Duffy wrote:
vitus979 wrote:
That's fair.
Whatcha think about the charge that the changes were deliberately aimed at blue states?
I think that’s true in a sense. It exposes more painfully how high the taxes are in these places and it also makes it so the fed isnt subsidizing the cost of these taxes anymore.
My personal taxes will probably go up over all, btw. That being said there
needs to pressure on this state (CA) to get it together. Our state leaders are completely out of control.
Completely.
Think about this, we have spent at least $3.5 billion on our “high speed” rail project so far and not one single inch of high speed rail track has been laid down.
Where’s all that money going?
And, seriously, we’re supposedly going to build high speed rail. Rail. Trains.
By the time it gets done (if ever) we will have self driving cars. And democrats call themselves “progressive”.
Fucking scam.
What the hell does the operational design of the car have to do w/ roadway system capacity and how many vehicles are saturating it? Whether the occupant of the car is driving it or not is entirely beside the point of trying to move more people outside of the highway network to lessen traffic gridlock.
$3.5B does seem like an awful lot so I wouldn't attempt to defend that number specifically, only you can't just start laying track down w/o technical studies on siting feasibility, corridor safety, seismic resilience, right-of-way acquisition, etc, etc. No idea the scope and duration so I can't say what a reasonable amount ought to be, only that a shit-ton of unseen prep work has to go into a project of that magnitude so I wouldn't expect it to be cheap.
We've had similar grumbling for a massive freeway bridge replacement project which the state/feds spent something like $300M to study, and then one of the key partners didn't like the answers they were getting and walked away from the table ~ so all the feasibility & design analysis is just sitting on the shelf for the foreseeable future and the existing bridge continues to decay and fall short of all its traffic performance metrics. People will say all that money was wasted (which in a sense is true, but only if you knew in advance the project was never intended to get built) but they haven't a clue what's involved in planning not just the structural design and construction itself but all the logistics around managing the project site before, during, & after. I can only imagine something attempting to link SF-LA would be vastly more.