This "great" nimby "victory" for the "environment" increases "avoidable" VMT, burns more "avoidable" diesel, and actually increases "avoidable" transportation related greenhouse gas emissions.

The High Desert corridor would take over 50,000 truck trips out of the LA basin, and off of the gridlocked urban freeways. These are truck trips bound to and from the Central Valley to and from points east of the LA basin, and cut off as much as thirty miles for those trips, that bypass the LA basin, also improving health related air quality in the South Coast Air Basin.

With higher efficiency semi trucks you get about 8 mpg., at 22 pounds of CO2 per gallon of diesel burned, times 50,000 trips, times 3.75 gallons burned, times 365 days per year, is around 753,000 tons per year of avoidable CO2 emissions.

They have continued the HSR link study, although, it makes little sense without the toll road. I am not sure how you build or finance the share ROW... So this should be interesting, as it would seem they will have to do some serious revisions to the current environmental work for the HSR component.

These trucks are meeting real demands, and these trips will be made, regardless of the route...

So this "victory" over "evil" roads actually makes things "worse" for all stakeholders with increased avoidable costs, increased avoidable congestion, and it does nothing to help improve the environment. I've gotten really spoiled by the cold beer and toilet paper those "evil" trucks deliver...

Of course, as you note FUD, today it is the "evil" autos, those "evil" (capitalist) trucks and that "evil" VMT (Vehicle Miles Travelled for those wondering)... And, the illogical State "VMT" policy also applies to those VMT driven even by zero emission vehicles...

The kind of math free phony pseudo environmentalism this "victory" of neo-luddite thinking represents is as alarming as the ignorance of those who deny global warming, and the impacts of CO2... When these fringes are done screwing things up, the Everglades are toast, and we are all going to starve to death, in the dark...