From the San Francisco Chronicle:
(11-05) 00:26 PST SAN FRANCISCO -- California voters appeared to be climbing on board a plan to start construction of the nation's first high-speed rail system.
With better than 40 percent of ballots counted, Proposition 1A was holding a narrow but steady lead.
The bond measure would approve the sale of nearly $10 billion in bonds as a down payment on an 800-mile high-speed rail network that would send electric trains zipping between Northern and Southern California at up to 220 mph.
Supporters, including transportation, environmental and business groups and the heavy-construction industry, said high-speed rail would offer a fast, greener and less-costly way to travel up and down the state.
Opponents - mainly taxpayers groups and the libertarian Reason Foundation - criticized the high-speed rail proposal as either poorly planned or a good idea that the state can't afford in trying economic times.
4 comments:
What a brilliant idea; to have hundreds of people traveling at speeds of more than 100mph across the San Andreas fault! Thanks Local 3 (and others) for the theft of more tax dollars to be waisted on a useless rail system.
Now, if you want a rail system, how about first maintaining the existing system? Then, put in a high-speed rail from L.A. to Vegas! That might actually attract riders. I mean seriously, only a West L.A. weenie would get on a train to go to S.F.
San Andreas Fault? That didn't stop 2 nuclear power plants and off shore oil rigs.
The fact is that the airlines are not reliable as they have to be bailed out often. Driving is not the most efficient way to get around. The toll road people down there in the O.C. are asking the taxpayers to loan them over a billion dollars so that wealthy people can cut across the hills in their nice cars and avoid the traffic that the average wage earner has to sit in. The private sector can't get it done without our help. I support the proposal for high speed rail and if there is an earthquake, and there will be one, so be it. Planes fly through lightning and there is always the possibility of hitting ground when you are not ready to land. Safety is not the major concern here, having a first class transportation system like most of the industrialized countries have should be our top priority.
We need to be able to compete in a modern world and
We will never be able to compete in a "modern world" so long as we keep pushing the soft sciences in the classroom and diverge from the core subjects of reading, writing, and arithmetic. $9,950,000,000 is a lot of money to shuttle executives and state employees up and down the state. And if history has taught us anything it is that the State of California (Caltrans, etc.) just doesn't understand how to build anything on a budget. They are the king of cost overruns.
And talking about toll roads...that shouldn't even be up for debate. Using public funds to build toll roads should be a crime.
As is typical in California: when something's broke, throw billions of dollars at it. Then when it's still broke, point fingers and throw billions more at it. I guess it hasn't occurred to anyone to actually DO something rather than sit around and talk about it. If we sit around talking about it long enough, we won't have to worry about anything. That's more of the soft science BS the public schools (at least in O.C.) teach! Just another reason I'm sending my kids to a private school I can't afford, what with me paying for public AND private education…UHG, don't get me started!
If you build it, they will come.
(Jim Morrison) according to Wayne Campbell of Wayne's World.
I don't think that moving around is going to go out of style any time soon. We should have built this decades ago.
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