CAHSR is not meant to connect desert towns, but SF to LA. They are more than big cities to be connected with HSR. There have been mistakes in planning and design, but you cannot get anywhere with insufficient funding. Unless funding is secure, there is no way that CAHSR will deliver to the promises. The only difference with Shinkansen is that in Japan the funding continued, despite the fact budget went spiralling 3 times more than the original plan.
But, in 1964 people didn't know whether HSR scheme would succeed. In 2020, there's more than enough evidence suggesting that HSR works and delivers an unprecedented capacity. When CAHSR comes online, the critics will also fall silent, but until then HSR will suffer from low public support. Do you think that Senate is vital in securing funding for HSR? Why can't Republicans understand the importance of HSR? I hope that Northeast Corridor, Texas Central and CAHSR will be HSR at sometime in the 2030s.
Leaving aside the strawman of the cost estimates, the supposed "ballooning" of which have always been wildly exaggerated, as soon as the "train to nowhere" moniker is thrown around, one really just needs to stop engaging: People are either willfully ignorant or somehow aroused at the prospect that anyone responsible for executing this program has at any point acted seriously to position -- and deliver -- this project without the opportunity for interim service, despite
a) the Authority being
legally and
fiduciarily required to demonstrate and meet this condition to even receive disbursement of funds and
b) the fact that the Central Valley segment has always been called the "
Initial Operating Segment."
The basic business plan the Authority has had for delivering this program hasn't fundamentally changed all that much, other than communities insisting on adjustments to the alignment that changed the entire timeline and basic cost assumptions of that end of the corridor: that is, they didn't "
pivot" to the Bay Area,
the scope for the LA-Basin component expanded beyond the window of interim operations.
People enter a distortion field whenever this project is discussed (ie.
media who insisted Newsom "cancelled" the project, when he neither said nor implied any such thing -- even the reporting linked is rife with mischaracterizations and falsehoods...). Overall, media outlets -- especially, the LATimes -- in this country have been generally bad at covering this project (as they are with most transport infrastructure), and this seems to be creating a self-fulfilling prophecy where people are imagining the project's fortunes are diminishing when, in actuality, no such thing has occurred.
The reality is that the project is and always has been sound -- they would not have advanced out of environmental review and received approvals (and funds) were this
not the case. There are
long-planned,
existing, and
possible infrastructure investments that will facilitate perfectly viable interim service as the full system is continually built-out.
Starting in either LA or the Bay Area would
not have delivered the project faster; it only would have mooted the advantage of existing bookend infrastructure as there is of yet no wormhole -- or any teleportation device -- to magic trains between San Jose and Los Angeles without passing through the Central Valley...
