You might not be from California, but Merced to San Fernando valley is a pointless commute. Their is no need for high-speed rail in the 5 corridor. The 5 Fwy is

You might not be from California, but Merced to San Fernando valley is a pointless commute. Their is no need for high-speed rail in the 5 corridor. The 5 Fwy is "high-speed" and the corridor is both straight and sparseley populated. The benefit of HSR is only in plowing through the "last mile" (in actuality, the last hour). Look at London's linnk to pairs with Eurotunnel. That is a successful HSR because it drops into Waterloo. If it dropped into Heathrow/Gatwick/Cambridge or something else two hours away, it wouldn't be nearly as useful. It would be a more interesting project to see an HSR from Berkeley to Palo Alto or SF to Monterey, or something that actualy opened up new areas to one another. Right now the Bay Area is hamstrung by these types of regional bottlenecks, which the HSR is not going to solve. I don't disagree with you on the fact that these bottlenecks exist for the reasons your mention. But that is also my point: there is no consensus on them, so special interests are able to leverage legitimate differences of opinion. The eralier example of trans-continental was exactly the opposite. The consesnsus and political will was so strong, all barriers were basically steamrolled out of the way (legal, ethical, etc).