8 ms·

All Aboard the Bureaucracy Train

140 points by zaik 3y ago

roenxi 3y ago
> ... we refuse to learn from experts ... This theme comes up a few times in the article. It is a misunderstanding of the Western mindset. Everyone involved can see that there are people out there who are better than us at building. The issue is that their methods are unacceptable and, when understood, are likely to be explicitly rejected. Think of it like communists refusing to allow private ownership - the evidence is available that private ownership leads to better results overall and they understand the mechanics of how it works. The issue is that there is a fundamental rejection of the idea that someone is entitled to control the benefits of an asset. There is no mechanical confusion about what would happen if private property was instituted, or how to affect it. It isn't a question of learning new things. The problem is things that are politically desirable (pristine air quality, well paid jobs for workers with ironclad security, not upsetting anyone, strong regulatory controls) are incompatible with a cheap & high quality product. As I repeat ad nauseam, most of what China does to successfully build infrastructure is literally illegal in the West.
- resolutebat 3y ago
  The article doesn't even mention China, it's comparing the US against other Western countries like Spain, which is actually very good at building public transport.
- renhanxue 3y ago
  Many of the countries he compares against are part of the Western world, though? Spain, Portugal, Italy, the Nordics - all of these have significantly lower construction costs than in the US. What unacceptable methods are you thinking of, here?
- smokel 3y ago
  The article uses several European countries for comparison. These also have "the Western mindset". The article does not even mention China, but refers to Asia, which is pretty big.
- tomgp 3y ago
  This ignores the fact that European countries are able to complete infrastructure projects with better worker protections and tighter environmental controls for a fraction of the cost. I haven’t read the article in question but follow Alon’s blog where he provides ample examples of this… https://pedestrianobservations.com/ https://pedestrianobservations.com/
  - roenxi 3y ago
    I'm sure they are, but that is not quite addressing what I'm saying. I'm saying that building an effective transit system obviously isn't the purpose of the systems that control New York's transit. There are interest groups prioritising objectives other than building the infrastructure. Otherwise it is impossible to justify the actual outcomes of these projects - it goes waaaaay beyond incompetence and although everyone identifies a different interest group there is consensus that they exist. And my personal point is that the US (anglosphere, really) has a lot of systems to identify minority interest groups and make satisfying them a key part of completing a project. And therefore the problem isn't that people are refusing to learn, the problem is that building infrastructure isn't a priority. Someone who builds good infrastructure doesn't have any useful lessons to share, because that wasn't Goal #1. The people with veto power over the projects would like the infrastructure, sure, but if it doesn't get built cheaply and too a good standard then that isn't going to be a shock to the system that causes change. This article is subtly suggesting that there is a competence problem. I'm saying no, I think the people involved in this are plenty competent. There are just interest groups with enough power to scuttle the project and they need to be identified and negotiated with.
    - gumby 3y ago
      I think the US (and perhaps all other countries) have plenty of experience running roughshod over local interests. In the US case big infrastructure programs of the 50s were typically built on black communities; in the mid 1850s Hausmann built the central Paris of today by demolishing whatever he wanted. It’s a positive thing that people’s interests are heard as infrastructure is for everyone. If there’s going to be a road, water treatment plant, or courthouse it has to be built somewhere, so some sacrifice has to be made, but better that there is some discussion, no? There has been a destructive and cynical view of the commonweal for the last 40-50 years which has made these discussion completely oppositional but that doesn’t have to be the case. The article touches on this.
- this15testingg 3y ago
  how does private ownership not mean that someone is entitled to control the benefits of an asset? isn't that the entire idea of capitalism? in the context of public (emphasis on PUBLIC) infrastructure, how does pristine air quality, well paid jobs for workers with ironclad security, not upsetting anyone, strong regulatory controls not be considered in a "high quality product"? How could it be high quality without those? The idea that public infrastructure has to be profitable/a product instead of a public good is misguided and ignores the realities of the costs and requirements associated with such things. would you say that the strong regulatory nature of air travel makes is low quality? if the NTSB/FHWA took car transportation as seriously as flying, I would imagine the US would not have 40,000 deaths a year just from driving. I don't understand how that amount of death (ignoring pollution, minor/serious injuries, personal cost, lost time, resources both monetary and material, etc) makes the US transport choices a "high quality" product.
