Environmentalists protest high-speed rail

with everyone out of work and taxed to death.who is going to ride the zepher???????????

Hi-speed rail in a seismically active state?

I fully believe in high-speed rail. However, please, please, please no more under-funded transit systems in the Bay Area or anywhere for that fact. Undependable service works to frustrate riders or potential riders, and reinforces the notion mass transit does not effectively work, and continues to push people towards their cars.

I am heart-broken by the "showdown" between advocates of high speed rail over system routing. The highway and airline lobby must be thrilled by this controversy because, in addition to the normal electoral obstacles present in huge public works bond measures, they can count on a segment of rail supporters saying, "They didn't do it my way, so I'm voting no! (or staying home, or not contributing money, or actively opposing the measure)." How will the average voter view this bickering? By saying "If rail supporters can't get their acts together to agree on this, why should I vote yes?" If this "showdown" isn't amicably settled, I see a crushing electoral defeat for any HSR proposal, and another victory for transportation business as usual. Altamont vs. Pacheco? How about neither?

Editor: How could you possibly get your headline so completely screwed up? Environmentalists are not against high-speed rail; in fact they are champions of high-speed rail. And they know from studying the problem and looking at the matter objectively that for a number of reasons the Altamont high-speed route into the Bay Area is far superior to the Pacheco Route.

I think we can be concerned about the environment and support High Speed Rail. I do not see the two as mutually exclusive. However, I disappointed at the groups referenced in Sickofrisco's post who are ALWAYS opposing change or progress because they still live in the 1960's.

Sickofrisco may or may not be right about the environmentalists (who I guess want to keep cars on the road now) -- but I'd bet that there is plenty of population for HSR here. It is more like Europe than Japan - population centers seperated by large distances of countryside - if you catch the TGV you will be in for some very long stretches of countryside on your way to Geneva or wherever.

as far as rai transit being dangerous, we need less dorks

High-speed trains are cool.

What should be done is that High Speed Rail be built and run by private/public partnership. The public part can get the land and the private part can build and run it. Both partners share the costs and profits. But it will never work that way because for high speed rail to be built properly and with low cost means non union labor and materials. Which will never happen here.

While I love the idea of high-speed rail, I'm currently oppossed to it, because I have to wonder if it won't end up under-funded as most of our tranist systems in the Bay Area. What this often does is affirm people's commitment to their cars because alternate transit doesn't effectively operate.

We shouldn't have ANY expansion of or increase to our existing rail system. Rail transit is DANGEROUS. Every time I open a paper lately I read about some dork getting hit by a train.

Someone please shut these moron up. They make a lot of noise but do not speak for the majority of californians. another price we pay to live in a free country. lawyers suck.

The corrected title of this article should be ENVIRONMENTALISTS OPPOSE EVERYTHING. Personally, I'm not too keen on high-speed rail simply because I don't believe we have sufficient population density to make it economically feasible (it works in Japan because they have a population of 60 million people bunched in big cities laid out in a line on the coast on their main island). However, I wouldn't use such silly arguments to oppose it. Fact of the matter is that these so-called "environmentalists" are a bunch of Luddite obstructionists and clueless, hysterical types - the same ones who caused us to let our forests burn down because they were opposed to cutting down dead and dying trees to eliminate the fire hazards. We would be far better off as a society if we stopped giving these people attention everytime they throw a tantrum about something...