Yup. I remember the comic books where this appeared, back then.
Posted on 10/24/2022 11:17:08 AM PDT by grundle
California hasn’t created a railroad to the future but a warning to the rest of the country to avoid its delusion and folly.
California progressives tried to build a European-style high-speed rail network and alienated the French in the process.
A big New York Times piece on the rail project reports that the French, who wanted to work with California, decided the state was simply too dysfunctional and departed to help complete a high-speed line in Morocco instead.
The ongoing unraveling of California’s rail plan is an object lesson in how infrastructure as eschatology is a bad idea. If transportation is conceived as a way to save the planet and fulfill a deep-seated, quasi-religious fixation rather than as a means to move people around more efficiently, it is bound to fail. Throw on top California’s politicized decision-making and regulatory and legal obstacles to building, and it’s a formula for a boondoggle for the ages.
No matter how high California has estimated the cost of the project to be, it hasn’t been enough, even as almost nothing has been built. It started out at $33 billion in 2008. Now, it’s $113 billion, with no one knowing where the funding is going to come from.
Not that the California experience will diminish the progressive ardor for high-speed rail. As far as its enthusiasts are concerned, it is like socialism — never failed, just never truly tried.
President Barack Obama proposed an 8,600-mile high-speed rail system, and transportation secretary Pete Buttigieg wants the U.S. to be the “global leader” in high-speed rail. Progressives think of bullet trains like windmills on rails, a symbol of enlightenment and modernity, a way to free ourselves from the selfish, small-minded tyranny of the automobile and adopt a sleeker, greener, more virtuous future.
Then, the wheel meets the rail. In California, it might have sounded appealing to build a high-speed rail link between Los Angeles and San Francisco — if you abstracted the project from all the topographical and other difficulties. For political reasons, a less direct, less economical route between the cities was selected. And the decision was made to start building between the two megalopolises, in the Central Valley, creating the possibility that California may end up with a bullet train to and from nowhere.
Of course, we already have cheap, high-speed transport between population centers. It is called air travel.
As Randal O’Toole of the Cato Institute points out, planes cruise at roughly 500 miles per hour. The Amtrak Acela, on the other hand, has a top speed of 150 miles per hour. Yes, airplanes need infrastructure, but not expensive, complex new infrastructure all along their routes.
O’Toole notes that Japan’s high-speed trains seemed like the future in the 1960s, when air travel was more expensive than rail. Also, Japan’s high-speed trains had a ready-made customer base in the considerable proportion of the country’s population that already traveled by train.
In the U.S. today, in contrast, the average cost per mile of traveling by air is cheaper than traveling by rail, and a minuscule 0.1 percent of all passenger travel is via Amtrak.
If we built the Interstate Highway System, why can’t we build a comparable high-speed network? As O’Toole observes, the highway system basically paid for itself and accounts for a substantial 20 percent of the country’s passenger-miles and a roughly comparable proportion of freight ton-miles.
High-speed rail could never be a match. Even if you put aside the endemic cost overruns, the inevitable construction delays, and the considerable maintainable costs, it can only carry passengers, not freight.
While progressives swoon over high-speed rail as the shiny future, some other genuinely futuristic technology is likely to emerge. If the age of self-driving cars ever arrives, people will be able to experience a car more like a personal train, except unlimited by rails.
California hasn’t created a railroad to the future but a warning to the rest of the country to avoid its delusion and folly.
California’s high speed rail project is going to end up as the world’s most expensive bike trail.
Every time I read about this I think of the monorail episode of the Simpson’s.
It may be a progressive fantasy, but it has already cost billions of dollars and poured tons of concrete and seized property all over California.
Every day you drive through the Central Valley you see another overpass going up.
It is hideous. It is a total boondoggle. No one will ride it.
But it is happening.
The true Visionaries on California’s High-Speed Rail never expected it to be completed, and never expected it to remotely pay for its build costs and maintenance costs. It was envisioned as a boondoggle project to generate at least six times its construction estimates with all the prerequisite grips levels, and frankly, it appears on track (no pun intended) to achieve that end. It was perfectly obvious that the system would never work, the moment it was conceived.
Every weekend Hwy 15 is jam-packed with traffic going to and from Vegas. High-speed rail might actually make sense there, and yet for some reason that doesn't even make financial sense.
Whoever thought that high-speed rail could replace low cost puddle jumper flights between LA and Frisco?
I have a high speed rail for Newsom, and its made out of cedar.
I also have the tar and feathers to go along with it.
--Percy Shelley
There is another post about the Triangle Black UFO.
This CA Rail discussion triggered that as similar.
So, CA can get some black triangle UFOs to pick up passengers from LA and ‘zap’ them to San Fran and back.
That would be cheaper, more efficient, and more sure of success than this ‘rail line’.
Starting in the middle and working out from that point is a stupid plan for a transportation system with no demand projected for the 20 years that followed.
This was always a money laundering scheme for DNC contributors.
Whenever I drive in California I’ll usually end up on bouncing down Rt. 99, careening on and off those tight 60s off ramps, admiring the overpasses to nowhere monuments to the California leftist gods.
this is a state that needs 2 years and over $1.5-million to build a single toilet ..........
I always thought it was strange that oil pipelines were considered dangerous to the migration of animals, but apparently high-speed rail is not.
ya... lets see what happens when its all done and the train is doing 210+ and a mild earthquake hits. I’m surprised japan’s hasnt got whacked yet this way!!
The same thing happened in Florida; the Obama Administration offered 2 billion dollars to build a high-speed rail line between Orlando and Tampa, current US Senator and former Governor Rick Scott turned it down and wanted no part of the project, liberals in Florida ruthlessly mocked him.
I really believe that California has reached the stage where nothing important or significant will ever be built there again. There are too many lawyers, too many fantasy rules to follow, too many special interest obstructionists, too many people to bribe. Too many cost overruns. When the French pull out, you know you've hit rock bottom.
I know I've done it many times. Traffic gets so backed up on Sundays on I-5, that my buds and I had to risk a ticket for riding on the shoulder or let our motorcycle motors overheat beyond repair. The I-5 is nothing but miles and miles of desert until it connects with with Victorville. Then more miles of deserts except for the occasional small town with accomodations.
I drove from east San Diego to meet up with the Minutemen in Tombstone. Miles and miles of desert. Further than from LA to Vegas, but same experience.
South Cali taxpayers were for that high-speed link to Vegas. It was known that link would have gone through the desert along the same freight tracks in desert land, and not need to buy property for this boondoggle that is going nowhere. The concept between LA and Frisco was cool, the execution has not been.
Fast-forward to the present, and the dream is all but dead. The Obama plan collapsed, falling victim to a combination of inexperience, mismanagement and furious opposition from several key Republican legislators and state governors. The California project is still technically up and running, but it is so far behind schedule that it has yet to lay a single mile of track, despite 14 years of work and about $5bn spent.
I believe this article to be a little behind. Pretty sure the line now connects Merced to Modesto. Google a map and you'll see why this debacle is called the "train to nowhere."
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