> The first element, that’s the one that used to be present but isn’t anymore, is a large public sector, because you need a large enough bureaucracy that can supervise all the contractors.
If a large public sector is a prerequisite for lower-cost transit, then the cost of that large public sector needs to be included in calculating the cost of transit. I suspect that would change the analysis quite a bit.
Probably less than you'd think. Levy is delivering a punchy oneliner here; what the Transit Costs Project research indicates is that what's often missing in countries with high construction costs isn't so much bureaucrats as it is in-house engineering and technical program management resources. A lot of the design and program management work they do needs to be done by someone, but in countries with high construction costs this work mostly tends to be done either by consultants or by the contractors themselves, and that leads to misaligned incentives.
They do get into these things a little bit later in the interview, but the surprisingly simple conclusion is that when an organization is buying something, the people working out the deal need to understand what it is they're buying, or the organization gets ripped off. It sounds simple to the point of being silly when I put it like that, but it's actually true. And this should feel familiar to a lot of people in tech; how many times have you had to use or implement some very stupid system that got purchased because of buzzwords or because the people deciding what to use aren't the people using the system? (Education is particularly plagued by these problems.) What the Transit Costs Project finds is that this is a thing in public works as well: if your civil service has insufficient in-house technical expertise in its field, or if it doesn't trust its own technical expertise, that tends to make costs go up. It's far from the only contributing factor, but it's an important one.
When cost overruns for these types of projects can routinely be measured in billions of dollars, I think it's not that hard to justify hiring a few dozen civil engineers to keep things under control. The "big" civil service Levy talks about doesn't necessarily need to be big in terms of team size, but it needs to have weight.
This topic is so politicized that the transit lovers don't feel free publicly acknowledging all of the costs. For instance, one manager of the local bus company said that while new city buses cost $800k+++, they're a good deal when spread out over 12 year and all of the passengers. So I asked him to include the cost of the driver-- and the driver's benefits-- and that totally changed the equation. It can reach $1m/year to fully staff a bus over a year. Suddenly, the hardware isn't the biggest expense over the lifespan of the bus.
50k per driver per year sounds low. This page [0] suggests the low end is 60k and that's just what the driver makes, not the full loaded cost of the employee with benefits. I've seen the estimate for a loaded cost to be 25-40% more than the salary. So it ends up being more like 75k per driver.
Your estimates are fine, but you're only talking about the basic salary which in the US is only part of the equation. You've got to include benefits including health insurance which is easily $10-20k/year in the US for a family. Add in pension costs and it's a good rule of thumb to double the quoted basic salary. If you do this, the $350k of your estimate becomes $700k. Add in more for two to three layers of management, and you're easily over $1m.
Note my comment below, parents quotes expenses aren’t grounded in actual audited finances.
I’d just note that in the US at least, bus services generally operate at a loss and run many routes due to political reasons rather than efficiency/profitability.
The interstate system is almost profitable for the government. Fuel taxes raise somewhere around 30 billion to 40 billion a year, and the amount spent in interstate system maintenance every year is about that amount. If they increased the tax slightly, and stopped siphoning money off of it to fund non-road expenditures, it would be in the black.
I wasn’t intending to make a statement on whether or not public transit should be independently profitable, just providing context.
I didn’t even touch on ridiculous regulations like “buy America” (aka all buses have to be manufactured in the US) that drive up the cost of transit in a way that private drivers would never accept.
Precisely the right question to ask! Profit vs. loss has no relevance when one is providing a public service. The relevant question is cost: capital investment / creation cost & operating cost.
> Profit vs. loss has no relevance when one is providing a public service.
I beg to differ. While profit shouldn’t be the only indicator under consideration, when you are operating a state owned enterprise under a fee for service model, profit is certainly a valid metric to consider.
Cost and benefit. You could spend £10b a year providing a 12tph high speed train from Wales AK to Prudhoe Bay, but there wouldn’t be a reasonable benefit from it.
No offense to said manager, but I’m guessing they aren’t doing the accounting, so it’s not like they are the best source.
Edit: a better source would be the national transit database [0], which tracks the fully audited costs of every transit agency in the US. A very cursory analysis of this file [1], dividing total costs by VOMS (aka vehicles used to provide peak service, not even the size of the whole vehicle fleet) for directly operated bus service (mode=MB, TOS=DO). Gives a cost of roughly $250,000 per year on average across the US. This is fully loaded, including operations, vehicle and facility maintenance, general admin, etc. basically the $1 million per year is little more than a rumor.
