Having spent years in the field of market research, I can tell you a few truisms about the discipline.  1) Any pollster worth their salt can get any result their client desires.  2)  The sample chosen (not just size, but composition) drives results.  3)  Unless you see the actual questions and their order you can't understand the results.

With that in mind, let's see what Dan Walters of the Sac Bee noticed about the High Cost Rail survey

We should be as skeptical of the poll, however, as of the ridership projections.

Take the declaration, for instance, that "a clear majority of frequent intrastate travelers indicate that they would like to use the train once it is built."

The actual question was whether travelers would use it when told that riding the bullet train between San Francisco and Los Angeleswould cost less than an airline ticket and "much less than the cost of driving."

In other words, as the authority's deputy director Jeffrey Barker put it to reporters Tuesday, the train would be "a cheaper way to travel."

Of course the response to a "cheaper way to travel" would be positive, but it's very questionable premise.

It could be cheaper than driving only if the car carried just the driver and one counted the full-bore costs of driving, including depreciation, maintenance and insurance on the car, rather than merely the incremental cost of fuel for such a jaunt.

The authority's assumption that bullet train fares would be 83 percent of airline fares, meanwhile, is based on using the highest possible airline fares, rather than the more common and much-lower no-frills Southwest Airlines fares. It also assumes bullet train overhead is as modest as the authority's current "business plan" projects.

Regarding point 3 above, I hear that at least one group has filed a public records request for the raw data, so the real results of the survey have not yet been reported on.  Stay tuned.