6 ms·

This ultimately has to come back to voter standards. Other first-world countries in Europe and Asia manage to create comprehensive public transit systems cheap

This ultimately has to come back to voter standards. Other first-world countries in Europe and Asia manage to create comprehensive public transit systems cheaper and faster than the US does -- yet they also have environmental reviews, safety standards, unions, contractors, etc. They are able to do it simply because the people running the city fear that they won't be reelected if they fail to provide comprehensive, properly functioning public transit. Voters there believe that providing public transit is one of the basic duties of government. It's amazing how streamlined a public project can become if the politicians fear for their jobs. In the US, voters don't punish politicians for problems with public transit, even in places like New York where most people use it. So it's no surprise that it sucks.

narrator 9y ago
Why does it cost 1 billion dollars a mile to build a subway in San Francisco? Where are all the costs coming from? It's the same with healthcare. Nobody knows why it's so ridiculously expensive. I wish they could hire some smart forensic accountants to figure out what is behind the ridiculous cost and then actually fix the problems by replacing the guys who are price gouging or work with the government to change regulations to make it cheaper.
- pcurve 9y ago
  Agreed, but the article does explain why it costs absurd amount cost per mile. Unnecessary roles that don't reflect modern construction techniques, high union labor costs, regulations, and concession to people to minimize quality of life disruptions, etc. I'm all for fair wages, but $110+/hour or $225,000/year? Give me a break. You'd have lines going out to NJ if they open up the job to everyone at $85,000/year. I work in healthcare and we all know WHY it costs outrageous amount here in the states, but nobody wants to fix it because EVERYBODY has his or her finger in the pie. Yes, price gouging is a problem, but it's only side effect of a bad system. Healthcare is expensive because there are too many damn fingers in the pie, and nobody wants to pull his or hers out first. Doctors, hospitals, private insurance, drug distributors, medical device makers, lawyers, pharma, pharmacists, physical therapy center. Guess what all these entities have? IT, HR, Sales & marketing, etc.
  - shard972 9y ago
    I wish people could start with that premise in healthcare, that there isn't 1-2 big things causing the US healthcare system to be so expensive. So many people seem to always have a point about "Oh if we just moved everything to medicare" or "if we just repealed obamacare" as if there is a silver bullet. The only thing i think we can know for sure about why the US healthcare system is expensive, it's because of what you said, so many special interests groups that all work within the system and gouge each other every day to keep their heads above water.
    - jessaustin 9y ago
      I almost wish we could forget for a moment that health care in USA is expensive, and pay attention instead to how quickly it is getting so much more expensive. Let's just stop the worst of the bleeding, and worry about solving all the problems later.
      - mcny 9y ago
        Well it can't happen without price transparency. Transparency is good on it's own. Why does Google not want to make all salary and compensation information public? Why do insurance companies want to keep their contracts and payouts with hospitals secret? There is zero reason for these things to be secret. These things should be required to be public. We can't fix problems if we can't see them.
- shard972 9y ago
