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That won’t fix the cost of rail in America, which is the main reason America doesn’t have better rail. Look at California high speed rail or light rail in Seatt

That won’t fix the cost of rail in America, which is the main reason America doesn’t have better rail. Look at California high speed rail or light rail in Seattle. They have insane costs per mile, are still very over budget, falling behind schedule, and basically are forever grifts. The availability of parking is unrelated to these issues. It comes back to mismanagement and corruption.

n8cpdx 6mo ago
Can you explain how Seattle is an example? They’re opening new lines, Link is packed often, seems like a well used reliable service, but I only visit once or twice a year.
- SilverElfin 6mo ago
  It’s been a while since I read about their system but as I recall, across the entire system something like 100 billion is the total cost. But that’s only for like 75 ish miles. So it’s very expensive. I recently saw a news article saying they’re 30 billion short per their projections and are now cutting lines out of the plan that voters expected when they supported levies, and some surrounding cities where residents have each paid hundreds or more a year for the rail to come to them, now may not get them at all. Even though they’ve been paying into it for a decade or two. Which to me is a form of theft.
  - barchar 6mo ago
    The central sections of link were expensive because they're built through the center of the earth with really huge stations, some of this is to avoid impacting cars but much is just to get elevation changes. The connection over lake Washington required a lot of money and work too, as it's a floating bridge. The less complex sections were mostly on-par with other us cities.
jltsiren 6mo ago
The cost of passenger rail is high in America, because America doesn't build enough rail. If you try building a single megaproject, nobody knows what they are doing, everything is inefficient, and mistakes will be made. But you learn by doing. If the individual projects are small enough that there are always multiple projects in various stages, you develop and maintain expertise. Then you can build things cost-effectively and finish the projects in time.
- WorkerBee28474 6mo ago
  > The cost of passenger rail is high in America, because America doesn't build enough rail. The cost of passenger rail is high in America because America has 11% of the population (read: customer) density of Japan. (For cities, NYC has 25% lower population density than Tokyo.)
  - wahern 6mo ago
    Dividing population by total land area is a horribly misleading way to understand density. There are alternatives, like population-weighted density, that give you a better picture: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3119965 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3119965 Here's a blog post where somebody re-invented the concept and analyzed density in Europe: https://theconversation.com/think-your-country-is-crowded-these-maps-reveal-the-truth-about-population-density-across-europe-90345 https://theconversation.com/think-your-country-is-crowded-th... The population-weighted density of the US is roughly similar to continental Europe.
  - mitthrowaway2 6mo ago
    There's this one neat trick where you only build the rail where the people go!
- tokioyoyo 6mo ago
  I think it's not feasible in America because of the culture. If you have a good chunk of people that are hell-bent against sharing space with others for one reason or another (some are legitimate reasons!), you're already discarding a significant chunk of passengers. Another hot take is... if you want any of the infrastructure to be mass-used, you have to make it better than the alternatives, so people with the means would use it as well. Like your subway should be faster than the cars, so even affluent people would take it. Your trains should be faster than door-to-door flight time, so people would take that as well. Unfortunately that makes a lot of things more complicated in communities with high income disparity.
yongjik 6mo ago
At the same time, the same government, mysteriously, has no problem building a vast network of roads reaching everywhere and spanning the whole country. If the US government neglects a section of highway until a city becomes unreachable by roads, there will be riots. The same city losing a train service? Totally expected, trains are supposed to suck. The sorry state of American public transport is a self-fulfilling prophecy: everybody knows that public transportation sucks, and therefore nothing is done to improve it, because it's a waste of resource.
- scythe 6mo ago
  >the same government, mysteriously, has no problem building a vast network of roads reaching everywhere and spanning the whole country. Our road-building has slowed dramatically since the 1980s. The Interstate Highway network would be much more expensive and slow to build today. >If the US government neglects a section of highway until a city becomes unreachable by roads, there will be riots. Consider John's Island, South Carolina. The highway that was supposed to go there has been delayed for 33 years. Access to the island/town is through two two-lane roads that get backed up to a standstill every night. There's a running "joke" about how everyone is going to die if there's a major hurricane.
  - throwaway2037 6mo ago
    > Consider John's Island, South Carolina. The highway that was supposed to go there has been delayed for 33 years. I Googled about this issue. It looks like it is multi-factor: legal battles, lack of funding, and significant conflict over growth management vs. environmental concerns. In summary: Money and NIMBYism.
wsatb 6mo ago
That’s maybe the reason today to not build more but not the reason it is bad. America ignored rail for decades in favor of highway systems and now the cost is almost always considered infeasible. We will redo our roads every 5-10 years though. If it was invested in 50 years ago or more we would be in a different place for sure.
kj4211cash 6mo ago
The per mile costs are definitely high in America, for a lot of reasons, often related to laws and policies, but that's not really the issue. At the end of 2025, nearly 20 years since California voters passed Prop 1A, we have spent under $15 Billion on California High Speed Rail. As a point of contrast, the cost of 2025's tax cut extensions is estimated to be $4 Trillion. The fact is that we don't have quality intercity passenger rail in this country because politicians aren't willing to support it and fund it as reasonable levels. Seattle light rail is an interesting example because politicians there are willing to support it and so ... we are building it, despite the relatively high per mile costs. LA Metro is interesting right because the voters passed sales taxes that funded various light rail projects. So LA is building better rail. But the political process means that every district supervisor gets their own rail project and so we have light rail to Pomona but are struggling to get a subway down Wilshire where it's obviously more needed. Anyways, all this is to say, politics is a big part of the reason why we don't have better rail in America. And blaming "grift" is a right-wing political talking point that probably doesn't help.
- junofan 6mo ago
  > political process means that every district supervisor gets their own rail project This is part of what people mean by “grift.” Anyway, I’m not right wing. I just want cheap rail done competently. That’s not “not the issue.” As a voter, that is very much an issue for me.
- wallst07 6mo ago
  California is about the size of Japan with the same GDP. They could pass their own funded project for public transportation. It's a problem with the entire US needs to support it, that is politics 101.
  - throwaway2037 6mo ago
    > California is about the size of Japan with the same GDP. On the surface, this is true, but it ignores taxation structure when comparing a federal state to a sovereign nation. It would be very hard to get state-level income tax rates above 15% in the US. That cannot compete against federal/national tax rates that normally approach 40% in US and Japan. In any nation, the vast majority of large mass transit project construction costs are paid for by the central/national gov't. I would characterise your comparison is disingenuous. > They could pass their own funded project for public transportation. They could not reasonably 100% self-fund large mass transit projects. They need federal dollars, a lot of them, and it is very competitive to get them. As an example, look at how long it has taken to raise necessary funds to build the Silicon Valley BART extension. There is tremendous support from the public for this project, but it takes a long time to raise necessary local funds. In parallel, they need to "win" federal support for the lion's share of construction costs.

