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Elon Musk Hates 405 Freeway Traffic, Pays Money To Speed Construction
S810 writes "Elon Musk, one of the main people behind PayPal, Space Exploration Technologies and Tesla Motors, has paid $50,000 to help Los Angeles speed up construction of the 405 Freeway, making it better and says that he will pay more if needed. From the article: 'Musk said he is open to pay the cost of adding workers to the widening project "as a contribution to the city and my own happiness. If it can actually make a difference, I would gladly contribute funds and ideas. I've super had it." — Musk quips that it's easier getting rockets into orbit than navigating his commute between home in Bel-Air and his Space Exploration Technologies factory in Hawthorne.' For those who aren't familiar with this issue, the 405 Freeway runs from the northern end of the San Fernando Valley all the way down to El Toro and runs by LAX. Residents are getting frustrated that this widening project is over budget and well over the anticipated time frame that it was supposed to completed by."
If you want to throw money at the problem of highway construction, you offer a large payout contingent on how quickly it gets done while still within project specifications.
The workers get paid by the hour and so do the contractor managers most of the time. So to give them money with the promise of "more if needed" will result in pleas of "hey! we need more!!!"
These people seriously don't understand how it works when highways are constructed with public money -- the recipients never want the money to run out.
it's all the cars on it.
if they built the sort of light rail which the region desperately needs it could cut down on the traffic hugely.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
You aren't in traffic, you are traffic.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
This project was budgeted at $1 billion dollars, and is currently projected to cost $1.1 billion. So no, $50k is not significant. Also, he didn't even spend the $50k on construction: he paid it to a lobbying group, Angelinos Against Gridlock, whose goal is to speed construction. The group actually looks like one worth supporting (they have a vision that includes both roads and rail improvements and it seems reasonably thought out), so that $50k might be well spent. But it's spent on an advocacy organization, not on construction.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
He lives in BelAir and commutes to Hawthorne ?? Give me a break... that was ridiculous 30 years ago and still is. One word, listen closely... MOVE. Everyone seems to think it's normal to drive these ridiculous long commutes and it's actually a symptom of a screwed up society in love with their crappy cars. Try living closer to work and walk there, or ride your golf cart or something.
Since Elon Musk is so wealthy and he's only paying $50,000, may I contribute my $5 ?
The $5 from me to me is worth much more (by ratio of my wealth) than the $50,000 to Mr. Musk, btw
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Sure, LA has a great talent pool of engineers, but I am sure it would have been cheaper to just have SpaceX in a region with better managed freeways, and less density. I'm sure the engineers wouldn't mind moving since LA is a hell hole these days when it comes to commuting.
You seem to have no idea the scale of work the goes into turning virgin terrain into a proper road. It involves hundreds of men working hard labor, dozens of machines that cost $10M each (or about $15K a month, if you want to rent) and are backordered for two years and burn 100 gallons of diesel a day, and hauling thousands of tons of rocks across large distances to poor on the ground. Then you take the amount of time to do all that and quadrupal it if you actually want to drive on it faster than 35MPH and not have your transmission fall out. None of that pays attention to the cost of surveying the land and planning out what angle is needed on the banks, determining just how much you can safely slope the road so both compact cars and big trucks can safely drive on it, to securing right-of-way from landowners,....
But yeah, it's public money, so we can ignore all that and complain that they should work for free so no tax dollars are wasted while we still get roads that you don't need a horse to traverse.
Air is a public good because it is "both non-excludable and non-rivalrous in that individuals cannot be effectively excluded from use and where use by one individual does not reduce availability to others." Freeways are not public goods because a vehicle taking up space on the road reduces availability of the road to others.
Any sufficiently unpopular but cohesive argument is indistinguishable from trolling.
That is the stupidest thing I have ever heard.
First off the road is not free. It already costs loads of money to maintain cars, insurance, and gas, and you pay for the road in your taxes. That is like saying the solution to house hold fires is to make people pay x thousand dollars before the firemen turn on the hoses. People do not want to commute in the first place, and they already shelled out the cash to buy those roads/firetrucks.
