Ben and Mook,

Courts:

This will not be decided near term on the Prop. 1A compliance issues. Courts are loath to micro-manage the voters "intent", that is what elected officials are supposed to do, under our system. There are a number of significant issues of statutory compliance with CEQA that are sticky and the poor quality of planning and environmental impact analysis under Kopp and Arnold's regime was and is still quite lacking. And finally there is the reality of the failure to begin condemnation of required properties, which could take 18-36 months for the currently approved "IOS" to nowhere. This creates problems with the Federal ARRA funds, which will lapse, if not spent by the deadline.

Mook's points:

Mook is right about many points, we do need a system of some sort, and these things take time to build and sort themselves out. But, this is very different from the freeways. There is simply no problem statement, on what kind of system, over what phasing, or prioritization of components and projects to "implement", are required, to solve what observed and pressing transportation needs, at an affordable cost/benefit ratio, with taxpayer money......

Perfection and nirvana not required:

Don't get me wrong, I support the concept of a high speed component in a well planned system of regional, intercity, and high speed passenger rail for California. And, it doesn't have to be exactly perfect, or the fastest, or the cheapest, or some other extreme measure of perfection. But, right now, we have no real rail plan at all. And, the more I read and reread of the Draft State Rail Plan, the more apparent it is that we don't really have clear goals and objectives to guide the rail "vision" or program.

Total Quality Management and Management by Objective:

What are we doing and why are we doing it? Dr. Demming's Fourteen Steps of Total Quality management don't mean much, if you can't answer this first question, because the rest of the points are about "how" to do it right. So without a set of realistic and needed goals and objectives it doesn't really matter how we do it. Since there is no measure of effectiveness, there is no way to assess benefits or success, and plenty of opportunity to waste taxpayer monies.

BOB2