  - bluetomcat 3y ago
    It's more of an American cultural trait. People are fearful and obsessed with safety. They can be vocal and overreacting for trivial stuff. They often act in a virtue-signalling manner and put stickers on their cars. Before anything gets done, millions of tweets and reddit comments have been written.
    - vmfunction 3y ago
      In US, safety is often tight to 'will we get sued for this' mentality that is associated with the corrupt legal system. This could also attributed to the over cost of building a train system in US vs other parts of the world.
      - renhanxue 3y ago
        Levy's research group calls this "adversarial legalism" and yes it does seem to be a contributing factor to high construction costs.
- helsinkiandrew 3y ago
  > most of what China does to successfully build infrastructure is literally illegal in the West The biggest thing China does to successfully build infrastructure is to repeat successful previous designs without modifying them - ie build 10 identical nuclear reactors, bridges, stations etc - and utilise the scale to do it much cheaper (it doesn't matter if your nuclear reactor is 30% less efficient than the latest, if you can build it for 30% cheaper in half the time) That's not illegal in the west it just appears hard to do.
  - SkeuomorphicBee 3y ago
    Exactly, Chinas biggest secret is to lean on economies of scale. In case of transit they standardised early-on on only five types of train/rail-corridor and then whenever a city needed a metro, lightrail or any other type of rail transit they would just pick one of the five that fits best and build it using all the knowhow and economies of scale from previous builds. RMTransit has a good video about it [1] [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ehTy-qQVZhM&t=0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ehTy-qQVZhM&t=0
    - gumby 3y ago
      The article even lauds the benefits of this, using the LA schools as an example, but doesn’t follow that thread.
      - secabeen 3y ago
        As I understand it, the challenge in building is in adapting the plan to site specifics, or adapting the site to the plan. In China and other top-down planning regimes, they will adapt the site to the plan. If the station or school plan requires that a historic neighborhood be impacted to use the plan unchanged, farewell to historic buildings. Here we adapt the plan to fit within the space, or whatever, but that quickly eliminates the cost savings, as now each station or school is slightly unique. This also shows up in residential and other smaller projects. Look at the historic aerial photos of Levittown, NY and PA, which created the notion of the suburb: https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=levitown&iax=images&ia=images https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=levitown&iax=images&ia=imag... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levittown https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levittown The original landscape is completely eliminated, all original trees are gone, it's been scraped clean. Most developments near major cities are infill or replacement, and they adapt their plans to the site. There are still greenfield builds happening in exurban areas, but in existing metro areas, everything is bespoke.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- himinlomax 3y ago
  This argument is already refuted by the article; building is currently less expensive (often by more than half!) in Western/Northern Europe (excluding UK/Ireland) than in the US, and you can certainly be sure that air quality, labor laws, security and so on are not inferior in any way in Sweden or Germany compared to the US.
- btbuildem 3y ago
  > their methods are unacceptable and, when understood, are likely to be explicitly rejected I agree, but not for the reasons you've stated. The methods are unacceptable, because they cut into profits. The reason anything at all is built in the US isn't because of some intrinsic good it will provide; it's because someone will profit off the building. If the finished product provides some value / service, that's entirely incidental. If you look at it this way, the problem simplifies greatly. It becomes easier to explain why we have failing infrastructure (too costly to maintain = no profit to be made off maintenance), why a lot of new builds seem cheaply done (more expense put into design, materials and execution = less profit), etc etc.
  - fallingknife 3y ago
    Of course someone is going to profit. That's the only reason anything gets built anywhere ever.
    - btbuildem 3y ago
