Tunnels in the US cost more than anywhere else
tunnelingonline.com
tunnelingonline.com
Take the newish Hudson Yards station. Its platform is about twice as wide as the original subway station platforms, and it's far longer than it needs to be too. On top of that, it has a full-length underground mezzanine above the platform, which is unnecessary. Overall, the effect when I first used it was "why is this so unnecessarily massive?"
Oversized stations are even more problematic when you consider that the MTA wants to build all of these by mining rather than using cut-and-cover, because cut-and-cover has too much disruption to surface tenants. And mining is far more expensive than cut-and-cover, so the extra volume you need to dig out for excessive station sizes hits your purse even faster. For as high as the actual tunneling costs are, it's the station costs that truly make the subway extensions stratospherically expensive.
The MTA is planning on a 100 year horizon. It is ALWAYS cheaper to build capacity now than to retrofit later, even inflation adjusted. If you’d like to challenge their methodology, first go read the planning report!
The ultimate pennywise/pound foolish.
I can't believe more people are not angry about the World Trade Center Path station. They managed to spend twice the original budget at four billion dollars and all this time there were signal problems between Newark and Harrison because Path didn't have money to fix it.
How do we do huge infrastructure projects when we can't trust the bureaucrats and the politians who are supposed to oversee these things?
In the aftermath of 9/11, a lot of federal money was made available for the reconstruction of all the stuff that was destroyed. However, it was only usable for things in the Ground Zero area. So to maximize the utility of all this money, the Port Authority created an insane train station dressed up to the nines to soak up $4B of free federal cash. They also lumped a bunch of other unrelated things into the station that raised the sticker price but would still be covered by the feds.
For what it's worth, this station was also at one point supposed to serve a LIRR extension from Atlantic Terminal to WTC, but kind of died after Pataki could not convince the feds that this was a reconstruction project and he left office. The project was never downsized in scope to match the new reality.
What happened with Manhattan was that tenements were replaced with office buildings, and these use more, not less commuting.
Take out the elaborate mezzanine and make it a simple single level multitrack platform directly under the surface, and you might make the first train and be out of the station in less time, lowering the needed capacity of the station structure in the first place.
Traveled a lot in the developing parts of asia and their subway stations even when massive are very plain and utilitarian. They deal with much bigger crowds than anything we could reasonably face in the west.
The biggest reason for the difference you’re pointing out is safety. A mezzanine creates safety in two directions. First, as a gathering area with likely positive pressure ventilation in case of a train fire. Second, a refuge for incidents on the surface.
The developing world generally isn’t planning for either in their infrastructure.
Later would be nigh-impossible because of the skyscrapers going up on every side, and the railyard above. Hudson Yards is a massively complex project.
"... Oversized stations are even more problematic when you consider that the MTA wants to build all of these by mining rather than using cut-and-cover, because cut-and-cover has too much disruption to surface tenants. And mining is far more expensive than cut-and-cover..."
Your response:
"... It is ALWAYS cheaper to build capacity now than to retrofit later, even inflation adjusted. ..."
The implication of your response is that on a 100-year timeline, the way that the modern stations are apparently being built (by mining) is cheaper than building them by the way the parent commenter says (cut-and-cover).
I was just curious why it's "always" cheaper. Is "mine and build big" the cheaper method only when there's a ton of density on top like Hudson Yards, or is it also the case in places with less surface density?
The Seattle has 79% more area than San Francisco and San Francisco has 17% more people. How does it make economic sense to have a Subway when so much of the city is zoned for detached single family homes and there is acknowledged seismic and flooding risk?
In 2020, wouldn't it be far more future proof and likely cheaper to plan on smart streets with self-driving pods like Dubai is doing with its Next platform? The moment autonomous on-demand P2P system is viable, it's going to turn subways in less densely populated cities into albatrosses.
What Sound Transit calls "light rail" is as high capacity as some subway systems. I named the nonprofit that led a lot of this organizing Seattle Subway because it got attention when we needed it, and it's true anyway. :)
I think your other questions are interesting, but it seems like you have an opinion and you're looking for a way to defend it. If you're actually curious about why we're building a subway network and aren't just looking for a way to disagree, let me know!
https://www.eastbaytimes.com/2016/11/27/barts-oakland-airpor...
Now if technological progress in transportation were to completely stall, I'd agree that it likely would make sense, but the last thing I want as a taxpayer is a very expensive project that is eventually outcompeted by advances in ridesharing in the time it takes to build out the network. Given that there is no lack of public transportation boondoggles that have left taxpayers holding the bag, it's not unreasonable to ask questions and exhibit some skepticism, especially when the population density is below 8000 people per square mile.
In places like NYC, I would be in complete agreement with you as the population density would dictates that only a subway would ever make sense because you simply don't have the road system relative to population density for a ridesharing solution to ever make sense.
Lastly, I commented in good faith, but this condescension, "but it seems like you have an opinion and you're looking for a way to defend it", doesn't exactly help you garner support for what you're trying to achieve. That's also the kind of accusation that comes from someone accusing others of doing something they are guilty of. Perhaps it's you that has an opinion that you're looking for a way to defend?
There is, quite frankly, not enough capacity north-south or across Lake Washington for people to be in vehicles at the low density of a comfortable car, which is what light rail is for. Already much of the commuting mode share in the Seattle area is people using buses to get downtown, in some cases driving to a park and ride lot to catch a bus there. Seattle has mostly exhausted the limits of this approach, so now there is a huge light rail construction project.
Whether you go with roads or rail, you still have the problem of building across those geographic chokepoints. Either way, you've got the cost of building bridges/tunnels regardless of the mode of transportation.
The subway they're referring to is almost certainly the Link light rail, which runs through the bus tunnels, and has other extended stretches underground. It's probably the same light-rail that you're referring to.