This was an interesting read, with a couple of glaring errors:
* The systems that predate the modern NYC subway were not called the IRT. The IRT was a single system, which now makes up the “A Division” of the subway. The other system was the BMT, which was combined with the IND to make up the “B Division” (since they have compatible trackage and car lengths/widths, unlike the IRT).
* The interviewee claims that the IND only really expanded into two new areas (via the crosstown line and QBL), which isn’t true: the IND also included the Culver and Fulton lines, both of which cover otherwise underserved neighborhoods.
Alon Levy definitely knows about the history of the IRT, the BMT, and the IND, so the interview getting that wrong is definitely odd. Although from the way it's worded, it's possible that it's just the interviewer doing an incorrect transcription, since Alon clearly refers to "the privates" (plural).
There's an Oxford professor, Bent Flyvbjerg (bonus points for knowing how to pronounce this) who's devoted his career to analyzing very large projects and why they're so terrible. The problems are not limited to transit, and they extend to big software projects and big construction as well. (Spoiler: they're inherent in the organization of bigness.)
Willie Brown (former mayor of SF and state legislative leader), when he was safely out of office, said the quiet part out loud: the initial estimates are just to sell the project. No one on the inside takes them seriously.
Some serious ADHD apparent in this interview. Like what was that digression about North African countries writing in French? That really should have been edited out.
The theme of that section was about impact of history/tradition on the (suboptimal) ways countries do construction, including "X country tends to learn from Y country's approach even if the realities of X and Y are very different."
I think the point was North Africa learns from France even though the situations are vastly different. All of Asia following Japan's approach was another example.
Surprised nobody in this thread mentioned "How Big Things Get Done". Fantastic read that talks about the challenges of big projects when they don't bring on the right people with existing expertise:
This theme comes up a few times in the article. It is a misunderstanding of the Western mindset.
Everyone involved can see that there are people out there who are better than us at building. The issue is that their methods are unacceptable and, when understood, are likely to be explicitly rejected.
Think of it like communists refusing to allow private ownership - the evidence is available that private ownership leads to better results overall and they understand the mechanics of how it works. The issue is that there is a fundamental rejection of the idea that someone is entitled to control the benefits of an asset. There is no mechanical confusion about what would happen if private property was instituted, or how to affect it.
It isn't a question of learning new things. The problem is things that are politically desirable (pristine air quality, well paid jobs for workers with ironclad security, not upsetting anyone, strong regulatory controls) are incompatible with a cheap & high quality product. As I repeat ad nauseam, most of what China does to successfully build infrastructure is literally illegal in the West.
This ignores the fact that European countries are able to complete infrastructure projects with better worker protections and tighter environmental controls for a fraction of the cost. I haven’t read the article in question but follow Alon’s blog where he provides ample examples of this… https://pedestrianobservations.com/
I'm sure they are, but that is not quite addressing what I'm saying. I'm saying that building an effective transit system obviously isn't the purpose of the systems that control New York's transit.
There are interest groups prioritising objectives other than building the infrastructure. Otherwise it is impossible to justify the actual outcomes of these projects - it goes waaaaay beyond incompetence and although everyone identifies a different interest group there is consensus that they exist. And my personal point is that the US (anglosphere, really) has a lot of systems to identify minority interest groups and make satisfying them a key part of completing a project.
And therefore the problem isn't that people are refusing to learn, the problem is that building infrastructure isn't a priority. Someone who builds good infrastructure doesn't have any useful lessons to share, because that wasn't Goal #1. The people with veto power over the projects would like the infrastructure, sure, but if it doesn't get built cheaply and too a good standard then that isn't going to be a shock to the system that causes change.
This article is subtly suggesting that there is a competence problem. I'm saying no, I think the people involved in this are plenty competent. There are just interest groups with enough power to scuttle the project and they need to be identified and negotiated with.
One of the most egregious issues with the second avenue extension is that the underground portion is way larger than comparable systems. A large part of this is backoffic space (which should be overground and consolidated, like everywhere else), which no minority interest group is interest in. And you can see that: In the next Phase they have reduced the backoffice space (which no passenger will ever notice) due to cost pressures (saving over a billion, I think) and no one complained.The same is true for many other examples.
This is also noticable elsewhere. When looking at german planning, they reference other german projects and rarely projects of the sourrounding countries, and thus often don't notice the lessons learned there.
> I'm saying that building an effective transit system obviously isn't the purpose of the systems that control New York's transit.
