Many contractor shops have terrible wages yet they charge eye watering prices. You can’t improve the costs here by pushing the worker wages down. All that money is just going to accumulate in jeff bezos bank account

High Speed Rail is not being built because no one is sure it'll be used, whereas expanding public rail in the cities is always going to be expensive because you're renovating around a dense urban area. It's also non-optional - Sydney's traffic problems are bad, and getting worse. We either do something now or watch as the CBD eventually dies.

Public HSR even going out into the sticks gets rapidly surrounded by commercial and residential real estate rent-seekers, and prices quickly (within 10-20 years) arrive close enough to CBD parity to again price out young families. You would need something like a community land trust or transit authority trust that locks up the land and locks in the basis pricing along the rail line about 1-2 km out on either side of the rail, and around a 3-6 km radius around the terminals, with a taxing jurisdiction about double those radii, that gives the families a shot at entry without the same housing pricing dynamics we see now. That trust would have to plan for incremental, systemic densification on a self-funding model based upon the "rent" charged through taxes. Otherwise, the funding for densification evaporates into land developer hands through the years, because it is non-linearly more expensive to densify than spread out, but the energy utilization and efficiency is much lower and higher respectively per capita with densification than spread out. Land developers are valuable, but it is unfair to expect them to behave contrary to their incentives.

Is Australia and HSR really a good example of this? I would think the only viable route would be Sydney-Melbourne, and that seems far enough apart to be directly competing with air travel, likely a major reason for it to be marginal profit-wise.

Also Australian workers are no doubt well paid compared with some, but compared with the U.S. or Western Europe? Taking into account cost of living etc.? Certainly engineers in Australia in general don't seem to be getting SV wages.

I can confirm, I moved from Seattle to Sydney. It's not even close.

Single data point on new grad s/w engineer salary at small/medium business in Melbourne, circa 2015 ~40k in USD.

we have generally higher wages and prices on the low end (that is, the rest of the population and high minimum wages), and comparatively lower wages compared to the US coasts for tech/stem. That high minimal wage and remoteness affects the price of a lot of things.

That being said, the original poster is a little bit off, as both Sydney and Melbourne have inner-city transport options and infrastructure that outcompete practically all American cities in that regard, and punches pretty damn well on a worldwide basis (behind only a few cities that are notable specifically because they are world leaders).

You're right that Melbourne and Sydney infrastructure outcompete pretty much all US cities, but the punching above their weight on a worldwide basis is Australian mythology. I've lived on both and several cities in Europe and Melbourne and Sydney are behind pretty much every big city in Europe and Asia. Public transport for example is absolutely atrocious, the state of the roads are extremely poor...

That reminds me of a story. In 2009 I flew into Sydney with a team of 20 people and 40 duffle bags, and the regional airline to Melbourne refused to check half the luggage despite us having a pre-arranged letter from them stating otherwise. So, a team member and I rented a car, bought a SIM card and several Red Bulls, and drove to Melbourne to join the rest of the team the next morning. With the international flight, that was a very long day!