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Or so reports the Wall Street Journal. Major companies mentioned in the article: railcar makers Siemens, Bombardier, Alstom; locomotive maker General Electric; Union Pacific; Wabtec (once known as Westinghouse Air Brake Company); So if you watch a lot of porn you will be desensitized to real see over here now sildenafil viagra de pfizer life sex. Many men experience it during times of trauma and many people cannot heal, because the curse forces them to relive and suffer from viagra cialis generico the condition of ED. It releases a high volume of testosterone, which is buy cialis pharmacy why not check here important to maintain healthy weight. If you are looking for a solid, simple business to start up on your own, then the vending machine route levitra cheapest price http://icks.org/n/data/ijks/1482456154_add_file_7.pdf may be the road to follow. and consulting firm HNTB.

I am sure that is just a tiny sample of all the companies hoping to cash in on the hundreds of billions that rail enthusiasts want the government to spend on their high-speed toys.

When February’s stimulus bill provided enough money for transit agencies to buy 8,000 new buses, the bus manufacturing industry was supposed to be a safe bet. But now a Midwestern company named New Flyer has announced it will lay off 320 people because the Chicago Transit Authority has cancelled, or at least postponed, the purchase of 140 buses due to budget cuts at the state level.

New Flyer admits it has “a large backlog of bus orders, including some from California, Milwaukee, Philadelphia and Rochester, that would use stimulus money. But because its buses are engineered to order for each customer, the company said in a statement, it cannot easily switch its production schedule to fill the gaps left by the delayed order.” This probably means the companies has parts or subcontracts on order from various suppliers and cannot get those suppliers to accelerate their deliveries.

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Early reports indicate that the Rocky Mountain Rail Authority — a Colorado entity led by a former state senator — wants to spend $21 billion on a starter high-speed rail system from Ft. Collins to Pueblo and Denver to Eagle. That’s about $65 million per mile, and would only buy trains that go an average of 60 mph in the mountains (that’s the Denver to Eagle part) and 140 mph on “portions” of the Ft. Collins to Pueblo part.

This is only a starter system as Colorado wants the Eagle line to go to Aspen, Craig, and Grand Junction, while Colorado, New Mexico, and Texas propose to eventually extend the Pueblo line to El Paso. The Antiplanner conservatively estimated that true high-speed rail on these routes would cost an average of $50 million per mile, so $65 million for 60 mph trains is pretty outrageous.

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A California judge ruled yesterday that the environmental impact report (EIR) written for the California high-speed rail project is inadequate and must be done over. Shortly before the ruling, Quentin Kopp — a powerful politician who formerly chaired and still sits on the rail authority’s board — called the lawsuit “frivolous” and predicted that it would be thrown out.

But Judge Michael Kenny concluded (750KB pdf) that the high-speed rail proposal was too vague. As a result, the EIR contained “an inadequate discussion of the impacts of the Pacheco alignment alternative on surrounding businesses and residences which may be displaced, construction impacts on the Monterey Highway, and impacts on Union Pacific’s use of its right-of-way and spurs and consequently its freight operations.”

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The Federal Transit Administration (FTA) has published data verifying the Antiplanner’s conclusion that light rail is just about the most dangerous form of urban travel in America. Not necessarily dangerous to the riders; just to anyone who happens to be nearby. Of course, we always blame the accidents on the people who get hit.

So what is the FTA’s conclusion? That it needs more power to regulate transit safety. We heard the same thing after the Washington MetroRail crash that killed nine people: just give the FTA power to regulate transit safety.
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That’s a pretty dumb idea considering it was the FTA that funded all those rail projects in the first place. Unlike subways, light rail sharing the right-of-way with cars and pedestrians is inherently dangerous, like putting a vicious dog in a room with nursery school children. Having someone monitor the dog is not going to help much if the dog is faster than the guard. A real solution to safer transit is to stop building light rail. Then no one would be needed to regulate it.

The Census Bureau says that about 5.1 percent of commuters in the San Francisco-Oakland urban area take the Bay Area Rapid Transit to work, compared with 10 percent who ride bus or light rail and 72 percent who go by auto. So naturally, the media predicted complete chaos if BART workers went on strike, as they threatened to do yesterday.

As it happens, last-minute negotiations helped to avert the strike, possibly because union leaders realized that public sentiment was against them. Of course, we don’t yet know what final deal was reached; historically, transit agencies cave into the unions, but this time BART is feeling such a pinch that it may not have given up too much.

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