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Comment by johnfabian | Hacker News Reader

In general Italy builds transit infrastructure cheaply by European standards (which means massively cheaper than North American standards). Despite real concerns about corruption or ineffective bureaucracy they've managed to improve their rail infrastructure a lot these past few decades. Germany and the UK look very bad compared to them in this respect

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> In general Italy builds transit infrastructure cheaply by European standards

And then: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ponte_Morandi

Given that bridge was in its 5th decade, I don't see how that applies to what the Italians have done in the last couple of decades, unless you're arguing what they are building today will be tomorrows Morandi Bridges?

i have no idea what the italians have been doing. i would observe that in the uk most bridge failures were in the 19th century, when the properties of materials such as cast iron were not too well understood - same lack of understanding that the morandi bridge seems to have had much more recently.

Wikipedia lists 282 bridge failures between 2000 and present, 4 of which occurred in the UK, 7 in Italy, and 35 in the US.

no doubt my wikipedia skills are lacking, but kindly where are you getting the 4 in the uk from?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_bridge_failures#2000–p...

I admit it’s not great data, but I think it’s a step better than drawing conclusions from a single event.

Germany deliberately starved public transport to death over last decades, spending money nearly exclusively on motor highways to pleasure lobbyists.

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