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Amtrak, the national passenger railroad company of the U.S., continues to have routine breakdowns despite receiving massive injections of taxpayer dollars from the Biden administration, according to data from the Department of Transportation (DOT). Since 2021, there have been 333 Amtrak train incidents reported nationwide as of July 9, 2024, slightly less than the 397 incidents that occurred between 2016 and July 2020 during former President Trump’s tenure, according to the DOT. The Biden administration, as a part of an announced $66 billion for passenger rail in the Bipartisan Infrastructure Act, has dedicated huge amounts of taxpayer cash to Amtrak,...

The city of San Francisco is in the process of constructing a downtown-area railroad extension that is estimated to cost in excess of $4 billion per mile of tunnel, The San Francisco Standard reported. The extension, known as The Portal, is a tunneled rail service that would connect the Salesforce Transit Center in the city’s downtown corridor to Caltrain and future high-speed trains, according to the Standard. The project’s overall cost estimate was recently revised up from $6.5 billion to a total of $8.25 billion, which makes for a per-mile cost of over $4 billion, ... “[Y]ou’re seeing some whopping...

The latest figures show an undeniable correlation between an increase in violent crime and immigration.. The number of knife attacks recorded at train stations in Germany has more than doubled since 2019, and foreign nationals are greatly overrepresented when analyzing the ethnicity of suspects. By Aug. 31 this year, the German Federal Police had already recorded 527 violent crimes in which a knife had been used at German train stations — the equivalent of more than two knife attacks a day on average. The figures were provided by the federal government following a request by Martin Hess, an MP for...

Government is urged to implement action plan to address this issue before the 2024 Olympics ... With the Paris Olympics less than a year away, French authorities want to make sure the bedbugs don't bite during the games and have started a drive to exterminate the pests. Social media users have been publishing footage of the insects crawling around in high-speed trains and the Paris metro, alongside a rash of online articles about bedbugs in cinemas and even Charles de Gaulle airport. The reports have reached the highest levels of government. "The state urgently needs to put an action plan...

TOKYO Japan is very proud of its trains, and in many ways rightfully so. The country has one of the cleanest, most reliable, and most convenient rail networks to be found anywhere on the planet. But it isn’t perfect, and the undeniably worst part of train travel in Japan is the possibility of encountering a chikan, or groper, onboard. Rail operators have tried various countermeasures to attempt to prevent gropings, but the actions of one East Japan Railway Co (JR East) worker have been drawing criticism after a video taken at Shinjuku Station in downtown Tokyo on Aug 30 recently...

DENVER — The Regional Transportation District continues to deal with a widespread shortage of train and bus operators, and that resulted in a large number of canceled trips Monday. As of 6 a.m. Monday, RTD’s website was showing more than 50 canceled trips ... Beyond canceled trips, the shortage has resulted in many operators working six days a week. Officials have been weighing whether to reduce service in some areas to make up for the lack of drivers,

Taxpayer watchdog group: Emails show sales tax revenue going toward projects that are ‘not what most voters have in mind’..[ full title] ... A Colorado Springs tax watchdog group obtained communications between city employees that show discussion of using sales tax revenue for traffic reduction and bike lane infrastructure while other city officials have denied that’s where funds would be directed. City voters approved a road improvement ballot measure called 2C in 2015, which is up for renewal in the Nov. 5 election. 2C is a 0.62 percent sales tax increase that is supposed to be dedicated to road maintenance...

Crony Bidding And Gross Incompetence Reign.. At a time when Coloradans are desperately pleading for improved and new roadways the agency in charge of the same, the Colorado Department of Transportation (CDOT), is mired in the greatest crisis of its long-storied existence . ... In December 2018, Governor Jared Polis appointed 35-year-old Shoshana Lew as his new Executive Director, a history major .. She replaced Governor Hickenlooper's appointment of 56-year-old Michael Lewis, an engineer with extensive public construction management experience. ... Lew's primary qualification .. was her close relationship to Michelle Obama who called the newly elected governor for a...

California Gov. Gavin Newsom announced Tuesday that the state will no longer pursue plans to build an estimated $77 billion high-speed rail line between Los Angeles and San Francisco because the project "would cost too much and respectfully take too long," per the AP. The big picture: The project was years behind schedule with an estimated completion date of 2033. It had been hamstrung by political backlash in the state, and polling showed that a majority of Californians disapproved of the plan as costs ballooned. Similar proposals for high-speed trains on the East Coast, including along the heavily trafficked Northeast...

