High speed rail = high tech jobs + big construction + real estate development + energy security + manufacturing + tourism + speedy efficient transportation for all
"Make no small plans. They have no magic to stir humanity's blood and probably themselves will not be realized. Make big plans; aim high in hope and work, remembering that a noble, logical plan once recorded will never die, but long after we are gone will be a living thing, asserting itself with ever-growing insistency." -Daniel Burnham
"The future is now, and it's in high speed rail!"
"Government should support transportation initiatives that reflect these travel trends. Instead of wasting taxpayer dollars continuing to enlarge our grandfather's Interstate Highway System, we should invest in the kinds of transportation options that the public increasingly favors."
"Not all HSR opposition is right-wing. But the right is the political home of HSR opposition."-Robert Cruickshank
"Conservatism seeks to preserve the status quo, which in the U.S. means oil, coal, suburbs, consumerism..." -David Roberts, Grist
"When it comes to high speed rail – a passenger rail project, popular in Europe, being built in California, backed by liberals like Barack Obama, touted for its benefits for the environment and the climate, intended to help reduce dependence on driving, and seen as threatening to an oil-based sprawl economy – it pushes all the right-wing’s buttons in ways that few other pieces of infrastructure can." -Robert Cruickshank
TIME TO INVEST IN AMERICA AGAIN!
"There's no reason why Europe or China should have the fastest trains" -President Obama
3-tier rail system for America
"There is simply no better way to move large numbers of people from city-center to city-center than on high speed rail." -Congressman Bill Shuster
-California Governor Jerry Brown
"Building a new system of high speed rail in America will be faster, cheaper, and easier than building more freeways or adding to an already over-burdened aviation system - and everybody stands to benefit." -President Obama
"If Californians have the patience and the political will to stick with it, they'll have a project with extraordinary environmental, economic and transportation benefits. If they don't, they'll have worsening congestion, rising pollution and soaring transit expenses as gasoline prices continue their inevitable rise. We like the first vision of the future better." -Los Angeles Times, 1/7/12
"California leads the way for many new things in this country, whether it's organic food or high technology or filmmaking. This will be the chance for California to lead the nation in transportation as well" -USHSR President Andy Kunz on CNN
"When she has finished building in 2012 what she began only in 2004, China will have more high-speed rail lines than the rest of the world put together.
It goes without saying that China's 42 dedicated near-arrow-straight, near-perfectly-level lines, with their 8,000 miles of 220-mph-capable track (half of it alreay built, and at a total predicted cost of nearly $400 billion), shame into insignificance America's achievements and aims, where the fastest train reaches only 125 mph, and that only on short stretches of track near Baltimore, and where the total length of planned, but thus far unbuilt, high-speed-capable rail is a laughable 563 miles." -Simon Winchester, Vanity Fair magazine
"Public infrastructure investment raises private-sector productivity... they literally are the veins and arteries of commerce." -Vice President Joe Biden, February 2011
"America needs to stop conducting it's politics in a parallel universe divorced from reality with no facts." "We need to put our country back in the future business." -Bill Clinton, 1/27/11
"A lot of people want to turn off the lights. I'm not one of them. We're going to build, we're going to invest, and California is going to stay up among the great states and the great political jurisdictions of the world." -CA Governor Jerry Brown, January 2012
"You have to begin to put the infrastructure in place to put in high speed trains... it should be a national priority. If the French can do it, why can't we?" -Gordon Bethune, Former CEO, Continental Airlines
"Dollars spent that get Americans out of cars will ease traffic, save money, reduce pollution, slow global warming, and make us less vulnerable to volatile oil oligarchs." -Bloomberg
"Passenger rail development takes time, but good things come to those who are patient and stay the course." -Thelma Drake, VA Department of Rail
"Building a world class transportation system is part of what made us an economic superpower."
"And now we're going to sit back and watch China build newer airports and faster railroads - at a time when millions of unemployed construction workers could build them right here in America."
"We shouldn't be in a race to the bottom... America should be in a race to the top, and I believe we can win that race." -President Obama, 9/8/11
"High speed rail is the #1 large-scale climate solution that can be built more quickly than any other option!"
HIJACKING HIGH SPEED RAIL
"Highway builders, auto lobbyists and airline monopolists have hijacked America's transportation policy. As a result, our mobility future has been clogged with their self-interest, blocking the rail-travel alternative." -Jim Hightower
"It’s shameful how our corporate and governmental masters of transportation have sidetracked what not so long ago was a world-leading, cross-country train system and reduced it to an underfunded hodgepodge that is an insult to the traveling public and wholly inadequate for a nation with pretensions of greatness."
"Critics who call high speed rail a 'boondoggle' are wildly mistaken. Its the existing knot of ever-expanding freeways and airport terminals that is an unsustainable boondoggle." -Edmund Xu
"Highways and airports receive about 45 times the subsidies that Amtrak does" -National Journal
"Denver is building 119 miles of light rail and 70 new stations in a decade, creating huge development opportunities to make the region more livable and sustainable." -Reconnecting America
"Not only will high-speed rail significantly reduce travel times and traffic congestion for Dallas and Houston area residents, but it will also create new, high-paying jobs and stimulate economic growth," -Dallas Mayor Mike Rawlings
"Republicans support, where economically viable, the development of a high-speed passenger railroad system as an instrument of economic development and enhanced mobility." -Republican Party Platform 2004
"High speed rail is the large scale, comprehensive solution to both climate change and the coming energy crisis." -ushsr
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