I expected better from you than a knee-jerk “you must be on the payroll” dismissal. How weak.

While I get that you don’t like the current approach for California HSR, what you advocate for is mediocre incrementalism. There is no doubt that with a billion here and a billion there you could make far more immediate progress, both in terms of ridership and revenue, than what is now being built. That doesn’t automatically discredit the entire undertaking.

Building a high capacity, high speed, low polluting transportation network backbone for California is not something you do by selecting the immediate next tactical step (a double tracking project here, a new frequency there) to get the best immediate bang for your immediate buck, no matter how “smart” that step may immediately appear. That incremental path leads, “smart” step by “smart” step, to a sub-optimal and mediocre system that will have inherent limits... by following the locally optimal trajectory through a parameter space you will end up at a local maximum of utility. That local maximum is not the global maximum of the utility function and is not where we need to go. Your “smart” incrementalism starts out great (bravo!) but leads straight to mediocrity.

Building a modern rail network in California requires thinking ten steps ahead, and then working backwards to figure out the most effective immediate step to get there. That step will NOT have the most bang for the buck in the short term, nor should it. It may even have zero immediate benefit. But it will eventually get you to the ultimate goal.

Now, if you question the need for a high capacity, high speed, low carbon mobility solution for California, we can just agree to disagree.

What we can and do agree on is that CHSRA isn’t following the right trajectory. There is waste and inefficiency and bad planning, but it’s not too late to fix it.