Posted on 05/27/2016 7:53:55 AM PDT by george76
Jerry Brown’s dream of constructing a high speed rail line connecting the Bay Area with Southern California suffered a major setback this week, but rest assured every effort is being made to spend enough money quickly enough to make pulling the plug seem unreasonable. Construction costs of the project have escalated so rapidly since the times state voters narrowly approved a bond issue that instead of constructing new tracks in the Bay Area and Los Angeles, the trains will share existing tracks with conventional freight and commuter trains, drastically increasing travel time, and making the trains half-fast at best. But even with this economy measure, funding is turning out to be a problem.
...
The latest auction in California’s cap-and-trade market for greenhouse gases fell sharply below expectations, as buyers purchased just 2% of the carbon credits whose sale funds a variety of state programs -- notably, the proposed high-speed rail project.
The quarterly auction, conducted May 18 and announced Wednesday, will provide just $10 million for state programs, including $2.5 million for the bullet train. The rail authority had been expecting about $150 million.
Those revenues are crucial, because the federal money promised to the project have to be matched by state funds. The greenies had assumed that carbon credits would be a means of avoiding appropriating taxpayers’ money to the project. But enthusiasm for paying for carbon credits has diminished:
One possible cause is that potential buyers believe a pending lawsuit could overturn the entire system. The California Chamber of Commerce is the lead plaintiff in a suit that contends the fees are a tax that was never authorized by the required two-thirds of the Legislature and that the law never specifically authorized the auctions. The state contends the fees are not taxes, but a consequence of regulations.
(Excerpt) Read more at americanthinker.com ...
Gee, they nearly got what they needed. They only missed by 147.5 million (out of 150 million). That is a glowing success by gov’t standards.
Great Expectations.........................Piss poor reality......................
Choo-Choo Willie Green is deeply saddened, I’m sure.
” . . . making the trains half-fast at best.”
Half-fast, huh? Haha!
I nearly shipped my pants when I read “half-fast”...
I hear that train a’comin’
Its rolling up round da bend..
Aint seen a high speed railjob
since MoonBeam was Gub way back when
Funny how some names just stick with us!
Ya mean that Senator Feinstein’s husband will need to wait a little longer for his payoff?
No kidding, that too. As if the rest of the country will hear about Mr. Feinstein...
In my post, I was referencing Willie Green, a former Freeper who advocated all forms of statist mass transportation on this forum. Any thread about trains and mass transit in general could count on his input.
His advocacy really rubbed some of us the wrong way. I tried to stay on civil terms with him, but I think I had it out with him in a thread that he quit right after.
It will never be built.
To rephrase Willie Green, “its the bullet train to nowhere.”
The only question is why liberal politicians are fixated on 19th Century technology.
Trains do have their place.
But I think it should not be a political decision.
The government has no business picking winners and losers.
This is reality, Brown can’t really do the job with out billions he doesn’t have. The idea of “sharing” tracks with commercial rail traffic is laughable. That’s how AMTRAK operates in California today. For a change, I decided a couple of years ago to take AMTRAK from Oakland to Los Angeles (Magical Name, The Coast Starlight). It takes TWELVE HOURS! It takes more than TWO HOURS just to get from Oakland to San Jose! When you finally get to San Luis Obispo, you have to wait there for opposing traffic for more than an hour since there is only a single track between SLO and Santa Barbara and freight traffic takes precidence since AMTRAK doesn’t own the right of way. And as for speed, the train seldom get going more than about 50 mph because the tracks can’t safely handle trains that travel faster than that! But it’s a beautiful ride if you have the time, plus you get to see Vandenberg AFB and all the missle launch sites there that line the coast which can’t be seen by car since Us 101 is probably ten miles inland through the Vandenberg area. and for seniors a round trip is less than $100!
Sure they do. But not if someone tries to force people to ride on them, and I agree, it shouldn’t be a political gravy train.
Which is what this thing is.
At the cost per mile projections, the $2.5 Million would cover 2 and half miles of track.
Politicians love big construction projects because they make it easy for them to steal big time money without getting caught.
Yup. That’s why it will never be built.
Its too expensive, there’s no private financing in place and there is no market study to show how a bullet train would pay back the accrued costs of building it.
Its just a vanity project for liberal politicians looking to put their name on their future memoirs.
Poor Willie is most likely bouncing off some well padded walls in a state run intuition.
Its been playing havoc with rail lines here on the San Francisco peninsula. There's lots of construction activity as they raise or lower rail lines so automobile traffic will cross under or over the trains. And they went on a big push to electrify the commuter lines that will be sharing track. All in the name of being "green", which is a lie - because the CalTrain diesel engines are driven by electric motors whereby the diesel engines create the electricity at the point where it is needed. The overhead electric wires get their electricity generated by burning oil, with huge losses of efficiency. These "high-speed" trains will move at a crawl sharing lines with commuter trains that stop every few miles on the peninsula, and move within crowded residential neighborhoods (homes 20 feet away). What a stinking mess the liberal politicians are shoving down our throats.
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