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Comment by craigyk | Hacker News Reader

I think a major factor is that the US hasn't been around for very long and we're coming to a point where a lot of infrastructure is coming under need of repair or replacement simultaneously. In particular instances, this infrastructure degradation has been greatly exacerbated by decisions to save money in the short-term. My personal opinion is that this is all part of a decades long rightward shift away from "big government" and willingness to pay for proper maintenance of public works. 2008 was a wasted opportunity to combine much needed infrastructure investment with fiscal stimulus.

There is no question a lot of work will need to be done over the next decade. The question is, who will do the work, and how will it get paid for?

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I think I agree with you on most of this, but I completely disagree with your first sentence. The US is one of the oldest current stable governments. All of the other major countries today got to completely rebuild their infrastructure after WW2: Germany, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore , perhaps even the UK. Some of these advanced countries weren't even politically stable until the 70s-80s.

The US on the other hand has been politically stable for at least ~150 years and the northeast has been for longer. (Most of my life I've lived in houses that were over a century old. Go to Korea and you will find /no/ living areas built more than 30 years ago.) We're building on one or two century old infrastructure at this point. The two hardest things we have to deal with that no one else does (except China perhaps, but they're not at this stage yet to care, I think) is the size of the country and the age of the current infrastructure.

As a fun fact, some cities in Korea don't even use telephone poles, it's all underground[0]. And I'm sure you've heard of similar infrastructural marvels in Japan.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bundang-gu

That's a really good point. I guess we'll see if Europe has its own infrastructure problems in 50 years or so when some of that "new" WWII infrastructure starts to get old. I would say, though, that not all parts of Europe had to rebuild from scratch. You still find WAY more 100+ year old structures in Europe than the US.

Well, the UK wasn't by any means completely destroyed in WW2 and there's a lot of work being done there to upgrade centuries old infrastructure.

Some examples:

1) The Thames Tideway sewer is being constructed to handle the fact that the old London sewers have run out of capacity and routinely flood sewage into the Thames when there are heavy rains. The problem is that unlike modern sewer systems, London's is used for both rainwater and household sewage. And the original system was designed to overflow into the Thames, on the assumption that would ~never happen. But population growth and lots more concreting means it now happens regularly. The Thames Tideway is a massive, very deep underground tunnel that roughly follows the path of the river.

2) The London Underground is the world's oldest underground railway. It is upgraded continuously. The Crossrail upgrade is the largest construction project in Europe (technically Crossrail is not LU, but it's all a part of an integrated somewhat underground network).

3) The UK road network costs less to maintain than is raised via fuel taxes. The roads are effectively a profit centre for the government, in a sense. They are maintained continuously.

4) The UK water pipe network has had leaks at an economically sustainable level for 15 years now (i.e. the cost to find and fix the remaining leaks is higher than the value of the water lost). It does not use lead piping:

http://dwi.defra.gov.uk/consumers/advice-leaflets/lead.pdf

I don't think there's actually any difference in infrastructure age between Europe and America. WW2 is a red herring. A lot of modern infrastructure runs underground and was undamaged or only lightly damaged by bombing, which was in any case, focused on the cities. The biggest impact of WW2 on the London Underground, for example, is that these days they have to do systematic searches for unexploded underground bombs before doing any work.

For point 3 ... that's the case for motorways and other major roads. Local road maintenance comes from the local council, and that's why anything less than an A road is usually littered with potholes that are rarely repaired.

Thanks for the response. I really don't know much about the UK so I appreciate all those examples!

However, even if WW2 is a red herring, I don't think you can compare Europe and the US to each other because the US is a single country under one government and Europe is a group of very individualistic countries that don't always cooperate well. This is just my theory, but any single country in Europe has the ability to change their countries infrastructure much more easily than the US (or any city in it) because the entire country's resources can be more easily bent toward it.

