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Chicago's infrastructure is falling apart as well. The L hasn't been extended in decades, and there are no plans to electrify the rest of the suburban rail line
by djsumdog 9y ago
Chicago's infrastructure is falling apart as well. The L hasn't been extended in decades, and there are no plans to electrify the rest of the suburban rail lines. The city is corrupt and constantly out of money. Every time they raise revenue, it disappears, with the streets full of potholes and non-existent lines between car lanes.
The only city that's truly expanding their rail in a significant way is Seattle. With the ST3 project and the Redmond Transit corridor, hopefully they'll see some relief from the insane housing prices. But they needed that expansion two decades ago.
Don't even get me started on Caltrain.
Everybody is going crazy over self driving vehicles, but if we do get them, they won't be a reality for at least 10 ~ 15 years. It's a more difficult problem than people think, and all that money could be put into fixing and expanding our crumbling rail.
I don't understand why America hates rail so much.
- rayiner 9y ago> I don't understand why America hates rail so much. Because in America, transit is welfare for poor people, and acts like it. Busses in small cities in Germany coordinate schedules to optimize transfers. Busses in secondary US cities just don’t shown up sometimes because the driver decided to clock out early. There is no accountability, due to the potent combination of the fact that the primary constituency is politically marginalized to begin with and also are not paying the taxes that fund the systems.
- lostmsu 9y agoRe: Seattle: 15 years for two rail lines is a joke. Assuming they actually build it.
- Jesus_Jones 9y agoIt is taking way too long. But there are reasons. (1) There is a limit on the amount of bonds that they can have bid out at a time. (2) they had to do a lot of tunneling. (3) the next segment involves building over a floating bridge. Light rail over a floating bridge is non-trivial. I do wish they'd increase their ability to do simultaneous work though, I'll be dead before it gets near my house.
- lostmsu 9y agoFor 3), there was recently an article, that highest cost in US rail projects is buying land. 3 kinda offsets this.
- Jesus_Jones 9y agoBuilding rail on a non-fixed "floating bridge" is probably expensive too :-)
- djsumdog 9y agoIt will be the first floating bridge rail in the world. They've already built the test track, so so hopefully they have an accurate idea of how much the production segments will cost: https://vimeo.com/163631993 https://vimeo.com/163631993
- Jesus_Jones 9y agoReplying to my own note, the cost is controversial, and plenty of people don't want to spend money on infrastructure, or have endless arguments over we'll just use driverless cars, only spend money on roads, or only spend money on buses, etc. But somehow we managed to pass something here.