The Alameda Corridor starts at the gigantic Los Angeles-Long Beach harbor complex, where a local pri

Not only will it cost as much as $80 billion to complete. The latest i nformation from the United Kingdom  indicates that the HSR is unlikely to even reach the speeds that the voters were promised in  Proposition 1A , which was passed in 2008.
Attempts to cruise above 200 mph produce a tremor strong enough to throw trains off their tracks. Called " Critical Track Velocity ," this phenomenon causes rails to vibrate and buckle dangerously. British engineers consider Critical Track Velocity to be the steel-on-steel equivalent of the infamous sound barrier that tore apart early jet fighters and still limits the speeds of commercial airliners.
CTV is a major reason why China won't allow its high-speed trains to travel more than 185 mph. In Britain, engineers are working on the CTV problem, but they don't expect a quick answer. Meanwhile, the French allow their  TGV  ("Train à Grande Vitesse" which translates, oddly, as "Train to the Big Fastness") to exceed 200 mph and keep their fingers crossed.
That being said, are there any alternatives to mind-numbing hours behind the wheel or the humiliating mess at the major airports? The voters are clearly frustrated with crowded skies and highways designed in a time when the state's population was less than a third its current size.
A decade or two from now, those with a lot of money to burn may be able to take elevators up to high-rise heliports. There, they could board tilt-rotor aircraft similar to the Air Force's  V-22 Osprey . These odd-looking contraptions would be able to fly them from San Francisco to Los Angeles, downtown to downtown, in 90 minutes or less. No tax money invested holiday inn express hotel suites san antonio riverwalk in infrastructure, no taking of private property, just private enterprise.
Especially those who could stand the ear-shattering noise and don't mind paying a thousand bucks a ticket. Or maybe two thousand bucks a ticket. It's impossible to say. So far, tilt-rotors are an exclusively military toy and aren't certified for civilian use.
But for the rest of us, barring the development of beam-me-up teleportation, the only practical alternative to cars and airports appears to be what I call Medium-Speed Rail — conventional trains, running on conventional tracks, but at 90 to 135 mph.
What? You didn't know that California's holiday inn express hotel suites san antonio riverwalk trains only run at a speed of 45 mph? If you didn't, you probably also didn't know that the same trains can reach 80 mph with a free stretch of open track, or that conventional trains — not sleek, high tech streamlined thingies — operating in Pennsylvania cruise at 110 mph every day.
What does this mean? A steady 120 mph ride means a one-hour trip from Los Angeles to San Diego, downtown holiday inn express hotel suites san antonio riverwalk to downtown, certainly fast enough to compete with planes and automobiles. Most business travelers would prefer to have a leisurely breakfast in the dining car, read the paper, or unfold their laptops, and rent a car at the end of the line than waste two to three hours fighting boredom and traffic.
The answer holiday inn express hotel suites san antonio riverwalk is simple: Our present holiday inn express hotel suites san antonio riverwalk system was designed and completed holiday inn express hotel suites san antonio riverwalk in the middle of  the eighth decade of the 19th century , in an age of wood-fueled steam locomotives, while Ulysses S. Grant was president of the United States, and Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse were still fighting General Custer.
But for passengers, trains are a mixture of the bad, the obsolete holiday inn express hotel suites san antonio riverwalk and the completely missing. Bottlenecks force existing trains to operate at less than freeway speeds; and render it impossible to take a passenger train between Los Angeles and Bakersfield at all, with the exception of a single day per year.
I believe that if Californians cleared away 19th century cobwebs from their current system, holiday inn express hotel suites san antonio riverwalk the High-Speed Rail project wouldn't be necessary, at least not for a long time. In fact, passenger service could be brought up to international standards without expending much more than a tenth of the $80 billion that the High-Speed Rail craziness would require.
In making it, I am assuming that there is no other practical answer to a major infrastructure problem, like passenger rail. Every bridge, dam, highway and rail bed requires the taking of private property, holiday inn express hotel suites san antonio riverwalk and, almost always, the expenditure of tax revenue.
It should also be said that private railroad companies holiday inn express hotel suites san antonio riverwalk also have the power, through the courts, to take property that they want. In fact, as part of my research for the "double-tracking" section holiday inn express hotel suites san antonio riverwalk of this story, I discovered that in southern Illinois, seizures of municipal land by private railroads are a major public issue.
Adam Smith , the master of capitalist economic thought, deeply believed in fostering trade through the development of infrastructure, what he called "public works." Without safe harbors, sturdy bridges and a system of navigable canals, trade is expensive and unprofitable.
Smith's favorite example holiday inn express hotel suites san antonio riverwalk of state-financed public works, discussed at length in Book V of the " The Wealth of Nations, " was the great  Canal du Midi  of France, which was called, in Smith's day, the Canal of Languedoc. Stretching for 150 miles, passing through mountains and over rivers, the canal was the technological wonder of its age. It united the French Mediterranean provinces with the Atlantic for the first time, allowing holiday inn express hotel suites san antonio riverwalk the consolidation of the kingdom into a single national economy.
