I'm seriously dumfounded. I have lost a ton of faith, what little I already had, with this government.
Does ANYONE have a reasonable explanation?
Rationally speaking, you're 100% right. Those are all true impediments. From a realpolitik perspective, it makes total sense to start building where it's not controversial so that parallel non-engineering work can be undertaken. There are rational reasons why labor is so expensive, why planning committees take so much time, and why things take as much time as they do.
But this isn't how large public works can get done quickly. Any sufficiently large project is less technocratic and more political. Allowing large projects to be governed entirely technocratically has shown that timelines stretch so far out as to render the project impossibly expensive to finance and too limited in scope by project's end. There needs to be a single authority (with checks on it...) that can get things done, governed by a politician who can ensure that the authority's efforts are directed to popular projects. An agency with a planning body that makes community-approved blueprints ready before funding comes in, and with the authority to exercise eminent domain on approved plans and start work quickly and immediately.
So while it's cheaper out in the Valley than in LA or SF, it's still significantly more expensive than a non-grade-separated, say, ~75-100 mph-rated track would entail, the sorts of which are common in Europe and do a decent job moving people around cities spaced at such distances.
There might be some validity to this thinking:
(1) If you build part of it and show that it works, it makes it more of a concrete reality. Instead of asking people in urban areas to give up precious right-of-way to build something hypothetical, you're asking them to give it up to build something they can see.
(2) You're also asking the urban areas to wait less time between when they give up the right-of-way and when the system is built. By pushing the rural areas to the earlier part of the schedule, you can move the urban areas to the later part of it.
(3) If it's built in one part of the state, it creates peer pressure for other parts of the state to build it. It looks bad to be the one part of the state that is blocking it.
(4) While the sunk cost fallacy isn't rational, "we've spent this much and we're half done already" will still convince some people.
I'm not saying that overall this was a good strategy, but I can see some advantages. In any case, it seems like the main issue was massive cost overruns.
Hah, do you live in the Bay Area? With the amount of NIMBYism, I don't think peer pressure would help with getting it built to connect the SF/SJ connections. It's why we do not have BART going for a full loop around the bay. Santa Clara county voted it down.
Santa Clara county voted it down.
It's also probably the section of the track where the train can go the fastest, which would give them impressive numbers that might help keep the project rolling.
A couple reasons; pragmatically, there were issues toward both termini, but an initial route in the Valley would be useful to connect to either terminus and start getting real benefit (the valley stretch alone is of very little, though non-zero, utility)
Politically, the program faced state-internal opposition from Republicans, and putting the initial construction and operation, with associated jobs and benefits in one of the more Republican areas of the route was a mechanism to mitigate that.
the program faced state-internal opposition from Republicans
Except for single-vote majorities in 1969-70 and of just the Assembly for just part of 1995-6, the Republicans haven't had a majority in either house in the past sixty years.
They had, and used as a lever on every other issue, a veto pretty much forever on the budget up until Prop 25 in 2010 dropped the 2/3 supermajority for passing the budget. (Despite the current situation, 2/3 supermajority for either party in either house, much less both houses, of the legislature is historically extremely uncommon.)
They also had and used a similar power with regard to tax realignment since there was (and remains) a similar requirement for tax increases, but that's been a weaker power both since Dems went around them to the voters on tax increases in 2012 and because the Dems have actually had 2/3 supermajorities in the legislature at some times recently, including right now.
But, both of those powers were in full bloom when the funding application to the federal government (which needed budgeted state funds) was made (by, it must be noted, a Republican administration in Sacramento, with whom legislative Republicans had more pull than their hard power in the legislature would suggest, though given the quirkiness of the Schwarzenegger adminstration, probably less than would be typical of a Republican governor.)
In the article they mention the number of parcels needed grew by 500, did owners subdivide in order to increase returns?
[0] https://www.fresnobee.com/news/local/article218398575.html
[1] https://www.fresnobee.com/news/local/article218398575.html
IIRC, the valley-first alignment was part of the application for federal funds made when Arnold Schwarzenegger was governor, so it's unlikely it was motivated by concern for friends of the (at the time) once-and-future Governor Brown.
https://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/07/weekinreview/07mckinley.h...
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/07/weekinreview/07mckinley.h...
In many places in California, the people already living their have both the inclination and the means to tie up the construction project in court until 2145. They don't want the construction, or they don't want the influx of commuters, or whatever. To a first approximation, the places that will accept the project happening are the ones looking for a train that goes somewhere else.
Getting a rail line between a major city (LA/San Jose/San Diego/SF etc) requires going through pretty serious mountain ranges. There is already rail line between them in their own geographical pockets (LA-San Diego, SF-San Jose-Oakland)
Mountain View to SFO in 5 minutes
If it has to go somewhere, everyone wants the high speed rail to go through someone else's house, preferably a long ways away.
However going through mountain in an environmentally conscious way gets radically expensive in very short order. Additionally this style of construction tends to have its own legally contentious issues. (Dam construction for water management being comparative)
You already pointed out that Los Angeles was a problem. For San Francisco the route chosen ran into problems 30 miles south of San Jose, where they were planning to use existing rails (at slower speeds). And once you're in San Jose, you still have a long ways to go to get into San Francisco.
See https://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-bullet-train-... for verification.