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.

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.

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...

The state has to consider whether it is capable of doing this at all (obviously, it isn't).