Bloomberg<\/a>, from whom our friends at the Las Vegas Review-Journal pilfered their “scoop” (again, Tuesday), “Brightline West is betting it can capture about 20% of the 47 million annual trips projected between Southern California and Las Vegas by 2031, according to bond offering documents. The all-electric trains on the rail line, built along a median on Interstate-15, are expected to reach speeds as high as 200 miles per hour. Service is expected to begin in September 2029.”<\/p>\nAt one point, service was expected to begin in 2028.<\/p>\n
While we’re just pulling numbers out of asses, Brightline will serve 48.6 trillion of those little liquor bottles to 12 billion bachelorettes when service begins next week sometime.<\/p>\n
It’s all just so mind-numbingly stupid.<\/p>\n
The average airfare from L.A. to Las Vegas is about $100 (often less). The flight is about an hour. Brightline’s tickets are expected to be $120. The ride will take more than two hours.<\/p>\n
After riders get to Rancho Cucamonga, they have to jump on Metrolink, a regional commuter rail service, to get to L.A.<\/p>\n
It doesn’t matter how optimistic Brightline is, or how great their trains are doing in other states, or how breathlessly our local journalists report about this train. It’s a pipe dream, an empty promise, a fictional daydream, a fool’s errand, a wild goose chase, a ghost project.<\/p>\n
A bubble inside a smoke screen wrapped in a mirage.<\/p>\n
In case you’re not picking up on the nuance here: It’s utter bullshit. Again.<\/p>\n
Do we love being the only one to call bullshit on bullshit projects? Yes, sort of. Would we rather not have so many bullshit projects to call out as bullshit? Probably.<\/p>\n
As we said in another story recently, in the absence of real journalism, the grifters write the headlines.<\/p>\n
We only come up with one really good quote a year, so we’re trying to make the most of it.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The high-speed train project that was never happening is exponentially not happening based upon new cost estimates. The cost of the project was originally $12 billion; now it’s $21 billion (an increase of 75%). The project has just $5.5 billion in funding ($3 billion in federal grant money, $2.5 billion in bonds), which means the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[23,30],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-45134","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-vegas","category-las-vegas-wtf"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n
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