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Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

I don’t understand why American governments are so bad at providing public services. Money often isn’t it. The NY subway has an operating budget of $8 billion for about 1.7 billion riders per year ($4.7 per rider per year). The London Tube has an operating budget of (2.2 billion pounds—$3.5 billion pre-Brexit) for 1.4 billion riders ($2.5 per rider). The systems are in extremely similar cities, are almost exactly the same route miles, and are similarly old. Yet NYC’s system costs almost twice as much to run.

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I honestly don't either. It feels like everything we do costs 10x anywhere else for 10x the time. You would think the cost of building a few light rail lines in a city like Seattle would cost less than a cross-town subway in Japan. In my short life I've never seen America really build anything impressive in transportation - BART, the NYC Subway, the interstate highway system, and most of our airports seem like they were all built from the 40s to the 70s (and some earlier than that).

The DC metro was mostly built in the 80s and 90s (early construction started in the 70s), and the Portland MAX started construction in the mid 80s and has been expanding regularly since then. Atlanta's MARTA rail network was built mostly in the 80s. There are examples if you look for them, though I'm not sure what all counts as "impressive" here.

Outside of city subways: Amtrak's Acela service (which is what passes for "high-speed" though I understand this is weak in comparison to Europe and Japan) was built and established in the early 2000s, and boosted Amtrak's share of the air/train travel on the NYC-DC corridor from 37% to 75%. Boston's Big Dig project, which for all its faults was certainly impressive, spanned a couple decades and was finished around 2004 or so.

Acela is technically capable of speeds that would be considered "high speed" for a legacy system (which is what this is, it's not like they could tear out New York city and build fresh then put it all back) of over 150mph. Unfortunately lack of investment means it doesn't achieve what is possible along most of the route.

Two main things you'd do if you had money and political will to speed this up:

1. Tear out old bridges (some have been "urgently in need of replacement" for a decade already) and replace with modern ones. Locals like how the old bridge looks? Great, hand over the money for a new one that looks the same. No money? You get a generic reinforced concrete bridge rated for 120mph and suck it up. This can be done in 24 hours per bridge for a short bridge, shut the railway, smash the old bridge, drop the new one in, test it, re-open the railway. If you have the manpower you can do ten bridges at once.

2. Eliminate at-grade crossings. These are unsafe even for lower speeds, they're lethal for High Speed Rail and must be closed. If practical add a bridge or tunnel. If not, too bad, close them anyway and people have to go round.

> it's not like they could tear out New York city and build fresh then put it all back

Several large cities in Europe have built new high speed tracks in tunnels under the city.

The track between London St Pancras and Stratford stations in London (and from Stratford further east) is an example. St Pancras is the end of the line, so the speed is necessarily limited by the acceleration and braking capability of the train, but [1] says the speed is 230km/h = 142mph. [2] says speeds in tunnels are limited to 270km/h (168mph), they probably mean a bit further out of the city.

Other than the last 1km or so, the whole track of this route is new.

Realistically, any city worth spending so much money on will have every train stopping at it, so there's no need for higher speeds in under-city tunnels.

[1] https://www.railforums.co.uk/threads/hs1-maximum-permitted-s...

[2] http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/in_depth/629/629/6969116.stm

> which is what this is, it's not like they could tear out New York city and build fresh then put it all back

I don't understand why not? Japan's high speed rail was added into multiple major cities without tearing up the whole city. What did they do that can't be done in the US?

I think it has a lot to do with the way government in the US is structured, specifically the focus on local representatives. Because US legislators are beholden to voters in a particular locality, any time there's an infrastructure project which receives state and/or federal funding there is tremendous pressure to make it draw as much money as possible into the local economy. This is the classic "bringing home the bacon" which is expected of pretty much every US politician. This has increasingly become accepted as the norm in the US, despite occasional lip service from politicians. The truth is they are all too happy to accept spending lavishly on local projects, as long as it benefits members of their party.

Other developed countries tend to have parliamentary systems where policy making requires multi-party coalitions. When you need to get three or more parties on board there is less opportunity to get park-barrel spending passed without _someone_ crying foul.

> I think it has a lot to do with the way government in the US is structured, specifically the focus on local representatives. Because US legislators are beholden to voters in a particular locality, any time there's an infrastructure project which receives state and/or federal funding there is tremendous pressure to make it draw as much money as possible into the local economy.

