Only 31% of California voters want to keep paying for bullet train | Hacker News Reader

Only 31% of California voters want to keep paying for bullet train

latimes.com

53 pointsgok113 comments

This is the upper middle class robbing poor people. The projected fare would be $86 per ticket, about triple the cost of driving for a family of four. The people who are going to pay that are upper middle class travelers and business travelers. Which would be fine if the project was paying for itself, but it won’t be. It’ll be state subsidies for high income professionals. That money could be doing so much good (schools, public transit for lower income people, etc.).

For example, the $100+ billion this will eventually cost could create a fund that would perpetually pay (with inflation increases) about $1,200 to every low-income K-12 student in the State.

No, the upper-middle-class robbing the poor has been the history of our highway system, which you can't use without owning a car and paying ~ $0.55/mile to operate it. We have shoveled hundreds of billions of dollars of subsidies down the throat of the automobile culture and we did not get a functioning transportation system from doing so. We got a massively regressive, barely functional system and all of its attendant externalities in the form of health problems for those living near the roads, and end-of-civilization CO2 pollution problems for people living everywhere.

The cost of HSR suddenly sounds so much more reasonable if you frame it in terms of the road budget. HSR's all-in cost for right-of-way, tracks, stations, and trains is about four years worth of California's current road budget.

That's completely divorced from reality. Even poor people own cars! 80% of people in poverty have access to a vehicle.[1] $0.55/mile is about $120 for an LA to SF trip. For a family of four, this train is $350. Which one do you think a low-income family is going to take to visit relatives for Christmas?

In any case, poor people who don't own cars rely on busses and subways--which this boondoggle does nothing for.

[1] $77 billion would also create a perpetual fund that would be able to buy a $10,000 used car for every household in poverty every 5 years.

That's cherry-picking a favorable example for the car. It's always better to take your car when you fill it up with people, compared to other modes that charge per person. It's true locally - always cheaper to drive from Oakland to San Francisco vs. four round-trip BART tickets - and it's true regionally - cheaper to drive the whole family than to fly, if you don't value your time. Of course both of those assume that you can afford the car and that the car you can afford will survive the trip.

Anyway, your last sentence is wrong. Much of the money under the HSR project is going to local transportation projects. So far they have spent or committed seven billion dollars for Caltrain, BART, Muni, Sacramento RT, Capitol Corridor, ACE, LA Metro, Metrolink, San Diego Blue Line, and Coaster, among others.

It's a highly relevant example. What are the reasons a lower-income person might travel from LA to SF? Traveling to visit family is probably the primary reason.

You can see this play out with the Acela on the east coast. It's almost all business travelers or nicely dressed professional looking people. People who can't afford $100+ per ticket take the bus ($35).

Likewise, even lower income people traveling alone aren't going to spend $86 for a ticket on HSR (if it's not more like $100+ by the time it's finally open). They'll pay $35 for a Bolt bus.

Speaking of disconnected from reality, you seem to be claiming that poor people travel, which they don't. In yet another example of American inequality, the bottom income quartile of families are quite stationary; they can neither afford to move about nor do they have "days off" as such because an American is not legally entitled to any.

The supermajority of American families cannot even afford an unexpected $500 expense; they sure as hell aren't going to blow hundreds to drive to LA.

'rayiner seems to have argued you in a circle here. He is the one claiming the poor aren't going to ride this train; you hardly contradict him when you argue they aren't going to use cheaper transportation either.

Not at all. He hasn't addressed my point which is that for individuals travelling alone the train will be dramatically cheaper than driving over long distances.

You haven't come close to establishing that either. Bus fare from SF to LA is less than half that train ticket price.

Even poor people are forced to own cars because the whole cityscape is designed with that assumption, so they have to shell out thousands of dollars they could've used on food or other niceties, to buy a barely functioning vehicle that costs them more money and time to repair constantly.

And the alternative would be ?

(Note: those poor people need to be able to do 30-40kg groceries, at a distance of, say 5-10 kilometers, when they're 50 years old)

That $0.55 / mile is dropping with EVs (which also help address some of the other problems you mentioned) and would crater if driverless cars become a reality in the next decade or so. A driverless EV should easily be able to beat $86 for a 400 mile trip from SF to LA. Which makes we wonder if the time for high speed rail has come and gone.

The difference between HSR and driverless EVs that can go from SF to LA is the former has existed for 50 years and the latter has literally never been demonstrated.

