10 ms·

There are a bunch of different factors: - Wages are high, so labor for construction is very expensive (not unique to the US) - It's difficult to acquire prope

There are a bunch of different factors: - Wages are high, so labor for construction is very expensive (not unique to the US) - It's difficult to acquire property to build new stuff in existing cities compared to building in new places. - It is also incredibly slow/expensive to build subways if you try to prioritize minimizing inconvenience to nearby residents above all else (cut-and-cover is MUCH faster/cheaper than tunneling). - The US is also not very interested in trying to learn from what construction techniques, etc. have worked for public transit in other countries Aside from the first point, a lot of this comes down to the fact that even in places in the US that have decent public transit, transit is treated more as a toy that is nice to have than a serious priority by the government, and it is only built when it doesn't cause any inconvenience to residents/drivers/etc. The US has historically been willing to demolish low income areas and force people to move in order to build highways, however.

spaetzleesser 5y ago
"- The US is also not very interested in trying to learn from what construction techniques, etc. have worked for public transit in other countries" That would also apply to other areas like health care. Exceptionalism is not a good thing to improve yourself.
oneoff786 5y ago
Is this last point still true? I would imagine most poor area land is still owned by rich people?
- prawn 5y ago
  They might not care about it being compulsorily acquired at a decent price. They'd be less likely to have an emotional attachment to an investment property than to their current or ancestral home.
api 5y ago
I’ll add one more: there is a strong preference in a large percentage of the population for suburban and rural style homes and light business areas. We build a ton of that and often very quickly. We are very good at building that type of landscape. The HN crowd tends not to be the target market for this though so it gets criticized and downplayed here. There has been a shift toward urbanism in the last 25 years though, and prices exploding in the cities show that the market is lagging in satisfying that demand.
- almost_usual 5y ago
  COVID has definitely slowed down urbanization.
- _dain_ 5y ago
  > there is a strong preference in a large percentage of the population for suburban and rural style homes and light business areas. We build a ton of that and often very quickly. Because that's the only thing you can build. The zoning regulations don't let anything else happen easily. You can't reason from this that this is what people actually prefer.
  - sokoloff 5y ago
    You can't reason that that's what most people prefer, but it likewise seems clear that if most people in some town/city did prefer something else, the zoning laws would be changed.
    - BlargMcLarg 5y ago
      In a world where there is little to no friction and no incentives to prolong the changing of those laws, yes. Unfortunately, that is not the world we live in. Even something as simple as wanting to change it but seeing the immense amount of effort to try and get it noticed is enough to dissuade most people from trying.
    - _dain_ 5y ago
      No, that isn't clear at all. Bad and unpopular laws can remain on the books for a long time if there is a politically powerful minority who benefits from them. Also it might just be that most people don't even know about the problem.
    - api 5y ago
      There's a huge generational divide here. When Gen-X and younger people get control of city governments you'll see this shift.
    - imtringued 5y ago
jrockway 5y ago
Yeah. The major slow projects I can think of in recent years; Second Ave. Subway, East Side Access, Crossrail, etc. all involve deep bore tunneling through some of the most densely occupied land on Earth. Utility relocation, minimizing disruption to residents and businesses, etc. are the "hard part" here. If you could just nuke Midtown, East Side Access would have been easy. If you could demolish half of the Upper East Side, build a subway in the crater, and then cover it with new buildings, it would have been ready sooner. But, that's impractical. People are emotionally attached to their homes and neighborhoods. That said, future projects can probably done more cheaply. IBX and QueensLink won't involve much underground work, and the right of way is already clear. The problem is that the benefit isn't clear enough to actually fund the projects and get them started. (That is an even more complicated problem. The MTA is a state body, subway lines entirely within the city are not something people on Long Island and Westchester want to pay for. Maybe there should be some sort of Independent Subway that the city itself pays for ;)
- bluGill 5y ago
  The low cost leader in subway construction is Spain and they use deep bore tunneling, and they even use larger tunnels than most everyone else (one large tunnel is more expensive than two smaller ones)
- pbourke 5y ago
  See also Seattle’s SR99 tunnel and Boston’s Big Dig (though the latter is 15 years old now). Tunneling through an existing city, often near water, is just hideously complex and expensive.
  - Fomite 5y ago
    I remember when I was in Boston a discussion of how to expand one of the T-lines under Tufts Medical Center without causing vibrational problems for the equipment in the hospital right above. That's a non-trivial engineering challenge.
    - xvector 5y ago
ravenstine 5y ago
I totally agree, though I think these primarily stem from one thing, which is that America hasn't been seriously tested for a very long time. When you're not challenged, you can easily settle into what is adequate, even if you support progress and innovation on paper. America is a great place to live despite its faults, but it's also stuck in the past. Take for instance our major cities; somehow much older cities around the world ironically have more modern elements than cities like Los Angeles and New York, which for all intents and purposes aren't significantly different from where they were in the 1970s (besides greater population and in the case of LA much less smog). If we want to build quickly and actually begin to address problems rather than just accept things as the way they are, we need to be knocked down a peg. I don't think that means getting nuked or whatever, but it would mean that our "too big to fail" status would need to actually be jeopardized in a meaningful way. Once the current generation of grey-hairs in government finally croak and pass on the torch, then there would be the chance to garbage-collect excessive regulations and better pick and choose what should be regulated heavily or not, rather than regulate with a broad brush. Laws and regulations should be designed with exceptions in mind, and not just for fat cats in the club.