You were not saying that. You said "The problem is things that are politically desirable are incompatible with a cheap & high quality product." That is an absolute statement. These two things are incompatible. It is not possible to have both.
To which tomgp responded with an example where seemingly they have both. The things which you said are incompatible with each other.
And then just after that you say that the "systems that control New York's transit" is basically corrupt.
So which one is it? Because these two are two very different situations and switching from one to the other feels quite dishonest to be honest with you.
I think the US (and perhaps all other countries) have plenty of experience running roughshod over local interests. In the US case big infrastructure programs of the 50s were typically built on black communities; in the mid 1850s Hausmann built the central Paris of today by demolishing whatever he wanted.
It’s a positive thing that people’s interests are heard as infrastructure is for everyone. If there’s going to be a road, water treatment plant, or courthouse it has to be built somewhere, so some sacrifice has to be made, but better that there is some discussion, no?
There has been a destructive and cynical view of the commonweal for the last 40-50 years which has made these discussion completely oppositional but that doesn’t have to be the case. The article touches on this.
> most of what China does to successfully build infrastructure is literally illegal in the West
The biggest thing China does to successfully build infrastructure is to repeat successful previous designs without modifying them - ie build 10 identical nuclear reactors, bridges, stations etc - and utilise the scale to do it much cheaper (it doesn't matter if your nuclear reactor is 30% less efficient than the latest, if you can build it for 30% cheaper in half the time)
That's not illegal in the west it just appears hard to do.
Exactly, Chinas biggest secret is to lean on economies of scale. In case of transit they standardised early-on on only five types of train/rail-corridor and then whenever a city needed a metro, lightrail or any other type of rail transit they would just pick one of the five that fits best and build it using all the knowhow and economies of scale from previous builds. RMTransit has a good video about it [1]
As I understand it, the challenge in building is in adapting the plan to site specifics, or adapting the site to the plan. In China and other top-down planning regimes, they will adapt the site to the plan. If the station or school plan requires that a historic neighborhood be impacted to use the plan unchanged, farewell to historic buildings. Here we adapt the plan to fit within the space, or whatever, but that quickly eliminates the cost savings, as now each station or school is slightly unique.
This also shows up in residential and other smaller projects. Look at the historic aerial photos of Levittown, NY and PA, which created the notion of the suburb:
The original landscape is completely eliminated, all original trees are gone, it's been scraped clean. Most developments near major cities are infill or replacement, and they adapt their plans to the site. There are still greenfield builds happening in exurban areas, but in existing metro areas, everything is bespoke.
One step out from "repeat successful designs" perhaps is "use the same project planning team / infrastructure from one project to the next" ?
A critical flaw in US infrastructure is that the infrastructure owners typically have no "large project" management skills -- the transit system is run at a "starvation level" that keeps the staffing at just barely enough to keep the system running and there's no spare resource to have some "enormous engineering project" project manager just sitting around just in case you want to run a big project. Instead these organizations hire an external project management organization that (usually) doesn't share incentives with the client organization.
It's unsurprising that large infrastructure projects without proper oversight end up being run poorly.
From the article:
VA: This lack of effective leadership from the public sector comes up over and over again in your discussions of American transit, both internally and in their relationships with other actors. They struggle at cooperating with other agencies — with the Department of Transportation, with the Department of Environmental Protection, with parks, with buildings, with the fire department. And they’re also quite inefficient at managing consultants because they don’t have enough technical in-house knowledge to really understand how to.
AL: Exactly. So then they’ll hire a consultant to manage the consultants — it’s the most ridiculous thing.
Another thing they do is not a public/private build out. China owns the companies building the roads. It gets to set the price, design, wages, etc.
The reason things are expensive in the US is privatization. It should be super obvious why. The contractors we hire are super incentivized to drag things out and bloat costs. They make more money by doing less. And since the gov is footing the bill, no harm no foul.
It gets even worse when you take corruption into account. Because now the mayor can get nice kickbacks for awarding contracts to their drinking buddies who also are mysteriously campaign donors. Not saying corruption doesn't happen in china, it does, but not generally for infrastructure things. Instead, it's the drinking buddies being put in charge of the projects.
One of the dumbest parts of Reaganomics was removing the public ability to maintain public infrastructure.
It seems unlikely that a cookie cutter design could just be emplaced in different areas without running into problems in the environmental reviews. Different local conditions would presumably require different local considerations.
Projects can get shut down because Red Spotted Scuttlers are spotted in the local area. Or the local laws require different pollution controls. This is a facet of why I say "literally illegal" - I don't think your plan can be executed in a reliable sense while being legally on the straight and narrow path. Certainly not if activist groups start looking to take a project out by lawfare.
