Free Republic

Picture Pittsburgh 50 years from now with these transportation changes: a terminal in a central location to handle a hyperloop system, vehicles for vertical takeoffs and landings, and high-speed trains; aerial trams linking neighborhoods; and new bridges crossing the Monongahela River at Hazelwood for motorized vehicles and at the former Wabash rail bridge piers for bikes and pedestrians. Those might sound like something from a science fiction novel, but they are among the ideas the city says it must consider in a 50-year Mobility Vision Plan released Thursday by Mayor Bill Peduto and Karina Ricks, director of the city’s Department...

A key block of California lawmakers is feuding with the Biden administration over the state’s high-speed rail endeavor, arguing that conditions of a restored federal grant lock the project into what the group sees as an outdated technology for powering the bullet train. In a recent letter to U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, California Speaker Anthony Rendon and 17 other Assembly Democrats say the federal grant unnecessarily directs California to use overhead electrical lines to propel the trains down their tracks. Instead, Rendon wants California to keep open the option of powering locomotives with batteries or fuel cells, arguing that...

Zhao Jian, a professor at Beijing Jiaotong University and railway expert, recently expressed alarm at the unsustainable finances of China’s high-speed railway system, remarking that it was an economic “gray rhino.” The term is used to refer to an obvious yet ignored threat.Beijing Jiaotong University is China’s top university for transportation science and technology, according to an academic ranking conducted by ShanghaiRanking Consultancy in 2018. The school receives funding from China Railway (formerly China’s Ministry of Railways, now a state-owned firm), city governments, and metro companies all around China.Zhao has worked for Beijing Jiaotong University since 1982 and has led...

The Biden administration late on Thursday restored a $929 million grant for California’s high-speed rail that then-President Donald Trump revoked in 2019. ===== Trump had pulled funding for a high-speed train project in the state hobbled by extensive delays and rising costs that he dubbed a “disaster.” Trump repeatedly clashed as president with California on a number of policy fronts, prompting the state to file more than 100 lawsuits against the Republican Trump administration.

China currently has one of the most expansive and impressive high-speed rail networks on Earth, and they aren’t showing signs of slowing. As their network reaches the far corners of their nation, Beijing could be setting its eyes on what lies beyond – far, far beyond. According to reports, China wishes to build a high-speed, 13,000-kilometer (8,078-mile) train that travels from mainland China, up through Siberia in Eastern Russia, under the sea through the Bering Strait into Alaska, across the rocky peaks of Canada’s Yukon and British Columbia, and into the USA. Once constructed, they have could further extend their...

France is set to ban short domestic flights in favor of train services, after lawmakers approved a plan that will see several air routes discontinued to reduce emissions. MPs voted late on Saturday to some suspend some flights by domestic airlines that can be made by train in less than two-and-a-half hours, as part of a wider climate bill. If the bill passes through France’s upper house, the Senate, France will join a number of European countries seeking to move away from short flights. But some have criticized President Emmanuel Macron for watering down proposals from his own environmental panel,...

A major construction team on the California bullet train project notified the state rail authority this month that it will not complete a 65-mile section of the future route in Kings County until at least April 14, 2025 — nearly two years after the date that the state included in a business plan adopted Thursday. The additional delay could again boost costs and jeopardize the state’s funding plan to complete a partial operating system between Bakersfield and Merced by 2030. The project’s rising price tag has forced the state to repeatedly scale it back and delay indefinitely a goal to...

California’s high-speed rail plan is running on fumes. Whether the actual train ever runs is anyone’s guess. The project is seeking to withdraw an additional $4.1 billion in funding, the last of a $10 billion bond approved by voters in 2008. Voters approved that measure, thinking it would be used to connect the cities of Los Angeles and San Francisco. Instead, it’s being requested in order to connect Merced to Bakersfield — the still-incomplete first stage of the project, which covers less than half of the hoped-for distance. The project has been (forgive me) a train wreck from the beginning....

California’s bullet train has become a nearly forgotten source of trouble, eclipsed in the public eye by Covid-19, a gubernatorial recall, and out-migration from the Golden State. But it’s still out there, sucking up time and money, and as empty as it ever was. The California High Speed Rail, its formal name, was a hobby-ego project for former governor Jerry Brown that was supposed to move passengers between Los Angeles and San Francisco at 220 mph by 2020. Instead, the project is moving at the speed of the museum piece it sometimes appears destined to be. Not a single train...

2014, when the rail authority awarded the contract, it went with the lowest bidder...which promised $300 million in cost savings by altering the design that the authority had proposed to regulators. Seven years later, these changes have been largely abandoned and have contributed to more than $800 million in cost overruns on the Kings County segment. That figure is 62% above the contract price tag, which the rail authority has agreed to pay, according to interviews and technical and contractual documents reviewed by The Times. In addition, the rail authority awarded the contract without first completing a scientific assessment of...

