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California bullet train cost surges by $2.8B
- surlyadopter 9y agoLol at anybody who is surprised by this event.
- austenallred 9y agoThe most predictable worst case scenario of all time. I’ll be shocked if it comes in under $15B.
- jandrese 9y agoThe article says the cost is ballooning from $6B to probably $10B.
- mrpippy 9y agoAnd that's just for 119 miles of track in the Central Valley. How much will it cost once they get to populated areas?
- sputknick 9y agoIn the article it says the cost for the entire project is currently $64 B. I can't fathom that kind of money
- QAPereo 9y agoThink of it this way... we’re going to end up spending about $7 trillion in Iraq and Afghanistan having accomplished essentially nothing good. $64billion is a rounding error for our government.
- BRAlNlAC 9y agoThat doesn't really work though. If you earn 70k a year, $640 isn't a rounding error, that's still a significant part of your budget.
- QAPereo 9y agoYeah, but we’re not talking about total budget, not even the total military budget; that’s $7 trilllion just on two losing wars. You need to lose another decimal place, and remember that you also print your own money and can levy taxes.
- lamarpye 9y agoYou are confusing the Federal government with the CA state government.
- acdha 9y agoTry dividing it by 50: every state could get two of these projects with half a trillion left over for DC and the territories. That’s even before you factor in that California’s population and economy would merit a larger chunk than, say, South Dakota. Seems like a better deal than paying to destabilize a region and create a lot of long-term enemies.
- jeffbax 9y agoIf you don't consider the 20T of growing debt, sure. At what point do we ever care about the budget at all then? Asking as an opponent of the wars.
- QAPereo 9y agoCare about budgets, and cut the waste such as losing wars and corrupt, broken nonsense like the F-35. Care about price controls in the health sector, and care about investing in infrastructure.
- ebikelaw 9y agoCalifornia spends that much on our roads every four years. It is hardly unimaginable.
- Gibbon1 9y agoDivide $64 billion by 30 years.
- sputknick 9y agoThat makes it a lot more reasonable, thank you.
- DrScump 9y agoBut then add operating costs and debt service over 30 years.
- Gibbon1 9y agoAnd then subtract fares. http://www.hsr.ca.gov/docs/about/ridership/ridership_revenue_source_doc5.pdf http://www.hsr.ca.gov/docs/about/ridership/ridership_revenue...
- DrScump 9y agoSubtract actual farebox revenues, yes. But I don't expect that their revenue projections are any more accurate than their cost estimates were.
- niftich 9y agoI've long held the opinion that the Central Valley portion of the project, and/or the first phase of this project -- which in this case, refer to the same stretch -- is overbuilt in ways that make little practical sense. If you're putting stations into every major town, roughly 30 miles apart, it makes little sense to build things like curves with a radius of over 3.5 miles (~ 5.6 km) on a viaduct, comparable to open-line track radii in France for TGV lines, just outside of Fresno's station where you're going to slow down to 0 mph anyway. This kind of silliness is why they're over budget. The most acute impediments to long-distance rail in California is the lack of dedicated, quality track along which a trainset could speed along between towns without regard to freight, so it would stand to reason to solve that part first, while leaving a bunch of expensive niceties for later, when enough appetite for them has been built up. When France built the TGV, or Germany their equivalent, they didn't rebuild their downtowns to accommodate high-speed tracks; this is a uniquely American fetishism the same way the US took interstate highways into their downtowns in the 60s.
- ebikelaw 9y agoIn order to meet the voter-mandated requirements of the proposition which started the project, some trains must run non-stop from San Jose to Los Angeles at 220 MPH. Many trains will go right through Fresno at very high speeds. That is why the track has the radius it has.
- niftich 9y agoI think the original Prop 1 bill [1] lays out maximum nonstop travel time targets between major cities to be delivered, and a requirement to be able to bypass any station at "mainline operating speed", (which I strongly believe is an engineering detail that has no place in law), but not a requirement to actually have some trains on the books that will proceed through Fresno without a stop. The spirit of your post stands nonetheless; the Prop 1 bill codified a bunch of ambitious requirements ahead of time, ignorant of local conditions or engineers' opinion. [1] http://www.leginfo.ca.gov/pub/07-08/bill/asm/ab_3001-3050/ab_3034_bill_20080826_chaptered.html http://www.leginfo.ca.gov/pub/07-08/bill/asm/ab_3001-3050/ab...
