7 ms·

I would argue that a large reason why infrastructure tends to fall into such sorry states of disrepair in the US is because of the vast misalignment of interest

I would argue that a large reason why infrastructure tends to fall into such sorry states of disrepair in the US is because of the vast misalignment of interests between politicians and the services. When the person responsible for this stuff has a shelf life of maybe four years, there's simply no incentive to allocate adequate amounts of time, energy, and capital towards things which someone else will inevitably get credit for because of the time it takes. Besides, no one gets praised for this sort of thing...it's just something they're expected to do. The whole thing is a shame.

nickthemagicman 9y ago
Most countries WITH term limits seem to be doing much better than countries without term limits.
- bedhead 9y ago
  Yeah it's funny. Anecdotally, I think most people would agree that other countries, particularly Western European ones, seem to just care more about transportation infrastructure. Maybe it's just a cultural thing. But there is still that interest misalignment I would argue. And voters tend to be as myopic as the politicians, always waiting for a crisis to roll around before actually caring.
  - CydeWeys 9y ago
    I can assure you that New Yorkers, perhaps uniquely in all of America, care deeply about transportation infrastructure. The problem is that the MTA (which runs the New York City subway, mind you) is inexplicably run at the state level, meaning decisions about NYC public transit are made in Albany, three hours away. And naturally the state as a whole is not willing to invest as much money into the subway as NYC itself would be, even though the majority of the state's tax revenue comes from NYC and its metro area. It's your classic case of the urban center subsidizing the rest of the people in the state and not getting anything for it in return. There's actually a New York City secessionist movement (from NY state, not the US) for reasons along these lines.
    - caf 9y ago
      New York City's population is what, half of New York State? How do NYC concerns not dominate state politics?
      - kevin_thibedeau 9y ago
        They don't have half the legislative districts.
        caf 9y ago
        Ahh, rural malapportionment. Introducing one-vote-one-value seems a bit less extreme than secession, but maybe that's just an ambit claim.
        somecontext 9y ago
        For some context, the population of New York city (NYC) in the 2010 US Census was ~8.1 million, which is ~42% of the ~19.4 million for the state. Of the 63 seats in the New York State Senate, 26 represent NYC. Of the 150 seats in the New York State Assembly, 65 represent NYC. Those represent ~41% and ~43% of the seats in the upper and lower house, respectively.
    - zanny 9y ago
      Most city residents should support these kinds of secessionist ideas. State tax dollars around the entire US subsidize rural living by maintaining unsustainable roads and utilities infrastructure to reach people with way more capital on average than the people in the cities getting the short end of the stick. It comes back to incentives. If you don't support high-volume infrastructure to enable city growth - in an economic climate and era where practically all work is optimized in cities, and where living outside a city is simply an extravagant luxury - but you do support broad low volume high upkeep infrastructure all over rural areas, you build an incentives structure to artificially drive more people out of efficient, high density cores and into twig mcmansions guzzling water to feed lawns that nobody uses for anything because they are inside all day anyway. The better structure would obviously be to promote what costs less per capita while also promoting economic growth - promoting high density living, even if the upfront costs are high. Electoral incentives, however, are practically opposite such a notion, sadly.
- m_mueller 9y ago
  Any citation on this?
seanp2k2 9y ago
Same problem with janitors, or a NOC/ops team...it doesn't enhance your career to say "we kept everything working", and building a better solution requires much more investment and has a much longer-term deliverable that it's almost impossible to get people who are trying to "climb the ladder" or get re-elected for a second and final term to cut out a significant portion of the budget for.
- yourapostasy 9y ago
  > ...it doesn't enhance your career to say "we kept everything working", and building a better solution requires much more investment and has a much longer-term deliverable that it's almost impossible...to cut out a significant portion of the budget for. The next time one of your managers takes this approach, remind them Amazon did not accept "we kept everything working" as good enough infrastructure. We're in a unique period in history where nearly every part of the infrastructure of future generations is up for grabs for re-imagining, because most of our civilization's infrastructure does not embed computational capabilities. Does your management want the status quo, or do they want 10X or better improvements in cost and utility that can be sold as the new infrastructure? The last time Amazon did that to a widely-accepted status quo infrastructure, we ended up with AWS.
porpoisemonkey 9y ago
One option would be to open up more infrastructure initiatives to direct democracy. Arguably the most heavily invested body to getting the subways improved is the people who actually live in New York and use them. Making this feasible would require a more efficient platform for soliciting ideas from citizens, voting on them and tracking overall execution which doesn't exist today. This isn't, however, an intractable problem - there are distributed trust systems (based on so-called "trust algorithms") that are being designed today such as Ethereum.
- ceejayoz 9y ago
  Is there anything folks won't just add "with a blockchain!" to and claim to have solved a problem?
  - porpoisemonkey 9y ago