The California High-Speed Rail Authority is asking Gov. Gavin Newsom and state legislators to release about $4.1 billion in state bond funds to ensure that there is enough money to complete construction that’s now underway on the bullet-train route in Madera, Fresno, Kings, Tulare and Kern counties. If the governor, the state Assembly and the state Senate ultimately concur this spring, the money would come from Proposition 1A, a $9.9 billion high-speed rail bond approved by California voters in 2008. The rail authority’s board unanimously approved the request in a Zoom video meeting Tuesday. Still pending in the state’s 3rd...

The fiasco of California’s pathetic attempt to build a high-speed rail (HSR) line between Los Angeles and San Francisco continues to generate far more embarrassment than actual completed track. Once again, for what seems like the umpteenth time, California is unable to meet the deadlines imposed by the federal government as a condition of receiving federal aid – in other words, subsidies from other states for building what should be commonly known as “Brown’s Folly,” after Jerry Brown, who go the itch to build it after riding bullet trains in Japan and Europe.Kathleen Ronayne reports for the Associated Press:California is...

Federal Judge Dale A. Drozd temporarily blocked President Donald Trump’s efforts to send more water to Central Valley growers on Monday. Drozd issued a preliminary injunction in two lawsuits brought against the administration by California’s Natural Resources Agency and Environmental Protection Agency and a half-dozen environmental groups. Federal Pumping Can’t Increase During May The order bars the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation until May 31 from increasing water exports from the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta through the federal Central Valley Project. The suits argued that the exports would cause irreparable harm to species protected by state and federal law. “Today’s victory...

It's time to stop throwing money at an obsolete form of travel and focus on the transportation system that is already moving more than 80 percent of passenger travel in the U.S. When most of the nation’s governors shut down nonessential businesses and directed people to stay at home, they made the mistake of keeping urban transit systems running despite a 2018 study showing that mass public transportation systems expedite the spread of infectious diseases in communities. Further, a 2011 study found that people who ride urban transit are nearly six times more likely to suffer from upper respiratory infections...

The relentless march of urbanization, in the United States and around the world, has been coming for a long time. .. America went from 8.8 percent urban in 1830 to 25.7 percent in 1870, then to a majority in 1920, and up to about two-thirds by the mid-1950s. We were 80 percent urban by 2010. North America has the most urban population in the world. But it is not alone in seeing an accelerating trend. The U.N. estimated that, in 2009, half the world’s population lived in urban areas for the first time in human history. Over 4 billion people...

For decades, politicians who propose and promote big government have done all they could to wean Americans off the convenience and freedom of cars and pack them like sardines into subways and buses, .. the real reason for progressives’ passion for trains is their goal of diminishing Americans’ individualism in order to make them more amenable to collectivism ... Fortunes in taxpayer monies have been misspent trying to get people to travel in ways they wish not to, sitting or standing in close proximity to perfect strangers instead of in the private company of their own vehicle with their loved...

In the midst of Sunday's presidential debate between Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders, Biden blurted out that his campaign's high-speed rail plan would take "millions of automobiles off the road." This is the second debate in which the former vice president brought up the belief that bullet trains will get people out of their cars. This is, to put it mildly, extremely unlikely. Biden's campaign site calls for "the construction of an end-to-end high speed rail system that will connect the coasts, unlocking new, affordable access for every American." Would bullet trains passing through major cities scattered across the U.S....

California High-Speed Rail Authority on Wednesday bumped its overall cost estimate for completing the rail line between San Francisco and Los Angeles to $80.3 billion, blaming inflationary increases and better cost projections... After years of embarrassing cost overruns and delays, managers of California’s ambitious bullet-train project insisted that they are on pace to meet a preliminary 2022 federal deadline for laying track along the first segment in the Central Valley. But that will use up virtually all the money the project has available. The authority’s latest business plan comes amid unrelenting pressure from state lawmakers, some of whom want to...

Democratic presidential candidate Michael Bloomberg would push for all new cars to be electric by 2035 and new buildings to produce zero carbon emissions by 2025 as part of clean energy plans he released this week. Bloomberg’s latest climate plans build off his December plan to cut the United States’ carbon emissions by 50% by 2030. That’s less ambitious than the Green New Deal that many of his competitors have embraced that calls for achieving net-zero carbon emissions within 10 years. Bloomberg’s plans do not include total costs or specifics on how they would be paid for, details his campaign...

DENVER — The Regional Transportation District continues to deal with a widespread shortage of train and bus operators, and that resulted in a large number of canceled trips Monday. As of 6 a.m. Monday, RTD’s website was showing more than 50 canceled trips ... Beyond canceled trips, the shortage has resulted in many operators working six days a week. Officials have been weighing whether to reduce service in some areas to make up for the lack of drivers,