It is a good idea, but to pull it off requires that nobody wants the project to fail. If someone goes looking it probably breaks rules.
Yeah of course it works. It is possible that literally everyone knows that approach works. How to build buildings things cheaply is not a mystery to the building builders.
The issues is that the people making the decisions either don't want it to be cheap, or aren't allowed to make the cheap decisions. I'm betting option 2.
The activists of various stripes, locals, courts and regulators. occasionally bad incentives or requirements by whoever contracts out the work if it is sponsored by a public body.
What if you looked at all the justifications in the US and engineered for the most onerous ones by default rather than per project? It may raise the initial cost but would likely allow for the repeatability cost savings which could theoretically offset. A cursory non expert look at this suggests that things thst must be followed in the most onerous places also cover lesser places, but I’m no expert.
Local environmental reviews remain a real challenge then though assuming it can even be done.
If you can't build the design, then someone will have to design something else that can be built. If people aren't already using cookie cutter designs, there is a reason for that. The reason may be one that most people don't like, but it is still going to be there.
And I am putting that the reason is probably going to be that the law probably does require consideration of site-specific factors.
> Strange how literally everyone in the world can figure this out, but not the US.
As mentioned, most of the world doesn't apply US standards and laws.
And you're speaking a bit strongly. Most of the world doesn't figure infrastructure out. The median for project management and country-wide governance is dysfunctional failure across most of the globe. You can tell because most people are impoverished despite us having all the tools to sort that out for something like a century.
> As mentioned, most of the world doesn't apply US standards and laws.
EU environmental protection rules are, generally, rather stricter than those in the US, and Europe does mostly manage to build proper train systems (though not nuclear plants, unless one happens to be France).
It's worth noting that the US has no particular problem building _roads_, visiting from Europe, as a country it seems to be about 50% road. I don't think environmental rules are as big a factor as you think they are in the US's train-y woes.
EDIT: An interesting point of comparison might be Ireland; like the US, Ireland is a wealthy country which can't build infrastructure to save its life. It has pretty much the same environmental rules as other highly-developed European countries, but hyper-local politics and extreme NIMBYism makes doing anything impossible.
There's a proposal at the moment to build a high-speed (ie 300km/h) line from Cork to Dublin to Belfast, but it's more or less tacitly acknowledged that that's the sort of thing you just can't do here, so there is a parallel plan, which may actually happen, to upgrade the existing Cork to Dublin line to fake high speed (ie 200km/h); this is kind of within the realm of the possible in Ireland, in that it doesn't require a new line, so may eventually happen at huge expense. Sound familiar?
> EU environmental protection rules are, generally, rather stricter than those in the US, and Europe does mostly manage to build proper train systems
It’s not a question of US laws being stricter (i.e. more protective of the environment), but rather requiring a process that is more onerous and expensive. In France, for example, the government does whatever environmental review is appropriate in deciding whether to build something. It then passes a law to build the thing, which preempts all local laws that could hold up building of the thing. Once the decision has been made, you can’t easily sue to stop the project in its tracks.
In the US, the government’s decision to build something is just the first step in a process that involves many layers of review and phases of litigation that takes years before you can start digging.
The US appears to be 50% road due to sampling bias because you travel everywhere by road. The US also also has far more freight rail per capita than the EU.
It’s less a matter of who is better at building rail, than it is prioritizing freight over passengers.
So, funny thing. Most of my experience of the US has been San Francisco and its immediate area. From my perspective, it's very road-oriented, and has an astonishing amount of space given over to parking; giant tech company offices and new apartment blocks are side by side with massive parking lots. You just don't really see that much in large European cities.
Anyway, looks like it's 3% based on that map (though the area I was primarily thinking of falls just outside their definition of 'central', I think), compared to _26%_ for Atlanta. I'm having trouble visualising what that even looks like.
I went to school right in the middle of that map. It’s very selectively picked to get to 26%.
The boundary includes a very small percentage of the city which happens to house a large sports stadiums, local and federal government buildings, a large hospital, and one of the largest universities in the country that is primarily a commuter school.
Also the map seems to count some of the underground parking at GSU as taking up space above ground.
I don’t think they are talking about parking because parking has nothing to do with a government being able to build roads vs rails. Parking essentially has none of the problems of building across the boundaries of multiple land owners that makes building a road or rail difficult.
