Fair. Maybe I'm too much if the weeds of this because all I can think of is how much of a fight it was to pass ST2 and ST3 and how we haven't even started on the Ballard line despite voting for it in 2016 (10 years ago!) and how it might be delayed forever.

I get that it is neat but it's hardly the Hoover dam is it?

No, it's not an insane engineering achievement. It's just a normal one, because nobody else has floating bridges, nobody else needed it. It's also years late and costs 10x more than it should.

It's also the wrong stupid technology. The trains are constrained on space because of the low-floor bullshit. It's the longest light rail in the country, it's too fucking long and slow. Even if we fully built out ST3 it can't handle more than ~20% of commuters. It can't be expanded with express tracks because it's built deep underground, so the commute is so much slower than the equivalent in other countries and will NEVER compete with the automobile except during peak rush hour. The northern stations are next to the freeway so over half the land that could be transit-oriented development can't be, and then what's left is devoted to parking anyway. Complete, total waste of a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, built and planned by people who don't and won't ever use transit.

That 10x cost directly makes it so we can't build out our system properly and we keep building out car infrastructure because people would rather have a car and save 2 hours a day commuting.

The commute is slow because the light rail is slow. It's the wrong technology for commuter rail and there are too many stops. (I'm assuming you live north).

(more details: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47457884)

Can't do highspeed rail because it's too impractical and expensive, while we're spending a west coast highspeed rail network worth of money on the least popular war in US history.

Evidently tax cuts for the wealthy are more important than infrastructure.

If you watch the OP, you'll see that the construction of this aqueduct caused billions of dollars worth of environmental devastation. Rail all you want against regulations, but when an argument boils down to "I wish we didn't have to internalize all these costs and could just push them off on someone else", I'm not especially sympathetic.

Certainly that’s part of it, but also just NIMBYism. Los Angeles were able to defeat the Owen’s Valley farmers back then, I don’t think they would be now.

That may be true for some twisted definition of "building". Most people would say the money is simply being wasted by bureaucrats, consultancies, etc.

And when did that project start and how much has it cost and how far can you ride on what they've completed up until now?

Progress is made on it daily? Great. How soon can I ride it?