High-speed rail's latest destructive fantasy

Bakersfield to Palmdale

Ralph Vartabedian in the LA Times:

The future California bullet train would barrel out of Bakersfield and shoot up 4,000 feet over the Tehachapi Mountains en route to Palmdale, an engineering feat that would cost $18.1 billion and impose significant impacts — including the loss of low-cost housing, a homeless shelter and a high school, according to new details.

The impacts are outlined in a draft environmental statement released Thursday by the California High-Speed Rail Authority. It selects a preferred route that would include 9.3 miles of tunnels and 15.8 miles of elevated structures, representing about 30% of the entire passage between the two cities.

The rail segment is a crucial link in California’s ultimate plan of running bullet trains from the Bay Area to Los Angeles and beyond. But this stretch of the route, as planned, would take out the R. Rex Parris High School in Palmdale, the Lancaster Community Homeless Shelter, the Solid Rock Bible Church, eight motels, 253 residential housing units, 311 businesses and 175 farm fields, according to the environmental documents...

The environmental documents also indicate that a section of the iconic Pacific Crest Trail, which runs from the Mexican to Canadian borders through mountain ranges, forests and deserts, would have to be relocated. The resulting trail would run within sight and sound of the passing 220-mile-per-hour trains. The impacts “would be significant and unavoidable under CEQA,” the report states, referring to the California Environmental Quality Act.

The housing losses would include 34 single family homes, 164 apartments and 55 mobile homes, the authority said.

When and if these impacts would occur is only a guess, since the state lacks the $18 billion to build the section. The rail authority is working under a plan to build 171 miles of rail from Bakersfield to Merced for $20.4 billion, a cost that would consume all of its available funding if it can be completed on schedule by about 2028. But under its 2020 business plan, the rail authority still asserts it can complete the entire Los Angeles to San Francisco system by 2033...

The cost of building over the steep mountain range has grown much more rapidly than the entire project. In 2012, the Los Angeles to San Francisco construction was estimated to cost $68 billion, and it has since grown 18% to $80 billion under the 2020 business plan. By contrast, the cost of the Bakersfield to Palmdale section shot up from $7.7 billion in 2012 to the current $18.1 billion, an increase of 135%...

The modern route would include some massive structures, such as one viaduct extending 4,600 feet, nearly a mile, and another soaring 220 feet, roughly the height of a 20-story building, above the ground, according to the rail authority.

The last attempted rail path through the area was in the 1870s, when Southern Pacific carved out a winding route with thousands of Chinese immigrant laborers, equipped only with dynamite and hand tools. It is still the only rail route between the Central Valley and Southern California.

Since 2015, the rail authority and its consultants have been refining the Tehachapi Mountain crossing and the preferred route identified Thursday has fewer miles of tunnels. Five years ago, studies indicated that it would require 16 miles of tunnels, rather than the current 9.3 miles.

In addition to the tunnels, the route would include 75 overpass or underpass structures as it crosses highways. Another 49 roads in the way would just be closed.

See also New bullet train plan paints optimistic picture, but opposition continues to grow.

The Republican Party: "A malignant force in American life"

Osita Nwanevu in the New Republic:

...Bipartisanship has become a both particularly sacred and particularly destructive part of the American civil religion, a hollow and superficial virtue promoted by political elites responsible for the domestic and foreign policy failures the two parties have crafted together over the past 30 years—from the Iraq War and support for oppressive regimes abroad to the expansion of extreme poverty and the carceral state at home. 

But bipartisanship, as Biden knows, also remains appealing to the majority of the American electorate, including the majority of Democrats. 

The daunting task ahead for progressive activists is convincing ordinary voters that a major political party—prejudiced, venal, and unmoored from reason—can lose the right to govern. 

Because without a pressure campaign making it clear that Republican power is unsustainable for the country and the planet—that a party in thrall to a racist demagogue and aligned against the Voting Rights Act is not only disagreeable but dangerous—Democrats will never build the support necessary to structurally reform and rebalance the American political system...

...It’s left to the rest of us to face the truth squarely: Donald Trump is not a departure from the values defining the Republican Party, but the culmination of its efforts to secure power in this country. 

The question before us is not how much more the Republican Party might be willing to tolerate from the president but how much more we are willing to tolerate from the Republican Party. 

The GOP, founded by a generation of extraordinary men more committed to human freedom and the ideals expressed by our founding documents than the Founders themselves, has had a strange and improbable history. 

Built in opposition to the institution of slavery, the Republican Party is now a reliable opponent of equality and a malignant force in American life—a cancer within a patient in denial about the nature and severity of her condition. 

It should be not only defeated but destroyed—vanquished from the American political scene with a finality that can only be assured not by electoral politics or structural reforms alone, but by a moral crusade...

See also The Shelf Life of a Deplorable.

Rob's comment:

I disagree that the Republican Party should be "destroyed." 

After smashing it at the ballot box, better instead to have the Repug Party live on as the political home for our "deplorable" minority: racists, religious crackpots, mysogynists, homophobes, anti-Semites, gun fetishists, and anti-science flat-earthers. 

If all our rotten apples are in one barrel, they will be in public view and under open political quarantine.