If you are not already familiar with it, I think you would enjoy reading Christopher Alexander’s work on pattern languages. His books “The Timeless Way of Building” and “A Pattern Language” are about describing and cataloging the patterns of architecture and urban planning that work together to create places that are alive and pleasant to live in. Not only have his ideas been tremendously influential in his own domain, they were a major inspiration behind the pattern movement in software engineering (Gang of Four, Design Patterns and all that), which is what got me interested in his work originally.

The first book is more theoretical and philosophical; the second is actually a catalog of patterns, starting from the regional/international level and going all the way down to the details of individual house construction. The patterns that are relevant here include:

Web of Public Transportation: one of the key difficulties with public transportation is building a well-connected web. You may have your HSR, your buses, your BART, taxis, ferries, moving sidewalks, pneumatic tubes, whatever, but I’m gonna want to drive my car anyway unless a convenient and fast interchange between the various modes is available (and it usually isn’t, because different kinds of public transport are typically administered by different agencies who have no incentive or even a disincentive to coordinate). Solution: make the interchanges primary and the transportation lines secondary, and put control of the interchanges in the hand of the local communities, with the idea that they will contract and provide incentives to those transportation companies willing to serve the interchanges. Poster child: the Swiss railway system. The HSR proposal is obviously inherently line-centric; how much thought has gone into how it will connect up with local transportation networks?

Ring Roads: avoid slicing communities in half, cutting off access to the waterfront or countryside, and polluting them with noise by building high-speed roads (or railways) through the middle of them. Instead build tangent to the community, always leaving one side open to the countryside, and shield neighborhoods by berms or a sunken road. Oh how I wish I could bike to work in Emeryville along the waterfront without crossing three train tracks and eight lanes of highway, twice. This pattern has obvious implications for HSR construction, especially for the Central Valley towns you mention.