15 ms·

Why are U.S. transit projects so costly? This group is on the case

215 points by jseliger 4y ago

calvinmorrison 4y ago
because absolute power corrupts absolutely. More at 11
- jonny_eh 4y ago
  Problem solved, thanks!
- MuffinFlavored 4y ago
  What I find interesting about this "narrative" is... where is the specifics/proof? It feels like "something" (the media?) wants us to think that it isn't just a few bad apples ruining the pie. It's the entire pie. It's unfixable. What's also interesting is... say you do flag someone/something down as an example of corruption. Their side of the story is that they aren't doing anything wrong. What/where is the truth?
- phillipcarter 4y ago
  And the transit projects across the globe that don't cost so much?
  - hunterb123 4y ago
    that proves their point does it not? some transit costs $5m per mile, some transit is $1b per mile, find the corrupt one. anytime you have a large spigot of taxpayer money you'll have people in charge trying to funnel it away using contractors, lobbyists, etc.
    - phillipcarter 4y ago
      It does not prove their point.
- creato 4y ago
  In the US it seems like most problems with big projects are due to responsibility being diffuse across many political groups, and just about anyone with a lawyer has near veto power over almost any project. How is that absolute power? Blind pithy cynicism is unhelpful.
glasss 4y ago
I enjoyed the blog post and discussion around a very similar topic: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31890048 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31890048
Victerius 4y ago
HN is dead. This comment section proves it.
- enchiridion 4y ago
  There’s a lot of tension over politics at the moment, I think people have been letting off steam here the past few days as a result, because I’ve noticed it too. Good news is that a lot of us know how good the dialogue can be. Instead of despairing, why not jump in and raise the conversation?
  - InCityDreams 4y ago
    As a Europerson...i don't really see much difference between this comment section and many others - over several years, at different times, let alone now. One comment: "I really think this is pretty much solely about politics [etc]."...is what we would refer to as 'social stuff'. Is it about being non-metric?
- newaccount2021 4y ago
peteey 4y ago
>some of the design, planning and early engineering is within the realm of what a professional civil servant could do. There's nuance to consulting costs. The government GS pay scale poorly accounts for specialized labor. It the government cannot pay to attract talent in a competitive fields, it must instead pay consultants.
- asdff 4y ago
  LA metro is in a similar bind. They have to go with certain contractors because these contractors have hired all the talent that is qualified to build to LA metros own specifications for designs. They literally can't afford to understand their own specs.
  - pas 4y ago
    It's common in other countries to hire a separate professional firm (for each specialty) to supervise the work of the general contractor. Does LA do this?
    - twobitshifter 4y ago
      Yes they do.
- rhino369 4y ago
  It's not just a pay issue. Government is terrible at hiring good performers, weeding out bad performers, and motivating its workforce. Even if you hired a lead engineer for 400k, can't fire them if the end up being incompetent.
  - acdha 4y ago
    Government can easily get rid of bad employees. They have to be fair but it’s far from the impossibility popularly claimed. What tends to be the case is that the management creates a mess and then complains that they can’t sack some scapegoat. Following fairness rules would allow the employee to say that they were following policy or had their judgement overruled, so instead they’re left alone and labeled “unfireable!” It’s also important not to have too rosy an impression of a sector. Most of us here have seen private sector managers who were untouchable or managed to shift blame to others. They just didn’t have public oversight and usually don’t make the news.
SoftTalker 4y ago
- asdff 4y ago
  Elon will still have to contend with the anchor of process that is the public comment period and inevitable CEQA lawsuits by rich busybodies who are afraid the poors will have a more convenient time getting to their jobs in the service industry.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- acdha 4y ago
  This theory certainly seems more plausible — he'd hate having to reach an agreement with people he can't order around, whereas selling cars is comparatively easy: > Musk admitted to his biographer Ashlee Vance that Hyperloop was all about trying to get legislators to cancel plans for high-speed rail in California—even though he had no plans to build it. https://time.com/6203815/elon-musk-flaws-billionaire-visions/ https://time.com/6203815/elon-musk-flaws-billionaire-visions...
  - jdminhbg 4y ago
    People say Hyperloop hasn't accomplished anything, but serving as a scapegoat for the completely unrelated failure of California HSR is more than nothing.
- mushbino 4y ago
- dementis 4y ago
  The prototype "hyperloop" tunnel in California is now becoming a parking lot. https://news.yahoo.com/musks-california-hyperloop-prototype-become-150500735.html https://news.yahoo.com/musks-california-hyperloop-prototype-...
- 4y ago
asdff 4y ago
The article mentions the issue of local alternatives, but here is an example of a half dozen "alternatives" to show how truly ridiculous this is: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/0byerml83ks8dvy/AAAOVqg4is6ytUG76WLPM-t-a/Maps?dl=0&subfolder_nav_tracking=1 https://www.dropbox.com/sh/0byerml83ks8dvy/AAAOVqg4is6ytUG76... The sepulveda transit project will be an underground heavy rail project at the end of the day, unless the metro board is truly corrupt that is, but you have these homeowner groups who must be appeased (1), a monorail company that wants to use the transit construction opportunity to steal from the public purse by offering an objectively worse technology that the public will be saddled with forever (2), and despite all of this 93% of the actual public wants the underground heavy rail anyhow which offers the fastest end to end time (3). Despite this, LA metro is spending labor and time to come up with and market these alternatives that are complete farces—3 of which are monorail based which serve as appeasement to above groups. Now imagine how much more efficient this could be if they could just build what any engineer would select as the best option (the fastest end to end option), and not have to do six times the planning to appease certain groups anytime they planned to do anything at all? Metro can't even paint a bus lane without this massive community engagement process that only serves to hamstring transit from being most optimal for commuters, to the least likely to piss off car drivers or busybodys looking out their window (4). Oh and this one single bus route was funded by the taxpayer 6 years ago and ground was supposed to be broken 2 years ago. Considering the route was planned even before taxpayer funding was approved, its been probably a decade at least of squawking and politicking and not a drop of paint has been put to the road surface yet. 1. https://la.streetsblog.org/2022/02/07/homeowner-groups-metro-sepulveda-rail-will-destroy-neighborhoods/ https://la.streetsblog.org/2022/02/07/homeowner-groups-metro... 2. https://la.streetsblog.org/2021/03/15/ten-reasons-to-ditch-the-sepulveda-monorail-proposal-now/ https://la.streetsblog.org/2021/03/15/ten-reasons-to-ditch-t... 3. https://www.dailynews.com/2022/06/20/public-says-93-favor-rail-tunnels-not-an-overhead-monorail-for-mega-sepulveda-pass-project/ https://www.dailynews.com/2022/06/20/public-says-93-favor-ra... 4. https://la.streetsblog.org/2022/04/28/metro-board-approves-bus-rapid-transit-through-north-hollywood-burbank-glendale-eagle-rock-and-pasadena/ https://la.streetsblog.org/2022/04/28/metro-board-approves-b...
- bombcar 4y ago
  Why are they looking at heavy rail? Wouldn't light rail to connect with the other light rail in the area make more sense? I agree the monorail is stupid.
thetli8 4y ago
not to make this political but this is more political than not. people vocally want certain things (eg. prevailing wages) more than they want efficient costs so there's little incentive to make things cheaper. a good case is always california's railway vs. florida's brightline. the differences are stark: - $1B per mile vs. <$20M per mile [1] - prevailing wages vs. market wages - politics and nimby-ism vs. privatized project - delayed to maybe 2030 vs. opening 2023 [1] https://fee.org/articles/florida-company-shows-california-how-to-build-a-railroad-with-its-brightline-rail-system/ https://fee.org/articles/florida-company-shows-california-ho...
- mushbino 4y ago
  Labor costs are between 20-40% of the cost of construction. The Florida brightline project uses existing rail. The california project is all new rail and requires the purchase of land. It's also worth noting that private sector contractors in CA know how to game the bidding process and often politicians or their families have stock or personal relations with the contractors.
