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Comment by scythe | Hacker News Reader

It seems like European infrastructure construction is more centralized than its American counterpart. In the Bay Area, there are two competing transit providers, each funded by the same taxpayers. Every city seems to run its own show, and CAHSR infamously rejected offers from European companies to do construction. It's just my view from 10000 feet, but the average city council has few civil engineers on board, so maybe a more top-down system could be better. The Boring Company might be a meme but at least there's not a different one in every city.

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In Paris, you have the national train company (SNCF) who competes with the Parisian subway system (RATP). To make matters even more complicated, some suburban rail lines are operated by one over the tracks of the other. This is seamless until one of them goes on strike...

For the geek part: when trains shift from one network to the other (RER B between Châtelet and Gare du Nord), they free-wheel while they transition power from one network to the power of the other one. On the rare occasion that a train has to stop in the middle of that dead zone, it can't move anymore...

This is half true: European infrastructure construction is almost perfectly decentralized to the point that it's (for the most part) fully centralized at the level of each member state.

The US half tries to fund and administer infrastructure at the federal level, state level, as well as local level, depending on the state.

As an American, I find the EU to have phenomenally good infrastructure, but I think that's because decisions aren't being made in Brussels, they're being made concurrently in Paris, Berlin, Amsterdam, London, etc.

I feel that the US would do well to emulate the EU, and centralize the funding, regulation, and administration of its respective systems in each member state.

This is why I'm not entirely opposed to the Trump infrastructure philosophy of encouraging states and local governments to pay their own way. It also encourages more private investment in infrastructure which is something that has contributed to the success of the subways in Seoul, Hong Kong and Tokyo as well as the original builders of the NYC subway.

I'm not opposed to that idea, but for it to work, we would have to invert our funding structures, with the majority of our taxes going to states and cities, and not the federal government. And while he seems to be happy to cut taxes, he doesn't seem to be too keen on cutting actual spending, so we're all gonna have to pay for it sooner or later.

I thought they were dumped by SNCF because they were making a pork barrel project instead of an actual rail system, and SNCF did not want to deal with the headache and reputation hit.

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