I believe there are favorable arguments for both route options. The Tejon route is factually shorter in route miles. Mitigating this fact somewhat is the fact that the Tejon route could present greater construction cost by having more tunnel and cut/fill work. It has a greater number of "rough terrain" miles. The strongest argument in favor of the Antelope Valley-Tehachipi route is the Antelope Valley itself. The Palmdale and Lancaster areas have had phenomenal growth, and due to the abundant open space and airport, promise to continue growth. Look at the maps, and notice that the high desert between Palmdale and Mojave is relatively low slope topology, whereas the Tejon route would be rough terrain from Valencia to the bottom of the Grapevine. If National HSR happens, it would seem to make sense that the east west section would most logically intersect the CA HSR around Palmdale/Lancaster. And just for the record, I question the wisdom of using so many tunnels in what is a known high seismic activity region (Tehachipi 1952 anyone?). Looking beyond the local overview of the CA HSR to the National level, I tend to think the AV route edges out the "shorter" Tejon route. That said, I do agree with some of the descriptions of the project mangement. Anything with politics embedded is going to be that way. I wish we could see that HSR just makes sense irrespective of politics. The uncomfortable truth, at least in California, is that the population density makes freeway/auto solutions permanently impractical, even if fuel was free. I would like to see more research on creating a physically idealized auto that could be intermodally "Auto-Trained". A vehicle with constrained length could be transversely loaded in parallel fashion reasonably quickly. One of the problems with HSR, politically, is the desire on the part of every city and county that any line passes through to want to have a stop there. It doesn't much of that and you can drop the HS in HSR. What I have been advocating is for CAHSR to purchase sufficiently wide ROW to allow sections where MSR and LR can be located adjacently and interconnect to allow HSR stops to be kept around the 250 mile mark. This screams loudly for local govt to preserve branch and secondary rail routes, even if by railbanking, to allow for this. Short term real estate profits from ex-rail land sales have overshadowed the longer range vision of transportation needs far too often. Another facet of HSR that hasn't gotten any press that I'm aware of is freight HSR. A transcon freight HSR jointly funded by private and public monies, could do wonders to get truck traffic off the Interstate highways and increase overall speed of general traffic. Trucking needs to evolve to a railhead-to-customer medium.