- irrational 5y ago
  > somehow much older cities around the world ironically have more modern elements than cities like Los Angeles and New York Somehow? Shouldn’t this say “Much older cities around the world have more modern elements than cities like Los Angeles and New York because they were razed to the ground during the world wars and rebuilt in modern times.”?
  - renewiltord 5y ago
    Nah, Thameslink beats any US line and it’s from 1988. Lizzie line will be better too. Oedo line too. And Fukutoshin like. Blackfriars is over the Thames. I don’t think there’s a US station that is as creative in use of space. Not to speak of the overground or DLR. I think it’s just trade offs. The US gives individual power, those other places give state power. Former excels in certain places but provides veto when you achieve steady state. So things stall here. Notice that in things which can be done with individual power, like developers making housing developments in Texas, outcomes are good.
rootusrootus 5y ago
I don't disagree with most of that, but some places in the US do put some priority on public transit. Much to the annoyance of local neighborhoods, for example, Tri-met in Portland regularly proposes and then eventually builds out new light rail lines through existing neighborhoods. The bus network could be better in outlying areas but in the city proper it is pretty useful for many people, not a toy. And Portland builds new highways rarely. Aside from small extensions, there hasn't been a new interstate-size highway created in decades. It all stopped in the 70s (though the final bits didn't get finished until the mid 80s). Edit: IMO Portland could really justify another interstate and Columbia river crossing to the east of the city, but probably won't do it. It would primarily serve lower income people who've migrated out that direction, and they don't really have much voting power. I don't envy their commute since so much of it has to be on surface streets before they hit a major arterial. The light rail has a leg that direction but it's slow, and there's just one out there.
- crowbahr 5y ago
  Highways do not serve low income areas, public transit does. Portland is entirely justified in not building expensive and low density transit solutions (highways) to service communities. A BRT or Light Rail line will justify the cost significantly better and lead to denser, transit oriented development along the path: All of which better serves the poor.
- rdiddly 5y ago
  Beaverton, Hillsboro and Washington County meanwhile are busy widening roads like always.
candiddevmike 5y ago
> Wages are high Maybe, but I think it's more that the managers/owners are greedy and need big profit margins, especially to pay back their political connections who gave them the contract to begin with. Corruption exists in some form at every step of a publicly funded project. People are too apathetic to care, and the process for getting a road repaved or whatever has been made almost entirely opaque to the electorate. Especially at the county and state levels, where serious cash gets gifted or grifted all the time.
- mastax 5y ago
  I'm very confident that the amount of greed and corruption in New York in 1905 was greater than or equal to the modern amount. See: Tammany Hall.
- bumby 5y ago
  >the process for getting a road repaved or whatever has been made almost entirely opaque to the electorate. Most government contracts use an open bid process which is much less opaque than what happens in private contracts. What transparency are you specifically looking for?
systemvoltage 5y ago
What if there is an overarching malaise of dysfunction, inefficiency and apathy towards ambition to build a better nation? 1950’s USA was very different than today. I've worked with some brilliant government orgs (NIST) but more often than not, many have the problem of top-down management and bureaucratic class that has no checks and balances, that is impossible to get rid of, and perpetuate dysfunction, overbilling, etc. No one questions them, media is busy with other things, and we always talk about funding the gov, but never asking "Can we do more with the same amount?". At least, private enterprises have skin in the game and they'd be toast if their products and services does not perform or is overbudget. Similar to government agencies, as private enterprises get larger (GE, Lockheed, IBM, P&G, Mitsubishi), they have exact same problems as governments. The solution is to completely start over. We did that in 1950's when many new agencies were formed. They were vibrant and well functioning. Without a garbage-collector process so-to-speak, government agencies tend to become dysfunctional. I love Eli Dourado's blog, particularly these two articles: How to move needle on progress: https://elidourado.com/blog/move-the-needle-on-progress/ https://elidourado.com/blog/move-the-needle-on-progress/ Notes on technology in the 2020s: https://elidourado.com/blog/notes-on-technology-2020s/ https://elidourado.com/blog/notes-on-technology-2020s/
- ehnto 5y ago
  Re-orgs are often partially a garbage collection process, I have noticed. Lots of talk about "efficiency" and "better alignment". All fluff you expect, but in practical terms, a lot of people get let go, projects and org units disappear, and priorities are reorganized. The whole operation is expected to work as if the re-org never happened, and often it will.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
yahn00 5y ago

spaetzleesser 5y ago

"- The US is also not very interested in trying to learn from what construction techniques, etc. have worked for public transit in other countries" That would also apply to other areas like health care. Exceptionalism is not a good thing to improve yourself.