There are S-Bahn stations in Switzerland with 10 times the daily riders of BART that are nothing more than a signpost and a place to stand. The American obsession with gargantuan stations serving a couple thousand daily riders costs a lot of money.
https://www.mercurynews.com/2020/03/29/barts-san-jose-extens...
Do you mean a specific BART station? The average total BART daily ridership (400k weekday, 100k weekend) is roughly comparable to the total daily Zürich S-Bahn network ridership (400k-450k in one figure I found).
I'm not sure that Zürich has the most popular network in the country but I would assume it's up there. Bigger stations here are definitely smaller than that SJ monstrosity, and I really like how efficiently they're laid out, but which popular stations are you thinking of that are just a signpost and a place to stand? Even the most popular space-constrained ones in the city (Hardbrücke, Stadelhofen) are way more than that, and the only I can think of in the city that are basically just a signpost are those with relatively infrequent service (Seebach, Friesenberg, etc.).
In any case, I think Caltrain feels a lot more like the S-Bahn equivalent, and most of the stations aren't much bigger either. This seems to hold for several other commuter train services in the US, such as NJ Transit.
1: https://www.google.com/maps/@47.337124,8.5196172,3a,75y,4.85...
2: https://www.google.com/maps/@37.502989,-121.939301,3a,75y,19...
Caltrain manages to be much more dysfunctional than BART, sadly.
Only this makes the 90 second Shinkansen stops possible as well as the 3 minute cadence between trains we saw in Hiroshima station possible. Not only is the platform used very efficiently, there is even a small Soba restaurant in the middle of the platform! :)
In comparison here in Europe (CZ) the trains are usually late and you migh only lern the platform couple minutes before the train arrives - and it might even change at the last minute! There are no door markers and trains stop preatty much at random somewhere at the platform. Most traincars still have stairs and people are not used to proper queueing, so they form a fan around every door that blocks people from quickly getting eiter in or out.
The trains are also slow (160 km/h max on parts of track and on a good day) and mostly not EMUs, so you have platform space used up by the locomotive. Oh well.
In the three European countries I'm most familiar with, at least some types of train stop in a consistent position, with platform markings and queuing.
Perhaps I should leave comments like "Japanese people just like things smaller because when I was there everything was so small" and not notice that they have a lack of space and are on average, smaller, hence the need for space saving measures and smaller fittings, or is that just one more, in my opinion, fairly innocuous musing that must not be stated… maybe it's just me? Maybe.[1][2]
しょうがない
My takeaway from this is that careful planning and analysis is necessary to decide what sort of station design is required. There is no one-size-fits-all answer, as many replies suggest there is, so it's not obvious to me that the MTA screwed this up.
By contrast, the Hudson Yards station is a terminus station of a single line. That means traffic is largely going to be directly from the single platform entrance (there's only one bank of escalators to the surface) to the waiting train, or vice versa. Even if it's potentially going to be busy, there is very little need for platform loitering, and certainly not for the massive overbuild of platform and mezzanine that exists today.
Hudson Yards is also the only station next to the Javits Center, so it has the massive traffic from large convention events like the Auto Show and NYCC.
Don't forget the shuttle to/from Grand Central Station. Times Square St has to be the most trafficked station.
> and certainly not for the massive overbuild of platform and mezzanine that exists today.
Better that than an oversized Jets Stadium where subpar football gets played 8 times a year.
I always assumed that Hudson Yards would serve as a terminus for future lines to new jersey. But I guess political will and federal funding is required for that.
London has terminus stations - the platform the train arrives on is where the train stops, and then starts on its return journey. Trains to your destination are therefore limited by signalling and traffic, typically a 10-15 minute turn around time. On average, in London during rush hour, you have a train to your home station every 20 minutes.
Perhaps in the US all major stations are through stations, but in the UK, especially London, we just don't have that, and mezzanines are at the very minimum, a safety requirement, because the platform your train leaves from, has other passengers waiting for other trains before your one.
Platforms are not large, and trains are very, very busy, and frankly, if you've only ever caught a train in the US you are in for a huge surprise commuting in the UK.
If the US ever adopted trains like the rest of the world has, the best time for building mezzanines, and huge stations is "yesterday".
To expand capacity beyond that would require reengineering the tunnels themselves. They go as fast as they can turn around and vent air as it is. You'd have to bore parallel tunnels to increase capacity, which would just mean adding more platforms and still wouldn't require a mezzanine.
Great thinking ahead, except plans changed and when (decades later) they eventually decided to build the Eastern Suburbs line, they chose a completely different alignment. So they just had these stub tunnels sitting underground, disused. During World War II they were converted to being an air raid shelter. They've seen some other random uses over the years, such as being used to film TV shows, part of them is used as a maintenance train siding, etc. Now the government is seeking proposals for the private sector to redevelop them into something useful.
When the Eastern Suburbs line was finally built on a different alignment in the 1970s, they did something similar – it has two underground platforms at Central Station, but they actually built four underground platforms. Two of them active, the other two with stub tunnels not going anywhere. Once again, this was to support another planned railway line, the Southern Suburbs line, which has never built either. For many years, the never-used platforms were used as archival document storage for the government rail authority. Now, Sydney is building a new metro line. The Metro line is not going to use these platforms, it is using newly constructed underground platforms. But these never-used platforms are going to be converted into utility rooms for the Metro line.
Similarly, at Redfern station, there is a big pit in the ground which holds half-constructed platforms for the Southern Suburbs line. I doubt those platforms will ever be used for that purpose.
So anyway, planning ahead is a great idea, but often it just turns into a waste.
Yeah, usually by totally rebuilding the station. Easier said than done when you already have a skyscraper built over top of you. NYC is trying to revamp a lot of its current stations that see magnitudes of traffic more than they were designed to on a daily basis, and that's a massive undertaking.
