Free Republic

Whether a high-speed rail system ever gets built in the United States is still up in the air, but if it is, artist and activist Alfred Twu has figured out exactly where those speedy rail lines should go. Twu started working on this map in 2009, when President Obama's plan to build high-speed rail was unveiled. "There were many such maps being made by various designers," says Twu, but since then he's updated the map with labels and put it on Facebook, and it struck a chord. It's gone viral. "With the huge response it's generated, I created a petition...

High speed rail is moving forward in California, but progress is pretty stagnant around the rest of the country. Still, there are a lot of proposals out there, and when placed on one map, they form an impressive rail network. This map was put together by California Rail Map, led by Alfred Twu, which combined existing proposals from high speed rail advocacy groups around the US. The US High Speed Rail Association, a nonprofit trade association, predicts a network similar to this one could be in place by 2030. Transporation Secretary Ray LaHood has called for a large HSR network,...

The Department for Transport has unveiled its plans for the northern section of the controversial HS2 railway, but has faced anger from Tories representing constituencies along the route who say it will destroy large swathes of the countryside and “blight” lives. The 225-mph trains will link London with Birmingham, Manchester and Leeds by 2033. It emerged that plans to connect the £32-billion ($50 billion) train line directly to Heathrow have been put on hold until the Davies Commission on airport capacity has reported. …

California’s Democratic Governor Jerry Brown compared efforts by the California state government to build the first-ever high speed rail project in the United States to the popular children’s story “The Little Engine That Could.” … Earlier in his remarks, Brown cited high-speed rail projects in countries such as China, Spain, and Morocco as part of the justification for the project in California. …

Mayor Ed Lee is floating the idea of tearing down the stub end of Interstate 280 in San Francisco in hopes of creating a new neighborhood and speeding up the arrival of high-speed rail service downtown. The idea, laid out by the mayor's chief transit planner, Gillian Gillett, in a memo to the regional Metropolitan Transportation Commission, would be to knock down I-280 before 16th Street - eliminating the ramps both at Sixth and Brannan streets and at Fourth and King streets. It would be replaced by a street-level boulevard akin to those built after the Embarcadero and Central freeways...

The House lawmaker responsible for oversight of the nation's railways promised Wednesday to use his new position to put the brakes on a controversial high-speed railway in his state. California Rep. Jeff Denham (R) was appointed chairman of the House Transportation Committee's Railroads, Pipelines and Hazardous Materials subcommittee Wednesday. Denham has sought previously to deny federal funding for the proposed California high-speed railway, and he said Wednesday afternoon in an interview with The Hill that he would use his new perch to keep the up roadblock. "I've obviously taken a very storing position about California high-speed rail and I'm going...

TORRANCE (CBSLA.com) — A Southern California Congresswoman Thursday defended plans for a high-speed rail project despite spiraling costs and concerns about its long-term viability. KNX 1070′s Jan Stevens reports Rep. Janice Hahn (D-Torrance) clashed with a Bakersfield lawmaker during a Transportation Committee hearing in Washington. State legislators in July approved nearly $8 billion in spending on the first phase of the rail project that will ultimately connect the Southland to San Francisco. Majority Whip Kevin McCarthy (R-Bakersfield) appealed to the Committee to review the business plan and to assess the viability of investing more funds into the project. “There are...

I thought of my fellow Californian Energy Secretary Steven Chu last week, when I paid $4.89 a gallon in Gilroy for regular gas — and had to wait in line to get it. The customers were in near revolt, but I wondered against what and whom. I mentioned to one exasperated motorist that there are estimated to be over 20 billion barrels of oil a few miles away, in newly found reserves off the California coast. He thought I was from Mars. California may face the nation’s largest budget deficit at $16 billion. It may struggle with the nation’s second-highest...

As the UN digs in its ever-sharper, global-grasping claws, there are less and less desirable places to relocate. The New World Order permeates and invades all. Agenda 21? This is how it is done in Australia. Been going on for years... We know a family who live in Sydney’s Parramatta. The oldest girl, now in her 80’s, lives in the family home which was built in the early 1900’s. She was invited to a meeting with Parramatta Council and she and others were told that the Council “could not tolerate” for much longer that there was only one or two...

<p>A government watchdog says Amtrak's train operators are testing positive for drugs and alcohol more and more frequently over the last six years.</p>

In 2008, voters under 30 preferred Barack Obama over John McCain by a 66 to 32 percent margin. Among older voters, Obama led McCain by 50 to 49 percent. How has Obama paid back the Millennial generation, which provided almost all his margin of victory? With what American Interest superblogger Walter Russell Mead calls "Obama's war on the young." Mead is not a tea party crazy or Ayn Rand zealot. He is a history professor at Bard College and an expert on American foreign policy. He voted for Obama in 2008, and he's not wild about Mitt Romney this year....

