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Only 31% of California voters want to keep paying for bullet train

latimes.com

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Re: Only 31% of California voters want to keep paying for bullet train

#41

Post by vvanders »

rayiner wrote: post #32
marcell wrote: post #10

The cost argument is always interesting to me, when you consider it in context. We (in America) recently passed a tax cut that will cost around $150B/year for the next 10 years, and likely more if the temporary parts are made permanent. Even with cost overruns, that's almost enough to pay for 2 California bullet trains PER YEAR for the next decade. And yes, I know California is just 1 state out of 50, but even still,…

The tax cut is at least money back in peoples’ pockets. This is a huge subsidy that’ll benefit a tiny fraction of people who need to routinely travel between LA and SF, and can afford to spend $86 doing so (probably over $100 when it finally opens, its gone up a lot already).

> The tax cut is at least money back in peoples’ pockets.

s/people/corporation

Re: Only 31% of California voters want to keep paying for bullet train

#42

Post by orangecat »

jboles wrote: post #11

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.

If you were given $77 billion to improve California, is this really how you would spend it?

Re: Only 31% of California voters want to keep paying for bullet train

#43

Post by AndrewGaspar »

hadrien01 wrote: post #28
jdavis703 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ask your representatives in parliament to consider implementing less internationally expansive laws or use a VPN.

Ask your newspapers in the U.S. to consider respecting user privacy.

The easiest and cheapest answer is the status-quo, which is ambiguity on whether you're compliant with GDPR, so it's completely logical they would just block access.

Re: Only 31% of California voters want to keep paying for bullet train

#44

Post by bmarquez »

rayiner wrote: post #26

This is the upper middle class robbing poor people. The projected fare would be $86 per ticket, about triple the cost of driving for a family of four. The people who are going to pay that are upper middle class travelers and business travelers. Which would be fine if the project was paying for itself, but it won’t be. It’ll be state subsidies for high income professionals. That money could be doing so much good (scho…

It seems like widening Highway 5 and adding a dedicated carpool lane, along with creating a Greyhound-like public transit route from Northern to Southern California would have been more cost effective.

Re: Only 31% of California voters want to keep paying for bullet train

#45

Post by jhpriestley »

I think this is a very misleading headline. 49 percent support the high speed rail project in this poll, based on a neutrally worded question. The 31% figure comes from a leading question that starts with "The latest estimates for California’s high-speed rail project are that it will cost up to $77 billion dollars and will be finished in 2033. This estimate is nearly twice as much as the original estimated cost."

The full survey is here https://drive.google.com/file/d/1g5uibGxcEuknURkZZvT4Ah4Q9-I...

Re: Only 31% of California voters want to keep paying for bullet train

#46

Post by jerf »

gingernaut wrote: post #22
stcredzero wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect that tech could do a better job at building it.

"Moving fast and breaking things" is not acceptable in infrastructure.

"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.)

Re: Only 31% of California voters want to keep paying for bullet train

#47

Post by ebikelaw »

rayiner wrote: post #26

This is the upper middle class robbing poor people. The projected fare would be $86 per ticket, about triple the cost of driving for a family of four. The people who are going to pay that are upper middle class travelers and business travelers. Which would be fine if the project was paying for itself, but it won’t be. It’ll be state subsidies for high income professionals. That money could be doing so much good (scho…

No, the upper-middle-class robbing the poor has been the history of our highway system, which you can't use without owning a car and paying ~ $0.55/mile to operate it. We have shoveled hundreds of billions of dollars of subsidies down the throat of the automobile culture and we did not get a functioning transportation system from doing so. We got a massively regressive, barely functional system and all of its attendant externalities in the form of health problems for those living near the roads, and end-of-civilization CO2 pollution problems for people living everywhere.

The cost of HSR suddenly sounds so much more reasonable if you frame it in terms of the road budget. HSR's all-in cost for right-of-way, tracks, stations, and trains is about four years worth of California's current road budget.

Re: Only 31% of California voters want to keep paying for bullet train

#48

Post by exclusiv »

vvanders wrote: post #41
rayiner wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The tax cut is at least money back in peoples’ pockets. This is a huge subsidy that’ll benefit a tiny fraction of people who need to routinely travel between LA and SF, and can afford to spend $86 doing so (probably over $100 when it finally opens, its gone up a lot already).

> The tax cut is at least money back in peoples’ pockets. s/people/corporation

It's quite nice for small business too.

Re: Only 31% of California voters want to keep paying for bullet train

#49

Post by scarmig »

rayiner wrote: post #32
marcell wrote: post #10

The cost argument is always interesting to me, when you consider it in context. We (in America) recently passed a tax cut that will cost around $150B/year for the next 10 years, and likely more if the temporary parts are made permanent. Even with cost overruns, that's almost enough to pay for 2 California bullet trains PER YEAR for the next decade. And yes, I know California is just 1 state out of 50, but even still,…

The tax cut is at least money back in peoples’ pockets. This is a huge subsidy that’ll benefit a tiny fraction of people who need to routinely travel between LA and SF, and can afford to spend $86 doing so (probably over $100 when it finally opens, its gone up a lot already).

Eh, this spending puts money into people's pockets just as much as tax cuts would, economically. The government isn't taking a hundred billion dollars and setting it on fire: it uses that money to purchase labor and manufactured goods, the price of which itself comes heavily from labor costs.

The question is whether a high speed train that doesn't offer any appreciable advantages over flying is more economically useful than the combination of investment and consumer spending that equivalent tax cuts would generate.

Another factor is that, as a Californian, I'd rather the federal government take my money and give it to people relatively near to me in my economic network than take my money and give it to oil barons in Texas. Californians don't have a choice between high speed rail money subsidized by federal dollars or healthcare/tax cuts/education/actually intelligent infrastructure choices subsidized by the same federal dollars: it's this or nothing.

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