Why are U.S. transit projects so costly? This group is on the case

(I hope it's not seen as outrageous to suggest this, but) perhaps one shouldn't tolerate this sort of behavior anywhere, ever?

Everyone deserves safe and clean public spaces.

IIUC, it's only that simple at a very superficial level. I.e., the complexity arises when you have to answer what you do about the offenders.

TL;DR:

(I'm not actually from SF, so apologies if I've misunderstood residents' views on this.)

Do you punish them? I get the impression most San Franciscans see drug addicts as pitiable victims of bad choices or the opioid epidemic. So behavior modification via punishment would be evil.

Do you put imprison the drug users for the safety of others? That sounds like punishment, which again most SF'ers reject.

Do you put the drug users in mental institutions / forced rehab? I suspect this reminds people of the dark days of abusive mental institutions, and is therefore rejected.

And what about people who are clean and sober, aren't homeless by choice, but for whom public housing isn't available? I.e., they're not mugging anyone, but they can't find anywhere else to sleep, poop, or pee? You have the sticky question of whether or not residents are legally obligated to have a home.

- frequent drug use - frequent drug sales - congested and filthy station entrances/exits - zonked out naked dudes starting fights on the platform (yes more than once or twice) - liquid poop on station stairs

I wish I was exaggerating but... this is just how it is around those stations.

I’d call that bad. I’m with you - we need more public transit in the bay. But there’s a huge swath of people where that Bart experience just isn’t going to work.

I'm not familiar with that area but I can infer that it must be pretty miserable for people who care about their surroundings, respect public spaces, and work hard to maintain a high standard in the environments they occupy. More power to them.

The Geary Bart extension was famously killed by local opposition. Although that was more a reaction to the store closures caused by the market street subway construction, not drug use or crime.

raising money this way results in very small risk premiums (so low interest rates)

if every project would have to do it separately it'd probably cost even more.

and to solve the obvious problem of efficiency a prediction market could be used to decide what to fund with the "cheap" money.

Not everything needs to be a mega city, but sprawl has massive externalities.

The issue is that we tax the land and the buildings together. We should tax only the land. And we're often not taxing it enough.

> I for one enjoy having open spaces that are not developed

I enjoy those spaces too! You know what we have right now? SPRAWL. For miles in every direction. Pavement that gobbles up more and more greenfield spaces, for low-density, low-value uses. Outlying wilderness land is not very valuable, but land in urban centers is very valuable. Because we don't tax that land appropriately, we just encourage people to sprawl out further and further, and because we tax buildings, we discourage people from building densely. This leads to more land consumption and less of the open undeveloped space you like.

Those trees you love? They're being cut down to make way for parking lots and strip malls and self-storage units. Really wasteful uses of land. Denser building would make it so demand for housing, commerce, and amenities are fulfilled on a much smaller footprint.

If we taxed land appropriately, we would have way more undeveloped land, and more appropriate density in the city, and you wouldn't have to commute nearly as far to get to the wilderness.

The average homeowner benefits directly from Prop 13 and fails to see how it has impacted other aspects of their life.

The implications for the municipal governments have been disastrous. Municipal tax inflows went from being ~95% property taxes to being closer to 40% in the present day. The rest of the income comes from new taxes and fees invented to fill the gaps.

Prop 13 is a major (but not sole) reason why CA has underbuilt housing for the last four decades. The tax assessed has no relation to the value of the land it sits on, so the trend is to underuse and underdevelop land. If your house is taxed at $1500 a year and keeps appreciating, why sell? Have that 4br/2ba to yourself, or rent it out and make a net gain of $60,000/yr. Either way it makes no sense to sell the property and allow it to be redeveloped into something that could house 10x the people.

I know property owners who bought for $40k in Berkeley and are now sitting on 2.4MM$ in value, doing the minimum in repairs while renting the unit for $6k/mo. This is not unusual. These people do not deserve your pity, and they do not deserve a massive systemic wealth transfer in their direction.

Unfortunately I think the dysfunction in California will have to reach catastrophic levels before Prop 13 repeal becomes politically^Wemotionally feasible for CA voters. The knock-on effects of P13 are too far removed from the average voter -- most won't connect increased crime, failing schools and public services, increased cost of living all the way back to it.

But Prop 13 will never change, it's a political 3rd rail now.

After a certain level of saturation these things just get easier. See road construction, expansion, etc. It's the default, yet it's clear that "just one more lane" won't solve traffic.

Regarding buses (and public transport in general): what's the utilization of the existing capacity for SF and Zürich? It would be interesting to compare number of buses, total distance driven, and other parameters for these rider numbers. Also do you happen to know anything about cost breakdown? (My guess is that Zürich is simply a lot more dense, and public transport is just the default there, whereas it's not in SF.)

The logic is pretty simple. Less train cars means less people per train, which means you can have shorter/narrower platforms, less escalators, fewer exits, etc. and significantly reduce the structure size.

People say housing cost is the worst in San Francisco, where it is 12x house price to income ratio. Hong Kong has a ratio of 43.5x.

The other 2 projects on HC Rd were controlled with auto signals and occasional, brief closures. Unsure of time-frames, as they were already underway when I arrived.