    I'm not sure I understand the reference since I don't comment on or look at much blockchain related articles here on HN. (Most of my research has been tangential to my former employment as a web security developer.) Is there a technical reason that a blockchain isn't suitable as one part of a possible solution to improving the speed, reliability and security of voting in the United States? My understanding of the blockchain concept is that what it provides is a proof-of-effort consensus-based system for creating an open and auditable ledger for transactions which would seem to fit the requirement of having an open and verifiable voting ledger for ballot initiatives.
    - ceejayoz 9y ago
      > Is there a technical reason that a blockchain isn't suitable as one part of a possible solution to improving the speed, reliability and security of voting in the United States? Ignoring for a moment things like hard forks, 51% attacks, lost keys, theft of votes via malware, etc., the biggest non-technical objection I'd see to it is that the concept of a secret ballot is considered absolutely critical in the US.
      - deleted 9y ago
Shivetya 9y ago
it is far easier to promise service than it is to pay for it. in that regard making promises to the users of the service and workers is one thing, when it comes to paying the bill they always kick the can down the road. NYC is the only American city which relies on heavy transit, just a little more than half the people working there use it. Only one other city crests ten percent and the after that its five percent and down. It is the most expensive transportation option available to commuters at all stages when you calculate it per passenger mile, this is with subsidies included. Even building all those roads the automobile less that a fourth of the cost and most public transit will be superseded by autonomous cars and buses; the later which can adapt to changing needs that subway and heavy rail cannot. Besides all the deferred maintenance and NYC is not alone in this, many lines are tens of billions in deferred maintenance, many lines face hundreds of millions with a few at a billion in underfunded pensions. Worse, subsidies have not increased ridership but instead employment. When most lines came about in the hay days of such it was nearly 60k riders per worker, that has fallen to less than 30k riders being served per worker. the simple fact is that such transit is expensive to build and maintain and even with incredible subsidy they cannot get enough people to ride it though NYC gets close. NYC has the same problem the rest do, no one wants to pay anywhere near what the actual cost is per passenger mile to use it.
- volandovengo 9y ago
  6 million people ride it every day. Where are you getting your numbers from? Other countries build subways that are better and cheaper than they are in America.
- ams6110 9y ago
  > NYC is the only American city which relies on heavy transit Chicago absolutely does also. While the total passenger numbers are lower, mass transit is critical to Chicago's economy.
  - Gibbon1 9y ago
    BART serves 300,000 riders a day. LA has been building out their commuter rail for two decades.
rayiner 9y ago
It's not a capital problem, it's a mismanagement problem. The London Tube spends about $2.9 billion (not including capital costs) to move 1.3 billion riders per year. The NYC Subway spends about $8 billion (again, not including capital costs) for 1.7 billion riders per year. That's roughly double adjusted for ridership.
- darawk 9y ago
  It's an incentive problem. Calling these things management problems (while technically accurate) is, unfortunately, unhelpful. People keep complaining about it, but the structure of our political system is such that it will never get better.
  - rayiner 9y ago
    Do they have appreciably different incentives in London?
    - untog 9y ago
      The MTA is run by the state, whereas the subway almost exclusively serves the city. That's a weird conflict that, AFAIK, London doesn't have to deal with.
- thephyber 9y ago
  > It's not a capital problem, it's a mismanagement problem Do you have any evidence of this? Being a naïve Californian, I would assume that there are plenty of variables other than management (labor costs, union membership, labor laws, cultural status of subway workers, legal statues, building requirements, vendors and their rates) that could plausibly represent most of the difference.
  - phkahler 9y ago
    I noticed the enthusiasm about relaxing procurement rules. I suspect that's going to bypass rules established by unions and other such things.
mc32 9y ago
Tokyo has one of the world's best subway systems. Like New York's used to be, Tokyo's are still privatized; owned by three different competing private entities. One big difference, besides upgrades and maintenance, in addition to ridership is the absence of a flat fee. On the other hand they ate self sustaining and keep updating their rolling stock as well as infrastructure.
- zanny 9y ago
  I don't think self sustaining subways are a good thing. You want tax subsidies on ridership to bring the price really low, to enable as many people as possible to use it as often as possible. Profitable infrastructure defeats the purpose of infrastructure, which is to be a force multiplier on others productivity. Introducing profit motive diminishes the potential effectiveness.
  - mc32 9y ago
    I understand Tokyo's subway systems developed in a unique environment before and after WWII, never the less, despite being commercial entities, they best just about any state run subway system in the world.
SN76477 9y ago
Maintenance simply isn't glamorous. No politician wants to stand up and say "I did 4 years and the roads are still working"
djrogers 9y ago
I think this is a likely counter-example to your premise. Cuomo has had a ‘shelf-life’ of a lot more than 4 years... I think the underlying problem is more a lack of accountability and the very low give-a-crap factor for politicians.
Razengan 9y ago
> Besides, no one gets praised for this sort of thing...it's just something they're expected to do. How do countries like Japan or Switzerland manage to keep everything relatively pristine?
mtgx 9y ago
Then perhaps the U.S. needs a more party-centric proportional representation electoral system, with less focus on individual candidates and more on the party. Then it will be the party that's responsible. However, you also need proportional representation, so you can actually have multiple parties. Otherwise, the "other" big party can just "wait its turn" to win the elections again - it doesn't have to prove anything.

