Even using your figure of 3:15, that isn't as fast as 1:30, and I'm just
surprised that no small commuter airline cannot find enough passengers to
make it work.
The airline is called Amtrak. There are 12 flights a day each way
between San Jose and Sacto. The flight lasts 3:15 and costs $51 round
trip. You can carry a machete and don't have to take off your shoes
unless you want to.

Speaking of useless projects and bullet trains...well, we are now.

You wanna see why our country is so @#$@!! up? Here's why. Nothing
to do with Red or Blue states.

As one responder mentioned, Amtrak provides a great service between
the Bay Area (San Jose/Oakland/Berkeley) and Sacramento. A guy that
works for me commutes twice a week from the Berkeley station to
downtown Sacto. But, it is somewhat slow as another responder
mentioned. Also it is unreliable, because about once a month
something happens to make my guy come in an hour or two late. The
problem is Amtrak "rents" the tracks from Union Pacific or whoever,
which runs freight and doesn't give a damn about Amtrak service.

So it's an ideal route to run some kind of high-speed, dedicated track
passenger service, i.e. bullet train. The demand is clearly there and
the alternate transpo is basically a car, which as yet other
responders pointed out is very problematical.

So what train service is being promoted for California, with no
discussion whatsoever? A friggin' bullet train between North and
South California! Where did this come from??? I haven't seen any kind
of cost comparison between this proposed boondoggle and other forms of
transpo improvement, like adding another lane to I5 (mostly two lanes
now), or upgrading Hwy. 99, or improving airports in the North and
South, or anything else. In fact nobody's said why transpo between
the two regions is so desparately bad that it needs a $20-$30 Billion
Dollar project like this! The transpo that is screwed up just about
everywhere in California is local, not regional. And the two regions
that can really use an improvement, Bay Area/Sacto, are not getting
it.