And another difference is that the development of a rail line requires billions in additional public funds (and also takes years if not decades to build) while the development of driverless cars is being paid for by private businesses. Wasn't your initial argument about saving money?

That characterization seems hilariously disconnected from the facts, which are that DARPA kick-started autonomous vehicles more than fifteen years ago with millions in government money, and that the vast majority of development of such vehicles has occurred on public roads, mostly in California. The parts that have been developed off-road have been done at an old Air Force base, and if you want to argue that facility is privately funded that will only make your argument sound even more dumb.

You are right that I should have included a qualifier in that statement that it is not 100% funded by private business but that percentage is probably pretty close. Yes, DARPA got things moving but like you said their investment was in the millions. Google, Uber, Tesla, GM, etc have invested billions into the tech. Once again if this is a question of the effectiveness of the money spent, DARPA's investment in driverless tech greatly exceeds the potential of billions being spent on high speed rail.

> And another difference is that the development of a rail line requires billions in additional public funds (and also takes years if not decades to build)

So does building the same capacity in roads. And, even moreso, so does building that plus the extra capacity required for the increased load required to handle on-demand driverless vehicles.

You're implying that there's a direct equivalence, but that's not really true.

Although the parent comment said "rail line", since TFA is, specifically, about HSR, that's a unique rail line in an existing system, which has something of an all-or-nothing construction problem. Having it half finished won't reduce the train travel time between LA and the SFBA for anyone.

Conversely, road capacity can be added incrementally, and, in many cases, when it is, it has an immediate effect for that section [1], providing relief as soon as the money and/or construction resources are available. In rural California, that's more likely to be months and fractions of a billion, not years and billions. The urban parts are slower and more expensive, but only proprotionally so (i.e. HSR is yet slower and even more expensive there, too).

You haven't presented any evidence for your assumption that on-demand driverless vehicles would require extra capacity, especially down a long-haul corridor. At best, that's some very heavy speculation on the operating cost (dominated by tires, suspension, electricty, I'd expect) versus capital cost of keeping enough spares in each metro.

[1] Yes, I'm aware that, at times, it can have a paradoxically negative effect on congestion, but I'm pretty sure that doesn't happen for capacity increases on what are essentially point-to-point corridors.

> That $0.55 / mile is dropping with EVs (which also help address some of the other problems you mentioned) and would crater if driverless cars become a reality in the next decade or so.

Driverless cars increase congestion, which increases cost of human travel, once the taxes needed to pay for road construction and maintenance are factored in.

Which is an investment that we will inevitably have to make at some point. I think it makes more sense to start preparing for that future than spend money on what is appearing to be a stopgap solution like high speed rail.

you can't use without owning a car

Or taking a bus, no? Seems like you can get a trip for under $15.

It seems like widening Highway 5 and adding a dedicated carpool lane, along with creating a Greyhound-like public transit route from Northern to Southern California would have been more cost effective.

Count the overpasses on I-5 when you plan to widen it. I think that when self-driving cars become typical (say, >50% of freeway traffic) that alternating 2 & 3 lanes and exploiting them with platoons of SDCs may become feasible.

FWIW, that's about what a ticket costs on the Japanese high-speed rail as well (for a shorter distance even). The difference is that in Japan, driving is way more expensive due to the heavily-privatized nearly fully-tolled highway system

But according to at least one study (1), the California high-speed rail project would be a cost-effective way to reduce greenhouse gases. If there were a tax on carbon that reflected the damage that greenhouse gases are doing to the environment, we'd be flying a lot less, and HSR would be a no-brainer.

(1) https://www.lewis.ucla.edu/publication/cost-effectiveness-re...

Nah, I’m arguably middle class and I’m getting tired of this boondoggle with its delays and ever spiraling costs. I take my vote back.

> This is the upper middle class robbing poor people. The projected fare would be $86 per ticket, about triple the cost of driving for a family of four. The people who are going to pay that are upper middle class travelers and business travelers.

Which is saving the poor money, since otherwise:

(1) The state will pay entirely out of tax money, largely funded through regressive fuel and consumption taxes, with no private component to expand capacity via freeways instead of HSR,

(2) the state will spend the same kind of public money with a partial private subsidy to expand capacity by adding (and replacing existing freeways with) tollways, which not only will taxpayers who don't take trips pay for, but those who do drive will pay more for.

At that price I'll continue to fly Southwest. As currently designed, nobody is going to use this thing.

Where do the US poor travel to?

They travel to visit family just like U.S. rich people! You can travel from say Spokane to Boise in about 7 hours by car, for about $215 in gas and wear-and-tear. That's affordable for all but the poorest people.

