The Low Spark of High-Speed Rail

City Journal ^ | 25 Feb 2021 | Kerry Jackson

[Rummyfan]

California’s bullet train has become a nearly forgotten source of trouble, eclipsed in the public eye by Covid-19, a gubernatorial recall, and out-migration from the Golden State. But it’s still out there, sucking up time and money, and as empty as it ever was.

The California High Speed Rail, its formal name, was a hobby-ego project for former governor Jerry Brown that was supposed to move passengers between Los Angeles and San Francisco at 220 mph by 2020. Instead, the project is moving at the speed of the museum piece it sometimes appears destined to be. Not a single train has run, with train testing still six to seven years away, amid seemingly never-ending delays.

The news regarding the project is, as usual, dismal. As the Los Angeles Times reported in January, Ghassan Ariqat, vice president of operations at bullet-train contractor Tutor Perini, sent a “scorching” letter to California officials criticizing persistent construction delays, “contradicting state claims that the line’s construction pace is on target,” and warning that the project could miss “a key 2022 federal deadline.” “It is beyond comprehension that as of this day, more than two thousand and six hundred calendar days after [official approval to start construction], the authority has not obtained all of the right of way,” Ariqat wrote. Because of the sluggish construction pace, he added, his company “will have to lay off a significant number of its field workers in the very near future” after already letting 73 walk.

[Rummyfan]

Confidence in the original timeline was once high, but setbacks have mounted. One high-speed rail blogger wondered in 2009 if the state itself should make a bid for the 2020 Summer Olympics, since California was “on track” for “fast, high-capacity public transportation” that would allow events and venues easily to be “spread out over a much wider area.” Twelve years later, as the Los Angeles Times has noted, the project “may run out of money” before the “171-mile starter system between Bakersfield and Merced” can be completed. And this month, rising costs forced the High Speed Rail Authority to reduce the planned pair of tracks between Bakersfield and Merced to a single track, saving $1.1 billion but likely coming at the expense of train speeds.

The project, which has gone through at least a half-dozen business plans, is the definition of a money pit. When voters approved it via 2008’s Proposition 1A, they were told it would cost $33 billion. The Los Angeles Times editorialized that the cost was “not too much to wager on a visionary leap that would cement California’s place as the nation’s most forward-thinking state.” Several other newspapers favored the train, but a few came out against it, with the Orange County Register warning that Prop 1A was “a fast track to bankruptcy” and a “boondoggle.”

The original projection has proved far too optimistic. Cost estimates have bounced around since 2008, landing at various times at $64 billion, $77 billion, $98 billion, and $117 billion before settling, for now, at $100 billion for a scaled-back version that links Los Angeles and San Francisco. That’s $20 billion more than the price tag of a year ago when Governor Gavin Newsom, in one of the political understatements of the year, said that “the current project, as planned, would cost too much and take too long.”

[Rummyfan]

And in contrast:

How America Fostered The World’s Best Freight Rail System

[George from New England]

Low Spark of High-Heeled Boys 1971
Great song by Traffic

[Bob434]

i love that song!

[Bob434]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R8M8R835Ck4

The song

[nuconvert]

Just listened to it in my car the other day.

[MercyFlush]

Had California simply got out of the way and allowed the original French consortium to build high speed rail along the I-5 corridor up and over the Grapevine it would be built by now, it would be profitable, and it would be generating revenue for the state in many ways.

Instead the Democrats were offended that someone wanted to make a (GASP!!!) profit from the proposal so they killed the French plan and came up with High Speed Pork to replace it.

Now it’s a gerrymandered line whose primary purpose isn’t transportation but to generate graft and bribes for Democrat politicians and their patrons.

[Bob434]

cleaner more clear versio:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ngdqM2Fguqk

[George from New England]

Even longer than the ‘take a complete dump’ song of Stairway to Heaven.

[lefty-lie-spy]

Right on!
I was going to say something to credit the author’s knowledge of this brilliant Traffic song too.

[cdcdawg]

Here’s a good cover:
https://youtu.be/LsSLdzPdbs8

[nuconvert]

I have it back to back with Freedom Rider on one of my playlists.

[Olog-hai]

That is nonsense. The USA’s rail freight system used to be far superior and could compete with trucking, that is before the road networks started getting subsidized as they continue to be today. With all of the consolidation that regulation and fake deregulation has forced, market share for rail will never get above 40 percent (it’s currently below that) and rate competition will be nonexistent. Never mind the “success” being driven by containers from Red China . . .

[George from New England]

Other notable full length songs from a by-gone era.

Autobahn - Kraftwerk

Tubular Bells - Mike Oldfield

American City Suite

Small Beginnings - Flash

Beginnings - Chicago

Jump Into the Fire - Nilsson

Roundabout - Yes

Get Ready - Rare Earth (21min)

Green-Eyed Lady - Sugarloaf

In A Gadda Da Vida - Iron Butterfox

[George from New England]

When you’re on the roll ...

In Memory of Elizabeth Reed - Allman Bros.

Nights in White Satin

Light My Fire

MacArthur Park

Sky Pilot
s
Alice’s Restaurant

The End - Doors

[DoughtyOne]

The literally most stunning fact about California’s low speed
rail project, is that no matter its molasses in January pace,
it still receives more funding as time goes by.

One pictures a time hundreds of years from now a future
civilization seeing the relics of this project sticking up
out of the farmland in California, wondering what wondrous
thing had once existed there, failing to grasp that what
they see was it’s high point, never to become more than
those relics of what never was.

[eyeamok]

California's Future High Speed Rail from Bakersfield to Fresno

[Publius]

I met a traveler from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
'My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!'
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

-- Percy Shelley: "Ozymandias"

[FreedomPoster]

Since we’re off on this tangent, y’all might like this.

Blind Faith in Hyde Park, 1969
https://youtu.be/F7ADa0l9k0A

I’m pretty sure this is one I watched late last Summer. Can’t go to much live music, so I’ve upgraded the den A/V and watched a lot of concerts.

[DoughtyOne]

Very fitting...

Thanks.