> France’s unions are powerful, but Mr. Probst said they did not control project staffing. Isabelle Brochard of RATP, a state-owned company that operates the Paris Metro and is coordinating the Line 14 project, estimated there were 200 total workers on the job, each earning $60 per hour. The Second Avenue subway project employed about 700 workers, many making double that (although that included health insurance).
It seems like transit bureaucracies in the US don't have the expertise to manage massive construction projects and little incentive to control costs.
I was unable to browse the link because the site is overloaded, but I'm familiar with Alon Levy and his blog. Hopefully the data makes a difference but bureaucrats often to respond that their situation is unique and not comparable to other countries.
Construction is fundamentally a business of optimizing for minimum cost within the law. Taking the foreign companies and making them operate in NYC would get you the same result as the local companies because the root problem is decades old laws that more or less serve to create regulatory capture to benefit the members of various unions and trades organizations.
What do you mean? What would give foreign companies an advantage? If a transit construction project can be done at lower cost, isn't that a good thing, for the local government and for riders? And construction is something that hires local workers anyway.
Foreign firms do bid, just not with lower costs or faster schedules. Skanska from Sweden is in charge of NYC's East Side Access, which was originally forecasted to be completed in 2007 at a cost of $4B, and has morphed into the world's most expensive per-mile rail project at $12B with a completion date in the 2020s.
Construction workers are generally hired locally, and I doubt that specialized construction skills would be considered qualifications worthy of priority visas in the US.
I'm insanely excited about this. One of the research scholars, Alon Levy, has written extensively about infrastructure costs on the blog https://pedestrianobservations.com/.
It's an important topic, yet unsexy for the general public, which is why it needs more attention.
Cost just seem to slowly ratchet up in the US, with each piece of the process/org taking their little chunk of $. I'm sure rising standard of living is part of it, risk aversion, outsourcing public infrastructure capabilities (and responsibility) to private contractors. Add to it also the important topic that we've fallen out of practice (as a country) of having large numbers of people who are capable of working on these kinds of infrastructure -- so it gets more expensive to find them.
It's a big loss. We could have 2x or 3x the new infrastructure we do, if it didn't cost so much.
I wonder how it works in Tokyo. They have the most impressive infrastructure of any city I've ever been to, and it seems that is because they never stop. At that point, it makes sense to just salary everyone involved and not deal with the corruption that comes from outsourcing. The most popular vehicle on the road in Tokyo appears to be the concrete mixer.
I've heard that the railway companies in Tokyo own a lot of the real estate around the stations. They cross finance public transport as a means of making the buildings they own more attractive.
It’s not just transit. All local government projects in the US suffer from cost disease. No doubt corruption and waste plays a part, as do rapacious unions, but there is also the whole machinery of public participation designed to prevent future Robert Moses from steamrollering their pet projects, which worked all too well.
It's not just government. At my company some business units do their best to spend as much as they can, even if it's grossly inefficient. To me, it feels like Parkinson's law both in terms of time and resources.
It's simple - the incentives are aligned against not spending.
When the basic of budgeting, whether public or private, is "use it or lose it", there's no incentive to lower costs - because if you lower costs now, then next year you won't get funds to do something useful.
You can also go the other way around, where you give a bonus based on amount of unspent budget... Which quickly results in all spending cut where possible by the person who would get said bonus, regardless of whether it damages the goal of the organisation or not, and with no care that long-term effect might be higher spending than not (for example due to half-assing vehicle maintenance).
Yep, the same thing happens in both public and private sectors. As a company gets older and bigger, there's a strong tendency for it to accumulate the kind of semi-parasitic costs you mention, get worse at changing things due to bureaucratic ossification, develop more intricate internal politics, and so on. And then there's simple regression toward the mean: a company that becomes successful due to unusually good luck and leadership will probably not have unusually good luck in the future; on average they will have average luck, which will cause them to go downhill. Entropy reigns eternal!
... And yet, things we buy from private companies tend to get cheaper and better over time. It's weird, isn't it? I think the big difference here is that private companies are not immortal monopolies, but government agencies are. Sears was the Amazon of its day, and gradually became less impressive -- but we weren't screwed, because now Amazon is the Amazon of its day, and in time we'll find out what upstages Amazon. In contrast, the government of New York used to be unusually good at building subways -- but now it can barely maintain what it already has, and people living in NYC are just stuck with it, because there's no realistic mechanism for the department in question to be replaced with a more competent one.
