California High-Speed Rail Now $2.3 Billion Closer

Image: California HSR

Our transportation-obsessed colleagues at the superb Transbay Blog bring encouraging news about California's effort to build a high-speed rail network that will stretch from San Diego to San Francisco. Transbay lets the champagne corks fly:

After almost a year of anticipation throughout the United States, the recipients of the discretionary high-speed rail stimulus grants have finally been announced, to time with President Obama’s State of the Union address.  California has been especially excited by the opportunity to obtain much-needed federal money to add to the portfolio of funds that will be used to build California’s high-speed rail project.  California was in fact so eager that the State applied for $4.7 billion (PDF), over half of the nation’s total allocation.  We were actually awarded $2.344 billion, or about half of the amounted requested in the application.  Of that, most ($2.25 billion) is set aside for high-speed rail, with a small remainder ($99 million) for other conventional rail improvements.  It is indeed a respectable sum of money — intended to give a tangible boost to California’s startup corridor, which could become the test case for American high-speed rail. [...]

California’s piece of the stimulus pie, meanwhile, includes the $2.25 billion to be used to complete various projects along four high-speed segments (San Francisco-San Jose, Merced-Fresno, Fresno-Bakersfield, and Los Angeles-Anaheim), including environmental review, engineering, stations, track, signaling, and right-of-way acquisition. 

These new funds, along with the $10 billion bond allocation already approved by California voters, means that the state's high-speed rail initiative is *ahem* really beginning to gain momentum. Hooray for that.

Let's visualize a high-speed, palm-lined future, shall we?

LINKS:

California High-Speed Rail (Official website)

Comments

[Maggie Darwin (@MaggieL)]

Hope you're visualizing a way to pay all that debt back. Including the part of the $2.3B that came from other states...