We (as Californians) have GOT to do better than this! There are huge infrastructure projects that we need to undertake in the coming years. We have got to cut the red tape and properly fund projects.
A similar project [1] is underway in Canada, but I worry sometimes it'll fall prey to the same administrative bog that the CHSR did. It'll be managed by a new Crown corp, VIA HFR, and from my understanding they're still taking engineering bids. I expect it'll be a while before shovels hit the ground.
A cheap, fast, and reliable rail from Toronto to Montreal would be a dream come true for a lot of Canadians. Any ideas on how best to make it a reality?
[1] https://tc.canada.ca/en/rail-transportation/railway-lines/hi...
How thorough were they being?
> We (as Californians) have GOT to do better than this!
We pay more taxes than anyone else in the country. /We/ are doing our part. The administration needs to be held accountable.
> We have got to cut the red tape and properly fund projects.
We need to light a fire under the administration and someone needs to take a wrecking ball through the state assembly.
... By the electorate, who clearly aren't doing their part if things like this keep happening.
Look at Switzerland - this is the land of trains, all reachable cities and villages have main train station at their heart, use is frequent, and its part of national pride (precision, coverage, cleanliness etc.). Yet prices are brutal, sure if you live here you can often afford it but it still hurts. The price keeps rising.
And I still use our family car for anything else but commuting to work (and even for that sometimes). Morning trains packed like sardines, in reality there are frequent (usually small though) delays which cascade. Car for 4 is significantly cheaper - I'd say 4x for full tickets, less with half/card but then thats 200 bucks a year on its own per head.
Whatever problems you are facing, I doubt that in US rail will solve all of them. Happy to be wrong here of course. I see rather some AI vans/minibuses ondemand hailing and sharing as way more effective and cheap solution. Small bus full of people has minimal env impact and can provide door-to-door transport.
Would it be cheaper with all the usual externalities priced in?
Cleaner forms of transportation should be subsidized. The fact that it costs me $8 to cross the Bay Bridge into SF but costs $10+ round trip on BART is a shame. Especially when you have two or three people in the car.
The hard parts seems to be figuring out (1) how to cut red tape for only certain projects and (2) figuring out what red tape to keep.
Chesterton's fence and all that.
One major example which Marco first became popular with was that he owned a barn but wasn’t allowed to use it for the factory since it was a farm on paper. The government told him to move to a designated factory area. He argued that it made no sense since he was living in a very remote area, and the barn was of high quality. What else should he do with the barn? Why would he need to build something new somewhere else? The barn was there already and stood already for hundreds of years.
His most popular quote is something along the lines of “we can’t all sit with a Chai latte and a MacBook in a coworking space in Berlin and make the 5th dating app. We need some people who do that but not everyone. Some people need to make things with their hands! And for that I need space! I don’t need glass fibre. I need space!”
I tried to do something and they stopped me. This is wrong, I should be able to do this and write my own story.
Which is a perfectly normal feeling. But if you end up saying that loudly in public without ever thinking, well what if the rule of "let this person do whatever they want" applied to people other than yourself, then that seems to indicate some lack of a wider view.
It sounds like Mr. Scheel is applying exactly that view. The idea is everyone should be able to use their remote farm shed for industrial purposes. Indeed, most of the intellectual foundation of the pro-freedom view is precisely that when you take a wider view freedom is generally better for everyone than authoritarianism right up until it becomes a threat to personal safety (even then, pushing the dial a little further towards freedom generally gets better results). If people can't do what they want, then how are things supposed to get done? If we're all doing things in ways that are believed to be impractical then it is going to waste an unreasonable amount of resources and be stupid.
I never said anything about Wikipedia. For the record, I'm a big fan of Wikipedia and I'm skeptical about the new US government.
Please don't assume that because someone holds opinion X that they also hold opinion Y. With the current levels of polarization, it's probably a fair assumption to make, but I think we all as individuals have a responsibility to counter that.
