You can take a new sleeper bus from San Francisco’s Caltrain station to Santa Monica, for $65 each way.  Not bad.

Meanwhile, perhaps with some improvements to the Tehachapi crossing to get Amtrak over the mountain, we could have a good rail connection between the cities as well.

In the long-term, I believe we’ll need high speed rail.  But we should be thinking about interim measures like these in the meantime, given how uncertain the high speed project is.