• Let the building begin! The official groundbreaking ceremony took place this week for the Transbay Transit Center in San Francisco (shown above), which will be the northern terminus for the California High Speed Rail system. (Independent)
• Meanwhile, no decision on the location of the Lakeland-area station for Florida’s HSR will be made until late 2011. (Ledger)
• California’s state Senate passed a bill requiring companies vying for a piece of the state’s HSR project to disclose whether they transported Holocaust victims or POWs to Nazi camps during World War II. (AP)
• Bring in the students! A group of grad students at the University of Pennsylvania have created a plan to rebuild the Northeast Corridor as a true HSR line that would make the trip from Philadelphia to New York City in 37 minutes. (Enquirer)
• A rising number of major HSR projects have been put on hold in Europe, due to the entire continent’s debt crisis. (AP)
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Tags: California, The Holocaust
Meanwhile, in other parts of the country states are tearing up their paved roads and turning them back to gravel. Somewhere in China, a Chinese guy is traveling on a brand new, super-high tech, high speed rail train, reading the Wall St. Journal, and is learning that America is just now breaking ground on our first line and tearing up paved roads in other parts of the country.
Well the problem is, what I read into it, that labor costs are just too high here to build a significant high-speed rail network, particularly in California. California’s project may be dead in the water before it’s even started, the money is just not there. In China labor is very cheap, they don’t have to pay the overhead. However it’s still important to note China’s system will likely never pay for itself, they’ve built far too much with far too little money. Although everyone cites Japan as a prime example of high speed rail success, it did cost tax payers over 200 billion dollars in debt. So this leads me to believe we will have to come up with a cheaper mass transit solution, that is fast and reliable like high-speed rail but does have the infrastructure costs. That means a new form of air travel.
Got a reference?
“…that is fast and reliable like high-speed rail but does have the infrastructure costs. That means a new form of air travel.”
While air travel might not require steel and concrete to be laid across the continent, it is far from being inexpensive. The economic sector of airline companies, since the beginning of commercial air travel, have been unable to generate profits – The countless bankruptcies and subsidiaries outweigh the profits of the few successful companies. (At least according to the CEO of Air Berlin, one of Europe’s largest carriers).
Also, while airports might be comparably cheap to built, the external costs of air travel are enormous. Any “new form of air travel” would have to stop allocating costs to non-travelers, other peoples and other generations. As planes rely on being propelled by some form of high energy density “fuel”, I honestly cannot see any alternatives or replacements of the extremely harmful burning of kerosene in this of the next decade.
The Philadelphia newspaper is the “Inquirer,” not the “Enquirer.”
I like progress, however little there is. I will take what I can get.