alt Hacker News> Switzerland and California have the same population density. Why can’t CA build high speed rail?
Go find the last major Swiss route that was built, and compare its land acquisition difficulties to what happened with the California project. I'll rankly speculate that difference will be the meat of your answer.
Building infrastructure is a skill, a skill you have to constantly work on. If you do it enough and not once then you can learn to get good at it. There is a difference between a long term consistent execution of a infrastructure plan and a 'lets build high speed rail'.
I don't think rules and regulation in California are actually worse then in Switzerland.