Posted on 05/26/2019 5:46:26 AM PDT by vannrox
Well, California Governor Gavin Newsom has abandoned plans to build a high-speed railroad between Los Angeles and San Francisco. After spending billions of dollars in funds, much of it from the Federal government, the Governor said that the project should be shelved.
He cited that the project was too expensive.
The face of American politics today. This is the slick and well-packaged oligarchy pick for California. Mr. California Governor Gavin Newsom. Look how plastic he appears. Why, he could be right out of one of those political villains from a 1980’s John Cusack movie.
It all began ten years ago. Back then, President Obama called for a network of high-speed railroads to criss-cross the country “within 25 years”. The nation roared with glee and cheering his forward thinking.
Perspicacious = To be far-sighted in understanding things.
At that time, of course, the rest of the world had already implemented High Speed Rail. America was going to get involved in a game of “catch up”.
Only this time, progressive values and liberal management would lead the way.
Look back. The year is 2009; “President Obama’s goal of building a high-speed rail network that at least 80 percent of Americans will have access to by 2025, is facing major resistance in Congress. Earlier this week, Vice President Joe Biden announced a $53 billion, six year plan to get the U.S. high-speed rail network going with $8 billion over the next year spent towards building new lines and upgrading existing passenger lines in areas such as the northeast and midwest.:
His plan, began its’ implementation through California.
Of course, compared to the rest of the world, it’s pretty modest. The idea was to link the two largest cities in California together. This would occur by placing rail lines through the large entirely rural California valley. The top speed would be limited to 220 MPH, which is the global norm. The most ambitious plans would have 800 miles of rail line, paid in part by the Federal government and bonds issued by the (insolvent) California government.
The decision to cancel this program was welcomed by Conservatives, and derailed by Liberals. Both for reasons related towards political considerations. However, in my mind, everyone loses.
What’s worse, rubbing salt in the wound, comes President Trump. He rightfully questioned the decision to kill the project. As a businessman, you do not casually start of kill things without study, and an analysis of the consequences. Obviously, there were concerns that the decision to kill the project were not carefully thought out.
This is an excerpt. You can read the rest HERE.
I will comment on why Europe has a functioning inter-city passenger rail service and we do not.
Europe is actually much smaller than the U.S. It is essentially a peninsula of the Eurasian land mass, and is squeezed in by seas both in the south and in the north. It is furthermore cut up into so many nation-states, with many languages and cultures. It also is a much older place. It’s urban grids were laid out centuries ago, prior to the invention of the automobile. Its cities feature mass transportation and are interconnected by passenger rail.
What is called high speed rail in Europe are tracks dedicated to inter-city passenger service, whose curvature and elevation, level of maintenance, infrequency of stops, allow speeds of up to 180 mph. The first line, Paris to Lyon, is 250 miles, about the distance from New York to Boston, or Chicago to St. Louis, but well short of the distance from Los Angeles to San Fransisco. The equipment operating on these lines is not so very radical.
In theory, we could bring AMTRAK’s northeast corridor up to the standards needed for high speed service. In practice, the time and cost of the permitting process makes this impossible. We would also have the problem of what to do with the commuter trains that operate on the same tracks. Separating the northeast corridor from the rest of the AMTRAK system might be useful for better enabling it to handle high speed rail; but, from where would the votes come in Congress? Improvement of the northeast corridor would not only be opposed by the airlines that serve the region, but by the rest of the country.
Elsewhere in the country, a big problem facing inter-city passenger rail is rail freight service. Our railroad companies own and maintain their tracks, and their trains have priority over AMTRAK. This makes a lot of sense. The energy required for slowing down, or even stopping 100-car trains laden with bulk cargo, to accommodate a passenger train, would eliminate the competitive advantage of freight rail. Besides, the distances are huge. Air transportation is the obvious choice, and what is called inter-city passenger rail is mostly excursion.
“The most basic answer is because of WWII.”
Thanks for making the point I usually make in threads on this subject. The war and the geography you include in your post are lost to so many who only have the “they have it so why can’t we” thinking.
“Why Can’t America have High-Speed Bullet Trains?”
same reason they don’t have ‘em in Canada and Australia but have ‘em in Japan: it takes a compact country with a high population density to have any chance that they’re economically feasible ...
But somehow our grandfathers and their fathers made it work
@ post 17 - well stated
We have become paralyzed by government process, regulation, permits, private property rights, and lawsuits often based on “environmentalism.”
Look at the pipeline process for an insight into how/why we cannot accomplish big infrastructure projects any more. This is not just a problem at the federal government level - it is found in state, county, and municipal government.
High speed rail would be a good thing, but the price of it now outweighs any benefit because it is too difficult. Same thing for nuclear power, hydro-power, enlarging existing highways, etc etc. The private property easements are problematic and deciding what goes where invites all kinds of corruption even assuming you can pull permits and get approvals from layers of bureaucracy.
With that said, you clearly have more insight into this area. There are numerous stretches of interstate in America with a large median - I have often wondered how/why we do not utilize that public land when possible for high speed rail. This might cut some of the costs and directly connect to major transportation hubs, but these medians do not exist in many places on the east coast due to crowding. Just a thought....
