Yea I understand that the goal of the california HSR is to get you from SF to LA in its current form, but I guess what I'm getting at is that these systems beco

Yea I understand that the goal of the california HSR is to get you from SF to LA in its current form, but I guess what I'm getting at is that these systems become much more viable when they truly get you from point A to point B for commuters extremely quickly -- ridership goes way up. If it takes you 30 mins to get someplace that previously took an hour or more, then taking that small transfer seems like a small burden to add onto that. So at least if part of your trip is at very high speed that is extremely helpful, and focuses additional density desires for people who want to move there or build houses. For example, the Taiwan HSR can get you from Taipei downtown to Hsinchu in around 45 mins, and its around the same distance between SF and San Jose -- 50-ish miles. The baby bullet assuming you can actually catch one will take around 1.5 hours to get from SF to San Jose. In Taipei, driving to Hsinchu vs taking the HSR is kind of ridiculous because you hit so much traffic just trying to get out of the city and then the toll roads along the way can be backed up at various points.. so the result is that if you can take the HSR, a large percentage of people do take it. BTW to get that 45 minute time between Taipei and Hsinchu, it stops at I think 2-3 stops along the way. So, you could have SF downtown, SFO, maybe Redwood City, Mountain View, and then San Jose. I mean these trains can go 170 miles per hour and they only take a couple of minutes to get up to around 130 mph, so its not like they need to have zero stops. But I guess if a 1.5 hour commute vs. 45 min commute people don't care too much about, then HSR is not really that useful, but I do think people would really want that. The HSR in the SF peninsula area as far as I know will not go much faster than any trains on that same corridor right now for a variety of reasons. So basically what we really need is a totally new corridor that separates grade such as elevated or underground in order to get the speeds and safety.