WASHINGTON — Track workers blamed for what Metro had called faked inspection reports are getting their jobs back, after an arbitrator found the reports were done as Metro had instructed. A court filing this week suggested Metro and five track workers who had filed a federal lawsuit over their firings reached a settlement in the case, and Metro and Amalgamated Transit Union Local 689 confirmed Wednesday that an agreement covers most of the at least 16 front-line workers and five supervisors who were publicly disciplined about two years ago. Three of the workers who challenged their firings are not covered...

The cost of constructing the Southern California section of the state bullet train could jump by as much as $11 billion over estimates released earlier this year, though rail authority officials caution that their new numbers assume a more expansive design than is likely to be built. The new estimates are contained in environmental reports prepared for Thursday’s meeting of the authority board, which will review planned routes throughout the Southland. The reports acknowledge that the new cost estimates could affect the $77-billion price tag of the Los Angeles-to-San Francisco system, though they also use a different methodology than previous...

RTD is cutting the number of cars on the light rail R Line that runs through Aurora because of a lack of ridership. RTD says ridership on the R Line is about half of projected numbers. The one-car trains look more like a trolly going up and down the tracks. RTD believes cutting the two-car trains to just one is enough to serve the needs of the R Line passengers and the low numbers for now.

DENVER -- Flaggers have returned to some crossings along the RTD A Line between Union Station and Denver International Airport. In June, the flaggers were removed, but they have returned as RTD tries to figure out a software problem that was discovered on a number of rail lines in the area. The flaggers have returned to the York, Steele, and Holly street crossings, a move that signifies RTD believes the automated gates are still not safe enough to operate without on-site supervision. ... RTD is only saying its contractor, Denver Transit Partners, is doing some updating and testing of the...

THE NSW Government has an embarrassing problem with $2 billion worth of new trains that are on order — they’re too wide to go through the tunnels. Whereas the current trains are 2.9m wide, the new models being built in South Korea are 20cm wider. That small difference could have a big impact. It means the new trains could collide with the tunnel walls on their way up to the world famous Blue Mountains. But Transport for NSW (TfNSW), the Government body that manages the state’s rail system, has come up with a cunning plan. It has proposed simply relaxing...

DENVER - The future of RTD commuter rail lines may be in question after its private business partner claims there is no solution to a lingering problem. In a letter to RTD, Denver Transit Partners said the crossing gate timing issue won’t be fixed by the deadline. Denver Transit Partners is made up of the group of contractors who built and maintain the A Line, B Line and the future G Line. At issue, the crossing gates that must be manned 24 hours a day, seven days a week, because of a computer glitch. ... The crossing gate technology does...

The Senate Finance Committee on Thursday announced its opposition to the construction of more high-speed TGV routes in France for at least the next 15 years, targeting three planned high speed rail routes in particular. A report into infrastructure financing has advised against pouring money into “projects where the socioeconomic viability is doubtful, the costs are unreasonable and the finance plan is still unknown”. Plans for LGV lines connecting Bordeaux with Toulouse and Dax, Poitiers with Limoges, and Montpellier with Perpignan were singled out as costly and unnecessary. …

Jerry Brown’s dream of constructing a high speed rail line connecting the Bay Area with Southern California suffered a major setback this week, but rest assured every effort is being made to spend enough money quickly enough to make pulling the plug seem unreasonable. Construction costs of the project have escalated so rapidly since the times state voters narrowly approved a bond issue that instead of constructing new tracks in the Bay Area and Los Angeles, the trains will share existing tracks with conventional freight and commuter trains, drastically increasing travel time, and making the trains half-fast at best. But...

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...

California will need to double down on support of the bullet train by digging deeper into the state's wallet and accepting a three-year delay in completing the project's initial leg, a new business plan for the 220-mph system shows. Rail planners have turned their construction plans upside down, attempting to fit the mega-project within the state's limited budget. The 2016 business plan, released last month, shows that the Los Angeles-to-San Francisco rail link has proved to be politically and technically more complicated to build than foreseen in 2008, when voters agreed to help finance the project with a $9-billion bond....

Infrastructure: California's high-speed rail project will never make its current 2022 arrival time, according to the Los Angeles Times. Doesn't this strike anyone in charge of this costly boondoggle as ironic?...Officials still haven't settled on a route, they're behind schedule in acquiring land, getting permits and financing, and the project faces several lawsuits. Boring on the 36 miles of planned tunnels isn't likely to get started until 2019, the Times notes, and by any reasonable estimate it will take another 7 to 14 years to complete. Even that's probably optimistic, since several parts will traverse known fault lines, vastly increasing...