Friday, January 29, 2010

823 Million Dollars

Wow, can we go out for bids on that?

For some perspective, the cost of adding a lane of Interstate highway is estimated to be $1.6 million to $3.1 million per lane-mile. There is something like 45 miles of two lane highway on I-94 between Pewaukee and Cottage Grove per a quick Google Maps computation. Based on these estimates, the cost to widen I-94 from two to three lanes in each direction would be between $144 and $279 million dollars.

That is only one-fifth to one-third of the cost of creating Doyle's "high speed" rail line. A rail line that will have minuscule ridership, be expensive to ride, be extremely inconvenient for almost all riders, and take longer to get between Milwaukee and Madison for any conceivable purpose.

Well done Obama. You cannot help but waste money.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Except for those poor sorry souls who can't drive. They probably shouldn't live in the Midwest, though. Also buses may exist for this purpose, but are less flexible re: luggage, less comfortable, and possibly less convenient??

Headless Blogger said...

Sorry, but you are wrong on just about everything.

Buses are the superior mode of public transportation. That is why they won the battle against rail & trolleys in commercial competition when they were introduced prior to WWII. Those details are well documented elsewhere on this blog.

And for $823 BILLION, we could run cabs to transport these thousands of imaginary car-less people point-to-point more efficiently than any train.