Anti High-Speed Rail Statement Debunked.
I had not been aware that a major American newspaper was owned by a journalism school, but that happens to be the case with the Tampa Bay Times. It’s independently owned by the Poynter Institute, a journalism school located in St. Petersburg, Florida.
More to the point, the Tampa Bay Times is home to PolitiFact, which has a staff of people engaged in fact-checking statements being made by politicians and public figures. In 2009, the newspaper won a Pulitzer Prize for its fact-checking of the 2008 presidential election. These days, with candidates for president all at full-throated roar, PolitiFact is very, very busy.
(I cannot resist noting that a couple of weeks ago, PolitiFact published their rating for one of Donald Trump’s statements, noting with not a little wonderment that since the beginning of the campaign it was the very first review of a Trump statement that was not rated either “False” or “Pants-on-Fire”.)
A few days ago, PolitiFact reported on a statement made by California State Assemblyman Jim Patterson (Republican-Fresno). He had attacked the California High-Speed Rail Authority which, he said, “failed to disclose huge cost overruns after they boasted private firms were interested in funding this project. We now know these firms are unwilling to put up any private money.”
PolitiFact went to the trouble of interviewing a number of those companies—the very “private firms” to which Patterson had alluded—and came back with their assessment of the assemblyman’s claim: FALSE!
Gee … we have thugs erecting threatening signs, property owners creating fake cemeteries, and politicians making false claims, all in an attempt to stop construction of California’s high-speed rail project.
Franklin Roosevelt once asked that he be judged by the enemies he had made. More and more that’s looking like a good way for Californians to evaluate their high-speed train.
As the media advised when it was still respectable investigative body, “follow the money!” Very interesting parallels of reaction to the high speed rail proposals between Florida and Texas, indicating airline lobbyists stirring the pot –again. The NIMBYs in California were stirred in the early 1980s with the proposed high speed service between LA-San Diego, especially if it did not stop in their town. In 1985, when I was a private capital project developer with Deutsche Bundesbahn for a proposed high speed (ICE) line between O’Hare-Midway Chicago-Champaign-Springfeild-St. Louis-Lambert, the pushback from even the politico NIMBYs was if the train did not stop in their town en route, they would not support the concept!
In this politicized milieu, it’s amazing when you look at the actual development of LRT and subway in LA, commuter rail in LA and Orange Counties, BART and Caltrain’s commuter rail growth with “Baby Bullets” in the Bay Area, and the Joint Powers Authority for intra-state rail operation. Given the above depiction of actual progress, one has to assume the existence of very powerful interests sending lobbyists with their carpet bags after the congressional and state delegations to derail the HSR for California.
Changing the initial phase from LA to San Francisco was a smart move to avoid the wringing hands between Burbank and LAUPT. However, those same NIMBYs allegedly protecting their property values are also out in force between San Jose-San Francisco. Funny, with all their educational degrees amassed in that corridor, they still don’t get it-it’s either HSR or paving more lanes for Route 101, which would consume more land and be less energy efficient, which I thought California prided itself on…