Exactly, as people are priced out of the cities, having good HSR connections to SF and LA would be able to spur a lot of regional growth.
This is a pretty common kind of blindspot for people to have, talking about how crazy it is to build transit to places with or lower populations or less population density, but forget that a lot of well-connected, dense places with good transit weren't very dense before good transit was built!
Transit to... Bakersfield? It's 112 miles from Los Angeles. Dumping high-speed rail (which in the current plan won't be high speed at all between Bakersfield and LA, but is going to be a slow, circuitous route going through Palmdale and Lancaster) is not really going to be realistic for any kind of commuting to LA.
There is a reason these cities never got developed more than they are. It's kind of flat, unappealing scenery and it's boiling hot in the summer. People would rather live in LA. California has huge swathes of land with very, very low population density because nobody wants to live there.
> It's kind of flat, unappealing scenery and it's boiling hot in the summer.
Several decades ago, you could have levied the same criticisms against South San Jose, Morgan Hill, and so on. But people now want to live here.
There are basically two ways to sustain the growth in California. One is to greatly densify places like the SF Bay Area, another is to improve the infrastructure elsewhere. And I don't expect see residential high rises in Palo Alto any time soon.
Up north, there's plenty of places that are more desirable in terms of weather, but they're not gonna get developed for environmental reasons. So what's left?
This is a pretty common kind of blindspot for people to have, talking about how crazy it is to build transit to places with or lower populations or less population density, but forget that a lot of well-connected, dense places with good transit weren't very dense before good transit was built!