Just an odd question....are people in Merced that desperate to go over to Bakersfield?
Railhenge continues on.
PING!
This is a giant boondoggle which is trying to suck out more money that could be spent much better elsewhere.
This particular train and any other High Speed Rail projects that get started are destined to be gigantic failures should they ever get completed....
I wouldn’t put it past liberals in California, but the only way these trains work financially is to stop people from driving or make flying so expensive so that train travel is the only viable option....
If you want to travel between LA and SFO, I would imagine a plane leaves every 20-30 minutes in both directions and takes a little over an hour to arrive.
Take a high speed train and stop 10-15 times between the two cities and it will take a few hours and not have anywhere near the number of departures.....
As much as boondoggle this project is, it also illustrate the problems of building anything in America.
Securing land for any large projects, like freeways and railroads, (mines, large factories, developments) is almost impossible. Bureaucratic nightmare, all kind of lawsuits, need for all kind of permits, approvals and studies, archeological, environmental etc. Deep state and lawyers, luddites at their best!
Obama, Trump and Bidet infrastructure projects run into this wall of bureaucracy, and there is no solution on sight.
AZ just build a short bypass of the Phoenix downtown.
Took about 2 years to build, but like 30 years of lawsuits and permits to get to it.
We just tied ourselves to knots, by getting the lawyers dominate our building projects.
Where is Willie Green?
Maybe they should just get Elon to use his Boring tools and build tunnels.
Probably would be safer anyway.
I am a tiny turd caught in the middle of this shit-storm. My startup company does some specialized engineering work on foundations and we’ve snagged work for many of the viaduct structures on this project. I have conflicting emotions. On the one hand, if not for the CAHSR contracts, COVID may have sunk my firm. On the other hand, as a private citizen and taxpayer, the project horrifies me. It will most likely go straight from construction to a rails-to-trails conversion, and become the most expensive bicycle path in human history.
This train will never reach fruition but the IDIOT in the state house will keep pouring money down an endless rathole.
There’s a very good reason we call this the train from “nowhere to nowhere” - Merced to Bakersfield? (OK, I have family in both places, but take the 5 freeway to visit).
Anyone wanting to get up or down the state quickly is going to take Southwest Air, not a SLOW train.
Too many snouts in the trough to let the boondoggle dry up.
On a local level, here in Sullivan county, a new fantastic high school is nearing completion
There is a problem. No road
Some of the or perhaps only one of the county politicos owns the land required for the road. He pissed off the county court by asking too much and they refuse to buy.
So, there is impasse and no road.
The process is universal an the rule since America’s earliest days.
Whatever the arguments for or against having such a train, just remember it will not happen and it was never intended to happen. It exists to be milked for graft, and will eventually be quietly cancelled.
“...between Bakersfield and Merced”
Given that route, about the use for the train is for cows to visit their relatives. But have they said how much the tickets will cost, and how the cows, who make less than minimum wage, will pay for them?
Imagine if the Democrats approve Slow Joe’s cross-country high-speed train boondoggle. Such a project would take at least 100 years to build.
ready, start,fund,plan. oops
More like a 10 year delay, if ever.
This is simply another of those mega-city-building operations that are the real goal of mass transit crap wherever it is built or planned...
The only way the communists can gain control of those outlying areas is to provide the means for crime, taxes, and corrupt politicians to inundate the remaining red states & counties...
A strategy that has worked for a long, long time...
A strategy that now includes, in addition, the targeted dispersal of millions of illegal-migrant vermin throughout the red areas as well...
Where the hell is choochoo Willie Green when you need him?
