[SmithL]

The California High-Speed Rail train travels near Mission Beach in San Diego, California, U.S., in this artist rendering released to the media on Monday, Feb. 14, 2011. President Barack Obama's administration wants to spend $53 billion over the next six years on high-speed rail.

[SmithL]

Hedey will not be happy.

[rellimpank]

—and then there’s the one to Las Vegas——

[forgotten man]

Who is on the board of the High Speed Rail Authority? Who appointed them? How much do they get paid?

[fight_truth_decay]

This is an early rail car-- what California can, in an economic reality, afford:

[GeronL]

white elephant... two things which Kalipornia are running out of whites and elephants.... heh

[paul51]

I doubt there is one single hi-speed railway, existing or proposed, that makes any sense at all in this country.

[Buckeye McFrog]

Wow, and I would have to presume that any dead-tree newspaper based in Oakland would lean very far to the left generally

[Carry_Okie]

It would make far more sense for California to spend transportation money on urban transit projects such as BART to San Jose than to try to build a high-speed rail system in a region that does not have the population density to support it.

Oh but it will! That's the whole idea. It is exactly what they did when they built BART in the first place: the real estate people had the station sites all picked out before the project was even announced. Here's how it appears to me to be going in the Central Valley:

1. Cut off the water.
2. Snap up the depressed the land along the project corridor.
3. Propose corridor. Foist bogus estimates of the project cost, ticket revenue, etc.
4. Get voters stupid and craven enough to vote for bond money to force taxpayers to pay "fund" it.
5. Start the project with insufficient funds before the people wise up.
6. Hustle "investors" for insta-cities.
7. Buy a few local pols to get approval while handing the bill for the necessary infrastructure to the public at large.
8. THEN start incurring "cost overruns."
9. Get said "investors" to scream for a bailout.

Deja vu all over again. I've been watching variations on this little racket for fifty years and the time these creeps buy is always during a recession. The real question is: Where do they think the people are going to find jobs to fund all this?

The nifty thing about it is that the southern San Joaquin Valley is a natural smog trap. That means one can sue to prevent anything but Willie Greene's chew-chew-money train. Anybody want to hazard whether the TNC already has their sites on the "proposed green belts"?

[blueunicorn6]

Why, if Jerry Brown starts shutting down stupid projects that exist only to benefit political cronies, where will it stop? If you start dragging reason into political decisions, then who’ll pay all those lobbyists? Not me!Please support this project and keep a good kid in lobbying instead of practicing law.