Follow up to previous postings on high speed rail in America, this news release: “The California High-Speed Rail Authority’s forecasts of demand and ridership for a new San Francisco-to-Los Angeles high-speed train are not reliable because they are based on an inconsistent model, according to a new study by researchers at the Institute of Transportation Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. The rail authority used the model to forecast ridership under a variety of scenarios, including different configurations of routing, pricing, frequency of service and travel time. “We found that the model that the rail authority relied upon to create average ridership projections was flawed at key decision-making junctures, ” said the project’s principal investigator Samer Madanat, director of ITS Berkeley and UC Berkeley professor of civil and environmental engineering. “This means that the forecast of ridership is unlikely to be very close to the ridership that would actually materialize if the system were built. As such, it is not possible to predict whether the proposed high-speed rail system will experience healthy profits or severe revenue shortfalls.” The study is the first academic review of the rail authority’s ridership forecasts, which was included in California’s successful application for federal stimulus dollars. In January 2010, the Obama administration awarded the state $2.25 billion in stimulus funds for trains that are expected to reach 220 miles per hour between Los Angeles and San Francisco.”