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...
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.
Boy terrorists sure would find this a hard target huh?
waste of money, waste of time.
Industrial strength stooooopid.
Build more freeways and runways.
Isn’t Central Valley where they are shutting down the farms because of that smelt fish?
“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 $2.15 BILLION to burn on this?
And it’s only the first leg in an umpteen billion dollar utopian wet dream.
I once had the misfortune to witness San Jose’s “Light Rail” being built.
It passed by me often, ALWAYS virtually empty.
Twenty years later it may finally have some riders, but it wasted millions for at least a decade.
High speed rail for a trip you can make by car in an hour is beyond stupid, it is so stupid we need a new word for it.
And we won't be able to resist union demands because we'll be losing millions while the system is idle.
Did I mention that currently California is borrowing million$ a day to cover unemployment checks?
Will that money be paid back? Will the bonds for this boondogle ever be paid? Will the Feds bail California out again?
My sister and her husband will loose a few more acres of their small vinyard south of FResno if it runs in the Santa Fe right of way. They lost some a few years ago when SF added another line...
Cut off the water.
Send in the trains.
“high speed”??
220 mph is piddly speed compared with a 500 mph passenger jet
instead of sinking tens and hundreds of billions of dollars into money-losing rail networks why don’t we improve our access and logistics for air travel?
and if we improved our security screening so that people didn’t have to arrive 2 hours early then air travel would be more convenient and appealing
They’re going to call it “Fresno Area Rapid Transit.” FART, for short.
This is so FU&$ING STUPID it boggles the mind. I work 3 days a week in the central valley. I-5 and Hwy 99 work just fine. There is 20+% unemployment and nothing worth taking a train to. Who is going to ride? What job are they commuting to? How much does this cost? And who is getting paid for the environmental study....that is who needs to be taken out first.....figuratively of course.
Oh, I get it. They’ll use a bunch of trains to haul millions of barrels of water to drought-stricken farmers in the Valley...what super-geniuses.
Actually, this is a brilliant maneuver!
The train, wherever it is built, will be a colossal failure. If the first segment is in a high use corridor (e.g., Gilroy to SF or Anaheim to LA), the failure could doom the rest of the project.
By building it in the low use corridor between noplace and nowhere they can (and will) claim that the failure is simply due to its not being connected to high population areas and that it will be a success when such connections are made. Further, they will argue that all the money spent so far will have been as good as thrown down a rat hole unless such further connections are made. By the time the public realizes (if they ever do) that the only result was that even more money was thrown down the rat hole, it will be too late.
Maybe 100 Stanford & USC students will ride it twice a year, to cheer their teams on the road on the taxpayers’ dime. Whooppee.
I've traveled this route on many occasions and not many people use the existing Amtrak service. What makes them think that people are going to switch from cars or air service? I also heard that, in order to pay for it, that the cars would have to be full 24 hours a day, 7 days a week... ain't gonna happen. Sad, sad, sad waste of non existent money.
And what out of the way routes are included in those 800 miles? What am I missing here?
Last trip I made driving from SF to LA was 382 miles.
Will you have to go through the TSA “Grope and Poke” to get on the train?
15 minutes? I’d take the train to work if it saved me time to arrive there.