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Our German au pair was astounded that every project that requires shutting down a lane on a road has two guys waving people through the remaining lane. Apparently in Germany they just use portable traffic signals.

I live in the US and am still astounded by this. I've seen cases where we have a portable traffic signal that's also manned by two guys.

There is a lot of featherbedding going on. Read this article about the Manhattan tunnel costs. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/nyregion/new-york-subway-... There are people who are paid to do nothing because that job existed in the past.

A lot of times in those instances the guys are only there for the peak hours or when the site is active. The light lets them leave the site with only the single lane open and not require overnight staffing.

Some of the reasons are:

- When the site is active they often have a need to hold traffic or otherwise alter the traffic pattern to move equipment around. An excavator swinging an arm through the travel lane, loading a dump truck with debris that might fly around a bit, etc.

- The two guys are more efficient than the portable light at moving traffic volumes, since they can extend/shorten cycles as they see fit, and don't have to add in a big extra margin for the last, slowest possible vehicle to get through the work zone. They can see when it's cleared and let traffic through the other direction immediately.

In Germany we simply have driver education which is a bit more extensive complex than driving around a block once and making a single T-turn, then putting the car into park at the end. Sorry for sounding a bit snarky, but the consequences of leaving out a proper education, including driving etiquette, should be obvious.

It took me next to nothing to get a license in the US. In Germany, it took me months with a minimum set of mandatory lessons required by law - theoretical and practical.

I also don't think the argument about needing a driving license asap on the country side works because it is the same in Germany. Only major cities truly allow you the be car-free. Public transport elsewhere can at least be spotty if not outright disastrous and comparable to the US.

While I generally agree with you, the concept of people acting as "human safeties" isn't unknown to us Germans - look up "Bahnübergangsposten" or watch any railroad construction site. There will always be one human with a manual horn to alert the crew whenever a train passes by.

Usually because the lane is only being shut for a few hours, and it would cost more and take more work to set up a portable traffic signal. In Ontario, if the roadworks take more than a day, there's usually a traffic signal set up.

Interesting anecdote: I was driving through North Dakota this summer and hit resurfacing roadworks. It was the first time I've ever seen it, but rather than setting up hundreds of cones and directing traffic through them, then re-arranging the cones to do the other lane, they just had a flagman on each side and a pilot vehicle guiding 10–20 vehicles at a time through the work zone. No cones at all. I'm sure that project was completed in half the usual time.

> The same is true on the 9th ave x 50+th street area where there's active water sanitation department's work going on. I walk along 9th ave every weekday morning and there are a lot of idle 'workers' who are probably supervising. I'd say only about half of them are doing useful work while others sit/stand around and chat.

This looks bad, and some of the time it is just inefficiency, but in many cases there may be a series of tasks, dependent on each other, some of which require a lot of laborers and some that don't.

It's often better to employ a welder for the day than to stop work entirely when you don't have one milling around on site waiting for their next task.

The same queuing problem exists all over in computing as well and is similarly poorly addressed often as not. Japanese car companies and more generally lean engineering is all about fixing this. I highly doubt worker assignments are anywhere near optimal and are probably mostly whatever the job foreman feels like is right.

Some groups have this down to a science for their particular industry (say, Apple supply chain logistics) and others aren't even aware of the issue and pass it off as expected.

It would be an interesting study to get queuing theory people, lean experts, or some such qualified group to look into public construction and maintenance projects to simulate and analyze optimal vs. actual. No question this would be very hard to do because unions hate this kind of thing and people don't like being measured over their shoulders and the basic implication that they're "lazy" or inefficient or whatever. (it's hard to measure and improve worker output while actually making the worker happier too because there tends to be a Stanford Prison Experiment vibe where you get managers nitpicking lunch breaks and the basic pleasantries of working instead of bulk errors like allocating skill sets)

You may be surprised, but much work on British railway lines is done by private companies contracted by the government, and overseen by a public agency. There are several companies that compete for the work.

It could be fairly straightforward to compare the efficiency of the same task in both countries.

>but in many cases there may be a series of tasks, dependent on each other, some of which require a lot of laborers and some that don't.

You say that as though the policies and procedures by which worn is done haven't intentionally been made inefficient to create work for the workers.

I once sat on a train for 3hr waiting for a railroad employee to show up with a chainsaw and cut a downed tree of the track. There was another employee in a service truck equipped for brush clearing a couple miles away at the station waiting for his wife who was stuck on the same train. He couldn't clock in and deal with the downed tree, because rules. This story is fairly well known among people who ride that rail line so some here may recognize it.

In the UK, there are various accepted ways of safe work on a railway, followed by both public and private sector employees and contractors.

One of them has a lookout at each end, who alerts the workers whenever a train approaches. Work stops until the train has passed, because the distraction caused by operating loud and heavy machinery is ao high. (The train only sounds the horn once, unless the driver fails to see an acknowledgement from the lookout.)

However, this isn't really practical on a busy line like a metro, so they'd much prefer to work overnight with the line closed if possible.

It's also possible to fence off the work area from live tracks, but installing the fence is then the disruptive work.

> as long as these workers are smart enough to not encroach on the active lines.

That attitude is completely at odds with the European approach to worker safety.

(I cannot comment on whether either point applies to the USA.)

As an example, there's are descriptions of the failures of the safe working system in the reports of accidents, such as this one: https://www.gov.uk/government/news/report-122019-near-miss-w...

