China built a national high-speed rail system for less than how much our bipartisan infrastructure bill cost. This means that we could have all lines connecting basically any pair of cities <500 miles apart if we were as efficient as China, for less than $1.2 trillion. This includes earthquake zones and mountains in central China (ie Kunming to Shanghai 190 mph is mostly tunneled and actually was cheaper than most of the other lines).
It's not just China though. Most other countries with high speed rail, have built it for cheaper.
And this Vox article I found here explains why.
https://www.vox.com/22534714/rail-roads-infrastructure-costs-americaThere's a lot of government slowdown, inefficiencies, in how we plan and build infrastructure, differing, and conflicting laws on the local, state, and federal levels. China for instance, is more Unitary and so it's easier to implement something top down. The US is a Federalistic System.
Vox also points out that a lack of practice, drives up costs as well.
" There are also myriad ways the US needs to streamline the process for developing transit projects. Lewis explained to me that European regulators were often shocked that American transit agencies have to go through their own process to get authorization to shut down a street or prepare an area for construction.
“A lot of the [processes] that we use here in the United States are too slow or too cumbersome and outdated. We need to make it easier to build more and better transit projects,” Lewis explained.
But cutting down on bureaucracy doesn’t mean slashing government budgets — while simplifying the rules and regulations that go into developing projects, American transit agencies need to be staffed up in-house to reduce reliance on expensive contractors and build up institutional knowledge."
