High speed rail

[Naked Gents Rut]

I actually read the Passenger Rail Working Group's report, moron. The only truly high-speed rail corridors they foresee existing in 2050 are the already extant Northeast Corridor and a new corridor in California. So again, why should taxpayers in the rest of the country pay to fund high-speed rail that they'll never get to use?

[snoopy369]

Are you capable of making a post without insulting someone or is that beyond you?

[Naked Gents Rut]

I don't insult people who know what the **** they're talking about.

[snoopy369]

I didn't think so.

[DanS]

You insulted him first, by assuming that he was doing a drive-by.

[DanS]

First, the rail line you're talking about goes from California to Nevada -- that's interstate. It connects to the nation's railsystem -- that interstate. Other high-speed railsystems will be built elsewhere in the nation, and eventually, they'll all link up -- that's interstate.

Who is contemplating this? Drake's absolutely right.

[Zkribbler]

I actually read the Passenger Rail Working Group's report, moron. The only truly high-speed rail corridors they foresee existing in 2050 are the already extant Northeast Corridor and a new corridor in California. So again, why should taxpayers in the rest of the country pay to fund high-speed rail that they'll never get to use?

You're argument collapsed under its own illogic:

There's interstate freeways on the East Coast and in the Midwest. Why should I have to pay for them when I'll never use them? Why should Hawaiians have to pay for any interstate commerce because there are no roads at all to their state?

[Imran Siddiqui]

You're argument collapsed under its own illogic:

There's interstate freeways on the East Coast and in the Midwest. Why should I have to pay for them when I'll never use them? Why should Hawaiians have to pay for any interstate commerce because there are no roads at all to their state?

Because everyone had roads in their state built for the entire project. So everyone got something for their money. It's a quid pro quo, you get highways in your state, and people in other states will get highways, if you help pay for for highways in other states.

This one rail line doesn't accomplish that. It would make sense if it was part of a system to make high speed rail lines through all the states, but who exactly is arguing for that?

[Zkribbler]

While Imran's getting closer to being right, that's still not the correct analysis.

If it were, the Army Corp. of engineers couldn't be levies in New Orleans because Montana doesn't need levies.

[Imran Siddiqui]

What a silly analogy. High speed rail is not the same as disaster prevention.

[Zkribbler]

Yet there's a commerce clause but no disaster clause.

[Kuciwalker]

No one's arguing it's unconstitutional, just ill-advised. Fail.

[DaShi]

On That ‘Sin Express’ to Nowhere…
By Michael Cooper
It is the Republican talking point that won’t die, even though it has little if any basis in reality: what they claim is an earmark in the federal stimulus package for a high-speed train from Disneyland to Las Vegas.

Ever since Democrats added $8 billion for high-speed rail projects into the final stimulus bill, Republicans have cast it as pork that will give the Senate’s Democratic majority leader, Harry Reid of Nevada, a magnetic levitation train project that he has supported in the past that could go from Anaheim, Cal., to Las Vegas in 86 minutes.

The latest to cite the project was Gov. Bobby Jindal of Louisiana, who, in his Republican response Tuesday night to President Obama’s address to Congress, complained that the stimulus included wasteful spending like “$8 billion for high-speed rail projects, such as a magnetic levitation line from Las Vegas to Disneyland.”

There are just a few problems with this. Nothing in the law talks authorizes a train from Las Vegas to California. The provision authorizing $8 billion for high-speed rail spending directs the federal Transportation Department to develop guidelines about who can apply for it, and then to decide how the money will be spent.

The Las Vegas line is not even one of the nation’s 11 officially-designated high-speed rail corridors, several of which will likely split the money (though a federal transportation official said that some lines not in the corridor could apply). And even if one project got all the money, it would not be enough to build a bullet train.

California’s other high-speed rail project, which has already won state approval for $9 billion in borrowing to begin building a bullet train from San Francisco to Los Angeles, is making a big pitch for up to a quarter of the federal money. And much of the money will not go towards the super-fast bullet trains that are popular in Europe and Asia, but rather to speeding up the much slower, conventional trains now running in various parts of the country.

Oh, and the money was requested by the White House, not by Mr. Reid, people close to the negotiations said.

But that has not prevented Republicans from hammering away at the project for days. Some have even called it a “Sin Express” (presumably thinking of the train heading toward Vegas, not Disneyland).

Senator John McCain, who has been known to enjoy Las Vegas, got into the act as well, mistakenly complaining to The Kingman Daily Miner about what he called “light rail” between Las Vegas and Los Angeles – which would surely be one of the longest light rail lines in the world.

“There was $2 billion in the Senate bill of the stimulus package for light rail; there was zero in the House,” the paper quoted Mr. McCain as saying on its Web site. “It came out of conference - only Democrats, no Republicans in the room - with $8 billion for light rail. And guess where it’s going to go? A light rail between Las Vegas and L.A. Everybody knows that.’’

Of course, Mr. Reid has been a longtime supporter of the Las Vegas train project, and has secured money for it ion the past. And he may have helped fuel the rumors when one of his spokesman told the Las Vegas Sun in December that while it was too early to know what would be included in the stimulus bill, the high-speed train project “not only makes good economic sense for the state, it makes sense from an environmental and energy perspective as well.”

.

[Dinner]

Britain's Virgin Trains wants to get in on the high speed train network proposed by President Obama supposedly they are most keen on buying in to the LA-SF route (with later expansions to San Diego & Sacramento) as well as the Boston-NYC route.

http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/industry_sectors/transport/article5804544.ece

[Zkribbler]

No one's arguing it's unconstitutional, just ill-advised. Fail.

It turns out there's even a bigger FAIL here.

Although Jindal claims there's a "Las Vegas to Disneyland" high-speed rail project in the stimulous bill, the Vagas route was only a proposal. It never made it into the final bill.

We is all idiots.