Free Republic

Jerry Brown, not surprisingly, used a ceremony marking the 75th anniversary of the iconic Golden Gate Bridge to tout his two bids for public works posterity – a north-south bullet train and a tunnel for water to bypass the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta. "Suck it in!" Brown said. "We got to build, we got to do it right. And this bridge I think really expresses that sense." Just as the bridge proved to be an economic boon, Brown said, so would a bullet train and a tunnel to improve water supply reliability, adding that just as the Golden Gate Bridge "connects...

The state's top analyst has urged lawmakers to pull the emergency brake on California's $68 billion bullet train, saying the recently revised plan carries way too much risk of failure. The Legislative Analyst's Office report released late Tuesday may give the Legislature political cover if it decides to ax the polarizing rail line as it begins debating whether to approve high-speed rail Wednesday.

Its popularity has declined sharply, many of its details have yet to emerge, and independent authorities have questioned its financial and operational viability, but California's bullet train project is very likely to get the green light from the Legislature soon. That's the consensus of those who have been counting votes among the Legislature's dominant Democrats, who can give the California High-Speed Rail Authority authorization to sell bonds and begin construction of an initial segment in the San Joaquin Valley. And that's true even though lawmakers still don't know, in any detail, what linking the northern and southern halves of the...

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,...

Critics have called it the train to nowhere and a $98 billion boondoggle. As concerns mount over the practicality and affordability of California's plan to build a high-speed rail system, even many former supporters are beginning to sound skeptical. Not so Gov. Jerry Brown. He has emerged as the most vocal cheerleader of a project that is as risky as it is ambitious. Building a first-in-the-nation project would provide a lasting legacy for the 73-year-old Democratic governor as he moves into the twilight of a long political career. His father is revered for promoting the construction of California's comprehensive water...

Gov. Jerry Brown is scaling back the state's highly controversial bullet train project to keep it alive. Just three months ago, his administration unveiled – with great fanfare – a revised "business plan" for building the north-south bullet train system to answer the embryonic project's many critics. The project would be slowed down and stretched out timewise with a new and supposedly more realistic cost structure, officials declared. It would be, California High-Speed Rail Authority chairman Tom Umberg said at the unveiling, "a new time, a new day and a new beginning." But the revised cost, about $100 billion or...

(CNN) - Herman Cain said Tuesday he could feel the pressure from his fellow 2012 candidates ahead of the CNN Western Leadership Conference Debate in Las Vegas. "The way it feels is that you got this big bull's-eye on your back, and it keeps getting bigger," Cain told CNN's Wolf Blitzer on "The Situation Room." Programming note: GOP presidential candidates next face off at 8 p.m. ET Tuesday, October 18, in the CNN Western Republican Presidential Debate in Las Vegas, Nevada. Submit your questions for the debate here. "It feels great, but as you know, the challenge is 'how do...

Herman Cain deserves credit for proposing a tax-reform plan that is specific, promotes economic growth, and has captured the imagination of conservatives nationwide. His 9-9-9 plan builds on the insight that one of the chief defects of the current tax code is its bias toward consumption over savings. But his plan’s peculiarities of design, substantive weaknesses, and political naïveté render it unworthy of conservative support.

During construction of the Hiawatha Line, the joint venture in charge of the light-rail project told federal authorities that minority and disadvantaged subcontractors were being included. Now it has agreed to pay the government $4.6 million to resolve allegations that those claims were false. According to the Justice Department, Minnesota Transit Constructors Inc. violated the federal false claims act by telling federal transportation officials that it hired companies qualified as Disadvantaged Business Enterprises to work on the light rail. The program helps businesses owned by minorities, women and other disadvantaged individuals obtain work on federal construction projects.

Gov. Jerry Brown said this afternoon that California's embattled high-speed rail project should move forward, despite growing criticism about the project's management and cost. While the nation is in a "period of massive retrenchment," Brown told The Fresno Bee's editorial board, "I would like to be part of the group that gets America to think big again." The Democratic governor has said little publicly about the project since it came under fire this year in Sacramento, with cost estimates rising and lawmakers questioning its oversight. The project, to connect San Francisco and Los Angeles, was once expected to cost about...

