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Comment by rapind | Hacker News Reader

> This seems like a viciously difficult problem to solve to me. How do you hire someone for a city's transport agency who has the ability to manage a multi-billion dollar construction project? Anyone with those skills will surely be able to earn 10x more in the private sector.

You recruit and reward just like any employer. The issue is that in government it looks bad to be paying market rate for talent, and yet the optics and blowing money on consultants with no results is practically ignored. Oh and there’s the plausible deniability when the consultant goes off the rails.

Our federal government up here in Canada can’t tie its shoe’s without a consultant. Gutting government in favour of private consultants is a really really big problem that’s being actively pursued, marketed, and lobbied for by these firms. In fact a lot of politicians come from consultancies (like McKenzie) and the ties are blatent. So basically capture.

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NYC can hire someone to manage adding elevators to stations. The Americans with Disability act passes in 1990 - more than 30 years ago. That is plenty of time for someone to be hired to manage what should (but isn't...) a smaller project of remodeling just one station, and thus get experience. Then you promote those people from within an develop expertise in more complex projects.

All stations should have a minor remodel every 10 years, and a major remodel every 30 years - just for structural reasons. NYC has enough stations to keep a small department of people busy constantly remodeling stations.

The MTA is controlled by New York State, and most of the state has no interest in making the subway nice.

The misalignment of economic ties and political borders is something that the US makes almost impossible to change, but leads to a lot of dysfunction all over the place.

Compare New York and its subway with Madrid, which has the most efficient Subway operation in Europe. Madrid's subway is also controlled by its state, instead of by the mayor, but go look at the state borders: It's pretty much the metropolitan area. It makes the voters' interest line up pretty well with each other as far as functioning government goes. It's not that there's no corruption in Spain: there's plenty. But bad results can be punished electorally.

In contrast, look at US borders, where a whole lot of metropolitan areas are split, and we have many states with multiple metropolitan areas. What does someone in Branson, Missouri have to do with someone in Kansas City? And yet, Kansas City is in two states. We also have metropolitan areas with dozens, if not hundreds of municipalities, which try to fund themselves via sales taxes and highway tickets, as those are often paid by people that don't live in the municipality, but just pass by. The people that control the majority of the votes and those that suffer the consequences of the decisions don't line up.

If you gave a foreigner an population map of the united states, and handed them a bunch of demographic layers, like where people go to work, or some basic political opinions, and told them to create a map of states and metropolitan borders, the map would be completely different from what we have. And it'd be especially different around our metro areas. And yet, we couldn't change any of those things to save our lives. It's not hard to draw borders that lead to more efficient government, and where more people are either happy with their government, or have a realistic chance to change its composition.

So ultimately blaming this on consultants is not going deep enough: We have very few forces pushing for a government that is efficient, with sufficient state capacity. But while a company can reorg, state borders are too important for national politics to change.

I’m not blaming consultants, I mean sure the big four suck at everything but they don’t add that much cost.

NYC is an interesting case. The city used to control the subway system, but early 20th century progressives in an effort to combat corruption pulled control to the state. This was an effort to professionalize government and establish a technocracy of sorts where learned people dictated outcomes dispassionately. Their legacy has been anything but impressive.

The US also isn’t carved up into political units based around cultural/linguistic groups with economies centered around old imperial capitals. There aren’t strong internal borders, so when a big city is on a state border, it accrues development across that political division. If the Eurozone lasts another 150 or so years, you might see more cross border metropolitan areas.

The NYC subways were built and operated by private companies in the late 19th and early 20th century (you can still see where the different companies had service because they built infrastructure that is stupid unless you are trying to compete with someone else). The city did regulate prices to too low to pay for ongoing maintenance, but otherwise did not control the subways. Of course that lack of maintenance did mean they eventually had a system they couldn't run at and they sold out cheap, but that was the mid 20th century.

You see the same thing in Boston. North Station and South Station don't have a connection. A link is periodically studied and discussed but it hasn't happened.

I’m obviously oversimplifying, and I meant regulatory control.

The study even explains how to do this. Milan maintains in house experts by loaning them to other agencies. The US could do the same if there was more cooperation and less of an adversarial relationship between agencies.

Yeah, the USA should definitely study what they've done in Italy. In about 15 years Italy has massively improved its train systems.

Also because working for a private company that provides services to governments is infinitely better than actually working for the government. So in some fields it’s effectively laundering a nicer place to work than government is willing/able to provide.

> In fact a lot of politicians come from consultancies (like McKenzie) and the ties are blatent.

The phenomenon is so pervasive in governments it has a name:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolving_door_(politics)

Assuming you mean McKinsey, this is such a great Canadian typo.

Take off, hoser!

(For those of you who missed Hamlet retold as a pair of drunk Canadians saving the world, the McKenzie brothers are the main characters of the movie Strange Brew.)

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