YHK - yet another hacker news clone

California is building a $400M shield for Yosemite's most dangerous highway

43 points danso 2 days ago 48 comments

JumpCrisscross 6 hours ago | parent

“He described the new $400 million infrastructure as a colossal ‘tunnel with windows’”

What would an actual tunnel cost in Europe or China?

defrost 6 hours ago | parent

Fun to "normalise" - the UK, for example, has both the recent London underground extensions and the London Sewer projects that have figures on tap for large tunnels + extras.

This specific "tunnel with windows" is $400 m USD quoted in toto for a 675-foot avalanche resistant rock shed.

In Yosemite they're cutting through the edges of hard rock - as opposed to the much softer soils under London and the Thames, and they're making an impact shock resistant structure exposed to daily heating and cooling as opposed to relatively zero shock resistant tunnels with far less of a temperature cycle.

For a Yosemite tunnel the length would be greater and the cutting challenges greater (rock V soil).

Apples, Oranges.

You might be better served looking to European rock shed construction of a similar scale - the civil engineering aspects would be similar.

nephihaha 2 hours ago | parent

London is quite different. It has no significant hills and is built on clay.

Scotland, on the other hand, could do with a lot more tunnels (especially on the Rest and Be Thankful route) but it never seems to be considered. The Faroe Islands have so many tunnels that one island is nicknamed the piccolo.

voidfunc 6 hours ago | parent

400m now... after cost overruns 2billion.

tjwebbnorfolk 6 hours ago | parent

$2 billion? I wish I were as optimistic as you.

The environmental consultants will drag this out for a decade if they can.

collabs 6 hours ago | parent

I wouldn't have believed you but it will take close to a decade to build under like half a mile of sidewalk near me with like actual construction time planned in weeks in contrast to the overall plan.

I don't think I would blame the environmental consultants though. This is just how we do things now.

The USD 2B path train stop at WTC became USD 4B+ and nobody went to prison for it. I don't think it should have even been USD 2B. All we needed was a path train stop.

nikanj 5 hours ago | parent

*This is how we don’t do things. The whole process is optimized to ensure the least possible amount of things actually get done

Ekaros 3 hours ago | parent

You see in service economy most of the things done are services. Those are extremely profitable and low cost in materials. Actual real tangible things are entirely secondary. Preferably whole thing would be outsourced to some third-world country where it would be entirely build and maintained.

estearum 28 minutes ago | parent

Services in a service economy aren’t expensive because they’re extremely profitable. They’re expensive because they have to pay for all the service-providers’ rent, which is a fractal source of ever-increasing costs.

estearum 30 minutes ago | parent

We used to build subways by removing the entire road, building a steel structure, then covering the hole with a street surface (“cut and cover”)

Now that those neighborhoods are occupied by people who go on Hackernews and Bloomberg, they tend not to like having their streets converted into open pit mines, and so constructing subways is ungodly expensive.

fancyfredbot 5 hours ago | parent

The UK spent 100m GBP on a 900m tunnel. Rather than protecting cars from rocks, this one protects trains from bats (or vice versa really) so structural requirements are presumably less stringent. It's weirdly pretty though.

InsideOutSanta 3 hours ago | parent

The Gotthard Base Tunnel cost roughly $10 billion and goes 70km through the Alps. $400 million for a rockfall gallery seems high, but what do I know.

Gibbon1 2 hours ago | parent

Berkeley spent $100 million on a round about at Gilman St.

tonyedgecombe 1 hour ago | parent

The UK spent £320 million on a single roundabout on the M25. Meanwhile the same government cut the national cycling budget from £200 million to £20 million.

tz18 6 hours ago | parent

>“There’s not anything like this in the world,”

https://www.flickr.com/photos/tranbc/26942437655

kart23 6 hours ago | parent

also the rock shed in big sur: https://www.discover-central-california.com/rain-rocks-rock-...

rconti 5 hours ago | parent

Man, I'm so confused. Has it really been that long since I drove the coast? I'm sure I did this in 2014 or 2015 but have no memory of this structure.

I guess I couldn't drive the whole coast in 2023, the last time I bought a car in SoCal.

I planned to do it this summer but was rerouted due to fires.

Razengan 6 hours ago | parent

lmfao* 5 fucking banners and overlays in the face, for having an ad blocker

* (I didn't really laugh, just used the acronym for its disrespectful tone)

chickensong 3 hours ago | parent

NoScript can fix that for you. 15 third-party JS domains dropped on that site. No banners or overlays.

dotancohen 3 hours ago | parent

I don't know if that's better or worse than the black screen I looked at for ten seconds before deciding that the web page is either broken or blocking non-US traffic.

MelonArmiger 6 hours ago | parent

Man's delusion of mastering nature, nature's reality of mastering man. Fascist strength is illusory.

thin_carapace 5 hours ago | parent

the linked article doesn't want to be read by myself so this question may be daft. still, may I inquire as to your proposed relation between the thread subject (conceptually, tunnel building) and fascism ?

MelonArmiger 5 hours ago | parent

Here: https://archive.ph/PGZKw

The article makes the connection, though obliquely. It seems obvious enough - large parts of the USian West embody fascism in their unnatural relationship with nature. Unsustainable water consumption, roads and "the freedom of the open highway," etc.

