> Unlike infrastructure projects in Britain or America, which are heavily reliant on external consultants to handle all stages of the project, this group of well-paid in-house engineers led much of the Madrid Metro expansion. The team stayed largely the same throughout the different projects, meaning that they were able to learn from their experience and apply it to future projects.
Imagine that: building expertise in-house and within the governmental org results in better planning and management and thus outcomes.
The UK used to have that with its railway projects - the old government owned British Rail had massive and extensive knowledge on large rail infrastructure projects and no need for expensive external "consultants". That all got lost when the Tories tore it apart into private companies... hopefully now they are being renationalised as their contracts expire, at some point in the future they can regain all that expertise in-house again.
The rail infrastructure was re-nationalised in 2002 - Network Rail is government owned.
The train operating companies are mostly privately owned but they do not build the infrastructure. Quite a few are state owned though (LNER, Thameslink, Scotrail, Northern...)
OK, but network rail don't have any in-house building skills. Actually they don't even do much truly in-house maintenance/fix work - it's mostly contracted out.
Network rail are not building east-west rail, let alone HS2.
Timetables, expansion any kind of change to rail running is approved centrally in DfT. The private operators are just that, they only run the trains to spec, on the track provided. In some cases they don't even run the stations they stop at.
What is criminal, and why the same mistakes that keep on being made, is that there little apatite or budget to retain expertise in house. This means that the DfT is reliant on consultants for most things.
THis would be fine if the people making the decisions were not people like chris grayling or grant schapps, who have no care for long term issues, only short term career success.
It costs a shit ton more, and there is less accountability. Its basically like asking claude to design the system for you. Sure it appears faster, but in the end it you'll have to redo all of it manually with no context.
The whole great british railway shit is basically just re-branding the regional franchises, and nothing more.
It's the standard privatisation playbook, also used with the NHS: first, politicians (often Conservatives) underfund and fracture a world-class public system (e.g. healthcare). Then, once it's struggling, their private-equity and investor allies swoop in to 'save the day' by privatizing it for profit as the 'only option to restore quality'.
Almost always conservatives, the key exception in recent history being Tony “Tory Lite” Blair's time in office (who pretty much ignored many years of promises to undo the direction Thatcher and Major had taken NHS and university/student funding should Labour be returned to power, greatly irritating many of us who voted for them that time around). Unfortunately this is a common pattern: parties like Labour get control and realise how hard it is going to be to fight what has been set in motion so do too little or actively push on in the existing direction (just applying a little lipstick to the pig for public appearances). The current lot are trying to do better in that regard, but are failing so impressively elsewhere that they likely won't have a second term and one term is not enough to build momentum, so their replacement will just put a stop to any good that has actually been achieved. The scary thing is that their replacement (assuming Refrom don't rip themselves apart from the inside between now and the next election, which is something there is still hope of happening) might make the old Tories look extremely moderate.
There are serious issues with that approach. If you don't have continuous funding from the projects, you end up with a big overhead of highly paid engineers without work for them to do. Then you have to lay them off, so you lose the institutional knowledge anyway.
We tried this early on with sound transit in Washington state, and because engineering work is boom and bust on a project by project basis, the model just doesn't work. The good people left for better jobs, and we were left with a team that basically couldn't produce, leading to massive delays on the next set of projects.
I think it is for this reason that Switzerland has a fixed budget for their railway construction. And it seems to pay off, Swiss railway is exceptional.
With a small country, stable government, and national level funding, that's perfectly feasible. I wish that would work in the US, but we have hundreds of transit agencies that do capital projects.
Each of those hundreds of transit agencies are small, but many of them cover populations similar to Switzerland. Some of them cover much larger populations. They should be able to do what so soon as doing entirely within their little agency and yet they are not.
What about renting them out to other cities? There are dozens of cities in Europe alone that are planning extensions of their metro systems, or even building ones from scratch (Cluj-Napoca in Romania, recently. Krakow in Poland soon.)
A morbid equivalent from the Middle Ages: bigger medieval cities had their own headsman, and they solved the risk of underemployment by sending him on external "jobs" to smaller towns where executions were rare.
Having a single buyer gives the government the ability to force standardization across cities, and squeeze contractors. Knowing the US though, it’ll become a jobs program for bumfuck towns like Plattsburgh NY
There is, because your own projects always get a priority. Plus, the institutional history. If the same group of people projected your metro for the last 40 years, they carry a lot of local know-how in their heads.
I would guess this is a consequence of people following orders. There's many people that should have refused the work along the way, but only the planner gets the blame, while I'd bet the planner was only following orders also.
People need to be able to think for themselves. I once stayed in an apartment house where I noticed a door 1.5 m up in the air on the outside of the building. When opening the door there was a small bathroom with a toilet. With no way of accessing it from the inside. Just that normal inside door on the outside wall up in the air. 100% someone in the chain made a mistake and said the door should be on the wrong wall. But no one that actually built the house stopped and say ”eh are you sure?”
Depends on the state and the political environment. Some people will deliberately sabotage projects for political reasons. The biggest problem with metros in India is the inability to provide last mile connectivity. Some cities will run buses in competition to metro lines, or provide free bus travel to women. Both actions compete against a fast mode of travel.
So, it is an India problem, not a government problem.
Metro doesn't use PPP or directly public in any Indian city I can think of, they setup SPVs and actually have stable engineering and finance teams across contracts. And most of the engineers are taken from railways only in any case. And it's a really good promotion path, ministers are known to select successful metro spv administrators for lucrative roles in the state secretariat. They even have lateral movement between SPVs of different cities, e.g many top CMRL people are ex-DMRC. So the talent problem is not there.
The reason for delays are more boring: land acquisition, coordination among nhai, state pwd, railways, utilities, etc etc. But overwhelmingly land acquisition is the main bottleneck. If land acquisition fails or isn't exactly as you planned then you have to tweak the project itself which ripples delays all the way into the construction contracts, safety approvals, NOCs etc etc. After you resolve that, flyovers and roads are simultaneously being constructed in most cities since they are all expanding so you have to coordinate with that. And india from pre-independence has utilities placed under the middle of the road, as opposed to the sides of the road. Now this is not an iron clad rule (nothing is, in india) but it's generally true. This means that you also have to coordinate with utilities. And most of them were laid in the last century without any record left of where they were laid, so you can't even plan ahead you dig and you find out you've slashed a utility line. Each coordination point above is an NOC and all put together it takes time.
Pune metro line 3's construction status was 85+% for over 1yr now
Land acquisition was over a long time ago. Progress on road is just invisible despite being built by a private company which will operate it for the next 30yrs
All Indian metros without exception are managed by SPVs.
Land acquisition is not something that gets over. It is a continuous process. Then the court cases if any always show up with some delay, and that can revoke transfers. Then you have to look for alternative land parcels, which may involve minor reroutes in the worst case. It's the same with finances, everything comes in tranches, land, money, everything.
> Pune
You can see this entire documentation[1], make sure to click on the two section headers to reveal content. While no doubt the document might mislead you about the extent of the delay, and really % done means nothing in these projects where the unknowns are unknown, you can clearly see it's the exact coordination issues I had mentioned earlier: utility coordination, handling expanding flyovers/roads, etc.
> All are perpetually delayed
Because, it's not an internal organisation issue or a personnel issue (i.e "hire more engineers"). The exact organisation does not matter when the problems are of the external kind mentioned above.
Now, the problems mentioned in TFA don't occur here because the SPVs house long term employees with - for government standards - fairly robust institutional knowledge.
If you want real private efficiencies, you have to give the entire responsibility of many departments to the private company. So, a near-private whole sub-municipality. Just making the metro SPV private is meaningless, although definitely better than having it under PWD...
Two possibilties, one, less likely: typically they work on the bottleneck things first and redeploy the people there.
Two: most likely, an earlier contract to construct the station (and especially for interiors like stairs, it's always a different contract) was cancelled[1] and they have decided to postpone tendering a new contractor for that station, until the nagging land issue is closer to being solved, lest the same issue happen again with the new contractor.
If you meant why can't it be decoupled, well that's because in general some entity in the chain won't give you a completion certificate trusting that you will integrate the two decoupled projects properly later. If you want to make the integration a separate step, no contractor will assume responsibility for it and sign it since the two components are done by others and it becomes a game afterwards of who takes the blame. It's also extremely low margin work. Sometimes, you will see TATA led businesses take the risk and somehow do it, out of altruism towards nation building, but I have not seen any one else do it.
In general the rule with govt contracts is that if there's any problem at all with the contract, all work even if it's unrelated physically speaking, will stop. Because it's related contractually speaking. Such is life.
[1] e.g because the timeline after delays stops being viable for him
> I see at least 4 stations daily where there has been literally 0 progress in the past few months
Where do you live? Delhi Metro has been quietly expanding rapidly over the past decade, and you can see fairly constant construction and execution. Same with the Gurgaon Metro.
If you are in Bangalore, its metro was a victim of the Siddarmiah-Shivakumar rivalry (Siddaramaiah backed Mysore and Mangalore at the expense of Bangalore to undercut Shivakumar who has significant investments in Bangalore).
> Until land issue is resolved...
This is the biggest timesink for any Indian infrastructure project. Eminent Domain is basically impossible in India under the LARR, which has constantly delayed infra projects across India.
In some way, it works out. Because of LARR being the way it is, the system descends into things being built on politician owned land and them pocketing the money, or politicians buying up land near an upcoming project where they know LA is done. While that sounds bad, overall this leads to positive infra development. Much better than the alternative of a principled politician who doesn't indulge in such corruption, but due to the inherent difficulty of LA also gets nothing done. Also considering the politicians are voted for, you also get a little bit of alignment to public interest. I.e Mr. X knows he can campaign on a sports center in the corner there without worrying about LARR on the existing old office building - his brother owns it.
Of course this is not business friendly at all... And you end up needing SEZs and special "Foo Cities" for land acquisition to even be remotely feasible for Foo companies. But hey atleast SEZs/special cities don't face the same problems.
It slows down SEZ creation as well, becuase an SEZ needs land, which forces state planning commissions to deal with the LARR headache, but at least it's state governments that are facing the headache instead of businesses.
It also prevents the development of mass dormitories for migrant workers in factories, which is the de facto model adopted across Asia.
> the system descends into things being built on politician owned land and them pocketing the money, or politicians buying up land near an upcoming project where they know LA is done
It works until it doesn't, as can be seen with Bangalore because of the Siddaramiah (Mysore) versus Shivakumar (Bangalore) rivalry, or Panchkula whenever Haryana got a BJP CM because former CM Hooda had significant land interests in Panchkula.
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Eminent domain and "bulldozer raj" might be undemocratic, but it's what helped Urban China clean up in the early 2010s [0][1], when it was in similar shoes to India today. So did South Korea in the 2000s to present [2][3]; Japan in the 1980s to 2000s [4]; and Taiwan in the 1990s to 2010s [5][6].
Urban villages, abadis, bastis, jhuggis, and other informal settlements should be demolished and expropriated to development authorities if India wishes to replicate the Asian model.
Edit: can't reply
> From my weak knowledge of asian countries, I think they took up, loosely speaking, individualistic capitalism
Not really. The main difference was light authoritarianism. India has too much democracy at the local level, where any wannabe neta can block a project by building a Mandir/Masjid or naarabazing "laal salam" or "Jai bhim".
When demolitions and urban renewal projects are executed in China, Korea, Taiwan, or Japan the full might of the system is used to push it through. No PILs or human interest media stories slow down those demolitions and urban renewals. If they need to crack heads or break a few legs, they will.
India under Indira used to be able to execute at such frequency, but then the counter-reaction in the 1980s and 1990s led to India neutering it's eminent domain laws.
In tamil nadu atleast, building housing for workers nearby the workplace is not the part that causes issues. The way it typically happens is that the business bears the costs, and at the least gets to do the maintenance contract themselves. And the state government provides security (especially when its a lot of women workers) and other utility services. Fairly smooth. The issue primarily is in the earlier negotiation and things like subsidies.
> SEZ dealing with SARR, but atleast its the state governments that face the headache and not the businesses
Can't underestimate the benefit of this difference, it's massive.
> It works until it doesn't
Yep, the failure modes are also of the ugly kind.
> Urban villages, abadis, bastis, jhuggis, and other informal settlements should be demolished and expropriated to development authorities if India wishes to replicate the Asian model.
I don't think we will replicate that model. I am not entirely sure what the model will be, since it's extremely unique. From my weak knowledge of asian countries, I think they took up, loosely speaking, individualistic capitalism, way more than I see among indians, income level and opportunity cost held equal.
I haven't yet seen an explanation for this, and the easy ones (e.g language, community) don't hold up to what I have seen.
I mean even most slums these days don't really have dirt poor people living in them. Dismantling it is not something the state can do and then just ignore the "powerless slum dweller" The people who used to live in the slums in the 70s decided to keep it that way (since they know the land is worth millions) and live in a standard apartment in a standard neighbourhood and treat the slum land as generational wealth. If you bulldozed it you will have money and lawyers coming at you. Not to mention they use tactics like building small temples and/or local hero memorials. So demolishing it becomes a news item on top of that. The new batch of city immigrants then stay in the actual slum asbestos houses, but after cities expanded most of them don't _really_ stay there. Some are also managed as a tourist attraction which leads to, let's say, artificial occupation. The problem with it is that it's forced, but that's another conversation.
It's the same with most urban issues - it only gets solved when the people (or more precisely, the swing voters) get rich enough to implicitly solve it. Electricity became better in TN only when majority of rural people became dependent on the mixer-grinder for making breakfast+lunch to take to work for husband and wife, all in the morning, enabling new behaviour. Until then they didn't really care if electricity went off. Note that city dwellers dont matter as much in elections, and less so back then. Flood management became much better since vardah was the first time majority of houses actually started having valuable things that get damaged! Before that, rural households simply kept their jewellery in the loft and moved to higher grounds. Only the urban dwellers actually suffered. Roads and storm-water mgmt became better only after most people started owning two-wheelers. It's still bad, but not as bad.
This is of course much slower, but there is also some surety to it. If there is a real incentive backing it, it ends up being executed better (by govt execution quality standards). And where I have seen it happen in front of my eyes in a rural town I frequent (now quite well-equipped I admit), it gets executed with a certain "fear of next elections" that I personally enjoy.
One interesting tidbit: of all things, internet connectivity is one such thing today. All rural households depend on it to such a degree that they would hanker more if "data is not there" versus even water not being there. Have observed people seeing water connections having issues, and temporarily reverting to the decade-ago norm of fetching it from a nearby pump with pots and mostly just... accepting it. But they go complain the same day when "data" goes out. To be fair, they use it for almost everything and not just leisure like we urban dwellers do, so it's understandable, but still.
> From my weak knowledge of asian countries, I think they took up, loosely speaking, individualistic capitalism
Not really based on my personal experience on the ground.