  - bombcar 4y ago
    The California project didn't have to be sold the way it was - but that was the whole point, get the boondoggle started. They could have spend a fraction of the money on improving the capital corridor and the Santa Barbara - San Diego corridor instead, but that wasn't sexy enough.
    - MichaelZuo 4y ago
      A lot of posters are saying politics. Doesn’t that imply it did have to be sold in certain ways in order to get passed? i.e. A modest version with a negligible risk of boondoggle would likely never have gotten enough attention in Sacramento to make it out of committee.
      - bombcar 4y ago
        It got sold that way because of CA's slightly weird proposition system. There's no real political willpower for transit in California as a state; it's all located in some of the cities, which are plodding along relatively slowly but consistently (the San Diego Trolley is miles more than it was 20 years ago).
anonyme-honteux 4y ago
Would it be wrong to say that the US has lost the engineering skills necessary to build this kind of big projects? During World War II the US was an mind blowingly efficient juggernaut of public projects, but it seems that it has lost is way, and that today its engineering culture lags way behind countries like Japan, Germany, France, Spain, ... You can only reap what you sow in term of engineering skills. The best minds in the US are focused on showing marginally more ads, wall street , and lots of other things that pay very well, but not big engineering works.
- HDThoreaun 4y ago
  I really think this is pretty much solely about politics. The US has plenty of engineering success in the private sector, but public sector projects are weighed down by corruption, environmental requirements, community support requirements, overpaid union wage requirements. Everyone wants a piece of the pie.
  - xxpor 4y ago
    Please read the actual article. It's much more complicated than that. France has incredibly strong unions, and yet their costs are a fraction of the US's.
    - anonyme-honteux 4y ago
      Germany has unions four time stronger than France and it has no issue building stuff. Union bashing is dumb story telling to keep the taxes of billionaires low.
      - masklinn 4y ago
        > it has no issue building stuff. Berlin airport.
      - dev_daftly 4y ago
        The version of unions in the US is completely different than in most countries.
nimbius 4y ago
in the case of Los Angeles its a combination of factors hobbling rail at any level. First, NIMBY suits every now and then that threaten minor stretches of the project and require significant funds to combat, or restructuring the program entirely so as to avoid the town in question. this added YEARS to the purple line expansion in LA and ensured it could not go through Beverly Hills or Westwood. Second, deliberate political boondoggling from Republicans ideologically opposed to any public transit, mass or otherwise. They know they cant defund or sanction it, so they get elected on platforms to "form a committee" or put a measure on the ballots to "fund an investigation and research" into things like delays or budgets for the program, which inevitably saps resources and time from the program and slows things down. IMO its largely NIMBYS though. California in particular has a bold cadre of arrogant holdouts for practically ANY expansion project. pull up google maps and look at the 710 freeway. Notice anything? yep, it stops deliberately before it gets to Pasadena. this lawsuit lasted nearly a decade and forced the city to give up entirely on the project, ending it right around el sereno and safely away from rich people. say what you will about communism, but the central planning committees get things done.
- asdff 4y ago
  People forget that we won WWII thanks to a centrally planned economy
  - bluGill 4y ago
    Central planning is great for big things. It is all the little things that are hard to get right
    - asdff 4y ago
      I'd argue warplanning is about getting all the little things right
      - bluGill 4y ago
        Central planning can get some little things right as well. It just can't get the sum total of everything.
uejfiweun 4y ago
Isn't it kind of obvious? The US has a ton of infrastructure already in place, and in heavy use. It's not such an easy thing to build new infrastructure on top of old infrastructure with heavy traffic. It requires notices, permits, diversions, schedules, tons of money, etc. What it boils down to is that it is extremely inconvenient to build transit projects in the US for everyone involved - the builders, the government, the taxpayers. On the other hand, it's not too bad to build things in places where there's nobody, or no infrastructure. Because it inconveniences nobody. Nobody cares if some new building or railway is erected in a spot where there was previously nothing. This is why Europe's infrastructure is so much better than the US's - because most of it was destroyed in WW2, and Europe was able to essentially start from scratch. It's the same deal with China, which was previously unindustrialized, and has had no problems erecting massive cities and transit networks in all these rural places. I see no way for the US to get out of this quandry short of a couple things: - Some kind of weapons or terrorism scare that causes massive city depopulation - Major transportation revolution that enables mass transit without infrastructure, think flying cars - Building brand new cities, which honestly probably will not happen unless climate change really fucks things up So buckle in to your carseats folks, because we're gonna continue to be a car nation for years to come.
- whimsicalism 4y ago
  China is able to build massive projects in the context of there already being heavy use of pre-existing infrastructure. Your take is just absolutely wrong when it comes to China - the US just has no cheap ways of managing competing interests like this.
- bombcar 4y ago
  US cities have spread and sprawled, and there's no planning except for freeways. Somehow we can acquire land for massive multi lane behemoths riding over the fields, and build them before the developments come in, but building or extending a train line before that is completely impossible.
- andbberger 4y ago
  no it's not at all obvious and your take is way off the mark. the first TGV line opened in 1981... france had quite a bit of infrastructure then, it wasn't some freshly cratered hellhole. > Major transportation revolution that enables mass transit without infrastructure, think flying cars no, please god no. steel on steel is a modern, mature and extremely effective technology. the only serious attempt to "innovate" in recent memory, the chuo shinkansen, an ongoing effort by the world's second most competent builder and operator of rail systems has been a massive shitshow. in addition to being far more expensive than conventional HSR, it has an order of magnitude less capacity. there's a word for this: gadgetbahn. just say no to gadgetbahns if steel on steel sounds too simple to you and isn't scratching some techy itch for technological complexity it's because you're not looking deep enough. there's an entire journal devoted to studying the dynamics of the wheel-rail system [1] [1] http://interfacejournal.com/ http://interfacejournal.com/
dsfyu404ed 4y ago
All these analysis just wind up concluding in a different politically correct phrasing of "y'all mfers piss a hell of a lot of money away on stuff that would be overt graft if it weren't an official part of the process and there wasn't some service exchanged with a plausibly deniable reason" The whole system from top to bottom is a money sieve and it's so diffuse nobody is responsible so nobody has any incentive to clean it up and everybody has some token reason why their bit of pork is necessary so an outsider without tons of inside experience that tends to also result in deep investment in the status quo can't hope to accurately clean it up without breaking everything.
kneel 4y ago
I once worked construction at a state park, I made prevailing wage which was 4X more than my regular hourly wage. Talk about the slowest moving construction project, everyone was incentivized to take breaks and milk their hours. We turned a 4 hours job into a 2 day project.
- chasebank 4y ago
  I worked for a private roofing company one summer in high school. The crew I was on would take two hour long naps under their trucks in the shade. I asked about it and one dude said, "The longer the job takes, the more we get paid." I can only imagine this attitude is amplified for government work.
- markus_zhang 4y ago
  Just wondering why does it affect the total cost though. I think the total cost is stated in the contract? So if you want to pay premium for the workers you are free to so that but that premium should be out from your pocket?
  - fshbbdssbbgdd 4y ago
    Usually projects pay prevailing wage due to a mandate, so every bid has that cost built in.
    - quickthrowman 4y ago
