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.
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.
Not even one subway station lol: https://www.cp24.com/news/it-is-quite-a-shock-cost-of-building-the-ontario-line-has-nearly-doubled-1.6167102
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
As someone who lives in the United States, it’s really sad how our government chooses to prioritize things that aren’t going to solve the issues we have.
Have you tried writing to your local representative and expressing your displeasure?
Lol I have before. Now I just save time and write the letter and then throw it in the garbage for them. :/
A transit line in my city has cost over $10 billion and still isn’t done, I don’t think you’re getting much for $150 million.
150$ M sounds a bit low.
I agree, I wonder where this number comes from. However, I’d rather spend $2B on public transit rather than $1B on a stadium.
Well it’s really not about specific numbers, the joke is they’ll act like this even when it’s a fraction of the cost compared to a stadium or something
The specific numbers matter a lot though. If a comprehensive transit system is only 15% of the cost of a stadium, the transit system is a no brainer. In reality, that $150M needs to be more like $100B to be remotely realistic (for context, the 11 station Silver Line extension of the DC Metro deep in the Virginia suburbs cost roughly $7B). Doing some super quick back-of-the-napkin math to extrapolate that cost for 11 stations to the total system size of 98 stations, we arrive at $62B for the whole thing if built from scratch today. That $62B is an understatement though because it ignores that construction costs in DC proper will be higher than for the Silver Line extension that ran in the median of a highway in the suburbs.
With a realistic estimate for the cost of the transit system, the decision making changes completely. It’s certainly not a no-brainer anymore.