The main difference was light authoritarianism. India has too much democracy at the local level, where any wannabe neta can block a project by building a Mandir/Masjid or naarabazi-ing "laal salam" or "Jai bhim".
When demolitions and urban renewal projects are executed in China, Korea, Taiwan, or Japan the full might of the system is used to push it through. No PILs or human interest media stories slow down those demolitions and urban renewals. If they need to crack heads or break a few legs, they will.
India under Indira used to be able to execute at such frequency, but then the counter-reaction in the 1980s and 1990s led to India neutering it's eminent domain laws.
TN historically worked because if I wanted a factory built, I knew who to call in the DMK and they would get land and permitting completed in a single window. It's the same in Telangana, Andhra, Maharashtra, Gujarat, and Haryana. UP and Chhattisgarh have also started to operate in that manner too. You used to be able to do that in Karnataka but the politics changed in 2021.
> The main difference was light authoritarianism. India has too much democracy at the local level, where any wannabe neta can block a project
Makes sense. In some ways, the opposite problem also exists. The municipalities dont have much money/power and are de-facto just a branch of the state govt and a neglected one at that. Cause of many urban infra issues.
> TN historically worked because if I wanted a factory built, I knew who to call in the DMK and they would get land and permitting completed in a single window
Yep, this is the kind of thing I alluded to up-thread.
In the UK infrastructure projects are about creating jobs and making their friends rich first, and providing some kind of useful infrastructure last (and also optional)
There is so much thievery of public funds it's just corruption disguised as incompetence and the public believe it every time
The 2008 crisis had a special flavor in Spain, cajas de ahorros (privately owned, but politically controlled banks) worked with politicians -surprise- to grant mortgages (i.e. lending someone else's money) to buyers of the housing constructions they themselves had their fingers in, at a time regular banks were already wary of the direction of the housing market. It wasn't uncommon people being told which bank to go to to obtain a mortgage that'd be usually refused.
To say they were "privately owned" doesn't sound right. Cajas de ahorros had no shareholders so profits were not distributed to any "private owner". Leaders and executives of the Cajas were appointed by a mix of local councils, unions, autonomous regions, and other non-private organizations. Juridically, they were "private organizations", but factually, they were just a form of state-owned company, as it was the municipalities and regions that made the important governing decisions.
> the UK infrastructure projects are about creating jobs and making their friends rich first,
So out and out corruption is rare in the UK. For example Farage has just received 5 million in dodgy money, which is more money than all of the previous political money scandals since Mandelson.
But to your point, most of the time and money in uk infra is spent trying to navigate planning laws and nimbys
That depends how you define political money scandals. Just looking in recent history you have COVID-19 and the associated scandals [1] which includes the govt trying to get £122 million + extras back from a company run by Baroness Mone in the house of lords. That's a political money scandal.
Or you could go for the Greensill scandal [2] with David Cameron who may have made as much as up to $60 million from it.
Nick clegg received $20 million + from working for meta after being in power.
There are so many more to choose from, Farage has just been the most obvious and worst at hiding it.
It doesn't have to be, but it probably is at least a form of soft corruption. If he wasn't the ex-leader of one of the coalition parties do you think he'd have got the job?
He isn't paid well because of his skills or anything else, but because of who he knows and his access. Whilst you can make the argument this is just lobbying, I would make the argument that a well-functioning democracy with no corruption would not value his access at such a high price. See the revolving door [1] and how that links to corruption and how these could be seen as examples of it.
For this specific example, Nick Clegg set the precedent, that a current high-standing MP might decide to push for laxer regulation on big tech, knowing that it will get them the high paying job afterwards as was already established in other industries like Defence. I am not saying he pushed for laxer regulation, but a current MP can now see it as a valid exit-opportunity and would be incentivised to do so.
This is corruption just on a longer time-scale as they are using their political power and position for personal gain.
A specific quote from the wikipedia entry below shows that this exact issue happens: "The Channel Four Dispatches programme 'Cabs for Hire', broadcast in early 2010, which showed several sitting members of Parliament and former ministers offering their influence and contacts in an effort to get lobbying jobs, has generated renewed concern about this issue."
And who ensures those planning laws remain as they are - expensive and annoying and enabling of NIMBYs? Politicians. These things were created with laws, they can be undone with them
We rarely have impediments such as a minority government who can't change laws
You don't need to dig too deep to connect the dots.
I share your frustration, but having seen the last two governments, can you, hand on heart, actually see them _deliberately_ trying to keep planning laws the same to benefit certain companies? I mean you can see them try, but actually succeed and keep it a secret? [1]
They do not have the cognitive capacity to run a party, let alone a secret conspiracy.
The sad truth is this: Planning law is a huge tangled web of laws, and common law. It is painful to unpick because one of the biggest drivers of local anger from voters is a new development of x. ( be that housing, shops, turbines, industiral unit, path, sign anything) The same people that make local pressure groups are the same people that vote.
Any change to planning law is hard, and ripe for smear campaigns.
"We want lower power bills"
ok we need to build some infrastructure
"POWER LINES ARE BAD, DOWN WITH POWER LINES"(sad picture in the newspaper, the new power lines block my view [powerlines are 4 miles away from their house] they are an affront to us living here. When we moved here they wern't there [when they moved there it was cheap because they are 5 miles away from a massive power station])
"kids have nothing to do, lets have a new playground"
Ok, let me plan that out
"NEW PLAYGROUND DUBBED THE TEENAGE DRUG PALACE HAS A BILL OF 450K" (angry photo of a man outside an empty field. "I don't like the noise" said many wearing two massive hearing aids)
Worse in the facebook age, its now a hate campaign where people are accusing others of being peadophiles for holding any kind of opposing view on local planning.
planning law changes today are either made to benefit loud nimbys or rich developers. i dont think pressure groups actually represent an average person from the neighborhood. imo the best way to fix it is by-right development for public interest projects (the government can build power lines or cheap housing anywhere it wants) and democratic resident vote for anything else. no fixed zoning maps or years long meetings. that way a loud minority cant block a project but if most locals really dont want it they still have a way to fight.
In rail, it's more like is that there's nothing for 20 years, then the government announces one project. Everyone piles onto that one project and gold-plates everything because they already know there's not going to be any more projects after this one for 20 years.
Then the project overruns by billions.
The government pays, then vows not to make that mistake again, so they don't have any more projects for 20 years.
Rinse and repeat.
A much more healthy cycle is like the Italian build-out of high speed rail, where they have multiple projects going, working their way from one city to another, and the line is usable after each part is done.
(in the case of HS2, a lot of the blame can be laid at the feed of NIMBYs, and the government pandering to them. Oh you lovely Tory-voting home counties voters! Yes, it's essential we preserve this ancient forest and that protected species, I know, so important, we'll make the entire line underground for your part of HS2, of course we have the extra billions to pay for that. Fuck you, you dirty northerners. I've just had to stump up a fuckton more than expected to pay off my voters, so I'm cutting your part of the line. You'll be lucky if HS2 goes north of Birmingham)
If it wasn't clear, I was talking about high-speed rail. Of course the other lines are very welcome! You can throw in the electrification projects too, all good.
HS1 was meant to start in 1996, only began in earnest in 2001, and was completed by 2007. HS2 was launched in 2009, only began in earnest in 2019, and is still ongoing.
So all we currently have to show for the past 30 years and billions in investment is a little bit of high-speed rail between London and the Channel Tunnel.
By comparison, the Italian high-speed network expands every year or so, as they keep completing phases of routes all over the country.
This reads a lot like GB News announcing in Feb 2026 "The "biggest scandal in British history" [South Asian child grooming/rape gangs] has been blown wide open this week as an independent inquiry into the grooming gang epidemic heard harrowing testimonies. Rupert Lowe, Independent MP for Great Yarmouth, launched the proceedings on Monday"
Despite Andrew Norfolk being "2014 Journalist of the Year" for breaking the scandal in The Times and writing about it since 2010.
And despite a 2003 TV documentary reporting on an 18 month police and social services investigation, the Ivison Trust trying to bring it to national attention since 2010. the Independent writing about it in 2010. The former Home Secretary talking about it on Newsnight TV in 2011. A 2011 National Crime Agency (NCA)'s analysis. Convictions of Rochdale gang members in 2012. A 2013 NCA analysis. Rotherham council commissioning the independent Jay Report in 2013. A 2014 investigation into the Rotherham Council by the government. Andrew Norfolk winning two other awards for his reporting on it in 2014. The largest investigation into that kind of thing in UK history in 2017. A 2017 report from a thinktank. In 2017 a former Policing and Justice minister urging the Attorney General about it. A 2017 article in The Sun by the MP for Rotherham about it and the media attention that got. A 2020 report by the Home Office, a petition by The Independent with 130,000 signatures pressuring the Home Office to release their report. A 2021 investigation by The Times, A 2023 article by The Guardian, A 2023 announcement by Prime Minister Sunak starting a taskforce... but now The Right is trying to tell people that nobody has noticed it and the mainstream media isn't covering it.
But yeah, sure, the public "believe government grift every time" and weren't angry about the COVID PPE scandals, or HS2, or any of the rest of them, at all, only YOU noticed.
As an engineer myself working for them 20 years ago, we were certainly not well paid like the article said. Quite the contrary: I was still on University(had not finished the final project) and had to do most of the hard technical work myself for someone else to just overview the results and sign. My salary was miserable.
Once I had finished I could earn 3 to 4 times more on several places.
They were also extremely creative taking foreign systems, studying the patent and modifying it to pay zero to the creators of the patents. This was done with things like the aluminium beams for electricity delivery that I think was developed by Italians, or the tunnelling machines that had all the pieces replicated inhouse.
The article also makes a big deal out of country-level factors like the system of autonomous communities, governance, in-house expertise etc.
But all of those should apply to Malaga as well, which also built a metro in the 2000s. But that one became a city-wide joke for always being supposed to open "this year" and that continued for at least 5 years...
There was definitively none of the cheap or fast involved in that project, a relatively limited line to make travel to the airport more convenient which still couldn't deliver. Today it actually operates, but I think the rest of the network (it was supposed to be a "proper" metro system and not just isolated lines) is still vaporware. Haven't lived in Malaga in many years, though.
> I believe that the U.S. suffers from a distinct lack of state capacity. We’ve outsourced many of our core government functions to nonprofits and consultants, resulting in cost bloat and the waste of taxpayer money. We’ve farmed out environmental regulation to the courts and to private citizens, resulting in paralysis for industry and infrastructure alike. And we’ve left ourselves critically vulnerable to threats like pandemics and — most importantly — war.
If you have the capability to manufacture heavy machinery, building it by copying an existing design is not rocket science. They're not crazy complicated and often built or adapted to a dig specific tunnel anyways.
Now, operating a tunnel-boring machine, that's a different beast, but you'd have to do that either way. Probably should get outside help if your engineers and scientists haven't planned and dug a tunnel in their life.
Don't students usually have miserable salaries? I would expect any engineer's salary to go up a lot after getting some experience and graduating, so it's hard for me to tell how much this data point generalizes to the whole project.
As for the patent side, I kinda give them kudos for that.
Meanwhile, bay area has companies with market cap of 30T (50T?), has nonexistent/incompatible and the slowest public transit.
1) BART 'works' for a subset of the population.
2) ACE train is one route only, from Stockton to San Jose.
3) Caltrain is one straight line. Caltrain has a bullet train that takes an hour for ~20-30 miles.
4) There is a ferry service for some parts of north bay.
There are probably dozens of other bus systems and ferries and what not, all incompatible and disconnected.
When people from bay area (and the big tech companies) tell you they are the greatest minds on the planet solving (or going to solve) world problems, look at their public transit and think. Then weep/laugh.
Source: I lived in the North bay, East bay and South bay.
Private companies and competition, solve a lot of problems in the society. Like making food supply work. Planning and building cities and public transport is something the public sector is better at solving. Clean, nice and walkable cities with a good working public transport system, is important for the local economy to work. City planning is the art of compromises - no body get’s what they want, but overall everybody is better off in the end.
Producers make what will sell but without any incentives, subsidies or regulation this would be a mess of profit chasing, unsafe practices and fragile supply chains.
In my view, the value of the public sector is in setting the rule of the game for private actors in exactly this kind of way (rules and incentives) instead of the politics of picking winners and losers directly or making direct decisions about what to build where, etc. Rule makers play the meta-game of designing how the game works and they leave agents free to play as they wish.
New Zealand and Australia have very minimal subsidies.
I do wonder what it would be like if our system was designed to feed people rather than to make money.
It's baffling that in Florida the land of oranges you see little cups of pealed that say product of Spain and packaged in Thailand. I know supply chains are complex and labor costs are a big factor but still.
I grew up in Florida and that's been a rough situation for a while. Crazy that they haven't been able to figure anything out over the decades it's been going on. I grew up with many citrus trees just around the neighborhood. I wonder if those have got it too.
Its natural for companies to push boundaries for better and better profits. It's sort of their nature.
Things might be fine in Australia and NZ right now, but as the hydric crisis deepens we might see a need for government to step up.
I think a problem is that, if you have a market-first approach you run the risk of the businesses growing so large and powerful that when you do need to intervene, it has become an impossible task. This happened with banking, it is happening with consulting in the UK and big tech in the US. Not to mention big pharma pretty much everywhere.
So I think its a very careful balance of carrot and stick that the government needs to have over its industries.
>if you have a market-first approach you run the risk of the businesses growing so large and powerful that when you do need to intervene, it has become an impossible task.
It's also said that four companies control 85% beef market in the US, which normally should make people rather queasy I would think.
>No the system is not perfect, but it is still one of the best in the country, except for NYC and maybe Boston
I mean, there are a lot of poorer countries (especially in europe) that manage to solve this in a much better way, so this kind of proves OP point that raw purchasing power is not equivalent to the standard of living.
BART alone was confusing before they made the trains actually match with the colors on the map, circa 2016. Used to insist on only designating trains by endpoint, except the endpoints changed as they expanded lines, and also changed depending on the day/time. So even a year into daily riding BART to/from work, I took the wrong train a few times.
I went to NYC and also various other countries, easily understood the train/subway system even if it was in a language I don't understand. Except for Italy.
The morning "bullet" trains (503/507/511) from San Jose Diridon take 1hr to go 48miles with 10 stops. I think electrification and widening to 3 tracks improved times and reduces the likelihood of delays. Certainly, they run more often now, about every 10 minutes at rush hour and every 30min off hours and weekends.
The two things you reference are very loosely related. I studied Transportation Engineering in the Civil department at UC Berkeley. I have always been very interested in public transportation. But I work as a Data Scientist in Silicon Valley rather than at one of the public transportation agencies. Because it pays roughly 10x as much. Every single one of the smartest people I went to school with is also now working in tech in Silicon Valley. A lot work on stuff like advertising optimization. Sigh.
