Train to Nowhere
Apparently, Congress just before the election appropriated $900 million to build part of a high speed rail line in CA. Rather than focusing either on LA or SF, Congress apparently appropriated the money for a mostly rural district that just coincidentally had a Democratic Congressman embroiled in a difficult election. So now Congress has dedicated a billion dollars of your money for this high speed rail line, from Borden to Corcoran:
I am not kidding you. More here from the AntiPlanner.
I discussed the CA high speed rail project here and here. I discussed the practice of building even one useless section as a way to commit the public to building the whole thing here. An excerpt of how this is done the Chicago way:
But what is really amazing is that Chicago embarked on building a $320 million downtown station for the project without even a plan for the rest of the line "” no design, no route, no land acquisition, no appropriation, no cost estimate, nothing. There are currently tracks running near the station to the airport, but there are no passing sidings on these tracks, making it impossible for express and local trains to share the same track. The express service idea would either require an extensive rebuilding of the entire current line using signaling and switching technologies that may not (according to Daley himself) even exist, or it requires an entirely new line cut through some of the densest urban environments in the country. Even this critical decision on basic approach was not made before they started construction on the station, and in fact still has not been made.
