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What happened to the great projects is that the governments responsible generally flubbed their ability to balance a budget so badly that people lost faith in t

What happened to the great projects is that the governments responsible generally flubbed their ability to balance a budget so badly that people lost faith in their ability to deliver anything. The MTA Second System was a glorious and wonderful idea on paper, and any New Yorker would love having it, but look what actually became of those lofty ideals: one useful connection and the station named "Grand Street" (B/D) plus a bankruptcy. Increased labor costs (thanks in part to pro-union prevailing-wage legislation) and environmental-planning holdups in years since haven't helped get things built for less money, either, and we've suffered a parade of boondoggle public-transportation projects, like the Acela service: crazy-money wasted on designing new trainsets instead of importing existing ones, and then the trains are run at normal-train speeds for most of their trip. Next up: California high-speed rail. Not that this is specific to public transit, mind you: the Big Dig should disabuse anyone of that notion. And even when the government supposedly tries to be efficient, we end up with scandals like with the new Bay Bridge. Bonus points, too, when the laughable micro-projects with insane price tags that are approved find themselves over-budget and end up dropping some of the promises that they did make. (In the Bay Area I know there are people who still complain about how VTA promised to run light rail up West San Carlos Ave, from downtown to the Valley Fair mall, and the old BART/VTA institutional/political rivalry is still running after all these decades.) How can we restore our faith, asks our intrepid columnist? You'll need to get the governments involved to get their acts together, and then it will be pretty automatic as they demonstrate competence. I wouldn't hold my breath, though.

pm90 11y ago
The government and especially municipal bodies are staffed by people from the community. If you want the government to change, there is a way to do so: generate more interest in what it does, how it functions. Get more people involved/interested, including yourself :) .
- mseebach 11y ago
  This is merely a restatement of the ideal of government, and doesn't address the fundamental complaint of the GP. Government isn't incompetent because it's made up of incompetent individuals -- it's incompetent because it's been deeply captured by special interest groups, including, but not limited to, public sector unions. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_choice https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_choice (TL;DR: When studying government from an economics perspective, the sum of rational self-interest actions across all actors isn't very well aligned with the overall public interest.)
  - pm90 11y ago
    I was not aware that this was an entire field of study! Thank you. I will need to do more reading. How exactly do you "deeply capture" government? I had the impression that these "Special Interest" groups can press their agendas precisely because they can staff government with people who are pliable to their agenda. If enough people with no "special interests" can be elected to positions of power, wouldn't that immediately remove corruption?
    - mseebach 11y ago
      Special interest isn't some kind of singular evil, it's whenever someone's interest aren't perfectly aligned with the community. It's easy to fixate on the big ticket stuff such as outright corruption, nepotism and so on, but it's also about a general dynamic that exist benignly at all levels of bureaucratic organisations: discovering the public interest gets increasingly difficult the deeper into the details you get + I'd like to be seen to be doing a good job to advance my career. Is fixing this or that pothole first more in the public interest? The citizen with the persistent letters to the right people (and/or the influential blog/the ability/luck to make a Facebook post viral) typically gets to decide. This dynamic scales up the chain. When you're buying a new IT system, do you get five clever guys down on Main Street to do it, or do you get Microsoft/IBM with all the promises of synergy in the cloud, the 15 page SLA (think of the bus count!) - and an invitation to that big "trade show" in Vegas? In practically all situations, even without corruption, the rational choice is to go with Microsoft. First, if it doesn't quite work, well, you have reams of case studies and white papers to point to, you really did do your homework, it must be us doing something wrong, let's get McKinsey to write a report. If it goes down, look at the fancy SLA. Plenty of cover that you don't have with the local guys - indeed, you'll learn just how many of your colleagues could have told you from the beginning that it would never have worked. And if it did work, all that nice money you saved disappears from your next budget to have the equivalent of Microsoft fix potholes in the next department. Concentrated benefits, dispersed costs. Again, all of this without specific incompetence or corruption, without being specifically pliable to any outside interest.

pm90 11y ago

The government and especially municipal bodies are staffed by people from the community. If you want the government to change, there is a way to do so: generate more interest in what it does, how it functions. Get more people involved/interested, including yourself :) .

mseebach 11y ago
This is merely a restatement of the ideal of government, and doesn't address the fundamental complaint of the GP. Government isn't incompetent because it's made up of incompetent individuals -- it's incompetent because it's been deeply captured by special interest groups, including, but not limited to, public sector unions. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_choice https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_choice (TL;DR: When studying government from an economics perspective, the sum of rational self-interest actions across all actors isn't very well aligned with the overall public interest.)
- pm90 11y ago
  I was not aware that this was an entire field of study! Thank you. I will need to do more reading. How exactly do you "deeply capture" government? I had the impression that these "Special Interest" groups can press their agendas precisely because they can staff government with people who are pliable to their agenda. If enough people with no "special interests" can be elected to positions of power, wouldn't that immediately remove corruption?
  - mseebach 11y ago
    Special interest isn't some kind of singular evil, it's whenever someone's interest aren't perfectly aligned with the community. It's easy to fixate on the big ticket stuff such as outright corruption, nepotism and so on, but it's also about a general dynamic that exist benignly at all levels of bureaucratic organisations: discovering the public interest gets increasingly difficult the deeper into the details you get + I'd like to be seen to be doing a good job to advance my career. Is fixing this or that pothole first more in the public interest? The citizen with the persistent letters to the right people (and/or the influential blog/the ability/luck to make a Facebook post viral) typically gets to decide. This dynamic scales up the chain. When you're buying a new IT system, do you get five clever guys down on Main Street to do it, or do you get Microsoft/IBM with all the promises of synergy in the cloud, the 15 page SLA (think of the bus count!) - and an invitation to that big "trade show" in Vegas? In practically all situations, even without corruption, the rational choice is to go with Microsoft. First, if it doesn't quite work, well, you have reams of case studies and white papers to point to, you really did do your homework, it must be us doing something wrong, let's get McKinsey to write a report. If it goes down, look at the fancy SLA. Plenty of cover that you don't have with the local guys - indeed, you'll learn just how many of your colleagues could have told you from the beginning that it would never have worked. And if it did work, all that nice money you saved disappears from your next budget to have the equivalent of Microsoft fix potholes in the next department. Concentrated benefits, dispersed costs. Again, all of this without specific incompetence or corruption, without being specifically pliable to any outside interest.