She lamented the wasted time and money that has hamstrung the California high-speed rail project. If anything, though, the opposite has happened.įiona Ma, the California state treasurer, was once one of the most vocal proponents of the Los Angeles to San Francisco line but became convinced, soon after hearing Brightline’s proposal five years ago, that the Las Vegas line and the private ownership behind it pointed to a more promising future.Īny high-speed rail network, Ma said in an interview, “should not be run by the government”. Photograph: Patrick T Fallon/AFP/Getty ImagesĪ less savvy company might have run into a wall of resistance from California politicians anxious to direct as much funding as possible towards their own high-speed line, which has been in the works since voters approved a ballot initiative to fund it in 2008. Vehicles drive past farmland and part of the California high speed rail authority San Joaquin River viaduct construction project in August 2021. It also lined up a bipartisan group of members of Congress from both states to write to the Biden administration in support of its plans. Over the past few weeks, the company signed an agreement with labor unions in Nevada and California, promising to use their members when hiring an anticipated 10,000 construction workers. (The rest of the projected $12bn budget will be raised by Brightline’s parent company, a major private equity fund called the Fortress Investment Group.) Perhaps most strikingly, Brightline has proved adept at winning political support for its plans and is now in line for a $3.75bn federal grant through Joe Biden’s signature infrastructure bill that would allow construction to begin this summer. The route doesn’t require a lot of expensive bridges or viaducts and environmental approvals have been relatively straightforward since the rail bed won’t do much damage that the highway isn’t already incurring. Brightline hasn’t had to worry much about buying land or obtaining right of way permits, because Las Vegas construction magnate Tony Marnell obtained the rights to build a track down the median of I-15, the desert highway linking Sin City to southern California, years before selling the project to Brightline in 2018. So far at least, the line has avoided the pitfalls that tend to plague large-scale rail projects and send their budgets soaring. The company has indicated it wants to keep the cheapest one-way ticket at around $100, making it competitive with the cost of air travel. The route would initially run from Las Vegas to a suburb on the LA commuter rail network. The site for a proposed station for the high-speed rail line to Las Vegas on the outskirts of Victorville, California. The ambition is to build an all-electric train that can hit a maximum speed of 186 mph and make the journey from Las Vegas to the Los Angeles area in a little over two hours. Unlike the California high-speed project, this one is not government-run but rather a private-public partnership led by a Florida-based company, Brightline, that already runs a successful commuter line from Miami to Palm Beach, soon to be extended to Orlando. Public and private sector experts agree, though, that the LA-Las Vegas project holds a different kind of promise and as currently projected could be up and running as soon as 2027. The most ambitious of all – a bullet train that aims to whisk passengers from San Francisco to Los Angeles in less than three hours – remains stuck in a seemingly endless limbo. Many ambitious US high-speed rail projects have come and gone over the past 15 years. Now, though, the idea is being revived, not as an exercise in decadence and debauchery, but as a sleek, high-speed inter-city service with the potential to revolutionize public transportation across the United States.
Passenger numbers fell off precipitously and after going through a few different iterations, the venture collapsed.
Amtrak agreed to run the service only because the Las Vegas chamber of commerce agreed to cover any losses and then only on weekends during the winter months. On the train’s star-studded inaugural run, the scotch, bourbon, gin and vodka all ran out within an hour. The idea did not catch on, largely because the journey took seven-and-a-half hours each way, almost twice as long as crossing the Mojave desert by car and more than seven times as long as flying.
0 kommentar(er)
