We appreciate the fact that today is April Fool’s day and that therefore this may be some sort of a joke. However, the latest dispatch from the California High Speed Rail front indicates that the plans of those wonderful folks who have been saying that they want to give us high-speed train service going between San Diego and San Francisco, but which would start by going from Bakersfield to Merced, have metamorphosed again. The latest shtick is that the first high-speed rail segment would go from los Angeles to Merced, although what Angelenos would be in a hurry to travel to Merced in sufficiently large numbers, has not been explained. And no indication whether there would be a separate right-of-way dedicated to “bullet train” service, or whether those trains would use existing trcakage and share it with Thomas the Tank Engine.
So what’s going on here? If the Los Angeles Times is to be believed, the real purpose behind all this foofaraw is to start building something — anything — before the end of this year, so California can glom on to some $3.5 billion in federal funds (that’s your money folks, even if you don’t live in la-la land). To get the story go to Joe Mozingo, New Plan for Bullet Train Could Cut Costs by $30 billion, L.A. Times, April 1, 2012.
This can’t be the end of the story, so stay tuned. There is bound to be more. Or, as they used to say, “Round and round she goes, and where she stops nobody knows.”