How is it that freeway construction can be assumed to somehow be immune to all these problems?
They’re not but they’re already built and therefore are already an ongoing concern. CEQA and a lot of the more asinine pro-labor and tax policies that exist today throughout the State postdate the established right of ways for most of the highways.
I won't say freeways are immune to all these problems , but built freeways don't close for union strikes.
This is only true in a vacuum without our political and legal environment. If you could make the project immune to CEQA, eminent domain challenges, and union pressure, then you have a much more viable railway. If you could at least brush off two of those three and one of them was the union pressure, then it might actually get built in the manner it was intended to be linking San Francisco, Sacramento, Los Angeles and San Diego. At this point we’ll be lucky to get a line that doesn’t share tracks with freight between SF and LA.