Each new meal requires new material

No, I think the atoms are usually recycled.

If you look at Amtrak and other train transportation within the state, they are all subsidized and still don't run at capacity.

Thank you for mentioning Amtrak. Did you know that Amtrak's only profitable line is also the only high speed rail line in the country? This is why all interstate passenger rail ought to be high speed rail.

Plus, if you think it's ONLY going to cost $68B by the time it's finished, you are being quite naive... The final cost off by almost 5X what the original estimate was.

So if we apply that same 5X multiplier to HSR, it will cost $340 billion to build HSR, versus $790 billion to build the equivalent capacity in freeways and airports. So building HSR becomes $450 billion cheaper than not building HSR. Thanks again for proving my point!

Instead of spending $68 Billion on a single high speed rail line between 2 cities that are already linked by several adequate transportation options...

The alternative to spending $68 billion on HSR is spending $119.0 billion for 4,295 new lane-miles of highway, plus $38.6 billion for 115 new airport gates and 4 new runways, for a total estimated cost of $158 billion. Therefore, spending $68 billion on HSR will free up $90 billion that can be spent on water projects (but see below).

...maybe we should use a fraction of that money for water projects? Moving water to where people live is a simple engineering problem.

Actually, it's much simpler than that. It's an economics problem. We could solve the water shortage by breakfast tomorrow if we wanted to.

NASA has become too political -- I am unable to trust their prediction models.

Isn't this basically the same claim used by those who believe the moon landing was a hoax?

Traffic is not a function of capacity

Except when it is.

The cost of switching to metric is high, but what's the cost of not switching to metric?

Traffic is not a function of capacity at all.

You could not be more mistaken, because congestion occurs when a road's volume to capacity ratio exceeds 1.0. You can read up on Level of Service for more information.

By this logic, the best solution for congestion is to have NO roads.

And by that logic, the best way for eBay to prevent too many people from winning the same auction is to have NO auction.

So I should have said, peak-hour traffic congestion on an unpriced road rises to meet maximum capacity. Thanks for pointing that out!

When you increase capacity to [600 lanes on the freeway] everything's a win past that point.

But that would be such a tax-inefficient use of land that you'll bankrupt the city, so it's a non-solution.

No, the fiscally optimal number of freeway lanes is not the number where there's never any traffic congestion, it's the number where the marginal cost (MC) of building another lane equals the marginal revenue (MR) from building it. Or in other words, when the cost of traffic congestion equals the cost of abating it. On an unpriced freeway, this means a certain amount of traffic congestion is optimal, at least where the price of land and road construction is nonzero, which is everywhere.

having nearly 9 million people in a very small area all sharing the same 3 Freeways will have massive traffic jams

I think traffic congestion is more a factor of the number of vehicles, not the number of people. Leave all the people and take away all their cars and I guarantee it would completely eliminate traffic congestion.

Self driving cars...do NOT fix the congestion problems.

That is not true. SDCs can drive much closer together, increasing the road carrying capacity.

But because peak-hour traffic congestion rises to meet maximum capacity, increasing the road carrying capacity has no long-term effect on traffic congestion. Therefore, self-driving cars will not fix congestion problems.

If only the DMCA itself had one.

It's unfortunate that, due to tiered rates, a wealthy person gets back 33 cents [pdf] for each kilowatt-hour saved, while a poor person gets only 16 cents.

They could encourage energy consumption even among the poor without burdening them by setting rates at a flat 27 cents per kWh and refunding 100% of the revenue equally to everyone through a tax refund.