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Notes -
There are two major categories of construction-related problem in the Anglosphere.
The first is environmental regulation, particularly the ability of local groups (farmers, old people, landowners, rich retirees who don’t want a railroad near their country home etc) to exploit environmental rules at relatively modest cost to stymie construction. A $100bn project can be held up because some of these people band together, commission a $90,000 study on some local rare bird that (of course, because it’s written by the leading academic fans of said bird) concludes that the construction would do irreversible damage to its habitat, triggering a state investigation, triggering a 4-year delay and endless legal action before construction can restart, costing hundreds of millions or billions because the contracts were already signed, people need to be paid etc. Anglo countries allow for individuals or groups to mount legal challenges to the state much more aggressively than other nations, and judges are much more likely to grant injunctions, freeze construction etc while those cases progress.
The second problem is that eminent domain rules are much stricter in Common Law jurisdictions, ie the Anglosphere, than in the rest of the West. Civil law countries don’t see eminent domain as (as) adversarial, it’s often just a matter of calculating compensation, processes are streamlined, there is no widespread belief that the state isn’t allowed to expropriate the land, only that they should pay for it. In a lot of common law jurisdictions, objectors can often demand to know why their land has to be taken, or demand to propose alternate routes, and can tie up negotiations over compensation in years of legal wrangling that has to be resolved before construction can be started instead of seizing the land first, starting construction, then resolving squabbles over compensation later.
A third, secondary problem is that the Westminster system and the altered version practiced in the US grant more power to local politicians than many continental European electoral systems, which either have party list systems and/or stronger executives. For example, a huge reason the California high speed rail has been a disaster is because inland state politicians forced the state to reroute the railroad (which should have taken the direct coastal route from Los Angeles to San Francisco) via a bunch of shithole cities nobody wants to go to, delaying the project by decades by compounding with both of the above issues.
I think there are pros and cons to both systems. But given that Anglo communities and states live in the Anglo system, they should just stop trying to build trains in my opinion. Build lots of busses, build other stuff, but don't force train lines that go years and billions beyond the plan.
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Isn't one of the supposed purposes of high speed rail to permit people from shithole cities and towns to affordably and practically commute to large metro areas to work?
Maybe the California state government indeed proposed that. If so that's quite silly because busses and freeways already exist. In fact I heard on the radio that the small stretch of rail from Merced to Bakersfield hardly services anyone at enormous cost and adds no value over already existing bus routes. At least that's the opinion of Conservative California radio hosts.
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In this case it was primarily in competing with the extremely oft used air route between the two cities, which sit in the sweet spot of distance where intercity train travel is usually both very viable and successful. More stops only make the route less competitive.
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CAHSR did make bad routing mistakes, but going up the Central Valley is not one of them. There is a reason why I-5 goes up the Central Valley, as does the existing freight railway. The Central Valley route is actually straighter (roughly 450 miles vs 470 for the coastal route) and there is a lot more space to build straight and flat.
The big mistakes were how you cross from the Central Valley to the coast at each end of the line. The correct route goes over Tejon and Altamont passes, for the same reasons that I-5 does. In the south, CAHSR proposed to go over Tehachapi Pass - adding 34 miles in length, 15-20 minutes in journey time, and $5-7 billion in tunneling costs. I can't anyone making the case for Tehachapi apart from "relitigating this will just kill the project" fatalism, so I don't know why the decision was made. In the north, CAHSR proposed to go over Pacheco Pass and enter San Francisco via San Jose and the Caltrain route (which would need to be extensively 4-tracked because Caltrain are already using the existing tracks) because Ron Didion wanted direct service to his hometown. You can find people willing to defend Pacheco, but it only makes sense if Caltrain and CAHSR are willing to work together to avoid unnecessary construction, which they are not.
It would be crazy for cahsr to pass by the biggest city in NorCal. Of course, the state of Caltrain organizational capacity is lamentable.
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In the nicest possible way, I think that's the most eloquent and convincing argument for common law land rights I've ever heard. I get that it causes problems but gosh, the alternative sounds pretty bad.
I mean, the Texas high speed rail is delayed more or less indefinitely because a bunch of ranchers on the route didn’t get the appropriate concessions to acquiesce to eminent domain, so they convinced the Texas nationalists it was a George Soros WEF plot to bring in a UN occupation to provide political cover to their lawfare.
Now obviously the Texas high speed rail could have bargained with the farmers(they wanted more stops to provide local employment and a few concessions on cattle-crossing logistics and were willing to waive their compensation rights if those conditions were granted, both of which seem like they could have come to a reasonable agreement on), but still.
And of course on the third hand the project may well be more an exercise in green fetishism rather than a practical idea; the Dallas-Houston route is well served by commuter flights and luxury buses which puts an upper floor on the price tag for rail tickets.
I've long been wondering whether a better application of HSR wouldn't be to urban centers directly, but to major airports. Ideally, the airport already has transit options into the city available, are generally on the outskirts of town where routing rail travel would be easier, and, while airlines might be unhappy about losing short flights, there are lots of short connections to hubs that could probably be faster by train than an extra connecting flight. Austin and San Antonio to Dallas or Houston, Chicago to Milwaukee, Oklahoma City to Dallas, Phoenix to Tuscon. All these flights are about an hour, and fly more than half a dozen flights daily each way, many of which are, I assume, to take a much longer flight from the larger airport, because driving would take a similar amount of time and solve getting around at the destination.
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Well, it depends. I don’t think the question of whether some random farmer should be able to block a $100bn infrastructure project that has the potential to improve millions of people’s lives and contribute to higher economic growth and prosperity for many people because of the principle of private property is absolute is an easy one.
Agreed, and I don’t want to suggest it is. Only that (to paraphrase) “the state can take your home without telling you why, there’s nothing you can do, and even if you argue on good legal grounds they’ll ignore you and take it anyway” sounds pretty grim and also open to abuse.
A part of the problem is that, as urbanisation increases, these projects aren’t designed to benefit flyover locals and everyone knows it. Ideally people would be happily giving up their land so that their area can join in the new wave of prosperity from the 100bn project, as (I think?) was the case with the original train system. But instead projects like HS2 mostly exist explicitly for elite urban traffic to bypass you.
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Amusing example recently from Toronto: the process is underway of electrifying the rail network in order to transform it into a German style S-bahn with frequent, fast, bi-directional service all day. This is legitimately maybe the most important public transport project in Canadian history, give or take the construction of the Canadian Pacific Railway. In terms of reducing greenhouse gas emissions it might be the biggest individual project because it will displace tens, perhaps hundreds of millions of car trips yearly.
So it is totally rational for the project to have been delayed because a group of concerned citizens (who incidentally, live near the rail corridor) were worried that the electrification might affect a type of salamander in a nearby ravine. That is not to say the salamander actually lives in the ravine in question: but it might, and the electrification of the railway and the increased train traffic might affect it somehow. No, the salamander isn't endangered. But who knows: perhaps it one day will be?
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