When Jerry Brown began his first stint as governor in 1975, he soon became embroiled in an intense controversy over setting aside lanes in Los Angeles of the extremely congested Santa Monica Freeway . . . This bit of history is offered because Brown is once again occupying the governorship, once again he has a big, high-concept transportation project that may be a debacle in the making, and once again he has a way out.It's the high-speed rail project to link the northern and southern halves of the state. Voters have approved a bond issue for the project, which is...

THERE IS nothing that epitomizes California's dysfunctional government more than the state's pursuit of a high-speed rail fantasy that is headed for all-but-certain failure. The latest criticism of the rail scheme comes from the independent Legislative Analyst's Office, which strongly opposes Gov. Jerry Brown's request for an appropriation of $185 million to keep the project moving forward. It's past time for the state to do what it should have done more than a year ago -- cancel the project and stop wasting any more of the taxpayers' money. The High-Speed Rail Authority has bungled the project from the start with...

California's chronic inability to govern itself has made it an international laughingstock with a blistering article in the Economist, a highbrow British magazine, only the latest manifestation of that unfortunate status. The state now has another opportunity to either cement its image as a civic buffoon or begin acting like an adult. It is the disaster-in-waiting known as the high-speed rail project. On a whim, politicians and voters decided a few years ago that a bullet train connecting the northern and southern halves of the state would be a jim-dandy thing to have, even though nobody knew how much it...

California's high-speed rail project is threatened by erratic financing, the state's precarious financial situation and management shortcomings and should be overhauled, the Legislature's budget analyst said Tuesday. The highly critical report by Legislative Analyst Mac Taylor's office concluded that management of the project be shifted from the state High-Speed Rail Authority into the Department of Transportation and the entire program undergo reevaluation -- especially the decision to build an initial segment in the San Joaquin Valley. The report details "a number of problems that pose threats to the high-speed rail project's successful development" and adds: "The Legislature faces some challenging...

TALLAHASSEE — High speed rail in Florida may not be totally dead yet. U.S. Department of Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood on Friday announced he will make the $2.4 billion originally earmarked for the state available through a competitive process. That means a coalition of local governments, including Tampa, Orlando, Lakeland and Miami, could attempt to win the funds to build an 84-mile line between Tampa and Orlando. They would have to compete with other states for the money.

Commuters are saving an average $9,904 annually and $825 per month, based on current gas prices, by riding public transit systems instead of driving their cars, according to the American Public Transportation Association (APTA). Gas prices increased 28 cents per gallon in the 10 days leading up to March 4. The current savings by using public transportation are the highest in the past two years, APTA officials said. "As gas prices rise, using public transportation is the quickest way people can beat high gasoline prices," said APTA President William Millar in a prepared statement. APTA releases a monthly "Transit Savings...

Freshman Rep. Jeff Denham, R-Atwater, caught some of his fellow California lawmakers by surprise this week when he authored an amendment to block federal funding this year for California's high-speed rail program. . . . In practice, there could well be some legal impediments to taking federal funds provided for one purpose and turning them to another; as a symbolic gesture, though, the bill makes a statement over what Denham termed the "ever-escalating costs" of California's high-speed rail project..

The federal government already has more than $10 billion in stimulus and other money set aside for high speed rail projects. To date, it has made commitments to spend $4.5 billion of that. Obama has made infrastructure a centerpiece of his presidency, calling for $53 billion in additional funds for high speed rail in his budget proposal this week. California: The state has captured the lion's share of these funds... Chicago-St. Louis: This route, which passes through Springfield and Bloomington, Ill., received $1.1 billion ... Orlando-Tampa: ... Vermont: The state was one of the first to win federal money, and...

A few days before this month's election, the federal government announced that California would receive an additional $715 million for its high-speed rail project, contingent on the money being spent quickly on a segment in the San Joaquin Valley. Why? You'd have to be terminally naive not to believe that the splashy announcement, made personally by an Obama administration official in Fresno, was to help an embattled local congressman, Democrat Jim Costa, stave off a very stiff Republican challenge. Costa, a longtime bullet train advocate, did, in fact, eke out a narrow re-election win. And last week, the California High-Speed...

