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Bullet train planning costs more

April 3, 2013

bullet trainPlanning for California’s high-speed rail system will be more expensive than originally thought, officials said Tuesday. (San Jose Mercury News)

It will cost taxpayers $97 million more for “office and field work” in the design of the so-called bullet train. That news comes as controversy swirls around the project’s total anticipated cost, which has risen dramatically since voters’ approval in 2008, to $69 million.

According to officials, the extra planning costs are due to delays and financing alternative studies for communities along the train’s right-of-way. Highly-paid design consulting firms and added project staff will receive most of the additional funding.

The bullet train project already has an unfunded liability of more than $50 billion. Construction for the Los Angeles-to-San Francisco rail lines set to start in July, with its first stretch a 29-mile route between Madera and Bakersfield.


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KILL THIS STUPID THING. Voters have been misled. People that need fast trips between Southern Cal and Northern Cal already fly SOOOooo CHEAPLY! For the mountains of money that will be spent to build and operate this train, you’ll never beat the cost of a jet ride. Besides; most of you foolish suckers that want this POS will be DEAD, long before it’s finished.


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BREAKING NEWS!! Gov’t has cost overrun. Oh wait that is the same news since we formed in 1776. Nothing new here.


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Rapid inmagracion, no es economico para usted.


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This joke of a project has one and only one objective….highly paid governments jobs. The construction will all be over paid union jobs. Once it is built there will be a small army of highly paid government employees to run the train system. It will never be self-sufficient and will never do the public any good.


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the project is powerful and promotes growth.


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Growth of govt unions. Not the good kind of growth.


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exactly!


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Gov unions are like a self-service cash register when you think accountability.


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they are using your ATM card


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oh, by the way, that is high-level mangement speak for B.S.


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TS – your words are even more powerful. Wow! Count them; a whopping total of 7.


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Are we at least going to get kissed?


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And no flowers afterwards either


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Remember the Big Dig in Boston? This train is California’s version of the Big Dig. It will make a lot of politicians and people at the top rich… it already helped get Dirty Harry Reid reelected. Politicians will use this issue to their advantage for the next two decades. And who can blame them? We’re being played and few people seem to care or even notice.


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Correction next two hundred years


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What a shocker! This is just the first of what is sure to be billions of dollars worth of cost overruns. Get ready to be fleeced like nobody’s ever been fleeced before!


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Yeah, I was TOTALLY taken by surprise that the government needs to spend more than it planned and that all the “experts” had come up short in the estimates. Shocker, I say!


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i was a consultant. win, lose or draw i got paid. budget run out? i packed up my documentation and threatened to leave. worked ecery time. goverment programs? there’s always another program.


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There are always programs because that is the only legal means by which to redistribute wealth via our fiat currency. Can only tax to pay for government, so programs are perpetual and never-ending. Or as Reagan said, “the closest thing to immortality on this earth is a Federal government program” – boy howdy, he wasn’t kidding!


Spend, spend, spend!


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Good grief! Unfunded liability thus far of 50 billion dollars????

Exactly WHO is the ridership that this project will need to sustain itself?


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This is one of those projects that trancends regional interests .

There is a global high speed train system planned .

We have to do our part , all evidence to the contrary we live on a sphere.

global rail system


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You should send them all of your money to do your part. I will do my part and try to convince them not to do it.


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You must be thinking of Barak Obama’s “Intercontinental Railroad”! http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/washington/2011/09/obama-gaffe-jobs-act-speech-brent-spence-bridge-ohio.html


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