n8cpdx 6mo ago

Can you explain how Seattle is an example? They’re opening new lines, Link is packed often, seems like a well used reliable service, but I only visit once or twice a year.

SilverElfin 6mo ago
It’s been a while since I read about their system but as I recall, across the entire system something like 100 billion is the total cost. But that’s only for like 75 ish miles. So it’s very expensive. I recently saw a news article saying they’re 30 billion short per their projections and are now cutting lines out of the plan that voters expected when they supported levies, and some surrounding cities where residents have each paid hundreds or more a year for the rail to come to them, now may not get them at all. Even though they’ve been paying into it for a decade or two. Which to me is a form of theft.
- barchar 6mo ago
  The central sections of link were expensive because they're built through the center of the earth with really huge stations, some of this is to avoid impacting cars but much is just to get elevation changes. The connection over lake Washington required a lot of money and work too, as it's a floating bridge. The less complex sections were mostly on-par with other us cities.

jltsiren 6mo ago

The cost of passenger rail is high in America, because America doesn't build enough rail. If you try building a single megaproject, nobody knows what they are doing, everything is inefficient, and mistakes will be made. But you learn by doing. If the individual projects are small enough that there are always multiple projects in various stages, you develop and maintain expertise. Then you can build things cost-effectively and finish the projects in time.

WorkerBee28474 6mo ago
> The cost of passenger rail is high in America, because America doesn't build enough rail. The cost of passenger rail is high in America because America has 11% of the population (read: customer) density of Japan. (For cities, NYC has 25% lower population density than Tokyo.)
- wahern 6mo ago
  Dividing population by total land area is a horribly misleading way to understand density. There are alternatives, like population-weighted density, that give you a better picture: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3119965 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3119965 Here's a blog post where somebody re-invented the concept and analyzed density in Europe: https://theconversation.com/think-your-country-is-crowded-these-maps-reveal-the-truth-about-population-density-across-europe-90345 https://theconversation.com/think-your-country-is-crowded-th... The population-weighted density of the US is roughly similar to continental Europe.
- mitthrowaway2 6mo ago
  There's this one neat trick where you only build the rail where the people go!
tokioyoyo 6mo ago
I think it's not feasible in America because of the culture. If you have a good chunk of people that are hell-bent against sharing space with others for one reason or another (some are legitimate reasons!), you're already discarding a significant chunk of passengers. Another hot take is... if you want any of the infrastructure to be mass-used, you have to make it better than the alternatives, so people with the means would use it as well. Like your subway should be faster than the cars, so even affluent people would take it. Your trains should be faster than door-to-door flight time, so people would take that as well. Unfortunately that makes a lot of things more complicated in communities with high income disparity.

