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TheHeretic -> High Speed Rail: All Aboard! (2/22/2009 10:47:41 AM)
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Yahoo News: Obama Plots Huge Railroad Expansion
Now this is the kind of economic stimulus proposal I can get behind. High speed rail is new infrastructure, something that will create new jobs and opportunities far beyond the construction workers and crews. It will push our technology, spawning God knows what innovation elsewhere.
I'm not sure what the snarking is about over the LA-Vegas route. I suspect it is nothing but an ignorant knee-jerk from those determined to oppose President Obama automatically, on every topic. "Disneyland to Lost Wages" is an excellent place to start building such a network.
First off, the demand is there (whether the future consumers know it yet, or not). This thing is going to have to turn a profit, and this is a location where it can. These are two major western cities, with a huge expanse of inhospitable nothing between them. One road, horribly congested. It can be a 4 hour drive, or a 16 hour one, depending on traffic. If we build it, they will ride.
LA-Vegas is also a great route to promote the new technology. These are both tourist destinations, and firsthand stories will make their way back to other parts of the country as people do exactly the Disneyland/Vegas family vacation some want to sneer at.
It also makes sense long term, if we are looking to develop a transcontinental network (and I think we should be). Los Angeles is the second largest city in the country, Las Vegas is the obvious hub for getting over the Rockies to Denver, and a destination in it's own right. The lines draw pretty well to Salt Lake, and then on to Portland and Seattle. (San Francisco will probably have to wait a while before getting a connection in Mojave, or maybe a Tahoe/Vegas spur. Even if the Sierra Nevada weren't such a serious challenge to cross, a more direct route would go through the areas where we tested atomic bombs.)
Considering that we are setting out to learn how to do this, LA-Vegas is a good place to learn. No massive mountains to scale (the proposed route even avoids the Cajon Pass completely), the crews won't be getting rained out very often, and while I'm certain the affected property owners and environmental extremists will shriek at every possible opportunity, much of the route is over flat, empty land.
Where I find the largest concerns for such a project is in the muskeg of regulations and bureaurocracy it will have to pass through. I haven't seen much indication that this administration is likely to start slashing that, but after seeing the anti-war bundle, and now the human rights activists get tossed under the bus, perhaps the environmental extremists will get to join them. I can hope.
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