Let’s look at the California example. Martin Engel provides the following comment on this San Francisco Examiner “news” report about a survey of Californians on the proposed LA to San Francisco high-speed rail line.
Here we go again. Another nonsense survey. “Would you go by train to anywhere if you had to travel and there were no other options?” What are we, idiots?
Did the survey ask only air travelers, since that is the only population that must make such a choice? Does anyone in his or her right mind believe that a train ticket will cost $50. in ten years, as Kopp and Diridon keep promising? How much did train tickets cost ten years ago? How much do they cost now? How many people in the Bay Area have even taken a train to LA, and when was that? What’s this silliness about “limiting flights?” Who is going to limit flights? Why not ask about “limiting driving?” Asking hypothetical questions in surveys is for the mindless.
Who do you suppose hired the BW Research Partnership to conduct this survey and why doesn’t the article state that?
Journalists who write about the high-speed train based exclusively on information generated by the train’s promoters belong in the advertising business, not the journalism business.
Oh, and Mr. Diridon is frequently inconvenienced when his flight time to LA takes four hours (going first-class on the taxpayers’ dime). One of the problems, he says, is extra cab fares to airports. They will be free to the train station, of course. Wait, this train of his is going to go door to door, stopping right in front of my house and then at my downtown office in LA . Wow, who doesn’t want a train like that.
