Earth Equity News

California Voters to Decide on High-Speed Rail System. By Russell Clemings, FresnoBee, October 10, 2008. "Voters decide Nov. 4 whether to build a statewide high-speed rail system... Proposition 1A provides... $9 billion for a system estimated to cost $33 billion for the first phase alone, which will run from San Francisco to Southern California. It also includes $950 million for local transit connections to the high-speed tracks... Current plans call for the high-speed system -- modeled after those already operating in Europe, Japan and China -- to start carrying passengers a decade from now... Building enough new freeway lanes and airport runways to accommodate the state's travel needs in coming decades could cost $82 billion, the authority calculates. In contrast, it says, a high-speed rail system serving all of the state's major cities would cost around half as much. For that money, the state would get a fleet of sleek bullet-nosed electric trains... at maximum speeds of 220 mph. Although speeds would be only half that over mountain grades and in congested big cities, the authority still says a nonstop trip from Union Station in Los Angeles to the Transbay Transit Center in San Francisco would take only two hours and 38 minutes."