Because public transit, done well, is the fastest way to move around. It gets you everywhere, even to places personal vehicles can't reach. It's a lot cheaper. It generates hubs of activity that keep cities lively and relevant. It doesn't get stuck in traffic. It doesn't need to be parked.
The benefits of good public transport are so mind blowing that it's difficult to explain unless you have lived on a city that has it.
Key words: "done well" and "good public transport".
Whenever I see discussions like this, I always feel the standards that most public transportation advocates consider "good" or even "acceptable" are far lower than mine.
Mine - Seoul, Tokyo, other East Asian cities.
Most public transportation advocates - Maybe NYC, many even lower.
Factors - reliability, cleanliness (both cars and stations), reach, safety (both actual and perceived, and both violent and non-violent).
Give me the Seoul or Tokyo subway and I'll gladly ditch my car (actually...no, but I'd only use it for excursions outside the city).
Hmm I disagree. I lived in Madrid. In fact in one of those cities that this article mentions from the new subway construction.
Subway takes 1h15min to reach the city center. Car only takes 30 minutes.
This is because when you are building a subway every one wants their station. The map above may look like straight lines, but if you look at the real map, the north of line 10 is not straight at all, it's more zig zag.
We are trying to make transportation work for everyone and we end up with transportation that works for no one.
Also, the subway closes at midnight, and by Spanish standards, that's early. I was stranded twice (because different stations close at different times) until i decided that I would never take public transport in Madrid again
In addition to the other good reasons also raised, PT has much more optimal land-use than private cars. Train stations or metro stations take up relatively little land and can be integrated with business and services or have nice public plazas and small parks. Compared with multi-lane highways, parking lots, giant intersections that are hostile to pedestrians and active transport.
Because it’s available to everyone, including kids and elderly, and does not need high upfront payments.
I can just move to Madrid and move anywhere in the city for around 1-2€ per trip without upfront investment of 20.000€ for a car, plus insurance, maintenance, fuel and taxes.
Trains don't get stuck in traffic, and some of them have restrooms and space to walk around in. They're also better for the people outside of the vehicle.
However, even if such a thing did exist, you still have to contend with traffic and total road capacity. So, for instance, taking local systems (details will vary by city, but not much), a double-decker bus is ten meters long and takes ~100 people. A tram is 55m long and takes about 550 people. A commuter train is 160m long and takes a thousand people (and doesn't share roads, of course). A car is 4-5m long and typically carries one or two people. Take any large city, attempt to replace the public transport with private cars, and there simply _will not be space_.
Fully-segregated metros in particular can also be much faster than cars in urban areas; they don't have to contend with traffic or intersections at all.
Why would anyone prefer a car that YOU have to drive over an autonomous all terrain comfortable personal horse?
A horse knows how to navigate any kinds of terrain, while a car requires constant microsecond attention, extremely stressful, if you lose focus, might end up dead, worse kill a lot of other people! Horses don't need roads to be built, or the elaborate supply chains of fossil fuels, and trillions of dollars per year in subsidies.
Collectively (as in, the collective action problem):
- Areas with few/no cars are nicer to be in. To breathe, to talk quietly and hear others talking, to walk around safely.
- Transport moves more people in less space and less overall investment. Toronto Highway 401[1] is an eighteen lane road and it moves fewer people per day than Metro line 1.
- Low car areas are better for local economies. People object to reducing traffic saying it will hurt local businesses, and the opposite is true. Where it's nice to exist outside of a car, that attracts people, and local businesses thrive.
- Reduced costs on health services from reduced pollution. Fewer doctor and hospital visits and prescriptions, for lung infections, breathing problems, asthsma and COPD in London after Low Emissions zones.
- Reduced environmental impact of fewer cars, fewer trips taken by car.
- Many people can't drive; all children, many injured or disabled people, many poorer people, many elderly people (can't or shouldn't), some people with e.g. DUI convictions. Some 20% of households in the UK have no access to a car. A matter of fairness and not prioritising the wealthy car owner.
Personally:
- No need to find parking, return to that carpark.
- Transit is more spacious. Being strapped into a carseat, elbows hitting doors, head hitting roof, knees hitting steering wheel, shins hitting dash, feet constrained in footwell, surrounded by explosives "for your protection" is a really unpleasant place to be.
- Less concentration needed. Driving requires constant attention. Even when transit is crowded, you don't have to do anything.
- Implemented well, transit takes priority over cars at turnings, crossings, junctions, roundabouts, and moves faster. Toronto trams do this especially poorly, apparently.
- Freedom. No need for a government approved license and ID. Not beholden to dragging a ton of steel boat-anchor around everywhere with you.
SF Bay Area (land) has population density of a third of New York metro area or an eight of Tokyo metro area. The population density does not justify a world class public transit system. Not to mention there's a large body of water in the middle, which precludes building a lot of connections.
Having been in Madrid and having used the metro, I was also impressed by how well it works. Seemingly always on time, and very good price service ratio. You can buy "rides" and one ride means get in at any station and get out at any other station of the whole network, interchange as many times as you want. For, at the time, 1.16 Euro. Compare that to Berlin, where you can pay some 4 Euro or so for limited amount of stops or time. Madrid metro >> Berlin public transport.
Though in practice if you live there you probably have a Deutschland-Ticket; the 4 euro fee would be primarily for visitors. Even as a visitor you should just buy an X-day pass in the terrible app if you're going to be using it a lot, assuming that the terrible app deigns to let you do that and doesn't just throw cryptic errors.
(What is with German public transport ticket-buying apps? They all seem to be very broken.)
Well, it grew up really well but that was "geologically easy". Madrid lies over a granitic floor, tunneling there is easier and faster than it would be in Barcelona, Amsterdam or London.
So, after having lived in Barcelona and Madrid... Both metros are excellent, but besides covering a smaller area, I still prefer Barcelona metro than Madrid one. IMHO, Barcelona metro looks more like the one in the german cities and Madrid metro looks like London one.
Said that, this year Madrid metro users have been quite angry at some line closures at the same time than tunnels were fixed at the same time in the city. It is mostly a managing problem as well, as some of the trains (quite old in some cases) are still being rented instead of bought.
Line 7B grew up as well but in San Fernando de Henares some buildings got structural cracks and some houses (over 50) had to be bulldozed.
Metro works from 06:00 to 01:00, but there is nothing before of after that time. In Barcelona, for instance, Monday to Thursday works 5:00 to 00:00, on Friday 5:00 to 02:00, and from 05:00 on Saturday to 00:00 on Sunday non-stop. That has been for some years now and means lots of drunk people not taking the car.
In Barcelona, metro schedules are tighter as well. In Barcelona, in rush hours you may have a train every 2,5 minutes, in some cases less than 2 minutes. In Madrid it's more like 4 minutes. Trains are newer in Barcelona, too (and wider because most lines use iberic gauge), but that was because until the 90s Barcelona trains had some asbestos on them.
Anyways, a metro is not only about the trains, it's also about the stations. Most of Madrid ones have conditioned air and have better lighting than not only the Barcelona ones, but the European ones as well. But, again IMHO, signage in Madrid metro is HORRIBLE. Most of the signs are on the walls, when you are walking on a crowded corridor is easy to take the wrong direction. I need a magnifier to read the metro plan on the wagons. Also, it takes some time to understand that it "drives on its left" in a country where everything else "drives on its right". Not a big thing, but if you come from somewhere in Europe it may take you some time until you get used to all of it.
A lot of the price difference between Europe and USA now are wages. US wages for construction workers in NYC or SF are 2 or 3 times that of Madrid. Lots of things are cheap just for this reason alone.
Yes, but that cuts in the other direction. In the U.S., skilled work like subway construction will provide employer-paid healthcare. U.S. employers pay $1.3 trillion a year in healthcare benefits. You have to account for that on top of the reported wages. So that makes U.S. workers even more expensive relative to workers in Europe, where healthcare will be paid from taxes on the wages paid to employees.
people making this argument always forget the most critical aspect - people generally need healthcare when they are not working, almost always when retired.
Your argument is then essentially that people should be working indefinitely.
We’re talking about how labor costs impact subway construction costs. Retirees aren’t relevant to that. (And the U.S. has universal healthcare for them anyway.)
In Madrid where the average monthly pretax salary is below 1500 a shared room with four strangers costs 400-709 a month and small aprtments in bad neighborhoods cost 3000-4000 a square meter to buy.
Also, a shared apartment costs as much as you say. Not a room (source: idealista.es).
Purchase prices are high, but I'm curious as to what you consider a bad neighborhood, given the overall safety statistics in Spain, and Madrid in particular.
Housing affordability is a real problem, but misrepresenting data is counterproductive, as it can be easily disproven.
The US project prices are not just 3X the EU project prices. It’s just that the construction companies & consultancies overcharge. In the US the overhead is insane. From construction, to universities, to hospitals. Insane overheads everywhere.
This is an interesting one. I live in NYC and have spent lots of time in Spain - the cost of living differential is easily within the 2-3x range, maybe more if you're talking housing specifically.
I can't confidently say whether one feels more comfortable working construction in a globally VHCOL city like NYC or SF or in a MCOL city like Madrid.
It is difficult. I think the key is that Spain has a large corps of civil engineers working for the government. They plan all projects with great detail and then oversee their execution.
Agile regulations against NIMBYism and a world-class civil engineering industry with HQs in Madrid also help.
A good analogy is to ask what would need to be true for Madrid to replicate the AI hub in SF? Great VC, top engineers, certain risk-taking mentality, etc.
So, it's not easy. The environment that creates a fabric for radical innovation is quite different from a statist mentality, although hopefully, both are not mutually exclusive.
The sibling comments explain the regulatory differences. But another factor is that competent engineers and executives have much lower opportunity costs to work for the government in Spain because private sector opportunities are far less lucrative than in the U.S.
An ironic downside of America’s leadership in tech and finance is that there is tremendous brain drain out of the public sector.
> I think the key is that Spain has a large corps of civil engineers working for the government.
I agree with this. In general jobs with the government are seen as high quality jobs from my understanding. Another commenter mentioned that the high salaries in the private sector in the US brain drain away from the US public sector. In Spain salaries are much lower, so this is perhaps less of an issue in certain fields.
Hm so at least they scaled the cost down to $200K, which suggests that the bad press did something, but that also relied on the whole prefab toilet being donated.
- Figuring out NIMBY-ism. Anywhere you run a tunnel you're gonna have people suing you and stalling for decades. Less so if you use a tunnel bore machine, but cut and cover is pretty much a non-starter.
- Cost of labor is insanely high due to cost of housing. Short of jumping straight back into the 19th century, setting up temporary housing and bringing in guest laborers this is pretty much non-negotiable.
- Not a ton of expertise left in the country since there's 2 new subway tunnels a decade AFAIK.
- The grift has got to be worse here than in Spain. There if you get $40k in kickbacks that's a nice bonus, here that barely covers your rent for the year.
And then even if you bring the costs down, you have to figure out the taxation. Several billion per mile is the running rate and you may be able to bring that down but then you have ongoing costs. Muni's farebox recovery is only 1/4 of its budget so unless you're making existing lines redundant, there's new ongoing cost. Obviously the choices there will be to go into the pockets of the middle class or not do it at all.
> Cost of labor is insanely high due to cost of housing
This is not the reason. Labor is expensive even in parts of the US with low housing costs.
The real, simple reason is the US has a more prosperous economy where the average worker has more opportunity than their Spanish peers. Just look at unemployment rates. The US is at 4.3% right now compared to Spain's 10%. Even at the peak of the GFC the US barely had over 10% unemployment. In the meanwhile Spain has had over 10% employment almost the entire time the past four decades. Of course labor is cheap when that many people are jobless.
U-6 is 8.1%, but spain uses a pretty comparable base employment rate (u-3 equivalent), so fair cop that US unemployment is easily less than half.
Relevant: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol_effect - drives a lot of effects in the US where automation paradoxically makes non-automated industries insanely expensive (though not the whole story for certain niches e.g. healthcare and education)
So does that imply that there is a Goldilocks zone of prosperity where society are wealthy enough to afford good infrastructure but not too wealthy so as to become unable to build infrastructure cost effectively? Interesting that too much prosperity would actually lower living standards.
I mean, if you can have higher unemployment but still build good subways and overall have a good quality of life, maybe that suggests unemployment isn't a great metric for evaluating societies.
I understand housing construction, but why would a NIMBY be against metro construction? Being close to a metro station means real estate prices skyrocket and that's what NIMBYs are after.
Have you not met Americans? The very first thing 95% of Americans will say if you propose public transport closer to their house is that you are bringing crime. Also if the transit comes close then someone might build condos or apartments near it! Oh the horror!
I had a lady parade around my neighborhood handing out fliers saying that extending the bus stop to our neighborhood was going to bring rapists and pedophiles into the neighborhood. I thought she was an odd one out and insane so I made a joke about it at a neighborhood event a few weeks later.
Sounds like, solution is "company towns" where everything is built by giant mega-corporation, completely greenfield, and nothing is sold - just rented out.
Plenty of those exist in the US too, with public transit. The people complaining about NIMBYs can live there, but they don't. They're more popular among younger people without kids.
The "undesirables" they're concerned about are robbers, teenage gangs, or people on drugs who loiter around train stations. The lower-class people don't want to be around them either.
In metropolitan areas, people want to be close but not too close to train/metro stations or railroad/tunnels. 5-10 minute walk is ideal. Anything closer, people have vibration/noise and crowd/security concerns.
In US suburbs, a lot of people are going to drive even if they live next to a train station. So there’s no convenience or property value benefits. To them, they only see downsides.
Living directly in view of a metro entrance within the inner city will be have noise from people using it, but one minute walk away is considered perfect in Europe.
Many people who visit me for the first time comment on this.
On the very quietest summer night, when there's no ventilation systems running etc, I can sometimes hear an occasional dum-dum, dum-dum when I lie in bed. The tunnel is directly under the building.
In suburbia closer is also better, but away from the track is better than along the track of it's above ground.
The idea of security concerns sounds ridiculous to me.
False. I live in Madrid and being near a metro station a. Has no issues (for almost all stations) and b. is considered highly desirable. 10 minute walk is considered a lot (mine is 5, to either of the two nearby stations - at 10-12 minutes I can walk to four stations). These are genuine underground metro. They're deep and vibrations are mostly not an issue.
The article paints a somewhat biased view of the construction process. It gives too much credit to Gallardo and the pp and conveniently ignored the serious issues in the sam Fernando de Henares área created by too rapid construction that ignored environmental and design issues in the Sandy soil near the Jarama river. Several hundred apartments have been condemned because of it and a whole neighborhood affected ...
But it is the best metro I've seen in Europe or north america. Most usable and cheapest to use.
