California bullet train: The high price of speed
7th November 2011
Even a left-wing rag can’t avoid realizing the Unintended Consequences of Yet Another Politically Motivated Boondoggle.
The California High Speed Rail Authority, the agency trying to build the bullet train, couldn’t have found a more politically sensitive target. The school is where House Majority Whip Kevin McCarthy (R-Bakersfield), one of the project’s staunchest opponents in Congress, sends his children.
Critics say such blunders are routine for the rail authority. Across the length of the Central Valley, the bullet train as drawn would destroy churches, schools, private homes, shelters for low-income people, animal processing plants, warehouses, banks, medical offices, auto parts stores, factories, farm fields, mobile home parks, apartment buildings and much else as it cuts through the richest agricultural belt in the nation and through some of the most depressed cities in California.
Although the potential for such disruption was understood in general terms when the project began 15 years ago, the reality is only now beginning to sink in.
Once again, ‘progressive’ pie-in-the-sky can’t be bothered to think it through.
November 7th, 2011 at 14:41
Always thought this could be countered in Kalifornia by one question: What happens to a high-speed train during an earthquake?
The philosophical answer is that it turns into another pile of government waste.
Worse, it could turn into another Hollywood disaster movie.
November 7th, 2011 at 21:12
Decades ago, the I-94 corridor was laid out to/through Detroit. Dozens of schools, churches, animal shelters, etc., were demolished and an entire neighborhood–Polishtown, no less–disappeared from the map. Nobody (except for the folks affected, of course) bitched at the time, as interstates and expressways were seen as “progress”. In some parts of the nation, they still are.
How times have changed…