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I would argue that a large reason why infrastructure tends to fall into such sorry states of disrepair in the US is because of the vast misalignment of interests between politicians and the services. When the person responsible for this stuff has a shelf life of maybe four years, there's simply no incentive to allocate adequate amounts of time, energy, and capital towards things which someone else will inevitably get credit for because of the time it takes. Besides, no one gets praised for this sort of thing...it's just something they're expected to do. The whole thing is a shame.

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It's not a capital problem, it's a mismanagement problem. The London Tube spends about $2.9 billion (not including capital costs) to move 1.3 billion riders per year. The NYC Subway spends about $8 billion (again, not including capital costs) for 1.7 billion riders per year. That's roughly double adjusted for ridership.

It's an incentive problem. Calling these things management problems (while technically accurate) is, unfortunately, unhelpful. People keep complaining about it, but the structure of our political system is such that it will never get better.

Do they have appreciably different incentives in London?

The MTA is run by the state, whereas the subway almost exclusively serves the city. That's a weird conflict that, AFAIK, London doesn't have to deal with.

> It's not a capital problem, it's a mismanagement problem

Do you have any evidence of this?

Being a naïve Californian, I would assume that there are plenty of variables other than management (labor costs, union membership, labor laws, cultural status of subway workers, legal statues, building requirements, vendors and their rates) that could plausibly represent most of the difference.

I noticed the enthusiasm about relaxing procurement rules. I suspect that's going to bypass rules established by unions and other such things.

> labor costs, union membership, labor laws, cultural status of subway workers, legal statues, building requirements, vendors and their rates

I find it amusing how Democrats always obsess about fiscally conservative peoples obsession with 'deregulation', so when big news worthy accidents happen they point to conservatives and say 'see this is what you get with deregulation'. As if the only thing we're critical of is the money spent making sure accidents don't happen. Workplace safety and oversight of critical infrastructure is probably the lowest on the list of things I'm concerned with.

There are countless other bureaucratic government organizations that are crippled by incompetence and excess administrative oversight that are failing to accomplish their simple assigned tasks, to the point where it's now standard practice to expect costs to be 2-3x projections and only a fool would expect heads of public workers to roll as a result. Just blame the current leader of x polticial party, right?

I'm not convinced being in support of public infrastructure means I have to support throwing billions more into an organization that consistently fails to perform with the billions they already have.

And this has as much to do with the small group of consultants and big third party companies these people sign extravagant contracts with - under the guise of 'free markets'. So when these projects ultimately fail to be delivered, or end up 3x the cost, the big government liberals can blame capitalism. Because their idea of 'free market competition' is hiring the same 3 companies who managed to have enough lawyers and political connections to navigate their complex administrative systems put in place by these same bureaucrats, who often also end up being employees of these same companies later in their careers.

Lowest bidder government RFPs are just another layer of obscurity sold as a solution to this problem which just further masks responsibility with something that looks like a market on the surface but fails to hold up to even the most basic scrutiny. /rant

Did I miss something or an edited post? Where does the parent mention anything about politics or their views on this?

I don't really understand what your post has to do with the one it is replying to, but I agree with you that lowest bidder RFPs are not capitalistic competition.

...but what is the answer? You can't have a free market subway system that throws any old traffic down the tubes like you can with roads. So there has to be some kind of centralised ownership. (indeed, the NYC subway used to be a system of independent private systems, and they all failed as businesses).

Personally, I don't see how the blame here lies with the usual tired party politics blame game. There are so many different factors at work.

One thing to consider is that London has downtime when the Tube isn't being used. Most lines have an overnight break in the neighborhood of 4-5 hours. Even with the limited overnight weekend routes that have been introduce in recent years, each line still at least 20 hours a week were maintenance has full control of the system. NYC's Subway runs 24/7 with no easy maintenance windows. I image maintenance is simpler and therefore cheaper when you don't have to do it when the system is being used. There is also the obvious added labor costs involved in increasing the hours of operation. I have no idea what percentage of the discrepancy that explains, but it is certainly part of it.

