By Ted Rall, January 16, 2014
Gov. Jerry Brown has a dream, a dream that would serve as his greatest legacy: a high-speed train that would slash the six-hour drive from Los Angeles to San Francisco to a relaxing ride a smidge over two hours.
It may seem like a pipe dream now, but similar links have transformed other countries. When I visited Paris as a kid, the eastern city of Strasbourg was a weird, remote border town where people spoke German and claimed to like black blood sausages. Thanks to France's TGV trains, an all-day schlep is a quick day trip now — two hours each way — that paved the way for Strasbourg to become an important headquarters for European Union bureaucrats and Eurozone business types. Moreover, two hours on the train are not like two hours behind the wheel of a car. You can get a lot of work done on a train.
It doesn't take a big stretch of imagination to see why Silicon Valley and Hollywood might want to work together more closely.