Even if you do count roads if you move that boundary out just a little the number will drastically drop. It’s essentially a boundary drawn around some government buildings, sports arenas, and one of the largest Universities in the world which also happens to be a commuter school (I went there for undergrad btw).
> If you can't build the design, then someone will have to design something else that can be built.
Again. This literally has nothing to do with cookie cutter designs.
If something cannot be built in the area because there's some local wildlife, there are exactly two choices:
- no building is permitted, period, so you build in a different place (or don't build)
- you can build, so you chose the cookie cutter design for the type of construction permitted. E.g. you can't build on the ground, but can build a bridge? You literally take "bridge cookie cutter design N" out of 3 cookie cutter designs for a bridge station (or out of the 15 combinations for a modular station because that's what cookie cutter designs are).
> If people aren't already using cookie cutter designs, there is a reason for that.
It's not. It's the US' insistence on how special and unique they are.
> As mentioned, most of the world doesn't apply US standards and laws.
US is not as special as you make it out to be. The world also has "Red Spotted Scuttlers" and different pollution considerations based on locations, etc.
There is a 3rd option - do a custom design that considers site-specific issues. Say there is a project with an unusual requirement. Taking one from my experience, a height limit so that a certain area still gets an appropriate amount of sun.
The options are "go", "redesign to be more squat" or "no-go".
What I'm giving you is a sketch at how advanced environmental laws actually conflict with the idea of using cookie cutter designs. The ideas are at odds with each other.
> The world also has "Red Spotted Scuttlers"
Not after a typical infrastructure project. Usually a bunch of habitat gets killed off and it isn't unusual to lose a population of something exotic.
> There is a 3rd option - do a custom design that considers site-specific issues.
And this option is extremely rare.
> What I'm giving you is a sketch at how advanced environmental laws actually conflict with the idea of using cookie cutter designs.
No. What you're giving me is a lie that these are applicable everywhere all the time. You're also trying to sell a lie that the US is so distinct and special and unique that it can't have cookie cutter designs (unlike other countries) because only in the US this applies everywhere all the time.
> Not after a typical infrastructure project. Usually a bunch of habitat gets killed off and it isn't unusual to lose a population of something exotic.
That is, of course, not as true and not as common as you make it out to be.
BTW. I live in Stockholm, in a country obsessed with ecology and pollution etc. Most stations are cookie cutter designs (of course). There's exactly one subway station that never got built precisely because there was endangered wildlife in the area.
You are really aggressively arguing that you understand US law while demonstrating repeatedly that you don’t.
Why?
The core of the argument roenxi is making is that the legal system in the US is *very very different* from that which adheres in Sweden.
roenxi at no point argues that the legal system in play in the US is good, or better. They are just saying that because of legal barriers, what you seem to imply is incompetence at the planning level is, in fact, evidence of a poorly designed
legal system.
No, what roenxi, and now you are arguing, quite literally, that somehow cookie cutter designs for infrastructure are impossible because somehow laws are so extremely different and impossible to go around for every single one of the infastructure projects that for every single one you will need a bespoke design because environmental protection or something.
Infrastructure always relies on cookie-cutter designs and/or modular designs, and there's nothing special about the US in this regard except its insistence that it is somehow excluded from common sense.
I agree that that comment summarizes what appears to be your argument “you can build infrastructure cheaper even with restrictive environmental protections”.
The response from rayiner explains why this argument misses the point. It’s not about terminal goals being more or less virtuous in the US. It’s about the *process* for building in the US having many points of potential legal interaction that lead to delays and redesign requirements.
And that legal system is quite different from how large projects are able to be executed in the rest of the developed world.
The US used to build large projects this way, but there was a large populist movement that pushed to add more local veto opportunities.
Those vetoes are extremely expensive at the macro level.
Funnily enough how you can build cookie-cutter parking lots everywhere. Cookie-cutter roads everywhere. Cookie-cutter shopping malls and gas stations everywhere.
But any other bit of infrastructure? "oh no, local laws would not permit it because difficult legal landscape".
So this let me get this straight. This https://maps.app.goo.gl/Y7cvszoFfzxmAG6Q8 (Aurora, CO) and this https://maps.app.goo.gl/ByZfS93g82C1NkjdA (Derry, NH) and this https://maps.app.goo.gl/uUEdDNtcK5MfHZUW8 (Ankeny, IA) and literally hundreds if not thousands of these can be built from cookie-cutter designs so that they are really indistinguishable from each other. But when we talk about anything else, it's "impossible because US is like no other and also you have to make sure there's site-specific design because advanced environment laws actually conflict with the idea of using cookie cutter designs" or something
You keep arguing with a strawman. I’m not sure why.