      Yes, this is exactly how it works. All the public construction projects I’ve ever bid (sub or prime contractor) have been fixed price, and everyone factors the cost of the prevailing wage labor into their bid. The union local we hire from is actually paid a bit more than prevailing wage, so I’m already factoring those costs into non-public bids so it doesn’t change much for a union shop.
  - pj_mukh 4y ago
    Naively, wondering about this as well. One more Naive question: Can the government do giant speed bonuses i.e. make it worth their while to finish quick?
pcurve 4y ago
For those wondering about why there was no mention of union... https://pedestrianobservations.com/2019/01/08/meme-weeding-unions-and-construction-costs/ https://pedestrianobservations.com/2019/01/08/meme-weeding-u... apparently, even in non union states, these project costs are ridiculous.
- mikeyouse 4y ago
  Right - and in union-heavy countries like Germany and France, the costs are often much lower than in the US. There could be something to the structure or organization of US unions that impacts things here, but it's clearly not the root cause.
  - legitster 4y ago
    > the structure or organization of US unions that impacts things here An underrated topic. All unions are not made alike, and the laws dictating European unions are very, very different than those in the US.
    - wobbly_bush 4y ago
      There is very little discussion around this underrated topic. In India, the places where unions have a strong presence have lost a lot of industries. They have become notorious for getting any work done in those places, as some unions have morphed into gangs. This is not to imply anything about the benefit/tradeoff of unions in other countries.
  - beastman82 4y ago
    It is not at all clear. Union contracts vary widely state to state, country to country. I don't think you can make this claim.
  - robomartin 4y ago
    > There could be something to the structure or organization of US unions that impacts things here, but it's clearly not the root cause. Yes. US unions are very different from European unions. Without getting into the details, US unions can be very destructive, while European unions are far more wholistic or cooperative. To be clear, this is not about union members. It's about union leadership and the "mafia" how they do business. Union members are along for the ride, are sold entire narratives they have to support and can end-up losing big. Entire industries have been seriously damaged by our unions. Source: I was in a union for about a decade. In addition to this, I have had this conversation with members of other unions, some of them as post-mortems after years of union damage caused job losses to China and, ultimately, the companies they worked for to shut down. Solution? I can't think of a single simple idea. These are engrained cultural things. People rarely wake up to the reality of what's going on until the are suffering, take the time to think it through and ultimately realize where the pain came from.
ww520 4y ago
It partly has to do with the bidding process - the drive to get the lowest bid. Competent companies know the cost won't work and are unwilling to put up the surety bonds to take on a project. It leaves with the boldest incompetent company to make the lowest bid who gets their foot in the door and then jack up the cost overrun later on. Often the project failed due to cost overrun or sheer incompetence. At the end the cost of doing business go up for all parties involved. I've seen transit projects with hundreds of millions budget fell apart with nothing to show at the end, and have seen a transit project that doubled the cost and tripled the schedule to get to completion, and that was a good project.
- wongarsu 4y ago
  Reform of the bidding process is probably the most actionable change that can be done. Even if we keep the core principle of a "lowest bidder" process, there are bound to be lessons to be learned from how other countries implement the process.
- legitster 4y ago
  Also, the US bidding process is long, arbitrary, and favors rent-seeking. Only a small subset of local firms will bother to play in them. The way a private company would solve the problem would be hire a bunch of experts and in-house a lot of the technical design and procurement work.
- SECProto 4y ago
  Where I am (a Canadian municipality) transit and other municipal-led projects have several features that tend to keep them on budget and schedule (or at least closer to it): - Unit price contracts (much easier to track growth in cost, helps to identify and mitigate issues earlier) - Vendor performance management (Contractors and consultants are given a score after project completion, shapes how bids are evaluated on future projects) - Qualified bidders (contractors and consultants are evaluated beforehand, only allowed to bid on projects if they've done something of a similar scope/content before - ties in with the point above, smaller projects will allow bidding by contractors with less history/lower scores) The system isn't perfect (since it relies on vendor history, it only works well with projects of scope and type that they do regularly - i.e. roads and sewers mainly), but it's a lot better than a simplistic "lowest bid wins"
kumarski 4y ago
Manuel_D 4y ago
Better title: "why are US urban rail projects so costly?" The subject is way more niche than "transit". A big part of it is economies of scale. Europe, and other developed parts of the world also built a lot more urban passenger rail per mile. Now compare the cost of US freight rail - something the US does build and operate at scale - and it's much more competitive. Costs are often under $1M a mile, depending on factors like load, ground leveling, etc. Countries are better at the types of transit they build the most, and the US doesn't use a lot of urban light rail.
- dclowd9901 4y ago
  I buy this. Even from a pure equipment allocation standpoint it would be more difficult for a particular state or region to spin up a job, let alone somewhere that has literally no existing rail infra to speak of. In the article, they mention that Italy has something like a SWAT team of rail planning and designing consultants at the national level that swoop in on local projects and offer guidance. That’s just not something you get to unless you have a preponderance of rail projects under your belt.
  - beezlebroxxxxxx 4y ago
    Hearing about an Italian SWAT team for rail development just makes me think: "hire them." I wonder if it would be cheaper to just hire all of the talent, and then just buy Italian rail components if they are available and work. That is essentially what the tech industry in the US does now anyway. I guess certain "Buy American" protections get in the way of that, for good and bad reasons; but it's annoying that one solution is basically touching the third rail (sorry couldn't resist the train joke) in the country. Hire or import talent from abroad and learn from them, America's whole industrial history is basically a loop of that over time.
    - bombcar 4y ago
      California HSR basically did that, and the (French?) company left in a huff after a few years saying the working conditions were untenable. Much of our existing light rail rolling stock is European companies anyway - they make a deal to build a factory in the US to get the bid, usually. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siemens_S700_and_S70 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siemens_S700_and_S70
larsiusprime 4y ago
Arpit Gupta put it very well -- we need Value Capture for transit financing: https://thehill.com/opinion/finance/562077-value-capture-is-the-infrastructure-pay-for-everyone-is-missing/ https://thehill.com/opinion/finance/562077-value-capture-is-... When you put in a transit line, the surrounding land values go up -- it's as old as the railroads. The governing body needs to capture the increase in those land values. This is how transit is funded in many Asian countries -- the transit project goes from being a cost boondoggle to a profit center that pays for itself, either by taxing the uplift in land values, or the governing body owning that land and leasing it out to e.g. shops.
- baby 4y ago
  That is if the land there actually wants the traffic and is ready to adapt. Here in SF it feels like no one wants public transport to get to them, and they definitely don't want to build housing or reserve ground units for shops and restaurants
  - jxf 4y ago
    In NYC, all the places along the new Second Avenue line shot up immediately once it looked like construction was beginning again, and shot up even more once it opened.
    - yuppie_scum 4y ago
      Same in Boston (Somerville/Medford) with the Green Line Extension. It’s now unaffordable
  - mikysco 4y ago
    I feel like SF residents' aversion to new transit projects is unfortunate but totally reasonable... walk anywhere in SF near a BART (subway) stop and you face open drug use, trash, and other problems nobody wants in the neighborhood they call home. It's not like these are intractable problems - other major cities manage to keep their subway stops and surrounding areas clean & pleasant to use. The case against BART expansion is made by the experience & externalities of existing BART.
