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Comment by antimatter | Hacker News Reader

It is an embarrassment for the state and this country that we are unable to build something so trivial for other countries without such massive costs.

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What is the cost breakdown to build it? Equipment, labor, land? My understanding is that buying the land is extremely expensive. The original path of the train was changed so it could run through cheaper land but it's still expensive.

Maybe it's best that this doesn't happen because it will just turn into a boondoggle and the tax payers will be on the hook for it.

It would make sense hiring a European or Asian country to come in and build it for us with 1/5 of the resources and in 1/3 the time. If a country like Switzerland can dig through solid granite for 35 miles under a mountain (Gotthard Base Tunnel) someone out there other than a US company should be able to lay a few hundred miles of track.

I wouldnt want China or India to build it for us, but I would offer Japan, Germany, or Switzerland a premium.

Uhh, they cut corners on their train cars. Where we allow 1 inch of crush when an impact happens and limited twist, they allow a foot & change, with significantly more twist allowed. There are other safety standards they are not bound to too, unlike rail in the US.

There's a fundamentally different approach to rail safety in Europe. The US mandates rail cars built like a tank, but has tons of open grade crossings and simple signaling systems. Europe builds lighter (== faster, cheaper, less track-damaging, more fuel-efficient) cars and invests a ton of time and money making sure they don't crash in the first place.

Even given that, the survivability of a crash in a modern European train is very good. The Grayrigg derailment in the UK, for example, had an Italian-built express train jump the rails at 95mph and jackknife down an embankment. One death (she was 84).

UK railways carried 64.4 billion passenger kilometers last year. The Grayrigg derailment was the last accident involving the death of a passenger. It was in 2007. How many road traffic accidents avoided by rail travel since then?

Why?

The French already said they could build the California high speed train for half the current estimate, or something like that. As mentioned in other comments, it's the popular opinion and government fragmentation in the US that makes this impossible. In France, the train builders and operators are nationalized (roughly) and the central government is much more powerful (not in terms of absolute power but rather in public acceptance). So in France, where high speed trains have been successful for years, the state run constructors can get eminent domain, lay track and run trains with only a few nimbys that most people ignore. Another way to see it is if Parisians want to take a high speed train through your back yard to get to the ski or sun, too bad for you. That doesn't happen in the US with weaker central government and stronger property rights (for corporations too). Japan and China are the same way (centralized command-based government).

Sure, if we restricted eminent domain litigation and returned environmental impact statements to being under 75 pages (as they are legally required to be already) we could build rail much cheaper, but Trump has not said jack in regard to getting that cleaned up.

It's more than just that, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dirigisme

Edited to add: there are many ways for government and economies to function.

Well most of the citizens in the US don't care about public transit. The lack of seriousness about it logically follows.

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