      Why were the Pyramids built? The Cathedral of Notre Dame? The American public library system? Or their interstate system, for that matter? Who made bank off contributing to Wikipedia? Was Linus Torvalds driven by a profit motive when creating linux? Just because the West is ethically bankrupt and collapsing upon itself doesn't mean that humanity has always been that morally poor and unimaginative, or that it needs to continue that way.
      - mdhb 3y ago
        There’s a very particular and typically libertarian leaning personality type on the internet who for whatever reason seem to only be able to look at the entirety of the human experience through the lens of economics and they just come to the most ridiculous conclusions.
  - samatman 3y ago
    People who treat profit as a dirty word are responsible for enormous amounts of suffering. The only valid reason to subsidize some piece of infrastructure is if the provisioned public good leads to more overall wealth. I consider the word "wealth" broad enough to cover things like reducing carbon emissions, these things can be (and should be) estimated in monetary terms, but that will always be an approximation. My point is that subsidizing unprofitable transportation which doesn't itself provide value in excess of the subsidy is wrong. That's not public service, it's a boondoggle. The US, like any country, does subsidize infrastructure extensively. This includes the public highway system as well as our remarkable freight rail infrastructure. The reason this works is because the public goods so provisioned pay off extensively in wealth. While this includes the profits of the freighting and trucking companies, who after all won't transport goods if they don't make a profit, it also includes the entire country's population, who benefit from available and cheap goods. There are libertarians who argue that this would work just as well if the roads themselves generate profit, and I think they're wrong about that.
- komali2 3y ago
  > Think of it like communists refusing to allow private ownership - the evidence is available that private ownership leads to better results overall and they understand the mechanics of how it works. This leans on too many historically and philosophically contentious points to be a useful comparison imo. I'm not sure who you mean by "the communists," presumably the USSR and the early PRC? But they both had quite different economic systems, and if your argument centers around "they didn't have private property," then, we should toss in a couple fascist regimes as well, at which point, are we discussing communism, or simply systems with no, or with arbitrarily removed, private property? Cause that could include feudalism. Or are we discussing central planning systems, in which case, that could be ANY system, regardless of whether or not there's private property. (and by property are we including toothbrushes lol?) And honestly it does also depend on what you mean by better results overall. In this article it seems a key argument is made: > The first element, that’s the one that used to be present but isn’t anymore, is a large public sector, because you need a large enough bureaucracy that can supervise all the contractors. Many conflate public sector with socialist tendencies, and the person being interviewed here seems to imply that the lack of socialist tendency in the USA (I doubt we'd disagree about that!) is hampering its ability to engage in public projects effectively. Wouldn't that be in opposition to your point? Sure, Germany isn't communist, but many would say it is closer to it than America, and it has better trains. And the USSR absolutely had better trains. Whether it was truly communist, or something else, I feel is moot - it seems to be the thing you're describing as "worse results," but, it had better results, surely? Unless you think the USSR's public transit system wasn't good?
- nix0n 3y ago
  > The issue is that their methods are unacceptable and, when understood, are likely to be explicitly rejected. This sounds to me exactly like refusing to learn.
resolutebat 3y ago
Interesting if somewhat scatterbrained interview. He's kind of wrong about cut and cover being preferable though: https://worksinprogress.co/issue/why-we-stopped-building-cut-and-cover/ https://worksinprogress.co/issue/why-we-stopped-building-cut...
- nemetroid 3y ago
  Could you be more specific? To me, both articles seem to make similar arguments regarding cost vs. distuption.
- smokefoot 3y ago
  Some serious ADHD apparent in this interview. Like what was that digression about North African countries writing in French? That really should have been edited out.
  - xyzelement 3y ago
    The theme of that section was about impact of history/tradition on the (suboptimal) ways countries do construction, including "X country tends to learn from Y country's approach even if the realities of X and Y are very different." I think the point was North Africa learns from France even though the situations are vastly different. All of Asia following Japan's approach was another example.
  - Taikonerd 3y ago
    I just read that as, "Alon Levy really loves this subject and is talkative."
javier_e06 3y ago