  What about if it's just government waste/corruption mostly? Who is going to be able to hire someone to say that with such authority that things change? EG: We find out that 30% of road costs are being wasted by nepotism/contracts given to mates. I just can't imagine how it would work that someone could point it out and anyone would even care. If the county hired him, he wouldn't get any coverage. If the state government did, they would probably just bury it to cover their own ass. The federal government maybe, but then you have issue of jurisdiction and dealing with 50+ audits at once and trying to explain to every state voter about what is happening in their state. Only other option is independent watchdogs or companies but it still like it would be almost impossible to be even get a proper view of the real corruption from that angle as the government would never let you close enough to the deal making process. In the end, I really don't know how you can overcome the losses due to government corruption unless voters make significant changes in their behaviour. That or just wait for a whistleblower to blow the lid off it all in some spectacular way.
ghayes 9y ago
When you say Asia, are you including China? It's likely that the situation is different in each country, and grouping "Europe and Asia" versus the "US" leads to a pretty sweeping generalization.
- twblalock 9y ago
  By that logic, you should never compare any two countries to each other, because they all differ in so many ways.
  - jessaustin 9y ago
    Lots of people in public works construction would support such logic!
jorblumesea 9y ago
Here in the US voters don't punish any elected officials for anything because half don't vote and the other half that do are more concerned about their side "winning" and less concerned about practical day to day considerations like corruption. People would gladly accept a corrupt Democrat over a Republican and vice versa purely based on political lines.
- bradleyjg 9y ago
  NYC voted in a Republican for mayor in 1993, 1997, 2001, 2005 and sort-of in 2009 (he ran on the Republican line, but wasn't a party member). To contrast that with partisan affiliation when it comes to national politics, the last time NYC went for a Republican presidential candidate was 1924 for Calvin Coolidge.
  - shard972 9y ago
    > 2009 (he ran on the Republican line, but wasn't a party member). You aren't talking about "let's ban smoking and soft drinks" bloomberg are you?
- altstar 9y ago
  Not quite. Alabama voted for a Democrat last year. They are normally red.
  - philwelch 9y ago
    Even that was close, and the Republican candidate was a child molester on top of being an incompetent wingnut. It takes a LOT to sway American voters.
    - pcollins123 9y ago
      > Even that was close, and the Republican candidate was _accused of molesting children_. There, fixed that for you. Look, I'm very progressive, but we need to firmly stand behind "innocent until proven guilty" especially when it is so easy to create a slander campaign against a political opponent. And, yes, even the democrats are capable of that.
ams6110 9y ago
The USA is pretty big and has a lot of sparsely populated area compared to Europe. People living outside major metro areas don't care about public transit, because public transit only works and makes sense in dense urban areas. So people in Upstate New York don't care about mass transit in NYC, and so the representatives they elect to NY state government don't care about it. Public transit honestly is not even on my radar of issues I care about, because where I live it makes no sense at all.
- api_or_ipa 9y ago
  Pretty tired of "$REGION is too big and sparsely settled for transit" argument. British Columbia is over 2x the size of California, with about 1/10th the population but the city of Vancouver, the only large urban area in the province, has consistently high transit usage and investment. In fact, projections for transit usage have understated the growth in transit usage.
  - adventured 9y ago
    The lack of population density is a benefit in many regards. Texas is likely going to soon deploy high-speed rail at a cost not much higher than Western European standards or equivalent (adjusting for economic variance). There are two good reasons for that: Texas is far more friendly toward development, and there is a lot of sparsley settled, inexpensive land.
    - api_or_ipa 9y ago
      The challenge of public transport is to get the timing exactly right. Ideally, you'd build transit where nobody currently lives but will move to immediately after construction ends. Build it too late and it's really hard to make the necessary infrastructure modifications. Build it too early and the line won't generate enough usage, political opposition will grow and other modes of transportation will replace it.
  - Rebelgecko 9y ago