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- austenallred 9y agoWhoops, typo. Meant $15B
- phil248 9y agoI always imagine worst case scenarios involving thousands of deaths and probably explosions. This is just a very, very expensive train. I'm not sure why anyone would think building something in a very expensive state would not itself be very expensive. Did we expect building major infrastructure in an expensive state to be surprisingly cheap?
- jandrese 9y agoAccording to the article pretty much everybody else in this project said that it's going to cost $10B, and only the guy in charge was still living in the fantasy land where it could be done for $6B.
- niftich 9y agoYeah, the cognitive dissonance is only among the leadership of the project here. Big projects like this are chronically underbudgeted (or "optimistically budgeted"), and leadership always jumps through various mental hoops to attribute cost overruns to unforeseen factors, where more than half of the factors were easily foreseen by commentators. That being said, I sympathize with the nigh-impossible pressures here: it's difficult to convince an entire, diverse state to contribute funds to a project that will take a long time to come to fruition, and whose benefits will be broad, but marginal, across a variety of metrics. So there's a pressure to deliver an ambitious project at prices that are scarcely realistic. Being able to lead this does invite a certain amount of cognitive dissonance; in the famous words of Upton Sinclair, "it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it".
- dmitrygr 9y agoSo far no evidence has been shown for these "broad" benefits.
- bobbygoodlatte 9y agoYeah exactly. Considering in many cases a plane ticket from SF to LA will cost less and get you there faster, the high speed rail project makes little sense
- dionidium 9y agoTrains are better than planes along several dimensions, if done right. "Why would I take the train when I could fly for the same price?" isn't a very good question. The answer is that (again, when done correctly): - Trains are generally more comfortable - Trains allow you to use your cell phone - Trains can take you from city center to city center - Trains don't have the same security requirements - Trains are safer - Trains are cheaper to operate (and so should actually be cheaper in the long run) Planes are better over very long distances. But trains are better for regional travel.
- BlytheSchuma 9y agoCan the trains be upgraded (faster) over time or do the tracks also need to be swapped out?
- FreakyT 9y agoFrom the article, it sounds like the biggest obstacles are "land buys" and "delays relating to land buys". We need to strengthen eminent domain for transit projects so that we don't end up wasting tons of money appeasing corrupt landowners trying to hit the jackpot.
- noobiemcfoob 9y agoNo, eminent domain is already a questionable practice of screwing over the individual in the name of the collective. The state should never be able to simply co-opt private ownership just for "reasons".
- beat 9y agoI hate this argument. "Property", as in land ownership, does not exist outside of the State. You "own" land only by the consent of society. Conceptually, land ownership is inseparable from the State.
- patricius 9y agoOnly if you equate society and State, which I don’t. But do you believe that anything is made morally right when the State does it, e.g., confiscating property?
- beat 9y agoThe State is not the exact equivalent of society in general, but there's enough overlap to interchange them in most arguments. And you say "do you believe anything is made morally right when the State does it", but what you mean is "do you believe everything is morally right when the State does it". So you're turning bad phrasing into a bad argument. I can think that some things, even most things that the State does are good, without being universal. This includes eminent domain, which is a social good but must be applied carefully, on a case-by-case basis. Absolutism is the second core failing of libertarianism, after the absurd ideas of "natural rights".
- melling 9y agoBig items in the United States are incredibly expensive to build. Nuclear reactors, high-speed rail, etc. China, for example, has almost 18,000 miles of high-speed rail, and they're on target 23,000 miles by 2025. They are going to finish another 2000 miles in 2018: http://www.scmp.com/news/china/economy/article/2126548/full-speed-ahead-chinas-fast-rail-network-us112-billion http://www.scmp.com/news/china/economy/article/2126548/full-... China has hit been hit with delays in nuclear power, but they are nearing completion of their first AP1000 reactors: http://www.world-nuclear-news.org/UF-Chinese-plant-produces-AP1000-reload-assemblies-0801175.html http://www.world-nuclear-news.org/UF-Chinese-plant-produces-...
- gok 9y agoIt's easy to build infrastructure when labor costs are around $3/hour, eminent domain payment can't be litigated, and environmental impact studies are effectively not required.
- pishpash 9y agoWhat you say is true, but there is also this: political certainty to get something done once decided.
- kelnos 9y agoSure, when you only have one political party and your government is authoritarian, that's pretty much a given.
