Capitol Hill Blue Forums Misc. Topics Ain't This America SoCal/NoCal

Metrolink actually runs south all the way to Oceanside, just south of Camp Pendleton in San Diego County. At the Oceanside Amtrak station, you can get off the Metrolink train and get on a San Diego light rail train or an Amtrak train (more expensive, but more comfortable) and head south to San Diego.

I used to take Metrolink to go from Oceanside to work near UC Irvine. Nice ride, but a bit tricky to travel between work and the Irvine train station.

By the time I reach retirement age (not that I intend to retire in the formal sense) I imagine we'll have "the subway to the sea" which will make journeys to the city quite pleasurable.

"subway" or "trolly" ?

"subway" - San Francisco BART

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"trolly" - LA Light Rail

The one area which has tremendous implications and which separates NorCal from SoCal is the fundamental philosophy of how each region values living within a sustainable means and coexisting with the environment. The nine county Bay Area works as a community, together, to defend the Bay Area’s natural and agricultural landscape from permanent damaging development sprawl.

As a result of our community's efforts, the Bay Area has exquisite natural beauty, hills that offer stunning views, valleys and streams that provide clean water, farms and ranches that give us fresh, local food - because we work very hard to keep the Bay Area free of permanent damaging development sprawl by implementing Urban Limit Lines and fighting developers. We even have a term for this philosophy: The Bay Area Greenbelt Alliance

All of these places are within 12 mins of my house: (Mt Diablo foothills)

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These places are within 25 minutes of my house (Bay Bridge, Oakland Hills):

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Within 45 mins of my house (downtown Petaluma, Sonoma, downtown Napa and Napa river) :

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Rick, I am pleased that so much of the radiant good sense of the Canadian way of doing things has penetrated so far down into the Stygian gloom of Yankee barbarism.

Perhaps, someday, the people of Southern California, will escape from the mental disease emanating from Hollywood and move forward and join us in the broad, sunlit uplands of Cascadia. · · · ·

Should they fail to do so, then the whole world, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age, made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the Hellish Product Placements of perverted capitalist brainwashing. · ·

Not too much is left which is not developed and not permanently ruined by development sprawl down south. It's too late to roll-back and unspoil the already aesthetically spoiled landscape.

The decision by the El Lay city planners, which impacted me, of the lot across the street from where I lived, pretty much cemented my view of SoCal which I still hold today. I moved to NorCal within a year of that decision to be with people who appreciate ecology and natural beauty and to get as far away as I could from the El Lay rat race.

Thank gawd for the tree-hugging hippies of NorCal in the 1960s who had the foresight to protect the environs of NorCal. It is truly because of said tree-hugging hippies is the reason why NorCal still has its native natural beauty, today.

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You're welcome.

It's nice to be remembered. · ·

...and appreciated.

Let's get real. Yes Southern California was raped by developers in large part because that is where people ruched to move after WW II. And yes, there is a greater appreciation of nature to the north in large part because nature down this way isn't trees but sage brush and other not so glamorous plant life.

I lived in NorCal for several years and that 580 extension is just as bad as is the trip south of the City and oakland. Not really any difference from the burbs down here.

I have fought against the horrors of development in both locales and continue to do so. Here in Los Angeles we are now at the stage where most development is in filling and higher density developments, much as happened in east coast cities long ago.

Now if you want us to go back to a less developed time, then I hope you are willing to take some of the 20 million people who moved in this area after I did, because they have to go somewhere.

If anything, you should kiss our feet for taking them so you did not have to. did we do it well? Decidedly not. But that was then and now we are doing what we can to rectify and correct some of those excesses.

You cannot have a Venice without a Naples, you cannot have a Saint Petersburg without a Moscow, you cannot have a Grosse Point without a Flint, you cannot have a London without a Liverpool.

It's perfectly okay that you PREFER to live in a region that has a favorable climate and ecology for attractive green space, Rick.
I applaud your good taste and I think you have every right to express your preference.

But your Numan-like war on SoCal goes beyond expressing a preference.
In numerous posts and even entire threads, you've expressed the desire to separate the two regions and divorce from SoCal in the misguided belief that you can pretend to make 17 million people and their needs disappear, or that they can be palmed off to some redneck empire, simply because our ecology, our climate, and our industrial trends conflict with your sense of aesthetics.

It's because there are industrial zones and cities that aesthetes like yourself get to have your preferences, Rick.
Your region didn't want the development, so it went elsewhere.

But that's not good enough for you.
You'd rather it didn't exist at all.
And I say you wouldn't make it without your rough and distasteful counterparts in the L.A. Basin.

Just as not everyone can be a day trader or a CEO, not everyone can be a NorCal dandy, sipping tea while overlooking the Golden Gate.

Someone has to make stuff, someone has to run factories, someone has to do the uncouth things that you eschew.

Your argument is beyond mere prissy disdain, which is bad enough.
It's unreasonable, it's narrow-minded and it is intolerant.

It's also unworkable. California needs L.A. every bit as much as it needs the idyllic scenery of the North.

And besides, you need to visit your Central Valley area and clean up your meth labs. They're quite bothersome to those of us in the South who already put up with the ones out East in the Inland Empire.