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Comment by chmod600 | Hacker News Reader

"no political will in the US to build publicly-owned transport"

There's little faith that public projects have the expertise to actually get it done and make it work. It's hard for me to imagine the federal government succeeding at that for any reasonable cost, and I suppose you could blame some of that on partisan bickering. But I also can't imagine California succeeding for any reasonable cost, and it's a one-party state, so there's no excuse.

At the end of the day you need some people who actually know how to do the job rather than just argue over plans and subcontract twelve levels deep. My guess is that Birghtline found a few such people and that's their competitive advantage as a business.

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> There's little faith that public projects have the expertise to actually get it done and make it work.

This ends up being self-fulfilling. People don't trust the government, so they suffocate the project in fixed payscales and low-bid rules and endless reviews, and so the government can't get anything done, and so people don't trust the government...

> At the end of the day you need some people who actually know how to do the job rather than just argue over plans and subcontract twelve levels deep.

Right - so you need to be able to hire those people and pay them something close to what they're worth, or build up that expertise over the long term by having a steady pipeline of projects and training people as you go. But voters don't trust these governments enough to empower them to do that.

"This ends up being self-fulfilling."

Perhaps. But once the expertise is lost, you can't get it back by throwing more money at the problem. You have incompetent people hiring people who check all the right boxes but still can't do it, and then you have a huge sunk cost that you don't want to cancel so it drags on forever, eroding trust even further.

Private companies have some advantages here. If they don't think the project will succeed, they will stop, because they know there's no payday. If it's due to bad laws, they will lobby (a bad word, I know) to change them. They'll fire people who don't perform. They'll look in all kinds of creative ways to find people who can get the job done. They'll stop and think about who might actually ride it, because they need the ticket revenue, so they will build the lines in the right places with the right stops.

Maybe all of that could be true for some governments. But there's a long way to go before the US or the California government is able to do any of those things.

> But once the expertise is lost, you can't get it back by throwing more money at the problem. You have incompetent people hiring people who check all the right boxes but still can't do it

Maybe. Maybe there's no alternative to doing a pipeline of progressively bigger projects with in-house management and accepting that the first few will suck. But if you're not willing to pay what the expertise costs then there's no way you'll make it work, you need to get that level of expertise in house. I'd think that if you're willing to pay top dollar then you have at least a chance of hiring the right people.

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