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Comment by Circuits | Hacker News Reader

Yeah... this is a CA problem not a US problem. Had a similar amount of money been given to say... ND or MT to build some other structure it would have been done before the money was ever divided out.

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Not just CA, TX has similar issues with a PRIVATE HSR that the land owners simply won't let be built.

https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2019/04/texas-central...

To be honest I would be surprised if any land-intensive project gets completed in the Texas/NMexico/Arizona area; those ranchers are really territoral

I mean given all the adversity and polarization in current US culture we still haven't escalated to the armed siege of government buildings, yet those guys have already done that twice this decade over fucking cows

But the CA project wasn't canceled due to land owners protesting its development... so no the issues aren't similar.

Au contraire, the biggest issue that HSR faced was landowners fighting it every step of the way. Between fighting eminent domain and fighting with CEQA (California environmental quality act) it's surprising anything got done.

That was definitely NOT the biggest issue that faced the HSR.

Could ND or MT allocate 30-100bn in state funds for this? The federal grant was a huge loss but a drop in the bucket for how much this project has derailed due to the use of private contractors instead of public engineering.

I think you missed my point.

Montana has 1 million people, North Dakota has <800k, while California has almost 40 million people. California problems are US problems.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dakota_Access_Pipeline_protest...

How is that even remotely the same? If anything that proves my point. Despite massive setbacks that were 100% out of their control the company building that pipeline still got it built in time and under budget...

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