They also travel to see places and experience nature, because you don't have to be rich to go to a National Park, for example. Showing one's children what the world outside of <town> looks like is not an inherently unaffordable activity (although it certainly is more available to people with money, and on a different scale).

I think this is a very misleading headline. 49 percent support the high speed rail project in this poll, based on a neutrally worded question. The 31% figure comes from a leading question that starts with "The latest estimates for California’s high-speed rail project are that it will cost up to $77 billion dollars and will be finished in 2033. This estimate is nearly twice as much as the original estimated cost."

The full survey is here https://drive.google.com/file/d/1g5uibGxcEuknURkZZvT4Ah4Q9-I...

So leading questions are questions that supply two pertinent facts and a third pertinent if leading fact? Everyone wants a rail system to quickly take them where they need to go. Not everyone is willing to pay that much money, wait that long, or accept mind boggling mismanagement.

For example which question would result in more accurate responses: do you want lower taxes vs. do you want lower taxes if it cuts state budgets by 10%?

For any given X, there are more people who want the government to do X than there are people who want to pay for the government to do X. But since it's government, we're going to pay for it.

It's a bit leading, but not heavily. To be non-leading, it should also say that the high speed rail will take you from SF to LA in Y minutes, and tickets will cost $Z. Then it's non-leading; it's merely supplying additional information that not all poll respondents may know.

But it's not all that leading of a question. The cost and completion date, while they reflect badly on the project, are not irrelevant to peoples' opinion of it...

Totally misleading to be up front about expanding costs. No one has to right to know what the taxpayer could be on the hook for...

It's a classic loaded question technique. Emphasise the bad things before asking the question. This is pretty obvious.

Do you think they would have got the same result if it was worded "A high speed train will reduce journey times by X%, reduce congestion by Y% on the roads and reduce CO2 pollution by Z%. Do you think we should build one?"

When you sell voters the sizzle and not the steak; this disillusion is just a matter of time.

It was sold on an impossible premise; - Minimum 200 miles per hour (320 km/h) where conditions permit - Maximum travel time between SF and LA not to exceed 2 hr 40 min - Financially self-sustaining (operation and maintenance costs fully covered by revenue)

A flight to SF is 1.5hrs from LA (take off and landing). And only costs $150 round trip. If you could reduce the hassle of “security” you have a better, faster, cheaper high speed transit system.

It was supposed to cost $30b. It will cost north of $90b. And it will still need to be subsidized. And it will be slower than 2hr 40min.

If you could possibly deliver what was sold - I’m sure the polling would reflect that. But what the people are getting is a shadow of what they approved.

The SF/LA route has an even bigger problem: once you get to LA, then what? There's not really enough transit in the LA area to get where you actually mean to go, and that's almost certain to be true even if all the current transit projects finish. The Bay Area frankly isn't much better. You'll very likely to need to take a car (maybe an autonomous one) from the end points. And given that, flying seems even better. There are 3 big SFBA airports and 5 in the LA metro area; direct flights between those are more likely to get you closer to your endpoints.

The more legitimate case for CAHSR is really opening up the middle of the state. But that could have been done much cheaper.

Killing it would be short-sighted. If it gets killed, there would probably never be the opportunity to build it ever again. California is flush with tech money, put some of it to good use.

If you were given $77 billion to improve California, is this really how you would spend it?

I'd think that for half that much money you could greatly upgrade BART and more importantly extend it into the central valley.

Killing it would be far sighted. Technology is improving transportation methods, we have buses and planes that can do the same thing as this train at much cheaper rates and without tax dollars to construct or maintain.

There is no bus or plane that can do anything like what HSR can do. That's the entire point of the project. It will triple the capacity of our north-south transportation system at a fraction of the cost of equivalent airport capacity.

This is something that people don't understand when they haven't travelled enough to experience good rail systems. Rail has massive capacity, 100k people per hour per track direction. That's 500 lanes of theoretical freeway capacity, or 1000 lanes under realistic operating conditions, and it's more than the total capacity between all Bay Area and all L.A.-area airports, even if you operated that route solely with widebody jets, which we don't.

> It will triple the capacity of our north-south transportation system at a fraction of the cost of equivalent airport capacity. > This is something that people don't understand

You may be confusing a lack of understanding with straight up apathy.

Put another way, I don't think people care if the capacity is tripled. They're not interested in traveling with 100,000 of their closest friends that hour. They're interested in getting where they want to go, faster/cheaper/easier.

