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Comment by verandaguy | Hacker News Reader

As an outside/non-American observer: yeah, it'd make total sense, but it seems like there's no political will in the US to build publicly-owned transport infrastructure beyond:

- Maintaining what's already there

- Select state-level projects, in some states

- Select municipal-level projects, in some cities

This means there's been a huge deficit in this kind of project at the federal level.

In saying that, I don't want to give the impression that I'm on some ivory tower. Via Rail, a crown corp, is our national rail operator, and it's riddled with issues with little in the way of meaningful solutions.

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"no political will in the US to build publicly-owned transport"

There's little faith that public projects have the expertise to actually get it done and make it work. It's hard for me to imagine the federal government succeeding at that for any reasonable cost, and I suppose you could blame some of that on partisan bickering. But I also can't imagine California succeeding for any reasonable cost, and it's a one-party state, so there's no excuse.

At the end of the day you need some people who actually know how to do the job rather than just argue over plans and subcontract twelve levels deep. My guess is that Birghtline found a few such people and that's their competitive advantage as a business.

> There's little faith that public projects have the expertise to actually get it done and make it work.

This ends up being self-fulfilling. People don't trust the government, so they suffocate the project in fixed payscales and low-bid rules and endless reviews, and so the government can't get anything done, and so people don't trust the government...

> At the end of the day you need some people who actually know how to do the job rather than just argue over plans and subcontract twelve levels deep.

Right - so you need to be able to hire those people and pay them something close to what they're worth, or build up that expertise over the long term by having a steady pipeline of projects and training people as you go. But voters don't trust these governments enough to empower them to do that.

"This ends up being self-fulfilling."

Perhaps. But once the expertise is lost, you can't get it back by throwing more money at the problem. You have incompetent people hiring people who check all the right boxes but still can't do it, and then you have a huge sunk cost that you don't want to cancel so it drags on forever, eroding trust even further.

Private companies have some advantages here. If they don't think the project will succeed, they will stop, because they know there's no payday. If it's due to bad laws, they will lobby (a bad word, I know) to change them. They'll fire people who don't perform. They'll look in all kinds of creative ways to find people who can get the job done. They'll stop and think about who might actually ride it, because they need the ticket revenue, so they will build the lines in the right places with the right stops.

Maybe all of that could be true for some governments. But there's a long way to go before the US or the California government is able to do any of those things.

> But once the expertise is lost, you can't get it back by throwing more money at the problem. You have incompetent people hiring people who check all the right boxes but still can't do it

Maybe. Maybe there's no alternative to doing a pipeline of progressively bigger projects with in-house management and accepting that the first few will suck. But if you're not willing to pay what the expertise costs then there's no way you'll make it work, you need to get that level of expertise in house. I'd think that if you're willing to pay top dollar then you have at least a chance of hiring the right people.

It's kinda the same problem we have in the EU though. High speed rail is mostly state level. France wants their TGV serving mostly French travellers. Same with the Spanish AVE and German ICE.

It would be amazing to book a high speed train from Amsterdam to Barcelona at prices competing with Aviation. But nobody cares about this at a pan-EU level.

Isn't some of this due to different use cases? The need for the German government to have a train from Berlin to Bremen makes sense in a way that probably doesn't matter if you're not living in Germany, but having a train that connects on the various borders in a compatible way is harder to fund and requires all the other countries to generally agree to do it at the same time.

The likely outcome of a whole-EU train system is something like the US system where Amtrak generally hits the major population centers, but leaves a ton of the US behind because when you talk about Federal priorities, a train from Denver to Dallas isn't a huge priority compared to LA to SF or Boston to NYC. Obviously the EU system would fare better because it's starting from a better base, but it's emblematic of the tradeoff between bottom-up and top-down planning and investment for something like this.

The problem in EU is that most of the funding comes from the states so they want their own taxpayers to benefit first.

So there's not really any interest in selling tickets from Country A to Country C. Because country B has to put up with the traffic which is already resource-restricted. And they prefer their internal customers to get priority.

This way it will never end up as a reasonable alternative for flying. What's really missing in the EU is the ability to bypass cities. A train from Amsterdam to Barcelona has to cross right through the center of Antwerp, Brussels, Lyon (or a transfer in Paris through a horrible metro connection). It's not possible to have a direct train that bypasses all the cities straight to its destination. That would be a real alternative to flying. Considering the amount of flights between Amsterdam and Barcelona daily it's easily possible to fill a few direct trains. It's that stopping in every city center (without in-city facilities for high-speed tracks) that make it so horrible.

But anyway the EU really doesn't care about this at all and considering the huge construction durations they're too late for this to make a difference in climate change anyway.

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