    I'm not very familiar with British Columbia, but does the whole province have public transportation on par with Vancouver? If not, that seems to support the comment about regional sparseness... The city I live in (Los Angeles) covers an area 10x bigger than Vancouver. Even when you compare the metro areas, Vancouver is ~4 times denser
lend000 9y ago
It comes down to the size of the country, combined with a political voting system that favors incumbents and naturally organizes into a duopoly: First Past the Post. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-past-the-post_voting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-past-the-post_voting Approval voting is the future of democracy, if we can manage to get our elected officials to change the law out of their favor. Semi-direct democracy would be a nice addition, too.
- dragonwriter 9y ago
  > Approval voting is the future of democracy Approval voting is good for lots of things, but public elections by secret ballot aren't among them, because outside if open ballots and some kind of defined consequence of a particular vote, “approve” vs. “disspprove” doesn't mean the same thing on different ballots. For single-winner elections Condorcet-satisfying methods are pretty much the gold standard; but minimizing single-winner elections for ones that can use proportional systems (not necessarily party-list; candidate-centered options like STV are viable) is also an important technique.
  - ClayShentrup 9y ago
    Condorcet was assumed to be the gold standard for a long time, but then in the year 2000, Warren Smith's Bayesian Regret figures showed that actually Score Voting (aka Range Voting) was better with any mixture of strategic or honest voters. http://scorevoting.net/BayRegsFig.html http://scorevoting.net/BayRegsFig.html Approval Voting is extremely competitive in terms of performance, and _dead simple_. There is actually a theorem that Approval Voting will always elect the Condorcet winner anyway, given plausible models of voter strategy. http://scorevoting.net/AppCW http://scorevoting.net/AppCW There are lots of other problems with Condorcet, enumerated here. http://scorevoting.net/CondorcetExec.html http://scorevoting.net/CondorcetExec.html This particular argument is pretty devastating. http://scorevoting.net/FishburnAntiC http://scorevoting.net/FishburnAntiC > minimizing single-winner elections for ones that can use proportional systems is also an important technique. This is really not well supported. Even compared to the horrendously bad Plurality Voting system, PR has had mixed results. http://scorevoting.net/PropRep.html http://scorevoting.net/PropRep.html No comparison exists between the best PR methods and the best non-PR methods, so it's still very much an open question. And you may have to get Score Voting or Approval Voting to get PR in the USA anyway. http://asitoughttobe.com/2010/07/18/score-voting/ http://asitoughttobe.com/2010/07/18/score-voting/ > Approval voting is good for lots of things, but public elections by secret ballot aren't among them A significant fraction of the world's major electoral procedures experts support Approval Voting. E.g. www.electology.org/approval-voting Circa 2011, a group of 22 voting experts researched 18 different systems, and selected Approval Voting as best. http://www.lse.ac.uk/website-archive/newsAndMedia/newsArchives/2011/04/VotingSystems.aspx http://www.lse.ac.uk/website-archive/newsAndMedia/newsArchiv... I'd be curious to hear your thoughts on the book "Gaming the Vote" by William Poundstone.
saosebastiao 9y ago
In the US, there is no political party where you can go to prioritize competent government. You can only choose between these two options a) more government, or b) less government.
- closeparen 9y ago
  Libertarians don’t have much representation. You get to choose whether it’s business or personal life that should be heavily regulated.
- doseofreality 9y ago
  The choices really are: a) a lot more government, or b) more government
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
acchow 9y ago
It's too bad the US is still dealing with the simplest of issues - gay marriage, abortion, mandatory vaccination, immigration, prohibition of marijuana - and just doesn't have any room left to discuss things like public transit.