For many years, I observed the San Francisco Caltrain DTX (Downtown Extension, recently rebranded "The Portal"). This is the most important transit missing link in Northern California that is expected to connect two of the highest ridership transit arteries in the Bay Area and eventually unlock single-seat rail transit between Sacramento, San Francisco, San Jose, and points south. DTX is a two-mile tunnel planned to connect the rail line terminus south of San Francisco downtown to Market Street, where the BART subway has the 4 highest ridership train stations in Northern California. The combined project (DTX and Transbay Terminal, the already built train station it's supposed to connect to) is about 15 years late and many billions of dollars over budget.
What struck me is a complete lack of urgency and accountability, combined with out-of-control meddling by politicians pursuing completely unrelated goals. The project spent several years in EIR and initial planning, which is to be expected. Then for over a decade, San Francisco's board of supervisors held the project hostage because they wanted to demolish a freeway south of where the actual project is, while bolting on an unrelated and unrealistic tunneling project (the "Pennsylvania Avenue alignment") and taking over the governance of the Caltrain board (Caltrain is the least dysfunctional transit system in the Bay Area, so the Caltrain board was not too keen on this proposal). Eventually, after wasting many years and tens (hundreds?) of millions of dollars, the balance of power on the BoS shifted and they agreed to stop holding the project hostage, restructure the board (TJPA), and re-hire staff to actually plan the tunnel.
I've seen multiple project managers/directors come and go, and countless community input meetings happen discussing completely hypothetical project concepts. The money set aside for the project from the original Transbay budget is long gone, and numerous funding opportunities have passed by because the TJPA and its stakeholders were not ready to plan and submit a viable proposal in time.
Here are some things I would want to change going forward:
- Transit projects should be centrally planned by the state government (i.e. a regional subdivision of an agency similar to Caltrans) with structured opportunities for resident feedback and authority to override most input from local governments. This should include exemptions from CEQA and other review, and strong eminent domain powers.
- The Caltrans-like agency should have independent regional metro divisions (i.e. Bay Area, LA area, etc) with dedicated sources of regionally collected funding as well as a mandate to own and lease out land adjacent to transit stations as part of its funding. The divisions should have budgets to retain project management staff who accumulate long-term experience and manage multiple projects. They should have the independent authority to issue bonds and be required to publish construction efficiency and ridership statistics.
- Labor unions should be systematically prevented from influencing the course of planning, construction, and project execution. Unions meddle and cause many delays and project complications.
Unfortunately, even a structure like that is not a panacea. If you look at CHSRA, it actually has some of the features that I listed above. When CHSRA was first started, the planning process fell victim to meddling from state legislators (most famously the one who forced the route to go through Palmdale), followed by many wasted years fighting NIMBYs and doing useless planning. Ultimately, the only hope I see is to insulate the planners from political interference, set them up with independent funding, have one agency head who is responsible and accountable, and reduce the veto powers that California grants to citizens and governments.
And moreover, CHRSRA, while it is certainly delayed and over budget, appears to be a fairly well-run program with delays due primarily to external issues created by state & local government. It doesn't help that it receives nearly universal bad press, but I think that'll change by next year as they start laying track [connecting the stations and above grade crossings that have been long built].
What this article misses is that the line 10 expansion to the north was a clear attempt at gaining votes and not an attempt at designing a good subway.
If you look at the physical map, you will see that it visits multiple towns that are not in a straight line from Madrid. This causes the line to "zig-zag" and what should take 20 minutes in a straight line becomes a 1h 15min ride.
People use it because Madrid has started being hostile to cars and the only two alternatives are trains (which is pretty good, takes 30 min) or buses
It's also not 24/7, closes at midnight (and if you are going out in Spain, you will stay way later than that)
I am not sure how much do I trust an article about Madrid's metro that doesn't mention the fact that one of those expansions (Line 7, in San Fernando de Henares) was done with political instead of technical criteria, ending up in several hundreds losing their homes and a metro line that has to close every once in a while for repairs.
I am also heavily distrusting of the "75 percent of passengers described themselves as ‘very satisfied’". The infrastructure might be ok now, but the frequencies are getting worse (except when the pope visits, in that case they apparently have the money) and in rush hour everything is packed.
The article is in French, but geology is the key factor. Do you need to bore rock or sandy soil with tar? Is the area seismically active like in Los Angeles? This affects the cost and timeline of metro construction more than just wages.
The part about political accountability made me kind of chuckle.
> The PP candidate for Assembly President, Alberto Ruiz-Gallardón, promised to deliver 30 new miles (48 kilometers) of metro by the next election, compared to the 14 miles (23 kilometers) the PSOE had delivered during their previous 15 years in government. With this pledge, the PP won a majority and Ruiz-Gallardón was duly elected president.
It's hard to see that working in the US, even if we eliminated the jurisdictional patchworks, because what will happen is one candidate will promise 1000 miles and the other will propose destroying existing infrastructure, but they'll also make competing promises on homelessness, affordability, and various culture war issues, while jockeying for supremacy in media prominence, and then whichever one gets elected will build 0 miles and say it was somehow the other one's fault. It's just hard to imagine any sizable electorate in the US actually voting based on an issue like how quickly and cheaply public transportation is built. If we had the kind of people who care about stuff like that, we wouldn't have the problems we have.
In 1968, Garrett Hardin wrote a paper called "The Tragedy of the Commons" [1]. Many people seem to think this term dates further back to Adam Smith or earlier it does not. Well, this became hugely influential in noeliberalism and was used as the justification for governments to sell off their assets in the 1980s and 1990s in particular, all based on this (flawed) idea that private industry was more efficient. This was the era of public-private "partnerships". What that really means was privatizing the profits and socializing the losses while guaranteeing profits.
Utilities were generally public prior to this. Now we have private equity buying up utilities because the profits are guaranteed [2]. While electricity prices are regulated, capex on infrastructure isn't so they can simply boost profits by "investing" in the network ie creating extra capacity for data centers to be sold electricity at sub-market rates.
Lots of expierments were done and empirical data analyzed on the tragedy of the commons and it never matched the theory. Ultimately, this resulted in Elinor Ostrom winning the 2009 Nobel Price for Economics for disproving it with empirical data. Yet people still quote it.
Look at the list of metro systems sorted by length [4]. They're almost all Chinese. The 4th largest is in Chengdu, which only opened in 2010. In 16 years it's now the 4th largest in the world.
Pretty much any argument you can use about how China is different will have a contradiction by counterexample. Difficult terran? Chongqing. Old cities? Beijing, Shanghai. City too large? Good one.
It's not any single factor that allows for this. It's managed at every single level. For example, China has standardized rolling stock to a handful of variants so you avoid an entire procurement process (and grift). The UK spends billions of pounds to build an otherwise completely unnecessary tunnel under the Chilterns to protect the views of something of the most expensive property in the country [5]. Not in China. Audits of the Second Avenue Subway showed a host of corruption such as so-called "ghost jobs" [6]. Beverly Hills and Santa Monica fought the LA Metro extending into their areas because it might bring in the poors.
This is a pretty egregious misreading of both Hardin and Ostrom, where on earth did you get this from?
Hardin did not argue that private industry was more efficient. His paper described that with an unmanaged, private, unregulated open pasture that has no property rights, individuals will exploit it until it collapses. It wasn't used used as justification for privatization, if anything it was the opposite.
Ostrom did not argue that unmanaged resources don't collapse. Instead, she showed with data a third way of organising which was more involved with self-governing, communal rules to manage shared resources without resorting to either a private corporation or government control.
Visited China recently and it's pretty astonishing what can be achieved if you just ignore the whiners, complainers, environmentalists, and local governments. NIMBYs? Get lost. Have unique local culture? Funny but no. There's a special kind of beetle living there? Tough shit. It's ugly? So is your face. Etc. This is how the West built its infrastructure back in the day - nobody consulted NIMBYs or the native Americans on railway construction - but now we're too good for this, and we reap the consequences.
I'm still on team democracy, and we'll see how long it takes before China regresses to the norm of dictatorships. Xi has already broken the term limits. Nothing suggests he won't slowly lose his grip on reality like most dictators. But for now China has its charms.
Rail lines in the US were not great examples of this. Many towns refused to grant right of way to the rail unless a stop was added which basically forced passengers to change trains. As a result, there’s were so many changes it took two to three days to get from say, Chicago to NYC when it should have taken no longer than a day
About rolling out standardized infrastructure in China: One can also see this in their high speed train stations in capitols of provinces. Manny of them look of feel the same with their 28 tracks.
tbh Santa Monica and Beverly Hills complainers were right, at least when it came to their own interests. Visit that Santa Monica metro station. Nobody getting off that train is commuting to work.
It's worse that this: It's being taught to pretty much every student of economics during the first few classes, Ostrom sometimes being quoted as a counterpoint but not always.
Electric, Gas distribution, British Petroleum, British Telecom, Bank of England, other banks like Bradford & Bingley, Royal Mail, regional water companies, shipbuilding, aeroplane, car, iron, and steel manufacturing, nuclear power, canals and waterways, coal mining, munitions factories, pubs, zinc smelting, airlines, Ordnance Survey Mapping, National Highways, BBC and Channel 4 broadcasting, The Crown Estate, Nuclear Laboratory, UK Hydrographic office, Meteorological Office, Genomics England, Student Loans Company, Civil Aviation Authority, Porton Biopharma...
And have any of those NZ utilities been privatized?
Where are these utilities that were public, then were privatized? Not AFAIK in the US where the intercity and freight rail lines, telegraph lines, telephone systems, natural-gas-distribution networks, electrical grid, cable-TV grid and last-mile internet networks started out private. Maybe in Britain? But if so, the person I replied to should make it clear that his critique applies only to Britain.
> Unlike infrastructure projects in Britain or America, which are heavily reliant on external consultants to handle all stages of the project, this group of well-paid in-house engineers led much of the Madrid Metro expansion. The team stayed largely the same throughout the different projects, meaning that they were able to learn from their experience and apply it to future projects.
Imagine that: building expertise in-house and within the governmental org results in better planning and management and thus outcomes.
The UK used to have that with its railway projects - the old government owned British Rail had massive and extensive knowledge on large rail infrastructure projects and no need for expensive external "consultants". That all got lost when the Tories tore it apart into private companies... hopefully now they are being renationalised as their contracts expire, at some point in the future they can regain all that expertise in-house again.
The rail infrastructure was re-nationalised in 2002 - Network Rail is government owned.
The train operating companies are mostly privately owned but they do not build the infrastructure. Quite a few are state owned though (LNER, Thameslink, Scotrail, Northern...)
OK, but network rail don't have any in-house building skills. Actually they don't even do much truly in-house maintenance/fix work - it's mostly contracted out.
Network rail are not building east-west rail, let alone HS2.
True, but that is why I am sceptical about benefits of re-nationalisation. The skills are not going to come back.
The default assumption these days is that everything will be contracted out. It needs a cultural change and a lot of investment to change things.
Its much more pernicious than that.
Timetables, expansion any kind of change to rail running is approved centrally in DfT. The private operators are just that, they only run the trains to spec, on the track provided. In some cases they don't even run the stations they stop at.
What is criminal, and why the same mistakes that keep on being made, is that there little apatite or budget to retain expertise in house. This means that the DfT is reliant on consultants for most things.
THis would be fine if the people making the decisions were not people like chris grayling or grant schapps, who have no care for long term issues, only short term career success.
It costs a shit ton more, and there is less accountability. Its basically like asking claude to design the system for you. Sure it appears faster, but in the end it you'll have to redo all of it manually with no context.
The whole great british railway shit is basically just re-branding the regional franchises, and nothing more.
It's the standard privatisation playbook, also used with the NHS: first, politicians (often Conservatives) underfund and fracture a world-class public system (e.g. healthcare). Then, once it's struggling, their private-equity and investor allies swoop in to 'save the day' by privatizing it for profit as the 'only option to restore quality'.
> often Conservatives
Almost always conservatives, the key exception in recent history being Tony “Tory Lite” Blair's time in office (who pretty much ignored many years of promises to undo the direction Thatcher and Major had taken NHS and university/student funding should Labour be returned to power, greatly irritating many of us who voted for them that time around). Unfortunately this is a common pattern: parties like Labour get control and realise how hard it is going to be to fight what has been set in motion so do too little or actively push on in the existing direction (just applying a little lipstick to the pig for public appearances). The current lot are trying to do better in that regard, but are failing so impressively elsewhere that they likely won't have a second term and one term is not enough to build momentum, so their replacement will just put a stop to any good that has actually been achieved. The scary thing is that their replacement (assuming Refrom don't rip themselves apart from the inside between now and the next election, which is something there is still hope of happening) might make the old Tories look extremely moderate.
...and then everyone acts surprised that things become more expensive.
Maybe when I was 18. I haven't been surprised by this play by conservatives in a loooonnggggg time.
There are serious issues with that approach. If you don't have continuous funding from the projects, you end up with a big overhead of highly paid engineers without work for them to do. Then you have to lay them off, so you lose the institutional knowledge anyway.
We tried this early on with sound transit in Washington state, and because engineering work is boom and bust on a project by project basis, the model just doesn't work. The good people left for better jobs, and we were left with a team that basically couldn't produce, leading to massive delays on the next set of projects.
I think it is for this reason that Switzerland has a fixed budget for their railway construction. And it seems to pay off, Swiss railway is exceptional.
With a small country, stable government, and national level funding, that's perfectly feasible. I wish that would work in the US, but we have hundreds of transit agencies that do capital projects.
Each of those hundreds of transit agencies are small, but many of them cover populations similar to Switzerland. Some of them cover much larger populations. They should be able to do what so soon as doing entirely within their little agency and yet they are not.
Has nothing to do with size, see Japan and China.
What does it have to do with then?
My understanding japan has a surprisingly private train system, and China fits the model of "works when it's constantly expanding"
What about renting them out to other cities? There are dozens of cities in Europe alone that are planning extensions of their metro systems, or even building ones from scratch (Cluj-Napoca in Romania, recently. Krakow in Poland soon.)
A morbid equivalent from the Middle Ages: bigger medieval cities had their own headsman, and they solved the risk of underemployment by sending him on external "jobs" to smaller towns where executions were rare.
At that point, you're just hiring an engineering firm, so there's no real benefit to government doing it.
Having a single buyer gives the government the ability to force standardization across cities, and squeeze contractors. Knowing the US though, it’ll become a jobs program for bumfuck towns like Plattsburgh NY
There is, because your own projects always get a priority. Plus, the institutional history. If the same group of people projected your metro for the last 40 years, they carry a lot of local know-how in their heads.
America at least needs highly paid consultants so they can maintain their massive suburban project.
In India metro is either built by private companies in a Public Private Partnership
Or by govt orgs by contracting it out.
Both styles have resulted in massive delays so much so that it has become a meme that metro will be inaugurated 100yrs into the future
Maybe if Govt hired actual engineers like they do for railways then metros will be prioritised
India has the most interesting construction projects: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZcRDsIjG3g8
I guess this is what vibe coding in the real world looks like.