Pushing system capacity as a feature has a bit of a socialist bent, and that's a hard sell in the US.

>That's 500 lanes of theoretical freeway capacity, or 1000 lanes under realistic operating conditions

Also, I think your calculation are off by at least an order of magnitude. I thought that freeways can carry about 2000 vehicles per hour (on modestly congested urban freways). Assuming at least dual-occupancy vehicles, that's only 25 lanes.

> more than the total capacity between all Bay Area and all L.A.-area airports, even if you operated that route solely with widebody jets, which we don't.

This is an excellent argument against all that extra capacity being some kind of critical feature. If (you may be arguing "when" not "if", but that's not a given) we really need it, we could upgrade airport capacity to use more widebody jets.

In essence, we already have spare capacity (which could, by the way, be used to go other places), and you're suggesting it's critical that we take the opportunity to greatly increase the spare capacity just to go between the Bay Area and LA. I disagree.

  100k people per hour per track direction

Your source for this statistic?

I don't have any primary sources offhand, but the closest thing I last looked at was https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light_rail which has a number of 25k/h for light rail (pretty low speed, single-deck, presumably short trains).

I'd say 4x that amount for a full-sized HSR train is credible. It's just that that's a maximum. I don't believe that ridership will ever be high enough to approach that number, unless air travel is outlawed.

> I don't believe that ridership will ever be high enough to approach that number

Trains in the rush hour in the UK are pretty much always full, with people standing up. The tube at rush hour looks like this:

https://static.standard.co.uk/s3fs-public/thumbnails/image/2...

If it's not too expensive or infrequent I imagine it will be very popular.

> Trains in the rush hour

Especially given the picture you provide, I think you're talking about intra-urban rail (subway, metro, even suburban commuter).

That's a far cry from a 350-mile, 3-hour inter-city link.

Show me the picture for the London-Edinburgh "rush hour".

Done: https://i2-prod.mirror.co.uk/incoming/article158562.ece/ALTE...

Southend to Liverpool is 3-4 hours on the train.

Not done.

That's only, what, 240 miles? Which means it's not exactly high speed, is it? It could probably reach the 25k/hr that my sibling commentor is asking for, but not the 100k claimed for HSR.

Additionally, if it's Southend-on-Sea, that's not a major urban area. At 25k/hr, you could move the entire population to Liverpool in a little over 7 hours. I smell a contrivance.

Lastly, the name of that picture describes the train carriage as "busy" not something like "typical", so even then I'm skeptical.

Try again. London to Edinburgh. High speed. Typical rush hour.

How close does it get to the stated 25,000 passengers per hour throughput metric?

Keep in mind that's for light rail, only 1/4 of what the commenter claimed for HSR.

With 3 occupants per vehicle, 4 freeway lanes could carry 25k, not as outlandish-sounding as 25.

> we have buses and planes that can do the same thing as this train[...]without tax dollars to construct or maintain.

Tax dollars pay for road construction and maintenance. Tax dollars also subsidize airport construction and operation.

How do buses and cars accomplish the same thing?

Getting buses and cars to 180 mph even if they’re self-driving sounds a bit crazy.

Trains can move tens of thousands a people an hour at much faster speeds.

I suspect that tech could do a better job at building it.

I would argue that there's value in collaboration between innovators and an experienced group of civil engineering contractors operating under an accountable and transparent consortium arrangement.

Less Boston's "Big Dig" [1], more Hallandsås tunnel [2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Dig#Problems

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hallands%C3%A5s_Tunnel

"Moving fast and breaking things" is not acceptable in infrastructure.

"Moving slow and never breaking ground" isn't really either.

(Not literally true. Nominally, ground has been broken on the project. But it's a symbolic act without much referent in the real world so far.)

I can't wait for a public beta on a bullet train.

A lot of the money in tech is as liquid as Monopoly currency.

The cost argument is always interesting to me, when you consider it in context. We (in America) recently passed a tax cut that will cost around $150B/year for the next 10 years, and likely more if the temporary parts are made permanent. Even with cost overruns, that's almost enough to pay for 2 California bullet trains PER YEAR for the next decade.

And yes, I know California is just 1 state out of 50, but even still, it just seems like people have really bad context on what is / is not an outrageous cost for government.

The tax cut is at least money back in peoples’ pockets. This is a huge subsidy that’ll benefit a tiny fraction of people who need to routinely travel between LA and SF, and can afford to spend $86 doing so (probably over $100 when it finally opens, its gone up a lot already).

