Posted on 08/01/2014 8:04:47 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
A California appeals court has ruled a state authority may issue $8 billion in bonds to help finance a high-speed rail system in the most populous U.S. state, removing a substantial obstacle to the proposed $68 billion plan. In overturning on Thursday a state court's 2013 ruling, the three-judge panel in Sacramento said the California High-Speed Rail Authority, which is overseeing the high-speed rail project, "properly found that issuance of bonds for the project necessary or desirable," court documents show.
The panel also vacated a lower court order that the state redo its financial plan for the project.
The rail project has been dogged by questions over its planned routes, ridership estimates, and projected costs.
The plan to build an 800-mile high-speed rail system between San Francisco and Los Angeles is a priority for California Governor Jerry Brown.
(Excerpt) Read more at businessinsider.com ...
Another money pit.
That Simpsons Monorail episode summed all of this up really well.
What percentage of the workforce will have to be Obama Illegals and of course LGBT ?
State ok’s 8B.
Where is the remaining 100B going to come from?
Green Energy tax kickbacks
What the voters approved in 2008, is no where near what is being built. Not the speed, not the cost. This is light rail on steroids.
Once again, disenfranchisement.
Building hi-speed rail through a major seismic-risk area crisscrossed by faults, what could go wrong??!!
The success story of the Frankfurt airport to Koln high-speed rail: Built between 1995 and 2002....it cost around $7 billion to complete. Today? It runs once per hour. The ticket is around $110 (this was the cost in 2006, it may have gone down) for a one-way ticket between the Frankfurt airport and Koln, 110 miles in distance.
It’s a sixty-minute ride...where the normal ICE train could do the the job in roughly 2.5 hours.
How many thousands of people ride the train daily? Well...it’s mostly businessmen because of the cost. At some point in 2006, they were reporting a typical training leaving Frankfurt for Koln had around thirty people onboard. The entire train consisted of two cars. I would imagine they could have held roughly eighty people on the two cars max.
As for paying off the billions invested? Zero chance. It pretty much killed off all chances of a second future high-speed rail system in Germany.
It only makes sense if you intend to run a fast line from some airport to the nearby town (say twenty miles max). Otherwise, it’s a total waste of funds.
“the proposed $68 BILLION plan”
California needs a lot of things—like desalinization plants (the new Israeli ones work fine) to end potential droughts.
And new power plants for its increasing population (try Thorium reactors).
All that can be done for a lot less than 68 BILLION.
But instead, California will get a high speed rail that runs from San Francisco to a terminal two hours by car from LA (from LA you DRIVE YOUR CAR to the terminal, two hours from Los Angeles, and then get on the high speed rail to San Francisco).
WHY is ANYONE backing his crazy scheme, by a bankrupt state, which is in dire need of fixes to much of its infrastructure?
Oh well, another public works project disaster in the making. Now that the bay bridge is pretty much a wrap, on to bigger and better largess.
…as well as going bankrupt.
WHY is ANYONE backing his crazy scheme, by a bankrupt state, which is in dire need of fixes to much of its infrastructure?
I will answer that one: Corruption. This is the old Aquaduct system on steroids.
It’s actually cheaper to fly between cities in Europe than to take a train.
High-Speed Rail System straight to Unions, Dem-friendly contractors-donors and then to High-Speed bankruptcy.
These projects are just a way for the Dems to loot the treasury.
The only thing that’s going at high speed is all the water going down the drain! How about fixing the drought?
SoCal is the last place that needs 20th-century rail; it’s the place that Li-ion cars work best!
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