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I loved the story from California's HSR where they talked about the french rail builder coming to the US to bid, throwing in the towel after finding their time here wasted, leaving, and completing a new HSR project in Morocco, while California spent twice their expected budget to build nothing.
If that's not a great illustration of the US problems, I don't know what a better one would be.
Yes. Some examples of countries that have managed to build high-speed rail: Morocco, Uzbekistan, Indonesia, and Turkey. Kazakhstan, Iran, India, and Egypt all have projects under construction. Meanwhile in North America all there is so far is CAHSR, which at present seems unlikely to be completed. The Texas HSR project shows promise though.
The California project was quite devoted to "made in America" solutions and seemed very hostile to European technologies and perspectives. One of the big boondoggles of the project was the attempted creation of their own signaling system "CBOSS", which cost over $200 million before they abandoned it in favour of the off-the-shelf European tech.
The Texas HSR project is currently held up by political opposition while being fully funded.
No really, the group building it raised the money then tried to eminent domain a bunch of rural ranch land to build a nonstop Dallas-Houston route. Good idea, except Texas’ political system gives ranch owners a lot of say, and the HSR group laughed off their demands and just generally alienated them. So they declared it part of the new world order and dragged in the Texas nationalist movement(actually an important political machine that can swing state specific issues, especially if aligned with other interests) to hold up permits for eminent domain.
If the HSR group decides to negotiate with the ranchers then they’ll call off the nationalists and everyone will be happy. Instead there’s a knock down political fight and both sides have some portion of the blame.
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