Eh, this spending puts money into people's pockets just as much as tax cuts would, economically. The government isn't taking a hundred billion dollars and setting it on fire: it uses that money to purchase labor and manufactured goods, the price of which itself comes heavily from labor costs.

The question is whether a high speed train that doesn't offer any appreciable advantages over flying is more economically useful than the combination of investment and consumer spending that equivalent tax cuts would generate.

Another factor is that, as a Californian, I'd rather the federal government take my money and give it to people relatively near to me in my economic network than take my money and give it to oil barons in Texas. Californians don't have a choice between high speed rail money subsidized by federal dollars or healthcare/tax cuts/education/actually intelligent infrastructure choices subsidized by the same federal dollars: it's this or nothing.

> The tax cut is at least money back in peoples’ pockets.

s/people/corporation

It's quite nice for small business too.

Waste shouldn’t be used to justify waste. The cost is outrageous for what you get. The tax cut doesn’t change that at all.

> And yes, I know California is just 1 state out of 50, but even still...

Let's keep in mind that the GDP of California is greater than the 25 lowest economic producing states combined.

source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_territ...

I bet you could get the number over 50% by offering to pay $20 to every voter who voted no and would be willing to change their vote. That would cost less than $70M (based on registered voters, not actual turnout).

From Wikipedia:

"In July 2014 The World Bank reported that the per kilometer cost of California's high-speed rail system was $56 million, more than double the average cost of $17–21 million per km of high speed rail in China and more than the $25–39 million per km average for similar projects in Europe."

"As of May 2015, both construction packages awarded have come in significantly under staff estimates."

"In December 2016, an internal-use-only draft risk assessment produced by the Federal Railroad Administration was delivered to the California Rail Authority which warned that the ICS (Merced-Bakersfield) segment could cost as much as $9.5 billion instead of the $6.4 billion originally budgeted"

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_High-Speed_Rail

Link to the Methodology and Survey: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1g5uibGxcEuknURkZZvT4Ah4Q9-I...

Question 26 is the headline.

Question 25 is In general, do you [oppose] or [support] California’s project to build a high-speed rail system connecting Los Angeles, the Central Valley, and San Francisco?

Strongly/somewhat Support =49 Strongly/somewhat Oppose = 43

Cross Tabs break these question down by race, education, political party, age, region, etc: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1p1sIIQSUED6MwcGxVYcImDAsn7e...

Key graphic: https://www.trbimg.com/img-5b0779e9/turbine/la-pol-g-ca-usc-...

31% for, 48% against, 19% undecided for all Californian voters.

Also worth noting the huge disparity between Bay Area voters (overwhelmingly FOR continuing the project) vs. LA voters (this is an LA Times article).

Is LA Times against it because LA residents are, or are LA residents against it because LA Times is?

People think of California as one of the bluest blue states, but it's very far from homogeneous. The LA metro area, for example, contains several affluent and strongly Republican communities, which means that if you poll educated/affluent/traditional-news-reading people in that area you're going to get results that lean more conservative than what people often expect (and Republicans/conservatives in the US are generally against public transit and public-works projects).

You can get the same thing in the Bay area if you poll in the right places. See Atherton's lawsuits to try to stop Caltrain electrification, for example.

Politics aside, is there any more practical reason Bay Area would prefer to have this train more than LA (e.g. people in Bay Area visit LA more often than people in LA visit Bay Area)?

SFO and LAX send a lot of traffic to each other (each one is the other's top domestic destination), and there doesn't seem to be a directional preference:

https://www.transtats.bts.gov/airports.asp?pn=1&Airport=LAX&...

https://www.transtats.bts.gov/airports.asp?pn=1&Airport=SFO&...

There may be a practical argument that the HSR would make it easier to commute to SF from further away, which might relieve housing pressure a bit.

But I really do think it mostly comes down to politics, and to there being more people in the SF area whose politics lean toward public transit/public works than in the LA area.

How does China build 14,000 miles of high-speed rail, with another 10,000 on the way, while the United States essentially has zero miles?

Countries are the same size.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-speed_rail_in_China#/me...

Their cheaper and more efficient infrastructure is could to pay dividends over the next few decades.

Disregard of labor regulations and property rights, as well as cheap labor.

tl;dr https://ibb.co/iEPiao

Because of the US international dominance it hasn't really had to develop domestically to compete with other countries. Instead Americans compete among themselves, making commonly beneficial things controversial.

At some point Americans will hopefully realize that spending significantly more money on essential things like education, housing and transport won't be competitive in the long run.

