From Stanford history professor Richard White’s answer to the question, “Does California need a high-speed rail line, ultimately connecting San Francisco to Los Angeles?” in the New York Times:

“We shouldn’t build it. At best it will not solve any problems for decades to come, and at worst it will become an expensive problem itself. It will become a Vietnam of transportation: easy to begin and difficult and expensive to stop.

In a state dismantling its education system and watching its existing infrastructure collapse, it is criminally profligate to build a system that will drain revenue from more-needed projects. This is like building a state-of-the-art driveway while your house collapses.

Highway 5 between Los Angeles and San Francisco is miserable, but it is not the key transportation problem in California. For high-speed rail to work, it needs to get people out of cars, but the project doesn’t touch the huge mass of traffic, which swirls daily in the Los Angeles and San Francisco metropolitan areas. High-speed rail between Boston and Washington, D.C., connects trains with functioning public transportation systems. This is not true in Los Angeles nor in large parts of the Bay area.”