This post about Curt Pringle being elected chairman of the California High Speed
Rail Authority board mentions how a commenter on the California High Speed Rail Blog suggested Anaheim's mayor will now
be in a position to formally kill the competing magnetic-levitation (Maglev)
line that's also envisioned to pass through town.
Well, not if Cerritos Mayor Bruce Barrows has anything to say about that. Barrows, who heads the
Kodama is “the perfect choice for this
position” due to his extensive knowledge of Los Angeles and Orange
County transportation issues, said Barrows. Kodama's 20 years of urban planning experience includes the development of freeways, and bus and rail lines.
Orangeline planners envision an elevated, 110-mile-long train line
between Irvine and Palmdale with cars traveling up to 240 mph and a passenger capacity equal to that of an eight-lane highway. Total estimated cost of the project: $12 billion (give or take a few billion).
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However, the proposed system recently lost the support of U.S. Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nevada), who now favors
a high-speed, diesel-electric DesertXpress line from Las Vegas to
Victorville, which would cost only $5 billion (give or take a few
billion) but would also feature slower-moving trains than the Maglev.
Reid's earlier champion of the Maglev had been mocked by Republicans in
Congress as the “Sin Express,” but it was likely another Republican who
brought the senator around on his DesertXpress support: GOP power
player and DesertXpress backer Sig Rogich, who recently was named a
leader of a group of Republicans backing Reid's bid for re-election in
2010.
OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.