It's a bold headline from my alma mater: "A Reality Check on High Speed Rail" is how UC Berkeley bills a recent HSR symposium. Already Morris Brown is peddling this as yet another reason why HSR is terrible and doomed to fail. Morris wants us to not dismiss the symposium lightly. OK, I'll dismiss it heavily:

For much of the last week we've been consumed with the news coming out of the Bay Area, from the Menlo Park Town Hall to the Atherton v. CHSRA decision (which both occurred on Wednesday, making that one of the more HSR-heavy days I've had lately). But I wanted to pause for a moment to bring readers' attention to some of the excellent takedowns of the HSR denial we've been seeing in the Washington Post and the New York Times lately, particularly two articles that I'd intended to write about but got sidetracked with the Great Peninsula Debate.

Part 3 of Harvard economist Edward Glaeser's series on HSR costs and benefits is up at the New York Times' Economix Blog. This week's entry focuses on the environmental impact of trains, and "other social benefits" that are rather nebulously defined.

So this is an odd article (from the California Farm Bureau):

As the state's High-Speed Rail Authority plans an 800-mile high-speed rail system that will help alleviate congestion on roadways and transport passengers from San Francisco to Los Angeles in a little over two and a half hours, California's agricultural landscape is likely to change dramatically.