> The cost of upgrading infrastructure in a busy city is enormously expensive. San Francisco is on a peninsula with no room at all to expand outward. The only solution is to build up and that’s a real problem in an area prone to earthquakes.
People always ignore this fact. Infrastructure isn’t free. When all is said and done the Central Subway extension will likely have cost over $2bn for 1.7 miles of subway. [1] The new transit center cost $2.2bn [2]. Rebuilding 1/2 of the bay bridge cost $6.5bn. [3]
Consider that money for all of this is artificially restricted by Prop 13, and by California being a net-giver state, paying about $40bn per year more to the fed than we receive back, effectively being a piggy bank for poorer states.
> Plus there are a lot of people that like the character of their neighbourhood and don’t want to live in an apartment building.
Many commenters with a lot of hatred for San Francisco’s unique brand of dirext democracy are sadly OK with overruling the expressed will of the people not to turn our home into New York just so some tech billionaires can sell more banner ads.
Well that's just inefficiency or graft. The rest of the world is able to achieve far more for far less cost.
> Many commenters with a lot of hatred for San Francisco’s unique brand of dirext democracy are sadly OK with overruling the expressed will of the people not to turn our home into New York just so some tech billionaires can sell more banner ads.
Who's our? Generally voters tend to be older, wealthier and landowners. The large pile of younger, less wealthy, more transient renters isn't represented well. I don't think the outcome means the system works.
Furthermore, it’s not even a big city problem. California High Speed Rail has been an immensely expensive project so far, an order of magnitude more than comparable systems, and the only segment built is in Central California, not the expensive coasts.
> Well that's just inefficiency or graft. The rest of the world is able to achieve far more for far less cost.
Citation?
> Who's our? Generally voters tend to be older, wealthier and landowners. The large pile of younger, less wealthy, more transient renters isn't represented well. I don't think the outcome means the system works.
That’s how democracy works. If you don’t vote, you don’t have a voice.
All costs below are in $USD nominal per mile of fully-underground subway system.
NYC subway extension, east side: $3.7B per mile.
SF Central subway: $928M per mile.
Tokyo: $400M
Beijing: $240M
Berlin: $327M
Naples: $194M
Milan: $175M
This is backed up by a Citylab analysis:
Alon Levy at Citylab shows approximate range of underground rail construction costs in continental Europe and Japan is between $100 million per mile and $1 billion. Most subway lines cluster in the range of $200 million to $500 million per mile.
The US has a range of subway construction costs of $600 million to $2.6 billion per mile. The US median price cluster is $800 million to $1 billion per mile.
And of course plotted in Tableau [5].
> That’s how democracy works. If you don’t vote, you don’t have a voice.
People always ignore this fact. Infrastructure isn’t free. When all is said and done the Central Subway extension will likely have cost over $2bn for 1.7 miles of subway. [1] The new transit center cost $2.2bn [2]. Rebuilding 1/2 of the bay bridge cost $6.5bn. [3]
Consider that money for all of this is artificially restricted by Prop 13, and by California being a net-giver state, paying about $40bn per year more to the fed than we receive back, effectively being a piggy bank for poorer states.
> Plus there are a lot of people that like the character of their neighbourhood and don’t want to live in an apartment building.
Many commenters with a lot of hatred for San Francisco’s unique brand of dirext democracy are sadly OK with overruling the expressed will of the people not to turn our home into New York just so some tech billionaires can sell more banner ads.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Subway
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transbay_Transit_Center
3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastern_span_replacement_of_th...