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Comment by smilekzs | Hacker News Reader

Genuinely curious: From a purely economical / engineering PoV (i.e. conveniently ignoring politics for now), I wonder how much would it cost had it been built by Chinese instead? While China has a tried-and-true HSR formula, would the labor market difference be large enough to throw the plan off balance?

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Thalys (SNCF, the group that runs France's HSRs) had proposed to build the entire route for about $55B without any government subsidies ! But their offer was rejected, probably because it didn't provide for any skimming off the top.

In fairness, that also doesn't sound like reality to me.

No need to go into all the engineering details, but suffice to say that France, and its cities, are relatively geologically stable. California is just, yeah, it's just not. I think the Japanese, who have actual experience on the ring of fire, were a good deal less optimistic in their assessment of the project. Of course, the Japanese could be said to be overly cautious. So there is probably some reasonable middle ground maybe??? Though I don't know where that would be, I'm pretty sure it's not in the rosy assessment of the French.

The problem with building anything in California is that literally anyone can indefinitely stop any construction for practically nothing. There are probably housing construction projects in SF old enough to vote. We can't build houses, what hope do we have for something that is 5 orders of magnitude larger? This is not a problem the Chinese can solve for us.

I wonder how much of the cost is land prices which in China they would just take and force people to move.

https://cn.nytimes.com/china/20121203/c03nailhouse/ Sorry, Chinese is not naive as you think

It's not just the labor market difference. It's the legal and regulatory difference.

Do you think the legal and regulatory difference would make such huge difference that, in China, Beijing-Shanghai HSR project completed in 3 years for whole 1300 KM, and this California HSR projected for 12 years long between Merced and Bakersfield with 191 KM. Because they hired lawyers to do the construct work?

No, because you have to hire lawyers before doing construction work.

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