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Comment by femiagbabiaka | Hacker News Reader

It's absolutely critical that a country with California's GDP learns how to rearchitect itself to build again -- literally critical for America's progression. Nothing in this article makes me feel any better about the prospects of that happening.

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It’s structurally impossible. The half of the political coalition that contains virtually all the people who want to build any sort of urban infrastructure is too fractured into groups that each have their own distinct priorities unrelated to infrastructure or good governance. And of course the other half of the polity hates the government.

If you’re a democrat in california, where does infrastructure fall on your list of priorities? What big voting bloc does it get you?

Here in Maryland, we’ve been building a 16 mile above ground, mostly non-grade-separated light rail for a decade already and it’s nowhere near done: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purple_Line_(Maryland). I don’t know a single person other than myself who is motivated to make it happen. Nobody is agitating to get our miserable commuter rail system to run more timely. Road construction is the only thing that ever penetrates into the public consciousness. Making anything better is very low on everyone’s list of priorities.

> If you’re a democrat in california, where does infrastructure fall on your list of priorities? What big voting bloc does it get you?

As of now, nothing because everything takes forever to build. The authors of Abundance talk about how rural broadband is gummed up in bureaucratic processes. Same with CHIPS. Biden couldn’t point to it as an accomplishment because…it wasn’t accomplished yet.

Right but to waive environmental review, pass laws which push back against frivolous lawsuits, and allow city and state budgets to allocate money to transit you need a coalition that cares. rayiner is very right here, the problem is very few coalitions care. Urbanist/YIMBY groups are coming up that do care and they've taken politics by storm over the last 10 years, but they're still a small coalition.

I do transit and multimodal advocacy in the Bay Area and transit is just a ball that everyone passes one. Low income advocacy groups want stops in low income areas, high income homeowners want high frequency routes, some riders want more police presence, anti-policing advocates hate the police, some residents think it's ableist to have a bike lane take up what could be a bus priority lane, anyone who uses any parking spot that will be decreased protests, disability advocates want transit to have level boarding and pro-accessiblity options on the bus, some folks want free fares, other folks want to meter by distance; I could go on and on. I have talked to activists and members of the public each with these positions.

Getting the actual thing built is the last priority on everyone's list. Sure they all want it. But they only want it if their pet concession is on the list. That's the problem.

This seems like self-perpetuating dysfunction. If people knew that the government would eventually meet everyone's needs, then it would be more sensible to not have to meet everyone's needs right away. But as it is, we build nothing, which meets nobodies needs, and creates a kind of zero-sum game of thrones for anything that has the potential to be built.

"Nowhere near done" seems like a bit of an exaggeration, given that the link at the top of your linked page suggests that it's over 3/4ths done[1].

It's also, to my understanding, not grade-separated in various important places. I was in College Park two weeks ago and saw lots of at-grade development on the line, which presumably gets bogged down by Route 1 and the other high-traffic roads nearby.

(This isn't to imply that the construction isn't slow or inefficient; it's almost certainly both of those things.)

[1]: https://purplelinemd.com/media/jdwhz3kj/purple-line-press-re...

The last 10-20% of these projects always takes surprisingly long. The 2027 opening date is already looking questionable: https://wjla.com/news/local/purple-line-construction-project.... And it was supposed to open in 2022.

The 80/80 rule of project management: the first 80% of a project takes 80% of the time, and the other 20% takes the other 80% of the time.

Other countries can build entire rail lines entirely on viaducts for the same cost as it takes to grade separate a single Caltrain station. For example it was recently estimated that grade separating Broadway Station with a center platform would take $889 million and 5-5.5 years [1]. This is mind boggling.

[1] https://burlingameca.granicus.com/DocumentViewer.php?file=bu...

Building in earthquake territory generally increases costs by at least 2x. Ignoring private land rights also generally helps but costs.

> Building in earthquake territory generally increases costs by at least 2x

Japan. Most of Europe.

Japan, sure. But Japan deals with it by going in the opposite direction: most new structures are intended to be temporary, replaced with a few decades.

Most of Europe? No, just the southern part near the tectonic plate boundaries. Which also just happen to be the most expensive parts to build in Europe...so thanks for helping to prove my point.

The author covers this. Other countries build far more rail lines.

California will need to hit Rock Bottom hard more than once before replacing CEQA with something sane becomes possible. And that's just one of several wet moldy blankets blocking progress.

More young people need to actually start voting to get all the NIMBYism out of the government, and then change can happen.

If by NIMBY you mean litigation-mediated environmental regulation and union-optimized labor & wage rules, sure!

Porque no los dos?

Every one is anti-NIMBY until they own a backyard, then they don't want their house to be eminent domained or have a noisy train running near them.

If you put a stop nearby I'll let you run the tracks through my living room

The problem is that they have the option to own a house to begin with. Cali cities need to be all high rise apartment buildings.

Once the government starts raising property taxes, people will start selling off their homes, and then developers can buy the land and build apartments.

California can't raise property taxes unless Prop 13 is repealed and that's a very high bar to pass.

A lot of retired people would lose their houses so it would be a political disaster to remove it.

Yeah, I think we should keep that aspect of prop 13. That is what it was originally billed as.

It just doesn't make sense that golf courses pay taxes that are more aligned with the 70's property values.

If there was ever a major change to prop 13 taxes, I think we would need to phase in the new taxes over a five to ten year period. Otherwise, the market would be thrown into chaos.

I mean, majority vote for a certain candidates should do it. If enough people bothered to vote, it could happen.

You would need to overturn the proposition directly. The state Congress can't overturn it so you would need another proposition. That's a "simple" majority vote, but it's the third rail of California politics. We almost got it removed for businesses, but COVID happened and people were not in the mood for raising taxes.

As Californians will tell you, local communities are more important than all that.

Why?

California has a massive ecosystem advantage in terms of the tech industry, no other state comes close. If California can't build, America can't build.

Well, let's not get too pessimistic. Brightline built rail from Tampa/Orlando to Miami, and it seems to be pretty popular, although it's not high speed rail.

If we're not talking about high speed rail, Amtrak provides service from Oakland to Seattle and Oakland to LA already. The best part is that Amtrak has a dramatically lower fatality rate than Brightline.

Unfortunately our country has no motion any longer and the crumbling infrastructure is a good sign of prolonged decay that has started.

I think this whole article/title is ragebait at best.

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