Comment box Scope: information, some summary, personal thoughts Tone: neutral Opinion: some Sarcasm/humor: none Los Angeles actually has a lot of transit plans for the nearish future. It also has...
Comment box
Scope: information, some summary, personal thoughts
Tone: neutral
Opinion: some
Sarcasm/humor: none
Los Angeles actually has a lot of transit plans for the nearish future. It also has plans for the unfortunately not nearish future. This one, an extension of the "K Line" (light rail) north to Hollywood, is in the latter category.
This extremely well-produced video by Nick Andert (nandert) covers the K Line extension's three possible routings. He discusses the benefits and drawbacks of each one in the context of service speed, ridership, cost, and timelines.
Andert comments on the fact that the design for the project is ridiculously oversized, implying that it would cost billions of dollars and literal decades longer to build than it really needs to. The current plants would cost upward of $10-15 billion and be done not earlier than the 2040s, and more likely the 2050s. That's a very long timeline for what is ultimately not an unusually long tunnel.
According to Andert, the high cost is because of unnecessary design bloat. Consultants responsible for the most recent report have designed high-speed crossover tracks primarily to alleviate an "edge case" service disruption pattern (when a track is out in a certain section, for example for maintenance). They have also used far more crossovers than is typical. This is cool in the case that one track is disrupted because it lets you switch tracks at higher speeds and therefore reduce delays a bit, but the kinds of machines needed to build such tracks are very expensive, and the more space you're using drilling very long crossover tracks, the more you have to use those very expensive machines. And the thing that decides whether projects get built at all is, at its core, cost.
Andert's commentary complements that of Alon Levy and other commentators because it indicates resoundingly that American transit planners have no clue how to design cost-effective projects. (Levy actually wrote a blog about Andert's video.) Most designs are so over-extended that their high cost stops politicians and constituents from supporting them. If we want to build more transit in this country, we have to stop letting perfect be the enemy of good. We instead need to build what is actually necessary with designs that allow for expansions/future improvements if and only if they are needed. But we shouldn't plan every project to be super amazing massive incredible huge from the get-go.
Andert also notes that federal regulations require transit projects to have a 40% risk contingency build into their budget, i.e. if they expect a project to cost $800 million then they actually need to raise $1.12 billion to do it. Nominally this is meant to "reduce cost overruns." I'm not an expert but this is probably excessive. If there is $1.12 billion available for a project then $1.12 billion will be spent, even if only $800 million is technically required. So from my uneducated perspective I imagine this is part of what keeps costs high. That's not a central part of his argument, but it is something he points out.
Luckily because this is still in the early design phase, it's still possible for the plans to change. The cost could easily be decreased and the construction timeline shortened if the project were thought out a little better.
Comment box
Los Angeles actually has a lot of transit plans for the nearish future. It also has plans for the unfortunately not nearish future. This one, an extension of the "K Line" (light rail) north to Hollywood, is in the latter category.
This extremely well-produced video by Nick Andert (nandert) covers the K Line extension's three possible routings. He discusses the benefits and drawbacks of each one in the context of service speed, ridership, cost, and timelines.
Andert comments on the fact that the design for the project is ridiculously oversized, implying that it would cost billions of dollars and literal decades longer to build than it really needs to. The current plants would cost upward of $10-15 billion and be done not earlier than the 2040s, and more likely the 2050s. That's a very long timeline for what is ultimately not an unusually long tunnel.
According to Andert, the high cost is because of unnecessary design bloat. Consultants responsible for the most recent report have designed high-speed crossover tracks primarily to alleviate an "edge case" service disruption pattern (when a track is out in a certain section, for example for maintenance). They have also used far more crossovers than is typical. This is cool in the case that one track is disrupted because it lets you switch tracks at higher speeds and therefore reduce delays a bit, but the kinds of machines needed to build such tracks are very expensive, and the more space you're using drilling very long crossover tracks, the more you have to use those very expensive machines. And the thing that decides whether projects get built at all is, at its core, cost.
Andert's commentary complements that of Alon Levy and other commentators because it indicates resoundingly that American transit planners have no clue how to design cost-effective projects. (Levy actually wrote a blog about Andert's video.) Most designs are so over-extended that their high cost stops politicians and constituents from supporting them. If we want to build more transit in this country, we have to stop letting perfect be the enemy of good. We instead need to build what is actually necessary with designs that allow for expansions/future improvements if and only if they are needed. But we shouldn't plan every project to be super amazing massive incredible huge from the get-go.
Andert also notes that federal regulations require transit projects to have a 40% risk contingency build into their budget, i.e. if they expect a project to cost $800 million then they actually need to raise $1.12 billion to do it. Nominally this is meant to "reduce cost overruns." I'm not an expert but this is probably excessive. If there is $1.12 billion available for a project then $1.12 billion will be spent, even if only $800 million is technically required. So from my uneducated perspective I imagine this is part of what keeps costs high. That's not a central part of his argument, but it is something he points out.
Luckily because this is still in the early design phase, it's still possible for the plans to change. The cost could easily be decreased and the construction timeline shortened if the project were thought out a little better.