That's what they said about loans to the auto industry.

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"Better than a thousand hollow words, is one word that brings peace." ~Siddhartha Gautama (The Buddha)

Can anyone answer the following questions for me? Links citing your sources would be most helpful.

1) What is the projected number of passengers per year who will use this train?

2) How much will it cost to operate the train each year, including service, maintenance, repairs, employee wages, benefits, etc...

3) What is the estimated cost of a ticket to use the train?

There are more questions, but these are the most pivotal ones that must be answered in order to conclude if this train service is necessary and cost effective.

If you have one hundred percent reached your conclusion one way or the other and cannot answer all three of these questions, you are not basing your opinion on logic or facts.

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Did you really mean to pick Obama's nationalizing the auto industry as an example of success? It only cost the taxpayers $26 billion or more and produced a car nobody wants. It was unnecessary as shown by the success of Ford Motors. But this high speed rail project has a lot in common with the auto bailout, billions of tax dollars wasted to reward Obama political cronies. Hurrah!

Do you know why a lot of other countries have them and we don't?? It's becuase we're so stinking big. If we were nice small country like Japan, then it's easy and economical. But when you have as many square miles as we do, the scale kills you. Look at it this way: You have 100,000 riders and the cost is .10/mile/passenger if the train is full. If your average trip length is 50 miles, then the cost is affordable, but when your average trip length moves up to 100 miles, then the economics change substantially. Sure, I'd love it if we had a transcontinental bullet train that could take you from LA to NY in 12 hours, but the economics of doing it make it way too expensive.

Spending money that we don't have to create jobs that are grossly over-paid by taking money out of the economy via taxes IS NOT the way to get out of this economic situation. If this train was economical, we'd have the private sector doing it in a heartbeat, but they know that it's not economical and never will be. It requires building infrastructure that will not pay for itself.

Also, the idiotic idea of putting in a location where people have to drive almost halfway there, then wait for a train to take you the last 150 miles (that's only about two hours drive time), then get dropped off outside of Vegas where you have to take a taxi/bus/rent-a-car to your hotel, make ZERO sense.

This is a STUPID project. It's worse than the "Bridge to Nowhere". If you want to build a California based bullet train, why not build it between LA and SF?? OH, I KNOW!!! BECAUSE THEN IT WOULDN'T BE A FED. PROJECT, IT WOULD BE A STATE PROJECT AND REID COULDN'T PUT IT ON OUR TAB.

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Our nation has not always lived up to its ideals, yet those ideals have never ceased to guide us. They expose our flaws, and lead us to mend them. We are the beneficiaries of the work of the generations before us and it is each generation's responsibility to continue that work. - Laura Bush

Leftists and very small children don't seem to be able to understand that the Government isn't there to "fix" the economy, anymore than a tick is there to fix your dog.~Oftencold