I think I can, I think I can, I think I can.
And over the mountain the little engine went.
We’re going to get over that mountain, I have no doubt about it.
Gov. Jerry Brown championed a high speed rail that would connect southern and Northern California,
despite cost overruns, lawsuits over land use, and a lack of private investment.
Now, that high speed rail plan is being scaled back by new governor, Gavin Newsom.
The current project as planneds would cost too much and respectfully take too long.
What Gavin Newsom has done is he’s spit in Jerry Brown’s eye.
Newsom basically said, Jerry this is your little choo-choo
and I can’t afford to pay for your dream.
Columnist and fellow at Chapman University Joel Kotkin
has been skeptical of California’s high speed rail for years
and says that the only reason Brown stuck with it
was because it offered him a chance to have some sort of physical legacy.
Jerry Brown was the only reason why this thing hadn’t been killed before.
Gavin Newsom is looking at the future and saying,
you know, we're going to have all sorts of fiscal issues,
they're all things we want to do and this is an absurdity.
The high speed rail will now only stretch to Bakersfield to Merced.
And that’s not going to be easy because there is just not a lot of money to be made
between Bakersfield and Merced.
This is the ultimate train to nowhere,
going from two places that, don't have any particular relationship with each other.
It's a part of the, of the state where people actually drive.
The vast majority of people drive.
By the time got the station you still have to drive.
It's not like going from a place where people live because they can afford to, to a job center.
There's no job center involved here.
And here's the thing that really bothers me:
The Central Valley has very serious economic problems.
There is huge degrees of poverty, unemployment,
some of the poorest parts of the United States are in the central valley.
And we're doing this kind of fancy choo choo?
He says the high speed rail was always a solution in search of a problem.
The problems in California are not getting from LA or Orange County to San Jose or San Francisco.
Southwest does a spectacularly good job.
We have all these regional airports.
Most people in the major population centers are 15, 20 minutes,
maybe a half hour away from an airport where they can go in an hour directly to where they want to go.
The problems in California are inside the state.
It's getting from one part of southern California to another.
It's a problem of getting from one part of the Bay area to another.
And this didn't address that at all.
Everything from the Great Society to the New Deal started with a vision for our future.
Green New Deal backers say they want more high speed trains.
As a place to replace air travel and add green jobs.
This is a shot across the bow for the green new deal.
The green new deal is, is based on, you know, some ideas of people
that you ever wonder if they ever actually realized how big the United States is.
You know, when people say, we could be just like Europe, well Europe is much smaller.
The distances between cities has, are much less.
The cities were built, in many cases, two, three, 400 years ago, sometimes more.
And they were built around trains to start with.
Even so 80% of the people in Europe drive to work.
So the, the idea that you would go to a country where 90, 95% of the people drive to work
and that you are going to replace the roads
or that most of the long distance travel, the vast majority of it takes place in airplanes
is just lunacy.
I think that some of these people, like AOC,
I think somebody ought to, you know, put them in a car and say let's drive to Nebraska
and let's see how practical a train would be to get to Omaha.
It's not very practical at all.
So what’s Newsom doing here?
He’s basically scaling back.
He’s buying time to try and save money and hopefully get more money to get it going again.
The real battle in the Democratic Party is between reality and fantasy.
And this was a big win for reality.
People knew this was an incredibly stupid boondoggle.
And of course what’s really going to be interesting is:
Is any other state going to be as stupid as we are?