The question we are tasked with answering is: why?
You just basically named two continents and said they build faster than the US and you're accusing someone else of simplistic takes?
Which European country builds infrastructure faster than the US?
https://pedestrianobservations.com/ and the less feisty https://transitcosts.com/ are the canonical sources on comparative infrastructure costs.
As I recall, the TBM used in NYC was “mannned” by 5x more workers than an identical machine in Paris. We’re talking like 50 people. France isn’t known for labor efficiency, but between the various labor agreements, minority/women owned employee and subcontractor requirements, etc that many extra hands were being paid. Whether they did anything is another story.
- station sizes (causing spend on stations to increase by a factor of 2)
- nonstandard systems (elevators, escalators, etc) (causing an increase over nominal best practices of approximately 1.35)
- inefficient procurement (how contracting works) (increase by a factor of 1.85, although this is a squishy)
- soft costs (design, planning, construction management, contingencies) (factor of 1.2, again fairly squishy)
- labor costs (factor of 1.5 over a well run transit system baseline)
so it's both the case that the labor costs are outrageous and that they're insufficient to explain the outrageous project costs.
Which is what I said, the difference in labor costs "helps", not that it's the sole explanation.
The collapse of the Ponte Morandi / Polcevera Viaduct was just a few years ago and is still fresh in the minds.[1][2]
[1]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ponte_Morandi#Collapse
[2]
Police release new footage of doomed Morandi Bridge collapse in Genoa https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V479srTBlAk
Genoa motorway bridge collapse caught on camera https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Pl0rsVdXxM
Fast, cheap, good. Pick none. The American construction mantra.
So far it's worked because of the reserve currency and technological progress. But the time of the American monopolar world is coming to an end. In twenty years, the bill will come due and instead of acting to liberate themselves, Americans will fall over themselves to justify their status quo - unable to reconcile the existential shame they feel at the thought that they inherited power the likes of which the world had never seen before and transformed it to impotence.
"The billionaires", "we do it to be safer", "the X are ruining it". All the while they drift into irrelevance, raging hopelessly at shadows while their own choices drive them to destruction
It would be amazing if someone could research this, and publish a paper on exactly what reforms the United States needs to make†.
† to get to the same speed/quality/cost-efficiency as these countries
The weird outlier is the US!
By the way, much of the same can be said about manufacturing.
In the US a lack of construction has caused the industry to atrophy.
There was a long period where very little maintenance or construction was required.
Now we are seeing the structures all start to deteriorate at the same time.
Alon Levy is the most accessible source for this kind of cross-national comparision. https://transitcosts.com/ and https://pedestrianobservations.com/2023/03/03/we-gave-a-talk... is a good place to start.
How well build that infrastructure is/was built is debatable, and a massive loss of life has just occurred.
I think it depends heavily on which infrastructure you're talking about though and what parts of the project you're considering. Some countries may be faster at obtaining permits and/or finding the money, and others may be faster at actually building the thing; my impression is that Italy absolutely sucks at the former, but some projects are also slowed down by the sheer amount of archaeological finds that you stumble upon when digging under Rome or Naples.
Anyway, European countries have plenty of boondoggles. Germany’s Berlin Brandenburg Airport was a 30 year project requiring multiple legal battles etc. construction took 11 years where the initial €2.83 billion budget over ran to €6.5 billion due to massive design flaws, construction issues, poor management, multiple lawsuits etc.
Asia has similar issues, China for example does plenty of big infrastructure projects because its infrastructure is so behind, but it’s projects have massive issues. The Three Gorges Dam for example ballooned from $8.35 billion to $37 billion.
The key thing to understand is that while other countries have some boondoggles, the United States does almost nothing else despite spending massive amounts of money. The Purple Line mentioned was ostensibly going to be cheaper due to a public-private partnership but that ended in delays and greater costs as those almost always do, and the same was true of a highway expansion Maryland was trying to do with an Australian partner, and just about every other major American road, rail, bridge, bus station, etc. project is similar. Even our bike lanes take ages to build for the relatively small amount of work.
I agree with the theory that much of this is due to hollowing out the civil service as a “cost savings” measure – these projects sound like what I’ve seen at large organizations where they want a software project without hiring developers so they bring in one consulting company to do the work, and after the first round of failures, a second to oversee the first. Even if everyone is actually acting in good faith it’s just inefficient when you have multiple parties and difficulties sharing or acting on institutional knowledge.
