It is the fixed California hour on the John Phillips Show, Johnny's on Vacation. It's Randy Wang here and the phone number to join us is eight hundred two two two five two two two one eight hundred two two two five two two two. Your emails at Johnny Don't Like Show at gmail dot com or Randy Wang Radio at gmail dot com.
I do check both.
You can search for the John Phillipshow wherever you get your podcasts. You can also subscribe to my local show, the KABC News Blitz, which does have plenty of content that the Bay Area would love to listen to by searching for the KABC News Blitz wherever you get your podcast or just go to KABC dot com at five o'clock today. And of course my substack, it is where
all of my show prep lands. I look up all the stories that I think we're going to cover today and I put them all there so you can see everything that is worth your time learning about the stuff that you may have missed going on up and down the state of California at Randywangradio dot substack dot com. Our next guest is another one of our favorites. He is a recovery advocate based in San Francisco. His website is Tomwolfrecovery dot com. Tom Wolf, Welcome back to the John Phillips Show.
Hey Randy, it's great to be back.
So your Mayor Daniel Lurry had quite the week where one pole calls him the most popular mayor in the entire country, and he got to hold a press conference showing a noticeable drop in homelessness in San Francisco.
What do you make of it?
Well, I mean, if you come to San Francisco, you'll see that homelessness on the street is down. There's less what they call unsheltered homeless on the street. Do we still have open drug markets, yes. Do we still have a lot of overdose deaths, yes, But it's visibly better in neighborhoods like the Tenderloin and South of Market in San Francisco, where just a couple of years ago you had four hundred tenths on the street at one point.
Now there's less than thirty on the street. So we're actually seeing some proms.
It is so wild and it's such a different picture of homelessness than compared to Los Angeles. I counted one hundred tenths just on Vano and Boulevard from Bourbank Airport to my house on the other side of the valley when we were flying back from San Francisco this weekend.
Los Angeles is its own, like separate ecosystem. You almost have to put it in a separate category when you talk about homelessness than any other city in the country, because it's miles and miles of tents, thousands of homeless, forty seven thousand in LA seventy four thousand in La County, and you also have things like human trafficking and prostitution happening, along with gangs that deal drugs, all wrapped up within it.
And honestly, the leadership in LA is absolutely failing at addressing even the slightest change.
I like to say that LA looks at what San Francisco did three years ago, and instead of realizing that they're already on the other side of it, they like to double down on stupid.
That's a great point. In LA's not alone. Seattle's also doubling down on stupid. It's really unfortunate in LA. There's just a couple of really pragmatic elected officials down there, but then they're being led by Karen Bass, who's just done an abysmal job. I mean, there's no other way to look at it. And you know I'm not here to like bash her, but you got to be honest, like you have to look at results. Has homelessness really dropped?
She says it has, but all she have to do is drive down Figaro Street or go to skid Row and you know that that's not true.
Yeah, if you ask anybody at skid Row, they will say the problem has not gotten any better. Some will say the problem has gotten worse. In a RAND study looked at specific neighborhoods, including skid Row, and found Karen Bass's numbers to be thirty percent off.
Yeah, I mean, so look, economics one on one is you can manipulate data, right, And so she's cherry picking data from one specific study that we know is is inaccurate because it's all based on self reported data and what volunteers happen to see in that snapshot of a moment. That's how they arrive at conclusions. Like you hear all these homeless organizations saying only twenty nine percent of the people on the street struggle with addiction when we know that it's eighty percent or higher.
So what are some of the lessons that our buffoons in Los Angeles can learn from, not only San Francisco, but neighboring San Jose, which you have seen real improvements in the last couple of years.
Well, they injected accountability back into the policy of how they approach holmlessness. So in San Jose they basically give you three opportunities to accept services if you're on the street, and if you turn down those services three times, then it becomes punitive. At that point then the police get involved. In San Francisco, they started breaking up the open drug markets during the day, so they're still there at night, but they're not so much there in the day anymore.