yongjik 6mo ago

At the same time, the same government, mysteriously, has no problem building a vast network of roads reaching everywhere and spanning the whole country. If the US government neglects a section of highway until a city becomes unreachable by roads, there will be riots. The same city losing a train service? Totally expected, trains are supposed to suck. The sorry state of American public transport is a self-fulfilling prophecy: everybody knows that public transportation sucks, and therefore nothing is done to improve it, because it's a waste of resource.

scythe 6mo ago
>the same government, mysteriously, has no problem building a vast network of roads reaching everywhere and spanning the whole country. Our road-building has slowed dramatically since the 1980s. The Interstate Highway network would be much more expensive and slow to build today. >If the US government neglects a section of highway until a city becomes unreachable by roads, there will be riots. Consider John's Island, South Carolina. The highway that was supposed to go there has been delayed for 33 years. Access to the island/town is through two two-lane roads that get backed up to a standstill every night. There's a running "joke" about how everyone is going to die if there's a major hurricane.
- throwaway2037 6mo ago
  > Consider John's Island, South Carolina. The highway that was supposed to go there has been delayed for 33 years. I Googled about this issue. It looks like it is multi-factor: legal battles, lack of funding, and significant conflict over growth management vs. environmental concerns. In summary: Money and NIMBYism.

wsatb 6mo ago

That’s maybe the reason today to not build more but not the reason it is bad. America ignored rail for decades in favor of highway systems and now the cost is almost always considered infeasible. We will redo our roads every 5-10 years though. If it was invested in 50 years ago or more we would be in a different place for sure.

kj4211cash 6mo ago

The per mile costs are definitely high in America, for a lot of reasons, often related to laws and policies, but that's not really the issue. At the end of 2025, nearly 20 years since California voters passed Prop 1A, we have spent under $15 Billion on California High Speed Rail. As a point of contrast, the cost of 2025's tax cut extensions is estimated to be $4 Trillion. The fact is that we don't have quality intercity passenger rail in this country because politicians aren't willing to support it and fund it as reasonable levels. Seattle light rail is an interesting example because politicians there are willing to support it and so ... we are building it, despite the relatively high per mile costs. LA Metro is interesting right because the voters passed sales taxes that funded various light rail projects. So LA is building better rail. But the political process means that every district supervisor gets their own rail project and so we have light rail to Pomona but are struggling to get a subway down Wilshire where it's obviously more needed. Anyways, all this is to say, politics is a big part of the reason why we don't have better rail in America. And blaming "grift" is a right-wing political talking point that probably doesn't help.

junofan 6mo ago
> political process means that every district supervisor gets their own rail project This is part of what people mean by “grift.” Anyway, I’m not right wing. I just want cheap rail done competently. That’s not “not the issue.” As a voter, that is very much an issue for me.
wallst07 6mo ago
California is about the size of Japan with the same GDP. They could pass their own funded project for public transportation. It's a problem with the entire US needs to support it, that is politics 101.
- throwaway2037 6mo ago
  > California is about the size of Japan with the same GDP. On the surface, this is true, but it ignores taxation structure when comparing a federal state to a sovereign nation. It would be very hard to get state-level income tax rates above 15% in the US. That cannot compete against federal/national tax rates that normally approach 40% in US and Japan. In any nation, the vast majority of large mass transit project construction costs are paid for by the central/national gov't. I would characterise your comparison is disingenuous. > They could pass their own funded project for public transportation. They could not reasonably 100% self-fund large mass transit projects. They need federal dollars, a lot of them, and it is very competitive to get them. As an example, look at how long it has taken to raise necessary funds to build the Silicon Valley BART extension. There is tremendous support from the public for this project, but it takes a long time to raise necessary local funds. In parallel, they need to "win" federal support for the lion's share of construction costs.