land that will be bought for right-of-ways, passenger stations, switch yards, etc. and the undeveloped land adjacent to the route whose value will be enhanced by being in proximity of the project. Potentially, bedroom communities can be built along the length of this thing.

[Olog-hai]

That’s like saying highways are for freight, not people. And for the record, rail freight today is slower than ever, although single trains carry more gross weight; Union Pacific once had an initiative for 90-mph fast freight, but the federal government’s regulations killed that.

If the government would get the blazes out of the way of passenger rail (the regulations on it are incredibly ridiculous; all it takes is just an hour reading the CFRs on the Federal Railroad Administration’s website—they’ve been around since the early 1960s), then the private railroads would be able to compete once more.

[Carry_Okie]

You are not kidding, some sections down there move so much and so often they run the pipes above ground. No way a rail bed will remain level.

Well that's nothing compared to the next big engineering disaster they have in the works: the water tunnel under the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta for hogging water from the Trinity River to LA. This is a seventy mile long buried concrete tunnel traversing a peat bog in an earthquake zone with millions of people depending upon reliable delivery.

What could possibly go wrong?

[mosesdapoet]

If the die is cast on doing this thing perhaps Californians should very seriously consider and push for this;

I’ll Bet that none of that very expensive right of way is located on highway median partions which is probably, but not allways, is the most direct route. Routing that way would cost a comparative zip as far as right of way aquisition is concerned. Instead of allowing these billionarie God dening commie pig politicians parading around as “democrats” feed at the public trough.

It might even break even.