CAHSR

Mistakes abound, but CAHSR is the 'icebreaker' for Shinkasen in American--there is no domestic industry experience in HSR, yet politics demanded that it had to be American Made. So such mistakes were (depressingly) inevitable. CAHSR was also, at the start, politically tenuous--it had barely fifty percent support, and was only feasible because a massive slug of Federal cash was available.

The cost estimates were, if no laughable, certainly questionable. And because of the lack of cost sensitivity that afflicts most public sector infrastructure projects, a whole series of decisions that would have been questionable from an engineering standpoint were made to buy political support. The political support for a tenuous project was maintained, but suffered ballooning costs. All very typical mega-project issues. (Flyvbjerg has written extensively on such issues).