Allegedly.
> But there is an enormous amount of reflexive opposition from NIMBYs, Conservatives, and Libertarians.
The greatest obstacles to California's high speed rail project are vote-buying politicians and the voters who do not pay attention or understand what they are doing.
Conservatives and libertarians may have a lot to say about it, I gather that's because it has been such a colossal money pit boondoggle affair; but you may have noticed that conservatives and libertarians don't exactly hold a political majority in California, so I doubt that their objections are a major obstacle to its completion.
The plans they actually began to build with won't even produce much of a service, the target speeds are disappointing and there are so many detours from any meaningful corridor; and we haven't even seen the reality of it yet, which will probably be even more disappointing than the low expectations.
> ...Republicans have killed the projects to replace them _twice_ simply because they are rail projects and passenger rail is 'bad'
Well, I'm going to go out on a limb and say that was probably not why they excluded that project from the budget.
> Allegedly.
Not allegedly, it's actually being built right now. 119 miles of it in fact. It's not the whole system, but it's the IOS that they promised that they would build.
> the target speeds are disappointing and there are so many detours from any meaningful corridor...
The target speed is 220 mph between Gilroy and Burbank which is in line with the current highest speed HSR systems in the world. The route actually makes a fair amount of sense given that the cities in the central valley are not that small, especially since the stations in those cities are designed for trains to express through them. Rather, it makes more sense compared to the I-5 corridor which would have required branch lines to be built, not to mention the other fundamental issues that proposal had.