I just watched the promo video put out by the California High-Speed Railroad folks. An interesting quote from someone on there was to the effect that CA will spend something like $80 billion over the next 10 years on upgrading freeways, and a new high-speed train system can be built for half that. (That sounds about right, after looking at the figures.)

People always whine about how railroads are expensive, but no one ever complains about the expense of building new highways. I guess they view the former as optional and the latter as a necessary evil. If it were true that it is, in the long run, cheaper to build rail infrastructure and to divert people to it--and we could convince everyone that this were the case--it might make it easier to get these things built...