This style of working (where working lines are in physical proximity to workers) was called "Red zone" (where "Green zone" would be if the workers are not in proximity to a working line because the line was closed to traffic) and now is called "Open line" working.

It is unavoidably dangerous, and planners are supposed to choose it only when other options aren't practical, but in reality they often pick "Open line" for convenience. For example maybe the workers would prefer to do this on Tuesday midday, so we plan it as "Open line" and schedule it for Tuesday 1145, rather than for 0400 on Thursday when we can just shut the line to do it safely. This gets people killed, but because it doesn't reliably kill the specific people you scheduled most of the time it feels OK to them and to you.

This is also why unions aren't enough to implement safety. Unions represent workers and the workers feel like convenience is more valuable than safety. A 1-in-1000 chance to die, for five minutes extra coffee break is a good deal, until you're the 1-in-1000 and then it sucks. In the UK signaller unions fought very hard to continue working 12 hour shifts instead of maximum 8 hours. Because working 3x 12 hour shifts and then the rest of the week off is _convenient_ even though it was excessively dangerous if anything goes wrong.

In the US, because the government is not profit-driven, results rarely matter. So workers are seldom penalized for poor performance. So you end up with shitty workers. There are lots of people with great work ethic in the US, they're just mostly in private industry.

I don’t buy the whole “it doesn’t matter because it is the government”-thing. In the two bigger european cities I lived in service quality and government efficiency were usually very interesting voter topics. And local governments who didn’t manage to increase or at least uphold service quality would usually end up losing in the future.

So the thing that doesn’t seem to work in the US is the “hold them accountable”-part. Maybe public transport quality just isn’t an issue the typical US voter considers their business?

Its is not that it is not an issue. People in the US just do not vote. Compare the participation rates in your country vs the US. Majority of the people who vote are also uninformed I would say.

But isn’t it a bit hypocritical to first not vote, then complain about how things are paning out and then conclude that things in the hands of governments never work?

Democracy lives from everybody’s attendance — if you stay at home you got no right to complain.

Sadly even a strong faith in the invisible hand-shaped market-god doesn’t change that, because quasi monopolies like railway infrastructure and the invisible hand-shaped market-god never mix as well as promised for some weird reason.

It's not necessarily hypocritical say all.

If someone abstains from voting because they find all the choices equally unqualified, I don't think that eliminates the person's right to complain nor does it diminish the validity of their complaints.

There are also practical considerations, like voting taking place on a work day.

This is when you traditionally would vote invalid.

Governments are not profit-driven in many other countries with outstanding transit.

Why is America so bad compared to them?

My guess is that it has to do with low worker motivation, both from lack of individual incentives and organizational inertia. My friends in government jobs know what their promotions will be for the next 30 years and there is no allowance for variability based on personal performance. This prevents nepotism and corruption, but also means that leadership is based on seniority, not competence.

It would be interesting to see how successful governments manage promotion of talent.

My guess is that it has to do with the poor state of democracy in the United States. Local elections are dominated by moneyed special interest groups, many people don't vote in them, and those that do, often vote down the party line.

Result: It's difficult to run government services well, when we do such a poor job of picking good people to run the government.

I agree with your conclusion, but I'm not so confident "moneyed" special interest groups are the issue. I could speculate it has more to do with voter interest priorities in general.

Take California DMV for example. The DMV is led by state governor appointees. No governor will be voted in or out office based on DMV improvement performance. Running government services well hardly ranks in voters minds

The influence of the car industry in actively undermining alternatives through favorable regulation, direct handouts and access to the administrations by indirect bribes and revolving door delayed favors should not be underestimated.

Some counties in Europe have seen their former very nice state run public transport systems seen completely deteriorated over the past decades once sold out to the so-called 'efficient' private sector. I'm putting in 'so-called' as in practice they still receive close to as much in subsidies as the state-run enterprises they replaced, but now only serve cherry picked parts, most often with lower quality, and divest the required upkeep investments in infrastructure into separate businesses that are completely reliant on public funding.

There is a real myth about the effectiveness of private enterprise vs public enterprise.

Large private companies are not more efficient than a comparably sized public endeavor. Small companies can be, but that is systemically only true if you ignore the waste of 99% of the 'competitors' that are perpetually failing.

> The influence of the car industry [...]

Doesn't Germany have proportionally an even bigger car industry?

> Some counties in Europe have seen their former very nice state run public transport systems seen completely deteriorated over the past decades once sold out to the so-called 'efficient' private sector. [...]

Most public transport used to be private in the 19th century and was nationalized as a combination of cash cow and for military purposes.

The graphs on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impact_of_the_privatisation_of... look pretty good.

You mean, exactly the same as in any other large enterprise, private or public?

If you think everyone in the private sector is 'profit-driven', and you don't mean 'personal gain driven', which is the larger the company the less likely to be aligned with or incentivized by the benefit to the enterprise, I'm guessing you never spend time in such environments.

> No wonder the US can't compete with other countries (ahem, like China and anywhere in Asia) where workers have better work ethics. The US blue collar workers like to complain about their diminishing salaries and industries, but they won't be able to compete for long while their counterparts in other developing regions are working harder.

"better work ethics"? I prefer "unfair competition and dumping enabled by sometimes outright slavery".

That's the problem with most of the current free-trade agreements, they do not contain anything to protect the respective weaker parts getting exploited. As a result, scandals about child work and slavery conditions (e.g. in China) are commonplace, while at the same time European/US people lost millions upon millions of jobs because there was no way they could compete with what is essentially dumping.