I have a question to all the naysayers and praisers of the future autonomous car: have any of you ever been on a high speed rail link in europe? Assuming everything else equal, they're just a far superior way to travel, where you can walk around, drink coffee, work in a relatively quiet and steady environment and all of that going 300 km/h.<p>That said, there are obvious questions why the project is far more expensive than a comparable one in Europe, but that is a completely separate question.
The sixty-billion-dollar bullet train they’re proposing in California would be the slowest bullet train in the world at the highest cost per mile,” Musk said. “They’re going for records in all the wrong ways.” California’s high-speed rail is meant to allow people to go from Los Angeles to San Francisco in about two and a half hours upon its completion in—wait for it—2029. It takes about an hour to fly between the cities today and five hours to drive, placing the train right in the zone of mediocrity, which particularly gnawed at Musk. He insisted the Hyperloop would cost about $6 billion to $10 billion, go faster than a plane, and let people drive their cars onto a pod and drive out into a new city.<p>From Ashlee Vance Book on Elon Musk
Politically, from my own personal experience, most infrastructure projects are sold to the public with a much lower price tag than what they know to be the actual costs, because people are incredibly price sensitive when approving important infrastructure projects.<p>What we need is a true accounting of the cost of things, and the political willingness to do them. This way we don't have to worry about politicians 'underbidding' their projects just to get enough popular support. It becomes a rigged game when that happens, where the public approves projects that everyone on the project side knows will costs several times that early estimate.<p>If we want the bridges and the tunnels and the shared transportation, sanitation, etc. We need to understand that these projects cost money, and we need to be able to have t true accounting of them, not one that is politically convenient.<p>Otherwise, we'll just have this, with 2x and 3x being common run ups, ad infinitum.<p>Good numbers, on all projects, would help us better allocate our future dollars. Big numbers shouldn't kill meaningful and worthwhile projects. Bad ideas should.<p>The Swiss seem to be able to do it.<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gotthard_Base_Tunnel" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gotthard_Base_Tunnel</a><p>On time and on budget.
The tunnels under the San Gabriel Mountains is an <i>optional</i> alignment that is being <i>studied</i> by the CHSRA at the request of the residents who live in affected areas.<p>It may indeed not be cost-effective, at which point one would assume the CHSRA will go with a different alignment. (The others of which have been studied for longer. This tunnel alignment is a new option they wanted to study before finalizing the route for this stage.)
From the submission yesterday: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10448702" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10448702</a><p>America seems to be unfixable:<p>"The 11-mile East Side Access tunnel in New York City, for example, is 14 years behind schedule, and the tab has grown from $4.3 billion to $10.8 billion. Boston's 3.5-mile Big Dig was finished in 2007 — nine years behind schedule and at nearly triple the estimated cost."
The $68 billion figure is actually an overestimate. It's not in 2015 dollars; rather, it's adjusted for hypothetical future inflation. So if a tunnel is planned for 2025, that tunnel is priced in inflated 2025 dollars (using whatever made-up number for future inflation), not 2015 dollars.
Not surprised. But not hugely important in the scheme of things. The fact that the project exists and is being worked on seems a win to me given public transit history in the USA.
Autonomous cars are about to make this entire project redundant. It should be canceled, or maybe turned into a new kind of highway designed for 100% autonomous cars.<p>I'd feel much safer in a private car pod going 40 mph than a manually operated car going 80 mph. And I'd feel more comfortable in a private car pod than a busy public train.
For $68 billion, you could fly everybody in San Francisco to Los Angeles, and everybody in Los Angeles to San Francisco, and back again, about forty times. And that's <i>before</i> it starts going over budget.<p>But of course, the line doesn't go from Los Angeles to San Francisco. It goes from Burbank to Merced, on the good-governance principle that if you build something completely freaking useless, then somebody might find another hundred billion dollars to turn it into something useful at some point in the indeterminate future.