>>1939787I lived in California for almost 3 decades, I'm currently in Florida and spent 2 months in Japan earlier this year. As many have pointed out California's government is extremely retarded but there's a bigger core problem with US infrastructure and how things are built. Any time there's a major infrastructure project in this country insane amounts of money and time get eaten up by the sheer inefficiency of the government and the endless list of subcontractors trying to siphon as many tax dollars as possible from the process. Add to this litigation, property acquisition, disruptions in financing and what not. If someone can profit off of extending the process they'll try to do it, we monetize everything.
The history of JNR and the Shinkansen is full of crazy bullshit, delays, cost over runs, some wild stuff. The events leading to the breakup is worth studying but despite everything they managed to get the original Tokaido line finished in 1964 for the Olympics, and by 1975 they were running down to Fukuoka.
Problem #2: California does not have the population density and the series of heavily urbanized cores Japan does. We have very few major population centers that don't require a car as soon as you get there. California was built for the car; a major failing of the Bart system was that most stations were intended for people to drive in from the suburbs, park at the station, then take the trains into the cities. Civil planners bulldozed most of the existing urbanized cores on the east coast and imposed all the minimum parking requirements and zoning retardation that gave us endless sprawl. We aren't building new cities or redeveloping at scale, we aren't fixing the zoning issues outside of a few specific areas, you get the idea. Shorter intercity transit doesn't make sense if you have to drive anyway, and intracity transit doesn't either if everything is spread out between an endless series of strip malls and isolated tract homes.
