Michael,

As someone who attended these meetings for the last 10 years and asked very basic questions,which were never ably answered about costs, benefits, performance, travel markets, and other assumptions. The entire CHSRA political, planning, and financial strategy under both Kopp and Pringle appears to have been entirely based on lies to the legislature and to the voters. Just how many discredited, dubious, flawed, and failed business plans do the taxpayers have to pay for to figure out that this was sold on what were often very clearly lies?

I think that what is now being developed now as "Plan B", a fully integrated "high speed" rail passenger system, is probably much closer to what voters thought they were supposed to get, that could be delivered at a cost much closer to what the voters were told it would be.

Voters mostly vote for ideas, sometimes a few read the details on things that they might they like, but in the details they smell a rat and vote against things that sound too good, or are really of benefit to a few who paid for the initiative. Sometimes, that doesn't happen often enough, and sometimes the voters actually think that the people "in charge" will just need to figure it out and make it work.

The general concept of 'high speed" rail that most voters thought they were voting for was not/is not entirely unsound given increasing traffic congestion and high gas prices. Many of these voters have now ridden regional or intercity trains and want faster and more frequent service, and thought this woudl give them that alternative.

The details of how this "super high speed" rail was to be done were always problematic, and the costs were never realistic, given the ludicrous promises of performance from the CHSRA's staff and Board at the time.

High Speed may end up being "only" an affordable 125-110 mph system, with more of the investments on corridors like LOSSAN and the SJC where that makes sense, and that will probably will have more realistic travel benefits on already congested inter-urban corridors.

This recent change at the CHSRA is already a big improvement in realism, performance, accountability, and affordability, over the outright lies about costs and purported performance that were told to the voters by the previous CHSRA Boards.

I think this is a good change at CHSRA, because we were at a point where this was so screwed up, that it couldn't get much worse?