Comment by HCIdivision17 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by HCIdivision17 | Hacker News Reader

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I thought it was at least going to be something interesting about US infrastructure, but it's really focused on NYC. Unsurprisingly, the US does not place getting costs down for subways to be one of its higher priorities. Anecdata, admittedly, but I've seen very little talk about controlling union costs for MTA workers in the rural midwest; those poor guys are supporting a subway system that's barely there!

Really, though, infrastructure stuff is neat, and we probably should start fixing it up. The main problem is the size of the US infrastructure is outstandingly staggering. There's an article [0] that's an argument for pouring money back into the highway funds (and the like), and the cash involved is worse than astronomical. At the very least, I didn't know there were over 600000 bridges in the US... I honestly don't know where we put them all. (Are overpasses included?)

[0] http://www.budget.senate.gov/democratic/public/index.cfm/rep... I don't go to senate.gov much, so I'm guessing this is pretty partisan, but there's a crapton of followup links that are at least interesting.

On that note about bridges; When I was in Cuba, the tour guide made a special note to point out this bridge they had that connected one part of the island to another over a large valley. Apparently it was a big deal to get this bridge built? The Russians built it for them in the 80s, but before that, it was a nightmare moving around. It didn't look like much to me, a regular bridge that I've seen a thousand times here in Canada.

It put in perspective for me how expensive bridges really are. They couldn't afford to build one, crucial bridge. It took a major super power to do it.

I pulled the data and superficially a random square mile of Cuba is about 100x more likely to get hit with a mag 7 earthquake than a similar square in Canada gets hit by a mag 6. Cuba gets spanked every two or three decades with a serious mag 7 or so.

Your 80s bridge survived the '92 quake, assuming you saw it after '92 of course. That was a biggie.

Earthquake proof bridges are no joke to build.

If you want to see a bridge that is a real marvel you should see the Millau Aqueduct in France. It's considered the tallest bridge in the world. And at 400mm€ it wasn't all that expensive. I don't consider France to be a superpower and they didn't need to rely on anyone else to get it built.

The difference between that project and the bridge in Cuba is more likely expertise. After the revolution loads of finances, academics, engineers, and doctors left the country. Cuba has plenty of medical expertise, so much so that outside of US and Canada, they are the developing countries' hospital. But I don't think anyone is going to them for civil construction projects. They just don't have that expertise.

> It put in perspective for me how expensive bridges really are.

I don't think it's particularly effective to go about judging costs by a banana-republic Communist dictatorship which went and deliberately destroyed its economy (+) and replaced it with one controlled by Party loyalists. It's just not a particularly effective way to make anything happen at all: it focuses on getting adequate wealth and substantial power to the people on the top, and doesn't care much care about things on the bottom except as necessary to keep the peace.

If you go judging things by that standard, you could equally say that it puts in perspective just how expensive food is, because when the USSR pulled its support, Cuba came perilously close to starvation. Or housing - have you seen central Havana? That's not even a matter of building, just basic maintenance...

(+) Destroyed its economy in part to rid itself of Mafia infiltration from the Batista regime's days, which may have been a reasonable thing... if they'd left things in a free state instead of just replacing it with another little oligarchy.

Given how much more NYC pays in taxes than it gets back from the federal gov't and how much less many midwestern states pay than they get back (and how much more the latter tends to be the case for rural areas), it seems pretty unlikely that rural midwesterners are subsidizing the NYC subway.

I actually meant MTA workers in midwest subways (of which there should be none), but your reversal makes sense given how my snark could parse. Basically, I was just disappointed that the article clickbaited me into reading about costs that really are local and specialized. Felt like "America's costs are out of control! Let's look at a an unusual and globally unique city to show how!"

Hah! It makes so much more sense now...

FWIW, I do think the US as a whole should be concerned with (subway) infrastructure that's crucial to the basic functioning of cities that are the biggest drivers of its economy. (NYC simply has too many people to move to rely on surface traffic.)

And I think the neglect of the subways is representative of the general neglect of important infrastructure. Though some of the causes of high maintenance/repair/expansion costs differ, others are exactly the same.

What's the total population of the rural Midwest?

Not sure, I would estimate 15 million. It was maybe 17-20 million a couple decades ago, and has been declining.

The population of midwest states totals nearly 68 million people. According to the Census Bureau 84% of the US population lives in suburban and urban areas. That gives an estimate of nearly 11 million people living in the rural midwest.

I was initially just snarking, since I ain't done seen no subways when I lived in Indiana, but instead I learned about population distribution.

Personally, I would have figured a majority would have been rural (since there's just so much rural land area). I hadn't realized it was so sparse.

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