When I was a kid we were essentially promised three things in the near future: jet packs, flying cars and monorails.
Forty years later, I'm still waiting.
The first two will probably never happen, and after observing people's driving skills with terrestrial vehicles, I think we can all agree that's probably for the best. Nobody wants random people falling from the sky and crashing through their roofs.
The monorail still seemed like a possibility; I grew up 5 miles from Disneyland and they already had one.
So here we are in the year 2011 and the monorail idea seems dead as a doornail as well. But it looked like we might just get the next best thing: HI SPEED RAIL
They've been promising a bullet train between LA and San Francisco for decades. If you've ever spent hours cooling your jets at LAX waiting for the fog to lift at SFO, turning a one hour flight into a 6 hour ordeal, you'd certainly appreciate an alternative.
All it's been for years is talk, talk, talk. But in recent years they finally started to make it a reality, passed bond measures to pay for it, did impact reports, planned the routes, etc., etc., etc. Ground was supposed to be broken next year.
Now you would think the people of Bakersfield would be overjoyed. Not only was the route going smack through the center of town, on existing right of ways, but you'd be able to be in Downtown LA in under an hour, SF in two. And even more exciting was that the very first leg of the route was supposed to be built here, between little ole' Bako and Merced. It would bring much needed jobs, especially since the current plan was to build a massive maintenance facility here in Kern County. We're talking 70,000 jobs! It was a "win/win" all the way around! What could possibly muck it up?
I'll tell you what... the locals.
The local battle cry these days is "WHAT ABOUT THE DRILLERS?!?"
Bakersfield High School, "Home of the Drillers™", sits downtown, directly backed up against the city's largest rail yard. It's a collection of squat, bunker-like buildings and resembles a Depression era penitentiary. The first time I saw it I thought it had been abandoned. It turns out, that for the hi speed rail line, they'll need to widen the right of way, and that will mean tearing down one small building. And it has everyone completely up in arms.
ONE BUILDING!
I also heard someone cite "safety concerns", which seems a little curious since every day hundreds of tanker cars, carrying God knows which noxious poisons, go screaming by at 80mph within feet of the school and football stadium. Then again, the locals never met an industrial strength pesticide or poison they couldn't embrace. If there's a chance it might take out the whole Freshman class, so be it, cost of doing business in Bakersfield. But demolish a 20's era concrete box? No fucking way.
So everyone's now riled up and filing law suits and thinking of every way possible to throw sand in the gears and stop the rail project in it's, pardon the pun, tracks. Morons.
And I see, in the article, that it isn't just students and alumni who are spitting mad. They've also angered... mobile home owners.
Well, that's the final nail in the coffin, isn't it?