Maybe we should focus on the basics first, like getting the growing numbers our fellow people living in tents on the streets off the streets.
Even then passenger trains went as fast as the freight trains.
One route. Few departures. Only two stops.
They need more departures to increase convenience, Hybrid use trains like I suggested with less emphasis on passenger service per train could accomplish that more easily because adding a little capacity to numerable trains might be done at a lower cost than adding more dedicated trains.
The fact is that Americans are so oblivious to the possibility of going by train that we would need low risk baby step strategies at this point, which try to use what is still rolling and might build awareness of the option, grow the market if you will, not high risk grand schemes like HSR.
This is a progressive wet dream. Obama pushed the idea. And now it’s re-appearing in the Green New Deal. The left is convinced that we need these high speed rail trains in order to reduce air travel and reduce carbon emissions. But none of these plans explain how to pay for these projects. The feasibility studies that are done show astronomical costs in construction and maintenance. The price tags are so out of sight they make even liberals like Gavin Newsome pause.
A few reasons for this. For one, the US the is a very large country. And our population is spread out. Most people do not live in big cities. China is a large country too, but they have very high population density. So the train is useful to a high percentage of the population. In the US, a cross-country train would have dozens of stops and wouldnt be close enough to impact enough people.
The corruption factor would also be out of sight. Wherever you put a station, the land value is going to increase. So what do you think is going to happen when a politician (and his donors) own land near the train route? A station is going to magically appear even if that station is kind of pointless. But it also highlights the political grudge match that will ensue over where the stations should be.
But it’s also way too expensive to build anything like this in this country anymore. There is too many layers of bureaucracy and regulations to comply with that slow everything down. You will have to defend one lawsuit after another for one reason or another. You also got tons of middlemen with their hands in the cookie jar. And that is all exactly what was happening in California. The costs were soaring out of control.
So unless the progressive left can figure out how to pay for this and control the costs....high speed rail in America is going to remain left-wing fantasy. There is a reason why some are saying the Green New Deal is going to cost $90 trillion dollars. All these ideas they are proposing are so expensive the price tag is something the human brain can’t even wrap around. It’s impossible.
If there really was a market for HSR, and environmentalists would get out of the way, it would happen without the federal feed bag as well.
But HSR is like a mantra for some folks.
What was said also explains the German and Zjapanese economic miracles ... when they rebuilt after the war they did so with the latest technology ... meanwhile here in the States we had a greatly expanded industrial infrastructure that, while physically new, for reasons also derived from wartime priorities was also simultaneously already dated.
So the Rust Belt is what happened as our less efficient physical plants soldiered on to normal economic attrition, and even past that as the federal government and military-industrial gobbled up a lot of available Capitol, but once we took the decade and a half to retool it was American industry advancing even as, notably, the Japanese faltered.
Americans stopped doing trains in the 1950’s....we love our cars too much...and jet travel.
Why Can’t America have High-Speed Bullet Trains?
1. See Amtrak
2. Repeat
Hellcats for everyone!!
Yes, but the fundamental problem is contempt for TRUTH = REALITY.
The people who are chanting these mantras refuse to accept REALITY.
The REALITY is that they can have some of what they want but not all of it.
Obviously--as I say--they have made the choice collectively that they would rather have illegal-immigrants-on-welfare than high-speed-bullet-trains.
Also behind this is another dishonesty: They believe somehow that they can have both. That they can have illegal-immigrants-on-welfare and at the same time force the rest of America--which they dismiss as "the rich" but is in REALITY the hard-working-American-taxpayer--to pay for their high-speed-bullet-trains.
Leftists have California in a death-grip, and Leftists are dishonest, parasitic, willfully delusional, and intellectually and morally sloppy, and they have a fundamental and profound contempt for TRUTH, REALITY, logic, and intellectual clarity.
They are the descendants of the spoiled brats of the 1960s counter-culture movement, who sashayed onto the world scene chanting "Sex-drugs-and-rock-and-roll!" and "If it feels good, do it!"
They are basically spoiled brats who think they can have everything--never mind that somebody else has to pay it--and a tantrum for anybody who says they can't!
We who live in the People’s Republic of King County concur...we of the $4B bridge and the $3.5B tunnel.
1) Because all the Rightwing Bible Toting Bittercling White Folks have all the Bullets.
2) The Black Ops .gov already has a huge underground network in use.
Then where would the money come from for AOC's Green New Deal?©
Here’s a video you may like:
https://youtube.com/watch?feature=youtu.be&v=v1eNcuGcPW4
Me: What the Left really wants out of Illegal Aliens is political power. All those extra seats in Congress. They will tear the whole world down to have power.
That is exactly right.
When an honest man, Donald Trump, intruded into their domain and threatened their power by raising the Light of Truth, they reacted like cornered rats, fighting with everything they've got, attacking him and his family and everything else, and, as you say, they will tear down the entire world to hang onto their power!
These people are dangerous!
They are very dangerous!
Note tagline.
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