I would guess this is a consequence of people following orders. There's many people that should have refused the work along the way, but only the planner gets the blame, while I'd bet the planner was only following orders also.
People need to be able to think for themselves. I once stayed in an apartment house where I noticed a door 1.5 m up in the air on the outside of the building. When opening the door there was a small bathroom with a toilet. With no way of accessing it from the inside. Just that normal inside door on the outside wall up in the air. 100% someone in the chain made a mistake and said the door should be on the wrong wall. But no one that actually built the house stopped and say ”eh are you sure?”
Which is why we have https://old.reddit.com/r/NotMyJob/
So it’s nobody’s mistake?
No, that's the opposite of what I'm saying. I'm saying they are all blame worthy, and their culture itself is also blame worthy.
Depends on the state and the political environment. Some people will deliberately sabotage projects for political reasons. The biggest problem with metros in India is the inability to provide last mile connectivity. Some cities will run buses in competition to metro lines, or provide free bus travel to women. Both actions compete against a fast mode of travel.
So, it is an India problem, not a government problem.
metro construction is delayed in every state ruling party or opposition
Look at the memes for Pune metro line 3 and for Karnataka metro (forgot which line)
Metro doesn't use PPP or directly public in any Indian city I can think of, they setup SPVs and actually have stable engineering and finance teams across contracts. And most of the engineers are taken from railways only in any case. And it's a really good promotion path, ministers are known to select successful metro spv administrators for lucrative roles in the state secretariat. They even have lateral movement between SPVs of different cities, e.g many top CMRL people are ex-DMRC. So the talent problem is not there.
The reason for delays are more boring: land acquisition, coordination among nhai, state pwd, railways, utilities, etc etc. But overwhelmingly land acquisition is the main bottleneck. If land acquisition fails or isn't exactly as you planned then you have to tweak the project itself which ripples delays all the way into the construction contracts, safety approvals, NOCs etc etc. After you resolve that, flyovers and roads are simultaneously being constructed in most cities since they are all expanding so you have to coordinate with that. And india from pre-independence has utilities placed under the middle of the road, as opposed to the sides of the road. Now this is not an iron clad rule (nothing is, in india) but it's generally true. This means that you also have to coordinate with utilities. And most of them were laid in the last century without any record left of where they were laid, so you can't even plan ahead you dig and you find out you've slashed a utility line. Each coordination point above is an NOC and all put together it takes time.
Some metros are PPP Some are by contractors
However, all are perpetually delayed
Pune metro line 3's construction status was 85+% for over 1yr now
Land acquisition was over a long time ago. Progress on road is just invisible despite being built by a private company which will operate it for the next 30yrs
All Indian metros without exception are managed by SPVs.
Land acquisition is not something that gets over. It is a continuous process. Then the court cases if any always show up with some delay, and that can revoke transfers. Then you have to look for alternative land parcels, which may involve minor reroutes in the worst case. It's the same with finances, everything comes in tranches, land, money, everything.
> Pune
You can see this entire documentation[1], make sure to click on the two section headers to reveal content. While no doubt the document might mislead you about the extent of the delay, and really % done means nothing in these projects where the unknowns are unknown, you can clearly see it's the exact coordination issues I had mentioned earlier: utility coordination, handling expanding flyovers/roads, etc.
> All are perpetually delayed
Because, it's not an internal organisation issue or a personnel issue (i.e "hire more engineers"). The exact organisation does not matter when the problems are of the external kind mentioned above.
Now, the problems mentioned in TFA don't occur here because the SPVs house long term employees with - for government standards - fairly robust institutional knowledge.
The top comment now has content refuting the article: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48582433
> Look at the memes for Pune metro line 3 and for Karnataka metro (forgot which line)
The same memes exist everywhere: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48582563
> Even though private
If you want real private efficiencies, you have to give the entire responsibility of many departments to the private company. So, a near-private whole sub-municipality. Just making the metro SPV private is meaningless, although definitely better than having it under PWD...
[1] https://www.pmrda.gov.in/en/pune-metro-line-3/maan-hinjawadi...
Interesting. So do they not work on the things were land acquisition is solved?
I see at least 4 stations daily where there has been literally 0 progress in the past few months.
They could finish rest of the job right? Until land issue is resolved (which don't revokve around that land like stairs etc)
Two possibilties, one, less likely: typically they work on the bottleneck things first and redeploy the people there.
Two: most likely, an earlier contract to construct the station (and especially for interiors like stairs, it's always a different contract) was cancelled[1] and they have decided to postpone tendering a new contractor for that station, until the nagging land issue is closer to being solved, lest the same issue happen again with the new contractor.
If you meant why can't it be decoupled, well that's because in general some entity in the chain won't give you a completion certificate trusting that you will integrate the two decoupled projects properly later. If you want to make the integration a separate step, no contractor will assume responsibility for it and sign it since the two components are done by others and it becomes a game afterwards of who takes the blame. It's also extremely low margin work. Sometimes, you will see TATA led businesses take the risk and somehow do it, out of altruism towards nation building, but I have not seen any one else do it.
In general the rule with govt contracts is that if there's any problem at all with the contract, all work even if it's unrelated physically speaking, will stop. Because it's related contractually speaking. Such is life.
[1] e.g because the timeline after delays stops being viable for him
> I see at least 4 stations daily where there has been literally 0 progress in the past few months
Where do you live? Delhi Metro has been quietly expanding rapidly over the past decade, and you can see fairly constant construction and execution. Same with the Gurgaon Metro.
If you are in Bangalore, its metro was a victim of the Siddarmiah-Shivakumar rivalry (Siddaramaiah backed Mysore and Mangalore at the expense of Bangalore to undercut Shivakumar who has significant investments in Bangalore).
> Until land issue is resolved...
This is the biggest timesink for any Indian infrastructure project. Eminent Domain is basically impossible in India under the LARR, which has constantly delayed infra projects across India.
In some way, it works out. Because of LARR being the way it is, the system descends into things being built on politician owned land and them pocketing the money, or politicians buying up land near an upcoming project where they know LA is done. While that sounds bad, overall this leads to positive infra development. Much better than the alternative of a principled politician who doesn't indulge in such corruption, but due to the inherent difficulty of LA also gets nothing done. Also considering the politicians are voted for, you also get a little bit of alignment to public interest. I.e Mr. X knows he can campaign on a sports center in the corner there without worrying about LARR on the existing old office building - his brother owns it.
Of course this is not business friendly at all... And you end up needing SEZs and special "Foo Cities" for land acquisition to even be remotely feasible for Foo companies. But hey atleast SEZs/special cities don't face the same problems.
It slows down SEZ creation as well, becuase an SEZ needs land, which forces state planning commissions to deal with the LARR headache, but at least it's state governments that are facing the headache instead of businesses.
It also prevents the development of mass dormitories for migrant workers in factories, which is the de facto model adopted across Asia.
> the system descends into things being built on politician owned land and them pocketing the money, or politicians buying up land near an upcoming project where they know LA is done
It works until it doesn't, as can be seen with Bangalore because of the Siddaramiah (Mysore) versus Shivakumar (Bangalore) rivalry, or Panchkula whenever Haryana got a BJP CM because former CM Hooda had significant land interests in Panchkula.
---
Eminent domain and "bulldozer raj" might be undemocratic, but it's what helped Urban China clean up in the early 2010s [0][1], when it was in similar shoes to India today. So did South Korea in the 2000s to present [2][3]; Japan in the 1980s to 2000s [4]; and Taiwan in the 1990s to 2010s [5][6].
Urban villages, abadis, bastis, jhuggis, and other informal settlements should be demolished and expropriated to development authorities if India wishes to replicate the Asian model.
Edit: can't reply
> From my weak knowledge of asian countries, I think they took up, loosely speaking, individualistic capitalism
Not really. The main difference was light authoritarianism. India has too much democracy at the local level, where any wannabe neta can block a project by building a Mandir/Masjid or naarabazing "laal salam" or "Jai bhim".
When demolitions and urban renewal projects are executed in China, Korea, Taiwan, or Japan the full might of the system is used to push it through. No PILs or human interest media stories slow down those demolitions and urban renewals. If they need to crack heads or break a few legs, they will.
India under Indira used to be able to execute at such frequency, but then the counter-reaction in the 1980s and 1990s led to India neutering it's eminent domain laws.
[0] - https://archive.nytimes.com/sinosphere.blogs.nytimes.com/201...
[1] - https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Sk46cwSCkTs
[2] - https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2009-feb-09-fg-korea...
[3] - https://www.listentothecity.org/Resisting-Seoul-s-brutal-apa...
[4] - https://www.toshiseibi.metro.tokyo.lg.jp/documents/d/toshise...
[5] - https://www.taiwantoday.tw/print/Environment/Taiwan-Review/2...
[6] - https://www.taipeitimes.com/News/taiwan/archives/2013/05/21/...
In tamil nadu atleast, building housing for workers nearby the workplace is not the part that causes issues. The way it typically happens is that the business bears the costs, and at the least gets to do the maintenance contract themselves. And the state government provides security (especially when its a lot of women workers) and other utility services. Fairly smooth. The issue primarily is in the earlier negotiation and things like subsidies.
> SEZ dealing with SARR, but atleast its the state governments that face the headache and not the businesses
Can't underestimate the benefit of this difference, it's massive.
> It works until it doesn't
Yep, the failure modes are also of the ugly kind.
> Urban villages, abadis, bastis, jhuggis, and other informal settlements should be demolished and expropriated to development authorities if India wishes to replicate the Asian model.
I don't think we will replicate that model. I am not entirely sure what the model will be, since it's extremely unique. From my weak knowledge of asian countries, I think they took up, loosely speaking, individualistic capitalism, way more than I see among indians, income level and opportunity cost held equal.
I haven't yet seen an explanation for this, and the easy ones (e.g language, community) don't hold up to what I have seen.
I mean even most slums these days don't really have dirt poor people living in them. Dismantling it is not something the state can do and then just ignore the "powerless slum dweller" The people who used to live in the slums in the 70s decided to keep it that way (since they know the land is worth millions) and live in a standard apartment in a standard neighbourhood and treat the slum land as generational wealth. If you bulldozed it you will have money and lawyers coming at you. Not to mention they use tactics like building small temples and/or local hero memorials. So demolishing it becomes a news item on top of that. The new batch of city immigrants then stay in the actual slum asbestos houses, but after cities expanded most of them don't _really_ stay there. Some are also managed as a tourist attraction which leads to, let's say, artificial occupation. The problem with it is that it's forced, but that's another conversation.
It's the same with most urban issues - it only gets solved when the people (or more precisely, the swing voters) get rich enough to implicitly solve it. Electricity became better in TN only when majority of rural people became dependent on the mixer-grinder for making breakfast+lunch to take to work for husband and wife, all in the morning, enabling new behaviour. Until then they didn't really care if electricity went off. Note that city dwellers dont matter as much in elections, and less so back then. Flood management became much better since vardah was the first time majority of houses actually started having valuable things that get damaged! Before that, rural households simply kept their jewellery in the loft and moved to higher grounds. Only the urban dwellers actually suffered. Roads and storm-water mgmt became better only after most people started owning two-wheelers. It's still bad, but not as bad.
This is of course much slower, but there is also some surety to it. If there is a real incentive backing it, it ends up being executed better (by govt execution quality standards). And where I have seen it happen in front of my eyes in a rural town I frequent (now quite well-equipped I admit), it gets executed with a certain "fear of next elections" that I personally enjoy.
One interesting tidbit: of all things, internet connectivity is one such thing today. All rural households depend on it to such a degree that they would hanker more if "data is not there" versus even water not being there. Have observed people seeing water connections having issues, and temporarily reverting to the decade-ago norm of fetching it from a nearby pump with pots and mostly just... accepting it. But they go complain the same day when "data" goes out. To be fair, they use it for almost everything and not just leisure like we urban dwellers do, so it's understandable, but still.
> From my weak knowledge of asian countries, I think they took up, loosely speaking, individualistic capitalism
Not really based on my personal experience on the ground.
The main difference was light authoritarianism. India has too much democracy at the local level, where any wannabe neta can block a project by building a Mandir/Masjid or naarabazi-ing "laal salam" or "Jai bhim".
When demolitions and urban renewal projects are executed in China, Korea, Taiwan, or Japan the full might of the system is used to push it through. No PILs or human interest media stories slow down those demolitions and urban renewals. If they need to crack heads or break a few legs, they will.
India under Indira used to be able to execute at such frequency, but then the counter-reaction in the 1980s and 1990s led to India neutering it's eminent domain laws.
TN historically worked because if I wanted a factory built, I knew who to call in the DMK and they would get land and permitting completed in a single window. It's the same in Telangana, Andhra, Maharashtra, Gujarat, and Haryana. UP and Chhattisgarh have also started to operate in that manner too. You used to be able to do that in Karnataka but the politics changed in 2021.
> The main difference was light authoritarianism. India has too much democracy at the local level, where any wannabe neta can block a project
Makes sense. In some ways, the opposite problem also exists. The municipalities dont have much money/power and are de-facto just a branch of the state govt and a neglected one at that. Cause of many urban infra issues.
> TN historically worked because if I wanted a factory built, I knew who to call in the DMK and they would get land and permitting completed in a single window
Yep, this is the kind of thing I alluded to up-thread.
In the UK infrastructure projects are about creating jobs and making their friends rich first, and providing some kind of useful infrastructure last (and also optional)
There is so much thievery of public funds it's just corruption disguised as incompetence and the public believe it every time
In Spain it is the same, the Metro de Madrid being an anomaly rather than the norm (for now).
Some flagrant cases:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ciudad_Real_International_Airp...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castell%C3%B3n%E2%80%93Costa_A...
https://maps.app.goo.gl/8BRnx8eQFfihvHmv5
https://english.elpais.com/elpais/2019/05/17/inenglish/15580...
The 2008 crisis had a special flavor in Spain, cajas de ahorros (privately owned, but politically controlled banks) worked with politicians -surprise- to grant mortgages (i.e. lending someone else's money) to buyers of the housing constructions they themselves had their fingers in, at a time regular banks were already wary of the direction of the housing market. It wasn't uncommon people being told which bank to go to to obtain a mortgage that'd be usually refused.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Savings_bank_(Spain)
To say they were "privately owned" doesn't sound right. Cajas de ahorros had no shareholders so profits were not distributed to any "private owner". Leaders and executives of the Cajas were appointed by a mix of local councils, unions, autonomous regions, and other non-private organizations. Juridically, they were "private organizations", but factually, they were just a form of state-owned company, as it was the municipalities and regions that made the important governing decisions.
At least Spain has something, UK has something to show for it the numbers are crazy.
> the UK infrastructure projects are about creating jobs and making their friends rich first,
So out and out corruption is rare in the UK. For example Farage has just received 5 million in dodgy money, which is more money than all of the previous political money scandals since Mandelson.
