To put this into perspective, China's high-speed rail project in Indonesia connecting Jakarta and Bandung (a distance of 143 km) at a speed of 350 km/h was completed in just four months at total cost of $7.3 billion.
This line has seen an impressive number of passengers, with approximately 2 million people utilizing the service.
There's an incredible amount of productive economic activity that California is missing out on because of how difficult it is to move people and products around the state. Even with the catastrophic budget blowouts that you get with US transit projects, I could easily see the valley to valley high speed rail project having a huge, no-brainer ROI for the state. This is literally the most obvious city pair in the world for this kind of project.
The state would be fucking awesome if we had Chinese level competence