[Crawford]

His points all seem valid. And French TGV authorities made the same points, as did the original founders of CAHSR. If you want HSR in the U.S. you want this project to work. Why do all the transit experts say this project is madness?

CAHSR is pretty much the first project of its kind, anywhere. It started as a standard HSR project but has now morphed into a weird wildly overengineered commuter rail/jobs/economic justice project. The pronouncements are bizarre. They actually believe that routing an LA-SF line through random population centers strengthens the project, as if a NY-Atlanta flight benefits by flying over Charlotte.

The alignment is completely fu----ed up. The motivations are all wrong. They claim the poorest and most job-desperate areas are the highest priorities. If you take them at their word, rural Mississippi would be the best U.S. location for HSR. There will probably never be a complete LA-SF HSR line.