Train to nowhere.
“Train to nowhere.”
I hear that one a lot and it’s not a valid argument against this HSR plan.
The first sections of the Interstate Highway System were built in rural parts of Missouri and Kansas and they linked rural communities with rural communities. No major cities of any kind benefited from these first sections of road.
And that was by design.
See, the US route system was supposed to provide for four-lane highways all over the USA but after the cities got their parkways built the politicians never quite got around to funding the rural sections that would link the cities.
To make sure that the rural sections of the Interstates got built the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956 required that rural sections of highway were finished before the urban sections were finished. Otherwise the Interstate System would have just ended up as a series of regional super-highways linked by two-lane roads.
High speed rail systems that are being built with Federal money are required to use the same proven method to make sure that they get finished. Otherwise all that would be built would just be the urban sections and they’d never link up. This was the urban sections have an established rural section to immediately connect to when they eventually start service.
For the record, I do NOT support this HSR plan. I did support the French consortium that wanted to build a SF to LA route with 100% private funds along an alignment that was mostly rural. It’s the California Democrats who gerrymandered the thing into being a union jobs program and into being a cash cow for the politicians who bought desert land around Palmdale and Lancaster (land that will be bought at a premium for HSR).
Respectfully,
Megan