MTA can and does shutdown redundant parallel lines on the weekends and yet 5 years on there are still significant delays due to Sandy repairs.

It can also be an external mismanagement problem. If funds are only allocated to the subway to pay upkeep and the state never funds improvements, you can easily end up with huge maintenance costs to keep dilapidated ancient systems in place that could have been upgraded a decade ago and have been saving money most of this time.

Same problem with janitors, or a NOC/ops team...it doesn't enhance your career to say "we kept everything working", and building a better solution requires much more investment and has a much longer-term deliverable that it's almost impossible to get people who are trying to "climb the ladder" or get re-elected for a second and final term to cut out a significant portion of the budget for.

> ...it doesn't enhance your career to say "we kept everything working", and building a better solution requires much more investment and has a much longer-term deliverable that it's almost impossible...to cut out a significant portion of the budget for.

The next time one of your managers takes this approach, remind them Amazon did not accept "we kept everything working" as good enough infrastructure. We're in a unique period in history where nearly every part of the infrastructure of future generations is up for grabs for re-imagining, because most of our civilization's infrastructure does not embed computational capabilities. Does your management want the status quo, or do they want 10X or better improvements in cost and utility that can be sold as the new infrastructure?

The last time Amazon did that to a widely-accepted status quo infrastructure, we ended up with AWS.

Most countries WITH term limits seem to be doing much better than countries without term limits.

Yeah it's funny. Anecdotally, I think most people would agree that other countries, particularly Western European ones, seem to just care more about transportation infrastructure. Maybe it's just a cultural thing. But there is still that interest misalignment I would argue. And voters tend to be as myopic as the politicians, always waiting for a crisis to roll around before actually caring.

I can assure you that New Yorkers, perhaps uniquely in all of America, care deeply about transportation infrastructure. The problem is that the MTA (which runs the New York City subway, mind you) is inexplicably run at the state level, meaning decisions about NYC public transit are made in Albany, three hours away. And naturally the state as a whole is not willing to invest as much money into the subway as NYC itself would be, even though the majority of the state's tax revenue comes from NYC and its metro area. It's your classic case of the urban center subsidizing the rest of the people in the state and not getting anything for it in return. There's actually a New York City secessionist movement (from NY state, not the US) for reasons along these lines.

New York City's population is what, half of New York State? How do NYC concerns not dominate state politics?

They don't have half the legislative districts.

Ahh, rural malapportionment. Introducing one-vote-one-value seems a bit less extreme than secession, but maybe that's just an ambit claim.

For some context, the population of New York city (NYC) in the 2010 US Census was ~8.1 million, which is ~42% of the ~19.4 million for the state.

Of the 63 seats in the New York State Senate, 26 represent NYC. Of the 150 seats in the New York State Assembly, 65 represent NYC. Those represent ~41% and ~43% of the seats in the upper and lower house, respectively.

Most city residents should support these kinds of secessionist ideas. State tax dollars around the entire US subsidize rural living by maintaining unsustainable roads and utilities infrastructure to reach people with way more capital on average than the people in the cities getting the short end of the stick.

It comes back to incentives. If you don't support high-volume infrastructure to enable city growth - in an economic climate and era where practically all work is optimized in cities, and where living outside a city is simply an extravagant luxury - but you do support broad low volume high upkeep infrastructure all over rural areas, you build an incentives structure to artificially drive more people out of efficient, high density cores and into twig mcmansions guzzling water to feed lawns that nobody uses for anything because they are inside all day anyway.

The better structure would obviously be to promote what costs less per capita while also promoting economic growth - promoting high density living, even if the upfront costs are high. Electoral incentives, however, are practically opposite such a notion, sadly.

I agree with you.

The rest of the state wants NYC to gtfo as bad as NYC wants out.

