Wow, even CNN has figured out what a massive money-suck boondoggle it is. But the morons in Sacramento remain clueless.
6 thoughts on “High-Speed Rail”
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Wow, even CNN has figured out what a massive money-suck boondoggle it is. But the morons in Sacramento remain clueless.
Comments are closed.
The idea is that automobiles-are-evil — they require paving over land that could be forested or growing our food, we import much of our oil to fuel our cars, as soon as we build a road everyone drives on it and it turns into a parking lot, and so on. And autos are death traps — your lifetime exposure to driving has roughly the same 1:100 risk of fatality as a single ride on the Space Shuttle.
Some of these ideas may not be quite true; you can build enough roads, and they had a nice system of roads in California that I had experience first hand, but then they stopped building roads even to keep up with population growth.
Never mind that. You build a common carrier mode of transportation, where you have to buy tickets in advance, stand in line to board, and sit next to a total stranger with a bad head cold. The idea is if that “public” or “common carrier” mode is fast enough, people will put up with the inconvenience and prefer it to driving.
What the CNN piece is saying is that we have such a public mode of transportation that trades speed for the convenience of driving. They are called airplanes and they are operated by airline companies.
The HSR idea is that for a short enough trip, a fast train becomes competitive with a short distance plane — the train can pretty much run directly between stops whereas the plane has to taxi to a runway (slowly), wait in line for the runway for take off, gain altitude, descend, “wait in line” for landing clearance. When you figure that airports have to be enough way from population centers to have room for their runways and to not annoy with jet noise, for short trips between major population centers, for such “corridors”, an HSR may even be faster than a plane.
One thing that CNN misses is that the HSR would serve a whole lot more than a Bay Area to Greater LA “hop” — it would serve all of the towns in between.
OK, OK, those towns in between have names like “Fresno” and “Bakersfield” and “Modesto” — places that are so unhip, they might as well be in fly-over country instead of California.
But putting this in contrast with VDH’s essay “Medieval California”, what is so unhip about the interior non-coastal California towns, apart from getting zapped by “green” electric rate making so it costs your wages to run the A/C, where the hip folks on the Coast don’t know what you are talking about because their A/C is the Pacific Ocean?
But maybe there is a “if you build it, they will come” aspect to the CA HSR? That is, you run it through unhip interior towns “where no one (of consequence” now lives with the idea 1) we don’t have anymore coastal land, or what land there is we don’t want to develop because We Got Ours and Don’t Want to Share, 2) we don’t want to build more roads because we don’t believe in that.
So what is left is building the HSR line through the interior so the serfs in Medieval California can have Affordable Housing (high density, clustered around the train stations), and they can have HSR to get around, and the fast trip from LA to SF that you can still beat by air is Besides the Point.
Of course that CA lacks money to build anything — roads, HSR, whatever — and that the same political forces that turned the Central Valley into the New Oklahoma Dust Bowl by turning off the taps to save a bait fish, that such forces may/will/shall turn on the HSR and find some environmental reason not to build it, well, the burgeoning cost is perhaps the least problem with the plan.
Never mind that. You build a common carrier mode of transportation, where you have to buy tickets in advance, stand in line to board, and sit next to a total stranger with a bad head cold.
You forgot the part where buying the ticket means you wave your 4th Amendment protections.
Yeah, but how much 4th Amendment protection to you have in your car? (Can we search your car “for drugs?” No? OK, can you “come with us” until we can “straighten this out”?)
You don’t have to go with them until they straighten things out. Either they have probable cause or a warrant.
When I rode from Chicago to LA on Amtrack there was a stop in the middle of noplace where the cops show up with drug dogs to sniff through the luggage compartments. It took about half an hour or so. It was a routine part of the trip.
One thing that CNN misses is that the HSR would serve a whole lot more than a Bay Area to Greater LA “hop” — it would serve all of the towns in between.
OK, OK, those towns in between have names like “Fresno” and “Bakersfield” and “Modesto” — places that are so unhip, they might as well be in fly-over country instead of California.
If the train stops at all of those smaller towns, then it won’t be high speed any more. For each stop, you have to decelerate and stop, let people on and off (perhaps with luggage), and then accelerate once again. You might as well ride a bus.