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Atherton spent $145K to delay train electrification. The rest of us paid $400M

207 points by mslate

by pibaker

3 subcomments

Train electrification would at minimum reduce pollution from diesel trains, and in the case of Caltrain, improve train services and reduce the number of cars on the road.
It is peak irony that a piece of environmental regulation is being used here to delay the upgrade works. On brand for California, of course.

by danans

3 subcomments

> They lost. So why did it still cost us $400 million?
Did the article provide a direct answer to this? I see the $20M delay payments to contractors and the rise of labor costs cited, but is that all?

by nine_k

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«The good news is that California's legislature noticed. In 2024, prompted directly by this fiasco, California passed AB 2503, exempting rail electrification on existing right-of-way from the CEQA reviews that Atherton exploited. One veto point, closed.»
Maybe California is not as hopeless as it may look.

by abtinf

3 subcomments

The HN rules need to expand to ban all AI generated posts.

by smcg

3 subcomments

I think we should have a letter writing campaign to shame residents of Atherton. There's not that many of them.

by owentbrown

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Atherton has a *beautiful* public library adjacent to a defunct Caltrain station. It's great for kids and has a really nice cafe, ideal for VC meetings and networking.

by nayuki

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawfare

by ortusdux

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I'd like to see someone calculate how much Mercer Island's nimbyism added to Seattle's light rail.

by altairprime

1 subcomments

Can the county remove Atherton from its services coverage boundaries until the $400M of costs have been recouped?

by reducesuffering

4 subcomments

Atherton resident Marc Andreessen Apr 18th 2020: "It's Time To Build" "We can’t build nearly enough housing in our cities"[0]
Andreessen family 2 years later: "IMMENSELY AGAINST multifamily development! I am writing this letter to communicate our IMMENSE objection to the creation of multifamily overlay zones in Atherton... They will MASSIVELY decrease our home values"[1]
[0] https://a16z.com/its-time-to-build/
[1] https://therealdeal.com/san-francisco/2022/08/08/marc-andree...

by KennyBlanken

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Meanwhile, even worse is the effort to fight wind turbines - an extremely-well-organized network set up by the fossil fuel industry that uses local residents to astroturf for them. They provide talking points, lawn signs, graphics, guidance on social media posts, the works.
https://climateadvocacylab.org/resource/against-wind-map-ant...
One of their victims was Cape Wind. The project would have made the cape and islands almost 75% carbon-free power for decades.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cape_Wind
They've been desperately trying to kill off Vineyard Wind, too. And they have killed off many individual turbine projects.

by outside1234

1 subcomments

CEQA is basically a weapon for the rich to stop anything. It needs massive reform.

by nobodyandproud

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Why not push legislation to make them pay damages for a frivolous lawsuit?

0 subcomment

by aleksandrm

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Capitalism is a cancer to society, we let corporations dictate the progression of our country.

by jmyeet

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I came across Henry Fudge recently, who is a former wealth manager, economist and I think startup investor. He did a video on the cost blowouts of the UK's HS2 [1] where, apparently, £5.3B was spent on a tunnel to take the train underground through a wealthy commuter town north of London called Amersham. It's not quite as wealthy as Atherton but still. There was no engineering reason for the tunnel. The money was spent by British taxpayers to protect the views of some of the wealthiest people in the UK.
What's interesting is that many who defend our current mode of production (capitalism) either don't know or have forgotten that Adam Smith (of The Wealth of Nations fame obviously) had a very negative view of landlords, calling them essentially parasitic. I mean this is where the term "rent-seeking" comes from. Landlords and landowners essentially extracted value from the economy for no productive economic output. In other words, they were parasites.
Fudge has written papers on what he calls the "Housing Theory of Everything" [2] and calls the property market a "rentier black hole". When property becomes the best-performing asset, it redirects all capital that might otherwise go to producing things and (in his opinion) this is what really hollowed out British industry. He also argues for a land value tax, similar to what France has (IFI).
I find this interesting because it's an area where capitalism theory and socialist theory agree yet protecting house values has somehow become the entire focus of our economy. Even the term, the "tragedy of the commons" was a 1968 invention [3] and this still dominates discourse even though it was disproven with empircal evidence, work which garnered the 2009 Nobel Prize for Economics [4].
So land accumulation is both capitalist and socialist so how did we get here? I guess the landowners. So when people defend the likes of Atherton doing this, it's not based on any ideology at all. Oh and the poster-children for rent-seeking still have to be the Resnicks [5].
CEQA was a well-intentioned law. But as we've seen it's been effectively weaponized by the billionaires, the propaganda has been created NIMBYs and we now have an economy that most rewards land-hoarding with no economic output. And that's the real reason this happens and will keep happening.
[1]: https://www.tiktok.com/@henryfudgeofficial/video/76460341810...
[2]: https://henryfudgeofficial.substack.com/p/the-housing-theory...
[3]: https://math.uchicago.edu/~shmuel/Modeling/Hardin,%20Tragedy...
[4]: https://aeon.co/essays/the-tragedy-of-the-commons-is-a-false...
[5]: https://perfectunion.us/how-this-billionaire-couple-stole-ca...

by refulgentis

1 subcomments

I agree completely and empathetically and vehemently with the idea behind the message.
The slop & aggressively poor argumentation, the kind that I think would have caused me to fail it if I tried it in speech & debate in middle school, leaves me feeling empty.
They keep saying $400M, $400M, $400M, $400M, and the only cost they came up with is $20M. It makes me uncomfortable to support the overall cause if this is how it'll be played, because, setting aside morality of tactics, it's not playing to win. Anyone who is at the margins will see it plainly and be given a reason not to listen.

by george916a

0 subcomment

[dead]

by quantumwoke

2 subcomments

[flagged]

by rayiner

4 subcomments

Local governments are obsolete, a holdover from when you had to have a government entity over areas within a day’s horseback ride. States should disestablish these towns and counties and reorganize them as administrative subdivisions of the state that answer directly to the governor and state legislature.

by shitloadofbooks

3 subcomments

What is the name for the literary device that LLMs use where it explains something and then follows with a "pithy" "gotcha" sentence?
> > Atherton didn't have to win. A CEQA lawsuit doesn't need a strong legal theory to do damage — it just needs to introduce enough risk that funders freeze and clocks keep running. The delay is the weapon.
In my opinion, this construct is massively overused by LLMs and is extremely jarring to read. The pithy followup "The delay is the weapon." feels like Year 8 Debate Club and is very melodramatic and cringy.
It must be possible to steer the LLM away from this?