Originally Posted by
Sant
That's during pre-NIMBY era.
Fat Tony from
The Simpsons: "Actually, you can really keep costs down when you don't pay for materials, or labor, or permits or... land."
That holds very true on why the US were able to build the transcontinental railroad so quickly back then but has a hard time doing anything today.
Materials? Meh, chop the trees in the forest! Environmentalists? We don't need no environmentalists!
Labor? Oh we have the Chinese and the Irish to do the job for us, and they'll do it no matter how dangerous it is. And the best part, they do it for dirt cheap, and if they die, they can be easily replaced!
Permits or land? Just rob and steal the land from the Native Americans! Yeehaw!
Try to do that today will be an impossible feat to do.
Originally Posted by
Cloudship
And that is the strategy. If you lack the votes to block a project, drive up the costs and time frame to the point the project fails. it doesn't matter how much it costs everyone in the end, because you can always blame the cost on the other side. And even if you loose this battle, if you have driven the costs up high enough, you can use it as a example of why future projects are going to be too expensive (see Las Vegas Monorail)
And which goes back to my argument that it's not the money nor politics, it's the NIMBYism that ultimately kills HSR plans in the US.