I am glad to see that at least one person sees the problem with high-speed rail in the United States as I see it. That person is Jake Bacharach at HmmDaily:
American infrastructure is this costly because of immense, endemic, universal public-private corruption—systems of both direct and financialized graft at every stage of infrastructure development, from the planning to the ribbon-cutting to the use of deferred maintenance to ransack public transportation budgets for cash, year after year, after which the responsible authorities claim that fixing the century-old signals is just too damn pricey. This system of legal fraud begins with the bevies of project consultants, continues through ludicrous private contractor and labor costs, and continues when, years later, high-paid administrative fixers and new armies of consultants and contractors arrive to fix what broke because it was never maintained. It is a system of tolerated kleptocracy that may be the only thing that America still does better than anyone else in the world. It is baked into every assumption about building for the public benefit.
That isn’t true only of high-speed rail. It’s true of education, health care, the military, and every other action of government at any level in the United States. It will be true of a “Green New Deal” is such a thing were to be embarked upon. It is why we pay more for just about anything than anyone else in the world. Can we fix these things? Yes, we can. Will we? The smart money says “No”.
