A high-speed rail line in California is chugging along towards 2030 debut::The state’s High-Speed Rail Authority will soon begin accepting proposals from electric train manufacturers ahead of a proposed 2030 debut.
I’ll believe it when I’m on it.
I really hope they connect to SF or LA soon after. That train is going to be empty without one of those two cities.
What? It doesn’t go to LA or SF? What is the freaking point? All this will do is encourage more ticky tacky townhomes in the middle of nowhere along Highway 5.
Once selected and constructed, the high-speed trains would top out at 242 mph while traversing a 171-mile starter segment connecting Central Valley’s Bakersfield and Merced
Oh wow! In only 6.5 years, I’ll be able to get from 2/3 of the way to San Francisco to 3/4 of the way to Los Angeles very efficiently!
I swear we’re going to be litigated into irrelevance with all this NIMBY idiocy.
Oh wow! In only 6.5 years
Then again look it this way… Once the lining has been built it will serve California for centuries, just as the original built rail corridors have. The rail tech might change, but the cleared out suitably shallow contoured corridor remains. For centuries.
Do the easiest part first to prove it can be done successfully. It’s the pilot basically.
But without main population centres is it going to be done successfully? Imo they should have started with one of the ends, so that at least there is a big trip destination.
Too late for that now and I really hope it works out and we get a good example for north american high speed rail projects to point to despite everything.
They would be waiting forever if they wanted to break ground in downtown la or sf first.
You can’t will car lobbies and nimbys to action, you have to coerce the general public and the state, and this incomplete rail will be the coercion.
Honestly it’s a brilliant strategy for a shitty situation. After this phase, if they somehow don’t get permission to complete the line, they would never have gotten rail built between the cities anyway.
