"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
"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
"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
"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
"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
"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
"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
US HSRABOUT USUS HSR MAPBENEFITSTRAINSINFRASTRUCTURENEWSVIDEOSJOBSSUSTAINABILITY --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- US High Speed Rail Association Capitol Hill Office at Union Station 10 G Street NE, Suite 710 Washington, DC 20002 (202) 248-5001