The problem is that their unfortunately economically interdependent enough that when the idea gets floated the people who stand to lose money make a big fuss, sway public opinion and the idea is dead in the water. IIRC there was a little bit of noise about a similar split in Washington recently. NorCal would probably be much happier without SoCal. The rest of IL would probably do ok without Chicago, etc.

The pattern is that people in the country really don't like a bunch of people who are nothing like them running the state and telling them what to do and the city thinks the country is full of backwards hicks who are holding them back. They'd be better off without each other.

IMO being able to actually self govern is well worth whatever the price is.

This is the kind of realization Brexit should throw in your face. There are highly disparate groups of people with different ideologies that want nothing really to do with one another, and the only reasons they are forced to mutually participate are for historical inertias sake, and for the sake of those who profit off the status quo.

The inerta relates back to why large empires and countries formed to begin with. With the advent of NATO and the nuclear deterrent it is ludicrous to think anyone who is either nucularly armed or has defensive pacts with the armed could possibly be attacked or invaded by a traditional military. War today is predominantly economic, but allowing disparate populations to go their separate ways while maintaining positive relations and trade for mutual self interest only serves to grow economies in the long term.

> The problem is that the MTA (which runs the New York City subway, mind you) is inexplicably run at the state level, ...

Previously the new York city mayors had much more control, but they always had a lot of pressure to not increase fares. Note that the nickel fare only ended a decade or so before, after having existed for more than sixty years. So the system needed to increase fares to become more viable, but the mayors needed to run on platforms of not increasing fares.

Putting the mta in state hands was seen as a better, more technocratic solution, allowing the agency to do things that are necessary even if they aren't popular.

Even though I barely ever take the subway (only a few times per month), I'm perfectly content to largely fund it from my tax revenue rather from fares, if that is what is necessary. Even if I barely use it, I know that it has substantial benefits for many other people around me (e.g. people who work in restaurants and live far out in Brooklyn/Queens/the Bronx), and I'm willing to pay for that.

Any citation on this?

Tokyo has one of the world's best subway systems. Like New York's used to be, Tokyo's are still privatized; owned by three different competing private entities.

One big difference, besides upgrades and maintenance, in addition to ridership is the absence of a flat fee. On the other hand they ate self sustaining and keep updating their rolling stock as well as infrastructure.

I don't think self sustaining subways are a good thing. You want tax subsidies on ridership to bring the price really low, to enable as many people as possible to use it as often as possible. Profitable infrastructure defeats the purpose of infrastructure, which is to be a force multiplier on others productivity. Introducing profit motive diminishes the potential effectiveness.

I understand Tokyo's subway systems developed in a unique environment before and after WWII, never the less, despite being commercial entities, they best just about any state run subway system in the world.

Then perhaps the U.S. needs a more party-centric proportional representation electoral system, with less focus on individual candidates and more on the party. Then it will be the party that's responsible.

However, you also need proportional representation, so you can actually have multiple parties. Otherwise, the "other" big party can just "wait its turn" to win the elections again - it doesn't have to prove anything.

I think this is a likely counter-example to your premise. Cuomo has had a ‘shelf-life’ of a lot more than 4 years...

I think the underlying problem is more a lack of accountability and the very low give-a-crap factor for politicians.

> Besides, no one gets praised for this sort of thing...it's just something they're expected to do.

How do countries like Japan or Switzerland manage to keep everything relatively pristine?

Maintenance simply isn't glamorous. No politician wants to stand up and say "I did 4 years and the roads are still working"

One option would be to open up more infrastructure initiatives to direct democracy. Arguably the most heavily invested body to getting the subways improved is the people who actually live in New York and use them.

Making this feasible would require a more efficient platform for soliciting ideas from citizens, voting on them and tracking overall execution which doesn't exist today. This isn't, however, an intractable problem - there are distributed trust systems (based on so-called "trust algorithms") that are being designed today such as Ethereum.

Is there anything folks won't just add "with a blockchain!" to and claim to have solved a problem?

I'm not sure I understand the reference since I don't comment on or look at much blockchain related articles here on HN. (Most of my research has been tangential to my former employment as a web security developer.)

