It is an insane engineering achievement. A train literally running on tracks on a road that is floating on water!
It's also the wrong stupid technology. The trains are constrained on space because of the low-floor bullshit. It's the longest light rail in the country, it's too fucking long and slow. Even if we fully built out ST3 it can't handle more than ~20% of commuters. It can't be expanded with express tracks because it's built deep underground, so the commute is so much slower than the equivalent in other countries and will NEVER compete with the automobile except during peak rush hour. The northern stations are next to the freeway so over half the land that could be transit-oriented development can't be, and then what's left is devoted to parking anyway. Complete, total waste of a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, built and planned by people who don't and won't ever use transit.
That 10x cost directly makes it so we can't build out our system properly and we keep building out car infrastructure because people would rather have a car and save 2 hours a day commuting.
Your other points aside -
Doing something no one else has ever done is the definition of an engineering achievement.
There isn't a set of best practices. There aren't a bunch of off the shelf parts, there aren't any contractors who can help you out because they've done it a dozen times before. It is an original engineering challenge.
Pulling it off is by definition an achievement.
That said, 100% agree about the station placement. Heck the stations that are well placed were poorly designed, they should be profitable by including commercial real estate and residences, with the revenue from both going to Sound Transit to pay for the system.
But no, we didn't do that and I can't even get a cup of coffee, in Seattle, at our light rail stations.
Oh yeah, and we hamstring ourselves because every extra property can only be used for "affordable" housing and we paid top dollar for it, then limit how much it can be used and tie up prime property which could have been used for more purposes. Gee, why is everything so expensive!?
Yeah everything surrounding what sound transit was forced to do with their finances sucks, which is why I have a lot of sympathy for the people trying to run ST and maintain its budget.
Everyone complains ST is bleeding money but the voters passed the laws forcing the finances to be terrible.
But every time I post that Seattle needs to dramatic loosen up building restrictions, it pisses everyone off.
Everytime I say things like "we should just do what cities running a good budget and that have affordable housing are doing" people get upset.
The curse of being an engineer. "Do the thing that makes the numbers work out" is rarely a popular opinion.
The water systems for LA and San Francisco are really quite audacious even if they have less technical complexity than floating rail.
I've built ML systems way more complex than any of these but it's still way less ambitious and audacious.
Of course those were first built in the 19th century.
I'd be happy about the light rail expansion if they weren't talking about delaying the Ballard line indefinitely. :(
(more details: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47457884)
My point is that closing two lanes of the interstate for over a year is a failure of maintenance, rather than anything about light rail vs. driving.
Phase 1 from SF to LA is estimated for 2035-2040. They might do end-to-end service before that with existing tracks and slower speeds, especially from Palmdale to LA. The SF and LA segments require tunneling to get over the mountains.
But, hey, you'll be able to go really fast between California's 6th and 80th largest cities!
So slow, in fact, many countries have faster regular rail.