A TL;DR for sure but definitely but not apples to apples. A transit system is embedded with the cultural norms of the location so when applying cost once hast to wonder: What is the point of applying cost of a restaurant meal across the world or across states? Sure you can go there and save yourself a bundle but do you want to live there?
- nicbou 3y ago
  So "you ship your org chart"?
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
woodruffw 3y ago
This was an interesting read, with a couple of glaring errors: * The systems that predate the modern NYC subway were not called the IRT. The IRT was a single system, which now makes up the “A Division” of the subway. The other system was the BMT, which was combined with the IND to make up the “B Division” (since they have compatible trackage and car lengths/widths, unlike the IRT). * The interviewee claims that the IND only really expanded into two new areas (via the crosstown line and QBL), which isn’t true: the IND also included the Culver and Fulton lines, both of which cover otherwise underserved neighborhoods.
- jcranmer 3y ago
  Alon Levy definitely knows about the history of the IRT, the BMT, and the IND, so the interview getting that wrong is definitely odd. Although from the way it's worded, it's possible that it's just the interviewer doing an incorrect transcription, since Alon clearly refers to "the privates" (plural).
davidw 3y ago
How expensive it is to build things in the US is a big problem. Ezra Klein also did a piece about this a while back https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/05/opinion/economy-construction-productivity-mystery.html https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/05/opinion/economy-construct... It's an "interesting" issue because it does seem to defy simple explanations.
- balder1991 3y ago
  Thanks, that was a good read.
samatman 3y ago
> The first element, that’s the one that used to be present but isn’t anymore, is a large public sector, because you need a large enough bureaucracy that can supervise all the contractors. If a large public sector is a prerequisite for lower-cost transit, then the cost of that large public sector needs to be included in calculating the cost of transit. I suspect that would change the analysis quite a bit.
- xhkkffbf 3y ago
  This topic is so politicized that the transit lovers don't feel free publicly acknowledging all of the costs. For instance, one manager of the local bus company said that while new city buses cost $800k+++, they're a good deal when spread out over 12 year and all of the passengers. So I asked him to include the cost of the driver-- and the driver's benefits-- and that totally changed the equation. It can reach $1m/year to fully staff a bus over a year. Suddenly, the hardware isn't the biggest expense over the lifespan of the bus.
  - ljf 3y ago
    Care to break down that $1m per bus for staffing? I am in the UK so am not across driver, service engineer, cleaner etc. salaries in America. $80k per year for for the bus $50k per driver (https://www.glassdoor.co.uk/Salaries/us-bus-driver-salary-SRCH_IL.0,2_IN1_KO3,13.htm https://www.glassdoor.co.uk/Salaries/us-bus-driver-salary-SR...) let's say the bus needs 4 to cover the route 14 hours a day, inc weekends and driver holidays - so $200k $100k engineer (guessing not needed full time for just one bus?) $50k cleaner (guessing not needed full time for just one bus?) Then $570k for fuel and management costs? I've seen figures around $150k per year for fuel. Some (no doubt out of date) figures: https://www.liveabout.com/bus-cost-to-purchase-and-operate-2798845 https://www.liveabout.com/bus-cost-to-purchase-and-operate-2... Just interested where the costs are, I can only assume that the company is making more than $1m a year on the route to take on that expense?
    - comte7092 3y ago
      Note my comment below, parents quotes expenses aren’t grounded in actual audited finances. I’d just note that in the US at least, bus services generally operate at a loss and run many routes due to political reasons rather than efficiency/profitability.
AlbertCory 3y ago
There's an Oxford professor, Bent Flyvbjerg (bonus points for knowing how to pronounce this) who's devoted his career to analyzing very large projects and why they're so terrible. The problems are not limited to transit, and they extend to big software projects and big construction as well. (Spoiler: they're inherent in the organization of bigness.) https://albertcory50.substack.com/p/optimism-hubris-and-strategic-misrepresentation https://albertcory50.substack.com/p/optimism-hubris-and-stra... Willie Brown (former mayor of SF and state legislative leader), when he was safely out of office, said the quiet part out loud: the initial estimates are just to sell the project. No one on the inside takes them seriously.
skadamat 3y ago
Surprised nobody in this thread mentioned "How Big Things Get Done". Fantastic read that talks about the challenges of big projects when they don't bring on the right people with existing expertise: https://www.amazon.com/How-Big-Things-Get-Done/dp/0593239512 https://www.amazon.com/How-Big-Things-Get-Done/dp/0593239512
jbverschoor 3y ago
Final destination the Netherlands
sara44444444 3y ago
[flagged]

