21st Century Stonehenge?

Den torsdag den 25. januar 2018 kl. 18.09.03 UTC+1 skrev Jim Thompson:

maybe that is what the "Nazca Lines" are

"Central Valley drivers on the state's main north-south artery, State Route 99 -- often referred to as the "highway of death" -- are frequently bottle necked in ancient two-lane "freeways" that ironically run right next to unf inished high-speed-rail overpasses."

Victor Davis Hanson has enough sense to realise why the high-speed rail lin k is attractive, but he hasn't got enough sense to realise that frequently bottle-necked roads encourage people to persist in projects that will take some travellers off the over-crowded road. If you could take a fast train, you couldn't care less about the heavy traffic on the road, rather than bei ng part of it.

Presumably Victor Davis Hanson would be perfectly happy if California spent even more billions on up-grading the "freeways" from two lane to four or s ix lane - European motorways typically have three lanes in each direction, with more close to big cities, but Europe has got about ten times the popul ation density of the US, which does mean more people to pay for the roads. Europe has also got lots of high speed rail, but it typically connects big cities (no larger than San Francisco and Los Angles, but closer together).

These grandiose mega-projects seem to invariably result in huge cost- overruns and extended (by *years*) completion dates. The taxpayer always has to pick up the bill for someone else's incompetence.

Read the article: the long-term plan was hit with a rise in land prices on the right-of-way, and there was a manager who didn't want it reported, so delayed the completion instead of asking for bigger cash flow.

No incompetence, just judges noting the current land value at time-of-purchase in eminent domain proceedings, years after the 'plan' phase.

Cursitor Doom doesn't seem to have done any real engineering.

Initial budgets are always broad-brush affairs, and as the design becomes m ore finely detailed the final cost goes up.

This doesn't reflect incompetence - unless you define "competence" in terms of having an omniscient insight into the small details of a complex projec t. It's just a reflection of the way the real world works (which Cursitor Doom knows nothing about, since he treats what he read in the Daily Mail and on Russia Today as information about the real world, as opposed to nonsense c onfected to make right-wing half-wits like him happy).