A family of four living on $39,000 a year, going to LA? I sense another strawman. The gasoline alone is 20% of his weekly wages. Forget about the Disneyland tickets.

And yes, I have been down I-5 lately, driving all the way to San Diego for Christmas. We hit traffic, sure, but not nearly as much as I expected, and we didn’t leave at 5 a.m. or do anything special to avoid it.

If there was a reasonable train/bus combination to take instead, I’d have been on it. I thought a lot about how nice it would have been to take HSR on that trip, even if it meant taking a bus to Fresno, HSR to Anaheim and a regular train to San Diego.

But that’s the same argument against flying.

CC continued: “I’m just saying the level of gas and gridlock isn’t high enough for most Californians to say, ‘Yeah. I’d use that and keep my car at home.’”

Been down I-5 lately? We drove down after Christmas and ran into gridlock at completely-unexpected places and times. We considered flying, but have you priced airline tickets lately? (Jet fuel comes from the same $110 barrel as gasoline, doesn’t it?)

Yeah, I’d drive to a Bay Area HSR station, ride a couple hours, and rent a car at the other end. Instead of driving several hours and arriving stiff and tired? In a heartbeat.

If you fly Southwest, you still have to make your way to SFO/OAK/SJC, bags and kids in tow, etc. When you arrive at LAX, do you take a one-hour bus ride, or rent a car?

If you’re going to compare HSR to Southwest, at least compare the same things (go to terminal at this end, rent car at that end).

I love the idea of having fast service to SoCal. I’d abandon Southwest Airlines if I could take the train for the same price or even a little more than flying. My doubts stem from the logic of piling Mom, Dad, Joey and Buffy into the family car to visit Grandma in West Covina rather than making your way from Vallejo to San Francisco, bags and kids in tow, paying $220 and getting on a lovely cool train (that might, I’ll concede, make it worthwhile for many passengers) to downtown LA and then taking a one-hour bus ride to somewhere within maybe a mile of their destination.

That’s IF it gets built. But that’s where the “esoteric” part comes in. Most people in California have never experienced high-speed rail. I have. I love it. I get it. I just think the car-loving public (and yes, Californians do love their cars, for better or worse) will need a good deal of convincing that the benefits are worth the ever-increasing cost.

The Corridor gets decent ridership with service that is miserable, ditto ACE. I have ridden the Corridor quite frequently – it is slow, *expensive*, and unreliable, other than that it’s great. Comparatively Caltrain is fast, cheap, and reliable – that’s why it’s bursting at the seams. If the Corridor were that level, it would be packed.

I guarantee if they build SMART and do a decent job with it (the number of stops is not too high which makes me hopeful) it will be *packed*. The GG Transit buses from Santa Rosa get good ridership for service that will on the whole be slower.

And that’s a service that isn’t really HSR. It’s a modern intercity train with a few high speed segments. The CAHSR system would smoke Acela, by perhaps as much as 100 mph.

Face it. HSR demand is there. If we build it, they will come.

As to shutting down commuter rail systems, people screamed and howled a few years back when BART nearly went out on strike. Rail systems across the state are doing a booming business, and regional and local agencies are planning billions of new lines and services (if only they could get the money). The Coast Starlight is a poorly funded and poorly delivered service – but even with those constraints, in the summer months, it is close to capacity.

I don’t understand how you can make these kinds of claims. They fly in the face of all available evidence. I’m sure my case for HSR has its flaws and weak spots, but you’re not bringing any actual evidence to the table. Instead you fall back on your obsolete assumption that Californians are firmly wedded to their cars. They’re not. Look around you. More and more are taking any chance they can get to stop driving.

What prevents more folks from doing it is the lack of useful alternatives. But where those alternatives exist, as I said, ridership is rising fast. HSR would initiate a great deal of demand.

And your comparisons to European countries also show a lack of knowledge. Spain was a car-centric culture for a very long time. When the first AVE line was built to connect Madrid and Sevilla in 1992 it was seen as a vanity project that would fall on its face. Instead, the car-happy Spanish flocked to it and the system was immediately profitable, and now has been extended to four new cities, with three more branches in the works.

Ultimately, what this comes down to is whether or not Californians realize that the 20th century is over, and with it their car-dependent transportation system. Judging by the ridership numbers, I think Californians are grasping that point. And I am absolutely stunned that you are not.