You're describing the rest of the US, not New York. New York is the other way around, where extreme corruption and disenfranchisement means elected officials have no reason to pay attention to their constituents. Sheldon Silver was one of the strongest advocates for cutting bus service, even though his district has no subway service, so they all depend on it.

The reduction of pork barrel politics took away the carrot... we no realize that we have no stick.

Perhaps the litigious nature of US? Everything has to be over-planned, over-provisioned and triple checked with lawyers in case there is a kitten on the rail.

>The systems are in extremely similar cities, are almost exactly the same route miles, and are similarly old. Yet NYC’s system costs almost twice as much to run.

There is one fundamental difference between the two systems and that is that the London Tube stops service overnight while the New York City Subway remains open 24/7/365. Having a nightly maintenance window of several hours in which they can do preventive maintenance is likely a big factor in keeping costs down. Throw that in with the reduction of labor with limited hours of operation and I bet those two make up a solid portion of the difference in cost per rider.

MTA liberally shuts down service for hours/days at a time. I wouldn’t chalk it all up to not having enough time to do maintanence. It was 24/7 back when it was functioning more consistently as well.

Which is the exact type of things that leads to customer complaints. Customers have to be inconvenienced in order to do maintenance on the NYC Subway. In turn the bar to require maintenance will be higher than it is in London. The natural result of years of delayed maintenance is for the system to get worse and worse as time goes on.

I disagree that maintenance is more difficult in London than in New York. I spent about two weeks in London about a decade ago. The first thing that struck me is that when you arrived at the tube station in Heathrow you'd get all sorts of information about which lines were in service that day. In trying to navigate London there was a constant shuffle about which stations or lines were out of service. Plus it took about two hours to get from Heathrow to Victoria due to signal issues (the wrong kind of snow is also an issue, apparently).

That is not remotely a representative experience of today’s Tube.

London actually now has a night-tube as well.

Although that's only on Friday and Saturday.

The NY subway is also able to run 24/7 because of redundancies in routes, so they can perform maintenance without the subway stopping. London doesn't have this option.

Worth pointing out that there are redundancies in some routes, not in others. Sincerely, L train rider :)

Yeah service to Williamsburg is still dicey. You can be a sardine on the L, or if you're close enough to the JMZ, you'd better not have to ride back after 8pm (one or more of the trains may not be running).

The other fundamental difference being that the London tube has ~250mi (~402km) of track, while NYC has ~840mi (~1352km) of track.

In New York we have a public service union for virtually every public employee. Politicians buy the votes and political support of these unions (and their union members). This means that the average cop, transit worker, prison guard, and members of most other public service unions often make well over $100,000 a year salary (plus massive benefits) with many making upwards of $200,000 a year (with some making far more than that) plus full retirement after 20 years with a full pension for life. That means if you start working for the city or county at 21, you retire at 41, with a full pension and benefits for life (which needless to say, is a crushing financial cost).

As of 2014 over 100,000 MTA workers in New York City were making over $100,000 a year each, not counting benefits or pension costs.

https://www.empirecenter.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/MTA-...

Take the time to see how many pages of police offers you have to scroll through in Nassau County New York alone before you get to a page where they start making under $200,000 a year.

http://data.newsday.com/long-island/data/nassau/payroll-2015...;

I'm all for paying people a living wage, but its not hard to understand how, when you are spending countless billions (that increase every year) on paying countless cops and other public service workers $200,000+ a year how there is no money left over for maintaining (or, god forbid, upgrading) equipment. It doesn't matter which corporate party you vote for - Democrats and Republicans are both corrupt to the core and falling over themselves to secure these service-union votes. As a result our infrastructure is going to continue to crumble and our debt will continue to rise until we reach a breaking point which won't be pretty.

How the heck is this even possible? 200k a year to be a cop? Talk about hitting the lottery.. How is this even allowed?

Is the crime rate even that high? Isn't Nassau County one of the richest county's in the United States?

Crime is low. Its possible because year after year the public service unions (police, prison guard, transit, ect) and a variety of other political patronage groups sell their endorsement for higher pay and better contracts. So every year the salaries and benefits continue to rise. This has been going on for decades. These salaries and benefits represent the vast majority of our county/city/village budgets and result in massive property taxes (and other taxes and fees) to support the bloated payroll. Its not sustainable and as a result we have seen infrastructure (like the rails and the roads) and other critical services suffer.

