• elboyoloco@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    As much as I stand with you that gov’t uses our money poorly… And while I’m not a civil engineer… I am an engineer. There’s no way you are getting a mass transit system for $150M.

    • jumperalex@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      If I had to guess it was a poorly worded implication that they won’t even pay that to support what we jave, not a whole train system for $150M

    • New_account@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Came here to say this too. My benchmark is the Silver Line extension in the Virginia suburbs outside DC. For those unfamiliar, the project added an additional 11 stations in two phases opening in 2014 and 2022. The vast majority of the route takes place deep in suburbia where land prices are cheaper than in DC itself. The route is also almost entirely in the highway median for the Dulles toll road, which means they already had the right-of-way. It’s certainly not a comprehensive system, but rather, a small extension of a much larger system. Total price tag for phase 1+2 combined was $6-7 billion before adjusting for inflation to today.

      $150M will get you nothing. It’s a lot of money to an individual person, but it’s a rounding error to the municipal budget of a large city. I know this is just a meme, but the math is off by a factor of 100 to 1000.