The City of Bakersfield, California has an identity crisis. It is two hours from Yosemite, Los Angeles and California’s beautiful Central Coast. And that’s exactly its problem: it is two hours from anything and everything.
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Then came High-Speed Rail (HSR). California’s $64.2 billion bet on North America’s first true “bullet train” has more than 100 miles of track under construction right now in the Central Valley. The California High-Speed Rail Authority, created in 1996, released its 2016 Draft Business Plan last spring, which pivots focus from Southern to Northern California. The new plan is to build an Initial Operating Section from just north of Bakersfield to San Jose, where it will begin operations by 2025 after linking into an upgraded Caltrain corridor up the San Francisco peninsula.