narrator 9y ago

Why does it cost 1 billion dollars a mile to build a subway in San Francisco? Where are all the costs coming from? It's the same with healthcare. Nobody knows why it's so ridiculously expensive. I wish they could hire some smart forensic accountants to figure out what is behind the ridiculous cost and then actually fix the problems by replacing the guys who are price gouging or work with the government to change regulations to make it cheaper.

pcurve 9y ago
Agreed, but the article does explain why it costs absurd amount cost per mile. Unnecessary roles that don't reflect modern construction techniques, high union labor costs, regulations, and concession to people to minimize quality of life disruptions, etc. I'm all for fair wages, but $110+/hour or $225,000/year? Give me a break. You'd have lines going out to NJ if they open up the job to everyone at $85,000/year. I work in healthcare and we all know WHY it costs outrageous amount here in the states, but nobody wants to fix it because EVERYBODY has his or her finger in the pie. Yes, price gouging is a problem, but it's only side effect of a bad system. Healthcare is expensive because there are too many damn fingers in the pie, and nobody wants to pull his or hers out first. Doctors, hospitals, private insurance, drug distributors, medical device makers, lawyers, pharma, pharmacists, physical therapy center. Guess what all these entities have? IT, HR, Sales & marketing, etc.
- shard972 9y ago
  I wish people could start with that premise in healthcare, that there isn't 1-2 big things causing the US healthcare system to be so expensive. So many people seem to always have a point about "Oh if we just moved everything to medicare" or "if we just repealed obamacare" as if there is a silver bullet. The only thing i think we can know for sure about why the US healthcare system is expensive, it's because of what you said, so many special interests groups that all work within the system and gouge each other every day to keep their heads above water.
  - jessaustin 9y ago
    I almost wish we could forget for a moment that health care in USA is expensive, and pay attention instead to how quickly it is getting so much more expensive. Let's just stop the worst of the bleeding, and worry about solving all the problems later.
    - mcny 9y ago
      Well it can't happen without price transparency. Transparency is good on it's own. Why does Google not want to make all salary and compensation information public? Why do insurance companies want to keep their contracts and payouts with hospitals secret? There is zero reason for these things to be secret. These things should be required to be public. We can't fix problems if we can't see them.
shard972 9y ago
What about if it's just government waste/corruption mostly? Who is going to be able to hire someone to say that with such authority that things change? EG: We find out that 30% of road costs are being wasted by nepotism/contracts given to mates. I just can't imagine how it would work that someone could point it out and anyone would even care. If the county hired him, he wouldn't get any coverage. If the state government did, they would probably just bury it to cover their own ass. The federal government maybe, but then you have issue of jurisdiction and dealing with 50+ audits at once and trying to explain to every state voter about what is happening in their state. Only other option is independent watchdogs or companies but it still like it would be almost impossible to be even get a proper view of the real corruption from that angle as the government would never let you close enough to the deal making process. In the end, I really don't know how you can overcome the losses due to government corruption unless voters make significant changes in their behaviour. That or just wait for a whistleblower to blow the lid off it all in some spectacular way.

ghayes 9y ago

When you say Asia, are you including China? It's likely that the situation is different in each country, and grouping "Europe and Asia" versus the "US" leads to a pretty sweeping generalization.

twblalock 9y ago
By that logic, you should never compare any two countries to each other, because they all differ in so many ways.
- jessaustin 9y ago
  Lots of people in public works construction would support such logic!

jorblumesea 9y ago

Here in the US voters don't punish any elected officials for anything because half don't vote and the other half that do are more concerned about their side "winning" and less concerned about practical day to day considerations like corruption. People would gladly accept a corrupt Democrat over a Republican and vice versa purely based on political lines.

bradleyjg 9y ago
NYC voted in a Republican for mayor in 1993, 1997, 2001, 2005 and sort-of in 2009 (he ran on the Republican line, but wasn't a party member). To contrast that with partisan affiliation when it comes to national politics, the last time NYC went for a Republican presidential candidate was 1924 for Calvin Coolidge.
- shard972 9y ago
  > 2009 (he ran on the Republican line, but wasn't a party member). You aren't talking about "let's ban smoking and soft drinks" bloomberg are you?
altstar 9y ago
Not quite. Alabama voted for a Democrat last year. They are normally red.
- philwelch 9y ago
  Even that was close, and the Republican candidate was a child molester on top of being an incompetent wingnut. It takes a LOT to sway American voters.
  - pcollins123 9y ago
    > Even that was close, and the Republican candidate was _accused of molesting children_. There, fixed that for you. Look, I'm very progressive, but we need to firmly stand behind "innocent until proven guilty" especially when it is so easy to create a slander campaign against a political opponent. And, yes, even the democrats are capable of that.

ams6110 9y ago

The USA is pretty big and has a lot of sparsely populated area compared to Europe. People living outside major metro areas don't care about public transit, because public transit only works and makes sense in dense urban areas. So people in Upstate New York don't care about mass transit in NYC, and so the representatives they elect to NY state government don't care about it. Public transit honestly is not even on my radar of issues I care about, because where I live it makes no sense at all.

