As in most states, California originally created gasoline taxes to pay for highways. But the ever-hungry transit lobby effectively stole some of that money by convincing the state legislature to divert some gas taxes and most Diesel taxes to transit.
Of course, no amount of money is ever enough for the passenger rail lobby, so they conceived the idea of the state selling nearly $10 billion of bonds — with no particular source of revenue to repay those bonds — to fund high-speed rail and rail transit improvements in cities on the high-speed rail route. Of course, this was sold to voters as being essentially cost-free — because measures that require a tax increase must get approval from two thirds of voters instead of just half.
