Elon Musk Hates 405 Freeway Traffic, Pays Money To Speed Construction 431
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."
Idiot doesn't understand (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
SD Freeway isn't the problem (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Dear Elon (Score:5, Insightful)
You aren't in traffic, you are traffic.
Re:$50k enough? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:SD Freeway isn't the problem (Score:4, Insightful)
Do you really think a guy who runs a car company would want to see public transit improved?
Commuting is the problem (Score:5, Insightful)
May I contribute $5 ? (Score:5, Insightful)
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
Re:SD Freeway isn't the problem (Score:5, Insightful)
Its the only thing which will make life easier for drivers. Widening this road will just encourage more people to drive, increasing congestion everywhere.
Re:May I contribute $5 ? (Score:5, Insightful)
Immorally gotten wealth? You mean anyone who earns more money than you has automatically done it immorally?
Move your company (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:$50k enough? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Hamburger Analogy (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:May I contribute $5 ? (Score:3, Insightful)
You don't earn that kind of wealth by working hard. You earn it by withholding it from the people who do the work. In the past even the rich would have blushed at the idea of being paid that much more than the people doing the actual work.
Re:Hamburger Analogy (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:May I contribute $5 ? (Score:2, Insightful)
In the past even the rich would have blushed at the idea of being paid that much more than the people doing the actual work.
Because I'm sure Vanderbilt, Carnegie, Rockefeller, Schwab, Morgan, etc. were SO embarrassed by being multimillionaires in an era where an average employee in one of their companies made about $450 per YEAR...
Re:May I contribute $5 ? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Hamburger Analogy (Score:4, Insightful)
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?
Re:May I contribute $5 ? (Score:2, Insightful)
And the poorest of the "multimillionaires" then had the equivalent of $133 million.
So how does that change the point in the slightest?
Re:$50k enough? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:May I contribute $5 ? (Score:1, Insightful)
Pray tell, what's the maximum amount of money that you can earn "morally" before the next penny magically changes your alignment to Evil? And yes, that IS how you're saying it works. So tell us the exact number, or admit that you're full of shit. Those are your only possible choices.
Re:Hamburger Analogy (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:May I contribute $5 ? (Score:5, Insightful)
If you think that construction companies, union workers and prevailing wage workers are not already soaking this government project, then you have no idea how government contracts work in California.
This is an American problem. In other countries it doesn't work this way. I lived in Japan and China for several years, and public construction projects in both of them are done amazingly fast.
In the USA, the construction crew will show up, tear everything up, and put out lots of traffic cones, ... and then disappear. For months there is no activity. The machinery just sits there. Everyone now and then you see some guy in a hard-hat drinking some coffee, but nothing is getting done.
In Japan and China it is completely different. A construction site is a beehive of activity from start to finish. They set up giant lights so they can work through the night. When I lived in Shanghai, they build the middle ring freeway past my house, and it was annoying to hear the din of construction all day and night. But in three months it was over because they were done.
I really don't understand why America is so bad at managing these kinds of projects.
Re:405 (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:May I contribute $5 ? (Score:4, Insightful)
What's the exact number of millimeters that makes a person tall? The fact that there isn't a specific number does not mean the concept doesn't exist. See "sorites".
(This doesn't mean I agree with GP, I'm just pointing out the fallacy)
Re:May I contribute $5 ? (Score:5, Insightful)
Anything you can earn through labor is moral. Anything you acquire through investment is immoral.
Re:May I contribute $5 ? (Score:3, Insightful)
By far the biggest misconception about the economy is that it is a zero sum game, and therefore if someone gets rich, it must be because others are getting poorer.
No, I'd disagree. That's the second biggest misconception. As we can see from your post, though, it's evident that there's a lot of people out there that realize it's not a zero sum game and won't hesitate to point that out. If you haven't heard someone cry out "but the economy is not a zero sum game!", then you've been living under a rock.
By far the biggest misconception about the economy is that it is infinite in size, and therefore if someone possesses wealth, it does not necessarily deprive someone else of wealth.
At any point in time, whether it's now, in the past, or in the future, there is a finite amount of wealth. If person X has all of the wealth, then it is necessarily true that no other person has any wealth. It doesn't matter if the economy is a zero sum game or not. The zero sum game argument is a red herring and has no bearing on the fact that wealth is finite, period.
And yes, the capitalist class earns their wealth by withholding it from the people who do the work, literally. That the people who do the work still benefit from this arrangement (because the economy is not a zero sum game) does nothing to refute this claim. The workers may not be getting poorer in absolute terms, but they clearly are in relative terms, because the real world does work like that. Most people don't get rich; those that do do so by creating opportunities that pull lots of other people up with them, and then exploiting the labor of those other people, literally. Sure, Microsoft made Bill Gates a billionaire but helped out all their other employees as well. However, Bill Gates' accumulation of a sizable personal fortune was not a requirement for this; I don't believe that it was the truckloads of cash that were pouring into Bill's personal bank account that made Microsoft a success. I'll even go so far as to say that if Bill had compensated himself as generously as he compensated his workforce, Microsoft's success would not have been jeopardized. And yes, every single dollar that he paid himself is one fewer dollar Microsoft had to pay other employees.
If you're uncomfortable with some negative connotation of "withholding it", "relatively poorer", or "exploiting", then stop being an apologist for the capitalist class.
Re:$50k enough? (Score:4, Insightful)
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.