They went in. The first thing they did is they arrested everybody that had an open warrant, and that turned out to be about twenty five percent of the people on the street actually were absconding from justice. They were running from justice from other counties, even to other states. And so yesterday I saw a video in San Francisco where someone was arrested by the FBI. That means they
had a federal warrant when they were being arrested. So those are some of the steps that we've taken putting accountability back into the process, and you're seeing almost immediate results.
Now.
One of the new strategies that Lurie has unveiled specifically in the Tenderloin is the is the Reset Center someplace where we would take people who are high on fentanyl or math instead of taking them to jail and trying to get them cleaned before they try to offer them help. I know this program just started, but what do you think of it?
I mean, I think it's good. Look they're looking for an in between because here's the reality. If you arrest somebody on the street or using drugs or being you know, under the influence, that's a low level misdemeanor. They're going to go to jail. They're gonna get booked into jail, and they're going to be released within twenty four hours. And then you just took that cop that did that arrest off the street for four hours to do a
police report. The resets Center gives the police an opportunity to pick people up off the street, taken to this facility where they have to stay for twelve hours. There's a sheriff's deputy there, making sure that they stay for twelve hours until they sober up, and then they're being
offered treatment on demand. At that point, they're saying, hey, we can get you into a detox bed today, you want to take it, that kind of thing, and I think that you're going to start to see, you know, while the results will be limited, they only have twenty five chairs in there, you're going to start to see some positive results over time, I think.
Well.
And another thing that the city has been trying to advocate for, specifically Supervisor Dorsey, is having housing that is drug free, which is such a crazy concept even have to say out loud in the state of California. But that is a controversial idea.
It is a controversial idea. Look, last year, there was an Assembly bill that made it to Newsom's desk that I was a big part of. I was a co sponsor of that bill. It was Assembly Bill two fifty five to just ask for up to ten percent of housing ballers to be used for drug free recovery housing. And at the last minute he vetoed that bill, which
is insane to me because there's clearly a need. Look, you go to rehab, let's say a ninety day program and you come out of rehab and they put you back in the same SRO building that you were in on skid row. The chances of you staying sober are like zero. You have no chance of staying sober. So you've just wasted all that time and money and work and effort to get someone sober just to have them
go right back to using again. We need to create spaces so we can break this cycle of addiction, which is really the key to reducing homelessness, is breaking that cycle of addiction, getting people not only into treatment, but then giving them a place to live after that for a while that's drug free, so they can get on their feet and hopefully get a job and re enter society, which is what we should all want well.
And I think San Francisco really was the poster child for why housing first doesn't work, because you've told you've said that statyst's one this show before, but it's always worth mentioning A big portion of overdose deaths in the city of San Francisco happened inside those SROs.
That's right, and we have the data now. One in four overdose deaths in San Francisco now come in inside permanent supportive housing. We're housing first housing, and this is why I support HUD. At the federal level, they're trying to change and unravel housing first to create more opportunities for transitional housing and drug free housing, et cetera. And
states like California are actually suing the federal government. They're suing HUD to try to block it because they want to protect all the NGOs that are getting millions and millions of dollars in funding to keep running these buildings that they call housing that are just drug dends where people end up dying at a rate of one in four and it's just not It's not only not sustainable, it's actually cruel to the people that you're trying to help.
You know, I almost forgot about that because I do follow you in social media. But yeah, you were at the White House recently, you were taking this message national.
Yes, sir, I've been to the White House now twice in the last month. UH, working in conjunction with the Department of Housing and Urban Development and the Office of National Drug Control Policy, which just released their National Drug Strategy last week that focuses on drug prevention, on recovery from addictions on accountability. I'm going after the cartel's pumping fenconyl into the United States by the metric ton and I couldn't be honestly more grateful to say that I
support them one hundred percent. They're actually putting the focus back on recovery for the first time in a long time, and it really makes it feel like my work is paying off because I was given a seat at the table.
