Imagine what great and useful things could be done with 105 BILLION dollars. Homelessness, Traffic in urban centers (LA, SF, etc.), healthcare...
But, it’s in a state I rarely visit, and I’d probably never even ride it more than a couple times. If you think the money is better spent adding half a dozen more lanes to 405, I won’t argue. No matter what, I’ll be living somewhere that doesn’t require me to waste my life sitting in a car, and that will probably never be somewhere in California, train or no train.
$105 billion is about the size of California's current (and growing) surplus. Or about a fifth of how much California spent in 2021 ($512.8 billion). Yes it could be used to do more important things in the immediate sense but projects like these pay off tenfold in the long term
Yes, he's complaining about the abject failure of trains (and I have too). The project won't pay off if the same corruption that cost $105 billions results in an impractical project and that's the common result.
The US can't create an alternative to fossil fuels unless it solves it's inability to create public transit projects problem.
And if that money is not invested in trains, they only other suggestion practically speaking is, lets make highways bigger.
So yeah, I agree, you the US needs to get better at public infrastructure projects, but doing so while also working on trains, is better then doing so and building insane Texas highway cloverleaf interchanges.
If a nation pays a lot for a given infrastructure project because the nation is developing the means to produce it, then that nation would likely be able to produce the thing better later. Maybe that's Japan.
If a nation pays a lot for a given infrastructure project because corrupt interests have positioned themselves to soak up a lion's share of the money, there's no reason to think that won't happen the next time. That's what happens in the US. Further, thing about the US is that failed public transit project have become normal and accepted. Something is needed to change this but uncritically throwing money at them obviously won't be it.
Citation needed. “People really like it” doesn’t mean it paid off.
What California really needs is adding more lanes to fix traffic.
There are way to better spend money, but fixing traffic is literally the last thing anybody should try to do. Unless fixing traffic means public transport and bike infrastructure.
From a European perspective American cities already look like a bunch of highways with to occasional development of identical looking single family homes sitting between the highways. The idea that putting down even more road infrastructure is gone improve anything is bonkers.
The amount of road, water pipe and other utilizes the city has to support per citizen has exploded to an absurd degree and is a big reason why most US towns can't maintain their infrastructure. Actually utilizing existing infrastructure in a better way would be far more useful building new one.
Every high speed rail in history has come in way over budget
The biggest problem with CAHSR though is that the rich suburban fucks (especially on the SF peninsula) are trying to kill HSR with death from a thousand paper cuts^W^W lawsuits. That's how you get things like cities (coughathertoncoughbelmontcough) wanting underground sections built on someone else's dime. They'll cite things like noise while ignoring that a.) electric trains are quieter than diesels and b.) grade separation eliminates the need to sound the horn.
It's a really nasty self-fulfilling prophecy.
Other European countries have similar costs. California is the outlier.
Uhh... isn't this is a good reason to vote against them?