Max, the answer is yes, they could have hired "real" public staff to do some of this. Or simply used proper processes and incentives to do a proper job. The CHSRA could have done a few hundred other things along the way, that would have prevented this from becoming the bloated, gold plated, incompetently planned and managed public works catastrophe that it is today.

The CAHSRA had worked on the planning for nearly 13 years, before "choosing" thus option. And, since they were not ever required to do any of the FTA or FHWA "purpose and needs" in that planning process, l"the CAHSRA has been run by almost all consultants. And, with no requirements of justifying "high speed rail" or what "kind of speed and frequency of service, would those "needs" were given continuous marching orders to "only" plan for "real" "high speed" "only 200 mph.".

From the beginning, with the army of consultants running everything from day one, only the most expensive system that the fools appointed (not elected) to the CAHSRA Board wanted, to "show" that CA was as "modern" and "cool" as you really "cool" people in Europe, or Japan, and as "fsst" as China, because, we wanted to be really "cool", too.

Remember CA already had the three most successful rail corridors in the US outside of the Northeast Corridor, despite the second busiest rail corridor in the US (LOSSAN) still being effectively a single tracked railroad. There was no oversight by Wilson, or Davis, or Schwarzenegger, or Brown, and no real legislative oversight at all for the last 25 years of the CAHSRA fiasco, up until now. And. despite years of many of these valid criticisms, controversy, demonstrated incompetence, and out of control costs, this fiasco has sputtered on to where we are today...

All Federal funding for the States highways, transit, commuter, and intercity rail went through a relatively competent, but very political, California Transportation Commission, both to our State DOT (Caltrans), and to local lead agencies. The CTC, has acted as a "check" to ensure that funds are being allocated and prioritized based on "need". It assures the proper "purpose and needs" studies (to establish and validate transportation "purpose and need" to spend taxpayer dollars).

All funds coming to project through the CTC require that a project has done a proper "alternatives analysis" process (to determine a broad scope of potential alternatives to be tested to meet those "needs"). And, approves funding to proceed to "next steps" (environmental, preliminary engineering, design, and finally construction).

The CAHSRA fiasco, was not required to do any of those "initial" proper planning steps. The CHSRA Board, decided that we would build the "coolest", fastest, and most expensive train system we could design, based on little real demand analysis, establishing no real "purpose or need", based on a proposed 2 hour 40 minute travel time from SF to LA, on a very long and mountainous (especially via Gilroy and Pacheco pass) route, not serving over half of the Bay Area travel demand in the upper San Joaquin Valley, without any real analysis of "alternatives", not routes, not other HSR options. They presented this to the voters, and the Obama administration (and Ms. Boxer, then Senate Transportation Chair), as a "vision".

I am not the greatest fan of our emasculated Caltrans, nor of Caltrans infamous Division of Rail (often facetiously referred to as Division of Fail for being an "orphan" child in what was formerly the California Department of Highways), but they would have required all of the steps that the CAHSRA did not properly follow, and do have the base of personnel to do basic procurement and competitive bidding, by an unconflicted "public" staff. Instead, CAHSRA chose to use contractors and consultants, being paid to based on the amount of work that they manage (one of the hallmark's of the CAHSRA's "runaway money train" fiasco), to do all of the work.

Unelected Board, with no effective oversight, exempt from all of the normal "rules and regulations" to assure public needs are met, who were demanding a really "cool", "super fast", train, regardless of "needs", with cost as "no object", hiring folks who would give them whatever "vision" that the Board wanted, with no one having any incentive to do proper planning or (with actual disincentives????)to control costs..... And, with a scenario like that, what could possibly go wrong?

The CHSRA fiasco, in my nearly 25 years of history with it, has been a classic "case study" in its many glaring failures from its very inception.