Opinion: Death of a high-speed dream?

The story, as reported in last Friday’s edition of CALMATTERS, begins with a photograph of huge towers outside the city of Hanford. It is one of many California versions of Stonehenge. These are useless structures that were (or possibly still are) expected to be part of the state’s high-speed rail system. They stand as testament to a dream, maybe an illusion, of a transportation system that would move people from San Francisco to Los Angeles in about 2.5 hours.

Train to nowhere

Seventeen years after California voters approved the project and fifteen years after work began, the California High Speed Rail Authority (CAHSRA) is struggling to complete the line from “somewhere north of Madera” to “somewhere near Shafter,” a small farming community of about 20,000 people, north of Bakersfield. It is the “train from nowhere to nowhere.”

A report, delivered last Friday by Ian Choudri, the new CEO of the CAHSRA, indicates that the project connecting downtown San Francisco to the Los Angeles basin is “off the table” for now. Moreover, according to The Fresno Bee, the more modest route from Merced to Bakersfield “will fail to generate revenue to offset expense.”