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We may be cut short by 80 miles for the train to Vegas, but the one to San Francisco is moving along. Yesterday the California High-Sped Rail Authority met electing Anaheim Mayor Curt Pringle as the chairman and approving the scope of projects that qualify for federal stimulus funds. “We have obtained environmental certification for the general statewide alignment and station locations for the 800-mile system designed to carry over 100 million people by year 2030, as well as secured California state bond proceeds resulting from passage of Proposition 1A," explained Pringle. "These are the kinds of things that position the state very competitively to secure matching federal funds through ARRA to begin construction on three key segments and to complete the preliminary engineering work on the linking segments.”
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And this is, once again, where I call busll shit. 2030? That's a fucking joke. Don't even bother if you can't get it completed in a small enough amount of time to actually matter.
2030 does seem a bit crazy train.
China might well own this country by then, so perhaps they'll bump up the time table?
Or maybe we'll all have flying cars, like in the movies.
Nah. Flying cars, like hoverboards, use too many resources to be feasible. ;-) Unless they're hydrogen-powered flying cars.
Ross: The 2030 date is not the completion date for the Anaheim to SF route; that is when they project they will be serving 100 million passengers per year and the entire system will be built out, including LA to SD and the Merced to Sacramento branch.
Anaheim-LA should open a few years from now if the Authority receives a good chunk of stimulus funding, which seems likely.
That first phase will take only about 20 minutes from end to end. SF to San Jose is also included as an early stimulus-funded project. Those are the most practical routes to begin with and will have a huge effect on commute patterns in the region, including upgraded Metrolink service.
We can expect to be able to ride from Union Station to Transbay Terminal in SF by 2018, but we're getting some great upgrades before then.
I do hope the California High-Speed Authority has studied how in China and Taiwan they build 100 miles of high speed rail track and have the system up and running in three years.
The distance from LA to Anaheim is 25-30 miles, if they can build that in three years and have it up and running, that would be indeed a great feat.
Dude, construction on the Chunnel train linking London to Paris began in 1988 and the train opened for business in 1994.
Yes, it's only 31 miles. But boring a huge tunnel underwater, making it safe and usable? Within 5 years? Amazing.
Plus, we already have a nation train company funded largely by Taxpayer dollars. And there's a ton of existing passenger track in the state. Surely we can build off that already existing infrastructure. Plus, we're talking about something that is far less of an engineering marvel than the Chunnel.
This smacks of trying to do something big on the cheap. It'll give us shitty train service, take forever and probably clost more than it should. This bullshit incrementalist approach is, basically, the picture of everythign wrong with the modern American approach to everything.
Except for starting a war - then we just go all int. Until it "ends", at which point it's back to incrementalism on the cheap.
Also, apologies for my typos.
The thing is, they've got the majority's expectations lowered so close to the ground, that meandering snakebellies hover far above the masses heads.
When people challenge what is very often the result of union malfeasance/planned construction company delays - you get jostled with claims of being "high faluting". IE: 'Shut yer yap with all the elitist gosh durn book learning and rational analysis, we're lucky if them there fatcats give the proletariat *anything* for their dollar.'
But yeah, those myriad billion dollar stinker edsel jets that still can't lift off the ground yet, lets give those another round of funding.
So a huge high public projects only matter if you can complete it really fast? I'll be sure to pass that along to civil engineers, who apparently need to now start focusing on building small segments of sidewalk instead of large projects with large benefits.
Humanity has had it backward all along!
it seems to me that high-speed rail is caught in a Catch-22.
Build the easiest, fastest, flatest part first (say, Bakersfield to Stockton), as the DesertXpress seems determined to do with their train to Victorville, and get accused of building a train to nowhere.
Plan ahead for a statewide system, and get accused of being too slow.
I, for one, am just glad that we are no longer just talking about building high-speed rail but seem to be moving forward with the planning of a system, if not the actual construction.