I wonder what changed in our mindset in the last 50 years that such projects seem impossible now but possible back then. I mean subways were not any easier to build 100 or 50 years ago than today. And it surely was not cheaper.
How can you be truly independent and live that perfect magazine cover life if you’ve got to wait on the 9:27 to take you to the B line so you won’t be late to work?
For example, in 1930 it seemed feasible to build the Hoover dam; in 1950 it seemed feasible to build the interstate highway system; in 1960 it seemed feasible to land a man on the moon.
Now, in 2018, people think it isn't feasible to build some train stations. And those people might be right! What happened to our ability (practically, politically, and financially) to get such things done?
Over time and increasing population there is a evolutionary niche filling kind of process that occurs within social, political, economic, cultural and other axes/planes/spheres. After the density of these filled niches increase sufficiently over some threshold, our civilization experiences a calcification of movement across the niches.
Each niche acts as a middleman to extract some portion of energy to successfully navigate across them. This takes the form of some kind of concession, trade, grant, swap, boon, promise, etc. Fill a path with enough niches that didn't use to exist before, and we experience it as "we can't get it done" because the cumulative energetic cost rises above a tolerable amount.
Historically, the emergent property in most capitalist structures appears to naturally tend towards influencing government agents via the principal agent challenge to support/enforce increasingly rentier behavior over time and deviate from capitalist structures; I personally believe this is due to scaling issues (Adam Smith was not a fan of the kind of large-scale capitalism we take for granted today). This wasn't supposed to happen according to some economic schools of thought, but here we are. And niche filling, and use of our government to enforce stakeholder extraction claims, appear as another form that this behavior takes.
By that stance, no one living in Chicago, NY, or any city with public transit are "truly independent", or whatever. Waiting a few mins for a train or bus is no different than being stuck in traffic.
When I lived in Chicago my quality of life went up precisely because I didn't need to use my car. I never had to worry about finding parking. All I needed to do was learn some of the bus timetables and where the CTA lines generally were.
For various reasons that could probably be debated for a long time, big project construction now is much, much, much more expensive than it was a century ago.
The work included moving the existing bridge, demolishing the existing bridge, earthquake resilience, and building a big new traffic interchange on the west side.
The inflation-adjusted cost of the original bridge was $7.5 million. The final cost of the new bridge project was about $324 million. (2016 dollars) The new bridge project was 43x more expensive than the original bridge, but so much is different, I don't think you can draw any conclusions about changes in construction costs.
Heck, I wonder if it would have been cheaper to build a more comparable direct replacement bridge for vehicle traffic, and then a completely separate walking/riding bridge. The new Sellwood bridge cost nearly three times what Tilikum Crossing did, and that has light rail and buses in addition to bikes & pedestrians.
It's interesting that the Sellwood bridge was so much more expensive than Tilikum (2.4x as much, not 3x, according to my quick search). I wonder why that was? I'm not a civil engineer, but if I were to guess, I would guess that it's a combination of the new Sellwood interchange and the need to deal with the existing bridge.
"By 1860, confidence was sufficiently high that a consortium of no fewer than six engineers—including Brown, Hollingsworth and George Pullman—took on one of the most impressive locations in the city and hoisted it up complete and in one go. They lifted half a city block on Lake Street, between Clark Street and LaSalle Street; a solid masonry row of shops, offices, printeries, etc., 320 feet (98 m) long, comprising brick and stone buildings, some four stories high, some five, having a footprint taking up almost one acre (4,000 m2) of space, and an estimated all in weight including hanging sidewalks of thirty five thousand tons. Businesses operating out of these premises were not closed down for the lifting; as the buildings were being raised, people came, went, shopped and worked in them as if nothing out of the ordinary were happening. In five days the entire assembly was elevated 4 feet 8 inches (1.42 m) in the air by a team consisting of six hundred men using six thousand jackscrews, ready for new foundation walls to be built underneath. The spectacle drew crowds of thousands, who were on the final day permitted to walk at the old ground level, among the jacks."
Edit: I'll add, also, survivorship bias. We see what was achieved. We don't see what was planned and never came to fruition for lack of political will or whatever reasons.
To paraphrase Upton Sinclair, "It's impossible for man to solve a problem, when his salary depends upon it."
https://www.npr.org/2018/09/30/652284976/germanys-far-right-...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxation_in_the_United_States#...
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/nyregion/new-york-subway-...
Basically, large public works projects still seemed possible up to the early 1970s. The hypothesis is that it's only after two near-simultaneous changes, the rise of Reaganism-Thatcherism and the fall of the Soviet Union, that the state seemed to lose all of its potency. It seems like we placed all of our faith in the wisdom of the market, a machine that can never be stopped once given power.
They were much cheaper: http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/02/09/considerations-on-cost-...