Hard to believe -
- but no one has mentioned that the overwhelming majority of California's traffic demands (and therefore the root cause of nearly all congestion) relate to East/West and not North/South-bound traffic, as this iteration of HSR would supposedly address.
One can only wonder who stands to benefit from this project (and why proponents had to lie about the true costs at the time of the ballot proposition). As usual, the losers will be current and future generations of those tax payers still willing to reside in this politically dysfunctional state.