That's good for track maintenance too.
For example, Strong Towns [1] seems to champion the whole "the suburbs are unsustainable" perspective, but never the "public works projects in HCOL metros are too expensive for the resulting density" thesis. Market forces will likely work it out in this case though (people leaving HCOL locations for lower density locations where per dollar quality of life is higher, with major cities having to do more with less, or do less with less [tax revenue] [2]).
[1] https://www.strongtowns.org/the-growth-ponzi-scheme
[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/27/nyregion/mta-virus-budget...
Everyone in NYC hates it and we are currently building an extension at the old post office, as it is not fit for usage anymore.
The old one (the one that got demolished in the 60s) was miles ahead in both space and aesthetics. Also, almost nobody hates the Grand Central Station, even though it gets overran with tourists as it is a beautiful peace of work.
1. Amtrak insists on trying to do an airplane-like boarding situation for trains, rather than the traditional practice of telling people what track their train will be on several minutes in advance and letting them wait on the platform. This means you have boarding lines and expectant crowds in places that aren't designed to handle that kind of capacity.
2. Each of the services that call at Penn Station has its own segregated platforms, mezzanine, and ticketing areas, and the connectivity between these is poor and confusing. Although, this is probably driven in large part by...
3. Madison Square Garden was built on top of Penn Station, and a substantial portion of the above-ground infrastructure is dedicated to supporting that tenant rather than the transportation infrastructure.
Penn Station used to have a more normal major-station layout when it was still part of the Pennsylvania Railroad, but that was ruined by the building of Madison Square Garden on top of it.
'One entered the city like a god; one scuttles in now like a rat'
Building new platforms that were just "as wide as the original subway platforms" would be the bonkers thing.
Sure it's more expensive to build it big, but I bet its more expensive still (if not totally impossible) to build it small then _re_build it big a few decades later.
Sounds a little like American healthcare. Either super expensive but shiny care or either nothing or subpar care. No reasonable middle. I always wonder why all hospitals have to be super new with new devices.
A recent executive order by the president will force hospitals to reveal their pricing, but I'm not sure if that applies to actual negotiated prices for various insurance plans, or only to the phoney prices that they use for negotiating and noone actually pays.
Either way, a small ray of hope that things will change for the better soon.
Like many surface lightrail systems, the total length of Muni trains is limited by the intersection spacing of the surface streets it operates on, among other factors - the train needs to be able to stop without blocking adjacent intersections.
Full double-platform operation of Muni trains on the Market Street Subway has been on and off over the years with changes in station operations and controls, I believe it is currently on at least at Embarcadero. There have been technical (related to the ATC) and procedural problems (people waiting at the wrong position and having to run) that have made double-platform operation tricky. I also think the gains in efficiency by double-platforming are fairly modest since the throughput of the Market Street Subway has long been limited by signalling considerations.
It's kind of wild that that wasted space for MUNI underground is not a bigger complaint in the main. My fantasy is that the last 20 years of tunnel computerization for MUNI was going to result in multiple trains per station, or hooking multiple lines together at the entrance of the tunnel (IIRC they did this with the Boeing trains until the Meltdown and Bredas) in order to utilize the whole station length.
Or shrink and simplify the MUNI parts, there's no (apparent to a rube like me) reason MUNI stations have to be the same length as BART stations. Make 'em a single block long with NYC style foyers: attendant, turnstiles, ticket machines. No flowers, no coffee, no Jehovah's Witness tables.
As an outsider from Europe, let me try.
1. It always seemed to me that the litigious nature of doing business in the US must be costly to society. The thinking of "If anything ever happens to you, someone owes you money". Lawyers are needed in anything of consequence, and it leads to lots of overhead, distraction and unnecessary work to avoid the possibility of being liable for anything.
2. Then there is corruption. The US ranks lower than most european countries on corruption (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corruption_Perceptions_Index). The article hints at that, mentioning "politicizing" of infrastructure projects. That also costs money to society.
3. Then there is lack of competition. Because antitrust laws have not been enforced for decades in the US (not anywhere else too btw), I suspect that big infrastructure projects are getting distributed among a few large companies, who don't actually compete; they'll all make good money and pay their C-level execs well.
There may be other factors like healthcare costs, and unions adding to costs, etc, but those seem to be a result of the above, rather than a root cause.
Healthcare does have an impact, in that the comparison of labor costs btw US and Europe often doesn't account for the fact that the cost of labor in the US includes health insurance, generally, whereas the cost of labor in Europe does not. This is the flipside of comparing tax rates between US and Europe, where Europe's rates look very high, but include healthcare generally, so the same cost is booked as labor in the US but as general government spending in Europe.
The real difference is that it's 2-3 times as expensive in the US.
Yes. Which may be caused by the same three issues:
1. Doctors afraid of being litigated by patients, doing unnecessary treatments and paying costly insurance.
2. Corruption and bribery leading to things like Medicare being unable to negotiate drug prices and doctors prescribing addictive opioids to the tune of billions of dollars.
3. Inverted competition: Hospitals run a for-profit business while patients will prefer the best and most expensive service they/their insurance affords them. Who chooses a treatment based on price when your health is at stake? Also, somehow, drug prices are much higher than anywhere else, even completely generic stuff like insulin.
Nobody looses, except everyone else
But simply the problem is that the US economy is brutally productive, so the price of every input (labor, raw materials, capital) is priced according to their opportunity costs. If the same labor could make something that would then lead to a lot of profit in some other sector, then construction has to pay that high labor cost too.
http://rationallyspeakingpodcast.org/show/rs-236-alex-tabarr...
(Other laws make employment less liquid, somewhat reducing this benefit. IMO those laws should be changed, but only with the non-work-related benefits increasing commensurately (UBI). (Definitely not trying to bolster the Macrons here.))
