Well, he was born into the trade.
Willie Brown had the same potential but traded it all for power-for-power’s-sake. It was about the game, and the Willie Brown Show, and not about the state.
Was Ahnold really that bad? If so, how did he win a second term?
Well, the train would run both ways, wouldn’t it? And Nevadans must get kinda sick of spending every weekend in a desert, however neon-glitzy.
The HSR would be the last item developed in the expansion. The Cajon Pass needs to be widened for rail traffic desperately, and has been for decades. That should be the major push. Running HSR would just be gravy. But from Victorville or Barstow, you could run HSR along the 99, straight up the Central Valley. Or over to Bakersfield and then up to the Bay Area. But you have to get through the Cajon Pass before any project can connect LA to anywhere.
Except for those that are nonpartisan, like State Superintendent of Education, but nobody got 50% of the vote for that, so there’s a runoff anyway.
That’s a pretty ballsy suggestion!
I don’t really see why. Yes, I saw the argument above that it would make it easier for Californians to go to Vegas for their gambling, but that’s really only if they want to ride trains there, and I don’t think there’s a lot of evidence to suggest that they (we) do. The carrying capacity of the current lines for freight, however, do limit SoCal ports’ effectiveness/attractiveness for goods to arrive in LA or San Diego rather than Portland and Seattle (although I’m not prepared to say by how much).
P.S. Okay, I saw what you did there (eventually). Knowing the difference between cojones and cajon did put me at a disadvantage, though.
I’ll have to do a search to find them, but we used to have a train engineer on this board who explained the limiting factors in some detail.
I don’t think a high degree of expertise is needed to see the problems. It’s less about specific technical issues than general problems with implementation.
In a nutshell, HSR is one of those gosh-wow “solutions” that mistakes technological advancement for actual usefulness. Building out light rail to a useful density and coverage through our cities would be far more effective, just not sexy. Putting in one or two high-speed links, where normal-speed links already exist (Sac/SF/LA, or BosWash) accomplishes very little at very high cost. Even the rather modest Acela took years to roll out and still has a low percentage of “high speed” travel segments and achieved speeds.
All this without even getting to just how much fun the criminal/terrorist set can have with 200MPH trains that run through unpopulated areas.
You would think that it would be easier to move freight through LA/SD then Seattle, Portland, or even San Francisco because you don’t have to go over the Sierra Nevada or Rocky mountains to get it anywhere. Then again, at what point is it easier to ship it to an eastern port?
You consider 11 hours from San Jose to Los Angeles “normal speed”?
Yeah, let Sheldon fricking Adelson pay for it, he’s the one who’ll profit.
Well, those are for different problems. The point of light rail is to replace cars, the point of HSR is to replace airplanes.
California Uber Alles!: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=quLqEu4mUOU
And just to note that Brown got 54% of the vote without spending a penny in advertising.