140 points by zaik 3y ago

> ... we refuse to learn from experts ... This theme comes up a few times in the article. It is a misunderstanding of the Western mindset. Everyone involved can see that there are people out there who are better than us at building. The issue is that their methods are unacceptable and, when understood, are likely to be explicitly rejected. Think of it like communists refusing to allow private ownership - the evidence is available that private ownership leads to better results overall and they understand the mechanics of how it works. The issue is that there is a fundamental rejection of the idea that someone is entitled to control the benefits of an asset. There is no mechanical confusion about what would happen if private property was instituted, or how to affect it. It isn't a question of learning new things. The problem is things that are politically desirable (pristine air quality, well paid jobs for workers with ironclad security, not upsetting anyone, strong regulatory controls) are incompatible with a cheap & high quality product. As I repeat ad nauseam, most of what China does to successfully build infrastructure is literally illegal in the West.

resolutebat 3y ago
The article doesn't even mention China, it's comparing the US against other Western countries like Spain, which is actually very good at building public transport.
renhanxue 3y ago
Many of the countries he compares against are part of the Western world, though? Spain, Portugal, Italy, the Nordics - all of these have significantly lower construction costs than in the US. What unacceptable methods are you thinking of, here?
smokel 3y ago
The article uses several European countries for comparison. These also have "the Western mindset". The article does not even mention China, but refers to Asia, which is pretty big.
tomgp 3y ago
This ignores the fact that European countries are able to complete infrastructure projects with better worker protections and tighter environmental controls for a fraction of the cost. I haven’t read the article in question but follow Alon’s blog where he provides ample examples of this… https://pedestrianobservations.com/ https://pedestrianobservations.com/
- roenxi 3y ago
  I'm sure they are, but that is not quite addressing what I'm saying. I'm saying that building an effective transit system obviously isn't the purpose of the systems that control New York's transit. There are interest groups prioritising objectives other than building the infrastructure. Otherwise it is impossible to justify the actual outcomes of these projects - it goes waaaaay beyond incompetence and although everyone identifies a different interest group there is consensus that they exist. And my personal point is that the US (anglosphere, really) has a lot of systems to identify minority interest groups and make satisfying them a key part of completing a project. And therefore the problem isn't that people are refusing to learn, the problem is that building infrastructure isn't a priority. Someone who builds good infrastructure doesn't have any useful lessons to share, because that wasn't Goal #1. The people with veto power over the projects would like the infrastructure, sure, but if it doesn't get built cheaply and too a good standard then that isn't going to be a shock to the system that causes change. This article is subtly suggesting that there is a competence problem. I'm saying no, I think the people involved in this are plenty competent. There are just interest groups with enough power to scuttle the project and they need to be identified and negotiated with.
  - gumby 3y ago
    I think the US (and perhaps all other countries) have plenty of experience running roughshod over local interests. In the US case big infrastructure programs of the 50s were typically built on black communities; in the mid 1850s Hausmann built the central Paris of today by demolishing whatever he wanted. It’s a positive thing that people’s interests are heard as infrastructure is for everyone. If there’s going to be a road, water treatment plant, or courthouse it has to be built somewhere, so some sacrifice has to be made, but better that there is some discussion, no? There has been a destructive and cynical view of the commonweal for the last 40-50 years which has made these discussion completely oppositional but that doesn’t have to be the case. The article touches on this.
this15testingg 3y ago
how does private ownership not mean that someone is entitled to control the benefits of an asset? isn't that the entire idea of capitalism? in the context of public (emphasis on PUBLIC) infrastructure, how does pristine air quality, well paid jobs for workers with ironclad security, not upsetting anyone, strong regulatory controls not be considered in a "high quality product"? How could it be high quality without those? The idea that public infrastructure has to be profitable/a product instead of a public good is misguided and ignores the realities of the costs and requirements associated with such things. would you say that the strong regulatory nature of air travel makes is low quality? if the NTSB/FHWA took car transportation as seriously as flying, I would imagine the US would not have 40,000 deaths a year just from driving. I don't understand how that amount of death (ignoring pollution, minor/serious injuries, personal cost, lost time, resources both monetary and material, etc) makes the US transport choices a "high quality" product.
- bluetomcat 3y ago
  It's more of an American cultural trait. People are fearful and obsessed with safety. They can be vocal and overreacting for trivial stuff. They often act in a virtue-signalling manner and put stickers on their cars. Before anything gets done, millions of tweets and reddit comments have been written.
  - vmfunction 3y ago
    In US, safety is often tight to 'will we get sued for this' mentality that is associated with the corrupt legal system. This could also attributed to the over cost of building a train system in US vs other parts of the world.
    - renhanxue 3y ago
      Levy's research group calls this "adversarial legalism" and yes it does seem to be a contributing factor to high construction costs.
helsinkiandrew 3y ago
> most of what China does to successfully build infrastructure is literally illegal in the West The biggest thing China does to successfully build infrastructure is to repeat successful previous designs without modifying them - ie build 10 identical nuclear reactors, bridges, stations etc - and utilise the scale to do it much cheaper (it doesn't matter if your nuclear reactor is 30% less efficient than the latest, if you can build it for 30% cheaper in half the time) That's not illegal in the west it just appears hard to do.
- SkeuomorphicBee 3y ago
  Exactly, Chinas biggest secret is to lean on economies of scale. In case of transit they standardised early-on on only five types of train/rail-corridor and then whenever a city needed a metro, lightrail or any other type of rail transit they would just pick one of the five that fits best and build it using all the knowhow and economies of scale from previous builds. RMTransit has a good video about it [1] [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ehTy-qQVZhM&t=0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ehTy-qQVZhM&t=0
