California takes first step in acquiring trains for High-Speed Rail::The California High-Speed Rail took another important step toward becoming reality Thursday after the governing body’s board of directors began the process of obtaining possible vendors for the state’s most ambitious transit project in history.
Fuck that. Requiring trains to be built in the US will blow up the already obscene budget even more and lead to poor-quality trains due to a lack of experience in high speed trainset manufacturing.
We saw this in Boston, where the requirement of US-made led to absolutely fucked supply chains, constant delays and cost overruns, and shoddily constructed trains with a multitude of problems (though, admittedly, the entire Boston transit system has these problems anyway so I guess it’s just another part of government dysfunction). For what? For a voting bloc of like a thousand temporary workers?
Thing is, the US doesn’t really have high speed rail in the pipeline that can share technical expertise. The proposed Texas line is planning to use Shinkansen trains, Brightline already has a supplier, and so does Amtrak. Where are you going to get economies of scale to come into play?
It’s also a fucking California state project, and California is the safest blue state that ever blued.
No other type of job creates more secondary jobs like manufacturing. Manufacturing is what created the American middle class with good paying jobs and gave millions upward mobility. Both are things that have been in jeopardy in this country for decades now. The whole goddamn point of growing a domestic high speed rail system is that would incentive future growth in fail travel, create good paying jobs and keep us from being endlessly dependent on foreign know-how.
I agree. If we don’t have the capability right now, then let’s create it. I can wait to see the project completed if the end result is long-term domestic prosperity in the working classes.
This is the type of thinking we’ve been neglecting in America, and look at the current state things… We need long-term thinking to replace short-term solutions.