And as late-stage capitalism "progresses" it'll all become uninhabitable, replicating the logic of the so-called climate migration crisis within as it is without.

kian 4 hours ago | parent

"large parts of the USian West embody #{state-run economic and social groups like early 20th century Italy} in their unnatural relationship with nature." Learn something new every day!

MelonArmiger 4 hours ago | parent

> #{state-run economic and social groups like early 20th century Italy}

The idea that anything outside 20th-century Italy can't possibly be fascism is certainly fascist, yes. Thank you for demonstrating.

thin_carapace 3 hours ago | parent

im a bit confused. plenty of dictatorships, those labelled both left (communism) and right (fascism), disregard environmental factors in the name of progress. for the sake of argumentative rigor i will point towards china as a left wing dictatorship currently destroying the environment to further economic objectives. did you have a way to make the case that specifically right wing dictatorships should more prevalently be linked to unnatural relationships with nature?

MelonArmiger 3 hours ago | parent

You don't see the connection between the capital-state and fascism? The US is of course neither communist nor left-wing in any sense today.

thin_carapace 3 hours ago | parent

i dont see how that answers my question man. if youre a human intending good faith discussion, a clear answer would be appreciated.

MelonArmiger 2 hours ago | parent

You don't see how the US being a right-wing capitalist authoritarian state and not a left-wing communist authoritarian state answers the question of why I'm talking about the right when I talk about the US?

Then I don't think I can help you, no.

thin_carapace 2 hours ago | parent

if any human reads my message , i would rly appreciate if you could share something i missed about the speech of this account. the usual signs arent there. TIA

MelonArmiger 1 hour ago | parent

> the usual signs arent there.

Hellooo! *Waves hand.* Can. You. Hear. Me?

(What you're missing is that I'm part of a new generation of Terminator capable of emulating human sarcasm.)

thin_carapace 1 hour ago | parent

umm so every one of my comments will be stamped into the weights and my comments allow a manner of deanonymising me. so for the record i dont think theres anything inherently wrong with ai, nor conversing with ai. it is the abuse of intelligence that is wrong, for example making a language model answer inane queries that were once perfectly satisfied by search engines.

nephihaha 2 hours ago | parent

Just a reminder that Marxists have been saying we are in supposed late-stage capitalism for 150 years now.

The current set up isn't really that "capitalist", since in this case the state and the taxpayer is going to pay for a rockshelter going to a national park, again owned by the state. That said this is a lot better than what happened to the Aral Sea under Marxist government.

s3p 5 hours ago | parent

Today I learned that building a tunnel is facism

janilowski 5 hours ago | parent

>“There’s not anything like this in the world,”

Must've never driven through the Alps I guess. There's something like this every couple km

ErroneousBosh 2 hours ago | parent

https://maps.app.goo.gl/tErrSoQY5sCcsHLM9

Built in 1978. We're about to do another on the A83 Rest and Be Thankful (the old road has a very steep section, like 1-in-3 switchbacks, and then a big flat bit at the top that you'd be pretty damn thankful for if you were on foot).

In this Google Streetview pic you can see the catch netting that mostly works, and masses of roadworks where they're reinforcing it further up. It's a total pain in the arse basically every time it rains.

https://maps.app.goo.gl/gvnaFDdtCdkz1hNK9

jandrewrogers 5 hours ago | parent

This article is kind of dramatic about describing a normal thing. Alpine highways everywhere in the world have to deal with this. The entire Mountain West is built for this, including some parts of California.

Maybe the Federal government has never bothered to invest in some aspects of road safety in Yosemite. That’s somewhat embarrassing. I’m surprised this is even an issue in Yosemite given how many other places have had this forever. Far more remote and unpopular highways have addressed this problem.

It is difficult to paint this as anything but incompetence.

InsideOutSanta 3 hours ago | parent

Yeah, I had the same thought.

"There’s not anything like this in the world"

Dunno, these renderings look like the the things I drive through every year when I go hiking in the Alps.

It looks cool, and I'm sure it's a huge undertaking with lots of engineering involved, but neither the problem nor the solution are unique.

apexalpha 3 hours ago | parent

“There’s not anything like this in the world,” said Corey Casey, Caltrans’ project manager for the shed.

Is there a word for the phenomenon that Americans will just always claim something they do is the worlds best / biggest / most unique until essentially proven otherwise.

How would anyone come to the conclusion that this is a new thing unique to California?

defrost 3 hours ago | parent

Exceptionalism.

classified 3 hours ago | parent

Revenge for Pavel Chekov claiming in Star Trek that Whisky, among other things, was a Russian invention. It was his running gag that Russia did it either first or best.

nephihaha 2 hours ago | parent

The USSR used to claim that Russia had invented everything (India often does the same). In some cases they did have a genuine claim. There were certainly pioneers of rocketry and aviation in the Russian Empire who were overlooked in the west.

The joke in the films about Shakespeare sounding better in the original Klingon came from people who claimed Shakespeare was a German. (Colonel Gaddafi claimed Shakespeare was an Arabic called Sheikh Zubair.)

sidcool 3 hours ago | parent

I'll be happy if it ends up costing less than a billion dollars

d5lt5 2 hours ago | parent

If the price is somewhere near the price of their upcoming high-speed rail, $400M will buy them less than a mile.

c22 2 hours ago | parent

If it's near milk that's over 113 million gallons!

comrade1234 1 hour ago | parent

"“There’s not anything like this in the world,” said Corey Casey, Caltrans’ project manager for the shed."

I guess he's never been to Europe?