No one is saying “advanced” environmental laws directly conflict with building specific projects. First, I would never call these laws advanced. They’re bad laws, in my opinion.
Second, what they do is not forbid specific designs. Instead, they allow many different entities to exercise fairly arbitrary veto power over large projects, unless their idiosyncratic demands are met.
To first order approximation, it is the idiosyncratic demands of unpredictable groups of complainants with the power to use lawsuits to delay projects, that lead to large bespoke projects.
The core of the argument is that the folks planning and designing those projects are responding to the threat of lawsuits. Most other countries have one feedback period, rather than allowing an arbitrary number of unknown groups to embroil projects in delaying lawsuits at many different points during planning and construction.
What I'm giving you is a sketch at how advanced environmental laws actually conflict with the idea of using cookie cutter designs. The ideas are at odds with each other.
--- end quote ---
> The core of the argument is that the folks planning and designing those projects are responding to the threat of lawsuits. Most other countries have one feedback period
People keep saying this is impossible to do a) cheaply and b) cookie-cutter style because "laws" whereas the US is littered with cookie-cutter designs indistinguishable from each other in scale much larger than anything we're discussing.
It's not that it's impossible. It's that for some reason the US is a) ignorant, b) assumes it's unique and special in each and every shape or form, c) extremely allergic to any kind of infrastructure except roads.
And then that same US turns around, paves an area the size of Pentagon in a village with population of 1000, and plops immense cookie-cutter designs there and no one blinks an eye.
Are you a non-native English speaker? You do seem to be picking a confusingly aggressive tone given that the topic is infrastructure, and I'm not sure if I should be attributing that to culture clash or if it is just a standard misunderstanding.
1. The context behind that quote was "nuclear reactors, bridges, stations". As far as I know parking lots are being built by private interests on private land and there is no regulatory body responsible for parking lots. So it would make sense that they use good design principles.
2. I wouldn't trust the cookie-cutter impression from looking at roads so much; the design isn't as much in the road itself as in where the road goes and flattening out / tunnelling through/bridging over the local environment (your example earlier of the Swedish Metro, according to Wikipedia, is actually interesting from this aspect because apparently they're putting more of the new parts underground for environmental reasons - if so that is quite slow and expensive relative to above ground construction). In my estimation it isn't that usual to get stories of road projects that are turned in knots due to environmental factors.
But if you want to take roads as different that is fine by me. The US does like building roads, maybe they've got the regulation for that under control.
3.
> Why do you think I put quotes in my last sentence?
I thought it was for emphasis. It isn't a direct quote because you're the person who is talking about impossible things or the US being special - I've been saying US law adds a layer of complications and drives costs up. It only makes things impossible in extreme cases (like what we see with the death of the US nuclear industry).
> Are you a non-native English speaker? You do seem to be picking a confusingly aggressive tone
Is ad hominem your go to argument or you just have no others?
As evidenced below I could ask the same question. I don't.
> The context behind that quote was "nuclear reactors, bridges, stations"
Yes, it was. And? How does this context make anything of what I wrote invalid?
How is it you can build thousands of these: https://maps.app.goo.gl/Y7cvszoFfzxmAG6Q8 across the country but when it comes to "bridges, stations" this becomes "advanced environmental laws actually conflict with the idea of using cookie cutter designs"?
> the design isn't as much in the road itself as in where the road goes and flattening out / tunnelling through/bridging over the local environment
> because you're the person who is talking about impossible things or the US being special
I'm not that person. You're literally spending all your time in this discussion saying how difficult and nigh impossible it is to build cookie-cutter designs for things like bridges and stations in the US. Even though the US is literally one big cookie cutter design from beginning to end for things that are significantly larger than that. I gave three examples of that.
> your example earlier of the Swedish Metro, according to Wikipedia, is actually interesting from this aspect because apparently they're putting more of the new parts underground for environmental reasons
There's no article on Wikipedia about Swedish Metro. This is the article on Wikipedia for Stockholm Metro: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stockholm_Metro Not a single sentence on that page mentions environment. Or ecology.
To expand on your frankly bizarre idea that building a station or a bridge is somehow extremely difficult and cannot be done with cookie cutter designs, here's a map of Stockholm's rail transport: https://sl.se/contentassets/7bf3767b47ed44ff98b06403c08eaa6b...
This includes: subway, commuter train, light rail and narrow-gauge railway.
See how it destroys less of the environment than any shopping mall in the US?