I'm increasingly convinced that solving this category of problem is one of the most important unsolved political questions, and it's tragically under-explored.
> I'm increasingly convinced that solving this category of problem is one of the most important unsolved political questions, and it's tragically under-explored.
Not necessarily. Bruges lost its dominant economic place in the Low Countries because they failed to invest in maintenance and the canal to Zeebrugge silted over. Much the same happened in Saint Louis and explains how Chicago became the capital of the Midwest despite a couple hundred years' late start.
I doubt New York will go the way of Detroit, but that is an object lesson of what happens when cities don't stay on top of things.
>It’s not just transit. All local government projects in the US suffer from cost disease.
There are plenty of government projects done on time and at reasonable cost. Nobody here knows about them because you will never find them in the trendy major metros and upper class suburbs in which the occupants of HN live. Those places have money to burn so they burn it. Rust belt cities and Nowhereville rural towns and other places strapped for cash generally get their moneys worth because people the world over generally do their jobs and for the bureaucrats calling the shots in those places spending the minimum amount of scant resources to get something done is just part of the job. People shit on these cities for their crap roads, their run down school buildings and generally not being up to the kind of standards that a bunch of upper middle class people expect but you know what, their roads and their schools work just fine.
feels like Covid has put a serious dent on interest in mass transit...used car sales are through the roof. and people seem to be moving out of urban areas to suburbs.
There doesn't seem to be data supporting this assertion in the US. Used car sales were slightly up in June 2020 vs. June 2019, but May was flat and April and March were way, way down.
Going beyond anecdote to data shows the US transit ridership is down, but I don't think this is based on the reality of transmission possibilities.
When people get scared, they retreat from that which culture tells them to fear, which includes transit for the US. However, when you look at other places that use lots of transit, like Japan and Korea, we don't see much spread on transit. So the fear is not so much reality based. In plain contrast, churches are shown to have had many super-spread events, including in South Korea, yet people seemingly can't wait to get back to church, perhaps because it is a place that they view as intrinsically safe even though the evidence shows otherwise.
In short, humans are really bad at evaluating risk, especially in our current media environment which is has a very low Signal to noise ratio.
This has been my experience. We do not own a car, so my household still relies on transit for our uses, and our use of transit is way down simply because there's nowhere to go. I don't need to commute to work, we refuse to go sit in a poorly-ventilated restaurant just for grins, and virtually all of our regular needs are met by walking to them. When we do ride the bus (as there's no light rail to our neighborhood yet), it's to a park.
King County Metro, the public transit agency serving Seattle, has been cleaning its buses a lot more often and requiring mask use[0] for almost the whole pandemic. On the routes we use, I've noticed near-100% mask compliance and the buses are cleaner than I've seen them in a decade. I feel safer on a Metro bus than I do in a grocery store, where store employees are (with reason) fearful of confronting people who flout the mask rules and customers are incapable of following one way signs on the floors and aisles.
Yet in our mixed-use apartment complex, where residential is built above ground-floor restaurant and retail, the restaurants have been permitted by the landlord to put far more tables outside. (This is privately-owned land, so not on the public sidewalk.) This makes it impossible to walk through our complex and stay separated from diners, unmasked of course since it's hard to eat a mask on, talking and laughing. Yet we're all outside and the contact time is brief, so I've not said anything to the landlord because the risk is low and the restaurants need the income.
I wish, and hope, that our transit agencies will step up their marketing and outreach efforts to tell people what they're doing and why transit is safe. Because we have neither the space nor the plant environment for more cars and more trips by car.
0 - Until recently, Metro has not been actively enforcing this requirement but, starting this month, Metro "Health Ambassadors" are at transit centers, major transfer points, and riding on buses to hand out masks and "educate and remind" people of the mask requirement in all public places, per the Governor's rule.
> "In short, humans are really bad at evaluating risk, especially in our current media environment which is has a very low Signal to noise ratio."
that needs to be printed and hung on every door in america, as a constant reminder that we're in all the messes we're in because we're individually, and sometimes even collectively, bad at assessing risk.
the near-singular infatuation with covid relative to everything else that can and does kill us is rationally misguided (which is not to say ignore covid, just put it in its relative place). and news outlets like npr and nytimes that used to be considered relatively neutral are simply no longer trustworthy. self-righteous assertions of control with little concrete understanding is a dangerous road to be traveling down.