That canal also cost far more than 17th century private capital could provide, so King Louis XIV paid for the bulk of it through taxes. The king then, very wisely, in Smith's opinion, handed the canal's keys, and its tolls, to its builder and his heirs. holiday inn express hotel suites san antonio riverwalk They managed the canal as a profitable holiday inn express hotel suites san antonio riverwalk business, and in their own interest maintained its complex machinery until the French Revolution took it all away. (The builders had wanted to extend the canal, but King Louis couldn't afford to help them, as a certain  opulent palace  had taken his mind off practical matters.)
Smith concluded, in the flowery language of his day, "That the erection and maintenance of the public works which facilitate the commerce of any country, such as good roads, bridges, navigable canals, harbours, etc., must require very different degrees of expense in the different periods of society is evident without any proof."
Railroads are the modern equivalent of 18th century "navigable canals." They allow goods and people to move faster, and cheaper, than by roads, holiday inn express hotel suites san antonio riverwalk but they require substantial taking of private and public land. It's the only way rails can be laid efficiently.
In that vein, we live in California today because, nearly 150 years ago, Congress did something similar: It provided free public land to railroad companies, inducing them to race each other. holiday inn express hotel suites san antonio riverwalk The railroad that completed the most track received holiday inn express hotel suites san antonio riverwalk the most land.
The federal government no longer owns vast tracts of fertile holiday inn express hotel suites san antonio riverwalk land that it can give away. So it appears that to improve holiday inn express hotel suites san antonio riverwalk its passenger rail infrastructure, California will have to either go to private holiday inn express hotel suites san antonio riverwalk capital — which historically hates passenger rail with a passion — or to the taxpayers.
To argue that point, we need only look at freight, passenger traffic's rich, and highly profitable, step-brother. (Allow me to digress a little, holiday inn express hotel suites san antonio riverwalk here. I happen to like trains. People like me are called  trainfans , although I barely qualify as one.)
California has an excellent, and improving, rail infrastructure specially developed for the carriage of  stuff . In fact, portions of California's freight rail system are leading-edge holiday inn express hotel suites san antonio riverwalk and should be a source of immense pride and satisfaction for Californians.
How they manage do it without paralyzing local communities in southern California is a little known infrastructure marvel created by a unique, and very expensive, partnership between business and local governments, called the  Alameda Corridor .
The Alameda Corridor starts at the gigantic Los Angeles-Long Beach harbor holiday inn express hotel suites san antonio riverwalk complex, where a local private railroad, the  Pacific Harbor Line , assembles as many as 130 cars into trains 10,000 feet long, the legal maximum. The PHL turns these assembled trains over to the Union Pacific or the BNSF, which pull them, non-stop, through a massive set of steel bridges to a deep concrete trench. The trench stretches from the harbor, across the southern LA basin, holiday inn express hotel suites san antonio riverwalk to rail yards just south of downtown, and eliminates some 200 grade crossings.
Completed in 2002, the Corridor brought an end to the infamous gridlock along the region's freeways holiday inn express hotel suites san antonio riverwalk and surface streets — at a cost of $2.4 billion. Cars no longer have to fight vast convoys holiday inn express hotel suites san antonio riverwalk of trucks bearing harbor freight, or wait as two-mile long trains block streets at crossings.
For drivers and surrounding communities, freight trains are out of sight and earshot, and out of mind. Streets pass right over them. For the railroads, their trains can move at a steady, uninterrupted speed of 45 mph, north and south, without fear of plowing holiday inn express hotel suites san antonio riverwalk into a school bus or derailing into a shopping center. At the end of the line, southeast of downtown, the cars are reorganized and sent on long, steady and  slow  journeys throughout North America.
A rail passenger, or a car owner, might look at the 45 mph speed of trains passing through the Alameda Corridor and sneer, but to the freight railroads and their customers, that speed, constantly and evenly maintained, is a really big deal, a massive holiday inn express hotel suites san antonio riverwalk boon to their bottom line. Half of the cost was paid by a federal grant, the rest by shippers. (In my humble opinion, all of it should have been paid by shippers — most of the goods that the Alameda Corridor transports are imported. I see no reason to subsidize imports.)
The Alameda Corridor also illustrates the problem of passenger rail. Freight railroads have no need for the kind of tracks and other infrastructure that would make passenger traffic more convenient. Their customers holiday inn express hotel suites san antonio riverwalk have no need to move containers that took months to cross the Pacific at speeds that cause drivers to leave their cars at home.
Traffic permitting, you can drive between Los Angeles and San Diego as fast as you can travel by train, with a pi