218
Brightline's high-speed LA-to-Las Vegas rail project scores $3 billion in federal funding
(www.statesman.com)
Thank Fook no more hyperloop projects were funded.
this post was submitted on 10 Dec 2023
218 points (98.2% liked)
Fuck Cars
9626 readers
485 users here now
A place to discuss problems of car centric infrastructure or how it hurts us all. Let's explore the bad world of Cars!
Rules
1. Be Civil
You may not agree on ideas, but please do not be needlessly rude or insulting to other people in this community.
2. No hate speech
Don't discriminate or disparage people on the basis of sex, gender, race, ethnicity, nationality, religion, or sexuality.
3. Don't harass people
Don't follow people you disagree with into multiple threads or into PMs to insult, disparage, or otherwise attack them. And certainly don't doxx any non-public figures.
4. Stay on topic
This community is about cars, their externalities in society, car-dependency, and solutions to these.
5. No reposts
Do not repost content that has already been posted in this community.
Moderator discretion will be used to judge reports with regard to the above rules.
Posting Guidelines
In the absence of a flair system on lemmy yet, let’s try to make it easier to scan through posts by type in here by using tags:
- [meta] for discussions/suggestions about this community itself
- [article] for news articles
- [blog] for any blog-style content
- [video] for video resources
- [academic] for academic studies and sources
- [discussion] for text post questions, rants, and/or discussions
- [meme] for memes
- [image] for any non-meme images
- [misc] for anything that doesn’t fall cleanly into any of the other categories
Recommended communities:
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
First of all, woot, trains.
But this is a smaller section of high speed rail. One Vegas wanted and offered to pay for if memory serves. For a $4.2B project, $3.25B in tax exempt bonds were already authorized. Now another $3B? Looot of money flowing towards this project to get people to casinos. Hope accounting is up to par.
California does have another high speed rail that republicans have fought every step of the way. There is progress, but slow. Could probably toss some of that over budget excess our way to help out. Just say'n.
The budget excess earmarked for someone’s not-so-subtle rainy day fund?
The same funding package gave the Bakersfield to Merced high speed project $3.1 billion so they could buy trains and start running by 2030. The San Francisco to Los Angeles project was originally supposed to cost $9 billion but it's now estimated between $90 and $120 billion.
Brightline looks like a bargain compared to CHSR.
The Bakersfield to Merced* project, and the Central Valley portion is now estimated at $30bil; if you're going to rag on it get your facts right.
Love giving public money to private infrastructure.
Mixed ownership of rail isn't uncommon in the world, but yeah its a bit shit.
As a counter point, Brightline is basically the only private company to stand up a successful US commuter rail line in decades, so it makes sense to give them a boost here.
Somebody needs to build that fucking train, and they built one like it in rail hostile florida. That one is diesel because "reasons" but this one will be a sane electric.
There was a plan for actual HSR in Florida using the same ROW as Brightline. It was torpedoed by former governor and current senator Rick Scott. They sent money back to the Obama administration both because they didn't want the Democrats to get a win and also because of their privatization/kickback fetish.
Same exact thing happened in Ohio in 2010, Kasich sent the money back.
Also in Wisconsin
And destroying the desert landscape in the process. Let's add hundreds of miles of high speed rail on top of I-15, the miles of freight rail, old mines, new lithium mining, all the military bases, and all the solar and wind farms to the delicate biosphere that hasn't changed in a million years. Awesome.
Anyway, this country needs proper intercity and urban rail like yesterday.
I feel like with 3B they should at least be able to electrify the existing tracks between Rancho Cucamonga and LA Union, and have Brightline stop there. Would make the whole thing so much nicer.
Probably more important to get the project completed first. It's not a perfect project by any means, but it's still pretty good overall.