Hey, you think the next time you're down there, you could knock on the door of the DEA and see if they could go do a raid on the Hondos and the tenderloin.
Man, you know what. So it's funny because I've had that conversation. But they don't need to go to San Francisco to do the raid. They need to go across the Bay to Oakland, where they all live. They know that. It's just there's a lot of political factors that go into that, and just right now in California with the sensitivity around ice and doing raids and things like that, and the DEA, Yeah, it would be an unpopular thing in this state to do even if it was the right thing to do.
Well, that's what's wild.
I always point this out because it's just it's baffling to me. But a couple of years ago, Matt Dorsey tries to amend the sanctuary city law in San Francisco to exempt Honduran fentanyl dealers, saying that we should be able to turn them over to ICE. And he got shot down and called a racist for that.
Yeah he did, and you know, I give him a lot of credit for having the courage to go and do that. And all that was going to do was add, like, there's a list of exceptions for people that are illegal immigrants that commit crimes like murder and rape and sexual assault, those are exceptions in which you could be turned over to ICE to be deported. He just wanted to add a felony conviction for drug dealing to that list. That's simple,
very simple modification. And it brought out all the immigrant rights groups and they protested and called them all kinds of names, and you know, the rest of the board had to vote voted down because they were looking over their shoulder at this kind of you know, frothing mob of radical leftists that were coming forward and saying, you can't do this, And it's just mind boggling to me.
That they would want to protect organized drug dealers that have killed forty five hundred people in San Francisco in the last five years. It's truly mind boggling to be well and then.
One of the other complicated, even if we're just trying to charge these people locally. Brooke Jenkins, who I think does a fantastic job, she has explained that even if they arrest a hunter and drug dealer, they tell the judge that they're a victim of human trafficking, and the judge buys it.
Sometimes the jury buys it.
Yeah, not just in a superior court, but in federal court. Sometimes the jury buys it. There was just a hung jury the other day in federal court here in San Francisco for a hunter and drug dealer that got picked up by the Feds. The jury was deadlocked on conviction, and they used the argument that they were dealing under duress,
which is completely false. It's already been debunked. That whole argument has been debunked and disproven by a news article that ran in the San Francisco Chronicle two years ago about this. So it's amazing that they're still using that argument and people are still buying that false narrative.
We're speaking with Tom Wolf. You can get them on social media at t Wolf Recovery and his website is Tomwolf Recovery dot com. Now, I was just up in San Francisco last week, and I didn't spend any time in the Tenderloin, but I thought the city looked cleaner that I've seen it in a very long time. I felt incredibly safe. Union Square was really clean. Of course,
the good neighborhoods have always been vibrant and incredible. But what I have seen over the weekend is there's a lot of concern as to well cleanup efforts are going on in the Tenderloin, and in Soma a lot of the open air drug market is now getting pushed to the mission.
What is going on in the mission?
Okay, so there's two things going on in the mission district. Number One, the supervisor or the city council member that runs that district is out on mental health leave because she's embroiled in the middle of a scandal and is too afraid to come back to work to actually face the consequences. So there's no leadership in that district right now.
That's number one. And then number two. It's true they've moved a lot of the people on the street out to the Mission district, including the organized drug dealers that they're out there at sixteenth Mission right now, and if you go there after six pm, it's three to four hundred people deep. So the crowds that we used to see at Civic Center a couple of years ago in
San Francisco are now manifesting over at sixteenth Commission. And I really feel bad for that neighborhood because that's actually a really cool neighborhood that's being really adversely affected by the drugs. It doesn't help that around the corner there's basically a supervised an unsanctioned supervised consumption site that operates there that gives out free drug supplies to people on the street. So if you put those kinds of services there,
expect it to become a magnet. And that's exactly what's happened to that neighborhood. And so with that said, there's still a lot of work to be done, but I will say overall, overall, San Francisco is doing much better.
You know, in the last couple of minutes that we have, I'd love for you to explain your take on this, because you have lived experience, you were, you were formally homeless, you were formally addicted to these drugs, Can you explain to the average person how dangerous all of this harm reduction stuff is.
