When Inner Mongolia has better train service than your tech capital.
It takes 98 minutes to travel from Sacramento to Richmond, CA, a distance of 116 kilometers, by Amtrak. It takes another 42 minutes to travel the 29 additional kilometers to San Francisco on BART. That's about 60 kph for train service from the capital of our most populous state. 
It takes longer to reach Sacramento from San Francisco by train than it does to get from Osaka to Tokyo, a distance of 549 km. And the train station in Sacramento is kind of a glorified open parking lot. There's no train station in SF at all, you have to cross the bay.
Hiroshima has a clean, fast light rail system that goes right by the spot where we dropped an atomic bomb on the city. I think about this a lot when people try to explain that it's too difficult to build efficient transit or real high-speed rail in California.
Another difference between the Osaka-Tokyo train line and the Amtrak Capitol Corridor (I can't believe my fingers just typed that) is that it's rare for the Shinkansen to stop and just stand in a field for two hours, where it is not rare for the Sacramento train to do this at all
And when I say "it's rare", I mean that Japanese people would get chest pains just reading that last tweet, if their minds can even encompass it.
It drives me nuts that we have the technology to put Tracy, Stockton, Modesto and Turlock within a half hour's commute to Silicon Valley, and don't use it. People like Facebook cafeteria workers commute this distance by car, some leaving at 2 AM to get to a 5 AM shift.
What bothers me most about this is not that we don't build it, but that the idea of building it is not even within the realm of the imaginable. When we have a housing crisis, a multi-trillion dollar industry, the best minds on the planet, and a 100 kilometer distance to overcome
On my first visit to northern California, my girlfriend's dad took us with him to a conference in LA. We decided to take Amtrak back up to SF. He dropped us off in Los Angeles and was waiting to meet our train in his car 12 hours later in Oakland. This should not be possible.
San Francisco had better, faster rail service in 1941 than it does today. The Sacramento Northern connected the Transbay terminal (via railroad ferry!) to Sacramento and Chico, at speeds of 112 kph.
Chico is a pretty university city in northern California. Redding used to be an aerospace startup hub and is near Mt. Shasta, a major tourist (and crystal spirit hippie) destination. Connecting these places to San Francisco and Sacramento with high-speed rail just makes sense.
All I want is full Sim City-level dictatorial power over northern and central California for five years. Is that so much to ask?
Northern California's best hope at a regional transportation plan is a very large earthquake that causes tremendous property damage. Something like this happened after Loma Prieta. But seismicity is not policy, and we should be ashamed to make the Hayward Fault do the work for us
The United States is a rich, powerful country full of enterprising people, so it can kind of coast along for a long time with a gridlocked, useless government. But our lives could be so much better! We need to send our young people abroad so they won't settle for what we have.
All we need is *one* true high-speed rail link anywhere in the country outside the DC to Boston corridor, to anchor expectations. (We have to build the DC to Boston one last or journalists will stop covering the topic. Force them to endure Acela while Texas gets a shinkansen)
