Say Cruickshank, just how much will tickets cost to ride on the bullet? Hmmmmm?
Why is it that the libs so love about trains? They are fanatic about them.
If you have to ask you can't afford tickets and if you can't afford tickets they don't want you cluttering up their ride.
Okay, here's your list...
Building a passenger train will do ZERO for the environment because nobody will use it.
Mr Cruickshank is spitting in the wind. CA’s high-speed rail is dead. No amount of op-ed pieces is going to change that fact.
Bullet train? Bull Shi+ train.
Everybody rides for free to Big Rock Candy Mountain
but but but the proponents always swear that it is completely privately funded!
Oh c’mon, you people have no vision.
When CA soon breaks in half and floats out into the Pacific; Bakersfield and Merced will become the new LA SF.
and
And then there can be the channel to West California! Everybody wins !!
Why would environmentalist want at giant train track headed toward Yosemite?
Thanks for this. I don’t bother with the local SoCal papers anymore and I would have missed this gem. Best bit of the day. My face hurts from laughing.
If it was completed, how long would it take and how much would it cost to get from LA to Frisco?
It cost $200 to fly round trip from LAX to SFO, a route traveled by about 3.7 million passengers annually. This means there is about $740 million in annual revenue produced by this route.
Assuming all air passengers decided to take the train (a heroic assumption), and the train tickets are also $200 round trip, it will take over 100 years to break even.
Project costs ballooned from $30 billion to near $100 billion and who knows how much more by the time they completed it. It’s been a decade since over $6.5 billion was allocated ($3B from CA Bonds in 2008 and $3.5B from Federal allocations in 2010) and in the months before the governor scrapped the plan, they were still arguing about where to lay tracks.
Meanwhile, a private company that runs inter-city trains in Florida is working building a fully electric high-speed train from San Bernardino to Las Vegas - 185 miles of track and to include its own private train station. It was announced in late 2018 and scheduled to complete in 2022... basically 3 years of construction.
What’s wrong with the picture? Government is incapable of handling these large projects like they could in the past. The interstate highways, the transcontinental railroad... Now it can’t even decide where to put a train with 10 years to make up its mind.
I am all for high speed rail. But it is clear it must be fully privatized. The airlines (Southwest, Jet Blue etc) make money flying from SoCal to NorCal all day every day. They didn’t need subsidies, just opportunity.
If these people are concerned about global warming, they should be pushing a decrease in the birth rate in Central and South American countries (among others), and stopping deforestation in these countries. They should be against illegal and legal immigration increasing the population of the US, and thus contributing to loss of habitat, deforestation, and pollution.
They aren’t. It’s easier to blame us for everything.
Only fools like the author believe it's real - the Al Gores and Michael Manns of the world know better. But they benefit from the scam so they let it ride.
All public transportation funded projects are heavily subsidized. Less than one-third of costs come from ticket sales for most public rail and bus systems. This one is intended to be heavily subsidized, to the point that tickets will probably fund less than one-tenth of maintenance costs - taxpayers on the hook for the rest. (Note I said maintenance costs, not build costs.)
Interestingly, passenger rail service in the United States has failed because passengers choose to not take it.
And, as for as the "High Speed" lie, this is not now, and will never, ever, ever be the case between SF and LA or San Diego.
Never.
If it worked (it wouldn't, typically) it would suffer the embarrassment of perpetual delays (equipment issues, maintenance, llamas on the tracks, one could go on).
Add to that, there would be time delays in ...
1. driving to the train station and parking
2. ticketing and baggage
3. security, TSA or the equivalent
4. car rental at the destination (it is highly unlikely that the station is your destination).
This, when you include the choo choo ride, is a full day, nothing "high speed" about it.
.
As a once and former resident of the once-Golden State, I know many progressives and those even farther to the left.
None of them, not one, has said that they would like to take high speed rail.
And thus, to the first point, nobody wants to or will take this train (if it worked, which it would not).
.
It’s dead Robert.
That Siemens train is another German green religious piousness hypocrite propaganda infection.