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Comment by kitd | Hacker News Reader

Not exactly apples to oranges though, is it?

Sure, but that's not the point. My point is that infrastructure costs are like 20-50x more in California than in other developed countries for no apparent reason. We spend a million dollars of tax payer funds to build one single public bathroom in LA or even more in SF. There's something fundamentally broken... I appreciate seeing cost effective solutions that actually works. In California, it seems like most government 'solutions' are a complete scam to divert tax dollars into someone's pet project and create a funnel for their own income/profit.

> infrastructure costs are like 20-50x more in California than in other developed countries

Is that really true? For a simple example, it looks like a simple surface light rail line in the US typically runs about 100M/mi. That's pretty much the same as what it costs in the UK.

I may be exaggerating the exact number, but it's a well known fact that infrastructure costs more in California. The subway in San Francisco's Chinatown was more expensive than most modern airports... we're being scammed.

You’re exaggerating well known facts? Bro get some facts in here instead of just spewing anti California rhetoric.

Google it yourself. I've lived in California my entire life and will never leave. I'm allowed to criticize it. I want it to work harder and more effectively and stop wasting resources. Unfortunately there's zero accountability to voters because we're a one party state and the party nominee practically always wins. You can let an entire neighborhood burn down while out of the country at a party and the voters will still defend you.

There's no reason we pay such high taxes and have so little to show for it. I get tired of the endless excuses. Every other country--even the more expensive ones like Switzerland--have more effective infrastructure projects. I honestly don't even think this is debatable. Go look at how poorly maintained practically everything in the state is--schools, roads, bridges... It doesn't make sense when we're paying such high taxes and have all the big tech companies here... I don't know why people are so comfortable with that cognitive dissonance.

A "low-cost" subway is generally figured at about $80-100M/km, and in many more countries, you'd figure more like $150-200M/km as a good number.

The Chinatown subway was $600M/km, which is 3-4× "reasonable" construction costs, and fairly far from the most expensive subway, which is I believe NYC's Second Ave phase 2, at almost $4000M/km.

The US in general is a high-cost construction country (for a variety of reasons), but relative to the rest of the US, California is neither particularly expensive nor particularly cheap.

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