>The first Japanese Shinkansen train went over budget by 100%, but nobody remembers that anymore. Instead they talk about how wonderful the Shinkansen trains are.
HSR is at 300% of original budget without even a credible schedule for completion of that original plan -or- source of funding.
Long-distance "high speed" rail is going nowhere in CA without constraints on air travel, especially short-hop flights, that includes taxation for environmental consequences. Nobody flying the Bay Area or Sacramento - L.A. corridor is going to spend 4X as much to spend double the time in transit.
Yeah, the routing is weirdish - the opening date keeps getting pushed back (full route promised by 2020, we may not see first segment till 2029!) cost is going to be in 1b/year range. They are projecting 9 million riders on the Bakersfield segment, will be an interesting proof point if they can deliver that (Amtrak service use on nearby routes was declining for years ore pandemic).
I do wonder if for 100 billion we could have done automated bus or cargo lanes - or even just tried a few interesting ideas out.
The ballot summary was literally written by the ballot authors to avoid a more neutral party writing it
"But the intensifying drought and wildfires in Northern California and escalating hurricanes and storm surges along the Southeastern coastline drove the couple to sell both houses."
This is a crock. HMB is no more subject to drought or wildfires than anywhere else in the country. They fled to NC for the same reason my retired Apple executive neighbor did -- lower taxes and higher quality of life than CA now.
You state this as if it were a fact, but how did you come to this conclusion?
Presidents don’t determine the type of people who join the FBI, stay for decades, and work themselves into leadership positions. Presidents just appoint one of these individuals as director.
This would be like believing city police are mostly Democrat because the mayors have been mostly Democrat. Or the same of blue state state-level police.
None of this is factual or living in the real world, it’s simply adhering to an unsupported opinion because it reinforces your feelings.
California utilities are just pass-through delivery agents for natural gas -- they just charge cost + % to service. Gas prices can vary greatly depending on demand.
What the current push against consumer access to natural gas ignores is that there is a lot of natural gas produced as a byproduct of producing other oil drilling products, and if not consumed for useful purposes it just gets burned off into the atmosphere directly.
Coming from the gas starved Europe of 2022 [1], I am somewhat discombobulated by the fact that someone can still be so calm and detached about natural gas! So I went and looked at some numbers.
It turns out that the USA hasn't felt the current natural gas situation as much because it's a major natural gas exporter itself, and likely maintains large strategic reserves besides.
Still, even in the US, at very least the price on the futures market has roughly doubled if we take say 2019/2020 as the baseline. [2]
[1] In eg Netherlands and Germany the majority of homes use natural gas for heating. Due to a combination of Covid instabilities and the Ukraine war, consumer gas prices have reached record highs. Different sources quote different ratios [3] but I could pin one source down on claiming a factor of 5* compared to a couple of years ago.
[3] Depending on if you factor in government compensation, whether it's a projection or a spot price, etc. And I can understand people wanting to hedge their reporting a bit, because the numbers are a little crazy right now.
HSR is at 300% of original budget without even a credible schedule for completion of that original plan -or- source of funding.
Long-distance "high speed" rail is going nowhere in CA without constraints on air travel, especially short-hop flights, that includes taxation for environmental consequences. Nobody flying the Bay Area or Sacramento - L.A. corridor is going to spend 4X as much to spend double the time in transit.