Lawmakers in California approved billions of dollars Friday in construction financing for the initial segment of the nation’s first dedicated high-speed rail line connecting Los Angeles and San Francisco. The move marked a major political victory for Democratic Gov. Jerry Brown and the Obama administration, which have promoted bullet trains as job generators and clean transportation alternatives. The bill authorizes the state to begin selling $4.5 billion in voter-approved bonds that includes $2.6 billion to build an initial 130-mile stretch of the high-speed rail line in the Central Valley.
California is bankrupt, so they are going to spend billions of dollars building a useless train line. If you want to get from the Bay Area to LA, you hop on a Southwest Airlines flight in San Jose, Oakland or San Francisco and you are in LA an hour later. It is cheap, easy and fast. Why would anyone want to take a high speed train which takes three times as long, goes a couple hundred miles out of the way through the Central Valley, and crosses the Hayward fault and the San Andreas fault?