141–150 of 201 posts
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Getting to the city center, though, is often problematic. You either follow the existing railroad lines, which often have tight curves, or you build your own, which involves ripping out a long path through the already-existing city.
Or you tunnel. Expensive, but effective.
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Very impressive. But in just three minutes, I thought of an even better plan: put a $10M wormhole between LA and SF and have near instant travel. Wormholes don’t quite exist yet, but they seem close at hand.
There was a plane featured on HN this week with those exact specs.
Maybe it was a bad idea to have everyone with a brain cram into med-school, law-school or b-school. There are other things that need doing.
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> The 1976 BART cost $10B in today's dollars to construct. If you were alive in 1976 would you have said it was a boondoggle and the project should have been killed? And what would BART cost today to build? $50 billion? Would it be worthwhile at that price? The problem is that costs for public infrastructure are ballooning much faster than inflation. That puts more pressure on public infrastructure projects to produc…
At $50B, yes. BART will exist in some form for at least a century. It is so hard to understand how valuable it is to make something that so many people use every day for that long but it is really valuable.
$3 I’ll believe. Which is why the constant factors kill us relative to Europe. It costs us 3-7x to build the same infrastructure as Europe. That pushes the required value per ride that needs to be generated to unrealistic levels.
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Ah, does China go through the courts for every segment, taking months or years (including determining fair value for compensation)? Dodger Stadium was built by razing a poor but cultural neighborhood and it is now considered to have been unethically done. But it was fast...
> Ah, does China go through the courts for every segment, taking months or years (including determining fair value for compensation)? Which sounds like a very inefficient court system to me.
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> Ah, does China go through the courts for every segment, taking months or years (including determining fair value for compensation)? Which sounds like a very inefficient court system to me.
I'm not sure I want speedy government takeover of land.
While this article finds an issue with the way the Tejon Pass route was eliminated in favor of the Tehachapi Pass route, Tejon Pass route would skip a station in Lancaster/Palmdale, which would be a mistake. As the article acknowledges, these are rapidly growing exurbs that are refuge from the exorbitant land prices in the LA Basin. There is existing commuter rail service between there and Downtown LA, but a HSR is a…
What the heck is the train line doing near Fresno? Why is it not following I-5 and making zero stops in between the South Bay and LA?
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Uber, Google Search Engine, Facebook, etc.
None of them have done anything on this scale, have they? They’re valuable because they don’t make investments like this. Their work is on a long lever so they have great margins over massive volume.
While this article finds an issue with the way the Tejon Pass route was eliminated in favor of the Tehachapi Pass route, Tejon Pass route would skip a station in Lancaster/Palmdale, which would be a mistake. As the article acknowledges, these are rapidly growing exurbs that are refuge from the exorbitant land prices in the LA Basin. There is existing commuter rail service between there and Downtown LA, but a HSR is a…
What the heck is the train line doing near Fresno? Why is it not following I-5 and making zero stops in between the South Bay and LA?
The same thing happened in my country. Infrastructure like this always ends up about 5 times more expensive than originally thought. It doesn't really matter because there is always more money. Everyone just forgets about it and moves on. The US however is rapidly approaching a 1 trillion deficit. And if it wants to challenge China in manufacturing they need to rebuild the entire railroad system.
And if it wants to challenge China in manufacturing they need to rebuild the entire railroad system. Can you explain this point? The USA has a great cargo rail system that is efficient and integrated with other transportation systems.
Forty years of planned and extensive investment in infrastructure is how China lifted itself out of its misery. There was a time when the US did the same but something happened along the way.