I'm very in favor of high-speed rail, in general. But I remember when the price tag had jumped to "only" $100B, and that was already considered a scandal.
At some point the state has to say, "our requirements are making it insanely expensive. We need to consider a different route, or a lower speed."
I doubt those will fix the issues.
A better route can lower costs, but there are places in the world that build on much worse land for less.
Lower speed is unlikely to change anything, you can have a few sharper corners, but nothing that is a big deal. Meanwhile lower speed makes this much less useful vs flying. (and starts to make driving competitive - at least you have your car when you get there)
CA (and the US) has issues, and I don't know what they are. Every time someone suggests something they feel like a drop in the bucket, and all the different drops don't add up to much.
Land acquisition costs are one issue. The California Environment Quality Act (CEQA) is another. While well intentioned, it allows almost anyone to tie up any development project in court indefinitely based on trivial concerns. If we want to have a functioning industrial economy then we're going to have to scale back CEQA and accept a certain amount of environmental damage.
Your understanding of how the route affects the price is misguided.
It has nothing (or very very little) to do with how difficult the terrain is to navigate, it has everything to do with who owns the land, and how much they want to charge for it.
Often these "owners" only purchase the land once informed that it is a potential high speed rail route.
They will do the same to a different route. Once you buy land you become committed to a route. Reform is needed, but I'm not sure what.
In a way, it’s a transfer of wealth from masses to these land owners (or brokers in a sense).
I don’t think the tech or the route is remotely the problem. This is purely a matter of political will.
Not sure if you’ve read Abundance. But the basic idea is that rich, developed countries have onerous processes in place to satisfy many needs, which is antithetical to building stuff.
For example, CA requires strict analysis and studies. CA has myriad legislation to protect private property. It has restrictions on what can be purchased, from whom, and from whence labor can be sourced. Together, this vast web of limitations makes big projects like HSR extremely expensive and unwieldy.
It’s not that the scope or ambition of the project is a problem in itself. It’s that the mega project comes along with many requirements aside from just building it.
Effectively, CA is working at cross-purpose.
The resolution is actually very simple. You just exempt your mega-project from all the legislation constraining it.
If CA wanted to they could simply change the law. Skip labor-sourcing laws, skip community feedback, skip permitting and approval (aside from safety), skip domestic parts requirements, and apply eminent domain with no feedback process.
We don’t do that for political reasons. This isn’t a technical problem
I’ve heard a better idea.
“What you should in fact do is employ all the world's top male and female supermodels, pay them to walk the length of the train handing out free Chateau Petrus for the entire duration of the journey. You'll still have about 3 billion pounds left in change and people will ask for the trains to be slowed down.” ~Rory Sutherland
Someone mentioned sunk costs a couple of days ago, and here’s a glaringly stupid example but watch everyone justify the price tag with all sorts of reasons.
I am too, but folks have to realize this is handout to big construction and construction unions, it's not to solve problem of high speed travel between SF and LA. While that has always been a thing in public works, unfortunately in recent decades in the US we've gotten to point where it doesn't really matter if the project makes sense or is ever completed. It's a shame.
It should also be noted that the original route was from:
San Diego to San Fransisco
The state representative from San Diego was the original proposer of the high speed rail (after returning from Japan of course).
Once the crime and graft roulette wheel went into action, San Diego was almost immediately removed from "the route".
They also started construction before they even finalized the route, including not realizing they would have to move tons of utility lines along the way (they didn't get sign off from the public utilities beforehand), then it got bogged down by environmental reviews, land acquisition issues, etc.
The California High Speed Rail Authority just posted about how many "good-paying jobs" they created, as if that's the goal rather than building a functioning railroad. Disgusting.
https://x.com/CaHSRA/status/2040474563847278877
Here in WA state, politicians list their accomplishments with lines like "spent $XXX million on YYY".
Or, maybe, at some point, the state has to say No, to real estate mafia insider trading?
Oh, never mind, that's obviously not going to happen...
And that’s the real issue. It’s a continuous rent seeking behavior and resource extraction from masses to a limited number of individuals.
The Why Nations Fail book pointed out this exact issue that institutions that doesn’t serve the people’s interests is the main culprit.
The state has to consider whether it is capable of doing this at all (obviously, it isn't).
The state is capable, it is just unwilling to leverage its power to achieve a meaningful outcome. This is relatively normal across the country; NIMBYs and small landowners have outsized influence and ability to delay.
China builds high speed rail at half the cost of the US.
European countries of comparable size and GDP to California do not experience own-goals of this magnitude.
The state in the US, especially California, is not competent.
The state in China, is competent.
What is the best evidence that it is capable? I believe it isn't, as demonstrated in this and other areas.
For comparison, the construction cost of AlBoraq 200mph bullet train in Morroco is $5.3–5.7 billion in today's dollars. The line length is 200 miles.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al_Boraq