[nhf]

He's rightfully dunking on the Van Ness bus line for some reasons, but it's basically a major utilities infrastructure project disguised as a bus lane. They're overhead power and reconfiguring the street, but they're also replacing ~4 miles of 1800s water main, putting in a new earthquake-resistant sewer system, and redoing the fire hydrant water feeds.

I feel like it's more of a branding failure honestly. People would be much more understanding - if you heard "we're replacing 1800s utilities with 21st century tech built for the earthquake zone in SF and you get better transit along with that", I think the conversation would be much different than "it's taken a decade to build a new lane".

[Gibbon1]

That reminds me a bit of the California High Speed rail project. A bunch of the work in the central valley is grade separation for existing freight rail lines.

[wbl]

But then we'd wonder why the transit needs to be conditioned on the utilities. This is political malpractice undermining support for bus lanes citywide.

[phonon]

News article says [T]he $189 million project, which is part of a larger complimentary (sic) sewer and street light replacement project totalled at $316 million.[0]

[0] https://www.sfexaminer.com/news/two-mile-long-van-ness-bus-l...