• mEEGal
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    2 days ago

    wait wait wait wait wait wait wait

    fuck cars obviously but more than 250 million PER MILE sounds like it was taken out of “tales from the 1923 hyperinflation”.

    I assume it was the full cost, not the cost per mile

    • destructdiscOP
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      2 days ago

      The full cost is (conservatively) expected to be $126 BILLION.

      • mEEGal
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        2 days ago

        holy f-ing shit!

        I know in France, ten-ish years ago, high speed rail cost about 1 Million € per km… even if it increased ten fold, that still would be roughly about 20 MILLION per mile.

        insane ! either I’m missing something crucial, or you guys are getting ripped off

        • SwingingTheLamp@piefed.zip
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          2 days ago

          The Texas government is heavily Republican, and Austin is heavily Democratic, so the state has a grudge against the city. The cost for this project is to literally destroy large areas of the central city to make room. It’s worth the cost in their minds to “pwm the libs.”

          It’s hard to convey to people outside the U.S. just how psychopathically evil Republicans are.

        • Jiral
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          2 days ago

          Most of that cost is not from construction itself, not even from buying the land, it is legal (a lot of openly anti-rail legislation intended to inflate costs and risks), red tape, judicial stuff, frequent replanning due to insecure funding, political infighting …