  - gumby 3y ago
    The article even lauds the benefits of this, using the LA schools as an example, but doesn’t follow that thread.
    - secabeen 3y ago
      As I understand it, the challenge in building is in adapting the plan to site specifics, or adapting the site to the plan. In China and other top-down planning regimes, they will adapt the site to the plan. If the station or school plan requires that a historic neighborhood be impacted to use the plan unchanged, farewell to historic buildings. Here we adapt the plan to fit within the space, or whatever, but that quickly eliminates the cost savings, as now each station or school is slightly unique. This also shows up in residential and other smaller projects. Look at the historic aerial photos of Levittown, NY and PA, which created the notion of the suburb: https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=levitown&iax=images&ia=images https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=levitown&iax=images&ia=imag... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levittown https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levittown The original landscape is completely eliminated, all original trees are gone, it's been scraped clean. Most developments near major cities are infill or replacement, and they adapt their plans to the site. There are still greenfield builds happening in exurban areas, but in existing metro areas, everything is bespoke.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
himinlomax 3y ago
This argument is already refuted by the article; building is currently less expensive (often by more than half!) in Western/Northern Europe (excluding UK/Ireland) than in the US, and you can certainly be sure that air quality, labor laws, security and so on are not inferior in any way in Sweden or Germany compared to the US.
btbuildem 3y ago
> their methods are unacceptable and, when understood, are likely to be explicitly rejected I agree, but not for the reasons you've stated. The methods are unacceptable, because they cut into profits. The reason anything at all is built in the US isn't because of some intrinsic good it will provide; it's because someone will profit off the building. If the finished product provides some value / service, that's entirely incidental. If you look at it this way, the problem simplifies greatly. It becomes easier to explain why we have failing infrastructure (too costly to maintain = no profit to be made off maintenance), why a lot of new builds seem cheaply done (more expense put into design, materials and execution = less profit), etc etc.
- fallingknife 3y ago
  Of course someone is going to profit. That's the only reason anything gets built anywhere ever.
  - btbuildem 3y ago
    Why were the Pyramids built? The Cathedral of Notre Dame? The American public library system? Or their interstate system, for that matter? Who made bank off contributing to Wikipedia? Was Linus Torvalds driven by a profit motive when creating linux? Just because the West is ethically bankrupt and collapsing upon itself doesn't mean that humanity has always been that morally poor and unimaginative, or that it needs to continue that way.
    - mdhb 3y ago
      There’s a very particular and typically libertarian leaning personality type on the internet who for whatever reason seem to only be able to look at the entirety of the human experience through the lens of economics and they just come to the most ridiculous conclusions.
- samatman 3y ago
  People who treat profit as a dirty word are responsible for enormous amounts of suffering. The only valid reason to subsidize some piece of infrastructure is if the provisioned public good leads to more overall wealth. I consider the word "wealth" broad enough to cover things like reducing carbon emissions, these things can be (and should be) estimated in monetary terms, but that will always be an approximation. My point is that subsidizing unprofitable transportation which doesn't itself provide value in excess of the subsidy is wrong. That's not public service, it's a boondoggle. The US, like any country, does subsidize infrastructure extensively. This includes the public highway system as well as our remarkable freight rail infrastructure. The reason this works is because the public goods so provisioned pay off extensively in wealth. While this includes the profits of the freighting and trucking companies, who after all won't transport goods if they don't make a profit, it also includes the entire country's population, who benefit from available and cheap goods. There are libertarians who argue that this would work just as well if the roads themselves generate profit, and I think they're wrong about that.
komali2 3y ago
> Think of it like communists refusing to allow private ownership - the evidence is available that private ownership leads to better results overall and they understand the mechanics of how it works. This leans on too many historically and philosophically contentious points to be a useful comparison imo. I'm not sure who you mean by "the communists," presumably the USSR and the early PRC? But they both had quite different economic systems, and if your argument centers around "they didn't have private property," then, we should toss in a couple fascist regimes as well, at which point, are we discussing communism, or simply systems with no, or with arbitrarily removed, private property? Cause that could include feudalism. Or are we discussing central planning systems, in which case, that could be ANY system, regardless of whether or not there's private property. (and by property are we including toothbrushes lol?) And honestly it does also depend on what you mean by better results overall. In this article it seems a key argument is made: > The first element, that’s the one that used to be present but isn’t anymore, is a large public sector, because you need a large enough bureaucracy that can supervise all the contractors. Many conflate public sector with socialist tendencies, and the person being interviewed here seems to imply that the lack of socialist tendency in the USA (I doubt we'd disagree about that!) is hampering its ability to engage in public projects effectively. Wouldn't that be in opposition to your point? Sure, Germany isn't communist, but many would say it is closer to it than America, and it has better trains. And the USSR absolutely had better trains. Whether it was truly communist, or something else, I feel is moot - it seems to be the thing you're describing as "worse results," but, it had better results, surely? Unless you think the USSR's public transit system wasn't good?
nix0n 3y ago
> The issue is that their methods are unacceptable and, when understood, are likely to be explicitly rejected. This sounds to me exactly like refusing to learn.