MPSimmons 4y ago
I would guess that it has to do with the legal need to pay people fairly for their land that the transit needs to acquire.
deanCommie 4y ago
This is the natural outcome when you optimize a society for 1/ lowest taxes in the developed world, 2/ no expectation of a social safety net, 3/ biggest possible upside to start a business, get rich, and become a millionaire or a billionaire. Planet Money did a whole series of trying to set up an offshore company and realized that despite their reputation, Cayman Islands and the like actually do more due diligence of new companies than Delaware does. The US is the best place in the world to start a company and get obscenely wealthy. As long as you take the risk that if you are unemployed you might die on the street destitute. This incentivizes all sorts of antisocial behaviour like whole industries dependent on the lack of structure in the rest of society (the legal field, insurance, healthcare -> none of which are nowhere nearly as big or as lucrative in the rest of the developed world). It also means every construction project is an opportunity for the enrichment of someone, rather than being done by the state for the betterment of society. Rail infrastructure and good transit in general is an incredible societal equalizer, and works best when it's basic, cheap, but reliable, frequent, and consistent. Which the US is just not incentivized to provide. So instead, these projects become vanity opportunities to suck up as much wealth and at least help some middle class construction workers make lucrative bank. Good for them I guess. Don't see any other possible outcome in America today, such as it is.
tunap 4y ago
Many peoples' stamps are needed for any infrastructure being built. Engineers(electrical, structural, environmental, etc), architects, contractors, consultants, politicians and more, I presume. My rural county with 20,000 residences had 3 backwoods culverts replaced pre-pandemic(2 lanes, < 50 cars/day) & they each had price tags between $0.8 - $1.5 million USD. A million bucks to install new culverts & repave over... and the cheapest one wasn't even paved. Must be nice to get a slice of that pie.
- rnk 4y ago
  Can you give some more info on the size of this project? Hard to understand why a culvert on an unpaved (and presumably small water source) would cost much. Almost any project on a highway costs a million dollars.
  - tunap 4y ago
    Take a peek down the rabbit hole. As a recent transplant, I, too, have a hard time understanding the cost(s). It is literally a creek, but it does get swollen when it rains. The other projects were on Holbert Cove Rd, in the same time frame. https://connect.ncdot.gov/letting/Division%2014%20Letting/Forms/Letting%20Project%20Document%20Set/docsethomepage.aspx?ID=2756&FolderCTID=0x0120D52000890E35AC48ACBC4AB3ACB932195E660100BCA6FE5055E55B46BB6C28E73E096BA7&List=09442051-d8d9-4504-848a-6f2d19efcbf4&RootFolder=%2Fletting%2FDivision%2014%20Letting%2F05%2014%202019&RecSrc=%2Fletting%2FDivision%2014%20Letting%2F05%2014%202019 https://connect.ncdot.gov/letting/Division%2014%20Letting/Fo...
    - EricDeb 4y ago
      it would be fun to personally work along with this project and understand the costs as they are happening. I feel like this would help me get a better feel.
      - tunap 4y ago
        I did wander down from time to time to monitor the progress. It was definitely a slow process where equipment and materials sat untouched for weeks at a time, outside of the pandemic shutdown. I presume they were awaiting inspections between phases.
Cupertino95014 4y ago
I have to say, I was dubious that a study like this could come up with anything worthwhile, but the guy has some pretty sensible ideas: Build it cheaper, so you can have more of it - yep Do it faster, so it'll be cheaper - yep Quit throwing money at all those expensive consultants - yep ============== Put a lid on all those lawsuits - he missed that one.
Consultant32452 4y ago
The most important thing to understand is transit projects in the US are so costly on purpose. You can't fix anything until you fix the on purpose. If you manage to squeeze in one spot, new costs will pop up in another spot. It won't change until projects are cost efficient on purpose.
RadixDLT 4y ago
the money passes through many diffrent hands, contractors, construction companies, government taxes, license fees, architect designers, middlemen...
renewiltord 4y ago
It's simple, right? If you can make $x and your apparent return is $y, I will take as much of your surplus $y-$x as I can. To make it acceptable, I will use other words, but I'm really just trying to capture your surplus and I will get it because you will tell people that $y is much greater than $Y (these true return) because you must inflate $y by some amount to represent the gain to you $y-$Y politically. An exploitable principal-agent situation. Now, both you and I, without overt collaboration will align and help us both at the cost of the other guy who is paying for the whole thing. We can sucker him a little, because he's a gormless fool and his friends are useful idiots who will join in the deception.
narrator 4y ago
The conventional wisdom in the U.S is that the only way to fix transit is to vote for politicians who will increase spending on transit projects. This ideology of just spend more money has lead to spiraling costs in health care, education, and government. I'm glad someone's actually looking into what the heck actually costs so much money and not how to spend more money.
- pas 4y ago
  well, one very important piece of the puzzle is that the US is very rich, but very unevenly (income and wealth inequality), and the US spending on services compared to disposable income is not that high. another important piece is diminishing returns. the US leads in healthcare spending, but that also means that it suffers the most from diminishing returns. then there's the Baumol effect too (increase in wages [due to productivity increase] in one sector pushes up wages in other sectors - especially when unemployment is low), which explains some part of the cost increases. and of course both healthcare and education (and construction) are labor intensive sectors with almost no mass production. (prefab housing would help, but there's just not enough density for that) the US is very credentialist, which (plus the aforementioned inequalities) push up the value of a "good education", so people pay a lot for it. and finally, healthcare in developed countries is very much determined by environment ("lifestyle"). many people work their asses off, sit in traffic, live near pollution sources, become obese/ill, spend a lot on insulin/meds, and then get into bankruptcy at the end of their lives, and no amount of direct healthcare spending can help with that.
  - rsj_hn 4y ago
    > well, one very important piece of the puzzle is that the US is very rich, but very unevenly (income and wealth inequality), and the US spending on services compared to disposable income is not that high. Comments like these usually don't take federalism into account, or they just assume that because we have lower levels of benefits that we must be spending less. But let's look at the data: US Federal + State and local spending, as a percent of GDP[1]: * Pensions (Social Security + Other govt pensions) 9% * Healthcare 9% * Education 6% * Welfare 2% * Defense 5% * All other 2% Let's compare this to the OECD average: * pensions[3] 8% * healthcare[2] 9.5% * education[4] 6% * welfare[5] 2% Or we can go to a completely different source, which compares social spending as a share of GDP[3], showing the OECD average is 20%, and the US is right in the middle at 19%, spending more than Canada, Australia, Netherlands, Switzerland, but less than Germany, France, UK. What people don't want to admit to, as it is a painful realization, is that while the US spends as much as other countries, it delivers so little for that spending, because our delivery of healthcare and education is extremely inefficient. This creates a type of loop, where people compare the lack of comprehensive benefits we receive in the US, and decide we must increase subsidies further, which results in even more inefficient delivery, and then we go back to square 1, leaving people convinced that the US spends so much less on these things than other countries. Our problems lie not in too little social spending, but in obtaining too little social value from the amounts that we do spend. [1] https://www.usgovernmentspending.com/year_spending_2023USrn_24rs2n_00#usgs302 https://www.usgovernmentspending.com/year_spending_2023USrn_... [2] https://www.oecd.org/els/health-systems/health-expenditure.htm https://www.oecd.org/els/health-systems/health-expenditure.h... [3] https://www.oecd.org/els/soc/OECD2020-Social-Expenditure-SOCX-Update.pdf https://www.oecd.org/els/soc/OECD2020-Social-Expenditure-SOC... [4] https://www.oecd.org/els/soc/PF1_2_Public_expenditure_education.pdf https://www.oecd.org/els/soc/PF1_2_Public_expenditure_educat... [5] https://data.oecd.org/socialexp/family-benefits-public-spending.htm#indicator-chart https://data.oecd.org/socialexp/family-benefits-public-spend...

