High-speed rail proponents make changes to win over California lawmakers

Sacramento Bee ^ | 3/18/12 | David Siders

[SmithL]

Proponents of California's $98.5 billion high-speed rail project, freshly battered by critics and teetering before the Legislature, are preparing a series of eleventh-hour changes to reduce the project's cost and improve its chance of approval.

The effort is materializing just weeks before the Brown administration is expected to seek funding to start construction in the Central Valley.

The changes include accelerating construction to reduce inflationary costs and funding regional rail improvements in and around Los Angeles and the Bay Area. Those areas are represented by influential lawmakers whom the California High-Speed Rail Authority is trying to appease.

Time is short, however, and some lawmakers are losing patience.

"That is not a set of decisions that should be hurried," Sen. Joe Simitian, D-Palo Alto, told rail officials at a hearing in Mountain View last week, "when we don't yet know, after three and a quarter years, what the plan of the High-Speed Rail Authority is."

If pressed, said Simitian, "you may not get the answer you like."

The Mountain View hearing, which drew several hundred spectators and lasted more than five hours, was to provide a "sneak peak" of changes to a business plan the authority will release later this month, before requesting the appropriation of some $2.3 billion in rail bond proceeds by June.

[ILS21R]

We've reached a compromise:

[Olog-hai]

Reduce it by how much . . . ? Kinda embarrassing that France can build their high-speed railroads for around $20 million per mile and Cali’s system went all the way up to $125 million per mile, maybe?

[Bulgaricus1]

More crap we do NOT need in CA. We should have a law that makes if illegal to have complete morons running the State legislature, judicial system & gov. That is the only way things will ever change there. Send the guilty on a one way trip to North Korea...permanently!

[driftdiver]

And spain spent $1 trillion on theirs.

[EQAndyBuzz]

Ferry service with local rail would be a lot cheaper.

[blueunicorn6]

Greasing a few more palms with taxpayer money.

[Carry_Okie]

Proponents of California's $98.5 billion high-speed rail project, freshly battered by critics and teetering before the Legislature, are preparing a series of eleventh-hour changes to reduce offer a more appealing pack of lies about the project's cost and improve its chance of approval.

There, fixed it.

[Navy Patriot]

...what the plan of the High-Speed Rail Authority is.

That's funny, the plan is to move as much taxpayer funds into the pockets of cronies as possible.

That's been the plan from the moment of conception, I coulda told 'em that.

[org.whodat]

Bull, the rail, in france, was already in place all they did was modifie it, are you a friend of willie green??

[org.whodat]

Yes and you can drive from one side of the country to the other in about 10 hours.

[pogo101]

The changes include accelerating construction to reduce inflationary costs and funding regional rail improvements

Ah. So SPENDING EVEN MORE MONEY, EVEN MORE QUICKLY, is the response to charges that the HSR project costs too much for too little benefit.

Rrrrrrrrrrright.

[Olog-hai]

No, it wasn’t already in place. Anything that is “LGV” is new-build. Also, the LGVs were built with 25,000-volt AC wires while the traditional French network is electrified at 1500 volts DC. TGVs can run at a top speed of only 137 mph while on the older railroads.

[Olog-hai]

They did? That would put their per-mile cost at about $603 million. I know that they already closed one of the corridors (Toledo to Albacete) because there were only five people per train on average.

[KevinDavis]

Who cares.. The population in Europe is more centered in major metro areas and here in the states population is more spread out.. Apples and Oranges..

[Olog-hai]

It’s coming back to bite Europe in the rear end anyhow. They’re too overregulated and centralized to be able to do anything efficiently. (Which, ironically, is what killed a lot of railroading in this country.)

[KevinDavis]

What really killed the railroads in this country is the highway and a nice invention called the airplane..

[Olog-hai]

Not by themselves. It was government intervention (or interference, if you like) in building the infrastructure to support the mobility of those inventions (the cars and trucks that operate on the highways, particularly). By contrast, the railroad companies owned their own infrastructure, and apart from certain state-owned commuter railroads and a few hundred route-miles owned by Amtrak, still do; they also got taxed to the hilt on those properties, which was one of the first ways that they started to lose profitability especially on the passenger-carrying end. (New York State used to tax railroads by number of tracks they had on a right of way; so in that state, four-track main lines ended up getting reduced to a single track. The federal government used to charge a 10ٕ¢ tax on passenger tickets, even into the late 60s; no railroad benefited from that in the same way that people who pay gasoline taxes are supposed to get their highways paid for. Ain’t big government grand?)

Government regulation got in the way of the speed-competitive edge that private railroads were attempting to exploit after WWII; this relates to stuff like signaling, track classes, how much “armor” a high-speed train is required to have related to its crashworthiness, and probably others that I can’t think of off the top of my head.