“We used to build things”. That is a common refrain from tech billionaires on Twitter. Patrick Collison, co-founder of Stripe, dedicates a whole page on his website to celebrating things that were built quickly. The webpage is worth looking at, it shares some pretty incredible examples. And compares it to a new bus lane built in San Francisco, proposed in 2001 and opened in 2022 at a cost of $346 million. It definitely takes longer and costs more to build things that it used to.
This article takes a look at California’s high speed rail project, that will certainly not be making it on to Patrick Collison’s list. The project was first approved by California voters in 2008, a bullet train to connect Los Angeles and San Francisco costing $33 billion and completed by 2020.
Fourteen years later, two after the project was meant to be completed, and construction is now underway on part of a “starter” line connecting a few cities in the middle of California. This starter line is slated to be complete by 2030. Few expect it to make that goal.
And cost estimates have blown out. From the original $33 billion, the California High-Speed Rail Authority now estimate $113 billion. And some engineers have told the Times that at the current pace of work, the rail line won’t be finished this century.
This article is a really comprehensive look at everything wrong with how America builds infrastructure. In particular, the politics and the horse-trading that added billions of dollars of cost and increased the length of the line to keep local politicians and donors happy.
This is an excerpt from our Thought Starters email. Once a week we send you 5 interesting articles that have caught our attention, to get you thinking. No spam, we guarantee.