California is terrible at managing infrastructure projects.
Is it any wonder when you have evil groups of people spending hundreds of millions of dollars to tell people that they should vote against their interests?
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/19/climate/koch-brothers-pub...
Wasn’t it Newsom who canceled the project? Most high ranking Democrats are certainly rich from things like “energy” and “weapons” via k street and international analogues. We are bipartisan in our corruption and failure to build infrastructure.
No. Newsom was the messenger saying what was already pretty evident: the project had run itself into a logistic and financial corner that there was no feasible path out of (at least for now).
Note that HSR planning and construction is still taking place. The current public assumption seems to be that the "train from nowhere to nowhere" is all we'll ever get out of the project, but Newsom was actually pretty careful not to say this.
Major rail construction has basically been absent in the US for a generation or more. Does the lack of experience and support, combined with a general reluctance to bring in foreign expertise, explain the difference? Maybe. The Texas HSR project may be instructive, as it's bringing in a Japanese firm.
... yeah, I don't think that's true. Major road projects in the US often have exactly the same kinds of hemorrhaging cost overruns and other issues that rail projects do: look at Seattle's Alaska Way Viaduct replacement project, the Bay Area's Bay Bridge replacement project, or Boston's Big Dig for infamous cost overruns that are measured in large integer multiples.
The major difference, I believe, is that there is often massive public pressure to force through road projects when they hit snags, whereas rail projects tend to get cancelled at first opportunity.
FWIW, my experience with smaller-scale local projects in my area is that they are completed generally on time, competently, and achieve the desired aims.
This describes in more detail how it was done: https://www.epi.org/publication/bp166/
You mean like this?
[1] https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2019/10/13/national/ten-tr...
10 out of 30 down until further notice.
People have aversion to public works projects because they routinely see public works projects being mismanaged, hugely overbudget, delayed to geological times, used as source to appropriate public money into private pockets, and paraded for political influence while being badly maintained and chronically broken. I am far from being a millionaire, but I would require a lot of convincing to see how it actually benefits me and doesn't turn into another boondoggle for politicians and contractors. Maybe spending serious chunk of my income on a project that would not happen for decades, would be poorly maintained and I probably won't end up using because they'd screw up something like not having proper access to the endpoints is actually not my interests?
The politician isn't looking to do what's right, they're looking to get reelected.
But that's true in all democracies, pretty much by definition.
Plus, it seems that the main problem is that there's simply not enough experience/expertise at governments for managing/planning/executing these projects. Because too few people are in-house (or on payroll/retainer with the right/aligned incentives), and too few projects are done, so no competent team forms over time.
We're not talking about projects in the private domain. We're talking about government projects. Look at the Obamacare website boondoggle. Or the recent lack of backups in Baltimore when hit with ransomware. When it's a government project, it's very fair to consider graft and corruption as the primary causes, especially as they often lead to favoring incompetent people in charge of executing the project.
The US almost prides itself in the fact that its government is dysfunctional, that individuals can stop projects at the expense of the general public. One just needs to look at the countless of Hollywood movies where some lone Erin Brockovich-esque hero stands up to 'the machine', with the question rarely being raised what the collective costs and trade-offs are, or whether there's even a rational case to be made for the resistance.
The problem is, that alternatives are not priced comparably, thus the economics simply favors them. (Such as driving or flying.)
If tunneling would be cheaper (in concrete construction costs), then those could go ahead, because there's not much issue about it, it's about as straightforward as flying. (Of course below a certain depth, so no noise and structural concerns arise.)
California is terrible at managing.