Saturday, March 29, 2014

California's cursed bullet train fails to live up to the hype once again.


But then that's really par for the course when the Democrats set out to waste everyone's tax money.
California’s stillborn bullet train is now expected to be slower than promised when voters were asked to approve $9 billion in borrowing—in addition to being twice as expensive and half as useful. The LA Times reports:
Regularly scheduled service on California’s bullet train system will not meet anticipated trip times of two hours and 40 minutes between Los Angeles and San Francisco, and are likely to take nearly a half-hour longer, a state Senate committee was told Thursday.
But Louis Thompson, chairman of the High-Speed Rail Peer Review Group, a state-sanctioned panel of outside experts, testified that “real world engineering issues” will cause schedules for regular service to exceed the target of two hours and 40 minutes. The state might be able to demonstrate a train that could make the trip that fast, but not on scheduled service, he told lawmakers. If public demand for the service supports additional investments, travel times could be improved after the currently planned system is built, he said.
Yes, if the public can be squeezed for still more cash after the train is already built, it “could” be made to travel as fast as voters were originally told it would.


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