nickthemagicman 9y ago

Most countries WITH term limits seem to be doing much better than countries without term limits.

bedhead 9y ago
Yeah it's funny. Anecdotally, I think most people would agree that other countries, particularly Western European ones, seem to just care more about transportation infrastructure. Maybe it's just a cultural thing. But there is still that interest misalignment I would argue. And voters tend to be as myopic as the politicians, always waiting for a crisis to roll around before actually caring.
- CydeWeys 9y ago
  I can assure you that New Yorkers, perhaps uniquely in all of America, care deeply about transportation infrastructure. The problem is that the MTA (which runs the New York City subway, mind you) is inexplicably run at the state level, meaning decisions about NYC public transit are made in Albany, three hours away. And naturally the state as a whole is not willing to invest as much money into the subway as NYC itself would be, even though the majority of the state's tax revenue comes from NYC and its metro area. It's your classic case of the urban center subsidizing the rest of the people in the state and not getting anything for it in return. There's actually a New York City secessionist movement (from NY state, not the US) for reasons along these lines.
  - caf 9y ago
    New York City's population is what, half of New York State? How do NYC concerns not dominate state politics?
    - kevin_thibedeau 9y ago
      They don't have half the legislative districts.
      - caf 9y ago
        Ahh, rural malapportionment. Introducing one-vote-one-value seems a bit less extreme than secession, but maybe that's just an ambit claim.
      - somecontext 9y ago
        For some context, the population of New York city (NYC) in the 2010 US Census was ~8.1 million, which is ~42% of the ~19.4 million for the state. Of the 63 seats in the New York State Senate, 26 represent NYC. Of the 150 seats in the New York State Assembly, 65 represent NYC. Those represent ~41% and ~43% of the seats in the upper and lower house, respectively.
  - zanny 9y ago
    Most city residents should support these kinds of secessionist ideas. State tax dollars around the entire US subsidize rural living by maintaining unsustainable roads and utilities infrastructure to reach people with way more capital on average than the people in the cities getting the short end of the stick. It comes back to incentives. If you don't support high-volume infrastructure to enable city growth - in an economic climate and era where practically all work is optimized in cities, and where living outside a city is simply an extravagant luxury - but you do support broad low volume high upkeep infrastructure all over rural areas, you build an incentives structure to artificially drive more people out of efficient, high density cores and into twig mcmansions guzzling water to feed lawns that nobody uses for anything because they are inside all day anyway. The better structure would obviously be to promote what costs less per capita while also promoting economic growth - promoting high density living, even if the upfront costs are high. Electoral incentives, however, are practically opposite such a notion, sadly.
m_mueller 9y ago
Any citation on this?

