
Calif. awarded $2.25B for high-speed rail - wglb
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dkasper
Transportation infrastructure is a great investment in the future: where would
we be today without our highway system? With air travel becoming more of a
hassle each year it'll be great to have an alternative. Note that about 8
billion in total was approved, SF to LA is only one of the routes planned.

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patio11
I think transportation infrastructure is a great solution to yesterday's
problems.

Look at the newspaper industry: some commentators think their problem is that
delivering news on dead tree is overly expensive relative to what people want
to pay for it. Even if you accept that diagnosis, increasing investment into
dead tree processing, dead tree distribution, and dead tree delivery is _not_
the way forward.

I use trains to commute to my job as a computer programmer. My commute is
fairly inexpensive, hassle-free, and uses the best distribution system for
human bodies the world has ever seen. My commute is also a jaw-droppingly
stupid waste of resources.

My company and I waste three hours a day five times a week shuttling a few
pounds of grey matter and a pair of eyeballs from one glowing screen to
another glowing screen. The glowing screens connect to each other instantly,
for so cheap next to my (cheap) train passes it doesn't even make sense to
measure.

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jamesbritt
Meat-space bandwidth is currently unbeatable.

Telecommuting works for some people, in some jobs.

If eye contact, body language, serendipitous personal interaction, and shared
experiences are not important to the social and communicative aspects of a
job, then maybe staying home works well.

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CalmQuiet
Maybe there is need to _develop_ means/skills for it to work in _more_ jobs.
As Pascal hyperbolized:

"All human evil comes from a single cause, man's inability to sit still in a
room. "

[If not _all_ human evil... at least we can now append: "burden of
transportation infrastructure + CO(2)."]

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pragmatic
Hopefully this one won't lose $32 per passenger.

"The Pew Charitable Trusts SubsidyScope Project has just released a new report
that finds 41 out of Amtrak's 44 routes lose money."

[http://reason.com/blog/2009/10/27/riding-the-subsidized-
rail...](http://reason.com/blog/2009/10/27/riding-the-subsidized-rails-of)

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daydream
Why would it need to make _any_ money? Look at roads: they cost huge amounts
to build and maintain, yet the vast majority don't bring in any direct revenue
whatsoever.

Let's turn this statement on its head, and reframe it as a question: why isn't
all mass transit free?

(Yes, I understand economically why this isn't the case, and I still think
it's a worthwhile viewpoint/question to ask.)

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houseabsolute
Roads aren't free. You pay a toll to the government for their use every time
you go to the gas station. And they shouldn't be free, although gas should be
taxed additionally for its environmental externalities.

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jordanb
Gas taxes pay for the interstates, but they don't cover the local road network
in most parts of the country. Road maintenance is a massive part of most
municipalities' budgets and it comes from general tax revenue.

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houseabsolute
And that is truly unfortunate. There should be a tax on gas (mostly) and
automobiles that completely pays for roads, and compensating tax cuts should
be made against whatever the municipality collects; perhaps property or sales.
Above all else I think we can all agree that people should be taxed especially
to pay for what they use when it is possible.

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josh33
Because near-term job creation is the government's job, right? If this were
such a good idea, it would have been privately funded. It's nice to know I'll
be paying for another state's rail system for years to come

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ryanwaggoner
_Other funding sources for California’s bullet train include $10 billion in
voter-approved bonds and cash from private investors, which the California
High-Speed Rail Authority hopes will provide about $10 billion._

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patio11
Californian voters are in the unique position in American history where they
can unilaterally approve bonds that will probably be repaid by other people's
taxes. (Its similar to the position California unions have been in for the
last few decades, where they can unilaterally approve pay/benefits raises
which will be repaid by other people's taxes. These two situations are not
unrelated.)

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ecq
$33B for Afghanistan but only $2.25B for California?

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phamiliar
Don't forget the $30B for Israel to keep occupation of Gaza. So a total of
$63B for foreign occupation, and a total of $8B for domestic infrastructure
transportation.

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dnsworks
Sadly, the new California "High-speed rail" is slated to go 75MPH.

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mkinsella
According to the CA High Speed Rail Authority [1], a trip from San Jose to Los
Angeles is 384 miles and will take 2hr9m. That is an average of 180 MPH.

[1] <http://www.cahighspeedrail.ca.gov/map.htm>

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dnsworks
Interesting. This is completely different from the hyped up CAHSRA plan about
6 months ago that was saying "high speed raiL" when what they really meant was
"catching up on existing track maintenance"

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potatolicious
Honestly, if all they did was take old rail tech and make sure passenger rail
gets its own track (instead of being preempted by freight) I'd be pretty happy
already. This is where the bulk of the speed limitations come in.

