I wish that voters and leaders could’ve seen a menu of policy options when they approved this. I think they wouldn’t have gone in for such an irreversible proje

I wish that voters and leaders could’ve seen a menu of policy options when they approved this. I think they wouldn’t have gone in for such an irreversible project. For example, electric bus technology has been getting better and cheaper and seems will continue to get better in the future. So for all the money we’ll be spending on this throughout the 2020’s, we could’ve been converting buses, where practical, to electric. And if electric buses don’t work that well (few US models have yet been in operation for a long time), we can always just upgrade many thousands of regular buses to cleaner and more comfortable modern models. Incremental improvements are nice because they can be reversed and right-sized. It seems HSR is setting the size of its budget itself, as no one wants a half finished rail system. This wouldn’t be too bad except that there is a risk California will face pension problems in the future. The less money we tie up in debt now, the less chance there is for terrible cutbacks to critical services if a recession destroys tax revenues and pension assets.