- mstaoru 9y agoLabor costs on these projects are closer to $10/hour these days. The workers get paid reasonably well because their job is in shifts and seasonal. They're also usually provided some basic housing and food, health insurance and transport. Eminent domain compensation also tends to be very high for this kind of projects. People intentionally seek farmland that might be in the way of construction to get paid. Since it's all technically long-term "rent" in the communist regime, they usually get compensated on a yearly basis for as long as the rent stands, which may be as long as 5-15 years. And for the environmental impact studies, if Western media and people can't read Chinese, it doesn't mean these studies do not exist. China is very serious about ecology in the last years, it's not there yet, but it's moving in the right direction.
- gok 9y agoThe California HSR makes sense if you consider it not a railroad but a jobs program for eminent domain and environmental lawyers.
- rayiner 9y agoWorst case scenario? Plenty of time for costs to exceed even these projections by the time the initial segment is due to be completed in 2025. The $6 billion price tag was ridiculous. That's as much as the D.C. Metro Silver Line cost, and that was only 22 miles long. This HSR segment is 119 miles long. Yeah, it's probably cheaper to build through the Central Valley rather than the D.C. exurbs, but that much cheaper?
- AnimalMuppet 9y agoPlenty of ways for the initial segment to not be completed in 2025, too.
- fernly 9y agoYup, because > On the horizon are more difficult segments, such as the long underground passage through the Tehachapi and San Gabriel Mountains and the route into the urban San Francisco Bay Area. Especially the latter segment. I live along the assumed route to SF and let me tell ya, there are any number of wealthy NIMBYs who are ready to fight any attempt at building a noisy, unsightly, and potentially dangerous rail line past their houses in any way possible.
- frankharv 9y agoWhat I don't understand is why they don't use eminent domain authority to take these properties. It seems this project is exactly what eminent domain is for. Even though I hate taking peoples property this project is public and benefits all. I do wonder about using bonds that are paying out from the Highway Fund. So if this fails the highway fund still has to pay and that will mean less future money for road maintenance.
- dragonwriter 9y ago> What I don't understand is why they don't use eminent domain authority to take these properties. They will. That's not the issue. The issue is political/legal fights on other bases.
- 9y ago
- rconti 9y agoThe worst-case scenario has not yet happened. We can't call it that until it's actually built and we know how much it REALLY cost.
- 0xCMP 9y ago"Moving forward, he said, the authority will not start construction on future segments until all the land is in hand, a practice that outside experts have long said is prudent project management." Seems like they believed their own optimistic outlooks.
- baron816 9y agoHow is this train going to be useful again?
- lewis500 9y agoI wish that voters and leaders could’ve seen a menu of policy options when they approved this. I think they wouldn’t have gone in for such an irreversible project. For example, electric bus technology has been getting better and cheaper and seems will continue to get better in the future. So for all the money we’ll be spending on this throughout the 2020’s, we could’ve been converting buses, where practical, to electric. And if electric buses don’t work that well (few US models have yet been in operation for a long time), we can always just upgrade many thousands of regular buses to cleaner and more comfortable modern models. Incremental improvements are nice because they can be reversed and right-sized. It seems HSR is setting the size of its budget itself, as no one wants a half finished rail system. This wouldn’t be too bad except that there is a risk California will face pension problems in the future. The less money we tie up in debt now, the less chance there is for terrible cutbacks to critical services if a recession destroys tax revenues and pension assets.
- tabtab 9y agoIndeed. Regular CA roads have faint line paint and are falling apart. We have bigger priorities than high-speed trains. Is it too late to trade the money?
- kelnos 9y agoAgreed, and to take a bit further: I don't think we should be tackling projects of this size and scale when we don't even have good local and regional rail stories. They are the squeakiest wheel that should get the grease.
- dmode 9y agoWe need a high speed train connection. But the Federal government should be building such infrastructure, considering we pay 35% of our taxes to the Fed. In most countries, the central governments builds infrastructure at this scale.
- kelnos 9y agoMost countries don't have strong states/provinces like the US does. Regardless, part of the funding for the CA HSR project does come from the US federal government[0]. It's pretty common in the US for infra projects like this to have multiple funding sources. [0] http://www.hsr.ca.gov/About/Funding_Finance/index.html http://www.hsr.ca.gov/About/Funding_Finance/index.html
- upofadown 9y ago>Hill said the cost increases were mainly driven by problems including higher costs for land acquisition, issues in relocating utility systems, the need for safety barriers where the bullet trains would operate near freight lines and demands by stakeholders for the mitigation of myriad issues. There could of been an entire article written about these issues. Instead we got a bunch of stuff about politics. What's the point of writing an article about problems with a major infrastructure project without any discussion of the problems?