I mean, we could go on. Literally every single station in Stockholm area is cookie-cutter design. Even the 7 or so stations in the center in of the city that photographers like (see e.g. https://uncharted.io/@dominikgehl/exploring-the-stockholm-su...) are absolutely cookie-cutter with all elements absolutely standard and modular, and just have art added on top of them.
Somehow you're arguing that these are very challenging to build in the US because, quote: "It seems unlikely that a cookie cutter design could just be emplaced in different areas without running into problems in the environmental reviews" and "advanced environmental laws actually conflict with the idea of using cookie cutter designs".
I will reiterate: the US is a) ignorant, b) assumes it's unique and special in each and every shape or form, c) extremely allergic to any kind of infrastructure except roads.
And then turn around, look at huge swaths of land covered in cookie cutter shopping malls, and parking lots, and gas stations, and.... and say "yup, that is easy, and good design". If that field of concrete and asphalt could pass environmental review, so can any bridge or station.
Anyway, this is going around in circles, so I bid you a good day.
The original text did not include the word “directly”, which, ironically, is the reason your quote is not direct, and directly vs. indirectly is the substance of our disagreement.
Many of the countries he compares against are part of the Western world, though? Spain, Portugal, Italy, the Nordics - all of these have significantly lower construction costs than in the US. What unacceptable methods are you thinking of, here?
> their methods are unacceptable and, when understood, are likely to be explicitly rejected
I agree, but not for the reasons you've stated.
The methods are unacceptable, because they cut into profits. The reason anything at all is built in the US isn't because of some intrinsic good it will provide; it's because someone will profit off the building. If the finished product provides some value / service, that's entirely incidental.
If you look at it this way, the problem simplifies greatly. It becomes easier to explain why we have failing infrastructure (too costly to maintain = no profit to be made off maintenance), why a lot of new builds seem cheaply done (more expense put into design, materials and execution = less profit), etc etc.
Part of it is political pandering too. Iirc a french team made an early plan for cal hsr that involved going straight up the 5 and one day serving the central valley through spurs. To the polticians whose communities that 5 freeway route would have bypassed that was untenable. Now the route snakes through vs following the fastest and certainly far cheaper 5 right of way (since land is already public here too).
Why were the Pyramids built? The Cathedral of Notre Dame? The American public library system? Or their interstate system, for that matter? Who made bank off contributing to Wikipedia? Was Linus Torvalds driven by a profit motive when creating linux?
Just because the West is ethically bankrupt and collapsing upon itself doesn't mean that humanity has always been that morally poor and unimaginative, or that it needs to continue that way.
There’s a very particular and typically libertarian leaning personality type on the internet who for whatever reason seem to only be able to look at the entirety of the human experience through the lens of economics and they just come to the most ridiculous conclusions.
People who treat profit as a dirty word are responsible for enormous amounts of suffering.
The only valid reason to subsidize some piece of infrastructure is if the provisioned public good leads to more overall wealth. I consider the word "wealth" broad enough to cover things like reducing carbon emissions, these things can be (and should be) estimated in monetary terms, but that will always be an approximation.
My point is that subsidizing unprofitable transportation which doesn't itself provide value in excess of the subsidy is wrong. That's not public service, it's a boondoggle.
The US, like any country, does subsidize infrastructure extensively. This includes the public highway system as well as our remarkable freight rail infrastructure. The reason this works is because the public goods so provisioned pay off extensively in wealth. While this includes the profits of the freighting and trucking companies, who after all won't transport goods if they don't make a profit, it also includes the entire country's population, who benefit from available and cheap goods. There are libertarians who argue that this would work just as well if the roads themselves generate profit, and I think they're wrong about that.
Profit is not a dirty word. I don't think that's an argument anyone is making. Profit is not _sufficient_ motivation to make a lot of infrastructure happen, and until that's recognized we'll be building too little, too late. I think most actually would agree with the rest of your points--I certainly do.
If it isn't profitable overall, it shouldn't be built. Whether or not it should be profitable at the point-of-sale is a different question. But public goods which don't contribute to the common wealth are parasitic makework enriching the few at the expense of the many.
You're baking in a lot of assumptions in the statement "profitable overall". I take it that you mean "benefits society in a way that more than makes up for its cost" but a private company doesn't care, they naturally want immediate or (relatively) short-term profits. A country's first trans-national railway is naturally almost always a net benefit, to take an example, but it's too expensive for the private sector to build alone and almost certainly wouldn't be properly profitable for decades until the infrastructure grows around it.
