Other countries do this just fine and we can easily build freeways and highways. This is because of intentional sabotage. US politics are actively harming citizens by sabotaging projects to 'prove how bad x is' when in reality x is the right answer if you don't have active bad actors.
In Japan the cost of building the tunnels through mountains and undersea for Shinkansen ranges from $20-100M/km. Since there's no default ownership of subsurface land rights in CA it would be cheaper and faster to dig tunnels than pay for the land rights and environmental impacts.
For the $231B you ought to be able to get 2-3000 miles of tunnel done (3x what is proposed on the surface). Of course the stations are still a huge cost, because those have to be above ground, but you could choose where to put them. The bridges and aqueducts that have been built so far (Bakersfield to Merced) are intentionally where land costs are low and no one will ride them.
I agree, this isn't about figuring out how to build high-speed rail for riders. This is about figuring out how to extract maximum funds from tax/rate payers. It's just like PG&E. I'd go as far as to say that all the consultants and construction companies that have been paid should be banned from future public infrastructure builds unless the money spent is paid back.
And I WANT highspeed rail.
You are claiming that this is anti train and pro car conspiracy. Counter ponint : the SF Bay_Bridge cost 6.5 Billion, but was originally budgeted at 200 Million.
The US can't build anything efficiently. It's due to the massive mismanagement, bureaucratic nonsense, environmental review, permitting and NIMBY lawsuits.
The real conspiracy is that "they" never wanted a train, "they" wanted an endless jobs project.
The SF Bay Bridge cost $6.5B, and somehow still didn't include a bike lane.
It's mostly that we allow whiners to control the project and that's literally it.
This is the only actual difference between the US and other places
Take Los Angeles, the Santa Monica train slows down around a stop called farmdale because some whiner ran a bogus fear mongering campaign in 2011. I was at those meetings nobody liked this guy.
15 years later every trip, every day is still delayed because of this one man's stupid bitchfest
To be fair our interstate highways were built many decades ago by mostly just disregarding poor neighborhoods and taking land from them indescriminately.
We do build new ones (I26 is happening now) and that doesn't cost hundreds of billions of dollars. We can and have built big projects. We can and will build bigger ones. This is just sabotage at every possible chance. I have seen this my whole life. We are so far behind on solar adoption because of groups actively making things worse, often at a real cost to the group, just to make it look like actual good ideas are bad ones. Our politics are toxic and the core problem here, not the idea or the technology. This is toxic sabotage politics where it is better to break things than to let the other side have a good idea.