LA to Bakersfield is 110 miles. That's about an hour, certainly plenty of people do that journey in the UK multiple times a week. Tamworth for example is exactly 110 miles from Euston. In peak times the fast trains stop there for the commuter traffic and it takes 67 minutes. Peterborough, Gratham, Newark (100-140 miles) are all common commuter places,

If we ever got HSR I'm not saying the is unviable. People commuting from suburbs to downtown LA have a 60-79 minute commute, a commute they can't sleep or be productive through. That's no issue.

I'm just saying the hubs are completely incompatible in both culture and market. Bakersfield is an energy/agriculture hub and LA is an entertainment hub. The utility here isn't exactly efficient if people are traveling that far every day to work as a cashier. Probably wouldn't stimulate much in that regsrd

Likewise, there's not going to be a lot of people in LA who willingly want to go to Bakersfield if given an option. At worst they are forced there as another suburban option if the city prices them out.

You don't need HSR, just a normal 125mph train line.

Imagine you are born in Bakersfield, your family is from Bakersfield, perhaps they are agricultural workers, but you don't want to be a farmer, you want a job in a big city, perhaps an accountant, or a civil engineer, or a whatever. It's a typical modern desk job, for whatever reason you need to be in an office a few times a week, maybe not 5 since covid, but certainly 2-3.

You can either move a long way from your home, family, support network and live near your work, or you can maintain that community and support network but have a limited access to jobs. Or you can do both - stay living close to family so you can pop round in 10 minutes for a chat, but also have an increased choice of jobs and careers that a large city provides.

Nobody is commuting 100 miles a day for a minimum wage job sure, but there's far more jobs than cashiers - I assume LA has decent jobs somewhere between the "Holywood A-Lister" and the "$10/hour cleaner" scale, and due to its size it likely has more opportunities than Bakersfield alone.

>You can either move a long way from your home, family, support network and live near your work, or you can maintain that community and support network but have a limited access to jobs.

Is there enough people with that mindset in Bakersfield?the population is 400k, and the opposite narrative of commuting out the city to work the oil rigs probably isn't as common.

From a political point of view, LA doesn't exactly in need of even more starry-eyed youth to compete with trying to make some career in the entertainment sector.

>I assume LA has decent jobs somewhere between the "Holywood A-Lister" and the "$10/hour cleaner" scale, and due to its size it likely has more opportunities than Bakersfield alone.

Definitely not in 2025. I guess we'll see if we're still in one piece in a decade.