One of my best friend did the first LAUPT run through study in 1996, it called for up to 8 total run through tracks. The time savings to travelers and operating costs paid for the around (IIRC?) six hundred million dollar many time over for a 100 year lifespan used as the cost benefit horizon.

Later based on the six track configuration, I worked with a foreign outfit who built had built a number of investor financed public private projects like HSR,toll roads, and tunnels in Europe. That was around 2004, and they were ready to finance a "lease back' finance, design, build run through porject based on a lease back based upon only half of the net operating savigns to operator that the project would generate, with the travel time savings to the then estimated 100,000 daily riders that it could accomodate thrown in for "free"...

This firm was also interested in building the 710 tunnel under South Pasadena. They looked at the high desert corridor from Victorville to I-5 at the Grapevine. And, they even an extension of the 118 under Saugus Mountain from the 210 to the 14, in a toll tunnel with a leased lower level for the HSR connection They proposed and we analyzed all of those project and the run-through at LAUPT, as projects which could be profitably built with investor financing, based on expected toll revenues, on a fifty year private/public franchise agreements, with the projects reverting to the "gubmint" (aka "we the people") at the end of the franchise concessions.

Unfortunately, we don't know how to steal for politicians and contractors in CA without the "change order" racket (remember that was back before the CAHSRA showed us how to steal using the "change orders" combined with the "gold plated' design racket to increase the amount of "waste, fraud, and abuse"...).

Therefore, the thought that private firms taking the risk and building infrastructure for a firm fixed price, using private investor funding, without the typical change order racket, with the unlimited cost overruns, approved by politicians, and the hundreds of additional tickets to the political fundraisers that would be sold, was unthinkable to our State Legislature... Heresy BOB2, letting the "evil" capitalist's build and profit from something like that...

MTA has turned into a giant contract steering racket, and incorporated the "gold plated" design practices, with outrageous 1.5 billion dollar people movers to sports stadiums, at Oahu LRT costs per mile... MTA is mismanaged and cannot control costs or manage projects efficiently. MTA cannot even run the projects they've built properly these days. Of course, part of Union Station run-through debacle is the failure and unwillingness to provide the promised funding, since they've spent it all on the gold plated fiasco from Chowchilla to Wasco on cost overruns.

As to the increase to 2 billion for four tracks, instead of the $950 million estimate of 2020, reflects some real inflation, and a lot of "greedflation" by wired contractors who don't really have to compete as hard, in a system that takes political contributions from our "gubmmint" contractors... And now, down to a two track runthrough configuration, two thirds of the operating and travel time savings, that would have generated a net savings to pay for it, is lost. Heckuva job MTA!

So yeah.... With MTA letting the project become a total clusterf#k, and the Olympics coming in just four years... It is probably time to PANIC...

MTA has become more proof that these days we all do really have the "best gubmint" that money can buy..."