By Quinton Kopp : calmatters – excerpt
High speed rail requires a dedicated track and electrification, and almost a decade ago legislators prohibited a dedicated track in the Bay Area and non-electrified track in other areas.
My 1994 state Senate legislation established the California High-Speed Rail Project. It’s not inherently a “boondoggle”; it’s been made a boondoggle by politicians transforming it from high-speed to low-speed.
Functionally, high-speed rail requires a dedicated track and electrification. Almost a decade ago, legislative predecessors of state Sens. Jim Beall and Scott Wiener prohibited dedicated track to prevent the High-Speed Rail Authority from acquiring its own right-of-way from San Francisco to Gilroy. Thus, high-speed rail must use the Caltrain tracks, which limits no more than four trains hourly in primetime, because Caltrain, the right-of-way owner, will run six trains per hour…(more)
Or change the destination to San Jose or change the name of San Jose to San Francisco and stop the train there and you can save the issue of where to put the track along the peninsula. Electrification will be a more complicated problem to solve. Probably disbursing the funds to the various state transit systems is the most reasonable now.
