If high speed rail doesn't make it to SF, all city councils and mayors of all cities in the peninsula should get fired.

SILICON VALLEY -- The California High Speed Rail Authority is thinking about potentially abandoning the San Francisco-to-San Jose section of its proposed high speed rail line -- saying running 200-mile-per-hour bullet trains through the Peninsula might be politically impossible.

    The authority is instead floating a new idea, which would have the train line begin in San Jose, instead of San Francisco.

Are you kidding? Starting the rail in San Jose? A public works project that would improve lives for millions being stalled on nitpicky concerns by inconsequential bedroom communities? NIMBYism at its worst. I'm looking at you, Menlo Park, Atherton, and Palo Alto.

If we don't get this done, everybody in the SF Bay loses. And the blame will lie with you, Peninsula communities. (Especially when you look at particularly anti-HSR communities like Menlo Park and Atherton.) Get it together, people.

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6 responses
This is so infuriating.
I could not agree more. Having lived in the Bay Area, NYC and Chicago, I find the Bay Area's public transportation not only embarrassing but also an economic hinderance to the area's economy. Young folks in SF are hesitant to take jobs in the Valley because of the nightmares of commuting on the 101 / the pain that is CalTrain. When my startup, Data Robotics, moved from Mountain View to Santa Clara, I had to go from taking CalTrain every day to driving on 101 because CalTrain service to Santa Clara is so poor and slow. If only we had a bullet train...
Seriously, today I ran to the Burlingame Caltrain station to make a train that ended up being 15 minutes late. Then got off 5 minutes later at Millbrae to transfer to BART. Which was also late.

An hour later, I end up in SF. To go less than 15 miles.

Imagine if the NYC subway had never been built because of NIMBYism due to a few residents who didn't want to deal with the construction noise...At some point government requires vision and a backbone both of which CA state politics consistently lacks.
What a joke. The bay area is the only area in CA that needs this kind of transportation improvement (we don't need a bullet train down here in Orange County), and now they don't even want to bother with it where it's needed most? Still can't believe California even passed Prop 1A. Even if the thing does get built between Socal and Norcal, it will still be faster and cheaper just to fly. Just another example of uninformed voters passing an unrealistic prop that we will never see come to fruition in our lifetimes, and yet will still waste billions of tax dollars. California should have focused on regional improvements like this particular stretch in the Bay Area, rather than trying to build out a European-style transit system where we don't even need it. Way to go CA!
All the more reason, it should have taken the Altamont Pass route. This is ridiculous. Why the train is skipping Sacramento and the central valley is beyond me. #fail