Is a proposed passenger train line from Minneapolis to Duluth on course for a $700 million derailment? Or is it merely headed toward a $300,000 detour that could delay plans a year? Faced with competition from nine other routes seeking federal funding as well as a possible rerouting of the line's Twin Cities starting point -- to St. Paul, instead of Minneapolis -- proponents of the Northern Lights Express (NLX) have shifted gears.

Thousands of Tube passengers were trapped underground in packed, airless conditions for two hours as a power failure brought rush-hour trains to a stand-still. Around 2,400 passengers were forced to walk for 20 minutes along the track of the Jubilee Line. Some were left traumatised by the incident and video footage taken by a commuter showed one man in an oxygen mask being treated by paramedics at St John's Wood station. Five Tube trains were caught in the chaos - three between Baker Street and St John's Wood, the fourth at Swiss Cottage, and the fifth at Westminster. Commuters on...

In Delaware, 50 union workers, including 20 Electrical Workers (IBEW) members are at work and paying their bills and mortgages thanks to economic recovery money that is also saving Amtrak millions of dollars in new equipment.Those jobs are part of the as many as 3.3 million jobs that President Obama’s  American Recovery and Reinvestment Act saved or created since it was signed into law in February 2009. In the three months prior to passage of the legislation, the nation had lost 2.2 million jobs–more than 8 million jobs disappeared during the Bush administration. The Delaware workers are converting old and abandoned dining...

Washington, DC, September 29, 2010—A new report, Infrastructure Construction and Equipment Finance Opportunities, issued by the Equipment Leasing & Finance Foundation (Foundation), provides an outlook on infrastructure construction and offers a review of the current situation as well as an analysis of future trends. In addition, the study discusses current legislation or policies that may impact infrastructure construction, provides insight into the impact of infrastructure construction on equipment demand, and examines the opportunities this landscape presents for equipment finance. The study was conducted at the request of the Foundation by IHS Global Insight, a global economic and financial forecasting company....

The Leading Innovator in the Industry Presents New Solutions and Products Which Are More Energy Efficient, Environmentally and Passenger Friendly BERLIN, GERMANY--(Marketwire - September 20, 2010) - "The fastest way to save the planet" is Bombardier Transportation's motto at InnoTrans 2010, to be held from September 21 to 24 in Berlin, Germany. The company will again this year present new products and technologies focused on energy efficiency and environmental performance. This includes, for example, the highly efficient BOMBARDIER ZEFIRO family of high speed trains and three new BOMBARDIER ECO4 solutions as well as many other innovations in the areas of...

The city of Ramsey needs congressional help to get $3.5 million in federal funds to help build a new passenger rail station for the Northstar Commuter Rail service, a necessary component of a 400-acre transit-oriented commercial development. To finance the rail station, the city first applied unsuccessfully for $1.4 million in federal transit funds. Officials said the $1.4 million funding request was not in Sixth District Congresswoman Michelle Bachmann’s final list of appropriations. They are soliciting her support for this latest request of $3.5 million they hope will be part of the next authorization bill. “She was more than happy...

Southwest Jiaotong University in China is developing a low pressure underground tubes and maglev train which will travel at 1,000 kilometers per hour (600 mph). This is double the speed of current maglev trains. According to Shen Zhiyun, academic member of CAS and CAE, China should target the development of high-speed ground transportation with 600 to 1,000 kilometers per hour which should be in operation between 2020 and 2030.

America has a “waiting problem.”Think about the time you spend waiting in traffic jams… at the doctor/dentist’s office… at restaurants… at the gas station.And how about the six months of your life spent waiting at traffic lights? Or the five years you’ll spend just waiting in lines at retail stores, the post office, DMV, etc. (Early buyers of Apple’s products likely spend far more.)And according to Robert Poole, Director of Transportation Policy at the Reason Foundation, the average air traveler now spends two to three hours waiting at the airport. Granted, much of that is due to more rigorous security...

There’s just one thing wrong with Barack Obama’s $8 billion economic stimulus plan to build high speed railroad lines he claims will create lots of jobs, move millions of people, curb traffic, clean the air and make intercity travel more cost-efficient and fast. It won’t. It will create relatively few high paying jobs because the companies who build high speed trains are mostly in Europe and Asia. It will not be truly high speed like Japan’s Bullet train, because U.S. roadbeds can’t handle such speeds safely. It will have little or no effect on traffic because most of it is...

