I just know the timeline that starts with Jerry Brown and ends up somewhere around where the engineers explained that it still can't do it on schedule.
This guy explains that the 2008 plan that got approved was pretty much unattainable pie-in-the-sky stuff:
The 2008 high-speed rail plan approved by California voters required the train to travel from San Francisco to Los Angeles in no more than 2 hours and 40 minutes. At the same time, the project promised to serve the downtown of every major and not-so-major city in between, including Merced, Madera, Fresno, and Bakersfield in the San Joaquin Valley and the high desert city of Palmdale.
Those travel time promises, combined with that route map, meant that California High-Speed Rail would have to reach speeds of 220 miles per hour. In 2008, only a couple of trains in the world reached that speed, and it’s still the fastest any high-speed trains currently travel. Add in California’s mountainous, earthquake-prone topography, and you’ve set yourself up for one of the most difficult engineering projects ever attempted. All of this had to be accomplished by an agency, the California High-Speed Rail Authority, that had never built a single mile of track.
In other words, the project was set up for failure.
The conclusion talks about how plain bagels are better than no bagels after enough failed promises of everything bagels.
I don't know what would have been possible if California did it smarter instead of how they did it. But it seems like doing it dumber might have worked too.
It has? I'm asking skeptically because I have not heard about any particular increase in policing disproportionately targeting people athletic enough to jump stiles.
There's also a bit of a crime problem that nobody wants to talk about.
Ride on Bart? Maybe you have to deal with unpleasantness. The worst thing you have to deal with in your car is a bad DJ.
2025-03-12 09:47:40
The biggest problem that the rail-lovers have is that we can't build new tracks at all.
I'd be interested in some high speed rail myself... The ability to go from Frisco to LA in a couple of hours would be pretty sweet. LA to Vegas would be pretty sweet.
But we can't even drop a proof of concept. *EUROPE* is our proof of concept.
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I honestly don't know.
I just know the timeline that starts with Jerry Brown and ends up somewhere around where the engineers explained that it still can't do it on schedule.
This guy explains that the 2008 plan that got approved was pretty much unattainable pie-in-the-sky stuff:
The conclusion talks about how plain bagels are better than no bagels after enough failed promises of everything bagels.
I don't know what would have been possible if California did it smarter instead of how they did it. But it seems like doing it dumber might have worked too.
Huh.
Was that all it'd take?
How tough would that be to set up in NYC?
I admit that I'm primarily thinking about Merced to Bakersfield.
It has? I'm asking skeptically because I have not heard about any particular increase in policing disproportionately targeting people athletic enough to jump stiles.
There's also a bit of a crime problem that nobody wants to talk about.
Ride on Bart? Maybe you have to deal with unpleasantness. The worst thing you have to deal with in your car is a bad DJ.
The biggest problem that the rail-lovers have is that we can't build new tracks at all.
I'd be interested in some high speed rail myself... The ability to go from Frisco to LA in a couple of hours would be pretty sweet. LA to Vegas would be pretty sweet.
But we can't even drop a proof of concept. *EUROPE* is our proof of concept.