Furthermore, those areas of many century-old buildings in Europe are /probably/ not located in the most economically advanced city/countries and therefore falls out of my initial comparison of the US versus the major economies/countries today.

It seems the UK pipe network does have some lead:

"If you live in an older property, you could have a lead supply pipe – the underground pipe which connects your home to the public water mains..."

But you can have your tap water tested and they'll replace the pipes free if it's >10ug/l

The UK also has a partially privatised water system. When it first happened it was highly controversial, especially regional price disparities.

Now years later there's an interesting political storm in Scotland which has retained a public water utility. The public sector has to contract out for water supplies and a private bidder came in with a much lower bid. The Scottish Government, for various reasons not least that the private bidder was English, gave Scottish Water three opportunities to try and make a more competitive offer - they couldn't.

I can only say that you get what you pay for, private vs. public non-withstanding. I don't put it past any private company to put in an unrealistically low bid, and hope for one of three exit strategies (based on what I've seen in my short lifetime):

1) Bill the difference later, resulting in huge overruns. 2) Be out of the picture when the hits the fan. 3) Declare bankruptcy, all stakeholders walk away with their gains

Except you don't have to take the lowest bidder but the best. In this instance the Scottish Government desperately wanted to not take the Anglian Water bid - if they could have pointed out the bid was infeasibly low, or that Anglian had a track record of the behaviours you mention, or other benefits that the public sector offer might have then they could have avoided giving it to Anglian. Despite trying several times to make the Scottish Water bid better they still couldn't beat the private sector alternative.

Apart from a handful of cities that were utterly destroyed not much of Europe got rebuilt from scratch after WWII. There are parts of water systems from Roman times still in use today, and town centres whose housing stock largely dates back to before the Declaration of Independence.

150 years ago the US had only 23 million inhabitants, most of whom lived in rural areas that didn't have much infrastructure. The government might trace a continuous line back to then, but very little of the infrastructure or housing stock does. US infrastructure might be old compared with Singapore's but it's young by Western standards.

That is some good perspective. I am most familiar (whatever that means) with the US and Asia; I should have stuck to the two.

In any case, the fact remains that the US has a huge handicap due to the size (population and land) of the country. It is much easier for infrastructural change to happen in most other countries because they are much smaller. This is obviously only my theory right now from experience in the US and Asia.

> It is much easier for infrastructural change to happen in most other countries because they are much smaller.

This doesn't make sense - the US benefits greatly from economies of scale.

It does have to build much longer roads, pipelines and power lines between towns though, including in many sparsely populated areas.

Unless I'm mistaken and in light of the fact that infrastructure is mostly publicly funded, this is pretty much (true but) completely irrelevant.

Smaller countries also often depend on and have a very close relationship with the major private companies. For instance, Samsung builds apartments and helps fund subways.

Quite a bit of European infrastructure is old, e.g. much of the stuff in the Nordic countries is >100 years old. But more money has been put into maintenance and replacement.

For this issue specifically, part of the problem is that the U.S. kept installing lead pipes through much of the 20th century, and as a result is saddled with a lot of them. Flint's lead pipes aren't even particularly old, most dating to its big population/construction boom of the 1920s-40s. That is late enough that concerns were already pretty widespread by then, e.g. Helsinki decided to phase out lead pipes during the 1890s. I can't seem to find a date for when the U.S. as a whole phased out lead pipes, but I do find that NYC stopped new installations in only 1961, so it seems to have been quite late.

>2008 was a wasted opportunity to combine much needed infrastructure investment with fiscal stimulus.

Yeah, but that would raise employment and, by extension, wages, which American business elites don't want.

They'd rather keep half heartedly talking about basic income and some techno utopian magic robotic future for the next 50 years rather than support restarting the Public Works Administration and providing a decent job guarantees again to do actual needed work like this.

This is a huge issue.

Strong Towns has been running some pieces on this, due to postings from some people in Rockford, IL

http://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2016/1/4/no-new-pipes

Very interesting.

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