This website is blocked in Europe.

Available via AMP if you can stomach it: https://www.google.com/amp/www.latimes.com/politics/la-pol-c...

Ask your representatives in parliament to consider implementing less internationally expansive laws or use a VPN.

Ask your newspapers in the U.S. to consider respecting user privacy.

The easiest and cheapest answer is the status-quo, which is ambiguity on whether you're compliant with GDPR, so it's completely logical they would just block access.

I can't vote for the executives of the newspapers here in the U.S. (that right is held by the board members of each of those companies). You can vote for your EU parliament representatives. If there's things you don't like about the law you and your fellow citizens have the chance to change it.

If your not big enough to be a bully and you try—you're gonna have a bad time.

Let's call it the monkey defense. If you don't like something the majority supports, scream and fling as much shit at it for as long as possible until no one is left that can bear the stench or the spectacle. Then claim you were right about it being a failure all along.

The people who said this would be a massive boondoggle and voted against the bond in the first place were right all along.

The people who said it would be a massive boondoggle then went out of their way to make it a massive boondoggle. I guess the mistake California made was not realizing they weren't making a prediction, but a threat.

Yes, it was quite nefarious of them to alter the laws of physics and geology to make tunneling through the mountains outside LA into a nigh-impossible engineering task.

I’m not from CA, so maybe I have it wrong but I thought acquiring all the land is the reason the project is so expensive.

Correct, there is no freeway that passes through those impassable mountains. /s

Have you been on that freeway? It's not really a bullet train-friendly route.

Have you bothered to look around when you drove through it?

The amount of tunneling/demolition involved is quite viable. lol.

Umm.. I'd say that merely looking, especially by a non-expert, is more than just a little naive.

A famous civil engineer, no less than William Mulholland, had his career ended by the geology of those hills.

A dam built on a 1920s understanding of geology and dam construction is your argument.

And you are ignoring the fact they are trying to tunnel through something with very similar geology.

Okay.

My argument is twofold:

Firstly, that merely visually observing the surface of a mountain ("look around when you drove through it") is insufficient to draw meaningful conclusions about the overall geology from an engineering perspective, especially by a non-expert.

Secondly, that even experts have been confounded by the geological features of that particular mountain range.

If you're implying that my referring to an engineering project from approximately a century ago somehow makes it irrelevant, then you'd need to point out some fundamental engineering changes in tunneling and/or demolition (or the study of geology) as they relate to viability thereof, to be an actual argument/refutation.

You are aware it literally has a train line through it used by no less than the LA metro right?

Every big public project is a massive boondoggle. Should we just stop doing things?

We should at least prioritize the things we actually need. A fifth of what's been spent on the high speed rail line could go a long way to upgrade California's water infrastructure.

No, we should stop fucking up public projects. Nothing says we have to.

There are massive vested interests saying just that. They have the ear of all the relevant public officials, because they pay for that ear. Boondoggle public works projects are a transfer of wealth from the public to those interests. We might as well say, "let's spend less on the military!" Yes that would be great, but what we have is what the system produces.

The easy way to do this better would be to pick out a firm who had done a good job on a similar project overseas, and tell them to do the same thing under the same rules with the same workers, except over here, and we'll pay a 25% premium to cover relocation expenses. Hell we could pay a 50% premium and still come out way ahead. This would never happen, but it's instructive to think about all of the different levers the system would pull to prevent it.

The Golden Gate Bridge was finished ahead of schedule and under budget.

Maybe, but the Bay Bridge wasn't, and they were built around the same time. http://www.americanmanufacturing.org/blog/entry/dont-forget-...

That link discusses the renovation of the eastern section that took place since 2000? Hardly comparable to the original construction of either bridge...

It had the benefit of cheap Depression-era labor and vastly inferior worker safety constraints (12 died).

The disastrous new Bay Bridge project was more representative of modern California infrastructure projects.

many hidden assumptions and divisions here.. - Bay Area / Sacramento area voters versus LA versus who - the traffic and pollution of cars fits many individuals just fine, and the ability to think and act in larger groups is rarer than one might think - every govt project has cost problems, why is this different

Trains with modern power sources seem like a really good idea; the rest is project management.

  Trains with modern power sources seem like a really good idea

Tell BART that. Their new Antioch extension will be diesel powered.

Normally the majority will not support a public transportation project simply because the majority can not use it.

I flagged this article is geoblocked in Europe.

Can you imagine if you put every public infrastructure project to a vote?

We did put this to a vote and it passed.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com