Quote:
Originally Posted by Steely Dan
and that's the reason your chicago analogy is kind of goofy. unless all 300M americans decide to move to chicagoland over the next several decades, this town will never run out of corn fields to gobble up with even more unceasing sprawl. if chicagoland had exhausted all of its available buildable land (like the bay area), then more condos in the city (and everywhere) would have to be a part of the solution to $2M schaumburg houses.
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Oddly, this might ultimately be the best argument for CA HSR of all. CA can match Illinois cornfield for cornfield (well, nut and grape orchard for cornfield) if you start including the Central Valley and HSR would make rapid commuting from much of the CV to Silicon Valley a practical (if, perhaps, expensive) possibility.
Right now there's
"ACE" (Altamonte Corridor Express) serving a similar purpose much less well (it's hardly "high speed" but it does get people to SV jobs from CV homes). And if BART gets extended to Livermore as has long been under consideration, that almost gets CV dwellers to downtown SF (and soon enough downtown SJ) jobs.