I hear you but it is weird to see America falling behind in these things while the rest of the world catches up. Americans built a World Class Highway System in the 50s and I am sure we had the same argument back then on how it is so expensive or democratized that we cannot take away people's land etc etc. Yes it is tougher in democratized countries and there are good reasons for it but do we really give up ? I cannot imagine that.

Some of the current US backlash on eminent domain is a direct result of neighborhoods destroyed by the Eisenhower highway system... often poor black neighborhoods which nobody cared about in the 50s. The Voting Rights Act was passed 9 years later.

I know this is going to come across as an apologia for building highways through poor neighborhoods, but I see that as a natural consequence of the land simply being cheaper to acquire. I'm not denying that there was possibly some racial malice in the planning. It just seems obvious to me a government with limited funding is going to put the infrastructure through the cheapest path it can find. It was still a terrible thing to do to those neighborhoods, however.

The key argument against this is that many of the planned highways were also supposed to go through richer neighborhoods, but never got constructed because the residents of those neighborhoods were able to successfully fight against them.

(For one example, check out the incomplete stub at the eastern terminus of I-70 -- I don't believe the cost of the land was a major factor in that case)

I did not know that. I will have to look up more about I-70.

Exactly -- you can't build big projects without stepping on someone's toes. What we really need is equal-opportunity toe-stepping.

The discussions on you can't take away land didn't start until the 1960s, and costs went way up as a result.

US built first a large railway network, then a highway system, then stagnated. While there is room for debate on why this happened, the reasons are fairly obvious but writing about it here would bomb the writer to oblivion.

The difference is that the interstate highway system was not simply built for mass civilian transit, but as part of a post-WW2 initiative, functioning as emergency landing strips and providing easier access between airports, seaports, rail terminals, and military bases (which tend to reside near interstate highways).

the whole “emergency landing-strip” thing is a myth btw

In the US that’s true (according to Wikipedia), but in a lot of places around the world, landing strips on the highway used to be (or still are) a thing. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highway_strip

yeah, i would think that, generally (maybe even universally), the interstate roads in the us are neither wide nor thick enough to support aircraft. i didn’t realise that there are countries that actually did this though; that’s pretty neat.

There are some depression-era eminent domain laws that the federal government can use if they really want to. Literally the proper filings are made and the bulldozers can roll the next day.

The reason we don't have nice things like China does is just political will, not any legal barriers.

I’d be curious to know what these laws say. Isn’t eminent domain primarily governed by the Constitution (5A)?

The federal power for eminent domain that allows for 'seize the land and deploy the bulldozers the next day, deal with the court stuff later' comes from the Taking Act[1].

States have their own eminent domain powers which vary, however in general they're easy to sandbag in the courts for years, preventing the state from doing anything while the landowners argue over the money.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Declaration_of_Taking_...

It's complicated, but my understanding is that the government can take things, as long as it actually has plans to use the stuff it takes to help the public. E.g. building dams, highways, etc are the common use cases.

Importantly those highways don't need to be free to use. The government can take land and build a for-profit railway, in conjunction with a private corporation if they want, as long as it was to benefit the public.

It was found in 2005 that they can take your property and give it to another private party simply by making the claim that its for the public good. This has been used to take homes from people so they can be bulldozed and replaced with new construction, the idea being that the larger tax base is for the public good. This makes the power in effect limitless as you can claim almost anything is for the public good.

A major problem I have with this is appraisal prices often don't jive with reality. For example in San Fransisco houses almost always sell above asking, if the government were to step in and give the land away to a private person at asking they would be in effect getting a discount. Similarly my own home has had a lot of work put into it that doesn't effect it's appraisal price meaningfully, if forced to sell at that price I'd lose money.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kelo_v._City_of_New_London

The Supreme Court recently ruled that this is pretty general. Specifically they ruled that Chicago could take land (with payment) in order to give it to a chocolate factory that wanted to expand:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-07-02/supreme-c...

America simply has an issue with construction costs, look at say the big dig in terms of millions per mile. HSR along reasonably flat terrain like most of the US isn’t that expensive. The real issue is it’s very easy to cut from budgets. Unlike highways you don’t connect every city let alone town which makes it extremely unpopular at the state level.

I think the Texas high speed rail is running into issues with eminent domain along its proposed route and they're trying to use some 1800's era law to get around the lawsuits from the landowners looking to cash in.

Now seems like a good time to bring up Considerations on Cost Disease!

https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/02/09/considerations-on-cost...

What incenses me is that here in Wisconsin, they can declare farms that have been in our families for over a hundred years "blighted", and take them for a non-existent Foxconn plant with nary a peep. But if they need land for a high speed rail they can't do the same? If the people against high speed rail want to lie, OK, I get it. But why not come up with something consistent with the reality that the people are observing?

At this point, they don't even pretend to respect the intelligence of the people.

The Foxconn boondoggle (and wisconsin state level politics in general) always fires me up.

Just to correct, in PRC if your property is in the road planning area, you would be very happy because the compensation is very good compare to what you have. Of course, in developed countries, things are more expensive, and maybe people already have nice houses so they don't want to move to a new building.

The way environmental legislation works in the U.S, if some environmental non-profit wants to start throwing spaghetti at the wall to stop infrastructure construction, they can stop it basically forever by tying it up in court for decades.

You're getting downvoted, but it's true -- CEQA is a great example of how well-intentioned environmental legislation can be abused by basically anyone to stonewall any project for any reason.

A common-sense change might be requiring minimum quantities of local signatures to limit the potential impact of a small opposition.

Yeah CEQA is why the high speed rail project will never get built. It grants godlike powers to NIMBYs in California. Every single mile of the high speed rail project has the potential to get stuck in CEQA hell.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Environmental_Quali...

"In one case, anti-abortion activists filed a CEQA lawsuit to try to block a new tenant (Planned Parenthood) from using an already constructed office building in South San Francisco. They cited the noise caused by their own protests as the environmental impact requiring mitigation. This lawsuit delayed the new tenancy by at least 18 months."

"Governor Jerry Brown, in an interview with UCLA's Blueprint magazine, commented on the use of CEQA for other than environmental reasons: "But it’s easier to build in Texas. It is. And maybe we could change that. But you know what? The trouble is the political climate, that's just kind of where we are. Very hard to — you can’t change CEQA [the California Environmental Quality Act]. BP: Why not? JB: The unions won’t let you because they use it as a hammer to get project labor agreements." "