And it's an example of somewhere I'd seen this exact argument against rules/regulation regularly made on HN stories and the comments on them in what I thought was a mostly non-political context.
> I brought up Wikipedia because it's something I'm interested in.
Of course it makes sense. Farmland is dedicated to farming and producing food/related things. It lacks connectivity, has fertile soil, prices are cheaper. If anyone can just build a factory there, they will have a negative ecological impact (interrupt animal flows, pollute in areas that are supposed to be cleaner, etc). It's the same reason why you can't farm in an industrial zone, nor can you set up a factory in the middle of the city.
Yes, it can be taken too far and abused, but absolutely 100% makes sense and must exist.
> If anyone can just build a factory there, they will have a negative ecological impact (interrupt animal flows, pollute in areas that are supposed to be cleaner, etc).
All true of farming. FWIW as a fellow NIMBY myself, I use the excuse of 'animal flow' (in particular the flow of bats) to prevent anyone from putting anything more than a fence up within 150m of my house. It's great!
How could this possibly be known without a review in your opinion?
> fellow NIMBY myself
Unless you're American, things don't have to be so binary. The choice isn't between nothing gets built or anyone can just do whatever. We need a balance.
> All true of farming
I'm pretty sure birds and bees and what not prefer having plants than factories.
By all means, have planning applications and a system to process them. Things don't have to be so binary.
Funny you say that. Not only does that actually happen in pretty much all developed country, it's actually needed for a variety of reasons. There are subsidies to incentivise the "correct" crops (you don't want all farmers only doing cash crops for export, rendering your country very vulnerable to import markets to sustain itself), there are also rules/policies to rotate crops to avoid top soil erosion which could be devastating, there are rules on what types of pesticides can be used, etc etc etc etc.
"Everyone does it" isn't much of an argument when it comes to economics, the field is littered with a long history of group-think episodes where most people do things in a way that was, in hindsight, a mistake. And being steamrollered by more economically productive societies that don't ban progress. The modern policies developed countries adopted have resulted in vast investments in China (and Asia more broadly) to dodge the regulatory states that were built.
And the rest of your comment is straightforwardly telling farmers how to farm. On average, I bet they know all that stuff better than the legislators. They're farmers! If we can't trust them to farm then putting regulators in charge isn't going to save us. That attitude of mother knowing best is still going to result in more misses than hits, even if confidently repeated a few times.
Strongly disagree. The incentives are just not the same. If farmers use pesticides which will kill all bugs and pollute nearby rivers to increase their yield a tiny bit, that's not good for everyone else. If they decide they're only going to do tobacco because it's very lucrative to export, that's not good either. If the techniques they're using are obsolete (and thus inefficient and resulting in them barely being able to survive against foreign competition) or very bad for the soil/environment.
Farmers produce food, it's one of the most critical things in a country. If things go wrong, there are famines or economical crisis (cf. Egypt, Sri Lanka in the last few years, Soviet Russia in the past century). Hell, many countries were couped to take over control over their farming sectors for commercial interests (Hawai, Central America and the Caribbean, cf. the Banana Wars).
edit: for instance, if you have e.g. an environmental regulation that is so onerous that exemptions must be doled out for something as sensible as train electrification, then you don't have an environmental review regulation, you have a 'build nothing except what the exemptor decrees' regulation. Which is rather antithetical to the rule of law and good governance.
Bureaucracies everywhere tend to protect itself, but California's is particularly vicious. There is a reason many of us call the place Commiefornia.
>Most legal edicts aren’t laws enacted by Congress but “rules and regulations” promulgated by unelected bureaucrats—tens of thousands of them each year
>...President Trump, [] can, by executive action, immediately pause the enforcement of those regulations and initiate the process for review and rescission.
>When the president nullifies thousands of such regulations, critics will allege executive overreach. In fact, it will be correcting the executive overreach of thousands of regulations promulgated by administrative fiat that were never authorized by Congress...
(wsj thing https://archive.is/nFNp4)
You can just call it what it is and say Nazi salute.