At some point the state has to say, "our requirements are making it insanely expensive. We need to consider a different route, or a lower speed."
A better route can lower costs, but there are places in the world that build on much worse land for less.
Lower speed is unlikely to change anything, you can have a few sharper corners, but nothing that is a big deal. Meanwhile lower speed makes this much less useful vs flying. (and starts to make driving competitive - at least you have your car when you get there)
CA (and the US) has issues, and I don't know what they are. Every time someone suggests something they feel like a drop in the bucket, and all the different drops don't add up to much.
It has nothing (or very very little) to do with how difficult the terrain is to navigate, it has everything to do with who owns the land, and how much they want to charge for it.
Often these "owners" only purchase the land once informed that it is a potential high speed rail route.
It sounds like CA needs some eminent domain reform. I don't live there, so I don't know (and don't are to look up) the law. In the US in general the constitution requires a fair price, if someone bought land we have evidence of the fair price. My general advice (though often not allowed by law) is that you should pay 10% more than fair if they sell now, but if they go to court we only pay fair price (thus if you disagree with the fair price by 5% you should sell now anyway)
Not sure if you’ve read Abundance. But the basic idea is that rich, developed countries have onerous processes in place to satisfy many needs, which is antithetical to building stuff.
For example, CA requires strict analysis and studies. CA has myriad legislation to protect private property. It has restrictions on what can be purchased, from whom, and from whence labor can be sourced. Together, this vast web of limitations makes big projects like HSR extremely expensive and unwieldy.
It’s not that the scope or ambition of the project is a problem in itself. It’s that the mega project comes along with many requirements aside from just building it.
Effectively, CA is working at cross-purpose.
The resolution is actually very simple. You just exempt your mega-project from all the legislation constraining it.
If CA wanted to they could simply change the law. Skip labor-sourcing laws, skip community feedback, skip permitting and approval (aside from safety), skip domestic parts requirements, and apply eminent domain with no feedback process.
We don’t do that for political reasons. This isn’t a technical problem
We don't do that because of all the reasons those laws were put into place.
San Diego to San Fransisco
The state representative from San Diego was the original proposer of the high speed rail (after returning from Japan of course).
Once the crime and graft roulette wheel went into action, San Diego was almost immediately removed from "the route".
“What you should in fact do is employ all the world's top male and female supermodels, pay them to walk the length of the train handing out free Chateau Petrus for the entire duration of the journey. You'll still have about 3 billion pounds left in change and people will ask for the trains to be slowed down.” ~Rory Sutherland
Oh, never mind, that's obviously not going to happen...
The Why Nations Fail book pointed out this exact issue that institutions that doesn’t serve the people’s interests is the main culprit.
China builds high speed rail at half the cost of the US.
European countries of comparable size and GDP to California do not experience own-goals of this magnitude.
The state in China, is competent.
Like half of these ballooning budgets are things that Private Businesses brag about on the other side. "I got a $200B Private contract with the CA Gov't." Is a big win for the company, and a big loss for the taxpayer. To some extent I think CA should be able to reclaim a large portion of their contract (in some way) because costs ballooned.
The same for Military contractors. There needs to be better enforcement of "this is the budget that you bid, we won't increase that, and you still have to deliver."
Imagine if companies ended up having to sell part of their company to the gov't if they failed to deliver their contract.