The reality being, even in a country where cars are reserved for the monied, rail building and COSTS are horrific, will NEVER be recouped with fares and will continue to cost taxpayers forever. Take note, Democrats in the U.S. with
similar ambitions.

https://www.bbc.com/news/business-59334043

In article <8a44d114-0a1e-4432-a832-ed392d2bb250n@googlegroups.com>,
RichA <rander3128@gmail.com> wrote:

> The reality being, even in a country where cars are reserved for the monied,
> rail building and COSTS are horrific, will NEVER be recouped with fares and
> will continue to cost taxpayers forever. Take note, Democrats in the U.S.
> with similar ambitions.

They won't take note. They'll just double-down on their insanity.

Look at our (not so) high-speed rail boondoggle. Jerry Brown's toy
train, that was supposed to be a high-speed line from Sacramento to San
Diego, passing through San Francisco and L.A. along the way and cost $30
billion to construct is now just a normal-speed train from Bakersfield
to Modesto-- two farm towns with no commuter base to speak of-- and has
*already* cost $90 billion and not a single piece of track has been laid
on the ground. And the rail authority just last week told the
legislature they're going to need *another* ten billion for this train
no one wants or needs and no one will ride if it ever is actually
completed. All we have to show for $90 billion tax dollars out the
window is a half-dozen columns sticking up in the middle of the Central
Valley meant to eventually hold up bridges that will likely never be
built.

A thousand years from now, archeaologists are going to have the same
debate over those columns that we have about Stonehenge. What were they
for? Did the people of the time use them to track the stars? Or are they
the remains of a religious site?

But if one considers the real reason for the high-speed rail project, it
all makes sense. The purpose isn't actually to have a train system to
move people around the state efficiently. It's to enrich Democrat
donors, union bosses, and relatives of politicians. It's to make unions
rich with jobs and kickbacks regardless if anything useful ever gets
built with those jobs. It's to dump a metric shit-ton of tax money into
the coffers of Democrat-connected cronies, like Dianne Feinstein's
husband, whose company 'won' the contract to build the thing. I'm sure
that was a huge coincidence, the result of a corruption-free bidding
process.

For years, high-speed rail has drained the state budget of
transportation funds that might have easily updated nightmarish
stretches of the Central Valley's Highway 99, or ensured that the nearby
ossified Amtrak line became a modern two-track line.

If California really wants a high-speed rail line, the glaringly obvious
route to build would be L.A. to Las Vegas. If you could get on a train
at Union Station in downtown L.A. and be in Vegas 45 minutes later with
none of the hassle of air travel, that would be a resounding success.
Hell, Nevada loves the idea of bringing California gamblers to Vegas by
the trainload. They've offered to pay for most of it. But no, Governor
Hair-gel is adamant that we have to spend the most taxpayer money
possible for the least benefit to the public.