Some infrastructure or public service building also facilitates something else indirectly, or over a long enough time that it wouldn't feature into any direct calculus. The same goes for services. And how does one quantify this "profitable overall" requirement? This is why big projects are often ultimately a political choice, lambasted by businesses and economists, which often (but not always) are greatly appreciated in hindsight. That shouldn't be carte blanche for people to go out and spend tax money, but it illustrates a certain dilemma.
That's contrary to the reality. I live in a country sometimes described as the most successful communist country in the world, and our people's revolutionary train system is miles ahead anyone else's. "Communist" description is mere irony by the way.
I think allowing market principle to self-regulate cost performance of infrastructure investment has its own merits, but large scale infrastructure like train systems is not something that a commercial entity such as a train operators to just passively and inevitably move towards greater societal goals by nearsighted means of quarterly paperclipping, it's something that totaritalian subsidy and control could yield great results.
So what you're saying is that subsidizing the train infrastructure in your country contributes enough wealth to offset the expense of the subsidy? Weird, that's what I'm saying too.
The article doesn't even mention China, it's comparing the US against other Western countries like Spain, which is actually very good at building public transport.
The article uses several European countries for comparison. These also have "the Western mindset". The article does not even mention China, but refers to Asia, which is pretty big.
This argument is already refuted by the article; building is currently less expensive (often by more than half!) in Western/Northern Europe (excluding UK/Ireland) than in the US, and you can certainly be sure that air quality, labor laws, security and so on are not inferior in any way in Sweden or Germany compared to the US.
how does private ownership not mean that someone is entitled to control the benefits of an asset? isn't that the entire idea of capitalism?
in the context of public (emphasis on PUBLIC) infrastructure, how does pristine air quality, well paid jobs for workers with ironclad security, not upsetting anyone, strong regulatory controls not be considered in a "high quality product"? How could it be high quality without those? The idea that public infrastructure has to be profitable/a product instead of a public good is misguided and ignores the realities of the costs and requirements associated with such things.
would you say that the strong regulatory nature of air travel makes is low quality? if the NTSB/FHWA took car transportation as seriously as flying, I would imagine the US would not have 40,000 deaths a year just from driving. I don't understand how that amount of death (ignoring pollution, minor/serious injuries, personal cost, lost time, resources both monetary and material, etc) makes the US transport choices a "high quality" product.
It's more of an American cultural trait. People are fearful and obsessed with safety. They can be vocal and overreacting for trivial stuff. They often act in a virtue-signalling manner and put stickers on their cars. Before anything gets done, millions of tweets and reddit comments have been written.
In US, safety is often tight to 'will we get sued for this' mentality that is associated with the corrupt legal system. This could also attributed to the over cost of building a train system in US vs other parts of the world.
> Think of it like communists refusing to allow private ownership - the evidence is available that private ownership leads to better results overall and they understand the mechanics of how it works.
This leans on too many historically and philosophically contentious points to be a useful comparison imo. I'm not sure who you mean by "the communists," presumably the USSR and the early PRC? But they both had quite different economic systems, and if your argument centers around "they didn't have private property," then, we should toss in a couple fascist regimes as well, at which point, are we discussing communism, or simply systems with no, or with arbitrarily removed, private property? Cause that could include feudalism. Or are we discussing central planning systems, in which case, that could be ANY system, regardless of whether or not there's private property. (and by property are we including toothbrushes lol?)
And honestly it does also depend on what you mean by better results overall. In this article it seems a key argument is made:
> The first element, that’s the one that used to be present but isn’t anymore, is a large public sector, because you need a large enough bureaucracy that can supervise all the contractors.
Many conflate public sector with socialist tendencies, and the person being interviewed here seems to imply that the lack of socialist tendency in the USA (I doubt we'd disagree about that!) is hampering its ability to engage in public projects effectively. Wouldn't that be in opposition to your point? Sure, Germany isn't communist, but many would say it is closer to it than America, and it has better trains.
And the USSR absolutely had better trains. Whether it was truly communist, or something else, I feel is moot - it seems to be the thing you're describing as "worse results," but, it had better results, surely? Unless you think the USSR's public transit system wasn't good?
A TL;DR for sure but definitely but not apples to apples. A transit system is embedded with the cultural norms of the location so when applying cost once hast to wonder: What is the point of applying cost of a restaurant meal across the world or across states? Sure you can go there and save yourself a bundle but do you want to live there?
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/05/opinion/economy-construct...
It's an "interesting" issue because it does seem to defy simple explanations.