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There's a lot of hand-waving and unrealistic beliefs in this piece with regard to costs. For example: " O’Toole looks at the most expensive few lines possible
by djrogers 5y ago
There's a lot of hand-waving and unrealistic beliefs in this piece with regard to costs. For example:
"
O’Toole looks at the most expensive few lines possible:
Britain’s 345‐ mile London–Scotland HS2 high‐ speed rail line was originally projected to cost £32.7 billion (about $123 million per mile) and is currently expected to cost £106 billion ($400 million per mile).
International comparisons of high-speed rail costs exist, and Britain’s costs are by far the worst.
"
It looks as if California will exceed that cost by quite a bit for it's equivalent length HSR project, if and when it's ever completed.
And how does this square with the current reality of the California project costs (estimated to be over $100M, even though it's over a decade for completion, and the budget has already grown >2.5x)
"
the official Obama-era crayon, at 20,000 km, would be $500 billion at tunnel-free European costs, or maybe $600 billion with 5% tunneling
"
So we're gonna do the rest of the 19,400 km for only $500bn, when the most recent 600km is costing $100bn?
- hardtke 5y agoA good friend of mine works for a large construction firm that has bid on some of the California high speed rail jobs. He said that for much of the work (particularly moving existing utility infrastructure) there are no firms bidding, or at most one firm. They therefore know they can jack up the price to 2-3X normal costs. The work needs to happen in places where there are literally no construction workers, and crews don't want to go to where the work needs to be done since there is other work close to their house.
- wolverine876 5y agoWhere I live, which has a large African-American population, construction workers that I see are overwhelmingly white and many of the unions are notoriously racist (and I don't know about the others). Just notice the people working those jobs around you. How much is that racism costing the US economically? Of course it costs the targets of racism the most: I don't have high-speed rail; they don't have jobs, health care, etc.
- coredog64 5y agoBroad generalization: Unions that existed when segregation was still a thing generally have a less diverse membership than newer unions. I’ve mentioned it before here, but this historical holdover is one reason why US unions are dysfunctional relative to those in other countries.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]