215 points by jseliger 4y ago

calvinmorrison 4y ago

because absolute power corrupts absolutely. More at 11

jonny_eh 4y ago
Problem solved, thanks!
MuffinFlavored 4y ago
What I find interesting about this "narrative" is... where is the specifics/proof? It feels like "something" (the media?) wants us to think that it isn't just a few bad apples ruining the pie. It's the entire pie. It's unfixable. What's also interesting is... say you do flag someone/something down as an example of corruption. Their side of the story is that they aren't doing anything wrong. What/where is the truth?
phillipcarter 4y ago
And the transit projects across the globe that don't cost so much?
- hunterb123 4y ago
  that proves their point does it not? some transit costs $5m per mile, some transit is $1b per mile, find the corrupt one. anytime you have a large spigot of taxpayer money you'll have people in charge trying to funnel it away using contractors, lobbyists, etc.
  - phillipcarter 4y ago
    It does not prove their point.
creato 4y ago
In the US it seems like most problems with big projects are due to responsibility being diffuse across many political groups, and just about anyone with a lawyer has near veto power over almost any project. How is that absolute power? Blind pithy cynicism is unhelpful.

glasss 4y ago

I enjoyed the blog post and discussion around a very similar topic: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31890048 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31890048

Victerius 4y ago

HN is dead. This comment section proves it.

enchiridion 4y ago
There’s a lot of tension over politics at the moment, I think people have been letting off steam here the past few days as a result, because I’ve noticed it too. Good news is that a lot of us know how good the dialogue can be. Instead of despairing, why not jump in and raise the conversation?
- InCityDreams 4y ago
  As a Europerson...i don't really see much difference between this comment section and many others - over several years, at different times, let alone now. One comment: "I really think this is pretty much solely about politics [etc]."...is what we would refer to as 'social stuff'. Is it about being non-metric?
newaccount2021 4y ago

peteey 4y ago

>some of the design, planning and early engineering is within the realm of what a professional civil servant could do. There's nuance to consulting costs. The government GS pay scale poorly accounts for specialized labor. It the government cannot pay to attract talent in a competitive fields, it must instead pay consultants.

asdff 4y ago
LA metro is in a similar bind. They have to go with certain contractors because these contractors have hired all the talent that is qualified to build to LA metros own specifications for designs. They literally can't afford to understand their own specs.
- pas 4y ago
  It's common in other countries to hire a separate professional firm (for each specialty) to supervise the work of the general contractor. Does LA do this?
  - twobitshifter 4y ago
    Yes they do.
rhino369 4y ago
It's not just a pay issue. Government is terrible at hiring good performers, weeding out bad performers, and motivating its workforce. Even if you hired a lead engineer for 400k, can't fire them if the end up being incompetent.
- acdha 4y ago
  Government can easily get rid of bad employees. They have to be fair but it’s far from the impossibility popularly claimed. What tends to be the case is that the management creates a mess and then complains that they can’t sack some scapegoat. Following fairness rules would allow the employee to say that they were following policy or had their judgement overruled, so instead they’re left alone and labeled “unfireable!” It’s also important not to have too rosy an impression of a sector. Most of us here have seen private sector managers who were untouchable or managed to shift blame to others. They just didn’t have public oversight and usually don’t make the news.

SoftTalker 4y ago

asdff 4y ago
Elon will still have to contend with the anchor of process that is the public comment period and inevitable CEQA lawsuits by rich busybodies who are afraid the poors will have a more convenient time getting to their jobs in the service industry.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
acdha 4y ago
This theory certainly seems more plausible — he'd hate having to reach an agreement with people he can't order around, whereas selling cars is comparatively easy: > Musk admitted to his biographer Ashlee Vance that Hyperloop was all about trying to get legislators to cancel plans for high-speed rail in California—even though he had no plans to build it. https://time.com/6203815/elon-musk-flaws-billionaire-visions/ https://time.com/6203815/elon-musk-flaws-billionaire-visions...
- jdminhbg 4y ago
  People say Hyperloop hasn't accomplished anything, but serving as a scapegoat for the completely unrelated failure of California HSR is more than nothing.
mushbino 4y ago
dementis 4y ago
The prototype "hyperloop" tunnel in California is now becoming a parking lot. https://news.yahoo.com/musks-california-hyperloop-prototype-become-150500735.html https://news.yahoo.com/musks-california-hyperloop-prototype-...
4y ago

asdff 4y ago

The article mentions the issue of local alternatives, but here is an example of a half dozen "alternatives" to show how truly ridiculous this is: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/0byerml83ks8dvy/AAAOVqg4is6ytUG76WLPM-t-a/Maps?dl=0&subfolder_nav_tracking=1 https://www.dropbox.com/sh/0byerml83ks8dvy/AAAOVqg4is6ytUG76... The sepulveda transit project will be an underground heavy rail project at the end of the day, unless the metro board is truly corrupt that is, but you have these homeowner groups who must be appeased (1), a monorail company that wants to use the transit construction opportunity to steal from the public purse by offering an objectively worse technology that the public will be saddled with forever (2), and despite all of this 93% of the actual public wants the underground heavy rail anyhow which offers the fastest end to end time (3). Despite this, LA metro is spending labor and time to come up with and market these alternatives that are complete farces—3 of which are monorail based which serve as appeasement to above groups. Now imagine how much more efficient this could be if they could just build what any engineer would select as the best option (the fastest end to end option), and not have to do six times the planning to appease certain groups anytime they planned to do anything at all? Metro can't even paint a bus lane without this massive community engagement process that only serves to hamstring transit from being most optimal for commuters, to the least likely to piss off car drivers or busybodys looking out their window (4). Oh and this one single bus route was funded by the taxpayer 6 years ago and ground was supposed to be broken 2 years ago. Considering the route was planned even before taxpayer funding was approved, its been probably a decade at least of squawking and politicking and not a drop of paint has been put to the road surface yet. 1. https://la.streetsblog.org/2022/02/07/homeowner-groups-metro-sepulveda-rail-will-destroy-neighborhoods/ https://la.streetsblog.org/2022/02/07/homeowner-groups-metro... 2. https://la.streetsblog.org/2021/03/15/ten-reasons-to-ditch-the-sepulveda-monorail-proposal-now/ https://la.streetsblog.org/2021/03/15/ten-reasons-to-ditch-t... 3. https://www.dailynews.com/2022/06/20/public-says-93-favor-rail-tunnels-not-an-overhead-monorail-for-mega-sepulveda-pass-project/ https://www.dailynews.com/2022/06/20/public-says-93-favor-ra... 4. https://la.streetsblog.org/2022/04/28/metro-board-approves-bus-rapid-transit-through-north-hollywood-burbank-glendale-eagle-rock-and-pasadena/ https://la.streetsblog.org/2022/04/28/metro-board-approves-b...

bombcar 4y ago
Why are they looking at heavy rail? Wouldn't light rail to connect with the other light rail in the area make more sense? I agree the monorail is stupid.

thetli8 4y ago

not to make this political but this is more political than not. people vocally want certain things (eg. prevailing wages) more than they want efficient costs so there's little incentive to make things cheaper. a good case is always california's railway vs. florida's brightline. the differences are stark: - $1B per mile vs. <$20M per mile [1] - prevailing wages vs. market wages - politics and nimby-ism vs. privatized project - delayed to maybe 2030 vs. opening 2023 [1] https://fee.org/articles/florida-company-shows-california-how-to-build-a-railroad-with-its-brightline-rail-system/ https://fee.org/articles/florida-company-shows-california-ho...