Add on top that it's perception. In western countries how many people have direct experience with political corruption? Their views are going to be heavily influenced by media coverage.
And then add on top anti-corruption measures. If your gov't prosecutes corruption aggressively, it will seem like there is more of it, versus a country that just ignores it. If it's not in your face, you'd probably say your country is not that corrupt. When in fact the country that more aggressively fights corruption is probably less corrupt than one that doesn't.
>Although the material and equipment costs are similar (within 10%) for projects in the United States and in Europe, labor costs are substantially higher in the United States as outlined above. For example, in California the average billing labor rates for qualified tunnel workers is about $70/hr and the average New York labor rate of qualified tunnel workers is at over $100/hr, whereas in Germany (one of the high labor rates countries in Europe) the comparable labor rate is about $30/hr."
You add up all these inefficiencies, including Union labor, and it starts to bloat infrastructure projects. Unions can do wonderful things, but they no incentive to fix things when they're benefit. Or in the words or Upton Sinclair:
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it."
The question is are labor unions stronger in Paris or New York; London or Chicago?
It's not an obvious answer. If you just looked at pay, you'd probably come to the conclusion that unions in blue state metros in the US are much more powerful than any of their European counterparts.
Case in point here’s a news article from last week about the settlement for a young man who had a kidney removed instead of his spleen: https://www.weser-kurier.de/bremen/bremen-stadt_artikel,-ges...
The judge called it unbelievable and truly outrageous.
He’s set to receive 90k Euro for pain and suffering + indemnification for any future issues with his surviving kidney.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/nyregion/new-york-subway-...
There are “nippers” to watch material being moved around and “hog house tenders” to supervise the break room. Each crane must have an “oiler,” a relic of a time when they needed frequent lubrication. Standby electricians and plumbers are to be on hand at all times, as is at least one “master mechanic.” Generators and elevators must have their own operators, even though they are automatic. An extra person is required to be present for all concrete pumping, steam fitting, sheet metal work and other tasks.
In New York, “underground construction employs approximately four times the number of personnel as in similar jobs in Asia, Australia, or Europe,” according to an internal report by Arup, a consulting firm that worked on the Second Avenue subway and many similar projects around the world.
The idea that U.S. regulations are simply administered more poorly than European ones reminds me of the U.S. tax system. For years, anti-tax people in the U.S. (and the tax prep industry) have blocked changes that would simplify filing taxes. They think (correctly imo) people will like taxes less if they're hellishly complicated to file. Is something similar has been happening with other regulatory requirements?
I would be interested to read about it if anyone has any sources.
It's such a screwed up situation and is perfectly designed to enrich shareholders at the expense of the public purse, just a perfectly oiled machine. Metro doesn't even accept the cheapest bids, they continually turn to Tutor Perini because that is the only contractor with people familiar with the regulatory process. I'm not sure how you ever right the ship in this case. Pretty depressing.
You force reform. Like this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ykQdG51clqk
The economy the last four years speaks for itself. And even more shocking - the world didn't end, air is still breathable, water is still clean - amazing!
Their actual argument is that we should simplify the code itself, not try and hide its complexity from the payers using some computer system only available to the IRS.
They do think that you should have to file every year though, that is correct. That forces a bit of visibility and accountability on the government in that it shows people just how much they're working for the government before working for themselves.
This is similar to how the US makes sales tax visible to the payer, rather than hiding them behind an invisible VAT. It's about transparency.
Here in Germany, and I believe in all of Europe, every single invoice and receipt I’ve ever received includes both the gross and the net price. It has to because of how VAT can be deducted for business expenses.
Similarly my monthly pay slip spells out exactly how much I’ve paid this month for income tax, church tax, solidarity tax (this one is related to the German reunification), health insurance, retirements insurance and unemployment insurance. It also includes how much I’ve in the year up to today.
Nothing is hidden and most folks know very well how much they’re paying at least in aggregate. We just don’t make it difficult to pay.
People would know this if they'd just get a tax bill sent to them.
Believe me, people who live in countries where filing your taxes occupies ~5-minutes of brainspace per year aren't ignorant children. They know how much they are paying.
One of the points he makes is that Anglosphere countries (and the USA is worse than others) refuse to learn from other countries that have better cost and performance. He has a lot more to say - it's good reading.
In the UK, planning rules are often blamed for large project delays but you can't easily just throw the rules out of the window without causing concern that you will end up with a different problem.
The Shinkansen was/is a successful project but it had certain "costs" involving not just the demolition of lots of property but also the "eyesore" of above-ground railways. If you want to import that success, you import all of the problems at the same time.
I think perhaps governments would spend better quality time really asking and answering "what do we want this country to be about", then maybe they could start knocking the old walls down.
Sure, but the alternative is usually highways, which need to be wider, and tend to louder and more of an eyesore. I'd take a Shinkansen over I-75/I-85 any day. (looking at you, Atlanta)
Is this their way of saying corruption is an X factor they didn't account for?
"Although the material and equipment costs are similar (within 10%) for projects in the United States and in Europe, labor costs are substantially higher in the United States as outlined above. For example, in California the average billing labor rates for qualified tunnel workers is about $70/hr and the average New York labor rate of qualified tunnel workers is at over $100/hr, whereas in Germany (one of the high labor rates countries in Europe) the comparable labor rate is about $30/hr."
If the trickle down percentage is equal then the problem in the US is extractive labor unions; if US workers get a smaller percentage of the billing rate then the problem is extractive behavior by contractors. These problems require different solutions, so any attempts at cost control would need to determine which of these possibilities is in force.
US healthcare costs will also almost certainly feed into higher employee compensation for American workers. European employers will be paying into health care in some form or other (either through taxes or private insurance) but overall healthcare costs in Europe are far lower than in the US.
