A Train to Anywhere But...

High speed trains are an important part of the future of transportation. Especially in major urban sprawls such as Los Angeles and the San Francisco, where hundreds of thousands of people have to commute 1+ hours to work every day and back, high speed trains stand to make commutes shorter, thus giving commuters more sleep and more family time. This in turn will make them happier and generally more productive when they are at work. Thus, I was really excited when I learned that California will finally start work on its first high speed rail line!


This fancy new rail line will be built between (drumroll!): Bakersfield and Merced!


No wonder California's economy is currently being swept through the storm drain and out to sea.


The reasoning behind why this particular section of high speed rail was chosen to be built before competing proposals in Los Angeles (LA --> Anaheim) and San Francisco (SF --> San Jose)?

The agency says it could build just half of the 50-mile San Francisco-to-San Jose section with the funds available, compared to the entire 60-mile Merced-to-Fresno corridor or 113-mile Fresno-to-Bakersfield span. In Southern California, the authority thinks it could build two-thirds of the 30-mile stretch.

"We have to build a system that is going to be operable as soon as possible and that means building many miles of track that are connected to each other," van Ark said.

They're building it simply because they can. They are connecting Nowhere to Nowhere (sorry to my Bakersfield/FresYES/Merced friends) because they want to be able to say, "Ta-da! We have a high speed rail!" What baffles me even more is that they realize this.

But a Central Valley segment will have no operational significance -- van Ark said major population centers need to be linked and the agency will not bother starting service there.

"We will not have trains when we build this first segment," he said.

This lack of reason isn't even due to a Field of Dreams mentality. A deluded person might reasonably be expected to make the case for "if you build it, [they] will come." But no, they just want to build a rail (without trains!) for the heck of it. They're sticking it out in the middle of the Central Valley so that no one can see it. It will probably be made out of cardboard (just visible at 2 miles from the 99) so that the politicians can then pocket the billions of dollars that would otherwise have been used to improve commerce in California's cities. The state will then continue to spiral into debt until it becomes a black hole for the economy of the rest of the United States, prompting Montana to secede from the Union.


Good luck, California.