Yeah, I mean, so, the idea of harm addiction originally was to keep you alive until you find the miracle of recovery, and really before that, it was to keep you from getting the HIV virus from the nineteen eighties. Back in the eighties. It's what that transformed into is just supporting drug users with giving you clean drug supplies, free crack pipes, free met pipes, free foil and strauts
to smoke your fencial, free needles, all of that. It's kind of like giving someone a gun and saying, hey, the bullet dealer is right there on the corner, and you can buy a bullet for five bucks and you can play Russian roulette. That's basically what is happening with harm reduction. And that's how dangerous it is if you look at it that way, that's how lethal it's become. And it's really unfortunate because I don't think that was their original intent, but that's what it's become.
It's completely out of control. In Los Angeles, we're seeing these needle pass out programs everywhere, including right out side of Norms Delhi in MacArthur Park. We're seeing in Sacramento they're now at the public libraries putting out a needle distribution center in the parking lot. It's like, how are you supposed to take your kids there? It's insane.
It is insane, And look, I get it right, Like, I'm a former intervenous drug user, so I understand like you want to have clean supplies. But like, if you think about how much money the state spends on that, I mean, they spend like one hundred million dollars a year through the state Department of Public Health on these harm reduction services. How many treatment beds, how many detox beds could we fund and provide throughout California with that
money instead? So I really would you know, ask people to really consider when they go out and vote and they're voting for someone for governor or whoever, they consider what that means, what kind of ripple effect that's going to mean down the line. When you get departments like public health that decide how much money they're going to spend on harm reduction services to keep the homeless industrial complex going.
The website is Tomwolf Recovery dot com. You can follow him on social media and t Wolf Recovery. Tom Wolf, thank you so much for your message that you're putting out there every single day, and it's always such a pleasure to talk to you, my friend.
Hey, it's my pleasure, Ran, thanks for having me.
Eight hundred two two two five two two two is the telephone number. Let's go to David in Sherman Oaks. David, Hello, Hi, Ran, love your show.
Thank you so much. Yeah, I just wanted to express uh irritation that the entire City of La library system is going to be shut down next Tuesday for what they call staff Development Day, all seventy three advnches. I don't know how many staff, maybe one thousand plus or solf. We have a one billion dollar budget short, one billion dollar budget footfall. Yet somehow they have the I'm and the money to shut down our entire library system at our expense for a whole day to do what staff development.
It's really it's so irritating.
They're going to watch a bunch of seminars and how to be better communicators. Meanwhile, the kids are not going to be able to read the books, and the homeless are not going to be able to watch porn at the library computers. It's going to be such a sad day in the city of La Well, I'm.
Not homeless, but I need to never mind. But it's all getting aside. It's just frustrating because you know, working class people, you know, we depend upon the library for Internet and you know, legitimate stuff, whether it's looking for a job, or it's getting funding out what's going on with our healthcare providers or checking our banking.
So yeah, and that is a resource that your tax dollars pay for. So that's a resource that should be open every single day. Thanks for bringing that to our attention, David, Thanks so much for the call. It's Randy Wang here on the John Phillips. He's got a Caroline in Santa Monica. Caroline.
Hello, Hi, Randy.
That guy about the lapo is so awesome, Mark. I have friends who work there. A friend of mine runs public services at the Central branch, and do you know kind of crap she has to put up from the public and on top of which they are technical except for having a voice to talk to. They're technically available twenty four hours a day, seven days a week. You can get ebooks, you can watch movies, you can search databases, and they get less than good support from our city
fathers because they're always trying to cut their budget. So I think the guy was just completely out of line just because he can't go in one day.
Well, he seems to be a big supporter of the library. He's upset that he can't use it, and he's confused as to why he can't use it.
That seems pretty understandable.
But what other departments in service dates A lot of them do, but they don't affect the public, and so he's taking out I think that he's giving the staff who do the actual work short shrift is what my problem is, Okay, because they work really hard and maybe they need a service day. Teachers get service days three or four times a year.
