Engineering360: "California to scale back high-speed bullet train project"

" . . . we will have wasted billions of dollars with nothing but broken promises and lawsuits to show for it."

Flying remains faster, cheaper, and more flexible. It is better to walk away and quit throwing good money after (billions of) bad.

At some point, high speed rail may make cents. Just not now, not here.

I grew up in Bakersfield, and have lived in the area most of my life. I have been aware of the different cities fighting for a station on the High Speed Rail Route, and other communities fighting to have the rails routed elsewhere.

To keep it High Speed, you can’t have stations every few miles. It makes since to have a station in Bakersfield, Fresno, and Merced. Amtrak can handle the smaller stations along the way. (Bakersfield, Fresno, and Merced are each about 2 hours apart by Amtrak / by car.)

A multi-billion dollar project for three (practical) stations?

There isn’t really that much traffic or demand for a high speed rail in the Central Valley alone. I doubt there will be enough local traffic to support this thing. People in Bakersfield won’t say, “Hey, let’s go to Fresno for the afternoon – it’s only half an hour away by high speed rail!” I doubt the tickets will be cheap, and you’d need to rent a car when you got there anyway. There is just no motivation for such a trip.

You might have a good argument for a High Speed Rail between the San Francisco Bay Area and Merced. There are a lot of daily commuters, and really bad automobile traffic congestion. If you scale things down, I’d target that area.

The whole thing was a mess from the start. The voters approved an enormous bond for the rail project without any real guidance, oversight, strategic plan, etc… So everyone jumped at the chance to cash in on some easy money.

I’d like to see High Speed Rail used in the US much like it is in Europe. But this is probably a bad start. I hope I’m wrong.