California Going Ahead With Bullet Train 709
An anonymous reader sends this excerpt from the NY Times:
"[California state leaders] have rallied around a plan to build a 520-mile high-speed rail line from Los Angeles to San Francisco, cutting the trip from a six-hour drive to a train ride of two hours and 38 minutes. And they are doing it in the face of what might seem like insurmountable political and fiscal obstacles. The pro-train constituency has not been derailed by a state report this month that found the cost of the bullet train tripling to $98 billion for a project that would not be finished until 2033, by news that Republicans in Congress are close to eliminating federal high-speed rail financing this year, by opposition from California farmers and landowners upset about tracks tearing through their communities or by questions about how much the state or private businesses will be able to contribute."
Re:The bond measure was for $98 billion (Score:5, Interesting)
The bond, Prop 1A from 2008 [wikipedia.org], approved roughly $8.5 billion to begin the project, with a total budget of $33 billion to be used if the project could be shown to be able to run without subsidies from the government. The most recent estimates, which still show a ludicrously high number of riders (between 60 and 90 million per year) show that the budget will need to be $98, which is roughly triple the $33 billion original allocated for the project.
The project is in no way feasible for a state as deep into the red as California. The *only* logical explanation of why this is still going through is to allow those already riding the $8.5 billion gravy train to keep it going for another $90 billion.
Portland-Seattle-Vancouver would make more sense. (Score:5, Interesting)
This doesn't make sense. A rider arriving in LA is going to need a car when they get off the train, unless they fancy spending a lot of time waiting for on Metro (formerly known as the RTD - Rough, Tough, and Dangerous.) Total boondoggle.
It would make a hell of a lot more sense to link the Portland-Seattle-Vancouver, BC corridor with high-speed rail, since these are all cities where one can actually get around reasonably well without a car. It'd be a game-changer to have TGV-speed rail on that corridor - one hour between the downtown cores of Portland and Seattle, or Seattle and Vancouver? I've had regular, daily intracity commutes longer than that.
Oh well.
-Isaac
MORE airport subsidies? (Score:4, Interesting)
The reason why we have so many airports, so many highways, and so few trains already is due to the current subsidy structure.
Re:Time (Score:5, Interesting)
There were no environment studies, real opposition, etc?
Actually, the Trans-Continental Railroad did have environmental studies (they used different terms in the 1870's) and there was real opposition to the concept.... both from federal money being spent towards the endeavor as well as some groups of people who opposed even the notion of a railroad as anything other than a pipe dream. The environmental concerns were certainly different in the late 19th Century, but it was still an issue.
The one thing that made the cost tolerable was the granting of land to the railroad companies who built the lines. One "township" of land (a 6 sq. mil by 6 sq. mile block) was given to the railroads on alternating sides of the route, on the premise that the railroad companies could in turn sell the land as a means to partially recover costs and to guarantee a source of revenue. Indeed far more land was given away and sold through railroad companies than was ever actually obtained through other federal land grant programs like the Homestead Act. It is also one of the reasons why the railroad companies emerged by the end of the 19th Century as the primary source of capital for America.
The building of that railroad also was full of all sorts of graft and corruption, including various games being done to decide where "mountains" began (tracks through mountain ranges paid more per mile than over flat ground), not to mention how the initial investors into the railroad companies literally blew all of their money on lobbying efforts in Washington DC before the first track was even laid down on the ground.
Not widely recognized either, it was one of the last major acts of the Abraham Lincoln administration, and nearly the last piece of legislation signed by him as well. The politics that went into the Trans-Continental Railroad would easily be recognized today, and really is no different than this railroad to nowhere in California. All that has really changed is the names of the people involved, and oddly even that hasn't changed as much as you would think it should. It even had the entire congressional delegation from California working on this one project in one way or another, and the governor of California even making a trip to Washington in order to secure the funding for that railroad.
Hello? Airline subsidies? (Score:5, Interesting)
And it costs a lot less to build and maintain that infrastructure than the boondoggle that HSR is gonna be.
Yes, because of course the government hasn't subsidized the airline industry and airport infrastructure for 75 years...
Here's a fun fact: Amtrak's funding is less than 1% of federal spending on transportation, and many rail lines in the US are privately owned.
High speed trains are electric, and electricity can come from renewable resources or nuclear. They don't require much energy to keep rolling, and they can use regenerative braking (like many public transit lines already do.) You know all those commercials on NPR about how cheap it is to move freight by rail? They're RIGHT.
Airplanes generate enormous amounts of pollution, and they put it in the worst place possible. Remember how nice the weather was for several days after September 11th? Turns out we affected the weather pattern when all air traffic was halted:
http://articles.cnn.com/2002-08-07/tech/contrails.climate_1_contrails-cirrus-clouds-david-travis?_s=PM:TECH
Did I mention that airports require huge amounts of space, have to be located outside of cities instead of passing through them, and generate massive amounts of noise and pollution?
