Take a look at the voting data for Prop 1A. It is very likely HSR would not have been approved in the first place if the central valley had been excluded. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_California_Proposition_...
Then don't build it. That money would have been far better spent improving urban metro and regional rail. (And airports and roads and charging stations, et cetera.)
...only literally anything else!
CA HSR was the political lever to get funding to improve urban metro and regional rail, so, in a sense, the money was spent doing that.
Highly recommend Paradise Lost by Peter Schrag. Raising revenue requires supermajority voter approval in most cases. A huge chunk of the budget is already allocated by voter mandates and the legislature fights over the scraps.
So it seems like Prop 13 just fucked California.
Yes.
> Could the CA legislature not have passed a law?
To fund a long-term capital project? No, for a number of reasons. First, at that time, the CA legislature couldn't practically fund anything reliably (budget process is Constitutionally mandated to be annual, and at that time required a 2/3 supermajority to pass, which caused regular budget crises.) Second, and more importantly, structurally, to fund major capital projects, debt financing is required, and California cannot, Constitutionally, issue bonds without voter approval. Prop 1A was a legislative initiative amendment -- that is, the legislature had to pass a bill to put it on the ballot -- to secure that approval.