Blame it on Sam Marber. I have had a fascination with trains since I was a small boy growing up in a very tiny Las Vegas, a town that traced its roots to the need for a place to provide water for the trains moving from Salt Lake City to Los Angeles. Yep, water was plentiful in those days — at least for the trains. Sam was an older boy who lived across the street. His garage rarely had a car in it, at least not so any of us noticed. What it did have was a train setup that...

The French national railway SNCF has filed a detailed proposal with the Federal Railroad Administration stating an interest in operating high-speed rail in Texas. The route in question would run from DFW through Austin and into San Antonio. It would not be the Gulf Coast route that's been on the USDOT's official list of 10 prospective HSR corridors or the much-promoted Dallas-Houston link (including the Texas T-Bone). But Houston could be in the distance. From Yonah Freemark on the TransportPolitic blog: At $13.8 billion in construction costs, SNCF expects benefits to outweigh public infrastructure costs by 170% over a period...

The Senate majority leader’s about-face on high-speed rail. On Tuesday, Senate majority leader Harry Reid’s office confirmed to the Los Angeles Times that the Nevada senator no longer favors publicly funding a high-speed magnetic-levitation (“maglev”) train between Los Angeles and Las Vegas, a project he enthusiastically supported for years. Instead, Reid is suddenly throwing his support behind the DesertXpress, a privately funded rail venture between the two cities. Reid is claiming that his change of heart is merely pragmatic — but the underlying circumstances of the move may raise some pertinent questions about his political integrity. The construction of a...

Our building trembles, sometimes, but perceptibly. It is unmistakably a tremble, and I can't imagine what brings it about because the heavy machinery is across the river, where the paper is printed. I've worked in newspapers that house the presses, and when those babies start rolling, you have to grab a strap and hold on because the place feels like a submarine that just got the dive command. Probably, old buildings like ours occasionally settle themselves even more comfortably on their haunches and it is nothing to get worked up over. It only comes to attention, the trembling down at...

One has to wonder what the DHS has been doing for the past 7 years. http://www.thebulletin.us/site/index.cfm?newsid=20200234&BRD=2737&PAG=461&dept_id=576361&rfi=8

My uncle the pastor was just preaching this morning at church about a bunch of stuff iun the bible. I was wondering if you could help me understand some of it though im new. First of all Im confused about a passage of scripture about cain. It said he had a wife but where did he get it? I heard Ken ham say somthing about that but I forgot the answer. Second, I heard that Choo Choo trains that go backwards were in the bible and were considered satanic. Is that true? Finally I was wondering about if in Israel...

Feds hit brakes on rail moneyA federal agency questions the assumed benefits of commuter rail in the Triangle. The Federal Transit Administration has changed its rating of the Triangle's proposed commuter rail service from "recommended" to neutral, saying it cannot endorse the $695 million project until it resolves new doubts about its benefits. The Triangle Transit Authority, which hopes to start running commuter trains in 2008, is counting on federal funding to cover 61 percent of the system's cost. Without that money, the project is dead. Federal officials are not questioning how fast TTA trains will run or how many...

The temperature was just above zero when Metro Transit police officer Ken Vande Steeg asked Garrett Carter of south Minneapolis to get off the train and buy a ticket. Carter complied, stepping onto the cold platform at the Fort Snelling light-rail station. Carter's offense: He had a free-ride coupon, but hadn't exchanged it for a ticket from the vending machine. Had to be done, Vande Steeg said. The coupon buys one ride. On the Hiawatha line, which depends partly on the honor system for fares, enforcement is tightening. Officers still have some discretion, issuing warnings instead of citations when riders...

October 15, 2004DEATH ON THE TRACKSAmtrak Pays Millions for Others' Fatal ErrorsBy WALT BOGDANICH t is no mystery why, one spring day two years ago, an Amtrak passenger train jumped the tracks near Crescent City, Fla., and skidded to a stop on its side, killing 4 people and injuring 142.Investigators concluded that the track, owned by the big freight railroad CSX, had not been properly stabilized and that management's oversight of maintenance had been lax. But when millions of dollars in damage claims arose from the crash, it was not CSX, a multibillion-dollar corporation, that paid them. It was Amtrak,...