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Comment by pibaker | Hacker News Reader

Train electrification would at minimum reduce pollution from diesel trains, and in the case of Caltrain, improve train services and reduce the number of cars on the road.

It is peak irony that a piece of environmental regulation is being used here to delay the upgrade works. On brand for California, of course.

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Caltrain already electrified this track and got rid of nearly all its diesel trains; those are only used from San Jose to Gilroy which is not electrified (and not anywhere near Atherton).

I need to point out: the better acceleration from electric trains means you can run trains at tighter schedules, too. They're smoother, quieter; basically every aspect is an upgrade for users, including the environmental aspect. It's not just about money/emissions

Were the environmental regulations actually intended as roadblocks and the environmentalists were useful idiots, or did the regulations start out useful and get hijacked, or were they always bad but it was an unintended consequence?

Like is the reason why free X is better is just because whenever rules are made, the maker of rules can be corrupted to make rules for corrupters? And corrupters always exist, so minimizing the rules attack surface is a good strategy. And corrupters try to broaden the attack surface by having more rules and rule generation mechanisms in place.

The regulation, called CEQA, was passed under Governor Reagan, to protect the environment. Back then, the environment had a different connotation than it does now, so it wasn't about protecting plants and animals but was more about keeping things the way they are now. It basically protects what we now call NIMBYism, and it succeeds at what it was passed to do.

It is often used to block projects that will reduce pollution or produce clean energy, because a building might be ugly or produce too much shade, which the regulation prioritizes.

It was about the environment (response to wildfires). It’s just that shortly after it passed, the Supreme Court ruled that it applies to any project that needs government approval and subsequently became a NIMBY tool. CEQA + Prop 13 are the cocktail that are the center of almost all of California’s problems, which are fundamentally about housing.

I think it's the US fragmentation between city/county/state/federal, exacerbated by our asinine suburban municipality system. A town of 8000 has equal say to a city of 2M. Unless the feds insist (which they only do for highways and military installations) then it's incumbent on the state to wrangle its counties, which they were practically designed not to do.

Honestly LA's biggest problem, for example, isn't that the buses and Metro are insufficient (they might be) but that they're operated by 18 different agencies across 24 municipalities spanning 4 counties (made up numbers, but representative). Every tiny section gets to object, provide input, demand concessions, or outright refuse to cooperate. You see this to a limited extent with London boroughs, so i understand, but nobody seems to have mastered it like California.

Here in Chicago this has never been quite so bad, but it's still similar. The state just passed new rules to consolidate the Chicago area Transit systems. Thankfully we're drastically more functional than LA from the get go, and unlike LA, Chicago controls the vast majority of desirable land in the area, so the city has a lot more political power to ensure things keep working.

Regardless: the suburban/regional networks are massively worse than those within the city, funding is a nearly-annual state-v-city showdown, the state owns the highways within the city so they can override certain city decisions regarding bike lanes/bus lanes/trams....

The US is a mess lmao

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