While I agree that comparing China to California in terms of large scale engineering works is comparing apples to oranges (guess which is which). I disagree (kind of) on the following:
> There are also a lot of rather substantial engineering issues that have to be overcome in California
Japan is a mountainous, earthquake prone country, and they seem to have figured it out. The biggest problem geography-wise is probably all the NIMBY complaints. To be fair, they are really loud trains that would kill property values, and the complaints are valid. I think thats where a lot of those lawsuits are coming from.
"Japan is a mountainous, earthquake prone country, and they seem to have figured it out."
Japan's high-speed trains also cost a hell of a lot more than the OP is talking about. The Chuo Shinkansen will cost around $51 billion for a 286km train (i.e. half the distance from SF to LA). The Hokuriku Shinkansen was much cheaper, but still 10x more expensive ($18 billion) than the Chinese line. [1] Both make the LA-SF line look reasonable, if not exactly cheap.
I generally agree that the SF-LA line is too expensive, but the OP's reasoning is just completely wrong. India and China are cheaper because everything in India and China is cheaper than the US.
The Chuo Shinkansen is a very special kind of expensive, since something like 80% of that 268 km is going to be tunnels they have to drill. It works well to illustrate the point that you need some more nuance to compare costs.
Chuo Shinkansen hasn't been completed yet so at best that's the minimum bar for what it will actually cost. Until they know for sure that they won't find any underground surprises, that estimate will continue going up.
The reality is that estimating underground rail construction costs is significantly harder and riskier than above ground [1]. According to the AACE's classification system for cost estimates, the current number is a borderline class 2/3 estimate which means the estimate could be off as little as 5% or as much as 600%. Historically tunneling projects have ended up in the upper half of that range.
Tunneling estimates can go both ways... in Sweden the Citytunneln project ended up under cost and under time due to the tunneling being less complicated than expected. The Japanese certainly have experience, all their mountains are swiss cheese of highways and shinkansen tracks. I'm not sure how much American studies apply here since there's a different culture of trying to underbid to win the contract there.
Yes, granted. But again, the Hokuriku line was "normal", and was still 10x the cost of the Chinese line.
The point of citing both was definitely to show that you can have a pretty large variance in costs, even if you're the world expert in building these things in earthquake-prone areas.
And yet the example of Japan still neatly invalidates the argument that California is inherently an especially challenging engineering project. Japan's rail projects are the platinum standard and every rich country should be trading war machine budgets to build similar transportation services for the overall good of their people. Instead, America is lost in a can't-do loop in large part because it has made personal individual liberty the indivisible unit of its society. With that choice come consequences, the most obvious of which is that people rarely work well together because they're forced to abide those among them who put their own interests above the group's.
By the way, this is also the reason that California will never be able maintain and operate HSR to the same level as Japan. It requires a hell of a team effort to do what JR does every day.
> There are also a lot of rather substantial engineering issues that have to be overcome in California
Japan is a mountainous, earthquake prone country, and they seem to have figured it out. The biggest problem geography-wise is probably all the NIMBY complaints. To be fair, they are really loud trains that would kill property values, and the complaints are valid. I think thats where a lot of those lawsuits are coming from.