Each contractor has to report what they paid to each employee so that nobody is screwed. The idea was that the government didn’t want jobs to be done by cheap labor and they set a wage floor that corresponds to local union labor rates.
The wage difference can be quite drastic - floggers pay jumps from $15 Pernod to about $32 per hour where I live.
More info: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Davis–Bacon_Act_of_1931
> The idea was that the government didn’t want jobs to be done by cheap labor
To be more specific, they didn't want the jobs to go to black workers.
Remember a bitch by a VC that tech workers weren't benefiting from the high wages he was paying so much as land lords.
That. Financialization and rent seeking in the US acts as a privately imposed tax on real economic activity. That shows in in things like why my company has moved every five years since the early 2000's. Our lease expires. The rent doubles and we move.
Want to fix this; prune back the finance and healthcare industries.
“For example, in New York, the number of workers at the face of the tunnel can be up to four times the number of workers required in Germany or Austria for similar projects.”
I appreciate 2-3x overtime as a means of encouraging fully filling out the workforce at single rate. Overtime should be for true need, not a factored in norm.
It should encourage the employer to avoid overtime, but at that rate I would guess it also encourages the employees to do overtime.
Inefficiencies like this should be the enemy of both political parties. They’re why Republicans complain about Government inefficiency and waste, and they’re holding progressives back from accomplishing everything they’d like the government to do.
This feels like it’s basically a matter of labor NIMBYs enriching themselves at the general public’s expense.
Could this strange state of affairs be the result of a political system that is highly polarized and less fundamentally democratic than the Canadian and European system?
I suspect some of that dynamic lives on.
The spread in riding (electoral district) size in Canada only varies by a factor of 4.5 if the (mostly unpopulated) northern territories are included (the three territories have one MP, each, to represent populations of less than 30,000) and a factor of 1.5 among the populated provinces.
Canadian federal governments are generally comprised of whichever party received the largest share of votes nationally. This is not always the case in the US.
I'm going to disagree with you on this. In Canada, the general votes usually result in 1/3-1/3-1/3 split between the Conservatives, Liberals, and NDP. It's our first past the post system for MPs that results in the uneven split at the final tally. The only reason that the system hasn't succumbed to gerrymandering as badly as elsewhere is that district changes must be prompted by a change in the number of provincial seats from the census. The changes themselves are proposed by an unelected third-party with members chosen by the judiciary of the province and the speaker of the house (who is chosen by the MPs through a secret ballot vote). Otherwise, it would be all too easy to gerrymander an election in Canada and end up in the same situation as the US.
Contrast this with countries that use proportional representation which means everyone's vote basically means more or less the same as anyone else's vote.
The US is currently ranked 25th in the world by "democracy ranking"
On the other hand, we do use proportional representation (single transferrable vote, STV) to elect the senators for each state, which is different from the first-past-the-post method the US uses. In a normal election, half of a state's senators are up for re-election; exceptionally, the government may call a special "double dissolution" election, in which the whole Senate is re-elected, if the Senate repeatedly refuses to pass legislation sent to it by the House of Representatives. Our use of STV means that minor parties (Greens on the far left, One Nation on the far right, various centrist/populist independents and other small parties) end up controlling the balance of power in the Senate. Some people don't like that because these minor parties end up sometimes extracting all kinds of concessions from the government in exchange for letting government legislation through.
I think some kind of unequal representation – like the Australian and US Senates – is essential for a federal system to work. Look at the United Kingdom – England has almost 85% of the population, so a big enough majority in England can always overrule the other three smaller constituent countries (Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland), and there are no constitutional mechanisms to prevent that from happening. That's a large part, I think, of why the UK looks like it isn't going to last, with Scotland likely to break away sooner or later, quite possibly followed by Irish reunification some years further down the track, and once its just England and Wales, maybe even Wales will eventually decide to follow Scotland's example. If the British House of Lords was more like the Australian and US Senates, and gave the smaller constituent countries the ability to block an English-dominated majority, then the UK would be more likely to survive.
edit: CA accounts for 15% of the US GDP
U.S. is at place 25 and is categorized as a flawed democracy, lower than Canada and some European countries (but far from all).
Electoral college
“47.2 percent—nearly half—of the German population held a formal vocational qualification in 2016”
From: https://wenr.wes.org/2018/06/could-germanys-vocational-educa...
Germany, at least, keeps costs low by using the common market to depress wages. Housing supply in the dominant cities is very tight vs. wages. See Berlin and Munich.
Yes, why wouldn't be there? Speaking strictly for Romania (from where I'm from) the Bucharest underground in the 1980s and almost all of the big hydro-dams projects (which also require extensive tunneling work) were carried with Romanian engineers only (we received the help of the Soviets in the early 1960s for the hydro works, though). And to be honest that question in itself is a little "orientalist", but I'll just pass over that part of the post.
> If there are then good for them, but I still don't get why qualified people would accept so little
Because wages are still pretty low in countries like Romania (and I guess in Poland and Bulgaria too, to give just a few examples), $30 per hour is more than enough. Plus the engineers themselves alone are no good, the project is based on the people who actually have to dig the stuff out, for them $30 per hour is double more than enough.
Parts of Eastern Europe have had an industrial base since the 1800s. Indeed, the Czechs have been making cars since 1905. Of course Eastern Europe trains qualified construction workers.
Requiring everyone to have a degree, even to do simple stuff, would be absurd. If you do in the US, then that is the reason for high costs.
European unions are either dying with dwindling influence (France, Britain, Italy), or just a proxy for social welfare and compensation negotiation (Germany, Netherlands, Northern countries).
It makes for accomplishing smaller projects near prohibitively expensive. And typically you can't gang together multiple projects in order to optimize labor usage.
Honestly, I have very mixed feelings about the arrangements I have to work with.