One World Trade Center a public/private partnership started construction April 27, 2006 and opened on November 3, 2014 at the cost of 3.9 billion. Which is easily in line with similar projects around the world, even though it was much slower than such projects back in the 1920’s.
It’s a more complicated building than those 1920’s designs booth from modern standards + features like AC, but also because it was designed to survive an attack.
PS: The Copenhagen Metro has been a 28+ year project that’s gone well but it’s hardly that amazing on its own. Planning began in 1992, the first construction started in 1996, first line opened in 2002 and the project is still continuing with only 12.7 miles in operation. By comparison the DC metro system is currently 129 miles long of which about 50 miles are underground with construction starting in December 9, 1969 and the first 4.6 mile segment opening in March 27, 1976.
Part of this is tall buildings simply run into issues with workforce sizes. The same happens for developers building thousands of single family homes run into similar issues. They can build individual homes vastly faster than they can finish a large subdivision.
Elevators are also a bottleneck etc.
WTC did not have anything like that to worry about and an exceptional level of political will to keep it on schedule.
For more classic example consider say the $252 million 2.8 mile Marc Basnight Bridge which started construction July 27, 2017 scheduled to be completed on February 2019 and actually opened on February 25, 2019. While huge it was politically uninteresting compared to WTC and much cheaper, so while it ended up on time and budget nobody paid much attention.
That bridge is much closer to the typical major project in the US than the kind of things people remember because they made the news and ran wildly over budget.
No, 23.7 miles are in operation. 12.7 miles is the amount that opened in the first stage in 2002.
Washington DC has a population greater than the whole of Denmark, and the DC metro was opened decades ago, so I don't think it's a useful comparison.
“The metro consists of four lines, M1, M2, M3 and M4. M1 and M2 share a common 7.69-kilometre (4.78 mi) section from Vanløse to Christianshavn,[3] where they split along two lines: M1 follows the Ørestad Line to Vestamager, while M2 follows the Østamager Line to the airport. The metro consists of a total route length of 20.4 km (12.7 mi),[3] and 22 stations, 9 of which are on the section shared by both lines.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copenhagen_Metro
Also, the DC metro area is much larger than the area served by the metro system which is why the keep expanding it. In terms of actual daily riders the systems are surprisingly close, though DC gets swamped occasionally for things like Obama’s inauguration etc.
The paragraph you quoted mixes up the situation from before M3/M4 opened with the situation after. I also see where you have taken 13.9km for M1, but on M1's own article page it says 14.3km. Danish Wikipedia gives different figures again.
M1's total length is around 14km, M3 is 15.5km. Christianshavn to the airport is 7km by road, Østerport to Orientkaj about 3km, so the total is roughly 40km.
57 million annual riders on the Washington Metro doesn't seem so much for such a large city. There must be a good chance of getting a seat :-)
Copenhagen's metro claims 107 million annual riders, but the older and more extensive S-train also has 116 million annual riders. Supposedly the total comes to 183 million riders of either/both annually.
Note that Italy is not perfect. And like all cases of corruption it is worse in some areas than others. The construction costs project is about mass transit where Italy does fairly well, but they don't look at highways so we cannot say anything about how they do highways from the data here. (I'm sure someone reading this knows more than I do about Itally's highways and can comment)
I remember staying at the Shinagawa Prince, three years in a row, and it overlooks that big-ass office park, on the other side of the station.
One year, I look out, and there’s a huge empty lot.
The next year, there’s a steel frame, for several buildings.
The next year, the lights are on, and the buildings are obviously occupied.
Also, their standards are very high. They weather massive earthquakes, quite well.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-txmGH11sh0
https://www.rbth.com/travel/335939-moscow-metro-big-circle-l...
And this is all under massive sanctions and a less democratic and more corrupt system.
Besides it is irrelevant for the topic - say you are right, then you are still admitting that even a corrupt country that constructs public transport only for vanity can do it at 10x the speed and 0.1x the costs as we can...
That's like saying the vanity construction projects of Roman emperors weren't for vanity because they were used more by the plebs than by the nomenklatura.
Which group uses it most has absolutely nothing to do with what makes a vanity project. Quite to the contrary, the criterion for a vanity project is that a core motivation for its construction was to embellish the image/popularity/glory of the powerful person who ordered the construction. So yes, it is quite common for vanity projects to be precisely those used more by the plebs than the nomenklatura.
I don't think the explanation is that Russians are 10000x smarter than Americans, so it must be some environmental/organizational difference.
I don't see how it would. The reasons why a country with 1/10th the GDP and 10x more corruption still manages to complete their subway projects 10x quicker at 1/10th the cost is totally orthogonal to whether it's a vanity project or not, or with which group will use it most.