seanp2k2 9y ago

Same problem with janitors, or a NOC/ops team...it doesn't enhance your career to say "we kept everything working", and building a better solution requires much more investment and has a much longer-term deliverable that it's almost impossible to get people who are trying to "climb the ladder" or get re-elected for a second and final term to cut out a significant portion of the budget for.

yourapostasy 9y ago
> ...it doesn't enhance your career to say "we kept everything working", and building a better solution requires much more investment and has a much longer-term deliverable that it's almost impossible...to cut out a significant portion of the budget for. The next time one of your managers takes this approach, remind them Amazon did not accept "we kept everything working" as good enough infrastructure. We're in a unique period in history where nearly every part of the infrastructure of future generations is up for grabs for re-imagining, because most of our civilization's infrastructure does not embed computational capabilities. Does your management want the status quo, or do they want 10X or better improvements in cost and utility that can be sold as the new infrastructure? The last time Amazon did that to a widely-accepted status quo infrastructure, we ended up with AWS.

porpoisemonkey 9y ago

One option would be to open up more infrastructure initiatives to direct democracy. Arguably the most heavily invested body to getting the subways improved is the people who actually live in New York and use them. Making this feasible would require a more efficient platform for soliciting ideas from citizens, voting on them and tracking overall execution which doesn't exist today. This isn't, however, an intractable problem - there are distributed trust systems (based on so-called "trust algorithms") that are being designed today such as Ethereum.

ceejayoz 9y ago
Is there anything folks won't just add "with a blockchain!" to and claim to have solved a problem?
- porpoisemonkey 9y ago
  I'm not sure I understand the reference since I don't comment on or look at much blockchain related articles here on HN. (Most of my research has been tangential to my former employment as a web security developer.) Is there a technical reason that a blockchain isn't suitable as one part of a possible solution to improving the speed, reliability and security of voting in the United States? My understanding of the blockchain concept is that what it provides is a proof-of-effort consensus-based system for creating an open and auditable ledger for transactions which would seem to fit the requirement of having an open and verifiable voting ledger for ballot initiatives.
  - ceejayoz 9y ago
    > Is there a technical reason that a blockchain isn't suitable as one part of a possible solution to improving the speed, reliability and security of voting in the United States? Ignoring for a moment things like hard forks, 51% attacks, lost keys, theft of votes via malware, etc., the biggest non-technical objection I'd see to it is that the concept of a secret ballot is considered absolutely critical in the US.
    - deleted 9y ago

