The train will never connect LA and SF. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/27/us/california-rail-project-advances-amid-cries-of-boondoggle.html?pagewanted=all

The train will never connect LA and SF. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/27/us/california-rail-project-advances-amid-cries-of-boondoggle.html?pagewanted=all The first phase would be a 130-mile stretch from Bakersfield to just south of Chowchilla in central California, at a cost of just over $6 billion; of that, $2.6 billion would come from a $9 billion high-speed rail bond passed by California voters in 2008, and $3.5 billion from federal stimulus money. ... The authority said it chose the relatively remote section in the Central Valley as the first leg to be built, even though few people there are looking to use a railroad, so that construction could begin next year and meet deadlines for using federal money. But critics suggest that the real motivation was to get the spur in place, calculating that future legislatures would not be able to abandon the project before it reached major population centers. “What they are hoping is that this will be to high-speed rail what Vietnam was to foreign policy: that once you’re in there, you have to get in deeper,” said Richard White, a professor of history at Stanford University. “The most logical outcome to me is we are going to have a white elephant in the San Joaquin Valley.” There is no plan on how to finance the project once the bond and federal money is exhausted, beyond a hope of private investment and public money during flusher times. ... Beyond that, several experts suggested that the train would never attract the promised ridership, in no small part because unlike, say, the Amtrak Northeast Corridor, the bullet train would go into cities that do not have particularly extensive public transit networks, forcing people to rent cars once they arrived. Low ridership would undercut the economic and environmental benefits that are part of the argument for the project.