- slapshot 9y agoThere is high speed transit from San Francisco to Los Angeles today. It's called Southwest Airlines. Tickets are $45 for SFO-LAX each way in February right now (less than the expected cost of the train ticket). Other pairs (OAK-BUR, SJC-BUR) are similar ($49-$57 each way). Before you say that it's ridiculous, consider how else $64 billion (current official estimated total construction cost of the project -- not counting operating cost)[0] could be spent: - Commercial air travel costs around $0.10 per passenger-mile if you buy in bulk[1]. That means $64 billion could buy 640 billion passenger-miles of air travel. If allocated to the 11 million people who live in Los Angeles and San Francisco counties, the state could buy each resident 58,000 air miles of travel -- equivalent to about 88 round-trips between LAX and SFO. - If the LAX-SFO air corridor becomes too busy, that $64 billion could also be spent upgrading existing fleets by buying 147 brand new A380s at an average list price of $435 million each. [2] - If the environmental impact is a concern (not that laying tracks and punching holes through the Central Valley is free of impact), then buy new Teslas instead. Lots of them. At $35,000 per Model 3, you could buy 1.8 million new Teslas using that money. Add some solar panels to each purchase and you could still buy more than a million -- more than enough for every San Franciscan to get a brand new Tesla. [0] https://www.mercurynews.com/2017/01/13/confidential-report-california-bullet-train-could-cost-billions-more-than-expected/ https://www.mercurynews.com/2017/01/13/confidential-report-c... [1] http://www.opshots.net/2015/04/aircraft-operating-series-aircraft-operating-expenses/ http://www.opshots.net/2015/04/aircraft-operating-series-air... [2] http://www.airbus.com/content/dam/corporate-topics/publications/backgrounders/Backgrounder-Airbus-Commercial-Aircraf-price-list-EN.pdf http://www.airbus.com/content/dam/corporate-topics/publicati... (Edit: added citation for $64 billion official estimate)
- pretendscholar 9y ago>At $35,000 per Model 3, you could buy 1.8 million new Teslas using that money. Add some solar panels to each purchase and you could still buy more than a million -- more than enough for every San Franciscan to get a brand new Tesla. Which would be useless without the billions spent in maintenance every year for the roads and other maintenance. Its such a silly argument. If you include the full cost of airport construction it wouldn't be so pretty either. Having heterogeneous forms of transit is an intrinsic benefit as each are better under certain weather conditions and use cases.
- everdev 9y agoOne significant downside is the way the bonds and ballot measures work. In CA, we're asked to approve a few billion for the project in each election. Failure to pass means sunk costs or higher costs in the future to re-start efforts. If the state asked upfront for $2B/year for 15 years, I doubt it would have passed.
- DrScump 9y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boiling_frog https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boiling_frog
- dragonwriter 9y ago> One significant downside is the way the bonds and ballot measures work. In CA, we're asked to approve a few billion for the project in each election. No, it was all Prop 1A in 2008 for ~$10 billion. Voters have not been asked for additional CA HSR bond funds since. Presumably, given the level of other funding that has been secured, additional bonds will at some point be necessary, but the “every election” thing is not even remotely related to reality.
- djrogers 9y ago$10B will likely end up being 10% of the total cost. Not to mention all of the Prop 1A mandates that the state has already violated, such as the requirement for private partnership, and ridiculous ridership estimates...
- marcell 9y agoSome food for thought: Congress just passed a tax cut bill costing $1.5 trillion over ten years, or $150 billion. That's enough to build a California HSR ever year for the next ten years, accounting for 50% budget overrun, and still have $500 billion or so left over.
- gfodor 9y agoIt's a peeve of mine when analysts refer to a tax cut "costing" the government money. This is a deliberate dishonest re-framing (not your invention, but I blame those who invented it as trying to mislead people.) One could equally frame is as the taxpayers "recovering" $1.5 trillion that would have normally been taken from them. A better framing is "is expected to reduce tax revenues by XXX amount." Not to mention that projecting tax cut "losses" is a game of prediction anyway. Taking that projection, and then backing out "how many HSRs will we have saved" makes even less sense than taking the projection itself as gospel, because the HSR is also a projection, and also paid out over time, and also subject to inflation, etc etc. IOW this kind of analysis has the surface qualities of pointing out an interesting comparison but I don't feel it's conveying anything meaningful.