Here's a list for NYC:

http://www.seethroughny.net/payrolls/city-of-new-york

I do wonder how many of these are one-offs -- the cop making 650k (Adrian Schoolcraft) is on a closer look way less egregious than it sounds. He was something of a whistleblower in a way that fellow cops disliked, and this culminated in his house being raided and an involuntary hospital stay; the 650k is a settlement for all that. Daniel Carione is a cop on there for 450k, but that seems to be from a settlement after he was forced onto disability/retirement when he started wearing a hearing aid.

Even so, that list is amazing. Most of the entries are guys clocking a ton of overtime. The organization clearly wants to show public employees are overpaid, but it seems accurate. The NYT has cited them in the past.

> The systems are in extremely similar cities, are almost exactly the same route miles, and are similarly old. Yet NYC’s system costs almost twice as much to run.

My two cents: things are more expensive in the United States due to us insisting on being so different in two major ways:

1.) Different safety and road standards. All of Europe, as well as many other countries have completely or partially adopted European road and rail safety standards. For example: in the United States if a passenger rail line shares track with freight trains the passenger cars are required to withstand collisions with heavy freight trains with a minimum of deformation. This makes everything heavy and unique. Emissions standards likewise mean that if you're still running diesel equipment that's all going to be very unique.

2.) We don't believe in social services in the United States. The NY MTA has to fund health care (via insurance) as well as pensions. TfL sure ain't subsidizing health insurance for its employees, although they may be funding a pension.

As it turns out the bigger your pool of risk, customers, whatever... the cheaper things get.

TfL is. Everyone does that. It's part of the taxes that employers pay on top of salaries.

That's part of the reason why the cost of an employee is so much higher than the salary, and it's one of the costs you save by having nominally independent contractors instead of employees.

TfL does have good planning, though, and is largely able to fix things before they grow too expensive.

https://pedestrianobservations.com/category/new-york/ BTW.

> TfL is. Everyone does that. It's part of the taxes that employers pay on top of salaries.

Right, but TfL is paying into a system that every working Briton pays into. What the New York MTA pays into (mostly) is a scheme that benefits a much smaller group.

From an outsiders view its the extremely devolved nature of the USA that causes a lot of problems. In a more centrally managed country eg France or the UK if there's a major SNAFU like this quite often the tabloids go on rampage and something gets done.

Similarly with Racist Sheriffs and problems with local police forces happen the Home Secretary can sack the senior police officer in charge.

France is geographically the size of Texas with 300 million fewer people and a few gazillion fewer square miles.

I think it just boils down to American voters either having lower standards or not being willing to punish politicians for incompetence.

If the subway service in, say, London or Tokyo or Paris became as bad as some of the systems in the US, it would be a major political scandal and the people running the city would fear for their jobs. That doesn't happen in the US, even in places like New York where a majority of commuters use public transit regularly.

>not being willing to punish politicians for incompetence.

Punish them how? Here in America (and especially New York) we have a "two-party" system that works arm in arm to steal as much money as possible to line their own pockets. Voting for a different party doesn't mean getting a different policy - it simply means that patronage money is going into the pocket of different politically connected cronies.

Most of the rest of the world has "two-block" politics in practice, if not formally. The vast majority of national elections are between two prime minister candidates, whatever the makeup of their underlying coalitions is fairly marginal.

I think the difference in the US is much more fundamental, pluralism is baked in to the culture in a way that is pretty unique anywhere in the world, so people have very strong reactions to members of other tribes seeking authority over them. This has gotten very explicit recently, but the dynamic was always there.

There are some "cultural differences" here in the US that are used by the two corporate parties to distract and divide the people, but when it comes to substantive issues, there is no difference between the two. The same generals preside over the same endless wars. The same rotating crowd of FED chairmen, SEC lawyers, and supply-side economists hold sway over our "economy" (see lifelong Democrat and Goldmach Sachs alumni Gary Cohen who is making economic policy for Trump). The same crowd of insurance and drug company lobbyists run our for-profit healthcare system (whether or not we call it "Obamacare" and offer insubstantial subsidies to people mandated to buy insurance they can't afford from for-profit companies for policies with massive deductibles that render the insurance largely useless). The same crowd of authoritarians are appointed to prosecute the "war on drugs", which is really a war on the citizens and civil liberties. The same group of CIA agents are appointed to run the same police-state domestic (and global) spying programs and group of other various police-state agencies that are steadily eroding what few rights and privacy we have left.

