Comment by barry-cotter | Hacker News Reader

Comment by barry-cotter | Hacker News Reader

Why American Costs Are So High (Work-in-Progress)

1. Engineering part 1: station construction methods

2. Engineering part 2: mezzanines

3. Management part 1: procurement

4. Management part 2: conflict resolution

5. Management part 3: project management

6. Management part 4: agency turf battles

7. Institutions part 1: political lading with irrelevant priorities

8. Institutions part 2: political incentives

9. Institutions part 3: global incuriosity

> Canada is not much better than the US. Americans’ world is flat, with its corners in Boston, Seattle, San Diego, and Miami. Canadians’ world includes the United States and Canada, making it flat with the northern ends of the quadrilateral stretched a few hundred kilometers to the north. A study of a long-overdue extension of Vancouver’s Millennium Line to UBC has four case studies for best practices, all from within North America. This is despite the fact that in the developed world the system most similar to Vancouver’s SkyTrain in technology and age is the Copenhagen Metro, whose construction costs are one half as high as those of Vancouver despite cost and schedule overruns.

https://pedestrianobservations.com/2019/03/03/why-american-c...

Perhaps there is an inherent problem with Anglo-Saxon, legal and contracting culture, which causes the management structure of projects to be over complicated and wasteful?

After all, London is still a lot more expensive to build in that other European cities. And it's not a public private thing, it's a legal and management culture thing. Heathrow Terminal 5 (a private sector project) took 20 years and cost twice as much for one terminal building and a short metro extension versus the new terminal, runway and metro at Madrid Barajas (a public project) which has twice the capacity.

Surely, but why don't those problems exist elsewhere?

That’s what I ask myself. I‘D guess all those challenges exist elsewhere too but at different scales?

I think the answer is that we just have all sorts of different systems of governance, optimized for different things.

UK underground is ancient, it's part of the fabric of culture, the UK is the birthplace of real rail, maybe they just have a centralized org to pull that off. Maybe they have a historical entente with unions. Maybe for whatever reasons there's less graft. Maybe it's just not politicized. Maybe it's just a lot easier for 'right of way' - or there are ample underground facilities. Maybe they just make things smaller (ie stations) so it's easier.

I find these situations are very enlightening, because it doesn't boil down to a scrum vs. waterfall or static vs. reactive kind of thing ... it's just 'really complicated'.

It's also very frustrating obviously and makes one very cynical of all of the dopes in charge.

I would love to vote for a super competent non-populist city administrator who said 'these are the operational reforms I am going to make', i.e. a leader who's not actually a politician.

I sort of believe that past a certain scale, a leader will have to be political to both get things done and maintain decision power. Even, if everyone agrees in one goal, which is impossible, the execution is rarely an easy division of labour.

The administrative state in the US isn’t as trusted, powerful or competent as in other developed countries. This is partly because of the structure of government in the US, all the checks and balances making getting anything done harder, the US tendency for regulation by judicial settlement instead of legislation and the much more democratic decision making process. There are far more political appointees in the US system, and elected posts, than in other developed countries. The civil service just isn’t as powerful. All of these are self reinforcing. The US is just very different from other places.

The ignorance of international best practices is just imperial disease, a special case of not invented here. I honestly struggle to think of a technology or industry the US has lost leadership in and then recovered but it’s not like Germany is doing well in electrical vehicles. Sometimes your time is past, like the US and semiconductors.

The political and administrative sclerosis is unlikely to get better fast without the kind of pressing need that results in a new constitutional settlement. It could get better slowly I suppose. The inward looking self regard will get better when the US sees itself as an excellent country rather than assuming they’re the best at everything.

the US tendency for regulation by judicial settlement instead of legislation and the much more democratic decision making process

I'd wager that the democratic decision process in Switzerland is far more stringent and the public is far more involved.

On every level, be it a local tram line, a canton wide, or intra-cantonal rail system, or projects of national importance and great expense, like [1], the public is virtually always consulted via referendum and has to green light the project.

This is also a huge strength of the system. Because once a project is approved, the funds are secured and politicians can't pull shenanigans to pull, or divert funding.

I'd wager that a high democratic involvment into major (and expensive) projects is rather an asset, than a liability.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gotthard_Base_Tunnel

I think Switzerland with its long history of democratic participation has developed a pretty mature population that generally makes (relatively) informed decisions. If you introduced this in the US I bet people would vote for abolishing taxes while increasing government spending on their pet issues. It would probably take a while until people have learned that this doesn't work.

We have the chance to participate in the US too, now to what extend it is effective, I don’t know.

