People Who Draw Lines on Maps Are the Problem
dilanesper.substack.com
dilanesper.substack.com
>As of 2020, the California High-Speed Rail Authority is working on the California High-Speed Rail project and construction is under way on sections traversing the Central Valley. The Central Valley section is planned to open in 2029 and Phase I is planned for completion in 2033.
At the pace that the world is changing, isn't that a little slow. I dont know if it could be called an achievement to have an approximate travel duration of about three hours between LA and SF.
Of course, there weren’t property disputes to deal with but they still had to blast their way through the Rocky Mountains a decade before the f*cking light bulb was invented
Maybe this could have been avoided if the original bond had legal fees capped at something like 100 million - the people voted for a railroad, not a legal battle!
I call it design arrogance. It's when you think 'this is so poorly done, whoever made this was an idiot!'. But in reality, you just don't understand some non-obvious detail that lies underneath.
This is also a parallel to democracy--for all of our fist-rattling about politicians, sometimes they really do know what's best--that is their job afterall. The public is easily duped.
not: That's the expert's job, not the politician's. A politician's job is to secure and maintain enough support from critical stakeholders so that they can stay in power. Depending on how the society is organized, that might mean making many people happy with successful public policies, or only a few people happy in the army command, megadonor class, central committee, etc...
Rulers need power so they won't need to compromise.
-- experts are the ones supposed to be reliable about the outcomes¹; politicians should be the ones reliable about the weighs to choose as multipliers to said outcomes in decision.
How good one is at one's job, it still depends on the individual.
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¹That's not exactly «knowing what's best». Experts are often biased in a field. To the doctor it may easily be "not to overcrowd the hospital", to the economist "not to undercrowd the commercial areas".
In order for somebody to know what is "best", they must have the information, the processing skills and intellectual maturity, and a definition of """best""" which, non-trivially, leans towards objective, collective and universal goals instead of subjective, particular and contingent ones.
Until the times in which carrers will have ceased being a priority by necessity, it would not really change much if you wrote that in the job description.
There is a genuine disconnect between the politics of rich, liberal American cities towards building infrastructure (including housing) in theory and in practice.
People support things that reflect positively on them, even if they are personally against it for some specific reason. This was going to share UP lines in some areas (the peninsula, for example). There is no way people in San Carlos or Menlo Park were going to uproot their homes… but they expected everyone in the valley who needed to move, to move.
The metoo phenomenon had some of this too. People who engaged in some of the things the movement stood against were some of the same people caught up in the zealousness.
Also see Yimbys vs NIMBYs.
One: it's a very conservative part of the state; giving them part of the train line first might blunt criticisms of continuing the project.
Two: it's important to tie this part of the state into the two large conurbations (Bay Area and LA Basin) for resilience against changes in economic mix (e.g. perhaps water shortages cause agriculture to fall or conversely Silicon Valley burns out and people there need a more diverse set of job opportunities. Currently 5 and 99 run N/S through the valley while on the other side of the hills 880/101/280 (in Bay Area; dunno about LA) run N/S through the Bay Area. Crossing from one to the other isn't super convenient.
One thing you don't see clarified very often when talking about the costs of megaprojects is inflation. $90 billion in 2008 dollars is $114 billion in 2021 dollars, meaning that the apparent cost blow out (against the opposition estimate) could just be an inflation induced illusion.
And of course, that little line becomes 90% of the project timeline, and everybody’s baffled.
That line is willing to carry an infinite amount of work.