The arguments about the relative costs of the Las Vegas tunnel versus the cost of the CA rail project are interesting. You mention that the bulk of the cost is actually in the stations, yet tell us the per mile cost. How many fully accessible stations integrated with existing transport infrastructure are to be built on the high-speed rail project? The Vegas tunnel is currently unidirectional isn’t it? That would be less useful for the high speed rail project. It’s a bit different to consider a largely pleasure route which can largely be routed anyway from a transport project which is much less restricted in where it can be routed. A rail project has additional costs and complexities like laying track and signalling. I’ll assume your argument is that these are unnecessary, we can just use existing autonomous cars to solve this. In which case might we be better comparing cost by passenger throughput rather than per mile.