Full steam ahead for California bullet train
February 22, 2009 by Rob Gloster
File photo shows the French TGV high-speed train. One hundred and forty years after a transcontinental railroad linked California to the world, trains are being hailed as integral to the state's growth in the 21st century.
One hundred and forty years after a transcontinental railroad linked California to the world, trains are being hailed as integral to the state's growth in the 21st century.
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So you can't simply double the number of runways at airports, or the number of planes. It just doesn't work that way.
(You argument is similar to those politicians who say things like "either can spend 20 billion on a new subway system, or we can spend 5 billion and buy 10 times as many buses as we currently have, and move the same number of people!!111!!". Unfortunately you can only fit so many buses on the roads, so this doesn't work. At some point you start to get diminishing returns as you add new buses.)
In the mean time Obama intends to devalue everyones time to trying to it work. The technologies that made large high density coastal cities economically desirable have died in the last thirty years while the liberals did not notice.
When the Norman Lear era began with "All in the Family" The lead character Archie was a long shorman. It took 200 men a week to unload a freighter. Now a Container ship of much greater size can be unloaded by 15 men in 48 hours. All of the city services for those men Food, housing, schools for their kids are no longer needed. I do not need to tell anyone using this blog that people no longer need to meet face to face to communicate effectively but the effects on culture of the last 17 years of technology are only slowly working themselves into business culture. I would not say that Califonia is dead but what is the stimulus but a heart lung machine for liberal states?
California is still growing because people like the climate, not because California needs manual labour jobs. It has hi-tech business base that is doing well. It does not seem unreansoable for it to grow. As for needing a large number of people to get off at any single station. SF and LA have airports which will strained, why will train station (inside the city, not far away like new airports would be) not be able to support large number of passengers using them but airports can? High speed trains do not stop at every small town they only stop at few major stations, that is one of the ways they keep the average speed up. So think of them as cheap replacemnt for airport expansion.
California has not been growing for fifteen years. Jobs and population have been leaving. Intel for example is making substantial high tech investment in the United States this coming year but not one job in its native Silicon Valley. That is not typical; the typical California Company is not making any investment in the United States, unless it is to pick-up stakes and moves the whole company to another state.
The high speed trains work extremely well and are much better from getting from one city center to another than air travel -- for distances like LA - SF. In some countries commuters leave their bicycles at the station and take the train to work. Other places there are large parking lots at the station. If you commute by train the travel time is not lost: sit down, plug in your laptop, charge your cell phone and you are already at work. While you sail along at high speed you can see all the stationary drivers stuck in traffic :)
All one has to do is look at what happened with BART, to guess what will happen with high speed rail.