> it must be some environmental/organizational difference.
indeed, it very much is. And for that matter: a construction project ordered by an autocratic dictator in a corrupt second-world country has inherently a much higher probability of being finished in time and within budget than a nominally comparable project in a democratic first world country. It may later turn out to be of totally shitty quality or cause lots of other problems (e.g. safety, environmental, etc) because quality and other standards were sacrificed to the priority of meeting the will of the dictator/party, but when a totalitarian ruler gives an order, people feel they better comply quickly.
A totalitarian state that doesn't give a shit about your rights, the environment etc, can more easily just evacuate or disown everyone who lived in the planned line or area, whereas in a first-world democratic country the construction will be hindered by lawsuits (both for their legitimate right and for nimbyism, particular interests etc). Same for the environment: In Germany, these days, there's almost no large-scale construction project that isn't severely slowed down by activists because (true or false) the project is suspected to harm the habitat of some rare protected species. It drags through the courts, Experts have to evaluate the situation, solutions may have to be found (sometimes very costly), etc.
In a totalitarian country, all of that doesn't exist. The environment is just totally meaningless compared to the will of the dictator or party. Finally, it's not just the rights, legal, environmental and social standards that are much more complicated (and in consequence, costly and slowing things down) in developed democratic countries, but pretty much all standards, including for everything related to the building project. So yeah, a totalitarian state is total shite, but its leadership has waaay fewer obstacles to getting their construction project done in time and within budget.
Because it removes the explanation of the motivation that it will primarily benefit their personal usage. Since the decision-makers for the project obviously have to share the subway with millions of ordinary commuters.
Even if it was a vanity project, the vanity only accrues to the top leadership, not to the thousands of middle-managers. So it's extra significant that even with a 10x more corrupt structure, where the vast majority of said structure don't benefit from the vanity, it's still completed quicker.
Does it? I'd say that they have far more benefit of the project than the common commuter… it's just a different use. Their use is not merely commuting (they live in a palace and have a limousine and chauffeur and personal jet) but a tool for asserting and furthering their power and image… So yes, they very much have a personal interest in it. Also, vanity projects in corrupt and autocratic countries are often a way for the dictators and their nephews and goons to fill their pockets from state money. That too is way more benefit than the common commuter.
> the vanity only accrues to the top leadership, not to the thousands of middle-managers
The fact that such a vanity project isn't born from the vanity of middle managers doesn't change the fact that they too have a big personal interest in such projects. Playing your part well in a vanity project is what gets you promoted in autocratic and other totalitarian regimes.
> So it's extra significant that even with a 10x more corrupt structure, where the vast majority of said structure don't benefit from the vanity, it's still completed quicker.
The higher speed of authoritarian regimes when it comes to the decision making processes is nothing surprising but inherent to its nature: no checks and balances, no lawsuits or high standards to slow things down, just a simple top-down order structure. It's not good for the rights and freedoms of people, but it is inherently faster than a democratic system which requires to reach a wide consensus and to comply with a whole lot of complicated requirements.
Tokyo has also been around for ages.
Or you can just go with the simple stupid answer of corruption as if Europe isn't its own cesspool.
Huh? East Asian countries differ greatly from each other.
And the bigger countries, like China, differ vastly by region. Just like the US.
Ah yes, Norway and Greece are known for having the same climate.
The temperature range is literally 100 degrees Centigrade - record in Greece ks 48 Degrees C
Record in Norway is -51 degrees
Plenty of farmland. Maybe could use some hospitals.
A real need to rebuild post-world wars seems to have become some mind virus we have to constantly crank out mega projects.
Can we get over the ridiculous hallucination we need to “drill baby drill” and grind through all the resources to goto Mars? You and I will be dead before that’s tenable let alone implemented… can we let the future sort itself out a bit?
Why do we still buy into the story of post-war shell shocked paranoids who spent decades huffing leased gas fumes, expropriating the world from everyone else dropping democracy bombs.
Decades of television as a carefully curated propaganda pipeline has messed the last generation up.
Old infrastructure wears out, and often it fails to meet modern standards and should be replaced (ex old houses often cannot be insulated to modern standards, old bridges we now realize were not built strong enough). Many have for various reasons concluded that some of what we have built in the past was a mistake and so we should tear some things down to replace with something else. (ex replace highways with mass transit)
While we don't need to build or rebuild everything we did in the past, there is still a lot of things that if we would build our life would be better.