For example, even in big cities like NYC, there are public meetings about the projects, etc. Yet, I still believe that past certain point, people just stop either caring or not having the energy to follow thru the whole process.

Just a side note, it might sound pedantic but after living in Scandinavia, one thing I noticed that the expectation of “participation” during the decision making is not same even here. I bring this up because somewhat it contributes for more or less polarization and inefficient processes, I’d say.

For the competency and powerful the public administration, I think part of that it is really hard to compete with the private sector in the US, unless for prestige or political capital.

As trust goes, I am not sure if it is any different than most of countries in Europe except maybe Scandinavia?

For international best practices, at least in my subsection within IT, the US is the main driver for it. Most of people I talk to in terms of regulation see the US as its own jurisdiction but it is not like things there don’t make sense from a regulatory stand point, but they are just different?

Anyways, those are just simple observations.

Building public infrastructure just isn't a priority in the US. We can analyze the differences all we want but at the end of the day it just isn't that important. US society and politics isn't focused on that kind of thing and it is becoming less of a priority in Europe as well.

Addition: I don't know why this would be objectionable. The US has built a lot of infrastructure. Europe has built a lot of infrastructure. So has China, the Middle East, Korea, Japan and whoever else. They all have different system and ways of doing things. And they all fail and fall behind when it is no longer a priority. What the problem then is, is interesting, but not really that relevant. Because the problem is you can't fix the problem. Say you would need to restructure the MTA, who is going to do that? No one because there isn't much to gain, and a lot to lose. It's the same with housing markets. There are dozens of ways you could tackle housing, but it just isn't a priority. While protecting property values and not alienating voters is. It is a social rather than a technical problem.

There’s a whole host of reasons. When the US does something, it goes all out. For example, under NEPA and equivalent state laws, every US infrastructure project spends years embroiled in study and subsequent litigation over environmental impacts. In Spain, they don’t even do environmental review for rail projects. In France, once the legislature decides to build a project, it passes a law that preempts every other law (to keep people from using those laws to sue to stop the project). If you posited the theory that Nixon signed NEPA to secretly destroy the ability of liberals to build transit, that wouldn’t be a crazy theory.

Then there is public unions. Public unions in the US are unusually strong, I think in part because they’re the last bastion of unionism in the US. When the folks who built Paris’s new line went to go check out the Second Avenue subway construction, they remarked that our TBMs are staffed by twice as many people making twice as much money.

Then there is the political buy-in. Transit seems really important to folks on HN, who mostly live in the city. But 5% of Americans take public transit to work (and it’s about 2% for trains). In Paris, 70% of commuters take public transit, and in France overall it’s 30%. In DC, it’s under 40% (mostly bus). Many large cities, like LA, Houston, and Dallas are 5-10%. There is no political will to fix problems in a system that the vast majority of people don’t use. Not only that, but they’ll never be able to use transit.

That brings us to the fourth reason, which is density. The weighted population density of Paris (the population density weighted by where people actually live) is five times as high as for DC (the US city with the second or third highest transit ridership).

"But 5% of Americans take public transit to work"

I used to live a 10 minute drive from work, and I never took the bus because it would take close to an hour.

Now I live a 10 minute nonstop bus drive from work, but the fare is the same, which means it's several times the cost of gas for my vehicle even at 16 mpg. And it still takes about 15-30 minutes by bus, net, because of the time waiting for it.

I can walk home after work before the bus even arrives, but the only way to get there is across 3 highways with no crosswalks and people going 50+ mph.

I'm not happy with any of my choices, but driving my gas guzzler kind of seems rational after I've tried all the options and weighed them.

For the moment, it may make sense to not use my car because if I don't commute in it, I'm less likely to go somewhere after work, but that's more of a psychological trick than a logical consequence.

...and while I'm not in a mega-city, I'm in the middle of a medium to smallish city that's part of an area with a million people or so.

The platforms on Vancouver’s Expo and Millenium lines are 80m long. The Copenhagen Metro uses 39m long trains. If you need to build stations twice as big an escalation of double costs doesn’t sound that ridiculous.

But longer trains increases capacity, its why a lot of the commuter lines into London now have platforms that can take 12 car sets instead of 8.

Sure, but if you need to excavate twice the station length for trains twice as long it does cost more, probably by a factor of around two. So comparing Vancouver Skytrain to Copenhagen Metro is slightly misleading.

I like how in-depth Alon is, but it's hard to take his arguments seriously because he freely mixes hard facts, anecdotes, and weird subjective analysis.

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