this post was submitted on 06 Sep 2023
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US rail infrastructure is also more expensive just as a simply supply and demand problem -- we have very, very little supply compared to in Europe. We've fallen so far behind in the technology that most major projects involve bringing in contractors from Italy, Germany, and France to do the work. We even import most of our new rolling stock (and the Class 1s nearly never buy new rolling stock anyway, if they can help it). We're buying and building so little rail that we've lost the capacity to do it well ourselves and so have to import it at a premium.
Plus the US federal system -- and its general philosophy with e.g., city departments competing with each other for budget -- just makes infrastructure projects super expensive in general.
We need to start investing in it again to see the cost drop but people refuse to invest in it because the cost is so high. That might just be starting to change with Cali HSR, Brightline, the mid-Texas HSR project, Amtrak ConnectUS, etc., but we'll see.
There's a confluence of factors that make infrastructure projects such a nightmare in the US, but the big ones seem to be:
-Not institutional knowledge. State DOTs don't retain people who can plan and manage this stuff, it all gets farmed out to contractors or their people get scalped by contractors willing to pay 2-3x the wage the state will pay. So, they're completely at the mercy of contractors.
-Overreliance on contractors and subcontractors. Nuff said. There's a lot of shitty contractors out there whose whole game is to take the taxpayers for as big of a ride as possible, regardless of whether the work actually gets done. Because of Reagan era "reforms" (those are sarcasm quotes, to be clear), we use contractors for all kinds of stuff, and it's easy for shitty contractors to game the system.
-Stations: the US has a hard-on for building large stations, when they're very reliably the most expensive part of building any kind of rail infrastructure. We could substantially reduce rail project costs be re-examining our station designs and opting for more utilitarian choices. I'm not against making stations look nice, mind you, I'm not advocating for a brutalist, khaki concrete cube approach here; just saying that we can make more pragmatic choices than CAHSR's fantasy-future ribcages.