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Comment by unreal37 | Hacker News Reader

Even if this system cost $20 million to set up, how much public transit does that buy you? 100 feet of subway track? 20 buses? 1 mile of streetcar track?

Transit is way more expensive than any cameras.

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100 feet of subway track? I wish I could get those rates. NYC's latest Second Avenue Subway budget is $6.3 billion for 1.5 miles, or, about $800,000 a foot. You can get 25 feet of subway track.

California's not quite that bad, but, it's close to that bad. The Downtown Extension for Caltrain is $3 billion for a mile. SF's Central Subway is $923 million a mile. So sure, you can get about 114 feet of subway, but it'll be the short little LRVs and not like BART or anything nice-ish.

makes me think The Boring Company might do well lowering the cost of tunnels...

I'm told that, besides general competence issues and political-football games about who gets to builds the subway (contractors, ewwwwww) ... a lot of it comes from deep stations with onerous fire-safety guidelines that require massive mezzanines. These stations are mined out through narrow shafts instead of doing cut-and-cover, adding expense and inviting delays. See e.g. https://twitter.com/2AvSagas/status/1064907564230557696

But it's mostly the fact that the leadership doesn't care, doesn't have to care, and is actively incentivized not to care.

None of your numbers are correct. Buses will be more than a million per bus, plus the cost of hiring drivers. You would be lucky to get 10 buses.

Last I checked, Vancouvers electric trolley buses (with the poles and the overhead lines) were ~1.5 mil Canadian, with the regular diesel buses costing only about a million Canadian.

buses are generally significantly less than a million per bus. BYD electric buses have a unit cost of about $750k which is "approximately double the cost" of a standard diesel bus

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