Is there a technical reason that a blockchain isn't suitable as one part of a possible solution to improving the speed, reliability and security of voting in the United States? My understanding of the blockchain concept is that what it provides is a proof-of-effort consensus-based system for creating an open and auditable ledger for transactions which would seem to fit the requirement of having an open and verifiable voting ledger for ballot initiatives.

> Is there a technical reason that a blockchain isn't suitable as one part of a possible solution to improving the speed, reliability and security of voting in the United States?

Ignoring for a moment things like hard forks, 51% attacks, lost keys, theft of votes via malware, etc., the biggest non-technical objection I'd see to it is that the concept of a secret ballot is considered absolutely critical in the US.

> Is there a technical reason that a blockchain isn't suitable as one part of a possible solution to improving the speed, reliability and security of voting in the United States?

The better question is: what do you gain from using a blockchain? Distributed ledgers aren't magically faster, more reliable, and secure than a centralized ledger. They just don't require trusting any single party. But you're proposing using a distributed ledger to record voting on policies executed by centralized political entities.

At the end of the day, you still have to trust the MTA or some state or local government to do what your voters tell them to. And your voting eligibility is tied to citizenship and/or proof of residency, as established by your inclusion in some centralized database anyway.

So assuming electronic direct democracy is the solution here (and that's a big assumption), you're probably better off just having the MTA set up a webform tied to a database and calling it a day.

It'd be much easier just to make voting day a national holiday.

A big problem with things now is voter education, and people go to the polls without actually understanding what they are voting for - they are rushed and push through, or don't vote at all.

Surely it's more that they don't want to understand what they're voting for. Their main concern is to keep the other party out of power no matter what. Any thoughts about whether the party they're voting for is actually doing what they want are secondary and end up getting ignored if they conflict with the primary goal of not letting the "baddies" win.

You can't blame individual citizens for structural (sometimes intentional) flaws of first past the post voting.

All discussions on politics really boil back down to this - representation sucks because first past the post sucks. Changing the voting system in most places is a constitutional amendment. Hence, it will never happen. Nothing can get better because the only people who can change it (and don't say third parties, remember, we are in a system structurally designed to kill opposition to the ruling duopoly) are the ones in power because of the system the way it is.

If people could vote for the person they want to rule, with (preferably) proportional instant runoff elections (and thus no fear of "the lesser of two evils"), almost none of the current politicians in any state would be in power.

That's evidentially false though. We have a much better system in Australia and all the exact same problems. Most of it boils down to what the previous posters said. People are completely and wilfully uneducated. More than half the country (I'd say closer to 80-90%) are literally just voting for red team vs blue team with zero basic understanding of how the voting system even works.

The majority of people in Australia don't even know that we don't have FPTP voting, despite being asked to fill out preferences on the voting form. They also have no knowledge of how the senate voting works or even the senate's purpose in the government. The major parties and media conspire to keep this attitude prevalent.

The situation seems unsolvable. There's no incentive for the average person to dedicate any more time to politics than it takes to read a headline each day when they have their own lives to worry about. And such a shallow level of understanding is totally abusable by anyone and everyone with a pen in their hand.

The system is broken, but the voting system is just the tip of the iceberg.

I absolutely agree that the voting system is the tip of the iceburg, but Australia is actually progressing towards getting deeper into the bottomless hole of broken incentives.

The US, due to its founding documents, is permanently stuck on the surface, where at best people see the iceburg and can't even fathom the depths beneath - hence the near willful ignorance.

But isn't your example just demonstrating the incentives problem? Instead of it being at the level where, in the US, politicians are incentivized to preserve the status quo because that is what elected them, and to enable better representation would be to use power only they wield against their own self interest, you are just a graduated level lower - you start to enable more democratic elections, but then have the problem about educating anyone about it.

