like a circus tight-rope act

An article in the LA Times dated March 26, 2012 claims the proponent's hyperbole may be in jeopardy. The proponents claim that the project can side-step the legislative requirements. It appears that the fate of CA's HSR is going to lay in the hands of the judicial authorities who will hear the cases.

active in the news again

According the March 8, 2012 Fresno Bee article, a new study suggests the CA HSR will create jobs. In the real world of things costing money, how many jobs will it take to generate the additional tax increase to support a $100billion state funded project? For the immediate $2billion proposed HSR segment, how many other government reliant jobs will be cut? Is there a study somewhere that asks the question to how many jobs have been eliminated in California and the US due to the enormous increase in taxation?

The study spoken of in the article also suggest that a city along the proposed HSR route with a station 'would fare better' than a city without a station. Is this study actually suggesting that a city has negative benefit with lower land values from visual damage, noise pollution and severed land use access that leads to further economic decrease for everywhere except where a station might be located?

Note to the CA HSRA: update the transit technology to a modern day system that enables every town to have a station. Trains are a relic technology developed in the early 1800s. Our society has developed extensively over the past 150 years and has to have a mobility system capable of meeting modern day transportation requirements. Where is this study?

ehhh, hun?

In an act of desperation the CA HSRA is now accepting bids for contracts they can't award. Here is the newest turn of events with the HSRA the March 2, 2012 Fresno Bee article.

roll a coaster high speed rail

Following the HSR is like watching every move of a basketball being dribbled down the court in a basketball game. While voters balk at the escalating costs, the governor demands that the old technology electric train $98billion cost projections are too high; despite a 2010 expert study that claims actual cost estimate of $212billion. As dictators go, Jerry has no cloths. The logic Jerry must be using is the standardized cost of building an at grade expense of $70million per mile times 700 miles. The disconnect is representative to the dysfunction of bureaucracy which has only produced an unfinished EIR (environmental impact report) to show for the $600million spent on the project.

From the SF Chronicle

Here is an informative article from the San Francisco Chronicle Sunday December 4, 2011 about the advertising money spent to push the CA HSR. This is the article:

They have yet to lay a single track, but the California High-Speed Rail Authority has spent some $12.5 million on public relations in the past two years - with a number of politically connected consultants getting in on the ride.

In one six-month window:

-- Mike Villines, the former Republican assemblyman, billed a Central Valley rail contractor for $108,631.

-- Denise LaPointe, a former chief of staff to ex-San Francisco state senator and former High-Speed Rail Authority board member Quentin Kopp, billed for $53,444. That was just part of the $350,288 paid to her firm since October 2009.

-- Nicole Franklin, a former Oakland city planning commissioner, got $45,138 - including a portion of LaPointe's work.

-- Mike Lynch, the former chief of staff to onetime Assemblyman Gary Condit, billed for $31,748.

-- Plus former Kern County Supervisor Gene Tackett ($70,652), and Sara Katz, a staffer to former Gov. Pete Wilson and onetime San Diego Mayor Susan Golding, whose monthly billings for the first half of the year totaled $43,505.

"Frankly I can't see one benefit of that $12.5 million in spending," said state Assemblyman Jerry Hill, D-San Mateo.

"To me this is indicative of the operations of the High-Speed Rail Authority to this point, which from what we've seen is pretty much a failure."

Statewide, some 20 PR outfits have worked on the project since 2007 as part of nine regional engineering contracts.

In 2009, however, rail authority directors - worried that they needed to sell the project statewide - awarded a five-year contract worth $9 million to Ogilvy Public Relations, a major national firm.

After paying Ogilvy about $3 million, the authority was not happy with its performance and the two sides agreed to a parting of the ways.

In the meantime, as shrinking federal dollars put the future of the train line in doubt, the authority has still budgeted $2.5 million for PR this fiscal year.

Rail authority officials say the spending on public outreach has been reasonable given the size and complexity of the project.

Addressing Sprawl and Blight

Our car culture makes a direct connection of style changes to the automobile and how fashions impact tract house designs.

Blight is a corollary of automobile centric growth. Because our car culture is based on the automobile; and fashion is a conscious marketing tool in the sales of automobile design, so follow decade period cycles to style trends of tract houses. Tract housing developments and strip malls are the direct correlation to urban sprawl expansion. Tract houses are directly affected by contemporary design criteria. As clothing fashion styles change from season to season, the tract house styles make major shifts every decade. Inasmuch as fashions quickly go out of date, each tract style becomes out of vogue after a decade and a new tract house area becomes popular.

What is blight and how it happens. Blight is the result of cyclic design changes within the car culture. Tract houses are designed by sprawl developers as fashion statements to maintain the status-quo of cyclic trends. The tendency of society’s car culture mentality follows patterns based on that era’s marketing popularity for sprawl development and abandons unfashionable areas. As the new areas are built-out over a decade, older areas are unable to compete with the newly created trend. These older areas hold a lower real estate value and are targeted as unwanted investment properties with lost pride of ownership and become poorly maintained rental properties. As they fall victim to several decades, the mass produced quality of these low value houses become target to first time home buyers and higher foreclosure rates. Once these forgotten areas gather low value rental status, many properties fall into foreclosure and become abandoned. When abandoned properties are boarded up and the chain linked fences become the norm, blight dominates the area.

Visual hostility is a term coined by Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris, Ph.D., Chair, UCLA Dept. of Urban Planning, relating to her studies on the effects of the metro system in LA.

Abandoned neighborhoods are filled with visual hostility. This hostility is seen as empty lots, weeds, dead landscaping, trash, boarded windows, busted and blocked sidewalks, chain link fences, barbed wire, coiled razor wire, busted windows and graffiti. Concrete walls appear as prisons to those burdened and confined to living in these areas. Blight has a devastating emotional and mental attitude effect to children forced to grow up in these areas, as well as the adults. The behavior patterns mirror one’s surrounding environment. The residents of these areas are consequently affected with a mental attitude that has a visual onslaught of prison, poverty and war.

The HSRA Business Plan

California's revised high speed rail authority's business plan has been out for a few days. One of the main objections from the opposition was that the project is going to cost more than California can afford in its budget. Money seems like an irrelevant issue to the HSRA. The HSRA boasts that these new figures are now accurate; so anyone against the project has no validation. How is it that by doubling their estimated costs it suddenly is suppose to solve the lack of funds to build it?

One of the best explanations of the new HSRA budget is described in a Sacramento Bee article from November 5th.