Hacker News Reader

Comment by jimrandomh | Hacker News Reader

Not really. Rail in the US is spectacularly expensive; look up a few recent rail projects with dollar figures attached, they're billions of dollars each. That's the same order of magnitude as the cost of an entire self-driving research program (Waymo has taken $3B of investment, according to its Wikipedia page), which, if successful, would scale quickly and easily to the entire world.

View on HN

Alon Levy has put together a database on transit costs: https://transitcosts.com/

The important metric isn't the cost of the project, it's the cost per km (or mile, if you prefer). The construction costs for NYC in particularly are unjustifiably obscene--it's really on the level of "fire everyone involved and make the new hires go on a world tour of transit system agencies to learn how they do cost control before they do anything."

If the US companies can't do it just hire Chinese or Japanese ones who have enormous experience to build the infrastructure way cheaper.

Exactly this -- plenty of other countries have figured out how to build rail systems without massive cost overruns.

Well good ideas from capitalism does not apply to public projects did you not know?

Yeah, just bulldoze some houses and apartment blocks, so easy to build rail lines. Why didn’t anybody else try this?

China and Japan aren't exactly low-cost construction countries. Actually, they're among the highest-cost non-Anglosphere countries (which are perhaps best labeled "stratospheric-cost" countries). Instead, you want to look to places like Spain, Italy, Sweden, or South Korea as low-cost countries.

Their costs are lower because their land aquisition costs are lower. The problem isn't the tech it's the regulations/property rights.

The expensive part is addressing all the local regulations and acquiring land.

Human rights (and property rights) can be expensive.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com