Is it time to call it quits on the bullet train?: Letters

We asked readers, Is it time to call it quits on the bullet train?

Pull plug on bullet train

Having enjoyed high-speed rail travel in Europe, I was an early supporter of the bullet train. California’s lineal development pattern as well as the hassle of flying or driving up and down the state should have made rail a natural.But given route indecision, environmental review requirements, NIMBY’s, lawyers and the dysfunctional state bureaucracy, what could go wrong?

It would have been too simple to run trains along established freeway and interstate corridors. Anyway, it is time to pull the plug on the bullet train project and wait for more advanced future technology.

What to do with existing right-of-way and structures already built? Here are some outside the box ideas: the world’s largest skateboard park; a giant solar power array; affordable housing “new towns” or finally a declaration that any unfinished construction is public art.

— Robert Mease, Riverside

Better transit system

California is where the future happens first. That reassuring statement from 50 years ago rings a little hollow to those in 10-mile-per-hour traffic commuting to work from distant but affordable housing.

A shorter bullet train, as posed in your self-answering Question of the Week, is not much of an answer. But neither is an economy that requires one vehicle per person burning $3.25 a gallon gasoline. One way or the other, billions of dollars will be spent every year.

California needs a vision closer to home than solving global warming, and more sustainable than free education and medical care for everyone. An efficient, convenient and inexpensive mass transit system designed to meet economic needs could make things better here. There might even be a place for some high-speed rail. And there is a lot to be said for reducing the number of both cars and in-state airline flights.

— Peter G. Cook, Riverside

Shut project down

The bullet train was the dumbest idea ever conceived. Hundreds of millions of dollars spent on a boondoggle that could have been used to build and repair hundreds of miles of freeways and highways that thousands of commuters need on a daily basis.

Only a handful of people would have used the train. Shut this project down and if there is money left, use it to repair the crumbling roads in this state.

— Ronald Hawkins, Calimesa

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