I remember when BART was first built and San Mateo county opted out of BART. You couldn't take BART to SFO or even South San Francisco. Now they are talking about extending it to San Jose? This may sound very Californian, but I always support trains because once you have it it doesn't go away and eventually you get more that makes the train even more useful.
Why? If we stop CAHSR midway, there is zero chance Sacramento will keep subsidising a Bakersfield-Merced line. And once shut down the land is more productive doing something else.
That's not true in the slightest. In the context of BART, we've lost the Key System. We've lost quite a bit of SamTrans bus service too because BART is expensive to run. Plenty of small towns in the northeast lost rail service since the inception of Amtrak.
