They already have the land rights, favorable social environment for construction, more compliant population, less local/more federal legal zoning and land use power, more federal level direction to get things done, higher rate of engineers in population.
That CA is bad at all of those makes it expensive and hard
In addition to very low competence levels in gov't compared to Japan due to many factors. Sure Japan has financial corruption in construction but it's a known system and they build things treating it as a tax. In CA there are many more parties who all attempt to hold construction projects hostage.
Those factors aligned for the original Shinkansen when it was built in the sixties; now, not so much.
The maglev Chuo Shinkansen, originally meant to be finished by 2030 or so, has been stuck in limbo for several years now because the prefecture of Shizuoka refuses to issue the necessary permits.
>less local/more federal legal zoning and land use power, more federal level direction to get things done,
Nitpick: this part isn't correct. There's no federal legal zoning or direction or anything federal at all. Japan doesn't have a federal government; like most countries, it has a unitary government. The US is unusual this way, along with Germany and Russia.
But otherwise, you're right. It's much easier to build stuff here for all those reasons.
That's a great blog post. As I understand it, the national law is just as described, with only 12 zones, but the localities have some latitude in how to apply the law and make some blanket restrictions about things like building height. For instance, Kyoto famously has very strict limits on building height, though this is biting them in the ass because it keeps them from creating enough density to get more tax money, and too much land is occupied by religious sites that don't pay any taxes at all, so the city is going bankrupt.
Many people who ride it have one of various train passes that reduce the cost, or have a plan with work that covers it. I usually use a JR pass, it's pretty expensive without it.
Unfortunately the JR pass literally doubled in price in Oct 2023, it's now 50,000 yen for 7 days and makes no sense unless you're planning to speedrun the length of Japan and back.
The distance between SF and LA (350 miles) is 50% greater than the distance between Tokyo and Kyoto (227 miles), making the time tradeoff favor trains to planes. The two cities are much bigger than SF and LA, so many more people travel between the two cities (85 million per year). Also Japan can build and maintain rail much cheaper than the US.