But to your point, most of the time and money in uk infra is spent trying to navigate planning laws and nimbys
That depends how you define political money scandals. Just looking in recent history you have COVID-19 and the associated scandals [1] which includes the govt trying to get £122 million + extras back from a company run by Baroness Mone in the house of lords. That's a political money scandal.
Or you could go for the Greensill scandal [2] with David Cameron who may have made as much as up to $60 million from it.
Nick clegg received $20 million + from working for meta after being in power.
There are so many more to choose from, Farage has just been the most obvious and worst at hiding it.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controversies_regarding_COVID-...
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greensill_scandal
> Nick clegg received $20 million + from working for meta after being in power.
That's not corruption. That's just proof he had no principles.
It doesn't have to be, but it probably is at least a form of soft corruption. If he wasn't the ex-leader of one of the coalition parties do you think he'd have got the job?
He isn't paid well because of his skills or anything else, but because of who he knows and his access. Whilst you can make the argument this is just lobbying, I would make the argument that a well-functioning democracy with no corruption would not value his access at such a high price. See the revolving door [1] and how that links to corruption and how these could be seen as examples of it.
For this specific example, Nick Clegg set the precedent, that a current high-standing MP might decide to push for laxer regulation on big tech, knowing that it will get them the high paying job afterwards as was already established in other industries like Defence. I am not saying he pushed for laxer regulation, but a current MP can now see it as a valid exit-opportunity and would be incentivised to do so.
This is corruption just on a longer time-scale as they are using their political power and position for personal gain.
A specific quote from the wikipedia entry below shows that this exact issue happens: "The Channel Four Dispatches programme 'Cabs for Hire', broadcast in early 2010, which showed several sitting members of Parliament and former ministers offering their influence and contacts in an effort to get lobbying jobs, has generated renewed concern about this issue."
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolving_door_(politics)
With Mandelson its not so much the amount of money directly received, it is the damage done by leaking information.
And who ensures those planning laws remain as they are - expensive and annoying and enabling of NIMBYs? Politicians. These things were created with laws, they can be undone with them
We rarely have impediments such as a minority government who can't change laws
You don't need to dig too deep to connect the dots.
I share your frustration, but having seen the last two governments, can you, hand on heart, actually see them _deliberately_ trying to keep planning laws the same to benefit certain companies? I mean you can see them try, but actually succeed and keep it a secret? [1]
They do not have the cognitive capacity to run a party, let alone a secret conspiracy.
The sad truth is this: Planning law is a huge tangled web of laws, and common law. It is painful to unpick because one of the biggest drivers of local anger from voters is a new development of x. ( be that housing, shops, turbines, industiral unit, path, sign anything) The same people that make local pressure groups are the same people that vote.
Any change to planning law is hard, and ripe for smear campaigns.
"We want lower power bills"
ok we need to build some infrastructure
"POWER LINES ARE BAD, DOWN WITH POWER LINES"(sad picture in the newspaper, the new power lines block my view [powerlines are 4 miles away from their house] they are an affront to us living here. When we moved here they wern't there [when they moved there it was cheap because they are 5 miles away from a massive power station])
"kids have nothing to do, lets have a new playground"
Ok, let me plan that out
"NEW PLAYGROUND DUBBED THE TEENAGE DRUG PALACE HAS A BILL OF 450K" (angry photo of a man outside an empty field. "I don't like the noise" said many wearing two massive hearing aids)
Worse in the facebook age, its now a hate campaign where people are accusing others of being peadophiles for holding any kind of opposing view on local planning.
[1] yes yes, Jenrick and section 106 money.
planning law changes today are either made to benefit loud nimbys or rich developers. i dont think pressure groups actually represent an average person from the neighborhood. imo the best way to fix it is by-right development for public interest projects (the government can build power lines or cheap housing anywhere it wants) and democratic resident vote for anything else. no fixed zoning maps or years long meetings. that way a loud minority cant block a project but if most locals really dont want it they still have a way to fight.
> I dont think pressure groups actually represent an average person from the neighborhood
I think for most places, that is a safe assumption.
That's somewhat unfair.
In rail, it's more like is that there's nothing for 20 years, then the government announces one project. Everyone piles onto that one project and gold-plates everything because they already know there's not going to be any more projects after this one for 20 years.
Then the project overruns by billions.
The government pays, then vows not to make that mistake again, so they don't have any more projects for 20 years.
Rinse and repeat.
A much more healthy cycle is like the Italian build-out of high speed rail, where they have multiple projects going, working their way from one city to another, and the line is usable after each part is done.
(in the case of HS2, a lot of the blame can be laid at the feed of NIMBYs, and the government pandering to them. Oh you lovely Tory-voting home counties voters! Yes, it's essential we preserve this ancient forest and that protected species, I know, so important, we'll make the entire line underground for your part of HS2, of course we have the extra billions to pay for that. Fuck you, you dirty northerners. I've just had to stump up a fuckton more than expected to pay off my voters, so I'm cutting your part of the line. You'll be lucky if HS2 goes north of Birmingham)
Sorry but it's errant nonsense that HS2 is the only rail project of the last 20 years
Crossrail, Transpennine Route Upgrade, East West Rail, MML upgrade, Borders railway, Thameslink upgrades
If it wasn't clear, I was talking about high-speed rail. Of course the other lines are very welcome! You can throw in the electrification projects too, all good.
HS1 was meant to start in 1996, only began in earnest in 2001, and was completed by 2007. HS2 was launched in 2009, only began in earnest in 2019, and is still ongoing.
So all we currently have to show for the past 30 years and billions in investment is a little bit of high-speed rail between London and the Channel Tunnel.
By comparison, the Italian high-speed network expands every year or so, as they keep completing phases of routes all over the country.
> "the public believe it every time"
This reads a lot like GB News announcing in Feb 2026 "The "biggest scandal in British history" [South Asian child grooming/rape gangs] has been blown wide open this week as an independent inquiry into the grooming gang epidemic heard harrowing testimonies. Rupert Lowe, Independent MP for Great Yarmouth, launched the proceedings on Monday"
Despite Andrew Norfolk being "2014 Journalist of the Year" for breaking the scandal in The Times and writing about it since 2010.
And despite a 2003 TV documentary reporting on an 18 month police and social services investigation, the Ivison Trust trying to bring it to national attention since 2010. the Independent writing about it in 2010. The former Home Secretary talking about it on Newsnight TV in 2011. A 2011 National Crime Agency (NCA)'s analysis. Convictions of Rochdale gang members in 2012. A 2013 NCA analysis. Rotherham council commissioning the independent Jay Report in 2013. A 2014 investigation into the Rotherham Council by the government. Andrew Norfolk winning two other awards for his reporting on it in 2014. The largest investigation into that kind of thing in UK history in 2017. A 2017 report from a thinktank. In 2017 a former Policing and Justice minister urging the Attorney General about it. A 2017 article in The Sun by the MP for Rotherham about it and the media attention that got. A 2020 report by the Home Office, a petition by The Independent with 130,000 signatures pressuring the Home Office to release their report. A 2021 investigation by The Times, A 2023 article by The Guardian, A 2023 announcement by Prime Minister Sunak starting a taskforce... but now The Right is trying to tell people that nobody has noticed it and the mainstream media isn't covering it.
But yeah, sure, the public "believe government grift every time" and weren't angry about the COVID PPE scandals, or HS2, or any of the rest of them, at all, only YOU noticed.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grooming_gangs_scandal
You've been dying to find a tangentially related comment to shoehorn that into haven't you? Hah
Good info though mate well done
The rape gangs are truly horrific and one of the worst things to happen to Britain in recent history
As an engineer myself working for them 20 years ago, we were certainly not well paid like the article said. Quite the contrary: I was still on University(had not finished the final project) and had to do most of the hard technical work myself for someone else to just overview the results and sign. My salary was miserable.
Once I had finished I could earn 3 to 4 times more on several places.
They were also extremely creative taking foreign systems, studying the patent and modifying it to pay zero to the creators of the patents. This was done with things like the aluminium beams for electricity delivery that I think was developed by Italians, or the tunnelling machines that had all the pieces replicated inhouse.
Sounds like Spain all right.
The article also makes a big deal out of country-level factors like the system of autonomous communities, governance, in-house expertise etc.
But all of those should apply to Malaga as well, which also built a metro in the 2000s. But that one became a city-wide joke for always being supposed to open "this year" and that continued for at least 5 years...
There was definitively none of the cheap or fast involved in that project, a relatively limited line to make travel to the airport more convenient which still couldn't deliver. Today it actually operates, but I think the rest of the network (it was supposed to be a "proper" metro system and not just isolated lines) is still vaporware. Haven't lived in Malaga in many years, though.
> in-house expertise
This is under-appreciated.
> I believe that the U.S. suffers from a distinct lack of state capacity. We’ve outsourced many of our core government functions to nonprofits and consultants, resulting in cost bloat and the waste of taxpayer money. We’ve farmed out environmental regulation to the courts and to private citizens, resulting in paralysis for industry and infrastructure alike. And we’ve left ourselves critically vulnerable to threats like pandemics and — most importantly — war.
> It’s time for us to bring back the bureaucrats.
* https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/america-needs-a-bigger-better-...
Even if you do outsource some level of tasks, you still need in-house folks who know something so you don't get fleeced.
> * https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/america-needs-a-bigger-better-...
Woah, this is really a “worst person you known just made a great point” moment for me.
Curious, what do you dislike about him? I find many of his takes to be pretty reasonable, though he gets temperamental and snarky sometimes.
Too many strongly held opinion about topics he has no qualification for.
Pundits like him are among the cancers of democracy.
> the tunnelling machines that had all the pieces replicated inhouse
Wait... did you build your own tunnel boring machines? Or just spare parts for them?
If you have the capability to manufacture heavy machinery, building it by copying an existing design is not rocket science. They're not crazy complicated and often built or adapted to a dig specific tunnel anyways.
Now, operating a tunnel-boring machine, that's a different beast, but you'd have to do that either way. Probably should get outside help if your engineers and scientists haven't planned and dug a tunnel in their life.
Don't students usually have miserable salaries? I would expect any engineer's salary to go up a lot after getting some experience and graduating, so it's hard for me to tell how much this data point generalizes to the whole project.
As for the patent side, I kinda give them kudos for that.
Meanwhile, bay area has companies with market cap of 30T (50T?), has nonexistent/incompatible and the slowest public transit.
1) BART 'works' for a subset of the population.
2) ACE train is one route only, from Stockton to San Jose.
3) Caltrain is one straight line. Caltrain has a bullet train that takes an hour for ~20-30 miles.
4) There is a ferry service for some parts of north bay.
There are probably dozens of other bus systems and ferries and what not, all incompatible and disconnected.
When people from bay area (and the big tech companies) tell you they are the greatest minds on the planet solving (or going to solve) world problems, look at their public transit and think. Then weep/laugh.
Source: I lived in the North bay, East bay and South bay.
Private companies and competition, solve a lot of problems in the society. Like making food supply work. Planning and building cities and public transport is something the public sector is better at solving. Clean, nice and walkable cities with a good working public transport system, is important for the local economy to work. City planning is the art of compromises - no body get’s what they want, but overall everybody is better off in the end.
> Like making food supply work
Producers make what will sell but without any incentives, subsidies or regulation this would be a mess of profit chasing, unsafe practices and fragile supply chains.
In my view, the value of the public sector is in setting the rule of the game for private actors in exactly this kind of way (rules and incentives) instead of the politics of picking winners and losers directly or making direct decisions about what to build where, etc. Rule makers play the meta-game of designing how the game works and they leave agents free to play as they wish.
> Private companies and competition, solve a lot of problems in the society. Like making food supply work.
Is there any food market in the developed world that is not heavily subsidized by the state?
New Zealand and Australia have very minimal subsidies.
I do wonder what it would be like if our system was designed to feed people rather than to make money.
It's baffling that in Florida the land of oranges you see little cups of pealed that say product of Spain and packaged in Thailand. I know supply chains are complex and labor costs are a big factor but still.
Just FYI, the orange industry in Florida is almost at zero now, due mostly to citrus greening. https://www.npr.org/2026/05/10/nx-s1-5771748/florida-farmers...
I grew up in Florida and that's been a rough situation for a while. Crazy that they haven't been able to figure anything out over the decades it's been going on. I grew up with many citrus trees just around the neighborhood. I wonder if those have got it too.
Its natural for companies to push boundaries for better and better profits. It's sort of their nature.
Things might be fine in Australia and NZ right now, but as the hydric crisis deepens we might see a need for government to step up.
I think a problem is that, if you have a market-first approach you run the risk of the businesses growing so large and powerful that when you do need to intervene, it has become an impossible task. This happened with banking, it is happening with consulting in the UK and big tech in the US. Not to mention big pharma pretty much everywhere.
So I think its a very careful balance of carrot and stick that the government needs to have over its industries.
>if you have a market-first approach you run the risk of the businesses growing so large and powerful that when you do need to intervene, it has become an impossible task.
It's also said that four companies control 85% beef market in the US, which normally should make people rather queasy I would think.
If including tax breaks, New Zealand and Australia are not subsidized in total terms.
But the level of efficiency achieved thanks to the development of technology by private companies is what keeps them efficient around the world.
. Caltrain has a bullet train that takes an hour for ~20-30 miles.
San Jose Didrion to SFO (4th and Townsend} is 48 miles highway distance.
You will not beat the bullet train during rush hour. It would like take you an hour and a half if lucky, probably closer to 2 hours driving
The transit times seem long, but often beat driving times especially during rush hour
Thw CalTrain being “one line” makes perfect sense because it runs parallel to the Valley
No the system is not perfect, but it is still one of the best in the country, except for NYC and maybe Boston
>No the system is not perfect, but it is still one of the best in the country, except for NYC and maybe Boston
I mean, there are a lot of poorer countries (especially in europe) that manage to solve this in a much better way, so this kind of proves OP point that raw purchasing power is not equivalent to the standard of living.
BART alone was confusing before they made the trains actually match with the colors on the map, circa 2016. Used to insist on only designating trains by endpoint, except the endpoints changed as they expanded lines, and also changed depending on the day/time. So even a year into daily riding BART to/from work, I took the wrong train a few times.
I went to NYC and also various other countries, easily understood the train/subway system even if it was in a language I don't understand. Except for Italy.
The morning "bullet" trains (503/507/511) from San Jose Diridon take 1hr to go 48miles with 10 stops. I think electrification and widening to 3 tracks improved times and reduces the likelihood of delays. Certainly, they run more often now, about every 10 minutes at rush hour and every 30min off hours and weekends.
https://www.caltrain.com/?active_tab=route_explorer_tab
The two things you reference are very loosely related. I studied Transportation Engineering in the Civil department at UC Berkeley. I have always been very interested in public transportation. But I work as a Data Scientist in Silicon Valley rather than at one of the public transportation agencies. Because it pays roughly 10x as much. Every single one of the smartest people I went to school with is also now working in tech in Silicon Valley. A lot work on stuff like advertising optimization. Sigh.