mushbino 4y ago
Labor costs are between 20-40% of the cost of construction. The Florida brightline project uses existing rail. The california project is all new rail and requires the purchase of land. It's also worth noting that private sector contractors in CA know how to game the bidding process and often politicians or their families have stock or personal relations with the contractors.
- bombcar 4y ago
  The California project didn't have to be sold the way it was - but that was the whole point, get the boondoggle started. They could have spend a fraction of the money on improving the capital corridor and the Santa Barbara - San Diego corridor instead, but that wasn't sexy enough.
  - MichaelZuo 4y ago
    A lot of posters are saying politics. Doesn’t that imply it did have to be sold in certain ways in order to get passed? i.e. A modest version with a negligible risk of boondoggle would likely never have gotten enough attention in Sacramento to make it out of committee.
    - bombcar 4y ago
      It got sold that way because of CA's slightly weird proposition system. There's no real political willpower for transit in California as a state; it's all located in some of the cities, which are plodding along relatively slowly but consistently (the San Diego Trolley is miles more than it was 20 years ago).

anonyme-honteux 4y ago

Would it be wrong to say that the US has lost the engineering skills necessary to build this kind of big projects? During World War II the US was an mind blowingly efficient juggernaut of public projects, but it seems that it has lost is way, and that today its engineering culture lags way behind countries like Japan, Germany, France, Spain, ... You can only reap what you sow in term of engineering skills. The best minds in the US are focused on showing marginally more ads, wall street , and lots of other things that pay very well, but not big engineering works.

HDThoreaun 4y ago
I really think this is pretty much solely about politics. The US has plenty of engineering success in the private sector, but public sector projects are weighed down by corruption, environmental requirements, community support requirements, overpaid union wage requirements. Everyone wants a piece of the pie.
- xxpor 4y ago
  Please read the actual article. It's much more complicated than that. France has incredibly strong unions, and yet their costs are a fraction of the US's.
  - anonyme-honteux 4y ago
    Germany has unions four time stronger than France and it has no issue building stuff. Union bashing is dumb story telling to keep the taxes of billionaires low.
    - masklinn 4y ago
      > it has no issue building stuff. Berlin airport.
    - dev_daftly 4y ago
      The version of unions in the US is completely different than in most countries.

nimbius 4y ago

in the case of Los Angeles its a combination of factors hobbling rail at any level. First, NIMBY suits every now and then that threaten minor stretches of the project and require significant funds to combat, or restructuring the program entirely so as to avoid the town in question. this added YEARS to the purple line expansion in LA and ensured it could not go through Beverly Hills or Westwood. Second, deliberate political boondoggling from Republicans ideologically opposed to any public transit, mass or otherwise. They know they cant defund or sanction it, so they get elected on platforms to "form a committee" or put a measure on the ballots to "fund an investigation and research" into things like delays or budgets for the program, which inevitably saps resources and time from the program and slows things down. IMO its largely NIMBYS though. California in particular has a bold cadre of arrogant holdouts for practically ANY expansion project. pull up google maps and look at the 710 freeway. Notice anything? yep, it stops deliberately before it gets to Pasadena. this lawsuit lasted nearly a decade and forced the city to give up entirely on the project, ending it right around el sereno and safely away from rich people. say what you will about communism, but the central planning committees get things done.

asdff 4y ago
People forget that we won WWII thanks to a centrally planned economy
- bluGill 4y ago
  Central planning is great for big things. It is all the little things that are hard to get right
  - asdff 4y ago
    I'd argue warplanning is about getting all the little things right
    - bluGill 4y ago
      Central planning can get some little things right as well. It just can't get the sum total of everything.

uejfiweun 4y ago

Isn't it kind of obvious? The US has a ton of infrastructure already in place, and in heavy use. It's not such an easy thing to build new infrastructure on top of old infrastructure with heavy traffic. It requires notices, permits, diversions, schedules, tons of money, etc. What it boils down to is that it is extremely inconvenient to build transit projects in the US for everyone involved - the builders, the government, the taxpayers. On the other hand, it's not too bad to build things in places where there's nobody, or no infrastructure. Because it inconveniences nobody. Nobody cares if some new building or railway is erected in a spot where there was previously nothing. This is why Europe's infrastructure is so much better than the US's - because most of it was destroyed in WW2, and Europe was able to essentially start from scratch. It's the same deal with China, which was previously unindustrialized, and has had no problems erecting massive cities and transit networks in all these rural places. I see no way for the US to get out of this quandry short of a couple things: - Some kind of weapons or terrorism scare that causes massive city depopulation - Major transportation revolution that enables mass transit without infrastructure, think flying cars - Building brand new cities, which honestly probably will not happen unless climate change really fucks things up So buckle in to your carseats folks, because we're gonna continue to be a car nation for years to come.

whimsicalism 4y ago
China is able to build massive projects in the context of there already being heavy use of pre-existing infrastructure. Your take is just absolutely wrong when it comes to China - the US just has no cheap ways of managing competing interests like this.
bombcar 4y ago
US cities have spread and sprawled, and there's no planning except for freeways. Somehow we can acquire land for massive multi lane behemoths riding over the fields, and build them before the developments come in, but building or extending a train line before that is completely impossible.
andbberger 4y ago
no it's not at all obvious and your take is way off the mark. the first TGV line opened in 1981... france had quite a bit of infrastructure then, it wasn't some freshly cratered hellhole. > Major transportation revolution that enables mass transit without infrastructure, think flying cars no, please god no. steel on steel is a modern, mature and extremely effective technology. the only serious attempt to "innovate" in recent memory, the chuo shinkansen, an ongoing effort by the world's second most competent builder and operator of rail systems has been a massive shitshow. in addition to being far more expensive than conventional HSR, it has an order of magnitude less capacity. there's a word for this: gadgetbahn. just say no to gadgetbahns if steel on steel sounds too simple to you and isn't scratching some techy itch for technological complexity it's because you're not looking deep enough. there's an entire journal devoted to studying the dynamics of the wheel-rail system [1] [1] http://interfacejournal.com/ http://interfacejournal.com/

dsfyu404ed 4y ago

All these analysis just wind up concluding in a different politically correct phrasing of "y'all mfers piss a hell of a lot of money away on stuff that would be overt graft if it weren't an official part of the process and there wasn't some service exchanged with a plausibly deniable reason" The whole system from top to bottom is a money sieve and it's so diffuse nobody is responsible so nobody has any incentive to clean it up and everybody has some token reason why their bit of pork is necessary so an outsider without tons of inside experience that tends to also result in deep investment in the status quo can't hope to accurately clean it up without breaking everything.

kneel 4y ago

I once worked construction at a state park, I made prevailing wage which was 4X more than my regular hourly wage. Talk about the slowest moving construction project, everyone was incentivized to take breaks and milk their hours. We turned a 4 hours job into a 2 day project.

chasebank 4y ago
I worked for a private roofing company one summer in high school. The crew I was on would take two hour long naps under their trucks in the shade. I asked about it and one dude said, "The longer the job takes, the more we get paid." I can only imagine this attitude is amplified for government work.
markus_zhang 4y ago
Just wondering why does it affect the total cost though. I think the total cost is stated in the contract? So if you want to pay premium for the workers you are free to so that but that premium should be out from your pocket?
- fshbbdssbbgdd 4y ago
  Usually projects pay prevailing wage due to a mandate, so every bid has that cost built in.
  - quickthrowman 4y ago
    Yes, this is exactly how it works. All the public construction projects I’ve ever bid (sub or prime contractor) have been fixed price, and everyone factors the cost of the prevailing wage labor into their bid. The union local we hire from is actually paid a bit more than prevailing wage, so I’m already factoring those costs into non-public bids so it doesn’t change much for a union shop.
- pj_mukh 4y ago
  Naively, wondering about this as well. One more Naive question: Can the government do giant speed bonuses i.e. make it worth their while to finish quick?