- wwweston 9y ago>This is a deliberate dishonest re-framing "Dishonest" is a massive overstatement at best. It's completely reasonable to state that the government has lost $1.5 trillion in revenue, no matter what frame you choose. "Cost" would be one way to refer to that. I suppose I can imagine someone nitpicking that "cost" should refer to only expenditures, but that's an uphill battle against colloquial speech and even some formal usage (an opportunity cost is not an expenditure). The general argument that taxation itself is theft is stronger than the argument that reduced revenue is only referred to as a cost dishonestly. And that's not saying much. > Not to mention that projecting tax cut "losses" is a game of prediction anyway. IIRC, the $1.5 trillion figure is among other things the prediction of the legislators who created the policy when playing by the required legislative rules.
- shard972 9y ago
- curtis 9y agoI can't help but think that the California bullet train is solving the wrong problem. How much would it cost to extend BART into the Central Valley? And for that matter, extend BART all the way around San Francisco Bay? And can you do that for less than 60 billion dollars? And what kind of ridership could such a system attract?
- skybrian 9y agoBART is already at capacity and I don't think you can make it faster or more comfortable than a bus.
- niftich 9y agoA lot. It's also not a good use of money, as BART has an unusual track gauge, strange engineering decisions, and is operationally and mechanically incompatible with other commonly deployed rail systems. Not to mention, even with BART fulfilling a strange role between an in-city rapid transit and far-exurb commuter rail, extending lines further out from the operating core comes with issues around trainset supply and capacity allocations in congested areas, like the Oakland Wye, the Mission Street Subway, or the Transbay Tube. It's far more likely to "extend" fringes of the system with other modes that can then operate independently, like the eBART [1], ACE, or the Capitol Corridor, or even a bus line. Extending the BART entirely around the western side of the bay won't happen, disproportionately due to the city of Atherton [2]. It's also silly, considering Caltrain fulfills a very similar role in transit to what BART would bring to the table, along the identical corridor. I once wrote [3][4] about why the geography of the current transit options in the Bay are unfortunate, and single mode of transit completing the entire circle would do little to alleviate the problem that so much of transit around the Bay is already around this circle. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/eBART https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/eBART [2] http://sfist.com/2016/07/11/atherton_wealthy_will_still_maybe_t.php http://sfist.com/2016/07/11/atherton_wealthy_will_still_mayb... [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12282756#12283335 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12282756#12283335 [4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14277421#14278045 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14277421#14278045
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- randyrand 9y agoI wish they instead built more airports within each city linked by short high speed rail lines. LAX is overcrowded and getting to it is a nightmare in any traffic (which is most the time). The traffic within the airport drop off circle is also ridiculous. Imagine an LAX2 and LAX3 in different parts of the city with short high speed links between them. Airports cost (only) about $10 billion to make. And each could be smaller with probably only 1 runway. https://www.quora.com/How-much-would-it-cost-to-build-an-airport https://www.quora.com/How-much-would-it-cost-to-build-an-air....
- JAFTEM 9y agoI like that idea. The links between each could double as public transportation for all, just include connections with existing metro stations. It would encourage the city to build around each of those nodes: put one in West LA, one DTLA, and one in the Valley, improve the one in Inglewood. The 405 from LAX to West LA and the 10 from West LA to DTLA are among two of the worst stretches in the country. Though, people in for eg. West LA would have fits over the idea of airplanes flying over their sacred lands.
- Balgair 9y agoUmm, Burbank? OC? LA's airspace is already crazy as is. And the metro lines they are trying to put in are just, well, cute. Putting an international airport somewhere in Santa Monica would be silly. It's 20 miles away from LAX as is. Take a look at the air traffic as is here: https://global.adsbexchange.com/VirtualRadar/desktop.html# https://global.adsbexchange.com/VirtualRadar/desktop.html#
- baxtr 9y agoAny infrastructure project. Always. Wherever.
- starpilot 9y agoChina will have nationwide hyperloop before this thing gets built.
- kelnos 9y agoI guess that's one of the "benefits" of an authoritarian government: you just tell people what's going to happen, and they either agree, are ignored, or get fined or jailed.
- starpilot 9y agoIt totally is. Autocracy: gets shit done.
- nullnilvoid 9y agoAnd the people love the bullet train very much. As a matter of fact, the bullet train is making profits. http://www.rediff.com/business/report/pix-beijing-shanghai-bullet-train-worlds-most-profitable-high-speed-rail/20160720.htm http://www.rediff.com/business/report/pix-beijing-shanghai-b...
