Hacker News Reader

Comment by Karrot_Kream | Hacker News Reader

This is actually a fun one to point to. Replacing the Eastern span of the Bay Bridge happened recently, and has been one of the most expensive Californian infrastructure projects to date. It started with a price tag of $250 mil but it ended up costing $6.5 bil. In the meantime, BART has performed modifications on their tracks and has begun switching to new rolling stock, but it's been a lot cheaper than replacing the Eastern span of the Bay Bridge.

View on HN

Looks like the bridge opened about 100 years ago - so that's $6.5 bil/100 years. So that's one data point.

Wikipedia says BART costs about $0.6 bil/year. Which is 10 times as expensive as the bridge. I need figures on yearly maintenance cost for the bridge to make this accurate though.

But so far it's not looking good for BART.

Great comparison! Let's stop maintaining the bay bridge or servicing the bonds. Then rebuild it in 100 years.

That way everyone can use BART :)

You're comparing a 2-mile, $6.5 bridge to a 130-mile, $0.5 bil/year system and you think this looks good for the bridge?

Not to mention in addition to direct costs, you need to look at externalities.

It was not me who made the comparison, that's the person I replied to.

They were comparing number of people crossing the bridge to the total number of people using the entire BART system.

If anything what you say just makes BART look even worse, since a 2 mi stretch of bridge carries a half as many people as a hundred mile long BART system.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com