Posted on 03/18/2012 8:38:49 AM PDT by 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.
(Excerpt) Read more at sacbee.com ...
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?
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!
And spain spent $1 trillion on theirs.
Ferry service with local rail would be a lot cheaper.
Greasing a few more palms with taxpayer money.
There, fixed it.
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.
Yes and you can drive from one side of the country to the other in about 10 hours.
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.
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.
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.
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..
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.)
What really killed the railroads in this country is the highway and a nice invention called the airplane..
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