oneoff786 5y ago

Is this last point still true? I would imagine most poor area land is still owned by rich people?

prawn 5y ago
They might not care about it being compulsorily acquired at a decent price. They'd be less likely to have an emotional attachment to an investment property than to their current or ancestral home.

api 5y ago

I’ll add one more: there is a strong preference in a large percentage of the population for suburban and rural style homes and light business areas. We build a ton of that and often very quickly. We are very good at building that type of landscape. The HN crowd tends not to be the target market for this though so it gets criticized and downplayed here. There has been a shift toward urbanism in the last 25 years though, and prices exploding in the cities show that the market is lagging in satisfying that demand.

almost_usual 5y ago
COVID has definitely slowed down urbanization.
_dain_ 5y ago
> there is a strong preference in a large percentage of the population for suburban and rural style homes and light business areas. We build a ton of that and often very quickly. Because that's the only thing you can build. The zoning regulations don't let anything else happen easily. You can't reason from this that this is what people actually prefer.
- sokoloff 5y ago
  You can't reason that that's what most people prefer, but it likewise seems clear that if most people in some town/city did prefer something else, the zoning laws would be changed.
  - BlargMcLarg 5y ago
    In a world where there is little to no friction and no incentives to prolong the changing of those laws, yes. Unfortunately, that is not the world we live in. Even something as simple as wanting to change it but seeing the immense amount of effort to try and get it noticed is enough to dissuade most people from trying.
  - _dain_ 5y ago
    No, that isn't clear at all. Bad and unpopular laws can remain on the books for a long time if there is a politically powerful minority who benefits from them. Also it might just be that most people don't even know about the problem.
  - api 5y ago
    There's a huge generational divide here. When Gen-X and younger people get control of city governments you'll see this shift.
  - imtringued 5y ago

jrockway 5y ago

Yeah. The major slow projects I can think of in recent years; Second Ave. Subway, East Side Access, Crossrail, etc. all involve deep bore tunneling through some of the most densely occupied land on Earth. Utility relocation, minimizing disruption to residents and businesses, etc. are the "hard part" here. If you could just nuke Midtown, East Side Access would have been easy. If you could demolish half of the Upper East Side, build a subway in the crater, and then cover it with new buildings, it would have been ready sooner. But, that's impractical. People are emotionally attached to their homes and neighborhoods. That said, future projects can probably done more cheaply. IBX and QueensLink won't involve much underground work, and the right of way is already clear. The problem is that the benefit isn't clear enough to actually fund the projects and get them started. (That is an even more complicated problem. The MTA is a state body, subway lines entirely within the city are not something people on Long Island and Westchester want to pay for. Maybe there should be some sort of Independent Subway that the city itself pays for ;)

bluGill 5y ago
The low cost leader in subway construction is Spain and they use deep bore tunneling, and they even use larger tunnels than most everyone else (one large tunnel is more expensive than two smaller ones)
pbourke 5y ago
See also Seattle’s SR99 tunnel and Boston’s Big Dig (though the latter is 15 years old now). Tunneling through an existing city, often near water, is just hideously complex and expensive.
- Fomite 5y ago
  I remember when I was in Boston a discussion of how to expand one of the T-lines under Tufts Medical Center without causing vibrational problems for the equipment in the hospital right above. That's a non-trivial engineering challenge.
  - xvector 5y ago

ravenstine 5y ago

I totally agree, though I think these primarily stem from one thing, which is that America hasn't been seriously tested for a very long time. When you're not challenged, you can easily settle into what is adequate, even if you support progress and innovation on paper. America is a great place to live despite its faults, but it's also stuck in the past. Take for instance our major cities; somehow much older cities around the world ironically have more modern elements than cities like Los Angeles and New York, which for all intents and purposes aren't significantly different from where they were in the 1970s (besides greater population and in the case of LA much less smog). If we want to build quickly and actually begin to address problems rather than just accept things as the way they are, we need to be knocked down a peg. I don't think that means getting nuked or whatever, but it would mean that our "too big to fail" status would need to actually be jeopardized in a meaningful way. Once the current generation of grey-hairs in government finally croak and pass on the torch, then there would be the chance to garbage-collect excessive regulations and better pick and choose what should be regulated heavily or not, rather than regulate with a broad brush. Laws and regulations should be designed with exceptions in mind, and not just for fat cats in the club.

