What I am impressed by is how time competitive the Expo Line actually was, after the walk to the station, the wait for the train, and the walk to the Office.

This is why frequency of service matters, since wait time is the one variable that can be changed with the Metro option. The parallel Metro train speed actually began passing the car, once it was on the Air Line ROW....another one of the success stories, I fought for in my long career.

The Gold Line is much faster out of Downtown LA to Pasadena, and from Pasadena to Azusa is much faster than the I-210, and if you bike to the station, you beat the car, to anyplace within about 1 mile of a Gold Line station.

Now, for someone to do this "travel time" race from LA to San Diego, or vice versa, by Amtrak, versus auto, on a Saturday afternoon... Where, given "normal" peak and weekend congestion on the I-5, the train often wins, by well over two hours. And, with a non stop 2 hour run time, to San Diego (where with complete DT, and some 110 running, it is easily doable,) you can beat the traffic on I-5 by over 3 hours..

It is a shame that our politicians, wasting billions on the taxpayer financed CAHSRA "cluster f3ck" in the Valley, don't seem to understand that spending that in places like LOSSAN, or even to do things like SMART "right" (like with double track, and providing high frequency service levels, that are needed to get folks to use it) is where we should be putting most of our scarce commuter and intercity rail dollars. Because it is where people who are stuck in the gridlocked traffic, do actually seem to fill these trains....?