Posted on 11/08/2010 9:20:18 PM PST by gunsequalfreedom
California's Central Valley To Be First Section Of California's High Speed Rail System
The first section will be Merced-to-Fresno or Fresno-to-Bakersfield
The bill for the first section will be $4.3 Billion (with "B") and will be a dollar for dollar match with state funds. Trains will travel at speeds of 220 miles per hour, meaning you will get from Merced to Fresno or Fresno to Bakersfield really faaaaast!
The trip from Merced to Fresno by car takes 59 minutes. With the new high speed rail system you will be able to make the trip in about 15 minutes - once the train pulls out of the station. Add the time to park your car, get tickets, pass through security, get on the train and get the train moving and our bet is by car will be faster.
Is anyone going to ride this thing or will we have a $4.9 billion empty train going back and forth between Merced and Fresno?
Eventually the final first phase will be an 800 mile trip from Los Angeles to San Francisco. Funding for all 800 miles, however, is not secured and you have to wonder if it ever will be. Once the reality of an empty train going back and forth through the Central Valley at a cost of billions of dollars sinks in, some will no doubt be using the word boondoggle. Some already are.
Don’t you know that the choo choo crowd subscribes to the “if you build it, they will come” philosophy? Look at New Mexico’s train to nowhere...
Do you have a link to New Mexico’s train to nowhere? WHat is it called?
That is relevant only if you live at the railway station in one city and work at the railway station in another.
However people who live 10-20 miles away from both stations will need to figure out how to get to and from those stations. If they take surface transit that will eat all the time savings.
It is also important to know how much the ticket will cost compared to the gas and car wear cost. Sometimes speed at any expense is not an optimal solution.
California is flush with money, right?
...or is that Cal;ifornia is flushing money...down this blackhole.
The “Rail Runner.”
Boy terrorists sure would find this a hard target huh?
waste of money, waste of time.
Industrial strength stooooopid.
Build more freeways and runways.
Plus, is there big demand to go from Merced to Fresno or Fresno to Bakersfield...
If not, is it stopping all along the way...
If so, it won’t get up to speed. Hope somebody is picking you up at either end
Speaking of perverted weirdos that Republican homo who was arrested last year outside a gay bar and then came “out”, Roy Ashburn of Bakersfield was the deciding vote to put thsis boondoggle on the ballot. It was one of the first sign to those around him that the former conservative was going into mental meltdown.
Isn’t Central Valley where they are shutting down the farms because of that smelt fish?
No more money for California, how’s that sound?
I also noticed that in the architect’s drawing all people are shown with no luggage. What is the chance that people moving around Central Valley aren’t carrying half a ton of stuff with them all the time? If they aren’t carrying anything, why they are even going themselves? Those trains seem to be useful only for office workers (and only those who can’t live near work.)
"Let's see here: this state is broke beyond belief; every train project this state has ever done loses more and more money year-on-year like Swiss clockwork -- THEREFORE, let's build another black-hole, money pit train system."
Psychotics all, neither more nor less, just as our former colleague, Willie Green, is.
It’s called the New Mexico Rail Runner, aka Richardson’s Railroad
“The bill for the first section will be $4.3 Billion (with “B”) and will be a dollar for dollar match with STATE FUNDS.
So, Kalifornia suddenly has $2.15 BILLION to burn on this?
And it’s only the first leg in an umpteen billion dollar utopian wet dream.
I once had the misfortune to witness San Jose’s “Light Rail” being built.
It passed by me often, ALWAYS virtually empty.
Twenty years later it may finally have some riders, but it wasted millions for at least a decade.
High speed rail for a trip you can make by car in an hour is beyond stupid, it is so stupid we need a new word for it.
The only use this really has is in replacing the plane traffic from los angeles to san francisco. that would make sense if we were facing major airport congestion on either end, but I don’t think that BUR, LAX or SFO are in bad shape. OAK’s line for southwest can get ugly, which is why i use business select.
it would be more interesting to see if it takes seasonal commuters off of the 5 - i.e. students, but there can’t be enough of them going between the bay area and LA to make an appreciable difference.
Thank you. Here I was searching the news sites and all I had to do was search FR. Silly me.
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