Preventing people from travelling/taxing it beyond reason is only something you would want to do if you wanted to stifle the economy.
There is not a infinite demand for roads. There are a finite number of people trying to go to a finite number of places. And all of them are either going somewhere to make money or to spend it. The only correct way to plan a cities transit system is to provide enough transit to accommodate all of these trips.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
Why it matters is because public versus private goods is the entire point the cited passage. You started this by arguing that air somehow was a non-scarce good (i.e. can potentially be used up until there is "no more air left"). In doing so you provided an example of a free public good, which is neither scarce, nor rivalrous, nor excludable, as the passage requires. Do you have half a brain to be able to rationalize the fact that no matter how hard we breathe, we cannot "use up" the air like we use up hamburgers or freeways? Did that even cross your mind, yes or no?
Wonder what the public key field is for?
It gets worse. Until the 405 gets into the mountains, it's solid city on each side. Widening means buying property, expensive property. It's an elevated freeway, so it's hideously more expensive to build than on the ground.
Sadly, it's not going to fix the problem. Twice as many lanes would still not be enough. There's a choke point where the 405 meets the 101 in the San Fernando Valley that backs at least 2 miles every workday, and has done so for at least 30 years.
It may get better, but it's not going to be fixed.
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That is the stupidest thing I have ever heard. First off the road is not free. It already costs loads of money to maintain cars, insurance, and gas, and you pay for the road in your taxes. That is like saying the solution to house hold fires is to make people pay x thousand dollars before the firemen turn on the hoses.
You're very vehement for someone so incorrect. Use of a road is so different from asking for help from the fire department that I don't see what could possibly make you think they're similar. Okay, they're both public services, I get that. After that, nada.
The way to get the most efficient system is to have supply meet demand, and that cannot be at a price point of zero forever. Having to pay some amount for a service encourages or forces people to make choices, including whether they should work from home that day in the short term. Longer term it might influence their choices in place of employment or residence. That allows the taxpayer you seem so concerned about to maximize the public benefit of the whole system. Mass rapid transit is paid for by the taxpayer, so presumably that should be free also? Let me guess, you only drive so that's not relevant.
Preventing people from travelling/taxing it beyond reason is only something you would want to do if you wanted to stifle the economy.
There is not a infinite demand for roads. There are a finite number of people trying to go to a finite number of places. And all of them are either going somewhere to make money or to spend it. The only correct way to plan a cities transit system is to provide enough transit to accommodate all of these trips.
There is also a finite amount of land to be built upon, a finite amount of public money to use to build roads and so on. In general the people who plan urban transportation are not idiots. They know the costs to the economy, and their political bosses hear the complaints of the public and businesses. They don't set out to underbuild a road system just to piss you off. They try to maximize the effectiveness of the whole system given their constraints due to availability of money, land issues, political realities and so on. It seems that you understand that the number of drivers is not infinite, but you think that everything else is, or should be. That is irrational.
The subject who is truly loyal to the Chief Magistrate will neither advise nor submit to arbitrary measures (Junius)
Or maybe it's because there are 7 million more people in LA County than in Orange County?
You can't move a population of 10+ million people around every day by automobile without traffic jams. It's an impossible task. You can eke out tiny improvements, but just as quickly they are overtaken by increased usage and then you're looking at an even larger, more expensive and time-consuming upgrade to keep traffic moving . The 405 is a perfect example of this.
Auto travel does not scale efficiently and over the long term LA is going to have to significantly improve its mass transit (ie subway, light rail, street cars NOT buses) to have any chance of improving congestion. Thankfully the government understands this and is moving beyond 1950s urban planning policies.
But it's LA, and no place on earth is more beholden to the notion that a car is freedom and taking public transit is for the unwashed masses. Even when it's obvious to everyone involved that upgrading the freeway system is a huge, inefficient pain in the ass and a waste of public money you still get people like yourself clamoring that they should do *more* of it. It's absurd.
My questions is, why not have a 10 mile length of a double deck freeway that has no exits. That way, you get into the express deck, and you don't have to worry about asshats who swoop across 4 lanes of traffic to catch their off ramp at the last second.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.