And the insidious influence of the advocates has even taken over government. Governor Schwarzen has been steamrollered into putting trains on the ballot and letting the people decide. What a cockeyed way to make transportation policy! Everyone knows that we didn’t allow “the people” to design our current system. Can you imagine if there’d been a statewide vote on Interstate 5? The “people” might have said no! And where would that have left the truck stop industry?

So what should true believers in common sense do? How can they stem the rising tide of advocacy that has taken over media, government and business? For one thing, keep fighting the good fight! There were plenty of studies done in the 50′s that showed that rail and public transportation were inconvenient and inflexible. As a result, today’s transportation promotes freedom and independence (as long as you stay off the roads between 5 a.m. and 9 a.m. and between 3 p.m. and 7 p.m.). We need to get back to the days when privately financed rail lines were torn up and replaced by publicly funded roads and people learned the benefits of living far from where they worked in neighborhoods where everybody was exactly like them. We need to return to a time where governors and U.S. presidents always mention High Speed Rail in the State of the Union or state addresses and then allot about $100 to it in their budgets. And we need to return to a day when the news media talks about the “car culture” and America’s “love affair with the automobile” as an immutable feature of American life instead of claiming that trains actually work in places like Germany, France and Japan. (Actually, it’s common knowledge that, like the so-called “Lunar Landings,” footage, the CapCom’s High Speed Rail video is a hoax.). Finally, what we really need is a leader, a champion, a fighter like Charlton Hest to lead our cause and keep hope alive.

In the meantime, I repeat. “Right on Martin Engel.”

Please, please think a moment. Doesn’t anything this expensive, with such grandiose promises, warrant some thoughtfulness?

Does it not strike you as problematic when they promise 117 million riders annually? How about the $55. tickets from SF to LA? How about the $3 billion in annual revenue and $1 billion in annual profits? How about the 450,000 new permanent jobs? How about the $40 billion in total costs with no tax increases or additional state funding?
How about their voter polling data? How about their comparisons of current emissions of cars and planes vs. the train’s superior performance in 18 years? Does none of this raise some eyebrows? How about the fact-free comparisons with Japan and Europe as prototypes to be envied and copied here, as if that made sense?

Are you not struck by the relentless repetition of the same “facts,” taken from their press-releases, as if these are hard empirical data, rather than projections, speculation and guesses? If you have looked at all at the history of the lead participants in their political machinations to get this project on the books, doesn’t some doubt creep into you mind and suggest that further investigation might be called for? Doesn’t the name Parsons Brinckerhoff raise some red flags in your mind?

Erik, I cannot tell you how disappointed I am with the press for its failure to do its
job to ask the hard questions, rather than parrot those easy and questionable answers.

What France, Spain, and Taiwan all show is that you don’t need to have had a 30-year head start. There is still time to start HSR projects today and have them up and running within several years. It would have been best if CA had voted on the HSR bonds in 2004, but we’ll take 2008.