pcurve 4y ago

For those wondering about why there was no mention of union... https://pedestrianobservations.com/2019/01/08/meme-weeding-unions-and-construction-costs/ https://pedestrianobservations.com/2019/01/08/meme-weeding-u... apparently, even in non union states, these project costs are ridiculous.

mikeyouse 4y ago
Right - and in union-heavy countries like Germany and France, the costs are often much lower than in the US. There could be something to the structure or organization of US unions that impacts things here, but it's clearly not the root cause.
- legitster 4y ago
  > the structure or organization of US unions that impacts things here An underrated topic. All unions are not made alike, and the laws dictating European unions are very, very different than those in the US.
  - wobbly_bush 4y ago
    There is very little discussion around this underrated topic. In India, the places where unions have a strong presence have lost a lot of industries. They have become notorious for getting any work done in those places, as some unions have morphed into gangs. This is not to imply anything about the benefit/tradeoff of unions in other countries.
- beastman82 4y ago
  It is not at all clear. Union contracts vary widely state to state, country to country. I don't think you can make this claim.
- robomartin 4y ago
  > There could be something to the structure or organization of US unions that impacts things here, but it's clearly not the root cause. Yes. US unions are very different from European unions. Without getting into the details, US unions can be very destructive, while European unions are far more wholistic or cooperative. To be clear, this is not about union members. It's about union leadership and the "mafia" how they do business. Union members are along for the ride, are sold entire narratives they have to support and can end-up losing big. Entire industries have been seriously damaged by our unions. Source: I was in a union for about a decade. In addition to this, I have had this conversation with members of other unions, some of them as post-mortems after years of union damage caused job losses to China and, ultimately, the companies they worked for to shut down. Solution? I can't think of a single simple idea. These are engrained cultural things. People rarely wake up to the reality of what's going on until the are suffering, take the time to think it through and ultimately realize where the pain came from.

ww520 4y ago

It partly has to do with the bidding process - the drive to get the lowest bid. Competent companies know the cost won't work and are unwilling to put up the surety bonds to take on a project. It leaves with the boldest incompetent company to make the lowest bid who gets their foot in the door and then jack up the cost overrun later on. Often the project failed due to cost overrun or sheer incompetence. At the end the cost of doing business go up for all parties involved. I've seen transit projects with hundreds of millions budget fell apart with nothing to show at the end, and have seen a transit project that doubled the cost and tripled the schedule to get to completion, and that was a good project.

wongarsu 4y ago
Reform of the bidding process is probably the most actionable change that can be done. Even if we keep the core principle of a "lowest bidder" process, there are bound to be lessons to be learned from how other countries implement the process.
legitster 4y ago
Also, the US bidding process is long, arbitrary, and favors rent-seeking. Only a small subset of local firms will bother to play in them. The way a private company would solve the problem would be hire a bunch of experts and in-house a lot of the technical design and procurement work.
SECProto 4y ago
Where I am (a Canadian municipality) transit and other municipal-led projects have several features that tend to keep them on budget and schedule (or at least closer to it): - Unit price contracts (much easier to track growth in cost, helps to identify and mitigate issues earlier) - Vendor performance management (Contractors and consultants are given a score after project completion, shapes how bids are evaluated on future projects) - Qualified bidders (contractors and consultants are evaluated beforehand, only allowed to bid on projects if they've done something of a similar scope/content before - ties in with the point above, smaller projects will allow bidding by contractors with less history/lower scores) The system isn't perfect (since it relies on vendor history, it only works well with projects of scope and type that they do regularly - i.e. roads and sewers mainly), but it's a lot better than a simplistic "lowest bid wins"

kumarski 4y ago

Manuel_D 4y ago

Better title: "why are US urban rail projects so costly?" The subject is way more niche than "transit". A big part of it is economies of scale. Europe, and other developed parts of the world also built a lot more urban passenger rail per mile. Now compare the cost of US freight rail - something the US does build and operate at scale - and it's much more competitive. Costs are often under $1M a mile, depending on factors like load, ground leveling, etc. Countries are better at the types of transit they build the most, and the US doesn't use a lot of urban light rail.

dclowd9901 4y ago
I buy this. Even from a pure equipment allocation standpoint it would be more difficult for a particular state or region to spin up a job, let alone somewhere that has literally no existing rail infra to speak of. In the article, they mention that Italy has something like a SWAT team of rail planning and designing consultants at the national level that swoop in on local projects and offer guidance. That’s just not something you get to unless you have a preponderance of rail projects under your belt.
- beezlebroxxxxxx 4y ago
  Hearing about an Italian SWAT team for rail development just makes me think: "hire them." I wonder if it would be cheaper to just hire all of the talent, and then just buy Italian rail components if they are available and work. That is essentially what the tech industry in the US does now anyway. I guess certain "Buy American" protections get in the way of that, for good and bad reasons; but it's annoying that one solution is basically touching the third rail (sorry couldn't resist the train joke) in the country. Hire or import talent from abroad and learn from them, America's whole industrial history is basically a loop of that over time.
  - bombcar 4y ago
    California HSR basically did that, and the (French?) company left in a huff after a few years saying the working conditions were untenable. Much of our existing light rail rolling stock is European companies anyway - they make a deal to build a factory in the US to get the bid, usually. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siemens_S700_and_S70 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siemens_S700_and_S70

larsiusprime 4y ago

Arpit Gupta put it very well -- we need Value Capture for transit financing: https://thehill.com/opinion/finance/562077-value-capture-is-the-infrastructure-pay-for-everyone-is-missing/ https://thehill.com/opinion/finance/562077-value-capture-is-... When you put in a transit line, the surrounding land values go up -- it's as old as the railroads. The governing body needs to capture the increase in those land values. This is how transit is funded in many Asian countries -- the transit project goes from being a cost boondoggle to a profit center that pays for itself, either by taxing the uplift in land values, or the governing body owning that land and leasing it out to e.g. shops.

baby 4y ago
That is if the land there actually wants the traffic and is ready to adapt. Here in SF it feels like no one wants public transport to get to them, and they definitely don't want to build housing or reserve ground units for shops and restaurants
- jxf 4y ago
  In NYC, all the places along the new Second Avenue line shot up immediately once it looked like construction was beginning again, and shot up even more once it opened.
  - yuppie_scum 4y ago
    Same in Boston (Somerville/Medford) with the Green Line Extension. It’s now unaffordable
- mikysco 4y ago
  I feel like SF residents' aversion to new transit projects is unfortunate but totally reasonable... walk anywhere in SF near a BART (subway) stop and you face open drug use, trash, and other problems nobody wants in the neighborhood they call home. It's not like these are intractable problems - other major cities manage to keep their subway stops and surrounding areas clean & pleasant to use. The case against BART expansion is made by the experience & externalities of existing BART.

