Posted on 12/14/2014 1:57:22 PM PST by Jim Robinson
The California High-Speed Rail Authority will officially break ground next month in Fresno on construction of its statewide bullet-train route.
The Jan. 6 groundbreaking ceremony, announced Friday afternoon, comes about a year and a half after the agency awarded its first construction contract, a $1 billion deal to design and build the first 29-mile section from Madera to the south end of Fresno...
~~snip~~
California voters approved Proposition 1A, a $9.9 billion bond measure to help finance a high-speed rail system, in November 2008. But it wasn’t until the fall of 2010, when the Obama administration and the Federal Railroad Administration directed more than $3 billion in federal stimulus and transportation grants to California to begin construction...
~~snip~~
Between the federal money and bond funds from Prop. 1A, the rail agency has about $6 billion available to build the backbone of its system from Merced to Bakersfield. But that’s less than 10% of the estimated $68 billion cost to span the statewide system’s first 520-mile phase from Los Angeles to San Francisco by 2028 or 2029...
~~snip~~
Just where the rest of the money will come from is uncertain. While state legislators agreed this fall to allocate 25% of annual cap-and-trade money — funds paid to California by companies for credits to offset their air pollution emissions...
(Excerpt) Read more at fresnobee.com ...
giant sized ripoff
Good article on that
That Winning Bid for California’s High-Speed Rail: Is It Suspiciously Low?
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/12/that-winning-bid-for-californias-high-speed-rail-is-it-too-low/383737/
and I love the last paragraph
“[And, yes, I have asked Richard whether the exact winning bid (look at it again, 1,234,567,890) is serendipitous, engineered to come out that way, a bit of whimsy, etc.]”
You see, it can be done! It CAN be done!!!
That is how it’s done. You underestimate the costs and the ridership for political reasons, and then you apply the Law of Moses when it all comes crashing down, and you look for that financial white knight.
True... the voters here in Florida voted down HSR from Tampa area to Orlando, but between it there would be stops in about 7 cities, so it would be slow. The HSR would start at Tampa International Airport then it would stop in downtown Tampa (4 miles), then Plant City (15 miles), then Lakeland (25 miles), then Haines City (40 miles), Disney World (50 miles), Orlando (60 miles) then Orlando International Airport (70 miles). No way will it hit 100 mph...
They need a faster way to move illegals further north.
No matter how many times liberal ideas fail they continue to push ahead with them.
Ask mister Taggert!
Need desalinization plants
Dam it.
BOOM Town Fresno!
That’ll be a hell of a thing, of course, given that they’ll probably build one rail the length of the line, then build the second rail all the way back, it’ll take ten or twelve years to build. ;’)
It’s laughable to still call this thing a “bullet train”, but hey, “Progressives” are all about propaganda, not reality.
Check out this report:
http://reason.org/files/1b544eba6f1d5f9e8012a8c36676ea7e.pdf
“The time required to reach the proposed speeds, the distances between stops, and the fact that for part of the route the high-speed trains will travel on regular train tracks rather than upgraded high-speed rail tracks indicates that attaining the proposed speeds would be difficult between the majority of stops.”
Supposedly good old Jer is going to take the money from your ever increasing gas taxes.
It still violates the language of the proposition that started this monstrosity .... it is supposed to be supported by ridership but will NEVER achieve that....PLUS there is no outside money coming in to support it.
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