Some Farmers Oppose Referendum on High-Speed Rail ( California )

most Californians now believe that the “High-Speed Rail Authority” has become a boondoggle. The rail authority has not issued about $9.95 billion in municipal bonds approved by voters as Proposition_1A in 2008. All of the bullet train start-up cost so far has been funded from $3.2 billion in federal transportation and stimulus funds, plus $750 million in cap-and-trade money from the state’s greenhouse gas-reduction program

Sensing an opportunity to pass an initiative to repurpose the bonds, Republican State Sen. Bob Huff of San Dimas and the Republican State Board of Equalization member George Runner formed the “California Water Alliance” and talked a group of San Joaquin Valley vegetable farmers into raising $1.2 million to write the initiative and collect the 585,407 valid signatures from registered California voters by April 26 to qualify the proposition for the November ballot.

With a stated goal of building shovel-ready above ground water storage at Sites Reservoir in Colusa County and Temperance Flat Reservoir on the San Joaquin River, and raising the height of Shasta Dam near Redding and San Luis Dam near Los Banos, the entire ag community at first unified behind the “California Water Alliance” effort.

They spent money in Germany about 15 years ago on a high-speed rail project from Koln to the Frankfurt Airport. The project was supposed to demonstrate how successful this could be.

What they ended up running was a one-car deal big enough for sixty-odd passengers. The 2.5 hour railway trip was cut to roughly 58 minutes. It’s never made any real money....strictly businessmen going on trips out of the airport. When you figure the going rate for the trip...it makes better sense to take regular rail or a bus. I doubt if in an entire day....they transport more than 500 passengers.

It would be different if we were talking about NY City to Washington. There’s enough passengers to make this economically feasible.

MARTA in Atlanta was a grand experiment that taxed surrounding Metro counties 1% sales tax to “get this transport to the people!”

One of its earlier rail lines was to build a line out to Perry Homes so the welfare recipients could get to their entitlement offices quicker.

It took YEARS and YEARS for them to realize that leeches did not profit make, having had the temerity to even elect a welfare queen to the MARTA board, and they finally started constructing rail lines to places that had paying (unsubsidized) passengers.

Don’t know about it now, don’t even care about it. All I’m sure about now is that I’ve moved so far off its rail lines and bus lines and interstates that it isn’t my problem any more.

Thank you, but I have absolutely have NO idea about the efficacy and need for this choice. My only option at this point is to think that somehow those in charge of this project had to think of two places where they could put up some kind of rail line as quick and as bureaucratically possible at the same time.

My feeling at this point is that it really isn’t about the rail line, or the points it serves, but the fact that it is and that SOMEBODY is going to make a shitload of money off of it.

most Californians now believe that the “High-Speed Rail Authority” has become a boondoggle.

Become?

I am pretty sure that it started out that way.

The real railroad companies got out of passenger rail service because they couldn’t make money.

Amtrak has lost money every year since their founding (of course being government funded helps in that regard).

Every commuter rail system in the country could not exist if it was required to make a profit.

Passenger rail is dead.

First, I do NOT support this. Let a private company build it if it makes sense.

That said, here’s my response on a post here that goes into a little detail on the general plan:

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/3244020/posts

Please stop with the ‘road to nowhere’ argument because it makes us look silly. The Federal funding that accompanies HSR funding requires that the project be built according to the National Interstate and Defense Highways Act (Public Law 84-627) model. This requires rural segments of the routes to be built prior to the urban segments of the routes.

That’s because with the failed US Route system what typically happened was the politicians would build the urban segments of parkway/thruway and then at the county line the concrete roads became gravel or cheap macadam. The idea of four lane US Routes connecting the country never happened. So the NIDHA required that Interstate Highways be built in the rural areas first and then the urban areas would then connect to finished highways.

It’s a building method that wisely takes our politics into mind and the idea is illustrated by a few LA politicians who proposed building HSR in LA first and then maybe someday thinking about building the rest of it. Which they never will.

On the other comment from the article there is no proposal to build a rural high speed route and then just run trains on regular commuter rails. The proposal I heard on TV last night was to start running trains on existing rails and as the HSR segments are completed to then start using them. This way the system could start paying for itself at least in part as opposed to waiting ten years before the first paying passenger uses the system.

I think that part makes fiscal sense and is about the only fiscally sensible thing I’ve heard in connection with this project.

Don’t get the idea I support this project because I don’t. I think California was stupid not to let the French consortium build HSR on their own...I think the Democrats were afraid it might have been profitable and that offended them.

I oppose this but I’m really getting tired of the non-arguments against it such as the train-to-nowhere and the absolute argument of last resort: ‘boondoggle’.

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