MPSimmons 4y ago

I would guess that it has to do with the legal need to pay people fairly for their land that the transit needs to acquire.

deanCommie 4y ago

This is the natural outcome when you optimize a society for 1/ lowest taxes in the developed world, 2/ no expectation of a social safety net, 3/ biggest possible upside to start a business, get rich, and become a millionaire or a billionaire. Planet Money did a whole series of trying to set up an offshore company and realized that despite their reputation, Cayman Islands and the like actually do more due diligence of new companies than Delaware does. The US is the best place in the world to start a company and get obscenely wealthy. As long as you take the risk that if you are unemployed you might die on the street destitute. This incentivizes all sorts of antisocial behaviour like whole industries dependent on the lack of structure in the rest of society (the legal field, insurance, healthcare -> none of which are nowhere nearly as big or as lucrative in the rest of the developed world). It also means every construction project is an opportunity for the enrichment of someone, rather than being done by the state for the betterment of society. Rail infrastructure and good transit in general is an incredible societal equalizer, and works best when it's basic, cheap, but reliable, frequent, and consistent. Which the US is just not incentivized to provide. So instead, these projects become vanity opportunities to suck up as much wealth and at least help some middle class construction workers make lucrative bank. Good for them I guess. Don't see any other possible outcome in America today, such as it is.

tunap 4y ago

Many peoples' stamps are needed for any infrastructure being built. Engineers(electrical, structural, environmental, etc), architects, contractors, consultants, politicians and more, I presume. My rural county with 20,000 residences had 3 backwoods culverts replaced pre-pandemic(2 lanes, < 50 cars/day) & they each had price tags between $0.8 - $1.5 million USD. A million bucks to install new culverts & repave over... and the cheapest one wasn't even paved. Must be nice to get a slice of that pie.

rnk 4y ago
Can you give some more info on the size of this project? Hard to understand why a culvert on an unpaved (and presumably small water source) would cost much. Almost any project on a highway costs a million dollars.
- tunap 4y ago
  Take a peek down the rabbit hole. As a recent transplant, I, too, have a hard time understanding the cost(s). It is literally a creek, but it does get swollen when it rains. The other projects were on Holbert Cove Rd, in the same time frame. https://connect.ncdot.gov/letting/Division%2014%20Letting/Forms/Letting%20Project%20Document%20Set/docsethomepage.aspx?ID=2756&FolderCTID=0x0120D52000890E35AC48ACBC4AB3ACB932195E660100BCA6FE5055E55B46BB6C28E73E096BA7&List=09442051-d8d9-4504-848a-6f2d19efcbf4&RootFolder=%2Fletting%2FDivision%2014%20Letting%2F05%2014%202019&RecSrc=%2Fletting%2FDivision%2014%20Letting%2F05%2014%202019 https://connect.ncdot.gov/letting/Division%2014%20Letting/Fo...
  - EricDeb 4y ago
    it would be fun to personally work along with this project and understand the costs as they are happening. I feel like this would help me get a better feel.
    - tunap 4y ago
      I did wander down from time to time to monitor the progress. It was definitely a slow process where equipment and materials sat untouched for weeks at a time, outside of the pandemic shutdown. I presume they were awaiting inspections between phases.

Cupertino95014 4y ago

I have to say, I was dubious that a study like this could come up with anything worthwhile, but the guy has some pretty sensible ideas: Build it cheaper, so you can have more of it - yep Do it faster, so it'll be cheaper - yep Quit throwing money at all those expensive consultants - yep ============== Put a lid on all those lawsuits - he missed that one.

Consultant32452 4y ago

The most important thing to understand is transit projects in the US are so costly on purpose. You can't fix anything until you fix the on purpose. If you manage to squeeze in one spot, new costs will pop up in another spot. It won't change until projects are cost efficient on purpose.

RadixDLT 4y ago

the money passes through many diffrent hands, contractors, construction companies, government taxes, license fees, architect designers, middlemen...

renewiltord 4y ago

It's simple, right? If you can make $x and your apparent return is $y, I will take as much of your surplus $y-$x as I can. To make it acceptable, I will use other words, but I'm really just trying to capture your surplus and I will get it because you will tell people that $y is much greater than $Y (these true return) because you must inflate $y by some amount to represent the gain to you $y-$Y politically. An exploitable principal-agent situation. Now, both you and I, without overt collaboration will align and help us both at the cost of the other guy who is paying for the whole thing. We can sucker him a little, because he's a gormless fool and his friends are useful idiots who will join in the deception.

narrator 4y ago

The conventional wisdom in the U.S is that the only way to fix transit is to vote for politicians who will increase spending on transit projects. This ideology of just spend more money has lead to spiraling costs in health care, education, and government. I'm glad someone's actually looking into what the heck actually costs so much money and not how to spend more money.

pas 4y ago
well, one very important piece of the puzzle is that the US is very rich, but very unevenly (income and wealth inequality), and the US spending on services compared to disposable income is not that high. another important piece is diminishing returns. the US leads in healthcare spending, but that also means that it suffers the most from diminishing returns. then there's the Baumol effect too (increase in wages [due to productivity increase] in one sector pushes up wages in other sectors - especially when unemployment is low), which explains some part of the cost increases. and of course both healthcare and education (and construction) are labor intensive sectors with almost no mass production. (prefab housing would help, but there's just not enough density for that) the US is very credentialist, which (plus the aforementioned inequalities) push up the value of a "good education", so people pay a lot for it. and finally, healthcare in developed countries is very much determined by environment ("lifestyle"). many people work their asses off, sit in traffic, live near pollution sources, become obese/ill, spend a lot on insulin/meds, and then get into bankruptcy at the end of their lives, and no amount of direct healthcare spending can help with that.
- rsj_hn 4y ago
  > well, one very important piece of the puzzle is that the US is very rich, but very unevenly (income and wealth inequality), and the US spending on services compared to disposable income is not that high. Comments like these usually don't take federalism into account, or they just assume that because we have lower levels of benefits that we must be spending less. But let's look at the data: US Federal + State and local spending, as a percent of GDP[1]: * Pensions (Social Security + Other govt pensions) 9% * Healthcare 9% * Education 6% * Welfare 2% * Defense 5% * All other 2% Let's compare this to the OECD average: * pensions[3] 8% * healthcare[2] 9.5% * education[4] 6% * welfare[5] 2% Or we can go to a completely different source, which compares social spending as a share of GDP[3], showing the OECD average is 20%, and the US is right in the middle at 19%, spending more than Canada, Australia, Netherlands, Switzerland, but less than Germany, France, UK. What people don't want to admit to, as it is a painful realization, is that while the US spends as much as other countries, it delivers so little for that spending, because our delivery of healthcare and education is extremely inefficient. This creates a type of loop, where people compare the lack of comprehensive benefits we receive in the US, and decide we must increase subsidies further, which results in even more inefficient delivery, and then we go back to square 1, leaving people convinced that the US spends so much less on these things than other countries. Our problems lie not in too little social spending, but in obtaining too little social value from the amounts that we do spend. [1] https://www.usgovernmentspending.com/year_spending_2023USrn_24rs2n_00#usgs302 https://www.usgovernmentspending.com/year_spending_2023USrn_... [2] https://www.oecd.org/els/health-systems/health-expenditure.htm https://www.oecd.org/els/health-systems/health-expenditure.h... [3] https://www.oecd.org/els/soc/OECD2020-Social-Expenditure-SOCX-Update.pdf https://www.oecd.org/els/soc/OECD2020-Social-Expenditure-SOC... [4] https://www.oecd.org/els/soc/PF1_2_Public_expenditure_education.pdf https://www.oecd.org/els/soc/PF1_2_Public_expenditure_educat... [5] https://data.oecd.org/socialexp/family-benefits-public-spending.htm#indicator-chart https://data.oecd.org/socialexp/family-benefits-public-spend...