As Amtrak studies how to bring bullet trains to its frantically busy Northeast Corridor, one design team is suggesting a radically new route requiring a roughly 18-mile-long tunnel beneath Long Island Sound. Trains speeding from Washington to Boston would run through the heart of Long Island, cross into Connecticut through a tunnel emerging in Milford, head to Hartford and then race east toward Worcester on new tracks running alongside I-84. The segment between Manhattan and Hartford would cost about $20 billion, according to the University of Pennsylvania's high-speed rail design studio, which first put forward the idea in 2010. Overall,...

California's controversial high-speed rail project received a boost Wednesday when the Federal Railroad Administration approved the proposed Merced-to-Fresno route, clearing the way for construction to start early next year. A federal record of decision signed by Administrator Joseph Szabo represents the final bureaucratic hurdle for the California High-Speed Rail Authority. The decision gives a federal blessing to the 60-mile route and to thousands of pages of environmental review for the project. Backers of the project hailed the decision as historic for the development of the first high-speed train project in the nation and the start of construction in the central...

Opponents of high-speed rail contend that it's a boondoggle because of its $68 billion pricetag. But a recent UC Berkeley study provides evidence that a California bullet train might be a good investment, particularly when it comes to reducing greenhouse gases and fighting climate change. The study, published recently in the journal Environmental Research Letters, was the result of two years of research by UC Berkeley civil and environmental engineering professor Arpad Horvath and Mikhail Chester, professor at Arizona State University's School of Sustainable Engineering and The Built Environment. The study analyzed the environmental sustainability of a high-speed rail network...

The Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association is up with its second radio advertisement against Gov. Jerry Brown's November ballot initiative to raise taxes, comparing Brown's tax campaign to street robbery. "Hey, lady, hand over your purse or the schools get it," a voice at the top of the ad says. The ad, an issue-advocacy spot running statewide beginning today, comes as the Democratic governor begins in earnest to campaign for Proposition 30, his proposal to raise the state sales tax and income taxes on California's highest earners. The Democratic governor has characterized the election as a choice between higher taxes and...

Brown wants you to believe global warming "poses an immediate and growing threat to California's economy, environment and to public health," and that reducing greenhouse gas emissions, "which are warming the planet," is necessary "to prepare for the unavoidable impacts of climate change, including the increased likelihood of both flooding and drought." That's the same phony scare story repeated until many people finally tuned it out. It failed to persuade Congress to intervene with a law to limit greenhouse gas emissions, even though Congress almost never has seen a trumped-up crisis that didn't justify overreaching intervention... But, as the Sacramento...

If bullet trains someday race up and down the East Coast, they may not stop at 30th Street Station. Amtrak and city officials envision a new high-speed rail station on Market Street east of City Hall, linked by a 10-mile tunnel to Philadelphia International Airport, where a second new station would be built. The neoclassical 30th Street Station, opened in 1933 by the Pennsylvania Railroad and touted by Trains Magazine last year as "America's Finest Railroad Station," would become a hub for slower intercity trains and commuter service. Amtrak, which owns the station, says a new high-speed rail alignment beneath...

Driving across California is like going from Mississippi to Massachusetts without ever crossing a state line. Consider the disconnects: California's combined income and sales taxes are among the nation's highest, but the state's deficit is still about $16 billion. It's estimated that more than 2,000 upper-income Californians are leaving per week to flee high taxes and costly regulations, yet California wants to raise taxes even higher; its business climate already ranks near the bottom of most surveys. Its teachers are among the highest paid on average in the nation, but its public school students consistently test near the bottom of...

California is our Greece, the most fiscally irresponsible of U.S. states – and now it has another fiscal fiasco on its hands. A recent report about the state-sponsored “bullet train to nowhere” calculates $68 billion as the total sum to be spent on a high-speed rail line to run between Los Angeles and San Francisco. Passengers are supposed to be able to travel up to 220 miles per hour in two-and-a-half hours. A plane flight is less than an hour – not counting drives to and from the airports. Voters approved the rail project by a 53-47% margin, in a...

California is broke and broken. Its freeways and roads are crumbling. Many cities—like Stockton, which declared bankruptcy two weeks ago—are straining under hundreds of millions in bond debt and unfunded pensions for retired public workers. In the face of a slow-motion fiscal train wreck, why would state lawmakers commit to spending $5.8 billion in state and federal funds on the first phase of a high-speed rail line that practically nobody wants in part of the state where practically nobody lives? The state Senate on Friday narrowly approved legislation to start work on a 130-mile stretch of rail between Madera and...