There are so many places that governments in California have screwed up you would be amazed. How many of you knew that what is now known as W.E.D. Enterprises which was originally known as Walter E. Disney Company offered a complete monorail system to the City of Los Angeles as a gift simply for a tax write off.
It was absolutely killed when then MTA/RTD got behind and started lobbying the City Council to forget that lousy monorail and to go to our good friends at General Motors and buy more buses! Los Angeles also had a trolly system in the old Red Cars and they also had pollution free electric buses which ran in the streets of L.A. These electric buses ran from overhead wire pickups just like trolleys, but, they had zero pollution. Again, General Motors came in and wanted those electric buses gone and they poured in enough money to remove an incredible mass transit system that was already in place. A few of those rail sections and properties have been incorporated into metro-rail but most of it was sold off!
If many of you want to really consider something interesting go to You Tube and look heavily at the maglev trains running in Japan and in Europe. A really good Maglev system could be built all the way from Blythe California to the Los Angeles Basin and from San Diego to Los Angeles as well as Santa Barbara to Los Angeles.
If any California Governor had gotten behind mass transit and a system that would work, a great deal of what happened to California could have been reduced.
The only way to market mass transit is to have a system with major advantages over the automobile. It either has to be cheaper by a wide margin OR it has to be so much faster that it allows one to take a one hour commute and reduce it to 15 minutes.
If California got ahold of their Federal $ and sent it towards state wide mass transit and invested in extremely high speed systems, most of the costs would be offset. In this day and age there is no way to offset the cost. Give the system a major advantage over private vehicles and watch it go then!
How many Californians would this employ? New jobs? California can be helped and pulled out quickly if it is done right and done quickly, but it won't be Arnold who does it.
Imagine alone how much traffic could be removed in regular commute traffic by a 100mph line between the San Fernando Valley and Los Angeles. Imagine how much traffic would be eliminated by a 100mph high speed link between the valley and the beach cities.
The Recovery act can be one of the greatest things nationwide if "big business" does not siphon the money away into their pockets so it can be sent overseas with no return on investment.
We can hope that someone wakes up, be it Washington D.C. or Sacramento....