Three important points are missed in the article.

1) There's absolutely nothing train specific. My elderly grandmother's house was in the line of fire for a state highway redesign for about a decade, until they FINALLY decided on a route that didn't pass thru her house. Although the article only calls out delays in train construction its more of a generic "DOT is slow" story. I'm quite sure if they were building irrigation canals or dirt roads they'd still cause confusion and delay for a good part of a decade. There is probably a startup idea revolving around investing... Informally people know the DOT overpays so there were offers to pay 20% over prevailing prices on the goal of making instant 20% profit if the DOT selected that route... diversification, etc. There should be some way to create a REIT or social network or matching service for people who like to speculate like this. I don't think thehousingbubbleblog.com is quite the real estate social network they're looking for LOL, although it would probably be extremely informative for them.

2) The article claims its necessary because of a population of 46 million. Why does a population need transit, if they don't have jobs? Luckily the project will create hundreds of temp jobs. I'm sure that will be wonderful for increasing sales of $1M houses. I'm not sure the optimism is well placed. The big city I live in built a rather elaborate interstate freeway spur in the 50s to handle the obvious massive growth predicted, just in time for white flight to cut city population by about 25%, and recently was unable to afford to simply maintain the spur so they got fed funds to demolish it and replace with surface roads, the PR campaign was all "new urbanism" BS but fundamentally they were too poor after decline to maintain it. Its kind of an empty slum area about a decade after the demolition. The point of this anecdote is to point out that investing enormous amounts of money using a "build it and they will come" strategy is not necessarily wise. With startups you can scale in the cloud, doesn't work so well with real estate. In 1970 high speed rail in CA would have been brilliant before all the growth... now that the peak is past and decline has started, why build for growth now? Put that train track in Austin, or Colorado, or Madison, or ... well pretty much anywhere else? The startup lesson here is obvious, if dogfood delivery over the internet was the place to be in early 2000, in 2013 finally getting around to building your dream dog food delivery website isn't exactly forward thinking.

3) Depending on local levels of corruption, the only story you can tell about eminent domain is moral / ethical or implications of corruption, because the DOT usually reimburses people locally about 50% above prevailing prices usually with a secrecy clause. I've met several people who have done very well financially via eminent domain. The whiny restaurateurs in the article must rent their space... A 150% offer windfall in a field where biz failure is the norm is not to be ignored. I believe this is the "startup" connection, where if someone offers you millions or billions for something worth far less, you'd be an idiot not to take the deal or to complain about it.