That 70$ 'overhead' charge.
This was 10 years ago but I knew developers making $60/hour in salary while being contracted out for 3 times that amount.
on edit: added in California.
Yeah, not the best example to go with. If the numbers on HN are at all accurate, it's not uncommon for a FAANG employee to make more than a DOCTOR in North Carolina.
that's why I chose it as an example to compare with the wage of somebody who does hard physical labor underground with a significantly higher chance of injury https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4667042/ - relevant quote:
"However, there is still a relatively high incidence of labour accidents during tunnel construction when compared to incidence rates in the construction industry in general. During tunnel construction, rock fall events at the cutting face are a particularly characteristic of the type of accident that occurs."
A conservative/republican commentator would take this as evidence/proof of the indisputable superiority of the American system - truly it is a land of opportunity where people can make 2-3x more than in supposedly rich Europe.
A progressive/democratic commentator would instead point out that the LIFESTYLE a laborer can have in Europe at 30$/hour is in many ways superior to that of the equivalent American worker - they have full healthcare coverage, a prolific public transit system, and free university tuition for their children.
Then the counter-counter argument would be that the American worker could have a full house, 3 cars, and the FREEDOM to choose to spend money on their healthcare vs something else for their lifestyle, whereas the European laborer is in a system where a lot of choices are made for them.
Pretty interesting stuff.
You could reframe it as, “every German tunneler is paying a $40/hr non tax compulsory payment to someone’s kids in Germany’s ownership class.”
Anyone who travels to Europe is shocked at home, food, and car sizes. Sure there is beauty and history, but the standard of living seems significantly worse off.
There may be something to be said about safety nets, but it sure was a wakeup call for me.
Edit- don't get hung up on the sizes comment, it's merely an expression of wealth differences.
Signed, tested a year in Dallas.
Would I move back there in the near future? No. Is it comparable to any first-class European city? Definitely not. Is it on par with NYC/SF/DC? Not really. Los Angeles (where I currently live)/Seattle/Atlanta? Somewhat. Heading in the right direction? Definitely.
[1] Unless you're talking about DFW suburbs. In which case, once you cross the city line, try not to lose your soul in all the cookie cutter subdivisions.
I'm trying to understand this comment. I'll flip it the other way as a European Brit visiting the US.
Homes: You have an entire continent, with only 400 years of (European) habitation, so you have a lot of space. Your home building is also largely after the invention of the motor car. In Europe we have, are, and will, walk everywhere. So everything is closer together, and so are the houses.
Food: not quite sure what the issue is with European food, but as a European in the US, I'm astonished at how little fresh food and meat there is. If it's wrapped in plastic, I have no idea how old it is. Ugh. If I ask a butcher for a cut of meat, I know that meat has only been hung for a certain time, and on display for a certain time. Similar fruit and vegetables, and fish, and bread and so on. A massive bag of chips, or a gallon of high fructose corn syrup is not an achievement.
And then car sizes. European roads are historically dictated by horse and cart. In the US, you have Eisenhower and the freeways... after the invention of cars.
Don't get me wrong, I like the USA. I've spent about 5 years of my life, cumulatively in the USA. I think the European fantasy, is seeing America, and realising (from a European perspective), how much the USA could benefit from doing some European things. I want to just walk to the shops, or cycle down the road.
High speed rail would be an absolute game changer for you guys. Connecting up SF and LA, or NY and Phili, but you (or rather your politicians) just don't get it.
It's not the first time I've talked about it on HN, but from an EU point of view making a connection between house/car/food size and standards of living is baffling.
Humanity has probably spent ~5,000 years with the aristocracy upgrading their dwellings to something larger and more permanent than a closet-sized hovel. Same for possession of personal conveyances larger and more capable than one's own two feet. We can debate whether it is healthy, or philosophically ideal, but it certainly isn't a uniquely American phenomenon, and shouldn't be baffling, when viewed in the context of human civilization's habits of material acquisitiveness.
As for the housing... you can buy a cheap big house in bumfuck nowhere or a smaller place in the city. I guess just like in the US.
Did you live somewhere in Europe, or did you just visit on a holiday?
The grass is always greener on the other side of the fence.
> Americans have insane amount of disposable dollars compared to Europeans and they also spend like crazy
That's the other side of the fence. Most Americans you noticed had insane amount of disposable income, the ones you don't register possibly don't. In average the disposable income is higher in the US than in Europe, but so is the income inequality.
There are up-sides and down-sides to each systems.
Alon Levy has more in depth reporting of this failed report: https://pedestrianobservations.com/2019/07/22/new-report-on-...
And Matthew Yglesias has a good article on the congressional inference which is preventing this from being meaningfully analyzed https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/5/24/15681560/g...
Also, here in NYC, it isn't just tunneling that's expensive [0], we pay dearly for most of our infrastructure. As this article points out, the elephant in the room is labor costs.
[0] https://twitter.com/marketurbanism/status/118704548054032384...
My sister worked for a pump company, been in business for 150 years. Got calls all the time for replacement pumps that had failed after a century etc. One was 6 stories underground in NYC. Had to dig a tunnel down through a maze of services (electrical, tunnels, drains, water, gas) to get to it. Then had to have exactly the same pump to fit exactly into the geometry it used to have (no problem; they still had the drawing for the pump in a drawer and made an exact copy). Pulled the old one up, dropped the new one down, hooked it up and then buried it for maybe another century.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bertha_(tunnel_boring_machin...
If complications caused by conflicting stuff that you mention is one of the factors that drive up the cost, then I guess that general panning for all kind of infrastructure is just constantly done better (for whichever reasons) in non-amerian cities?
NYC went from 125000 in 1820, to 5.5M in 1920.
