Category Archives: News commentary

High-speed rail advocates are psychotic, says the Boyd Group, an aviation planning firm. Psychotics, notes the company blog, suffer from “confusion, disorganized thought and speech, mania, delusions, and a loss of touch with reality”–all of which describe rail nuts.

“If you really want to see psychosis,” adds the Boyd Group, “log on to the DOT’s website. Instead of providing hard, accurate information, it’s now a shoddy trumpet for politically-correct schemes pushed by the hobby-lobby that’s running the Department.” Displaying the DOT’s 2009 map of proposed high-speed rail lines, the blog says “high-speed rail isn’t infrastructure; it’s political correctness” and the administration’s plan isn’t a “vision,” it’s “corruption.”

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Rather than fight the plans of governors-elect Kasich and Walker to cancel high-speed trains in Ohio and Wisconsin, Secretary of Immobility Ray LaHood has preempted them by redistributing the $1.2 billion in federal rail grants to those states. Not surprisingly, most of the money is going to to California ($624 million) and Florida ($342 million). Washington state will get $162 million, Illinois $42 million, with smaller amounts to other states.

That brings the total of federal grants to California’s project to $3.2 billion. With state matching funds, it now has about $5.5 billion, or slightly more than 10 percent of what it says it needs to build the proposed San Francisco-Los Angeles line. Of course, the actual cost is likely to be much greater.

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Recently, someone asked the Antiplanner why Amtrak’s high-speed rail plan is so expensive. They were referring to a proposal published in late October to increase speeds in Amtrak’s Boston-to-Washington corridor to 220 mph.

The plan calls for spending $117 billion in the 427-mile corridor, for an average cost of nearly $275 million per mile. That’s almost ten times Florida’s projected cost of $30 million per mile and close to three times California’s projected cost of about $95 million per mile. Wikipedia reports that France kept the cost of one line down to $25 million per mile, but only by making compromises with grades and curvature. Continue reading →

The federal government’s most recent $900 million grant to the California High-Speed Rail Authority came with a string attached: most of the money had to be spent, not in Los Angeles or San Francisco where most potential rail patrons are located, but in the central valley. Handed out just before the election, the grant was a blatant attempt to help the re-election effort of U.S. Representative Jim Costa. It might have made a difference, for despite the fact that Costa’s district leans heavily Democrat, he won over an unknown Republican candidate by a mere 3,000 votes.

But now California has to deal with the fact that it only has enough funds to build a high-speed train to nowhere. The authority expects to vote tomorrow on whether to start construction from Borden to Corcoran. To be fair, the route would go through Fresno, but it wouldn’t take anyone in Fresno to anywhere they might want to go at a high speed: Borden is barely a dot on the map, while Corcoran is the home of Charles Manson and his fellow prisoners.