How Two Billionaires Are Destroying High Speed Rail In America [View all]

[liberal N proud]

Julie Doubleday


Eighteen years have passed since the establishment of the California High Speed Rail (CHSR) Authority. Over the course of those eighteen years, high speed rail in the state has been discussed and planned and delayed and delayed more. There have been proposals, referendums, debates, studies and budgets, but no tracks laid, no passengers queued, no trains roaring between Los Angeles and San Francisco in the promised three hour travel time at speeds exceeding 200 mph. I began looking into the state of American high speed rail in pursuit of a few simple answers. Why don’t we have the sort of rail infrastructure seen across Europe, in Japan and now in China? What do proponents and opponents say about the various projects underway today? Put simply, what are the pros and cons of funding and maintaining high speed rail lines in this country, and what do our legislators make of them?

As with every partisan issue (read: every issue), I expected to find two very different perspectives. One side of the aisle vehemently advocating for construction, their counterparts citing worrisome figures with equal fervor. I expected to find debate, analysis, anger, passion, probably a fair amount of name calling and a more than fair amount of bureaucracy. But, naively, I expected to find the story of an imperfect democracy, clattering along toward something resembling compromise at a leisurely sort of pace. Instead I found myself down a deep rabbit hole of lobbyists, think tanks, fossil fuel billionaires, propaganda, and dark money. On the downside, it was disappointing to discover that private entities with explicit financial interest in destroying public transit wield significant influence in the debate over public infrastructure. On the plus side, it was a lot more interesting than poring over budgets.

http://www.attn.com/stories/295/how-two-billionaires-are-destroying-high-speed-rail-america