_In some ways, M.T.A. projects have been easier than work elsewhere. East Side Access uses an existing tunnel for nearly half its route. The hard rock under the city also is easy to blast through, and workers do not encounter ancient sites that need to be protected._
_“They’re claiming the age of the city is to blame?” asked Andy Mitchell, the former head of Crossrail, a project to build 13 miles of subway under the center of London, a city built 2,000 years ago. “Really?”_
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/nyregion/new-york-subway-...
If you have 1000 years to do it and grow slowly enough, maybe you have 2 or three layers.
"If these recommendations are implemented, would the U.S. costs match the European tunneling project costs? Unlikely."
The reasons make sense, at least to me, someone who knows very little of this subject.
There is really a big problem here.
That said. Some localities (notably Genève) introduced a minimum wage. Also, a lot of employees are covered by a collective employment contract, which usually stipulates a minimum wage.
What is true is that few employees make less than 4000 Francs a month (~ $4000).
I understand that was also a commonality in the countries that spent the most preparing for y2k.
But anyway, what's to be done? According to the article:
* Streamline the environmental and approval processes.
* Establish an equitable risk sharing mechanism between the owner and contractor and properly implement it.
* Establish unified contractual terms and conditions for underground work similar to the FIDIC Emerald Book.
* Be fair and equitable in dealing with changes, disputes and claims.
* Reevaluate the need of all soft costs: Owner, PM/CM, EIS/EA, Engineering, etc., lower bonding limits, less litigation, lower insurance cost, etc.
* Revisit labor laws, rates, and union regulations and establish equitable Project Labor Agreements.
* Pay for public amenities and community and stakeholders’ provisions through other funds rather than transit funds. There is no doubt that community improvements and services are needed, but infrastructure projects should not be the vehicles to fund such services or improvements.
* Transportation Alternative Program is essential for sustainability and environmental benefits, but their costs should not be funded through transit project costs.
* Better management of stakeholders’ approvals, public expectation, ROWs, and utilities owners.
* Remove politics from infrastructure projects.
Where have I heard these before?
I'm wondering when this began to happen. I don't think this was the case from day 1.
I wonder if anyone is working on making these trains more silent. It seems hard but might be quite valuable.
They bought a commercial tunnel boring machine and decided to build their own. The first one is named Prufrock and it is going to be helping do the huge project in Los Vegas they've already completed the first phase of:
https://cleantechnica.com/2020/03/01/prufrock-next-generatio...
The next phase of their project literally connects the entire Los Vegas strip underground via tunnels.
https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-boring-co-las-vega...
Note that the Second Ave subway had been proposed and discussed for around one hundred years and was consistently considered too challenging to be practical. Doesn't it make sense that a situation like that would be extremely expensive to eventually deal with? Does finally building a subway line that for one hundred years was considered out of reach really compare directly to the construction currently or recently happening in other countries?
"The unions and vendors declined to release the labor deals, but The Times obtained them. Along with interviews with contractors, the documents reveal a dizzying maze of jobs, many of which do not exist on projects elsewhere.
There are “nippers” to watch material being moved around and “hog house tenders” to supervise the break room. Each crane must have an “oiler,” a relic of a time when they needed frequent lubrication. Standby electricians and plumbers are to be on hand at all times, as is at least one “master mechanic.” Generators and elevators must have their own operators, even though they are automatic. An extra person is required to be present for all concrete pumping, steam fitting, sheet metal work and other tasks.
In New York, “underground construction employs approximately four times the number of personnel as in similar jobs in Asia, Australia, or Europe,” according to an internal report by Arup, a consulting firm that worked on the Second Avenue subway and many similar projects around the world."
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/nyregion/new-york-subway-...
Europe has pretty strict environment rules, but they are not normally abused to stop a project by just delaying and litigating it forever.
In the US, the actual care for environment is lower I think BUT you can just drag out a project forever on enviro issues.
SF bike path was sued for not doing enough of an enviro study, took another $1M, maybe 1-2 years to get it going again.
This is one (small) factor.
Another - in the EU most folks are part of unions, but the unions are not such a political machine. So in the US you can get total nonsense in staffing, no show / low work jobs - the EU puts up with a lot less of that from casual observation (at least germany, maybe Italy / Greece have more of an issue here). Unions seems reasonably productive in Germany - does someone have more data here? I don't know the details, just my impression.
So I was quite surprised that this article is entirely correct: US metro lines really are way more expensive even than our way over budget line through our muddy, unstable soil.
The tunnels are different. its periodic work, not continuing (across the years) and there is no "substitution" of moving to another place. There is only dig the tunnel or not dig the tunnel.
In this article, they bring in the guy in charge of Crossrail (which runs right through Central London, at one point going between two existing transit lines with about a meter clearance on each side.) His first reaction was, perhaps, much like the first reaction of any casual observer would be: "What are all these people doing here just standing around?"
NYC union rules still require oilers on cranes (because it's still 1930 or something and our cranes all need the constant attention of someone resupplying their oil) and the union is paid a big fee for every tunnel boring machine, to compensate them for all the jobs lost (relative to half a century ago).
Of course, the MTA station design principles (mentioned elsewhere in this thread) do not help, excavating large caverns via mining, and the MTA doesn't know how to run a large program effectively and maintain good relations with its contractors, and of course there are a variety of exciting reported cases where the MTA doesn't even know why a person on the construction site is there or getting paid to begin with, so there's plenty of disaster to go around. Either way it works to the same result: we can't have nice things in this town.
For some reason, rational negotiation with the workers in the US tunnel boring community doesn't work. Given the amount of excess cost, I think it is very likely better negotiating could work. The question would be, why there hasn't been a rational negotiation. I would argue, the highly intermittent nature of tunnelling, and tunnel work, has made the entities involved (the employers, the state, the city, the corporates) reluctant to do the negotiating.