resolutebat 3y ago

Interesting if somewhat scatterbrained interview. He's kind of wrong about cut and cover being preferable though: https://worksinprogress.co/issue/why-we-stopped-building-cut-and-cover/ https://worksinprogress.co/issue/why-we-stopped-building-cut...

nemetroid 3y ago
Could you be more specific? To me, both articles seem to make similar arguments regarding cost vs. distuption.
smokefoot 3y ago
Some serious ADHD apparent in this interview. Like what was that digression about North African countries writing in French? That really should have been edited out.
- xyzelement 3y ago
  The theme of that section was about impact of history/tradition on the (suboptimal) ways countries do construction, including "X country tends to learn from Y country's approach even if the realities of X and Y are very different." I think the point was North Africa learns from France even though the situations are vastly different. All of Asia following Japan's approach was another example.
- Taikonerd 3y ago
  I just read that as, "Alon Levy really loves this subject and is talkative."

javier_e06 3y ago

A TL;DR for sure but definitely but not apples to apples. A transit system is embedded with the cultural norms of the location so when applying cost once hast to wonder: What is the point of applying cost of a restaurant meal across the world or across states? Sure you can go there and save yourself a bundle but do you want to live there?

nicbou 3y ago
So "you ship your org chart"?
deleted 3y ago
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woodruffw 3y ago

