The California bullet train hits the wall of fiscal and political reality...

The Washington Post is reporting that one of President Obama's strategies to end the nation's dependence on foreign oil, bullet trains, has hit a brick wall.

The President's vision of a national high-speed rail network integrated two "big ticket" items: a jobs program---supposedly generating tens of thousands of construction and manufacturing jobs---and an environmental program---cutting down on the number of automobiles, revitalizing urban centers, and sparing the environment millions of tons of carbon emissions.

Describing his vision, President Obama said in April 2009:

Imagine whisking through towns at speeds over 100 miles an hour, walking only a few steps to public transportation, and ending up just blocks from your destination. Imagine what a great project that would be to rebuild America.

The President promised this vision would transform U.S. transportation just like the interstate highways program did more than five decades ago.  It would provide 80% of Americans access to high-speed rail within 25 years with bullet trains trains moving passengers between the nation's major urban areas at 220 miles per hour.  Costs?  They wouldn't matter. The $797B stimulus program and passenger revenues would take care of that.

So far, President Obama has spent more than $10B in federal money on high-speed rail...with the same outcome as his Solyndra "investment."

Last year, Florida's Governor, Rick Scott terminated the proposed bullet train connecting Tampa and Orlando. Ditto in Ohio and Wisconsin, whose governors wouldn't even take the federal funds due to the strings attached.  And now, California's highly-touted "train to nowhere"---connecting Los Angeles and San Francisco---and which has been beleaguered from the start by political infighting, costs spiraling out of control, as well as eroding political and public support---is likely not going to leave the station.

California State Senator Joe Simitian (D), who chairs the subcommittee charged with overseeing high-speed rail spending, said:

I feel like right now we are faced with two bad choices.  One bad choice is to kill the whole project.  But the other is to say let’s spend $6.2 billion because we are being rushed into it because we could lose federal funding.  What we have to do is take a deep breath, take a step back and re-evaluate the entire project. We don't want to end up making a $100 billion mistake.

The lesson?

Talk all that President Obama may want about "transformation," he doesn't seem to understand that transformative visions are like dreams: Visionaries eventually must wake up to and to confront reality and, in this case, the facts.  To translate visions into reality, visionaries must be entrepreneurs and capable of working with venture capitalists.

Unfortunately, those two items don't rank very high on this social democrat President's agenda and Senator Simitian has awoken to the facts.


Let the discussion begin...




To read the Washington Post article, click on the following link:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/plans-for-high-speed-rail-are-slowing-down/2012/01/13/gIQAngYc1P_story.html?wpisrc=nl_headlines

To read about Governor Rick Scott terminating the Florida bullet train, click on the following link:
http://www.economist.com/blogs/gulliver/2011/03/obama_and_high-speed_rail