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Comment by mistrial9 | Hacker News Reader

High speed rail is beneficial over time; other parts of the world are doing it with success. It seems a very bad sign that a large project in the USA is so difficult, as mentioned elsewhere. Last quick comment is, don't discount the possibility that this is hardball from a new (attorney) Governor, and there are more chapters to this story coming.

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The difference between America and Europe, Japan, etc. is that is so spread out. To get from place A to B in an airplane you essentially just need two runways. A train needs miles and miles of expensive track that wind around the landscape between the two places. It just doesn't make sense except in densely populated areas like the Northeast.

The track itself isn't the expensive bit. It's simply steel, concrete and gravel, and probably could cost <100k per mile.

It's the compulsory land purchases and expensive consultants which are the main expense.

Track for high speed trains can be very expensive. Unless land is very flat, it's not uncommon for >50% of track to be on bridges/in tunnels.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beijing–Shanghai_high-speed_ra... The HSR between Beijing and Shanghai has 87% length are elevated.

> To get from place A to B in an airplane you essentially just need two runways

This is definitely not true. SFO's Terminal 1 cost $2.4 billion. Let's not forget the huge amount of greenhouse gas emissions from airplane fuel.

>It seems a very bad sign that a large project in the USA is so difficult

It's not just this one project, it's all the infrastructure in the US. It's horrifically expensive to build (compared to countries like Germany and Japan, which themselves are not low-cost-of-living places), it takes forever to build, there's massive cost overruns, etc. America is really just politically broken and unable to build the infrastructure it needs to continue as a world-leading economy.

Somehow America continues to be a world-leading economy, with a growth rate considerably better than that of Europe with its high speed rail. Can you name a large European company formed in the last decade or two that's dominating anything at all in this world? Something like Google or Facebook or Uber or Airbnb or Stripe?

The cynic in me says that all of these companies (maybe except Stripe, not familiar enough with them to know if they are embroiled in anything shady) are far to cavalier with privacy, legality, and generally common decency to fly anywhere else.

These companies dominate the world in what they do. There were no laws against their existence in Europe, but for some odd reason they did not originate there.

Pablo Escobar dominated the world in what he did, but most people would not find it a reason to be proud.

True. The eastern section of the bay bridge was originally estimated to cost $250 million. It ended up costing $6.5 billion.

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