All of these things remain exactly the same no matter how much people cry about Trump, or wear pussy hats, or scream about 54 different genders or how "white supremacy" is the problem. All of these substantive policies would have been identical (and run by many of the same people) had Hillary won the election. In reality, the .00001% of the people who own this country and both corporate parties are laughing at all those people while they continue to rape the people and steal our freedoms.

NYC’s subway system doesn’t see improvement because upstaters are conservative and aren’t going to benefit from it. The wealthy boomer republican districts believe that expanding public transportation into their towns will bring in the undesirable poors, and also oppose allocating funds to projects that don’t benefit them directly.

Well, that's one of the problems with the MTA: it's not technically under the direct control of any individual elected official. The MTA is an independent agency governed by a board that consists of five members appointed by the governor of New York State, four by the mayor of New York City, and three by county executives on Long Island and Westchester.

If the MTA were simply a city agency for which the mayor was directly responsible, it would be possible to channel voter anger (and there's plenty of voter anger, by the way) into action. But it's the governor who really has the most control, and he's responsible to a wide swath of voters outside the New York City region (who tend to want less spent on the MTA in any case). Plus many voters don't really understand how the MTA is structured, and elected officials can hide behind this independent-agency arrangement.

Exactly. If you read the article, it answers the OP's question pretty thoroughly. Comes down to incompetence and favoritism at the highest levels. The voters simply haven't done anything about it.

In addition to what others have been pointing out, I think the government is also frequently being forced to be penny wise and pound foolish.

I remember reading here a few years ago that one example of this is how writing the proposals for big projects for which construction companies than put offers have to be outsourced because all experts have been fired by the government. This apparently frequently leads to the government getting a much worse deal than anybody else would. I think another thing that happens is that do much oversight gets added that all costs explode. You can't iterate on anything because if the first version isn't perfect it surely was a waste of tax payer money when you need to go back for the next iteration. So you better have several committees and a long proposal process to make sure everything is perfect and no money gets wasted. Great example is the TSA iPad app for random screening selection that was a big topic a few years ago. The app randomly showed a left or right arrow and and cost millions to make if I recall correctly. I think the government being inefficient is somewhat of a self fulfilling prophecy.

One reason voters in the US trust their government far less to do a competent and honest job than voters in other rich countries is that their government actually is that much worse.

As for why, that's a much harder question...

I study how large groups of people work together towards goals for a living. Whenever there is a large org not meeting its goals or performing much worse than another large org in similar circumstances, I look at feedback loops.

What are the feedback loops involved? Are there consequences for poor performance? Are they the same? How often is feedback measured? Do the reward/punishment systems reflect the goals of the people paying for the org to operate?

I'm not going to go down the rabbit hole here. Instead I leave it to the reader. It's not rocket science to figure out. I've worked in and around government bodies of all sizes (including some that I considered very well run) and the bad ones are all bad for most of the same few reasons.

Uh, mind sharing where you got those numbers? The budget for TfL I see here says a total operational cost of 10.2 billion pounds (http://content.tfl.gov.uk/transport-for-london-budget-2017-1...)

TfL is way more than just the tube so I’m guessing op used numbers that broke out just the tube.

TfL manages more than just the London Underground. I think the other poster may be using the Tube's share of operating expenses?

http://content.tfl.gov.uk/tfl-mayors-budget-2017-18.pdf (page 10) versus http://web.mta.info/mta/budget/pdf/MTA%202017%20Adopted%20Bu... (page II-A). I’m just comparing the Underground versus the subway + the Staten Island Railroad.

That's interesting The TFL budget and the mayor's budget don't seem to match precisely, although roughly the same.

I wonder why?

For reference the broken down numbers for the underground alone are on page 25 of that document. (page 13 or so in the pdf)

Bit late here, but I'll give my opinionated answer anyways. The public sector is overall of lower human employee quality than the private sector. A high quality person that wants to get something done without a ton of red tape just doesn't stay in government work for the most part. It's not salary related or even money related, it's accountability related. Fixing that requires firing many entrenched people which will not happen. This is why many successful governments in the US task the private sector with building, maintaining, and sometimes even managing these projects. That has problems too, but in many cases at least it's done in reasonable time with reasonable quality or there is someone to hang.

Oh and I should mention large seemingly-private orgs that win all contracts, especially that are highly unionized without competition, are essentially government orgs and suffer the same issues.

You haven't answer the core question, which is: Why can London do this, while NYC cannot? Is there less red tape with accountability in London?

