But the city already has highways. If we started fresh sure let’s do more rail.
My point is just, what infrastructure can you do with say <$1b? It’s a lot of money but not building a whole new railroad kind of money. You can get a few station upgrade projects, a couple of electric trains, etc.
There’s room for private funding of a new electric car company. Save the tax dollars for big infrastructure projects.
According to the HERS analysis, adding a new lane to an interstate on flat terrain in a rural area costs $2.7 million per lane mile. To do the same thing in a major urbanized area costs $62.4 million per lane mile, more than twenty times as much. Even minor projects display wide ranges in cost. Resurfacing an existing lane of a principal arterial in a flat, rural area costs $279,000 per lane mile. To do the same in a major urbanized area costs $825,000 per lane mile, three times as much.
(That is without car related costs with fall on individuals, or environmental costs that arent counted at all.)
California at the same time is building high-speed rail between LA & SF at 66 million per mile - that is including the railway stations & the city tunnels mentioned previously at billions per mile.
And that's also a stupidly mismanaged project with 200+ million dollars in literally just planning mistakes and human errors (or sabotage).
With low maintenance & basically unlimited capacity I can only see that as a cost efficient project that should have been done 50 years ago.
Why would a new company increase traffic? Like people just have extra disposable income and love going out to drive when everyone else does?
If your argument is, someone who would have bought the car would instead switch to using rail. Then there is no place in the US that has heavy traffic that can also have a new railway built for under $1b.
What government money? Aptera is privately funded. They’ve won some government grants but most of their funding is from investors. They’re not taking money away from rail projects.
And even if we went all in on rail, what are we supposed to do in the years it takes to make the transition? Keep using ICE vehicles?
Sorry, I didn't see any other connection from when you said this:
My point is just, what infrastructure can you do with say <$1b? It’s a lot of money but not building a whole new railroad kind of money. You can get a few station upgrade projects, a couple of electric trains, etc.
There’s room for private funding of a new electric car company. Save the tax dollars for big infrastructure projects.
My bad, but I don't see the relevance otherwise - the tax dollars are already being saved & spent on big infrastructure projects, and the privately funded car company is also underway. Both are already facts.
Nobody is getting rid of cars or making any transitions overnight. How did you come to this anyway?