>Transportation? California approved high-speed rail in 2008 to link LA and San Francisco for $33 billion. Costs ballooned; there’s still no service. The U.K. c

>Transportation? California approved high-speed rail in 2008 to link LA and San Francisco for $33 billion. Costs ballooned; there’s still no service. The U.K. canceled HS2’s northern leg after years of overruns. Berlin’s new airport opened almost a decade late and billions over budget. Meanwhile, China built 40,000 kilometers of high-speed rail that runs at 350 km/h. I know this is a tangent but I really think it's completely asinine that we hold passenger rail and particularly high-speed rail to the same standards (environmental, eminent domain, etc) as other projects — public and private — in light of the fundamental differences: - RoW for trains is highly constrained. Turns and hills are both very bad. A factory can be moved. A road can turn. A train is SOL. - Passenger rail displaces transport modes that have far worse externalities for the environment, human safety and land use. Other infrastructure generally does not do this. There are a few exceptions like powerlines. - Failing transport networks are a national embarrassment. If we have to do this — if we're committed to Cold War Two — then can't we at least win? It's not just China that built more miles of passenger rail than the United States in the past two decades. It's also Mexico. Something is wrong.