Meanwhile, if you stand 2-3 blocks away from a high speed line, all you hear is a whooshing noise.
Re:The bond measure was for $98 billion (Score:5, Interesting)
Exactly, California all by itself is the 8th most productive economy in the world..
California suffers from 2 things, the money that goes out through taxes to help the other 49 states (shouldn't someone scream communism ? ^_^), and stupid voters that want to pay less taxes all the while keeping the level of public services intact.
The first one can't be fixed short of a new civil war, the second problem on the other hand can be fixed. There just is no political will to do it.
Re:The bond measure was for $98 billion (Score:2, Interesting)
It could have a little something with Californians voting on propositions to put caps on their taxes.
Since it is a known fact that Californians put caps on their taxes, what is the justification for spending on controversial projects above and beyond the government's known revenues?
Re:Time (Score:3, Interesting)
IMHO, sooner or later we're going to need a high speed rail, but it might be better to wait until "later". Right now it's just not cost effective because not enough people would ride it.
I don't think it would be so bad if we waited 15-20 years to start building it. By then, fuel costs and congestion should be bad enough that people will be begging for it and investors will be lining up to finance it.
Also, a *significant* part of the cost of building it right now is that we don't have enough money to finish it quickly. If the state and residents were behind this project 100%, it could have been completed in 10-15 years (or less) for closer to the original projected budget. It's not rocket science. The biggest problems are political.
As much as I'd like to be able to take the high-speed rail in California in the next 20 years (I first heard about putting HSR on the ballot back in 2002), it's just too expensive if we drag it out without being able to fund it right now. California should just buy up all the necessary land and reserve it for future rail development so that it'll be ready when the time comes.
In the meantime, I'm crossing my fingers for the BART San Jose extension within the decade :)
Re:The bond measure was for $98 billion (Score:4, Interesting)
>The "Miracle" where Rick Perry used federal stimulus funds to balance his states budget and increased unemployment by hiring a lot of minimum-wage and government workers. You hear it called the "Texas Miracle" on AM Radio talk shows to indicate that Rick Perry's flavor of socialism is far superior to the one we have in Washington.
Re:The bond measure was for $98 billion (Score:2, Interesting)
Californians. That's who we're talking about.
The "plenty of states" you're talking about (Utah, Nebraska, Texas) which are "fiscally sound" are places where poverty is way up and children are uninsured. Prisons are a growth industry. In other words, shitholes where you wouldn't want to live.
(note: of course there are tiny pockets in Utah and Texas that are very nice. Municipalities that have worked overtime to provide better environments than the shithole states surrounding them. Once you leave those small cities, it's shithole all the way to the border.)
Re:Time (Score:5, Interesting)
Property is theft? That's interesting. Say, do you know anybody with a house that is paid out? Did they steal the house?
They bought it from someone who stole it.
Do you know anybody with a car they paid out? Did they steal it?
Did the car company make the raw materials that the car is constructed of? No, they are a finite earth resource, made long before the company existed. They stole them. Or rather the mining companies stole them and the car company bought stolen goods. There is no reason those materials should belong to them any more than anyone else.
Do you know anybody with a toaster oven they own? Dirty thieves.
No I don't.
For every piece of land and every raw material on earth, at some stage somebody just said "this is mine". Usually with the violence, often killing people. Most land has actually been stolen many times thought various wars and invasions over recorded history, and many more violent conflicts before recorded history.
But because the reality that nobody has more of a right to any thing than anyone else does is not convenient, especially to those people that have successfully managed to occupy land, then this fiction of ownership was given to the current occupiers.
Now I'm not saying that this fiction of "ownership" is a bad thing. But it's certainly not the kind of inalienable right you think it is. And it's certainly the business of government to determine the parameters of that fiction. Because without government that fiction doesn't exist.
Re:The bond measure was for $98 billion (Score:5, Interesting)
Given the sheer number of representative and electoral votes they represent at the federal level, they certainly do get it back in quite a few other ways, no?
You just brought out one of the worst problems in our system of democracy and made it out as if it were a good thing for California (it's not). California gets the same proportion of representatives in the lower legislative branch as every other state in our nation. That means the voters in the state have no more power/representation than any other voter in any other state. However, California only gets 2 representatives in the upper house (the senate), where as Oregon gets 2 representatives in the upper house as well. This means every 250,000 voters in Oregon get their own senator, where as every 20,000,000 voters in California get their own.
The proportional power of a voter in Oregon is approximately 80 TIMES more than a Californian's (in the Senate). Another way of putting it: California, the most populous state, contains more people than the 21 least populous states combined. This means the population of those 21 states each individually have as much power as the population in California.
I don't understand how you made that out to be a benefit to California. On a side note, this disproportionate representation is a factor in why our nation is categorized as "conservative" or "center-right" - because the majority of power in the Senate is held by rural populations.