Not only that, but many Americans seem to misinterpret satire, like the Fox News entertainment network tends to broadcast, as fact or news.
I think it comes down to poor education. Not being familiar with the pedagogy I am certainly not in a position to recommend improvements, but I can say that if the obvious is getting so badly misinterpreted to the point of real harm, someone has not learned the basics very well.
well, to be fair, i think most fox newsers "believe" the commentary because of identity and a desire to will things into fact, rather than a serious, considered conviction. there's no desire to critique, and folks are generally aware of this, though not always omnipresently in their minds and actions.
you see the same phenomenon in church membership too, which legitimizes and reinforces this behavior in secular life. those used to be more compartmentalized, but that seems to have become unbound over the past 40-50 years, with (mostly) republican politicians intentionally blurring church and state for political gain.
our education could improve, especially around rationality and critical thinking, but i don't think that will make (or would have made) a large dent in the behaviors of fox newsers. they're largely responding to both an intentional and mutually-reinforced misperception of risk of "others" all around encroaching on their otherwise pure and wholesome lives. it's a totally unfounded risk, but that's beside the point, because the intention is tribalist, not rationalist (similar to maskers who prioritize compliance over risk appropriateness).
tribalism is the problem, put to very effective use by the will to power to divide and conquer. an effective contravention is to widen the tribe to include everyone, but that's hard to achieve and maintain.
>In short, humans are really bad at evaluating risk, especially in our current media environment which is has a very low Signal to noise ratio.
Isn't this just a nicer way of saying that the unwashed masses don't have the same priorities the experts want them to?
We live in a democracy, shouldn't social consensus do the lion's share of work in defining what is and isn't good risk assessment? If the overwhelming majority of people would rather be scared of a rare disease than a car crash then doesn't that kind of define what our priorities are even if guarding against the latter looks better on the metrics?
There are some questions that are clearly questions of fact. For example, "Which killed more Americans last year, car accidents or terrorist attacks?"
There are some questions that are clearly questions of opinion. For example "Should we spend more money on reducing car accidents than we spend on anti-terror efforts?"
There are also questions that straddle the border - for example "Should lives shortened by pollution count as deaths caused by cars?"
While questions of opinion are the domain of social consensus and democracy, it's not particularly elitist to say the purely factual questions need a right answer rather than a popular one.
No, elitism or "unwashed masses" has nothing at all to do with this. It's about making decisions based on gut or based on better information.
We have news media that works far harder to promote emotional culture wars than promote information transfer, and we have people succumbing to tribalism, and that has nothing to do with whether one is part of some sort of "unwashed masses" or whether they are part of elite decision makers that control what sort of propaganda/news/media that hundreds of millions of people see.
Information isn't some sort of perfect market where people see what they like the best, it is hugely influenced by what people create and what influential people promote.
No argument that the subway is having a bad year. MTA bus ridership might be off less than you imagine, though. And citibike ridership is up 20%. I don't live in NY anymore so I don't have any anecdotes.
But I don't know if it's because of 2020 or I'm just a cynic, but getting gov't or even the private sector to implement solutions that come out of such a think tank is going to be tough. I feel that people in power are becoming very nearsighted
Organizations that are poor and have no choice but to perform efficiently are the only ones that do. The catch is they get less done because they're poor. Buffalo doesn't have a subway but if they did you can bet your ass they'd get more for your dollar than than the MTA does. Likewise your local dirt and scrap haulers are making their trucks go further per dollar than the high dollar urban construction outfits could ever hope to. When you don't have a lot you care about how it gets used.
Fitting. "There will be a small project delay of 8 months to get the website to a state where it's able to serve active web visitors. Also, please increase our budget by 20%."
> France’s unions are powerful, but Mr. Probst said they did not control project staffing. Isabelle Brochard of RATP, a state-owned company that operates the Paris Metro and is coordinating the Line 14 project, estimated there were 200 total workers on the job, each earning $60 per hour. The Second Avenue subway project employed about 700 workers, many making double that (although that included health insurance).
It seems like transit bureaucracies in the US don't have the expertise to manage massive construction projects and little incentive to control costs.
I was unable to browse the link because the site is overloaded, but I'm familiar with Alon Levy and his blog. Hopefully the data makes a difference but bureaucrats often to respond that their situation is unique and not comparable to other countries.