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Comment by inglor_cz | Hacker News Reader

That is absolutely fascinating.

Spain has so far spent about 60 billion Eur on its (much more extensive) HSR network. It has a lot of harsh terrain as well, crossing mountains and semi-deserts.

There are functional HSRs in Morocco and Uzbekistan, Egypt is building its first own HSR.

What's wrong with Californian governance?

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Can't blame unions, considering how easily Europe gets it done. Most likely issue is that in the US, every landowner and minor municipality is empowered to delay and obstruct these projects and thus milk them.

unions in the US aren't necessarily even comparable to in EU.

Yea I would definitely like to know what the response is to eminent domain in other countries where its working better. I've never been in that situation and I can totally understand the resistance to losing your property, but I can't see American's being particularly unique in that feeling. Maybe the laws are just more permissive in the US for contesting the government.

In California specifically there are also environmental regulations like CEQA that provide another avenue for blocking such things, independent of eminent domain issues. Even if someone is building on their own land, lots of environmental review is required, and individuals or groups can sue on the basis that such review was inadequate. This ties things up for a long time. There are legitimate reasons to want environmental review, but the way it works in CA now, CEQA is largely just a tool people use to delay projects they don't want.

Most countries has that but it still doesn't take many decades to build a simple piece of railway.

Details matter. Most countries have environmental laws, but their teeth differ.

Polish environmental law is quite notorious for being deliberately easy on developers (at least outside national parks), which translates into a lot of construction activity.

OTOH Californian CEQA is such a NIMBY/BANANA weapon of mass anti-construction that I have heard of it, despite being located a third of a world away.

Both sound like intent.

It's that foot dragging whiners have outsized power and can gum up any project they want in the courts and tack on higher price tags

All you need is a few people who don't like it for any reason whatsoever and the other 99.99% of people who want it ... They no longer get a voice.

Only the blockers, the nimbys, the ideological naysayers, they get all the power - the podium, the press, and the ear of the court.

The yes people have effectively Zero political power

That's the American difference: we grant whiners sainthood

Actually, the Spanish HSR builders have been involved with the project.

[1] https://www.globalconstructionreview.com/europe8an-gian8t-be...

That is only a $1.2bn deal and shared with another firm. Having different contractors from all over the world do different little parts isn't a good way to reduce costs.

I recall a lot of the original funding (Billions of dollars) was spent on 3rd party consultants to run various multi-year long review processes (environmental, legal compliance, eminent domain, community agreements etc.)

Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson tackle this specific example (along with others) in their book Abundance that came out last year. It's a pretty easy read, and a really interesting examination of why projects like this struggle.

But as other commenters have pointed out — a lot of it is NIMBYism (plus a heavy dose of overregulation).

Conservatives tend to point at projects like this as examples of why our incompetent government shouldn't be allowed to build large projects.

But other countries can do this (including a good chunk of Europe), so I think it's really valuable to dig in and understand why we struggle.

Ironically it is largely because of private actors (those NIMBYs) that such things wind up being slow and expensive.

> overregulation

Europe and Japan are much more regulated than the US, and yet, they build rail just fine over there.

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