8 ms·
Killing it would be short-sighted. If it gets killed, there would probably never be the opportunity to build it ever again. California is flush with tech money,
by jboles 8y ago
Killing it would be short-sighted. If it gets killed, there would probably never be the opportunity to build it ever again. California is flush with tech money, put some of it to good use.
- stcredzero 8y agoI suspect that tech could do a better job at building it.
- toomuchtodo 8y agoI would argue that there's value in collaboration between innovators and an experienced group of civil engineering contractors operating under an accountable and transparent consortium arrangement. Less Boston's "Big Dig" [1], more Hallandsås tunnel [2]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Dig#Problems https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Dig#Problems [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hallands%C3%A5s_Tunnel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hallands%C3%A5s_Tunnel
- gingernaut 8y ago"Moving fast and breaking things" is not acceptable in infrastructure.
- jerf 8y ago"Moving slow and never breaking ground" isn't really either. (Not literally true. Nominally, ground has been broken on the project. But it's a symbolic act without much referent in the real world so far.)
- gascan 8y agoI can't wait for a public beta on a bullet train.
- Agustus 8y agoKilling it would be far sighted. Technology is improving transportation methods, we have buses and planes that can do the same thing as this train at much cheaper rates and without tax dollars to construct or maintain.
- privong 8y ago> we have buses and planes that can do the same thing as this train[...]without tax dollars to construct or maintain. Tax dollars pay for road construction and maintenance. Tax dollars also subsidize airport construction and operation.
- ebikelaw 8y agoThere is no bus or plane that can do anything like what HSR can do. That's the entire point of the project. It will triple the capacity of our north-south transportation system at a fraction of the cost of equivalent airport capacity. This is something that people don't understand when they haven't travelled enough to experience good rail systems. Rail has massive capacity, 100k people per hour per track direction. That's 500 lanes of theoretical freeway capacity, or 1000 lanes under realistic operating conditions, and it's more than the total capacity between all Bay Area and all L.A.-area airports, even if you operated that route solely with widebody jets, which we don't.
- DrScump 8y ago100k people per hour per track direction Your source for this statistic?
- mmt 8y agoI don't have any primary sources offhand, but the closest thing I last looked at was https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light_rail https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light_rail which has a number of 25k/h for light rail (pretty low speed, single-deck, presumably short trains). I'd say 4x that amount for a full-sized HSR train is credible. It's just that that's a maximum. I don't believe that ridership will ever be high enough to approach that number, unless air travel is outlawed.
- partycoder 8y agoA lot of the money in tech is as liquid as Monopoly currency.
- orangecat 8y agoIf you were given $77 billion to improve California, is this really how you would spend it?
- curtis 8y agoI'd think that for half that much money you could greatly upgrade BART and more importantly extend it into the central valley.