Stop this train, we have to get off

Lisa Benson

Letter to the editor in today's SF Chronicle:

Hold that train

Regarding “High-speed rail plan for San Jose to S.F. rolls out” (Front Page, July 10), I cannot believe that the rail authority would think that at this time, with pandemic, millions of Californians out of work, and a truly terrible economic recession for our state, that now is the time to ask for more money for this boondoggle!

And on top of that, they can’t even approximate what the possible price that a ticket from San Francisco to Los Angeles would be. We should be planning on how to feed our population, help get our schools back into session, and take care of one another, then planning how much faster it would be to get to Los Angeles via train. 

Unless they can guarantee that a train ticket will cost less than a flight from SFO to LAX, this is a waste of valuable time and money.

Susan Ruiz

South San Francisco

Rob's comment:

The smartest thing in the story Ruiz is commenting on is a quote from Quentin Kopp:

“They don’t have the money,” said Quentin Kopp, a retired state senator from San Francisco and former chairman of the High-Speed Rail Authority board who is now a critic. “It is a hoax. It is not real.”

The dumbest thing in the story is a quote from Mayor Breed:

“I applaud the California High Speed Rail Authority for reaching this important milestone,” San Francisco Mayor London Breed said in a statement. “The release of the draft environmental document for the San Francisco to San Jose project section takes us one step closer to bringing high-speed rail to San Francisco.”

Independent thinking has never been Breed's strong suit.

As a Democrat, I'm embarrassed by how the Democratic Party has always supported this project, probably because an important part of the party's base are the construction unions, which of course have always supported the project. 

All they care about are jobs for their members, not the project's huge waste of taxpayers' money.

The Chronicle put the story Ruiz is commenting on on the front page, though the story itself is only about the project's EIR, not anything really newsworthy to justify the front page. That's how the Chronicle, like many Democrats, continues to support the dumb project.

By the way, last month I asked San Francisco's two Assembly members---David Chiu and Phil Ting---how they voted on the project recently, but they didn't respond, which suggests they continued to toe the party line on this fiasco.

On ticket prices, see the analysis here.

See also Quentin Kopp, Almost a crime and $6 billion SF tunnel to get the $100 billion train to the $2 billion bus station.