That's harder to implement in a more individualistic society like the US, and the history of violent union busting surely didn't help either.

US labor laws focuses on all or nothing union control of a workplace. And once they have control, they get a lot of legal power.

Europe has a different model where unions do not have to have any sort of majority vote to be recognized. As such, membership tends to be more fluid. So the unions themselves have less specific control, but the unions can be larger, and be more recognized without as much antagonization.

Also, US unions have a lot of power over healthcare in the US. Usually being a function of the state in Europe, there's a lot less cost at stake when dealing with a European union.

So I think it's largely an apples to oranges comparison.

For example, for education, it boils down to US resistance to tracking and insisting that everyone should go to college and study whatever they want. If they can't afford it and don't have a scholarship, we'll give them a loan. There are many other factors, but this is the main one.

Europe made a decision to provide 3 years of inexpensive education to the best 1/3 of its students. The US decided to make 5 years of expensive education available to 2/3 of the population (although only 1/3 or so actually graduate, the rest drop out).

Because the European schools are selective, they don't offer remedial classes and have accelerated, slimmed down degree programs that can be completed in 3 years. You don't get a lot of freedom to choose your classes. There aren't many electives outside your major. They also have much fewer non-academic staff - US universities have about as many non-academic staff as academic staff. In Europe it's closer to 1:10. No sports, few campus life programs, no community outreach centers, etc. It's really just education (Pro-Tip: go look at a German university's job listing page, and compare to an American' university's job listings). Students apply to a degree program and cannot change their major once admitted. Three years and they're done. But they graduate with the equivalent of a masters degree in the U.S., because the first two years of a four year degree they cover in gymnasium -- the prep high school system, which also has rigorous admissions and screens people out, and is provided more cheaply than U.S. college prep high schools. There are "math" gymnasiums,"history" gymnasiums, etc. My mother went to a music gymnasium. Then from the music gymnasium you can go to vocational training in music or study music theory at a university, but you can't go study, say, engineering at a university - there is tracking and specialization. That means when you are 16 your options are already limited much more than in the U.S. You are basically focusing on your major already.

The remaining 2/3 of the population are not routed into college-prep style gymnasiums but into more vocational oriented schools. They still get a good education, but there is also practical education, and then 2 years after graduating high school they will have a career - for example, a trained machinist - but not a college degree.

There are options to change -- for example, night school -- so that someone who decides later to go to college can do so. But it's not an easy road, it's a narrow road, not the wide road. Most of the population doesn't do that.

For a lot of cultural reasons, the U.S. wont adopt such a system. They will keep telling everyone college is the best option for them, that they can change majors whenever they want, and then they will make colleges offer a lot of classes that should be given in high school, and they will maintain a bloated system of administrators. Many will find themselves with useless degrees and lots of student debt. It also leads to absurd levels of overstaffing in American colleges and absurd understaffing in vocational education.

There are other reasons for the other inefficiencies. It's interesting to look for even more underlying reasons -- say trying to explain why Healthcare in the US is so much more expensive than in Europe, whether it is similar problems to Education, or just random chance that both of these are in the U.S.. I do think there are underlying reasons that tie it all together, mostly related to the U.S. being a rich, idealistic country that had a lot of surplus wealth, and now that things are changing, we find ourselves unable to afford such extravagant systems, but they are too embedded and politically powerful to change. You can find plenty of people who advocate that more money be spent -- but people willing to adopt European spending rules, lower salaries, and restrictions on personal choice -- not so many takers. Bottom line, having the government "pay for education" so no one needs to pay out of pocket requires a massive restructuring of how education is delivered. Same for healthcare. This restructuring is unpopular in the U.S.

There's no real political willpower for transit in California as a state; it's all located in some of the cities, which are plodding along relatively slowly but consistently (the San Diego Trolley is miles more than it was 20 years ago).

likewise, i'm not going to stop using LAX because it's in Inglewood and not koreatown; i'll figure out how to make the commute.

if CA really wanted to build this right without succumbing to the pork granted to all these towns, CA should have probably taken a more incremental approach (eg. first build the cheapest, shortest-distance, and most environmentally-friendly path. then, build secondary rail systems that go through areas with high population density.)

there are many, many problems with BART's SFO extension (courtesy of quentin kopp), redundancy is not one of them. there was no BART to caltrain connection prior to the SFO extension, and caltrain is a completely unserious transit agency running hour headways.

genuine problems with the transit system in the bay area abound, you should pick one of those to complain about instead of some weird fixation on incompatible gauges

A "bright line" style upgrade to the SAN-LAX route would have been entirely worth it, and they're struggling along with it, but at pennies compared to what has been spent on HSR so far.

Berlin airport.

Generalizations about "clergy" do not make much sense if you want to cover Iranian Ayatollahs and Buryat Lamas at the same time. Same about unions. The context changes across the globe.

A tram recently got built where my parents live near Paris. They had to involve something like 15 cities, 3 departments, one region, the French state, and the european union. That was lots of people who wanted to have their way. It slowed things down. But it got built anyway and now it works.

Only if you want to. Going full PE and signing off is not required to have a pretty good career as an engineer as part of a larger firm.