irrational 5y ago
> somehow much older cities around the world ironically have more modern elements than cities like Los Angeles and New York Somehow? Shouldn’t this say “Much older cities around the world have more modern elements than cities like Los Angeles and New York because they were razed to the ground during the world wars and rebuilt in modern times.”?
- renewiltord 5y ago
  Nah, Thameslink beats any US line and it’s from 1988. Lizzie line will be better too. Oedo line too. And Fukutoshin like. Blackfriars is over the Thames. I don’t think there’s a US station that is as creative in use of space. Not to speak of the overground or DLR. I think it’s just trade offs. The US gives individual power, those other places give state power. Former excels in certain places but provides veto when you achieve steady state. So things stall here. Notice that in things which can be done with individual power, like developers making housing developments in Texas, outcomes are good.

rootusrootus 5y ago

I don't disagree with most of that, but some places in the US do put some priority on public transit. Much to the annoyance of local neighborhoods, for example, Tri-met in Portland regularly proposes and then eventually builds out new light rail lines through existing neighborhoods. The bus network could be better in outlying areas but in the city proper it is pretty useful for many people, not a toy. And Portland builds new highways rarely. Aside from small extensions, there hasn't been a new interstate-size highway created in decades. It all stopped in the 70s (though the final bits didn't get finished until the mid 80s). Edit: IMO Portland could really justify another interstate and Columbia river crossing to the east of the city, but probably won't do it. It would primarily serve lower income people who've migrated out that direction, and they don't really have much voting power. I don't envy their commute since so much of it has to be on surface streets before they hit a major arterial. The light rail has a leg that direction but it's slow, and there's just one out there.

crowbahr 5y ago
Highways do not serve low income areas, public transit does. Portland is entirely justified in not building expensive and low density transit solutions (highways) to service communities. A BRT or Light Rail line will justify the cost significantly better and lead to denser, transit oriented development along the path: All of which better serves the poor.
rdiddly 5y ago
Beaverton, Hillsboro and Washington County meanwhile are busy widening roads like always.

candiddevmike 5y ago

> Wages are high Maybe, but I think it's more that the managers/owners are greedy and need big profit margins, especially to pay back their political connections who gave them the contract to begin with. Corruption exists in some form at every step of a publicly funded project. People are too apathetic to care, and the process for getting a road repaved or whatever has been made almost entirely opaque to the electorate. Especially at the county and state levels, where serious cash gets gifted or grifted all the time.

mastax 5y ago
I'm very confident that the amount of greed and corruption in New York in 1905 was greater than or equal to the modern amount. See: Tammany Hall.
bumby 5y ago
>the process for getting a road repaved or whatever has been made almost entirely opaque to the electorate. Most government contracts use an open bid process which is much less opaque than what happens in private contracts. What transparency are you specifically looking for?

systemvoltage 5y ago

What if there is an overarching malaise of dysfunction, inefficiency and apathy towards ambition to build a better nation? 1950’s USA was very different than today. I've worked with some brilliant government orgs (NIST) but more often than not, many have the problem of top-down management and bureaucratic class that has no checks and balances, that is impossible to get rid of, and perpetuate dysfunction, overbilling, etc. No one questions them, media is busy with other things, and we always talk about funding the gov, but never asking "Can we do more with the same amount?". At least, private enterprises have skin in the game and they'd be toast if their products and services does not perform or is overbudget. Similar to government agencies, as private enterprises get larger (GE, Lockheed, IBM, P&G, Mitsubishi), they have exact same problems as governments. The solution is to completely start over. We did that in 1950's when many new agencies were formed. They were vibrant and well functioning. Without a garbage-collector process so-to-speak, government agencies tend to become dysfunctional. I love Eli Dourado's blog, particularly these two articles: How to move needle on progress: https://elidourado.com/blog/move-the-needle-on-progress/ https://elidourado.com/blog/move-the-needle-on-progress/ Notes on technology in the 2020s: https://elidourado.com/blog/notes-on-technology-2020s/ https://elidourado.com/blog/notes-on-technology-2020s/

ehnto 5y ago
Re-orgs are often partially a garbage collection process, I have noticed. Lots of talk about "efficiency" and "better alignment". All fluff you expect, but in practical terms, a lot of people get let go, projects and org units disappear, and priorities are reorganized. The whole operation is expected to work as if the re-org never happened, and often it will.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

yahn00 5y ago