As someone who voted for the the $10B bond, and would love to see HSR, all I have to say is: Good. We have to admit that CalHSR is a failure, and building a tr

As someone who voted for the the $10B bond, and would love to see HSR, all I have to say is: Good. We have to admit that CalHSR is a failure, and building a train between Bakersfield and Merced is stupid. The United States has some systematic problems when it comes to infrastructure. We see it at both the micro and macro level. At the micro level, it takes four guys more than a month to fix an escalator at a BART station. Months to paint lanes on a street in San Jose. At the macro level, $13B becomes $98B. CityLab ran a story about why NYC stopped building subways.[0] In it, it plotted the cost subway construction cost per mile at different times in constant 2017 dollars. First line cost $125M/mile in 1904. In 1944 it went up to <$500M, and even in 1988, it was just above $500M. Not bad for 44 years. Then cost go exponential in 2017 and 2019, ending at $4000M/mile! This is stupid. Another article (which I have sadly lost) compared the cost of construction in the US to France. I think they compared a Boston subway line to a Parisian one. The Boston one costs twice as much, and requires twice as many people for “safety”. I’m sorry, but this is grift. Then of course there’s all the environmental and neighborhood reviews that cost more, and stymie everything. If we want to make any progress, I’m thinking we’re going to just have to bust all of this up. Cut the red tape, and go with closed price bids. Hell, use foreign contractors. The French are apparently half the cost, faster, and high quality. Just hire them and be done with it. [0] http://getpocket.com/explore/item/why-new-york-city-stopped-building-subways http://getpocket.com/explore/item/why-new-york-city-stopped-...