Yeah, I don't know what they do with those. I think that's just an extra vacation day for them. Thank you so much for the call, Caroline, appreciate it. You know, let's talk about our schools for a second. Gavin Newsom did his May Revice press conference today. It went on for like two hours. He did take a lot of questions and I listened to a good portion of it while I was driving in this afternoon, and Gavin Newsom talked about how much much more this state is investing
in education than when he got here. Gavin Knew some claims that the state of California was only spending about seventeen thousand dollars per pupil in twenty eighteen, seven and a half years later, Gavin Newsome again, these are the numbers he was saying today, claims that we are spending about twenty eight thousand dollars per pupil. That is a huge increase and we haven't really seen a lot of
results for that. Now you can argue that part of that is they did create TK for all, so instead of having to send your four year old to daycare, you can send them to pre kindergarten for how long do you think that is? Like two hours or three hours? Like you can't you know, I got to imagine when you've got a kid that's in like, you know, half day school, you still can't like go work. So I guess you just get a little break from the little one.
So we have that, But especially since COVID. The outcomes that we have for reading proficiency, for math proficiency, for graduation, it's quite low, especially when you consider how well regarded our higher education system is. You know, the CSUS and the UCS. People have nothing but great things to say about them. The community colleges are so good, all of
the fake AI students want to go there. But when it comes to our local schools, when it comes to our public schools, where is the disconnect in the money that we are spending and what we are getting. Because not only our outcomes an issue, but every single school district is in a budget deficit. They're all having to make cuts. The teachers say they're not making enough money, so they're not getting it. Where is all the money going. Well,
here's something that you may not know. One of the reasons that a lot of the money we spend on education doesn't necessarily go to education is because this state is spending an unbelievable amount of money settling sex abuse lawsuits from decades and decades ago. And according to some incredible investigative reporting from Julie Wats at CBS California investigates, every single school in the state of California pays into the same insurance policy for liability for these lawsuits, and
that has gotten so prohibitively expensive. It's the newest wrinkle in the California insurance crisis. The schools can't afford the insurance. For more on this, here is.
And I came forward to tell my story. People thought I was crazy.
Joellechastic story starting back in the eighties at a Catholic high school in Orange County.
My junior year in the grooming process, the manipulation process which gets a survivor to think that the abuse is okay, started right away. The worst part, the worst part is that the school knew all along.
She says. Behind that smile was a troubled and vulnerable young girl, something she says her choir teacher took advantage of.
He sexually abused me over a two year period and by the time I graduated. By the time I graduated high school, I was pregnant and had a sexually transmitted disease.
WHOA, Okay, she better get every dollar that's entitled to her. I mean, there are so many horrific, gruesome stories, and when they happen inside of school, well, someone's going to be held accountable, and the taxpayer is usually the one.
It would be more than a decade before she get the courage to publicly share her story.
That is the burden of shame of child sexual assault. I was not ready when I was nineteen.
That's why she helped pass this twenty nineteen law that extended the statute of limitations for childhood sexual abuse lawsuits.
Thousands and thousands of survivors have come forward.
Nearly a decade later. Survivors like Joelle's say the law is working, exposing abuse and forcing accountability. School districts across California are paying billions to settle decades old abuse claims.
And it's not just school districts. The County of Los Angeles recently passed a four billion dollar settlement billion with a B to settle with all different kinds of sexual abuse from children that happened at a daycare center run by the county in Almonte and of course at the juvenile halls.
Exposing abuse and forcing accountability, school districts across California are paying billions to settle decades old abuse claims, but critics warn justice comes at a cost.
Everybody wants justice for these individuals, but there are unintended consequences.
According to public records, doctor April Moore's small rural district recently paid more than one point four million dollars to settle a case of alleged abuse from the seventies. How many teachers?
Wow, So you're the one that handles the books for these schools and you're getting cases that come across your desk that you're going to have to not pay the teachers, not lower the classroom size because you're paying settlements from things that happen in some circumstances before these people were even born.
