We took the train from San Jose to San Luis Obispo once. (Final destination- Cambria.) We thought it would be a fun trip for the kids and help us avoid holiday weekend traffic. It’s normally a 3.5 hr drive door-to-door including a rest stop or two.
It took about 20 minutes to get to downtown San Jose, park and get on the train. We ended up in a dark, smelly car filled with numerous questionable characters. My younger son was fiddling behind a seat and came out with an empty whiskey bottle (we considered ourselves lucky he didn’t find a used hypodermic needle)
It took 8.5 hrs to get to San Luis, we then rented a car and drove 40 minutes to Cambria, our destination.
So we paid for parking in San Jose, 4 train tickets, a rental car for the weekend and it took a total of 10 hours from start to finish. Does this make one bit of sense economically or time-wise??? NO!!
Today, if you plan ahead, you can purchase an $89 plane ticket to go from 5 different airports in No. Cal to ~9 different airports in So. Cal in less than 1 hr 15 mins, plus planes leave ~ every 30 minutes.
Only in screwed up California would anyone think that spending billions and billions of $$$ to replace plane travel with train travel makes sense. Of course these are the same stupid people who run empty light rail cars and buses all over the county so they can pat themselves on the back for saving the planet!!
“Stupid people are ruining this country.”
They already spent $700 million on business plans, consultants and environmental studies. And they haven’t laid a single mile of track yet!
Idiots is putting it mildly about the high speed rail supporters.