200 passengers per day / hour? - - - 153 Million for one lousy mile?


As much as I believe in public transportation in general; at 200 passengers per day, they might just as well hire 200 royal rickshaws to carry the people to work in kingly style. Hell - at even a tenth of that $153 million, I'd take the freekin' job!


That $153 figure is more than 20 times what a private railroad would pay for a mile of track - even expensive mountain trackage. Any more expensive than that, and they would probably just skip the project. It would otherwise have to be the most important piece of trackage over the whole damn 30,000 mile railroad! This is worse than the biggest BART boondoggle of all time, at over $120 million per mile for the SFO line; which even a democrat controlled congress balked at for a long time.

Having completed a 40 year career, a significant amount of that in public transit, I can say definitively, that much of the difference is California's absurd public works contract law (screwiest in the nation), which severely favors the contractors. They hold All the legal cards, both before any contract is ever written, and especially after it is let.

It is a bloody damn nightmare. It can take thousands of hours of public employee time (or consultant time - take your pick) just to clear all the legal hurdles necessary to get even the simplest contract advertized for bid; and that is just the start.

While many vendors are honest and do business honorably, giving fair value for the buck; they still have significant extra costs imposed by state required procedures and demands, and must bid accordingly. And then there are many that take full advantage of the State's idiocy; ripping off the taxpayers at $20-$30 dollars, per every dollar of value given.

Add to all that, dozens of federal rules demanding this unnecessary feature or that useless widget be added in to the project; not to mention the absurdity of having to file a 2-3 year long E.I.R. study in an already blighted urbanized area, over existing r.o.w.. Then include in all unrelated nonsense and damnable NYMBY b---s--- that spineless pandering politicians keep insisting upon - and there you have it.

And nowhere in America is there more corrupt, spineless, pandering politicians, than right there in Kaliphonia! Where it is never as simple as just plurp-plurp, plop-plop, and there's a glop of track.