How many teachers could that money pay for?
At least twelve twelve, twelve to fourteen teachers?
The school superintendent says, in most cases, schools pay settlements to avoid even more costly legal battles.
We can't.
Yeah, it wouldn't be a good look if LAUSD took the Mark Burnt story and took that one to trial.
We can't even investigate accurately.
With physical records and which is long gone and in some cases the accused dead. Digging through old yearbooks is sometimes the only way to confirm whether a student or employee even attended a school.
So yeah, for a lot of these county institutions, it's actually standard practice to destroy records and that has made it even more difficult to adjudicate some of these things.
So we're paying claims for things that may have happened in the past, and we're using the funds that are earmarked and designated for today's students.
And do so.
Just remember the cost per pupil twenty eight thousand dollars a year used to be seventeen thousand dollars a year. Some of that's going to the kids, some of that's going to the teachers, but a lot of it is going to settle all of these lawsuits.
And due to school insurance pools, districts without abuse claims can be on the hook for settlements. On the other side of the state. You see, instead of paying for individual insurance policies, California schools pool their money to cover claims.
This is where the issue becomes something that I wasn't even aware of how big of a problem this is the entire state of California schools, which there are what a thousand school districts in this massive state. They're all on the same insurance policy and So when one district in southern California has to settle up for a sex abuse lawsuit, every single district in the state is going to have to pay more in premiums.
You see, instead of paying for By the way, it.
Is another interesting conversation. The City of La They get sued about every ten minutes for legitimate reasons and illegitimate reasons. Someone once sued the City of La because they were drunk, piggybacking walking around on New Year's even they tripped on the sidewalk, and they got a few million dollars. But they're exploring trying to get insurance because right now they pay all these settlements out of the general fund. And I'm like, what insurance company is going to insure the
City of Los Angeles for liability lawsuits? Can you imagine what the premiums would be?
You see. Instead of paying for individual insurance policies, California schools pool their money into covered claims, so one settlement impacts the entire pool. The ripple effect ongoing to school insurance costs have nearly tripled today's struggling students or losing teachers and programs because of crimes committed in some cases before the students were even born, and at schools they've never heard of, and.
We are not able to pay the teachers. This is why there's all these fights and all these causes for strikes. We're not able to actually take that money that's supposed to go help the kids. The extra money the state brought in that Prop ninety eight went to fund the schools, it's all going to lawsuits to settle claims from crimes that happened decades ago.
And I'm not saying that that's a bad thing.
I think every single one of these victims deserves justice, but it is an eye opening look as to where all that money for education is actually going.
And that, to me, is an injustice for today's students.
If you were sexually abused in a California school, you may still have time to act.
Critics point to add like these from law firms looking for clients.
There's like this whole new, massive cottage industry that's arising.
Andybam, an attorney representing Los Angeles County, points to an LA Times investigation that found personal injury attorneys allegedly paid people cash outside of Social services office to join their sex abuse lawsuit.
I want to believe a well, that sure sounds like a scam.
I want to believe a woman or anybody who comes forward and says I was sexually abused by this person. I've litigated cases where that was true. I've also litigated cases where it was found to be not true. But Joelcastic stresses those cases are the exception, not the rule. In a system that's failed victims for decades.
False allegations and false claims and lawsuits are extraordinarily rare.
And they're rare, is you know for a victim to you look at like the Swallwell situation, for the scrutiny that those women have to go through to put themselves on the public stage, to open themselves up to threats that apparently were happening on Snapchat from Swallwell, it would be really tough to be making that up.
And they're rare.
I'm sure it does happen, but I got to imagine the majority of these cases, they're legitimate, and we're going to have to pay, and.
They're rare because the process stinks.
As the cost of these cases grow, so do calls for reform. Critics want to cap attorney's fees and limit future payouts, which to attorneys worn could ultimately harm survivors.
Survivors need to be able to have their day in court.
