[lupusreal]

How is it that America and Canada are both well saturated with freight rail, but getting the right of ways and building permits for high speed rail is evidently a completely different animal? I understand that high speed rail needs different right of ways than lower speed rails, larger turns and all that, but it seems like the processes for getting shit done in one case should at least cross over to the other.

Or is it the case that all the rail we already have is from an era when we were still competent at building, and if we had to do it all over from scratch we wouldn't even be able to get freight rail done?

[voisin]

Our freight rail wasn’t built in recent history. Something about our cultural shifts in the interim has made it that no matter how desirable something is, we can’t possibly do it without spending a decade studying it. Governance by bureaucracy.

My personal suspicion is that when countries have excess, they waste it by CYA with endless bureaucracy. But when countries are hungry and striving for excess they are more practical and will literally and figuratively move mountains to make things happen.

[jamal-kumar]

Has anyone outside of China tried to tackle the kinds of long distances there are in Canada? If it costs this many billions to do it just from Toronto to Quebec City then yeah I could easily picture cutting through extant farmland across a nationas big as that one to be an incredibly expensive undertaking. Pretty sure Canada has worse problems than not having high speed rail right now in terms of money