The Fight Over High-Speed Rail

12 July 2010 |permalink | email article

Here’s another issue on which Meg Whitman and Jerry Brown disagree. It’s high-speed rail. As the San Jose Mercury News reported, the outcome could shape the election, and determine whether the next governor will either look ahead or be reactionary.

Republican Whitman, the former eBay CEO, said through a spokeswoman that she believe the state cannot afford the costs associated with high-speed rail due to our current fiscal crisis.” She lives in the wealthy Peninsula town of Atherton, ground zero in the anti-bullet train movement because of concerns about tracks that would run through the community.

Jerry Brown, the Democratic nominee, and state attorney general, started the push for high-speed rail in 1982 and thinks that the current plan is a “bold” one that “we should find a way to make work,” his spokesman said. Brown lives in Oakland and would not be impacted by the proposed train route.

The $43 billion San Francisco-to-Los Angeles route – planed to run along Caltrain tracks in the Bay area – is due to start construction in the 2012. Key decisions will have to be made in 2011, after the new governor takes office in January and after Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger is termed out. He was a recent high-speed rail supporter because of the federal stimulus money it garnered.

Robert Cruikshank, Californians for High-Speed chairman, noted than former Palo Alto Mayor Yoriko Kishimoto, the most vocal anti-train critic in the Southern Peninsula’s 21st Assembly District in the June Democratic primary, lost to two candidates who were more even tempered on the issue.

“If I’m Jerry Brown, I would strongly support high-speed rail in the Peninsula and the Bay area,” Cruikshank said. “I would go up to Meg Whitman’s turf in the Silicon Valley and say, “This how we’re going to get California back to work.”

Given Whitman’s billionaire status, and her attempt to be elected at any cost, it’s the kind of issue which may not play well with Bay Area voters or perhaps anywhere else. It reminds me of that classic elitist phrase, “Not in my back yard.”

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