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Comment by helloooooooo | Hacker News Reader

Environmental review isn’t just about the hippie-greenie meaning of environment, but the actual built-environment. Questions asked include: how does the proposed plan interface with existing infrastructure? How will humans interact with it? What kind of traffic volumes are proposed?

It isn’t just about protecting and engineering our way around natural features. It’s about engineering around the built-environment as well.

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I have first-hand experience being required to do an environmental impact study and an archaeological study to fill a pothole in an existing road. These laws are beyond unreasonable. Same with catering to the people that think building out mobile networks alters their bodily fluids or some such.

We've ceded the entire process of deciding what can be built to the fevered imaginations of the most hyper-sensitive among us that have nothing better to do with their time.

And yet despite that transit projects in the US almost universally fail at most of these aspects. Or play into the existing status quo that is supposed to be changed.

And really these questions were already asked and explored in the design phase. By the time this has to be done all these things have already been threw many iterations.

Sometimes its better to just do a project, because you can always change a lot of things and iterate on a lot of aspects of a transit project.

The EIS process in New York amounts to little more than legally mandated graft and a blocking function for preventing new housing from being built. A residential project on the edge of Downtown Brooklyn nearly died because it cast a shadow on a tiny community garden used by fewer than 20 people. The compromise was to shorted then building which eliminated 20 or so units of affordable housing.

At this point in history, I think we really need to stop building in green-fields, farmland, etc. and only concentrate on redevelopment. We are past the point of ecological sustainability.

This is exactly true. In all honesty the US should never again build a new road or highway. There is already more then enough of both. Its not even close, in fact a huge amount of road needs to be removed, just reclaimed by nature.

To give an example, the city of Indianapolis is 'commited' to maintain a road that could go from Indianapolis to Alaska. Like seriously, even if 100% of government revenue was focused on just road maintenance, this wouldn't be possible. Lots of cities have the same situation, way to much infrastructure.

Within existing limits of the bay area cities you could easily build like 2 million new houses. Without a single new road, water pipe or anything.

This talk by Peter Calthorpe (the guy who invented Transit Oriented Development) about California and the Bay Area: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fUtdFbK4YG4

This video about his work in China is also amazing:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fUtdFbK4YG4

100s of Billions are needed to just upgrade existing rail to being electric and reliable. Even just upgrading the speed slightly and making rail reliable would be helpful.

Most roads, and highways, can be retrofitted with some type of passenger rail. To run alongside cars. No need to build in a greenfield.

It's amazing the environmentalists don't report how many new miles of road are put down every year.

The best time to electrify the railroads was 100 years ago, the second best time is now.

I'm not usually for full public, but in terms of the railroads the government just has to buy all the tracks and operate as an infrastructure provider.

Maybe on of the single best choices in Swiss history is the commitment to 100% electrified rail. I honestly didn't even know non electrified rail existed. In my mind it was just 'steam' and then 'electric'. I was pretty old until I for the first time read something about a diesel locomotive and I was totally confused.

> To give an example, the city of Indianapolis is 'commited' to maintain a road that could go from Indianapolis to Alaska.

Can you say a little more about this example? I tried about a dozen Google searches (unfortunately on mobile) but could not find anything related.

And it’s still a waste of time and money.

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