I don’t see it as ridiculing anyone. It’s criticising the system that created this mess.

Blaming cyclists for something a motorist failed to do seems to be a uniquely North American thing.

I can tell you that it’s also very much a thing in many parts of Europe.

You don’t even need that many people before cars become impractical.

Speak for yourself. I’m not pulling this out of my arse, I’m telling you things I just happen to know.

A single train with a single crew can transport more people in a day when travelling at higher speed.

This is running costs. The capital costs are irrelevant.

It’s cheaper to run a high speed service than a low speed one. You can transport more people with the same number of staff and trains because it runs faster. The solution isn’t to run an artificially cheaper low speed service along side, it’s to run the high speed service in a sane way.

The problem isn’t how they’re constructed, it’s how they’re run, and this article is basically just complaining about SNCF without realising it. They run bad timetables and aim for high occupancy rather than transporting more people. Jon Worth has better writing on the topic IMO.

Or the fact that it doesn’t need to be real because 1. It’s still funny and 2. We all know that the incident has happened somewhere, because shit like this happens so often.

Which part of what I said do you disagree with?

exactly, either way you need to make sure there isn’t any oncoming traffic.

If there isn’t space to overtake two cyclists side by side, there isn’t space to overtake one cyclist. If there’s another car coming towards you while you overtake, you’d be endangering the one cyclist.

I think this is the latest

I’d guess with inflation you’d be right, but if we’re sticking with the current value, what on Phase 2 justifies it costing the same as Phase 1?

Yeah they’re really taking their time with it.

You have to spend billions before laying track. That’s true of any high speed rail. They’ve done a lot of groundwork and built a lot of structures, and they should be laying some track relatively soon.

• Merced to Bakersfield is the initial operation segment, that is estimated to cost $28–35 billion, as per your link. This is the cheapest phase that you are referring to.

• Phase 1 adds the segments to SF and Anaheim. This is projected to cost $130 billion.

• Phase 2 adds segments to San Diego and Sacramento. These are a long way off and I haven’t seen any cost estimates for it, but as you can see it doesn’t triple the length of the system.

• There is no Phase 3 in the official design.

So where does the $500 billion come from?

full phase 1 != the IOS. The IOS is predicted to be $28–35 billion. The full phase 1, which is SF and Merced to Anaheim, and also most of the entire network, is predicted to be $128bn (as per your quote).

The IOS is projected to commence revenue service as a self-contained high-speed rail system between 2030-2033, at a cost of $28–35 billion, and will replace current San Joaquins service south of Merced.

From the top of the page you linked. I see no reference to $130b.

The federal government can also fund infrastructure projects in states.

Source on the $500 billion?

And governments don’t need to find money to fund capital projects. The US government can print money. They can effectively borrow money against the future economic growth that the project will provide, which is an easy bet with projects like this.