It is truly a hydra, because the education example plays out the same way - those that set the policy agenda of what is taught in schools, where civics and voting and taxes and budgeting should be taught but are not (at least stateside) were put in power by the ignorant, and thus it is in their own self interest and continued viability in politics to keep their voters ignorant. And it really does not matter who is elected or when - any person elected is always in a position to minimize the degree to which their electorate is educated, because emotional appeals are much simpler, and much more useful for personal ends, than rational and factual ones. You can't say one thing and do another and still get reelected when being scrutinized by an engaged, logical electorate who operate in a system that enables them to actually pick who they want to rule.

We are in a system designed to kill opposition to the ruling duopoly and yet the ruling duopoly has changed multiple times.

That would possibly have been the case in 1965, but party membership is at historically low levels and in multiple states independents outnumber either single party.

Unfortunately, 50-65% of people who are eligible to vote actually do so. Often, they do end up voting along party lines, but that's not because of party loyalty so much as a lack of knowledge regarding the candidates. If you give people the opportunity to learn about these things and impress upon them the importance of doing so, they will be more likely to vote rationally.

it is far easier to promise service than it is to pay for it. in that regard making promises to the users of the service and workers is one thing, when it comes to paying the bill they always kick the can down the road.

NYC is the only American city which relies on heavy transit, just a little more than half the people working there use it. Only one other city crests ten percent and the after that its five percent and down.

It is the most expensive transportation option available to commuters at all stages when you calculate it per passenger mile, this is with subsidies included. Even building all those roads the automobile less that a fourth of the cost and most public transit will be superseded by autonomous cars and buses; the later which can adapt to changing needs that subway and heavy rail cannot.

Besides all the deferred maintenance and NYC is not alone in this, many lines are tens of billions in deferred maintenance, many lines face hundreds of millions with a few at a billion in underfunded pensions. Worse, subsidies have not increased ridership but instead employment. When most lines came about in the hay days of such it was nearly 60k riders per worker, that has fallen to less than 30k riders being served per worker.

the simple fact is that such transit is expensive to build and maintain and even with incredible subsidy they cannot get enough people to ride it though NYC gets close. NYC has the same problem the rest do, no one wants to pay anywhere near what the actual cost is per passenger mile to use it.

6 million people ride it every day.

Where are you getting your numbers from? Other countries build subways that are better and cheaper than they are in America.

> NYC is the only American city which relies on heavy transit

Chicago absolutely does also. While the total passenger numbers are lower, mass transit is critical to Chicago's economy.

BART serves 300,000 riders a day. LA has been building out their commuter rail for two decades.

this is such a bad take. the point of public transit is not to get enough people to ride it so the system is profitable. do we expect roads to be profitable? they aren't, even if you say "the gas tax".

and lol at heavy rail can't meet needs that cars can. A single subway line in New York can carry 60k people _in each direction_ at peak capacity. Autonomous cars are years away and will never achieve that efficiency just because of space.

Subways are the most efficient way to move people in terms of square footage needed to move a person at speed, with heavy rail a close second, and walking third. You can fit 4-6 adults comfortably on a subway train with less space than those same people in a private automobile.

But farebox recovery rate is a good metric for measuring how well a public transit system actually serves (and fails to serve would-be) passengers.

Silicon Valley's VTA is among the worst, as its routes were chosen more for political purposes than optimal service.

Only one other city crests ten percent and the after that its five percent and down.

Easily available figures suggest you're... way off with that estimate.

This comment seems to have touched a nerve; it's voted way down.

Can anyone rebut Shivetya's claims?

1. Subway is the most expensive transportation option per passenger mile, when you include subsidies.

2. Only one other US city (besides NYC) has 10% of workers riding the subway. (If I'm reading that right - is heavy transit distinct from "light rail" here?)

If you can't rebut them, what good is voting them down?

I would turn that request on its head: can Shivetya produce any numbers to prove the claim about 10% of workers or the subway being the most expensive option? We're under no obligation to rebut a point that doesn't back itself up.

Where do you get your numbers?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._cities_with_high_...

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