- Uhhrrr 9y agoWhy are they wasting cycles buying land and dealing with right-of-way and safety issues? They could just buy 100,000 shipping containers for $2M (50,000 each way), stick them together, seal them up, and sink them off the coast.
- product50 9y agoI think the state just needs to gulp the costs here. There are a few large bets which every state should make every decade to make landmark progress. For California, having this bullet train will be it. No matter what happens, California needs to build this infra to help easier transportation and leisure travel for generations to come. The cost equation will seem peanuts in comparison to the benefits offers for multiple decades thereafter. Otherwise, we won't even know where this $64B went.
- vondur 9y agoI’m going to guess the one way price when completed is going to be more than an airline flight.
- jxramos 9y agoI'll place my bets tonight for 2X the fare.
- caseysoftware 9y agoThe only upside will (briefly) be not having to deal with the TSA and showing up ~2 hours before the flight. Unfortunately, the TSA is making an appearance in local metro and train systems more and more, so I expect them to show up pretty quickly. Then we'll have an grossly underestimated project with higher than "expected" costs with high ticket prices and no tangible benefits over the alternative - and likely faster - mode of travel. And odds are, the system upgrades will need to start immediately so the ongoing maintenance will not be significantly cheaper than construction. Yay?
- bsimpson 9y agoThe Transbay Terminal is in a lot more convenient location than SFO. Lyft to-and-from the airport adds $60 to your fare. Also, I don't know what the price model will be. In Italy, for instance, you buy a ticket reflecting the route you want to take and you can get on any train you want. Miss the 4:05? Take the 4:25. I wouldn't be surprised if this was similarly flexible. Most airlines, on the other hand, charge change fees unless you are a frequent flyer.
- azernik 9y ago> Moore said the surge in costs is likely to foreshadow even greater future increases. On the horizon are more difficult segments, such as the long underground passage through the Tehachapi and San Gabriel Mountains and the route into the urban San Francisco Bay Area. ... > In Hill’s presentation to the board, he said intrusion barriers will cost an extra $450 million; land buys, $400 million, delays for not acquiring land, $325 million; satisfying issues raised by localities, $250 million; and relocating wires, pipes and cables used by utilities, $350 million. These issues are all related to surface land acquisition and management (except piping/cabling relocation). Hopefully tunnel boring won't come up with new unexpected problems; they're far enough from built-up areas that there shouldn't be too much underground infrastructure to work around.
- 1024core 9y ago> The repayment of the existing bonds will cost about $18 billion in principal and interest over the next 30 years, money that is coming out of the state highway improvement fund. Great. Not only is this thing a waste of money, it's also sucking the air out of existing projects. Fuck this shit.
- foota 9y agoI'm constantly struck by how much we're willing to spend on military costs but not willing to shell out on infrastructure.
- chii 9y agoIf only an Infrastructure Industrial Complex could be established...
- adventured 9y agoThere are small ones within each major state. They keep costs insanely high for basic maintenance and also keep repair times extremely slow, versus comparables in Europe or Japan. Just compare how well the roads crews do in California versus Germany, it's night and day. California roads are an embarrassment at 4x the cost of German roads.
- mschuster91 9y ago> Just compare how well the roads crews do in California versus Germany, it's night and day. Well as a German I can say that most road workplaces aren't even worked at during the day - you need to be lucky to see a worker there, and heaven forbid working on weekends or during night. In addition it's rare that politicians have the guts to say "okay we close $Autobahn totally for a year instead of having a 2-to-3 years halfway usable Autobahn", even though this mode of work is way more efficient. Something like the 48-hour sinkhole repair in Fukuoka/Japan or the Russians repaving a whole massive street in a single day (https://sploid.gizmodo.com/watch-a-huge-swarm-of-machines-pave-a-road-in-russia-1784417285 https://sploid.gizmodo.com/watch-a-huge-swarm-of-machines-pa...) would be unthinkable in Germany.
- ashayh 9y agoIndeed. I just remembered an example where the Army bought trucks for $50B and scrapped 2/3rds of them: http://csbaonline.org/print/1180 http://csbaonline.org/print/1180 This is peanuts.
- outside1234 9y agoMy objection to the bullet train is that we could get many more people much more effectively to work/home with local transit, which largely doesn't exist, than with this boondoggle out in the central valley.
- ttn 9y agoNever been to California, using motorcycle as main transportation is not a perfect solution there?
- StreamBright 9y agoThis is exactly the same pattern that you can observe in government projects in Eastern Europe that we call corruption here.