Shivetya 9y ago

it is far easier to promise service than it is to pay for it. in that regard making promises to the users of the service and workers is one thing, when it comes to paying the bill they always kick the can down the road. NYC is the only American city which relies on heavy transit, just a little more than half the people working there use it. Only one other city crests ten percent and the after that its five percent and down. It is the most expensive transportation option available to commuters at all stages when you calculate it per passenger mile, this is with subsidies included. Even building all those roads the automobile less that a fourth of the cost and most public transit will be superseded by autonomous cars and buses; the later which can adapt to changing needs that subway and heavy rail cannot. Besides all the deferred maintenance and NYC is not alone in this, many lines are tens of billions in deferred maintenance, many lines face hundreds of millions with a few at a billion in underfunded pensions. Worse, subsidies have not increased ridership but instead employment. When most lines came about in the hay days of such it was nearly 60k riders per worker, that has fallen to less than 30k riders being served per worker. the simple fact is that such transit is expensive to build and maintain and even with incredible subsidy they cannot get enough people to ride it though NYC gets close. NYC has the same problem the rest do, no one wants to pay anywhere near what the actual cost is per passenger mile to use it.

volandovengo 9y ago
6 million people ride it every day. Where are you getting your numbers from? Other countries build subways that are better and cheaper than they are in America.
ams6110 9y ago
> NYC is the only American city which relies on heavy transit Chicago absolutely does also. While the total passenger numbers are lower, mass transit is critical to Chicago's economy.
- Gibbon1 9y ago
  BART serves 300,000 riders a day. LA has been building out their commuter rail for two decades.

rayiner 9y ago

It's not a capital problem, it's a mismanagement problem. The London Tube spends about $2.9 billion (not including capital costs) to move 1.3 billion riders per year. The NYC Subway spends about $8 billion (again, not including capital costs) for 1.7 billion riders per year. That's roughly double adjusted for ridership.

darawk 9y ago
It's an incentive problem. Calling these things management problems (while technically accurate) is, unfortunately, unhelpful. People keep complaining about it, but the structure of our political system is such that it will never get better.
- rayiner 9y ago
  Do they have appreciably different incentives in London?
  - untog 9y ago
    The MTA is run by the state, whereas the subway almost exclusively serves the city. That's a weird conflict that, AFAIK, London doesn't have to deal with.
thephyber 9y ago
> It's not a capital problem, it's a mismanagement problem Do you have any evidence of this? Being a naïve Californian, I would assume that there are plenty of variables other than management (labor costs, union membership, labor laws, cultural status of subway workers, legal statues, building requirements, vendors and their rates) that could plausibly represent most of the difference.
- phkahler 9y ago
  I noticed the enthusiasm about relaxing procurement rules. I suspect that's going to bypass rules established by unions and other such things.

mc32 9y ago

Tokyo has one of the world's best subway systems. Like New York's used to be, Tokyo's are still privatized; owned by three different competing private entities. One big difference, besides upgrades and maintenance, in addition to ridership is the absence of a flat fee. On the other hand they ate self sustaining and keep updating their rolling stock as well as infrastructure.

zanny 9y ago
I don't think self sustaining subways are a good thing. You want tax subsidies on ridership to bring the price really low, to enable as many people as possible to use it as often as possible. Profitable infrastructure defeats the purpose of infrastructure, which is to be a force multiplier on others productivity. Introducing profit motive diminishes the potential effectiveness.
- mc32 9y ago
  I understand Tokyo's subway systems developed in a unique environment before and after WWII, never the less, despite being commercial entities, they best just about any state run subway system in the world.

SN76477 9y ago

Maintenance simply isn't glamorous. No politician wants to stand up and say "I did 4 years and the roads are still working"

djrogers 9y ago

I think this is a likely counter-example to your premise. Cuomo has had a ‘shelf-life’ of a lot more than 4 years... I think the underlying problem is more a lack of accountability and the very low give-a-crap factor for politicians.

Razengan 9y ago

> Besides, no one gets praised for this sort of thing...it's just something they're expected to do. How do countries like Japan or Switzerland manage to keep everything relatively pristine?

mtgx 9y ago

Then perhaps the U.S. needs a more party-centric proportional representation electoral system, with less focus on individual candidates and more on the party. Then it will be the party that's responsible. However, you also need proportional representation, so you can actually have multiple parties. Otherwise, the "other" big party can just "wait its turn" to win the elections again - it doesn't have to prove anything.