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Comment by throwawaytoday5 | Hacker News Reader

It's not just California, it's every state and every city in the US. People have an aversion to public works projects often crying about taxes or how the service is useless or not good enough. We have a political system where one major party (out of two) decries any public spending that might help people who aren't millionaires/billionaires/corporations.

Is it any wonder when you have evil groups of people spending hundreds of millions of dollars to tell people that they should vote against their interests?

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/19/climate/koch-brothers-pub...

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> We have a political system where one major party (out of two) decries any public spending that might help people who aren't millionaires/billionaires/corporations.

Wasn’t it Newsom who canceled the project? Most high ranking Democrats are certainly rich from things like “energy” and “weapons” via k street and international analogues. We are bipartisan in our corruption and failure to build infrastructure.

> Wasn't it Newsom who canceled the project?

No. Newsom was the messenger saying what was already pretty evident: the project had run itself into a logistic and financial corner that there was no feasible path out of (at least for now).

Note that HSR planning and construction is still taking place. The current public assumption seems to be that the "train from nowhere to nowhere" is all we'll ever get out of the project, but Newsom was actually pretty careful not to say this.

Fair enough! I think my assessment on the partisanship of infrastructure development stands. My understanding is that the underlying reasons for cost inflation are non-partisan.

> People have an aversion to public works projects

People have aversion to public works projects because they routinely see public works projects being mismanaged, hugely overbudget, delayed to geological times, used as source to appropriate public money into private pockets, and paraded for political influence while being badly maintained and chronically broken. I am far from being a millionaire, but I would require a lot of convincing to see how it actually benefits me and doesn't turn into another boondoggle for politicians and contractors. Maybe spending serious chunk of my income on a project that would not happen for decades, would be poorly maintained and I probably won't end up using because they'd screw up something like not having proper access to the endpoints is actually not my interests?

Major highway and road projects in the US are often completed with minimal fuss. You don't really hear about these, because they go off smoothly. The difference may perhaps be that there's plenty of experience and precedent in doing these, both in government and industry, as road projects are constantly executed.

Major rail construction has basically been absent in the US for a generation or more. Does the lack of experience and support, combined with a general reluctance to bring in foreign expertise, explain the difference? Maybe. The Texas HSR project may be instructive, as it's bringing in a Japanese firm.

> Major highway and road projects in the US are often completed with minimal fuss. You don't really hear about these, because they go off smoothly. The difference may perhaps be that there's plenty of experience and precedent in doing these, both in government and industry, as road projects are constantly executed.

... yeah, I don't think that's true. Major road projects in the US often have exactly the same kinds of hemorrhaging cost overruns and other issues that rail projects do: look at Seattle's Alaska Way Viaduct replacement project, the Bay Area's Bay Bridge replacement project, or Boston's Big Dig for infamous cost overruns that are measured in large integer multiples.

The major difference, I believe, is that there is often massive public pressure to force through road projects when they hit snags, whereas rail projects tend to get cancelled at first opportunity.

On the flip side, the reconstruction of LA freeways after the Northridge earthquake was a resounding success, finishing a month or more ahead of schedule. How? By offering financial incentives to complete early. ;-)

This describes in more detail how it was done: https://www.epi.org/publication/bp166/

That's only a small number of the hundreds of major road projects. Most of them you don't hear about because nothing interesting happens.

FWIW, my experience with smaller-scale local projects in my area is that they are completed generally on time, competently, and achieve the desired aims.

Hmhmmumblemumble Houston Harvey Flooding Hagibis Flooding Nagano Shinkansen...

You mean like this?

[1] https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2019/10/13/national/ten-tr...

10 out of 30 down until further notice.

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