Well 'The Power Broker' is of course a really famous book and person. He is basically responsible behind the US having the brilliantly self destructive idea to build gigantic high ways threw every city in the US and destroying the city
centers, lowering property values and facilitating suberiba and urban sprawl.

What has to be understood about the situation back then is that he was responsible for a totally undemocratic infrastructure companies. If he built a bridge, he could collect tolls, and then build more infrastructure with those tolls. So in effect, he was operating basically an infrastructure business. And not just any old infrastructure business, he basically controlled access to one of the world major cities. He was more powerful then the major or any elected official.

Today the process just incredibly different. Today there are about 500 steps of 'public engagement' that have to be cleared. Funding has to be pulled together from lots of source, federal, state, local, private and so on. This basically leads to a situation where no city can really do anything for itself, it always requires far more. And on all levels a project needs to be agree on. When the federal government was pushing highways based on the Moses template, there was a top town push, the states bought in and the cities happy plowed over their cities to build highways.

Today for most of these policies there is no clear aliened solution. For a while the Obama administration was pushing 'light rail' and a few such systems got built by cities tried to hook into that subsidy. But then not really much expand unfriendly beyond that. And instead of looking at 'what is the right public transit solution' cities instead will just check what subsidies does the federal or state government provide that we can use to invest in public transit. State DoT meanwhile have been historically created to build highways, and that is really what they are good at and focus on, so if you build a highway, state will likely give you money, if you build a bikelane the state wont. Even worse the state DoT will just plan a highway threw your city and you can't stop it.

And then of course there is the environment piece. Almost any tram line will be better for the environment then using the car. But the horrible bad for the environment existing infrastructure, the 20-lane highway doesn't have to clear 'environment' review. It might have to clear some if you want to extend an existing highway, but that's much easier. So the burden put on new infrastructure projects, is far larger then the burden put on existing systems.

But the problem is really even deeper then those first other problems. The whole land use polices the US has done for 60 years is hurting the country when it comes to public transport (trains, trams and so on). Because of the sprawl style of development cities are broke and can't even fix or maintain existing road and water infrastructure. The city center and the poor parts of the city are systematically subsidizing the sub-burbs. The politically influential suburb of course do not want to finance city center public transit because are not well connected. But they do support another lane of highway that they use to get into the city. A transit line into the suburbs never makes money because you simply can not connect suburbs because there is just to much sprawl, not enough density for it to make sense.

When you do, your train station just ends up being a gigantic parking lot, see for example Torronto Go network. Granted this is better then not having rail at all, but far from ideal.

So, to even start to fix this, and start to make sensible public project choices and investments a lot has to change. First of all the tax system has to change to reflect reality (example being a land tax rather then a property tax). Shitty parking lots and cheap warehouse building shouldn't get better taxes then nice mixed-use apartments. Your infrastructure cost and income have to be realigned, suburbs need to be systematically pay more in fees for utilities to reflect the much higher infrastructure costs. Then you have to reform the zoning code so that you allow mixed use and higher density almost everywhere. Your environmental review process has to acknowledge some fundamental truths about the current system and what it replaces. Then you have to start building your transit together with redevelopment of areas to get higher ridership and higher (property/land) tax from those lines.

At that point these infrastructure projects will still be expensive and over budget, but at least you will get results were people 5 years later say 'well at least we got this amazing infrastructure' and don't remember how much it cost. Because at least you overpaid for right project, an not another lane on the highway that you would have also overpaid for, just with worse result.

Here is the thing, in countries like Switzerland, infrastructure often goes over budget as well. And so did high speed trains in most countries. But if you do it correctly, it still ends up being a good deal. If California does this right, and starts also connecting local rail and builds a true integrated rail system across of all of California, with a high speed back bone, these high cost will be more then worth it.

I strongly recommend 'urban3' check on youtube or their website. They do real data analysis of cities and show in data visualization where your city is losing money and where its making money. You can also see where public transit increases property taxes. Cities need to take that into account and focus their limited funds on places where they are making money (very often the poor districts actually should be more of the budget).

Here are some case studies:

https://www.urbanthree.com/case-study/