This was an interesting read, with a couple of glaring errors: * The systems that predate the modern NYC subway were not called the IRT. The IRT was a single system, which now makes up the “A Division” of the subway. The other system was the BMT, which was combined with the IND to make up the “B Division” (since they have compatible trackage and car lengths/widths, unlike the IRT). * The interviewee claims that the IND only really expanded into two new areas (via the crosstown line and QBL), which isn’t true: the IND also included the Culver and Fulton lines, both of which cover otherwise underserved neighborhoods.

jcranmer 3y ago
Alon Levy definitely knows about the history of the IRT, the BMT, and the IND, so the interview getting that wrong is definitely odd. Although from the way it's worded, it's possible that it's just the interviewer doing an incorrect transcription, since Alon clearly refers to "the privates" (plural).

davidw 3y ago

How expensive it is to build things in the US is a big problem. Ezra Klein also did a piece about this a while back https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/05/opinion/economy-construction-productivity-mystery.html https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/05/opinion/economy-construct... It's an "interesting" issue because it does seem to defy simple explanations.

balder1991 3y ago
Thanks, that was a good read.

samatman 3y ago

> The first element, that’s the one that used to be present but isn’t anymore, is a large public sector, because you need a large enough bureaucracy that can supervise all the contractors. If a large public sector is a prerequisite for lower-cost transit, then the cost of that large public sector needs to be included in calculating the cost of transit. I suspect that would change the analysis quite a bit.

xhkkffbf 3y ago
This topic is so politicized that the transit lovers don't feel free publicly acknowledging all of the costs. For instance, one manager of the local bus company said that while new city buses cost $800k+++, they're a good deal when spread out over 12 year and all of the passengers. So I asked him to include the cost of the driver-- and the driver's benefits-- and that totally changed the equation. It can reach $1m/year to fully staff a bus over a year. Suddenly, the hardware isn't the biggest expense over the lifespan of the bus.
- ljf 3y ago
  Care to break down that $1m per bus for staffing? I am in the UK so am not across driver, service engineer, cleaner etc. salaries in America. $80k per year for for the bus $50k per driver (https://www.glassdoor.co.uk/Salaries/us-bus-driver-salary-SRCH_IL.0,2_IN1_KO3,13.htm https://www.glassdoor.co.uk/Salaries/us-bus-driver-salary-SR...) let's say the bus needs 4 to cover the route 14 hours a day, inc weekends and driver holidays - so $200k $100k engineer (guessing not needed full time for just one bus?) $50k cleaner (guessing not needed full time for just one bus?) Then $570k for fuel and management costs? I've seen figures around $150k per year for fuel. Some (no doubt out of date) figures: https://www.liveabout.com/bus-cost-to-purchase-and-operate-2798845 https://www.liveabout.com/bus-cost-to-purchase-and-operate-2... Just interested where the costs are, I can only assume that the company is making more than $1m a year on the route to take on that expense?
  - comte7092 3y ago
    Note my comment below, parents quotes expenses aren’t grounded in actual audited finances. I’d just note that in the US at least, bus services generally operate at a loss and run many routes due to political reasons rather than efficiency/profitability.

AlbertCory 3y ago

There's an Oxford professor, Bent Flyvbjerg (bonus points for knowing how to pronounce this) who's devoted his career to analyzing very large projects and why they're so terrible. The problems are not limited to transit, and they extend to big software projects and big construction as well. (Spoiler: they're inherent in the organization of bigness.) https://albertcory50.substack.com/p/optimism-hubris-and-strategic-misrepresentation https://albertcory50.substack.com/p/optimism-hubris-and-stra... Willie Brown (former mayor of SF and state legislative leader), when he was safely out of office, said the quiet part out loud: the initial estimates are just to sell the project. No one on the inside takes them seriously.

skadamat 3y ago

Surprised nobody in this thread mentioned "How Big Things Get Done". Fantastic read that talks about the challenges of big projects when they don't bring on the right people with existing expertise: https://www.amazon.com/How-Big-Things-Get-Done/dp/0593239512 https://www.amazon.com/How-Big-Things-Get-Done/dp/0593239512

jbverschoor 3y ago

Final destination the Netherlands

sara44444444 3y ago

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