Why would anyone prefer public transit over a self driving comfortable personal car?
Because public transit, done well, is the fastest way to move around. It gets you everywhere, even to places personal vehicles can't reach. It's a lot cheaper. It generates hubs of activity that keep cities lively and relevant. It doesn't get stuck in traffic. It doesn't need to be parked.
The benefits of good public transport are so mind blowing that it's difficult to explain unless you have lived on a city that has it.
Key words: "done well" and "good public transport".
Whenever I see discussions like this, I always feel the standards that most public transportation advocates consider "good" or even "acceptable" are far lower than mine.
Mine - Seoul, Tokyo, other East Asian cities.
Most public transportation advocates - Maybe NYC, many even lower.
Factors - reliability, cleanliness (both cars and stations), reach, safety (both actual and perceived, and both violent and non-violent).
Give me the Seoul or Tokyo subway and I'll gladly ditch my car (actually...no, but I'd only use it for excursions outside the city).
Hmm I disagree. I lived in Madrid. In fact in one of those cities that this article mentions from the new subway construction. Subway takes 1h15min to reach the city center. Car only takes 30 minutes.
This is because when you are building a subway every one wants their station. The map above may look like straight lines, but if you look at the real map, the north of line 10 is not straight at all, it's more zig zag.
We are trying to make transportation work for everyone and we end up with transportation that works for no one.
Also, the subway closes at midnight, and by Spanish standards, that's early. I was stranded twice (because different stations close at different times) until i decided that I would never take public transport in Madrid again
> Car only takes 30 minutes
That is not rush hour time, though.
Oh yeah, I'm talking about recreationally. I would never accept a job offer that requires a commute to the city.
100% agree that commuting to work in public transport is way better
I work in NYC but live in the inner suburbs, as does most of my social circle.
For most of us, when it comes to commuting for work, it's always public transportation.
But when it comes to going into the city for leisure, it's always the car.
It takes 30 minutes to reach my workplace by bike, or alternatively 50 minutes by public transport.
In addition to the other good reasons also raised, PT has much more optimal land-use than private cars. Train stations or metro stations take up relatively little land and can be integrated with business and services or have nice public plazas and small parks. Compared with multi-lane highways, parking lots, giant intersections that are hostile to pedestrians and active transport.
Because it’s available to everyone, including kids and elderly, and does not need high upfront payments.
I can just move to Madrid and move anywhere in the city for around 1-2€ per trip without upfront investment of 20.000€ for a car, plus insurance, maintenance, fuel and taxes.
Trains don't get stuck in traffic, and some of them have restrooms and space to walk around in. They're also better for the people outside of the vehicle.
Well, first of all, there is no such thing.
However, even if such a thing did exist, you still have to contend with traffic and total road capacity. So, for instance, taking local systems (details will vary by city, but not much), a double-decker bus is ten meters long and takes ~100 people. A tram is 55m long and takes about 550 people. A commuter train is 160m long and takes a thousand people (and doesn't share roads, of course). A car is 4-5m long and typically carries one or two people. Take any large city, attempt to replace the public transport with private cars, and there simply _will not be space_.
Fully-segregated metros in particular can also be much faster than cars in urban areas; they don't have to contend with traffic or intersections at all.
Why would anyone prefer a car that YOU have to drive over an autonomous all terrain comfortable personal horse?
A horse knows how to navigate any kinds of terrain, while a car requires constant microsecond attention, extremely stressful, if you lose focus, might end up dead, worse kill a lot of other people! Horses don't need roads to be built, or the elaborate supply chains of fossil fuels, and trillions of dollars per year in subsidies.
Because of the lesser impact on land usage, fuel usage, noise, ...?
Collectively (as in, the collective action problem):
- Areas with few/no cars are nicer to be in. To breathe, to talk quietly and hear others talking, to walk around safely.
- Transport moves more people in less space and less overall investment. Toronto Highway 401[1] is an eighteen lane road and it moves fewer people per day than Metro line 1.
- Low car areas are better for local economies. People object to reducing traffic saying it will hurt local businesses, and the opposite is true. Where it's nice to exist outside of a car, that attracts people, and local businesses thrive.
- Reduced costs on health services from reduced pollution. Fewer doctor and hospital visits and prescriptions, for lung infections, breathing problems, asthsma and COPD in London after Low Emissions zones.
- Reduced environmental impact of fewer cars, fewer trips taken by car.
- Many people can't drive; all children, many injured or disabled people, many poorer people, many elderly people (can't or shouldn't), some people with e.g. DUI convictions. Some 20% of households in the UK have no access to a car. A matter of fairness and not prioritising the wealthy car owner.
Personally:
- No need to find parking, return to that carpark.
- Transit is more spacious. Being strapped into a carseat, elbows hitting doors, head hitting roof, knees hitting steering wheel, shins hitting dash, feet constrained in footwell, surrounded by explosives "for your protection" is a really unpleasant place to be.
- Less concentration needed. Driving requires constant attention. Even when transit is crowded, you don't have to do anything.
- Implemented well, transit takes priority over cars at turnings, crossings, junctions, roundabouts, and moves faster. Toronto trams do this especially poorly, apparently.
- Freedom. No need for a government approved license and ID. Not beholden to dragging a ton of steel boat-anchor around everywhere with you.
[1] https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-IRDiOiNYl9s/UEwAA79O2NI/AAAAAAAAG...
Why would anyone prefer airline transit over a comfortable private jet?
Why would anyone prefer to drive when you can be driven?
Why would anyone prefer a self driving comfortable personal car over teleportation?
Well, trains and underground public transit usually are impervious to traffic.
Even buses get exclusive lanes in some cities.
You can zip over people trapped in traffic on their personal cars. It is quite satisfying.
SF Bay Area (land) has population density of a third of New York metro area or an eight of Tokyo metro area. The population density does not justify a world class public transit system. Not to mention there's a large body of water in the middle, which precludes building a lot of connections.
Having been in Madrid and having used the metro, I was also impressed by how well it works. Seemingly always on time, and very good price service ratio. You can buy "rides" and one ride means get in at any station and get out at any other station of the whole network, interchange as many times as you want. For, at the time, 1.16 Euro. Compare that to Berlin, where you can pay some 4 Euro or so for limited amount of stops or time. Madrid metro >> Berlin public transport.
Though in practice if you live there you probably have a Deutschland-Ticket; the 4 euro fee would be primarily for visitors. Even as a visitor you should just buy an X-day pass in the terrible app if you're going to be using it a lot, assuming that the terrible app deigns to let you do that and doesn't just throw cryptic errors.
(What is with German public transport ticket-buying apps? They all seem to be very broken.)
Well, it grew up really well but that was "geologically easy". Madrid lies over a granitic floor, tunneling there is easier and faster than it would be in Barcelona, Amsterdam or London.
So, after having lived in Barcelona and Madrid... Both metros are excellent, but besides covering a smaller area, I still prefer Barcelona metro than Madrid one. IMHO, Barcelona metro looks more like the one in the german cities and Madrid metro looks like London one.
Said that, this year Madrid metro users have been quite angry at some line closures at the same time than tunnels were fixed at the same time in the city. It is mostly a managing problem as well, as some of the trains (quite old in some cases) are still being rented instead of bought.
Line 7B grew up as well but in San Fernando de Henares some buildings got structural cracks and some houses (over 50) had to be bulldozed.
Metro works from 06:00 to 01:00, but there is nothing before of after that time. In Barcelona, for instance, Monday to Thursday works 5:00 to 00:00, on Friday 5:00 to 02:00, and from 05:00 on Saturday to 00:00 on Sunday non-stop. That has been for some years now and means lots of drunk people not taking the car.
In Barcelona, metro schedules are tighter as well. In Barcelona, in rush hours you may have a train every 2,5 minutes, in some cases less than 2 minutes. In Madrid it's more like 4 minutes. Trains are newer in Barcelona, too (and wider because most lines use iberic gauge), but that was because until the 90s Barcelona trains had some asbestos on them.
Anyways, a metro is not only about the trains, it's also about the stations. Most of Madrid ones have conditioned air and have better lighting than not only the Barcelona ones, but the European ones as well. But, again IMHO, signage in Madrid metro is HORRIBLE. Most of the signs are on the walls, when you are walking on a crowded corridor is easy to take the wrong direction. I need a magnifier to read the metro plan on the wagons. Also, it takes some time to understand that it "drives on its left" in a country where everything else "drives on its right". Not a big thing, but if you come from somewhere in Europe it may take you some time until you get used to all of it.
A lot of the price difference between Europe and USA now are wages. US wages for construction workers in NYC or SF are 2 or 3 times that of Madrid. Lots of things are cheap just for this reason alone.
What came first, the wage or the cost of housing?
Even states like Mississippi and Iowa have low housing costs and wages much higher than Spain.
If you want to do a real comparison then you have to include the cost of healthcare.
Yes, but that cuts in the other direction. In the U.S., skilled work like subway construction will provide employer-paid healthcare. U.S. employers pay $1.3 trillion a year in healthcare benefits. You have to account for that on top of the reported wages. So that makes U.S. workers even more expensive relative to workers in Europe, where healthcare will be paid from taxes on the wages paid to employees.
Total compensation in the U.S. construction industry is about $46/hour on average: https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/ecec.pdf. That's almost $92,000 for a 2,000-hour year.
people making this argument always forget the most critical aspect - people generally need healthcare when they are not working, almost always when retired.
Your argument is then essentially that people should be working indefinitely.
We’re talking about how labor costs impact subway construction costs. Retirees aren’t relevant to that. (And the U.S. has universal healthcare for them anyway.)
Yes that is another reason, high healthcare costs for employing workers means higher construction costs in the USA.
In Madrid where the average monthly pretax salary is below 1500 a shared room with four strangers costs 400-709 a month and small aprtments in bad neighborhoods cost 3000-4000 a square meter to buy.
Average monthly pretax salary in Madrid: 2 575.46 EUR (source in es_ES: https://www.abc.es/espana/madrid/evolucionado-salario-medio-...)
Also, a shared apartment costs as much as you say. Not a room (source: idealista.es).
Purchase prices are high, but I'm curious as to what you consider a bad neighborhood, given the overall safety statistics in Spain, and Madrid in particular.
Housing affordability is a real problem, but misrepresenting data is counterproductive, as it can be easily disproven.
No one lives in rooms. Everyone in Madrid lives in apartment.
The average salary refers to those who have a job. Most family units have some that don't.
Not only are the wages higher, the unions insist on hiring 3x the number of necessary staff (https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/nyregion/new-york-subway-...)
The US project prices are not just 3X the EU project prices. It’s just that the construction companies & consultancies overcharge. In the US the overhead is insane. From construction, to universities, to hospitals. Insane overheads everywhere.
This is an interesting one. I live in NYC and have spent lots of time in Spain - the cost of living differential is easily within the 2-3x range, maybe more if you're talking housing specifically.
I can't confidently say whether one feels more comfortable working construction in a globally VHCOL city like NYC or SF or in a MCOL city like Madrid.
It's the amount of middlemen adding their cut to everything, don't blame it on the workers.
The price difference isn't 2 or 3 times though. We're talking about x10 easily.
What would need to be true for SF to replicate this? Would we need alignment at the mayor, state assembly and SFMTA levels?
It is difficult. I think the key is that Spain has a large corps of civil engineers working for the government. They plan all projects with great detail and then oversee their execution.
Agile regulations against NIMBYism and a world-class civil engineering industry with HQs in Madrid also help.
A good analogy is to ask what would need to be true for Madrid to replicate the AI hub in SF? Great VC, top engineers, certain risk-taking mentality, etc.
So, it's not easy. The environment that creates a fabric for radical innovation is quite different from a statist mentality, although hopefully, both are not mutually exclusive.
The sibling comments explain the regulatory differences. But another factor is that competent engineers and executives have much lower opportunity costs to work for the government in Spain because private sector opportunities are far less lucrative than in the U.S.
An ironic downside of America’s leadership in tech and finance is that there is tremendous brain drain out of the public sector.
> I think the key is that Spain has a large corps of civil engineers working for the government.
I agree with this. In general jobs with the government are seen as high quality jobs from my understanding. Another commenter mentioned that the high salaries in the private sector in the US brain drain away from the US public sector. In Spain salaries are much lower, so this is perhaps less of an issue in certain fields.
San Francisco Tried to Build a $1.7 Million Toilet. It’s Still Not Done: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/24/us/san-francisco-toilet.h...
It opened in 2024 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noe_Valley_public_toilet
Hm so at least they scaled the cost down to $200K, which suggests that the bad press did something, but that also relied on the whole prefab toilet being donated.
- Figuring out NIMBY-ism. Anywhere you run a tunnel you're gonna have people suing you and stalling for decades. Less so if you use a tunnel bore machine, but cut and cover is pretty much a non-starter.
- Cost of labor is insanely high due to cost of housing. Short of jumping straight back into the 19th century, setting up temporary housing and bringing in guest laborers this is pretty much non-negotiable.
- Not a ton of expertise left in the country since there's 2 new subway tunnels a decade AFAIK.
- The grift has got to be worse here than in Spain. There if you get $40k in kickbacks that's a nice bonus, here that barely covers your rent for the year.
And then even if you bring the costs down, you have to figure out the taxation. Several billion per mile is the running rate and you may be able to bring that down but then you have ongoing costs. Muni's farebox recovery is only 1/4 of its budget so unless you're making existing lines redundant, there's new ongoing cost. Obviously the choices there will be to go into the pockets of the middle class or not do it at all.
> Cost of labor is insanely high due to cost of housing
This is not the reason. Labor is expensive even in parts of the US with low housing costs.
The real, simple reason is the US has a more prosperous economy where the average worker has more opportunity than their Spanish peers. Just look at unemployment rates. The US is at 4.3% right now compared to Spain's 10%. Even at the peak of the GFC the US barely had over 10% unemployment. In the meanwhile Spain has had over 10% employment almost the entire time the past four decades. Of course labor is cheap when that many people are jobless.
U-6 is 8.1%, but spain uses a pretty comparable base employment rate (u-3 equivalent), so fair cop that US unemployment is easily less than half.
Relevant: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol_effect - drives a lot of effects in the US where automation paradoxically makes non-automated industries insanely expensive (though not the whole story for certain niches e.g. healthcare and education)
So does that imply that there is a Goldilocks zone of prosperity where society are wealthy enough to afford good infrastructure but not too wealthy so as to become unable to build infrastructure cost effectively? Interesting that too much prosperity would actually lower living standards.
I mean, if you can have higher unemployment but still build good subways and overall have a good quality of life, maybe that suggests unemployment isn't a great metric for evaluating societies.
>if you can have higher unemployment but still build good subways and overall have a good quality of life
How are you having a great quality of life if you're unemployed?
