Beamin,
I lived in CA for basically 2/3 of my life up until now and people do complain about the time it takes to get from SF to LA and back all of the time. Driving takes most of a day, but flying only takes around an hour (of actual flight) but getting in and out of the airports doubles triples that, easily. Or more, sometimes.
The logical solution is a bullet train like the civilized countries have. But no, they want --- unproven technology.. don't get me started..
You're right, its sheer insanity to attempt to use a vacuum - for the reason that becomes incredibly obvious when you take that airplane flight you will see it as plain as the nose on your face, because you fly along it the whole way, the San Andreas Fault line.. dividing the state. Earthquakes and larger than life engineering projects coexist only with difficulty. Its nuts to build a system thats suspended in a tube that goes deep underground in an earthquake prone state. Plus, the deeper you go, the hotter it gets. You know why they claim they need to use a vacuum, Because people know its hot underground from hot springs, which the state also has a fairly large number of. If the train stopped, and vacuum was lost, how would they cool the tunnel? People would rapidly bake alive in there.
Let me tell you the story told to me by a lady I was briefly dating around a year after this happened.. She was driving over the (old) Bay Bridge to San Francisco, which means she was on the top deck, and suddenly she saw cars driving the WRONG WAY on the top deck back towards Oakland, and they were gesturing wildly to her - as if to say "Go Back" ... she didnt go much farther because she saw it, a huge gap had opened up and a BUS was balancing on it, there had been a huge earthquake..
She was one of the lucky ones, at the same time, one of the highways in Oakland had collapsed killing dozens of people who had been trapped below the top deck when it fell.
......