You talk to consequence: behaviour on the job. That doesn't have a lot to do with negotiating. Negotiating is done behind closed doors.
Swiss cantons have virtually complete authority over their territories - it’s not surprising to me their large projects go much more smoothly: there are a single entity in charge and at blame.
In American society we deal constantly with our division of power: funding comes from all levels and therefore a single hiccup can break the entire chain. Suggesting that a city or state have authority over its own systems makes one persona-non-grata in most conversations - even in SF where our Mayor doesn’t have the authority to even replace the MTA director. The failure of American politics isn’t that we’re all federal or all local - it’s that the buck stops nowhere. Fascism and confederacy have their obvious issues: but inability to build a subway is not one of them.
In Stuttgart, Germany, we have rather big subway tunnels.
Also, this sentence stood out:
> [for Europe] Infrastructure projects are evaluated and funded based on needs and economic benefits rather than political interests.
Basically saying Europe's not corrupt, America is.
The construction business is prime real estate for corruption in Europe just as it is anywhere. And it's especially bad in some countries (Italy, Hungary, Bulgaria, all of the Balkans).
Tunnels without a mountain and a viaduct without much of a valley
https://vastagbor.blog.hu/2008/08/01/hegyen_volgyon_zakatol_...
For all that Americans say how diverse a nation the USA is, the EU alone [0] is a mixture of Common Law states and Roman Law states, where the laws are written in 24 languages that collectively use 3 character sets. Heck, despite the Euro it still has 10 non-Euro currencies in use.
[0] I’ve seen “Europe” used to mean “the EU” in the same way I’ve seen “America” used to mean “the USA”; and while the EU is definitely not a country, it is about the same size as the USA.
(Yes, Albany, because the MTA is run by the state instead of the city, mostly to limit accountability.)
I went to Bali in Dec. and visited 2 identical underpass tunnels built there in the past 6 years.
Makes you go hmmm ...
The CCP BRI programs do the same thing. For BRI, they ship excess Chinese steel rebar (lowering their per-unit cost) to a country, then fly burly Chinese peasant labor to the country, then bill the country for both. Win-win! (if you're the CCP.)
What's funny is that I talked to Bali drivers about the two new underpasses. They said it reduced traffic for one month, then everybody increased driving so it was back to the same gridlock. Just like strongtowns readers would predict. :)
https://www.strongtowns.org/nonewroads
The PA and MV underpasses would be beneficial since the purpose is a direct route from downtown across Central, rather than escalating gridlock remediation. But the numbers don't work at $1 billion per underpass for towns with around 40,000 residents.
Sources: I read the local SV rags about the tunnels. I went to Bali to see the 2 underpasses there and rode a taxi through them. I saw the BRI/related workers in the Jakarta airport.
EDIT: specifically metamorphic bedrock
Tunnelling through the Alps is also bedrock tunnelling, and not near-surface bedrock, either. The Gothard Base Tunnel, completed in 2016, cost $12 bn and is 35.5 miles long [1].
The London Crossrail tunnels are not in bedrock, but there was some significant engineering in threading around and between existing infrastructure, and in protecting it. For all I know, bedrock tunnelling may be easier.
[1] https://www.latimes.com/world/la-fg-switzerland-rail-tunnel-...
Fun Chunnel fact: when the TBMs driving from England and France met, they drove one below the other and abandoned it in place. The other was dismantled and removed in pieces.
I saw a TV show with a standard Tunnel Boring Machine and it was about 5 men operating it (plus the automated materials feed). Even if they were paid $1M a year, it would still be loads cheaper than these tunnels are costing New York.
London for instance is built on sedimentary rock (mostly limestone?). The metamorphic bedrock (mostly mica?) Manhattan is on top of is obviously much harder than that.
Switzerland recently completed the Gotthard Base tunnel which is almost all hard rock mining.
that's not to say all of the recommendations are bogus (e.g., the environmental review process being subverted to inflate costs), but rather that that particular conclusion is highly suspect.
the regulatory environment needs to incentivize smaller, leaner, more nimble contractors, rather than oligopoly, if we want a competitive market that will drive down costs and foster innovation.
South Korea belongs to East asia, not a Southeast Asia by all means, i.e.geopolitically or ethnically or culturally.
In South Korea, it is considered offensive and rude to treat Korea as a Southeast Asian country. It's like treating Japanese as Koreans and Vietnamese as Chinese.
Also, the NATM method that Koreans have used on the Sin-Bundang Metro Line is much more cost-effective than the open cut method.
- Streamline the environmental and approval processes.
- Establish an equitable risk sharing mechanism between the owner and contractor and properly implement it.
- Revisit labor laws, rates, and union regulations and establish equitable Project Labor Agreements.
These are just typical pro-corporate power talking points weeping about costs to the public so they can wreck the environment, externalize risk, and pay people that actually do work less.
For one recent and on-going example, look at the San Francisco Van Ness BRT project. This project merely adds dedicated bus lanes and center median boarding/unloading. Along with that work, there's some utility relocation, and sidewalk improvements.
This route is entirely along an existing major thoroughfare in heavily-urbanized San Francisco. The entire route is already entirely paved. Anyone can look at this and conclude there is no risk to the environment from this project. Yet the CEQA process for this project took ten years to complete.
The project would improve public transit, reduce traffic, reduce pollution. It's really ironic that laws meant to protect the environment are what held up this project for a decade.
There needs to be a way to short-circuit laws like CEQA for certain categories of projects, like transit in heavily-urbanized areas.
that wouldn't be such a big deal if reviews took days rather than years, but bureaucracies aren't designed to handle unbounded variety. that makes the process excruciatingly slow and expensive (bureaucrats are risk averse so are loathe to take responsibility in more than small chunks at a time).
In LA, housing associations sue to get concessions for their neighborhood and usually using the services of the small group that is suing.