>unemployment isn't a great metric for evaluating societies.
IDK man, being unemployed is not great. Not having money sucks.
What metrics do you think are better?
Aggressive deployment of eminent domain and exemption from CEPA and all the other “think of the children” NIMBY rules.
I understand housing construction, but why would a NIMBY be against metro construction? Being close to a metro station means real estate prices skyrocket and that's what NIMBYs are after.
Have you not met Americans? The very first thing 95% of Americans will say if you propose public transport closer to their house is that you are bringing crime. Also if the transit comes close then someone might build condos or apartments near it! Oh the horror!
I had a lady parade around my neighborhood handing out fliers saying that extending the bus stop to our neighborhood was going to bring rapists and pedophiles into the neighborhood. I thought she was an odd one out and insane so I made a joke about it at a neighborhood event a few weeks later.
Turns out, I was the odd one out…
Sounds like, solution is "company towns" where everything is built by giant mega-corporation, completely greenfield, and nothing is sold - just rented out.
Plenty of those exist in the US too, with public transit. The people complaining about NIMBYs can live there, but they don't. They're more popular among younger people without kids.
So perhaps there is no problem there? People can live in places like that and build wealth by investing it stocks (it beats real estate anyway).
I agree, home ownership is overrated as an investment. It's not bad but not necessary.
* Disruption while it is being built
* Fear that a metro will bring in "undesirables" (i.e. poor / lower-class people)
* Concerns about noise (whether real or imagined)
* Some people just hate change
The "undesirables" they're concerned about are robbers, teenage gangs, or people on drugs who loiter around train stations. The lower-class people don't want to be around them either.
In metropolitan areas, people want to be close but not too close to train/metro stations or railroad/tunnels. 5-10 minute walk is ideal. Anything closer, people have vibration/noise and crowd/security concerns.
In US suburbs, a lot of people are going to drive even if they live next to a train station. So there’s no convenience or property value benefits. To them, they only see downsides.
Living directly in view of a metro entrance within the inner city will be have noise from people using it, but one minute walk away is considered perfect in Europe.
Many people who visit me for the first time comment on this.
On the very quietest summer night, when there's no ventilation systems running etc, I can sometimes hear an occasional dum-dum, dum-dum when I lie in bed. The tunnel is directly under the building.
In suburbia closer is also better, but away from the track is better than along the track of it's above ground.
The idea of security concerns sounds ridiculous to me.
False. I live in Madrid and being near a metro station a. Has no issues (for almost all stations) and b. is considered highly desirable. 10 minute walk is considered a lot (mine is 5, to either of the two nearby stations - at 10-12 minutes I can walk to four stations). These are genuine underground metro. They're deep and vibrations are mostly not an issue.
The article paints a somewhat biased view of the construction process. It gives too much credit to Gallardo and the pp and conveniently ignored the serious issues in the sam Fernando de Henares área created by too rapid construction that ignored environmental and design issues in the Sandy soil near the Jarama river. Several hundred apartments have been condemned because of it and a whole neighborhood affected ...
But it is the best metro I've seen in Europe or north america. Most usable and cheapest to use.
> vibration/noise
That’s not true of most modern metro lines that are generally bored and not cut and covered.
Bored metro lines create no noise on the surface and are preferred nowadays because there is barely any constraint on the routes you can create.
Cut and covered are only used when creating whole new districts.
Surely you'd be _more_ secure near a station as there are more "eyes on the street" near an activity hub than tucked away in an isolated suburban node
For many years, I observed the San Francisco Caltrain DTX (Downtown Extension, recently rebranded "The Portal"). This is the most important transit missing link in Northern California that is expected to connect two of the highest ridership transit arteries in the Bay Area and eventually unlock single-seat rail transit between Sacramento, San Francisco, San Jose, and points south. DTX is a two-mile tunnel planned to connect the rail line terminus south of San Francisco downtown to Market Street, where the BART subway has the 4 highest ridership train stations in Northern California. The combined project (DTX and Transbay Terminal, the already built train station it's supposed to connect to) is about 15 years late and many billions of dollars over budget.
What struck me is a complete lack of urgency and accountability, combined with out-of-control meddling by politicians pursuing completely unrelated goals. The project spent several years in EIR and initial planning, which is to be expected. Then for over a decade, San Francisco's board of supervisors held the project hostage because they wanted to demolish a freeway south of where the actual project is, while bolting on an unrelated and unrealistic tunneling project (the "Pennsylvania Avenue alignment") and taking over the governance of the Caltrain board (Caltrain is the least dysfunctional transit system in the Bay Area, so the Caltrain board was not too keen on this proposal). Eventually, after wasting many years and tens (hundreds?) of millions of dollars, the balance of power on the BoS shifted and they agreed to stop holding the project hostage, restructure the board (TJPA), and re-hire staff to actually plan the tunnel.
I've seen multiple project managers/directors come and go, and countless community input meetings happen discussing completely hypothetical project concepts. The money set aside for the project from the original Transbay budget is long gone, and numerous funding opportunities have passed by because the TJPA and its stakeholders were not ready to plan and submit a viable proposal in time.
Here are some things I would want to change going forward:
- Transit projects should be centrally planned by the state government (i.e. a regional subdivision of an agency similar to Caltrans) with structured opportunities for resident feedback and authority to override most input from local governments. This should include exemptions from CEQA and other review, and strong eminent domain powers.
- The Caltrans-like agency should have independent regional metro divisions (i.e. Bay Area, LA area, etc) with dedicated sources of regionally collected funding as well as a mandate to own and lease out land adjacent to transit stations as part of its funding. The divisions should have budgets to retain project management staff who accumulate long-term experience and manage multiple projects. They should have the independent authority to issue bonds and be required to publish construction efficiency and ridership statistics.
- Labor unions should be systematically prevented from influencing the course of planning, construction, and project execution. Unions meddle and cause many delays and project complications.
Unfortunately, even a structure like that is not a panacea. If you look at CHSRA, it actually has some of the features that I listed above. When CHSRA was first started, the planning process fell victim to meddling from state legislators (most famously the one who forced the route to go through Palmdale), followed by many wasted years fighting NIMBYs and doing useless planning. Ultimately, the only hope I see is to insulate the planners from political interference, set them up with independent funding, have one agency head who is responsible and accountable, and reduce the veto powers that California grants to citizens and governments.
100% agree on all points!
And moreover, CHRSRA, while it is certainly delayed and over budget, appears to be a fairly well-run program with delays due primarily to external issues created by state & local government. It doesn't help that it receives nearly universal bad press, but I think that'll change by next year as they start laying track [connecting the stations and above grade crossings that have been long built].
I don't think CHSRA is a well-run program.
What this article misses is that the line 10 expansion to the north was a clear attempt at gaining votes and not an attempt at designing a good subway.
If you look at the physical map, you will see that it visits multiple towns that are not in a straight line from Madrid. This causes the line to "zig-zag" and what should take 20 minutes in a straight line becomes a 1h 15min ride.
People use it because Madrid has started being hostile to cars and the only two alternatives are trains (which is pretty good, takes 30 min) or buses
It's also not 24/7, closes at midnight (and if you are going out in Spain, you will stay way later than that)
I am not sure how much do I trust an article about Madrid's metro that doesn't mention the fact that one of those expansions (Line 7, in San Fernando de Henares) was done with political instead of technical criteria, ending up in several hundreds losing their homes and a metro line that has to close every once in a while for repairs.
I am also heavily distrusting of the "75 percent of passengers described themselves as ‘very satisfied’". The infrastructure might be ok now, but the frequencies are getting worse (except when the pope visits, in that case they apparently have the money) and in rush hour everything is packed.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/296888725_Geology_a...
The article is in French, but geology is the key factor. Do you need to bore rock or sandy soil with tar? Is the area seismically active like in Los Angeles? This affects the cost and timeline of metro construction more than just wages.
On the topic of public engineering projects overall, I'm wondering are there better books on this topic than Robert Caro's "Power broker"?
Which is basically "Soul of a new machine" for municipalities with all the political mess this implies. How do you get stuff done - and at what price.
The part about political accountability made me kind of chuckle.
> The PP candidate for Assembly President, Alberto Ruiz-Gallardón, promised to deliver 30 new miles (48 kilometers) of metro by the next election, compared to the 14 miles (23 kilometers) the PSOE had delivered during their previous 15 years in government. With this pledge, the PP won a majority and Ruiz-Gallardón was duly elected president.
It's hard to see that working in the US, even if we eliminated the jurisdictional patchworks, because what will happen is one candidate will promise 1000 miles and the other will propose destroying existing infrastructure, but they'll also make competing promises on homelessness, affordability, and various culture war issues, while jockeying for supremacy in media prominence, and then whichever one gets elected will build 0 miles and say it was somehow the other one's fault. It's just hard to imagine any sizable electorate in the US actually voting based on an issue like how quickly and cheaply public transportation is built. If we had the kind of people who care about stuff like that, we wouldn't have the problems we have.
Where does he discuss geology?
See also perhaps "The Transit Abundance Playbook":
* https://ifp.org/transit-abundance-playbook/
that gives specific recommendations to makes things quicker (in the US?).
In 1968, Garrett Hardin wrote a paper called "The Tragedy of the Commons" [1]. Many people seem to think this term dates further back to Adam Smith or earlier it does not. Well, this became hugely influential in noeliberalism and was used as the justification for governments to sell off their assets in the 1980s and 1990s in particular, all based on this (flawed) idea that private industry was more efficient. This was the era of public-private "partnerships". What that really means was privatizing the profits and socializing the losses while guaranteeing profits.
Utilities were generally public prior to this. Now we have private equity buying up utilities because the profits are guaranteed [2]. While electricity prices are regulated, capex on infrastructure isn't so they can simply boost profits by "investing" in the network ie creating extra capacity for data centers to be sold electricity at sub-market rates.
Lots of expierments were done and empirical data analyzed on the tragedy of the commons and it never matched the theory. Ultimately, this resulted in Elinor Ostrom winning the 2009 Nobel Price for Economics for disproving it with empirical data. Yet people still quote it.
Look at the list of metro systems sorted by length [4]. They're almost all Chinese. The 4th largest is in Chengdu, which only opened in 2010. In 16 years it's now the 4th largest in the world.
Pretty much any argument you can use about how China is different will have a contradiction by counterexample. Difficult terran? Chongqing. Old cities? Beijing, Shanghai. City too large? Good one.
It's not any single factor that allows for this. It's managed at every single level. For example, China has standardized rolling stock to a handful of variants so you avoid an entire procurement process (and grift). The UK spends billions of pounds to build an otherwise completely unnecessary tunnel under the Chilterns to protect the views of something of the most expensive property in the country [5]. Not in China. Audits of the Second Avenue Subway showed a host of corruption such as so-called "ghost jobs" [6]. Beverly Hills and Santa Monica fought the LA Metro extending into their areas because it might bring in the poors.
[1]: https://www.garretthardinsociety.org/articles_pdf/tragedy_of...
[2]: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/pe-buys-utilities-power-ai-18...
[3]: https://www.forbes.com/sites/artcarden/2019/08/07/elinor-ost...
[4]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_metro_systems
[5]: https://www.theguardian.com/business/2026/jan/19/hs2-tunnels...
[6]: https://secondavenuesagas.com/2018/01/01/inside-times-deep-d...
This is a pretty egregious misreading of both Hardin and Ostrom, where on earth did you get this from?
Hardin did not argue that private industry was more efficient. His paper described that with an unmanaged, private, unregulated open pasture that has no property rights, individuals will exploit it until it collapses. It wasn't used used as justification for privatization, if anything it was the opposite.
Ostrom did not argue that unmanaged resources don't collapse. Instead, she showed with data a third way of organising which was more involved with self-governing, communal rules to manage shared resources without resorting to either a private corporation or government control.
Visited China recently and it's pretty astonishing what can be achieved if you just ignore the whiners, complainers, environmentalists, and local governments. NIMBYs? Get lost. Have unique local culture? Funny but no. There's a special kind of beetle living there? Tough shit. It's ugly? So is your face. Etc. This is how the West built its infrastructure back in the day - nobody consulted NIMBYs or the native Americans on railway construction - but now we're too good for this, and we reap the consequences.
I'm still on team democracy, and we'll see how long it takes before China regresses to the norm of dictatorships. Xi has already broken the term limits. Nothing suggests he won't slowly lose his grip on reality like most dictators. But for now China has its charms.
Rail lines in the US were not great examples of this. Many towns refused to grant right of way to the rail unless a stop was added which basically forced passengers to change trains. As a result, there’s were so many changes it took two to three days to get from say, Chicago to NYC when it should have taken no longer than a day
China will also acid-wash land to extract rare earths. It does achieve what they wanted though.
The problem with the Chinese system is when there are genuine engineering problems then people are afraid to voice them.
p.s. I don't think Native Americans are a factor in most of the west except Canada and the USA.
True, but it's a provocative and widely understood example. Some things are lost in steamrolling everyone, basically, but it's still not a mistake.
About rolling out standardized infrastructure in China: One can also see this in their high speed train stations in capitols of provinces. Manny of them look of feel the same with their 28 tracks.
tbh Santa Monica and Beverly Hills complainers were right, at least when it came to their own interests. Visit that Santa Monica metro station. Nobody getting off that train is commuting to work.
> Yet people still quote it.
It's worse that this: It's being taught to pretty much every student of economics during the first few classes, Ostrom sometimes being quoted as a counterpoint but not always.
>Utilities were generally public prior to this.
Which utilities do you believe were government-funded or government-owned in the West? I will grant you most water supplies. Which other utilities?
Here's 114 companies formerly nationalised in the UK: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Former_nationalised_i...
or currently nationalised: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State-owned_enterprises_of_the...
Electric, Gas distribution, British Petroleum, British Telecom, Bank of England, other banks like Bradford & Bingley, Royal Mail, regional water companies, shipbuilding, aeroplane, car, iron, and steel manufacturing, nuclear power, canals and waterways, coal mining, munitions factories, pubs, zinc smelting, airlines, Ordnance Survey Mapping, National Highways, BBC and Channel 4 broadcasting, The Crown Estate, Nuclear Laboratory, UK Hydrographic office, Meteorological Office, Genomics England, Student Loans Company, Civil Aviation Authority, Porton Biopharma...
NZ: Electricity, gas, public transport, telecommunications.
And have any of those NZ utilities been privatized?
Where are these utilities that were public, then were privatized? Not AFAIK in the US where the intercity and freight rail lines, telegraph lines, telephone systems, natural-gas-distribution networks, electrical grid, cable-TV grid and last-mile internet networks started out private. Maybe in Britain? But if so, the person I replied to should make it clear that his critique applies only to Britain.
tldr cut and cover?
Nah, I think most/all of their new lines are single broad (9m diameter) bored tunnels.
Inhouse talent
By using cheap labor from Africa?