The Archdiocese of Orange County eventually settled Castics case for one point five million dollars.
Because that's what your tithing's going towards.
Because if you have your day in court and you prove it, then you should be entitled to that accountability that you deserve.
The question now for California lawmakers, does justice for survivors have to come at the cost of today's students? For CBS News, California Investigates and Julie Watts.
So there's the thing that you learned today because I learned it today while I was washing dishes this morning and listening to this Julie Watts report. If you ever wondered why, oh why we're spending twenty eight thousand dollars per student and we're getting a subpar education for it. Part of it is the bureaucracy. Part of it is our education standards and not teaching phonics. Part of it is the sweetheart deals that we negotiated to these unions.
But the other part of it that you may not have been aware of is that insurance costs for California schools have tripled in the last few years, and that is because they're having to settle decades old sexual abuse lawsuits. And something tells me we're gonna be doing this for
a long time now. If there's one issue in the state of California that I feel like does not get talked about, you know, as much as we hear the biggest issues affecting Californias are homelessness and affordability and housing. It's never my issue. I mean, those are big issues
and they are important. But the issue that I am concerned with more than anything else, and the one issue that makes me want to pull my beautiful head of hair out, is the traffic that we deal with in the state of California.
Now.
I have to say, traffic is a nightmare pretty much all the time in San Francisco. But it is a very walkable city, and I don't really mind the traffic if I'm in the back of a way MO just
playing my music playlist and just watching the city. It's the actual driving through the traffic I have to suffer for an hour each way every single day on the four H five Freeway, and that is why I'm always looking for our emerging candidates for governor, for mayor to at least address what would you do to solve the god awful traffic that we have because expanding La Metro
really hasn't done a damn thing. All the money that we've spent, it still doesn't really go to most places, so most people will never use it, regardless of if it's safe or not. The high speed rail was supposed to be done six years ago. The one line that's going to be finished in ten years is Wasco to Merced, which doesn't really help a lot of people.
So here's an interesting new idea.
What if instead of a high speed train, because it takes a really long time to build trains in California, they can do it in other countries, but they don't have sequa in other countries. What about the concept of high speed buses. Apparently this is being studied for more. Here's kcra.
Well, could California drivers soon share the road with buses that travel up to one hundred and forty miles per hour. It's part of a futuristic idea from Caltrans to bring high speed buses to our state.
Kise your threes.
I mean, I'm guessing now with electric motors, you can get cars that go that fast. I don't I don't know how safe that is. I mean, it's got to be in its own dedicated lane. I'm assuming you don't want somebody cutting you off with that.
Kisse your ray threees Denz and Cortez looks at the solutions leaders are looking at to make all of this work.
The future of California commuting may look a lot different than this.
We can travel throughout California on these buses.
Caltrans now exploring whether high speed buses traveling up to one hundred and forty miles per hour could one day share the roads with drivers.
So does that mean they're going to take a couple of lanes off the five Freeway and make them bus only lanes?
This project is simply exploring long term possibilities.
The vision connecting major cities like Sacramento, the Bay Area, Los Angeles, and San Diego with dedicated lanes on freeways, transit hubs, and long distance express service.
Long distance travel by bus could become an attractive and affordable way to go between California metropolitan areas and you.
Could probably watch a movie in the back.
Researchers turning towards international examples like South Australia's Audelaide's Obon that has been in service for four decades, high.
Speed buses could one day provide some of the speed advantage at a longer costume using existing freeway corridors once the technology is ready.
Under one con so, I'm divided on this because you're talking about taking away existing lanes, which is going to make the car traffic even worse. At the same time, if you're going to build more public transit, more places where you have people in big vehicles, trains take way too damn long. The bus only lanes, whether it's on the streets of LA or the freeways. At least theoretically, that's something that you could get done a lot faster, but you're going to have to make it real safe
and convenient, or nobody's going to use it. Well, there's something that I didn't know. California is looking into freeway buses that go one hundred and forty miles an hour,