Wow--I'm surprised at how down on rail you guys are.
My metropolitan area would be a disaster without rail. Buses are great for short trips, but bad for long ones. Rail is an extremely efficient way to connect high density areas that are further apart than buses can reasonably serve. As much money as we pour into infrastructure for cars, a little more investment in rail would be a great idea, particularly as we continue to urbanize as a country.
Having spent a lot of time in SJ/SF, I agree that it's quite useful there. SF is so expensive that it's nearly impossible to live in the city unless you're rich, and it's so space-constrained that it's almost impossible to justify a car day-to-day. And because it's so centralized, having BART to get right into the heart of downtown is nice--particularly because BART goes to SFO. For people coming into the city that know they won't need a rental car, BART gets them from the airport to downtown in ~25 minutes IIRC.
Light rail in San Jose and on the Peninsula? Much less useful. Outside of SF, there's a lot more sprawl, where it's unlikely that you not only live close enough to a light rail station and your destination is close enough to a light rail station to justify the additional time and cost of taking light rail. For travelers, if you're there on business, there's no connection from SJC to light rail, so if you wanted to get to a light rail station you'd need to Uber/taxi to the light rail. At which point you might as well either rent a car or just Uber from destination to destination.
HSR is only viable within certain distances--the idea of a nationwide network is crazy. But an HSR in California connecting the population centers, or connecting the major population centers in the midwest and on the eastern seaboard (and a handful of other places) makes a ton of sense. The bureaucratic issues (and associated costs) with building one are the biggest problems. I've done my share of traveling to and from SoCal from the Bay Area. I live really close to SFO and it's still a five hour experience to get from my house to downtown LA. If I could make that on HSR in even the same amount of time (and it would be substantially less), in a much more comfortable, better serviced environment (train travel is way more amenable to working than plane travel), I would happily pay what I pay for air travel.
Question: what brings you to downtown LA, and do you think your experience is typical? If you live close to SFO, it should be no more than a 2 1/2 hour trip to get you to LAX. It's the getting from LAX to downtown LA that's the hard part.
I will highlight that if you're trying to get to downtown LA from LAX, it's terrible. Unlike SFO to downtown SF, there is
NO mass transit connecting the two. I think that would be an excellent use of mass transit, but right now you have to take a bus from LAX to the Green Line, tranfer to the Blue Line, and then transfer to the Red Line if you want to get to Union Station. That would be a pain in the ass, and take
at least an hour plus.
But I can't imagine why anyone needs to get to downtown LA?
Part of it for me is living in Orange County and absolutely hating to drive into downtown LA, but outside of sporting events, concerts, etc, I can't imagine many reasons to go to downtown LA. And HSR would take you to Union Station. LA also has so much sprawl that you'd find yourself having difficult public transit here anyway, or taking Ubers/taxis everywhere.
Generally business travelers are going to need the freedom of a rental car and can shoulder or expense the cost, and probably aren't going straight to downtown LA anyway because business in LA is all over the place. Which means that getting to LAX (or Burbank, or Ontario, or Long Beach, or John Wayne--we do have 5 major airports here) is probably just as functional as getting to Union Station downtown. If it's about vacationers, I highly doubt that enough vacationers are going to be riding HSR to create enough ridership to make any sense.