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Comment by mattcantstop | Hacker News Reader

Interstate 70 in Colorado is very problematic. It is constantly backed up. Colorado needs to learn from this and get serious about rail for shipping and for human travel.

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I feel you man. Problem is that would be a major dollar infrastructure problem that would need federal dollars. With a deficit over 40T dollars and political wind blowing against more federal spending generally and Colorado not being a favored state at the moment I'd say the chances are slim of it happening in the next three years. It would be boffo if some liberal corporate billionaire put his shoulder against the project like that enough to inspire a combination of a Colorado bond issue, some state funding and support. The way California handled its high speed rail in Central valley here is not an inspiration I'll tell you that right now. What a fcuk-up and embarrassment that is. What were they thinking?

IF Colorado did this all alone they could potentially avoid a lot of the high costs that result from getting federal dollars. Maybe - Federally funded projects tend to cost 4-7x would they would elsewhere in the world - but nobody really knows why and so it is questionable if Colorado could figure out how to build cheap. Still the potential is there. Colorado's costs would be a lot higher at 7x the cost with federal funding vs doing it all themselves for reasonable costs - but only if they solve all the issues the drive costs up.

Note that I have no confidence Colorado will tackle the issues driving costs up. Several of the known factors are places where politically powerful people (from all sides so don't bring in class warfare) are increasing costs and they let you cut them off. There are a lot of unkonwen issues left after factoring the above, and it is likely they also have politically powerful people increasing costs.

> and political wind blowing against more federal spending generally

Federal non-defense spending in the US is as high as ever (ignoring the brief COVID spike) https://www.cato.org/blog/century-federal-spending-1925-2025

It's going to take 30 years to get a passenger rail connection between boulder and Denver...flat ground, 30 miles, where a train line already is.

The i70 line will never happen.

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