So basically we had a bunch of very expensive idiots running an outsourced project.
If they had kept the whole project in house, we'd have the initial operating segment already.
See also, CEQA is a terrible law that mostly blocks good things and rarely blocks bad things.
That's because I see a lot of bad decisions -- stupidity over greed. It only takes a few bad decisions made by people with power to completely sink a project. Now imagine building an airport or a subway. How many of these do we build? They are basically one off projects. Following a manual to repave a road doesn't require much competence, as it's a project that's done over and over again -- but doing a one-off project with unique challenges -- that requires serious competence.
And lack of competence is a much harder problem to solve than corruption. The incompetent person doesn't admit or know they are incompetent. The incompetent person can't be scared with lawsuits or investigations to become competent. No amount of sunshine will help. The only solution is to get rid of the incompetent person and put someone competent in charge. But that doesn't work at the national level -- if there is a shortage of incompetent people, or if our hiring systems aren't able to hire the competent person. So the solutions are very long term and painful:
* change how governments hire and promote staff to focus more on competence and less on passive traits like seniority/diversity/etc.
* reduce the need for competence by focusing on standardized projects built in a steady cadence. For subways, make every subway the same, or pick just 2 variants, and develop a team of people with experience working on these all across the country, with standardized best practices and a pool of skilled workers who have experience working on these projects.
All of that requires some pretty radical reforms of how our projects are funded and what role cities have to play in building them, as well as upsetting a lot of government unions.
Then there is the issue of Federalism. The Swiss have a highly efficient infrastructure system and have strong federalism, as does Germany, but you're not in a situation where each state has completely different zoning/eminent domain laws, or separate licensing so an engineer in one state may not be able to even work in another. This makes it harder for us to adopt more standardized practices across states for big infrastructure projects as well as a national pool of experts that can go state to state and build standardized projects.
eg power corrupts
Bids and bonds have already been levied against those estimates. Even if you make up new ones to match reality, it was fraudulent in concept. With less than half the length (515km versus the proposed >1200km CA project), the japanese built a HSR for about 2.3 billion USD (adjusted from 1959 ~400 billion yen). From the start, this has been a doomed project to get some people paid. Admittedly, the idea of starting something (anything) to connect the top and bottom half of CA is perhaps visionary, selling it as a doable project was dishonest.
However it turns out, the CA HSR (or slow speed rail) will not be completed in the lifetime of anyone alive today, but Californians still get to pay for it. I'm reminded of Lyta's admission about the Vorlon mistakes in Babylon 5's Thirdspace movie. It's just compounded for the poor Californians, each time.