Don’t let high-speed rail get railroaded through our town Dear
Editor, This letter is to inform local residents that the
high-speed rail study session to be held on Nov. 3 in Morgan Hill
is extremely important!
Don’t let high-speed rail get railroaded through our town
Dear Editor,
This letter is to inform local residents that the high-speed rail study session to be held on Nov. 3 in Morgan Hill is extremely important!
High speed rail is a great thing if it is done right and put in the right place. This is not the right place, and their plan is to do it as cheaply as possible, which is not the right way. This project will be with us permanently after completion and it’s critical that everyone understand the major impact their poor design and destructive placement will have on all of our lives.
The route under consideration runs east of U.S. 101, and will cut through businesses, farms and homes. Some roads will be closed because the route crosses them.
Trains will run 240 mph, every 3 minutes, 24/7. The sound is a high-pitched screech, wind will create a debris field 1/2 mile on either side. The route here will be four tracks wide, plus 50-feet on either side for maintenance.
Some tracking will be on a 35-feet high elevation, and all tracking will have high voltage wires and posts rising 20 feet above the track. It’s true noise, vibration and visual pollution. The voters approved a high-speed rail line running from Sacramento to Los Angeles, with a spur running across the Altamont to San Francisco. High Speed Rail Authority has changed it to run from San Francisco south to Gilroy and then across Pacheco Pass, cutting through residential, commercial and agricultural lands and destroying our livelihoods and our way of life.
Contracts will be awarded not to California companies, but to overseas companies. China is a big player, bidding on a complete package, not only construction, but management.
How’s that for scary?
Please attend this very important meeting.
Elaine Jelsema, Gilroy
Transportation policy is leading us on a debt train to ruin
Dear Editor,
As long as we suffer VTA-COG radical socialist transit, our transport policy will have us, like others following bad transport policy, on a debt train to ruin, facing a trainwreck like the one that the USSR suffered. Bad transport policy makes bad government, unlivable communities, unsustainable debt burdens, abuses taxpayers, abuses motorists who are, according to recent data published by the federal government, paying 102 percent of the costs of their transport.
Transit by all modes (government sector radical socialism) pays only a very small fraction of its costs, which means that they must gouge the hell out of us to have their rides. The waste is staggering – just look at all those empty seats being transported on VTA-COG buses, on Caltrain, Amtrak, etc. Just look at the new “stimulus money” buses parked at the COG bus yard on Southside Road. While streets and highways see injuries and deaths, and our transit policy geniuses at VTA-COG make “unmet transit needs” our highest transport priority.
No money for road safety – we must pay for all unmet transit needs. Their insane, intolerable, abusive transport policy demands their recall from office. If they are not subject to our constitutional recall remedies from the transit agency joint power authorities, then we must remove them from their elected offices. ASAP. Unless we have transportation policy reform, we’re doomed. So, we need to get these abusers out of office. Please let your readers know this urgent “unmet need.”
Joseph P. Thompson, Gilroy
