[www.vox.com]

"A second — taking a weird detour to Palmdale rather than going straight from LA to Bakersfield — was totally senseless, slowing down traffic at great expense purely to promote a single transit-oriented development scheme that happened to have sparked enthusiasm on the LA County Commission."

"A giant project gets done piece by piece, and a natural way to approach that would have been to do a small, useful piece first.

One such useful piece would have been to upgrade the existing Amtrak route from Los Angeles to San Diego. It’s fairly popular already, and with investment in electrification, the trip could be made nearly an hour faster. California, however, decided to take the much more expensive option of planning to build a brand new rail line between the two cities on a different route — adding about $7 billion in extra costs to cut the trip time by 90 minutes rather than 60."