There's nothing on Earth like a genuine, bona fide, electrified, six-car monorail!

Wouldn't it be cheaper to put us in vacuum tubes and suck us down to Portland or up, to the great frozen north?

@3 Thank god; at least for the foreseeable future, we'll still have our Gridlock.

Yep. Infrastructure is expensive to create and maintain. And yep, we've had about 40 years of "let's keep cutting taxes so that we can send our kids to private school." And yep, people bitch and bitch and bitch about transportation projects all during the planning and building stages. I've seen it all my life. Saw it with BART. Saw it here in LA with Metro. And then, the project completes and the bitching fades away and everyone enjoys a new, better system of getting around.

Look, I don't want billions of dollars wasted and mismanaged either. I know that can happen, too - trips around the world to "check out" other systems, management seminars in Honolulu, etc. But go to where there is high-speed rail: Japan, France, or China. Go from Paris to Marseilles in 3 hours (what used to take 10-12 hours by car), then come back to America and hop on Amtrak...and it feels like a Wells Fargo stagecoach. We need to start thinking about tomorrow.

@6 - it's amusing how you imply flying is as convenient as taking a train.

"Any mistake they’ve made, we’re going to put in the bank and learn from it."- bwahhhahahhaaa!!!!

@6 - two words: carbon footprint.

"Meanwhile in California, a high-speed rail project is now billions of dollars over budget and behind schedule. Asked about that, Inslee said, "Any mistake they’ve made, we’re going to put in the bank and learn from it."

You mean like ST2? ST3? The recent Amtrak disaster? Bertha? The streetcars? When various transportation agencies repeatedly and deliberately LIE to the
taxpayers about the true costs of their projects the last thing they care about is learneding from mistakes.

Plus, we're a lot like Cali -- in the the so-called Ring of Fire -- pretty much wherever the Pacific Ocean touches -- seismic zone fucking severe.

And even with earthquake early warning systems, they're still gonna need some time to stop from 250mph ... gonna need airbags. I still say vacuum tubes. Didn't they do that in Brazil? Or was that Asimov....

Or, why not combine the best of both worlds?
Vactrain
(From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia)

“A vactrain (or vacuum tube train) is a proposed design for very-high-speed rail transportation. It is a maglev (magnetic levitation) line using partly evacuated tubes or tunnels. Reduced air resistance could permit vactrains to travel at very high speeds with relatively little power—up to 6,400–8,000 km/h (4,000–5,000 mph). This is 5–6 times the speed of sound in Earth's atmosphere at sea level.[1] Vactrains might use gravity to assist their acceleration. If these trains achieve the predicted speeds, they could surpass aircraft as the world's fastest mode of public transportation.”

WHOA! It’s a thing! Well, it could be: “However, without major advances in tunneling and other technology, vactrains would be prohibitively expensive.”

Just imagine, if you will, zipping along at four- or five-K, at a window seat and kicking back and enjoying the scenery… (Or, perhaps, joining your fellow travelers in the Vomiteria) Let’s not let a little thing like the damn Cost get in the way of our Happiness and our very real need to get there yesterday.

Or, Plan B, just snug n’ safe in our little ‘eggs’, in those flexy tubes, zipping around like it’s nobody’s business….

@13 - lol