I'm not going to claim that construction of HSR will be completely free of idiocy. Large projects inevitably have waste and mistakes. (See Great Planning Disasters.) Heck, the original US Transcontinental Railroad was rife with it, even though it was built by Wonderful Solves-All-Your-Problems Private Enterprise. (See Union Pacific's Credit Mobilier and similar fraud from Central Pacific.) To some extent, that's part of the cost of doing business. The net effect was to revolutionize transportation in the USA. The same thing can be said about projects like high speed rail.