Bob, it’s distasteful to constantly crow about your expertise and professional qualifications. I’m sure you’re a smart and experienced fellow but show us, don’t tell us. It doesn’t help your argument as much as you think to lord your qualifications over others, or demand to see others’ qualifications before you can properly assess their opinions.

I have said before that I have nothing against incremental investments that are geared towards eventually realizing a statewide high speed (yes 200+ mph) transportation backbone with effective feeder networks in metro areas. If we were to proceed as you advocate, we would invest many small sums into incremental projects that ultimately add to less than the sum of their parts. There has to be a strategy. Your approach is all tactics, does work best in the short term, but will only find a local optimum of a very large parameter space. Incrementalism is OK as long as the long term end result isn’t mediocre.

California and the US have fallen so far behind the state of the art of passenger rail that advocates like you have learned to have lower ambition. In a way, your decades of experience hold you back.

We have spent just $5 billion on HSR over the past decade, so quit your bellyaching about how HSR is a black hole sucking the life out of California rail investment. Meanwhile we spend $20B on roads in California. PER YEAR.