Maybe, I am not familiar. I was addressing why Americans were so bad at public <anything>. I would appreciate someone familiar commenting on the competency of English government employees and politicians vs their private sector. Specifically if the gap is as wide as it is in the US, which I would assume it's not if anything gets done. It's pretty simple really, incompetence cannot accomplish things requiring competence; not really country specific.

That's only one fraction of what our govt tries to control. People think they literally need to run every aspect of our lives. We're finding out what it's like to have the govt run our healthcare and make decisions for us. The govt actually is supposed to be in office to protect us. If all goes well we will have many agencies closed that had no business being govt run. Private is always the best way to hold people accountable. That and competition.

Which is why the privately-run US health insurance system is the envy of the world.

Unions have a lot to do with it.

Why?

It always surprised me how few employees there are in busy NY stations. Those that I see always seem busy and exhausted.

In Montreal, there were some newspaper articles about how a few bus/metro drivers make $100k/year by doing a lot of overtime, blaming unions. However, this was an intentional policy from management who consider it more cost-effective to encourage staff to do more overtime, rather than hire more people (who may not have a full workload).

U.S. politicians aren't punished or rewarded for their choices in funding infrastructure. In large part, it's because one party supports, as one of their defining policies, almost any reduction in government spending, revenue, and services. I'm not sure the other party faces significant opposition to cutting infrastructure.

You can see it right now in the current tax bill. There is plenty of discussion about what will happen to whose tax rates, but almost none about what services, including infrastructure, will be cut if revenue is reduced. For one party, revenue reduction is, ipso facto, a good thing.

And to even more strongly contrast the current mindset with reality, there is almost no discussion about what government can do to help its citizens except for security.

It's not just funding transportation though, it's also the oversight of projects. Few people take transportation funding into account when they vote; almost no one seems to take transportation oversight into account.

I think also looking at it simply as a party problem hurts things, because there can be a lot of difference within the party, but people tend to overlook these things (and again, not just in terms of the amount of money that's spent, but also in terms of how it's spent).

> looking at it simply as a party problem hurts things, because there can be a lot of difference within the party, but people tend to overlook these things

The GP comment didn't describe it simply as a party problem; it put some accountability on both parties, and blamed the voters and everyone else participating in public discourse.

But sure, one party has made it a policy to cut spending, including on infrastructure. While the parent might be right that there are a lot of differences within the GOP, those differences aren't meaningful because they result in no differences in votes, laws, or public debate. They vote in lockstep and almost always speak in lockstep.

That's an interesting theory but the New York City Council is over 90% Democrat[0], the New York State Assembly is over 70% Democrat[1], and there's only been one Republican governor in over 40 years.[2]

If you're going to blame Republicans, you should probably make sure there are enough to make a difference..

0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City_Council

1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_State_Assembly

2 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Governors_of_New_York

The parent misinterprets the discussion and makes incorrect factual assumptions.

First, the question the GP addresses is about the U.S. in general, not NY subways:

> I don’t understand why American governments are so bad at providing public services.

Second, the GP discussed problems in the voting public and in both parties, while putting a preponderance of the responsibility on one party - a conclusion that seems hard to escape. The Democrats aren't radically cutting revenue and spending everywhere they are in office.

Finally, the NYC subway is operated by the state, not he city, and I believe it is funded in large part by state. Much infrastructure funding also comes from the federal government.

Public services are for the working poor, and politicians don't represent the poorer classes. The wealthy and middle class are larger, more dependable blocs, and politicians support policies that favor these two groups. Few in either of these groups use (or want to use) public services like mass transit. So the problem is pretty basic at its core: poor citizens are one of the largest non-voting blocks[1], and so underserved by politicians. This unequal representation leads to further income inequality[2] and partisanship, which leads to even more gerrymandering, more inadequate representation, and further income inequality...

Meanwhile every individual (politician or voter or working poor) acts in an individually rational way, furthering the problem.

[1]: https://www.census.gov/population/socdemo/voting/SB91-23.pdf

[2]: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2649215

> Public services are for the working poor

This doesn’t really work in New York City, where most people are exposed to the subway directly or through the crowding of our shitty roads.

That’s entirely untrue in NYC: 55% of commuters take public transit. I guarantee you that is not only “the working poor.” And of those who do not, a significant percentage still use the subway a few times a week.

So while this would be a plausible argument outside NYC, it’s a ridiculous one given the parent article.

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