api_or_ipa 9y ago
Pretty tired of "$REGION is too big and sparsely settled for transit" argument. British Columbia is over 2x the size of California, with about 1/10th the population but the city of Vancouver, the only large urban area in the province, has consistently high transit usage and investment. In fact, projections for transit usage have understated the growth in transit usage.
- adventured 9y ago
  The lack of population density is a benefit in many regards. Texas is likely going to soon deploy high-speed rail at a cost not much higher than Western European standards or equivalent (adjusting for economic variance). There are two good reasons for that: Texas is far more friendly toward development, and there is a lot of sparsley settled, inexpensive land.
  - api_or_ipa 9y ago
    The challenge of public transport is to get the timing exactly right. Ideally, you'd build transit where nobody currently lives but will move to immediately after construction ends. Build it too late and it's really hard to make the necessary infrastructure modifications. Build it too early and the line won't generate enough usage, political opposition will grow and other modes of transportation will replace it.
- Rebelgecko 9y ago
  I'm not very familiar with British Columbia, but does the whole province have public transportation on par with Vancouver? If not, that seems to support the comment about regional sparseness... The city I live in (Los Angeles) covers an area 10x bigger than Vancouver. Even when you compare the metro areas, Vancouver is ~4 times denser

lend000 9y ago

It comes down to the size of the country, combined with a political voting system that favors incumbents and naturally organizes into a duopoly: First Past the Post. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-past-the-post_voting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-past-the-post_voting Approval voting is the future of democracy, if we can manage to get our elected officials to change the law out of their favor. Semi-direct democracy would be a nice addition, too.

dragonwriter 9y ago
> Approval voting is the future of democracy Approval voting is good for lots of things, but public elections by secret ballot aren't among them, because outside if open ballots and some kind of defined consequence of a particular vote, “approve” vs. “disspprove” doesn't mean the same thing on different ballots. For single-winner elections Condorcet-satisfying methods are pretty much the gold standard; but minimizing single-winner elections for ones that can use proportional systems (not necessarily party-list; candidate-centered options like STV are viable) is also an important technique.
- ClayShentrup 9y ago
  Condorcet was assumed to be the gold standard for a long time, but then in the year 2000, Warren Smith's Bayesian Regret figures showed that actually Score Voting (aka Range Voting) was better with any mixture of strategic or honest voters. http://scorevoting.net/BayRegsFig.html http://scorevoting.net/BayRegsFig.html Approval Voting is extremely competitive in terms of performance, and _dead simple_. There is actually a theorem that Approval Voting will always elect the Condorcet winner anyway, given plausible models of voter strategy. http://scorevoting.net/AppCW http://scorevoting.net/AppCW There are lots of other problems with Condorcet, enumerated here. http://scorevoting.net/CondorcetExec.html http://scorevoting.net/CondorcetExec.html This particular argument is pretty devastating. http://scorevoting.net/FishburnAntiC http://scorevoting.net/FishburnAntiC > minimizing single-winner elections for ones that can use proportional systems is also an important technique. This is really not well supported. Even compared to the horrendously bad Plurality Voting system, PR has had mixed results. http://scorevoting.net/PropRep.html http://scorevoting.net/PropRep.html No comparison exists between the best PR methods and the best non-PR methods, so it's still very much an open question. And you may have to get Score Voting or Approval Voting to get PR in the USA anyway. http://asitoughttobe.com/2010/07/18/score-voting/ http://asitoughttobe.com/2010/07/18/score-voting/ > Approval voting is good for lots of things, but public elections by secret ballot aren't among them A significant fraction of the world's major electoral procedures experts support Approval Voting. E.g. www.electology.org/approval-voting Circa 2011, a group of 22 voting experts researched 18 different systems, and selected Approval Voting as best. http://www.lse.ac.uk/website-archive/newsAndMedia/newsArchives/2011/04/VotingSystems.aspx http://www.lse.ac.uk/website-archive/newsAndMedia/newsArchiv... I'd be curious to hear your thoughts on the book "Gaming the Vote" by William Poundstone.

saosebastiao 9y ago

In the US, there is no political party where you can go to prioritize competent government. You can only choose between these two options a) more government, or b) less government.

closeparen 9y ago
Libertarians don’t have much representation. You get to choose whether it’s business or personal life that should be heavily regulated.
doseofreality 9y ago
The choices really are: a) a lot more government, or b) more government

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

acchow 9y ago

It's too bad the US is still dealing with the simplest of issues - gay marriage, abortion, mandatory vaccination, immigration, prohibition of marijuana - and just doesn't have any room left to discuss things like public transit.