Being in the east of France, it's a bit sad how misconnected we are with the west of France. (Lyon <-> Bordeaux you'd think can be done in 2 hours, but no it'll take like 6 hours).
California's cities are all arranged in a line, it should be the easiest high-speed rail project ever, but it languishes due to lack of imagination.
California's cities are not all arranged in a single line. They are in two roughly parallel lines, separated by up to hundreds of miles and across mountains. There are the coastal cities of SF, SJ, SLO, LA, and SD (follows highway 1) and the Central Valley line of Sacramento, Stockton, Merced, Fresno, Bakersfield, Lancaster/Palmdale (follows highway 99 mostly). The 5 is a compromise interstate that runs in between these two, and there is very little development there. If you've ever driven the 5, you know what I'm talking about. Even most towns "on" the 5 are a few miles away.
The HSR line could have been drawn from LA to SF more or less following the 5, stopping at the outskirts of Bakersfield and then zooming straight through to a fork that stops next in either Gilroy (en route to the Bay Area) or Modesto (en route to Stockton and Sacramento). This would have been cheaper, shorter, and less encumbered by the need to get permits, approvals, easements, and the like from everyone in the Central Valley. Meanwhile, the chosen HSR route through the Central Valley runs through dozens of different counties, cities, tax districts, and regional planning agencies.
Also, Fresno is far less dense than Bordeaux, and has a population that generally considers a mile to be a "long walk."
The latter is way easier to build in particular the spine through the Capitol.
LA plus the Bay Area is most of the State, but travel between those two endpoints is a lot less than that plus travel between each of them and the Central Valley, and along the Central Valley’s North-South axis.
Sacrificing the stop in Fresno (and the other Central Valley cities) would not have enabled HSR for the majority of the state. If anything, it would have made it less viable, not only politically (both in terms of federal and state politics), but also in terms of meeting the actual official goals of the project.
No, they aren’t.
> it should be the easiest high-speed rail project ever
The error in the preceding claim isn’t the only reason why this one is false, too (geography and preexisting land use also play roles).
> but it languishes due to lack of imagination.
Mostly, it has been delayed by lack of funding, not imagination, but its not really “languishing” right now, either.