I agree that California has political power bordering on nationhood (emissions standards notwithstanding). But in our republic, the voters don’t have longstanding positive experience with rail travel. I’m sure that helped get HSR started in Spain, which is most like California in population and distances that need to be traveled.

The thing to remember about Japan, Spain and France is that their national governments are much more powerful in domestic policy than the US federal government. For better or for worse, the US still hews to a federalist model, where US states have far more power over transportation policy than a Japanese prefecture or most Spanish regions (the autonomous communities such as Catalonia being exceptions).

So here in CA, thanks to our political system, states have to take the lead on most transportation policies. But the feds WILL help, once we put in our $10 billion stake.

As to convincing Californians, unleaded is now at $4 statewide and diesel is almost at $5…

So CA is in the same league as only the smaller of those countries.

But national governments have much greater power than any state or provincial government. CA isn’t comparable to countries in the scope and type of economic power a national government wields even though they might be the same size and even though CA might have a bigger economy.

The one thing that stands out to me about those comparisons is that those other projects are essentially national projects supported by national governments or now by more than one national government working togather. The projects support key national goals with something close to national concensus about the projects’ importance.

A long time ago, I had the chance to work in Japan for a while and of course rode the trains. I also had the chance to learn and think about the political history of the project. I remember that the key thing in a lot of peoples’ minds there was that the “Shinkansen” helped to knit togather the different regions of the country. This was likely the political goal in other countries as well. In Spain for instance.

The political situation for HSR here in CA is obviously very different. There is no national concensus on the importance of passenger rail. So, there’s no national involvement. That means that the economic wherewithal of the Federal government doesn’t come into play very much, if at all, with HSR.

I also don’t see any concensus amongst CA state political leader on the importance of HSR to CA. There are obviously some people who support it but a lot of support is lukewarm at best.

And it isn’t clear what the political goal of having HSR in CA is.

It isn’t enough for a project, particularly of this size, to make rational sense. It also has to make some political sense to make it important enough for political leaders to support it for the decades it will take to build the system.

On the main subject- that extra dollar per gallon will get there soon enough. The only thing that will push down gas prices is a willingness by consumers to buy less gas, and the only way to get that is with serious alternative forms of transportation that use different energy sources (like the electricity that will power HSR, which is made from Natural Gas, Uranium, Water, Wind, the Sun, and Coal that gets burned in other states, but not petrol).