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Comment by ChadNauseam | Hacker News Reader

We definitely need more metro, trams, bus routes, and bike paths. I especially want the latter because I bike to and from work every day. However, I have to wonder about the cost of these projects. In SF, we recently spent $346 million on the Van Ness Improvement Project, which added 2 miles of bus lanes. I just can't see how that's a good use of funds. If someone gave me $346 million and told me to improve society, I could think of many better options than adding two miles of bus lane. So a prerequisite to the whole idea seems to involve solving whatever is making these projects so expensive.

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One of the problems indeed.

Though IMHO it's just lack of political will.

Highways are built at (relative) ease, no matter the cost. Data centers are infamously now being built at society expense (electricity and water capacity), sometimes literally in peoples backyards.

At the moment I don't have the receipts, but from anecdotes - it's all just political will.

There's a highway extension? Some properties are taken by eminent domain, some other NIMBYs are told to just suck it up.

Data center? Forget about it - foundations are being laid this moment (sometimes no matter the law)!

High speed rail? We must listen to every NIMBY on the proposed path, hence it will take 200 years to listen to all complaints and align opinions of the people impacted. Millions speant on "research, enviornmental impact and public opinion" - project stalls and is closed after 5 years.

NB: I am not from USA, I think this pattern fits many (especially western) countries. Successful projects (I repeat myself) are always based on political will, when rule/law framework is designed to make such projects easier and much cheaper.

NB2: Also as with anything - when you start building you get experience and expertese - the more you build the cheaper it gets. A lot of places havent built new train/metro/tram line in decades - hence all expertese must be built from scratch (from policies, to government clerks knowing how to deal with such projects, to construction businesses who never built rail in 50 years, etc.).

> Highways are built at (relative) ease, no matter the cost.

It's like that because it's a misconception that highways are built for passenger cars. They're built for freight and all kinds of business activities - regular people using them are just a bonus.

The majority of petroleum-based fuel, wear and tear on the highways and toll revenue comes from everything but passenger cars on highways.

Almost all of the new highway construction is for passenger cars. Yes, the interstate highways were built in part to facilitate intercity truck traffic, but the reason for building yet another beltway around, say, Houston isn't for trucks but for all of the passenger cars in the region that are congesting the roads.

The challenge that "developed" countries / cities have is that there's already a lot of existing (and aging) infrastructure around.

Meanwhile in other countries they build new cities from scratch, including infrastructure based on current-day knowledge of how these things pan out long term.

I think the US has the space and funds to do so. If they were to build a new city from scratch for the next 250 years, what would it look like?

> However, I have to wonder about the cost of these projects.

A very good way to deal with this is to recognize that all infrastructure needs maintenance and periodic replacement. Once it is time to replace a road, that is when you change it to include bike paths, bus lanes and so on.

You need some foresight, planning, make new road designs part of law, and political will. Some countries have made this work very well.

This feels like an instance of America being unable to build things due to corruption.

Two miles of any lane shouldn't cost over a hundred million dollars per mile. Repainting a lane should be vastly less and even if they're building a new flyover just for buses it shouldn't cost that much. Something is happening there. It is not getting built in an effective way.

Can almost guarantee that project involved much more that just bus lanes. I don't believe even California can spend that much on paint.

(And it did, the entire roadway, sewer, and water mains were replaced, traffic signals were replaced, etc: https://www.sfcta.org/projects/van-ness-improvement-project)

Okay, how would you spend $346 million?

If we had to stick to transportation-specific improvements, I would use the money to eliminate bus fare for a year. (muni generates about $100M in fare, so really it would be enough money to eliminate fare for ~3 years.)

Unlike subway fare, bus fare doesn't prevent n'er-do-wells from getting on the bus (they just ignore the fare and get on anyway), and it probably increases ridership and gets some people out of their cars, which reduces congestion (public benefit and therefore deserving of government subsidy).

Why not use the money to make bus service better? There is no city that can't effectively use many more buses. Bus riders all put service as their biggest problem over the cost.

Improving service is much better, but the relative scales here are crazy. She options are "completely eliminate cost" or "slightly improve service in one two-mile stretch". Granted, 10 million trips a year go through that two-mile stretch that was improved, but that's just a small fraction of all bus trips in SF.

It is more than that, but even still we should as that would help the people who ride their routes. In almost all cases this would bring in more riders who find the new service good enough that they can stop driving.

Where I live, I’d spend it on increasing parking availability at train stations, and/or run a lot more local buses that do a small (few kilometres) circuit around the station and ferry passengers to/from the station. Taking a bus to the station currently adds an unreasonable amount of time to the journey. It doesn’t matter how good trains are if I don’t live near a station and I can’t get there.

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