William Grindley before the state Senate's transportation committee
Grindley's presentation in document form: To have the train OR to obey the law
More reports on the California high-speed rail project by Grindley and others.
Kathy Hamilton on this week's high-speed rail hearings.
More reports on the California high-speed rail project by Grindley and others.
Kathy Hamilton on this week's high-speed rail hearings.
Labels: California, High-Speed Rail
posted by Rob Anderson @ 4:22 PM
5 comments
5 Comments:
Even the anti-car train nuts at SPUR have basically given up in despair about HSR:
http://www.spur.org/blog/2014-05-20/what-s-happening-california-s-high-speed-rail-system
(You can read between the lines that they have basically abandoned all hope)
Nice try, Anon, but that article only shows that the folks at SPUR are still True Believers in this boondoggle. I wrote about SPUR's shoddy high-speed rail paper several years ago.
They downplay the serious problems the project has---a lack of money to even begin building it, for example---while extolling the electrification of Caltrain and claiming falsely that "lawsuits are being resolved." So far all the litigation has been "resolved" against the High-Speed Rail Authority. As the Kathy Hamilton story I link indicates, there will likely soon be more court defeats for this dumb project.
The proposed "blending" of high-speed rail with the Caltrain system means that the system---if it's ever built, which has been increasingly unlikely for several years now---will never be able to make the trip between SF and LA in two hours and forty minutes, still another violation of what California voters voted for in 2008.
SPUR and the whole prog/liberal establishment has been shockingly dumb about this foolish project, which was poorly conceived from the start. As on other important public policy issues, this has been a massive intellectual failure by the left.
Both of the "authors" of this piece---which reads like a CHSRA press release---are employed by the project. In other words, they're just singing for their supper.
I really want HS Rail to work, but as the various interests have gotten involved the project resembles nothing like what voters voted on. Not unlike the street repaving bond...
Yes, if a camel looks like an animal made by a committee, the California High-Speed Rail Project is a transportation project conceived by a committee that tried to formulate the ballot measure to attract enough votes to get it going. Yes, the numbers and promises in Proposition 1A in 2008 have been superseded by reality, especially about the cost of such a huge project. Like a lot of big government projects, the idea was to get it started and find the money as you went along. (See dthe excellent Mega Projects and Risk. The high-speed rail project follows the pattern of deceit by the supporters of big projects described in that book perfectly.)
Governor Brown is supposed to be a smart guy, but he's dumb on this issue and not well-informed. All his can-do pep talks are pathetic. He doesn't have the money to even build the first segment in the Valley. Instead, he wants to throw some cap-and-trade money into the bottomless pit.
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