9 ms·

How Madrid built its metro cheaply (2024)

232 points by trymas 4mo ago

neil_s 4mo ago
What would need to be true for SF to replicate this? Would we need alignment at the mayor, state assembly and SFMTA levels?
- hnav 4mo ago
  - Figuring out NIMBY-ism. Anywhere you run a tunnel you're gonna have people suing you and stalling for decades. Less so if you use a tunnel bore machine, but cut and cover is pretty much a non-starter. - Cost of labor is insanely high due to cost of housing. Short of jumping straight back into the 19th century, setting up temporary housing and bringing in guest laborers this is pretty much non-negotiable. - Not a ton of expertise left in the country since there's 2 new subway tunnels a decade AFAIK. - The grift has got to be worse here than in Spain. There if you get $40k in kickbacks that's a nice bonus, here that barely covers your rent for the year. And then even if you bring the costs down, you have to figure out the taxation. Several billion per mile is the running rate and you may be able to bring that down but then you have ongoing costs. Muni's farebox recovery is only 1/4 of its budget so unless you're making existing lines redundant, there's new ongoing cost. Obviously the choices there will be to go into the pockets of the middle class or not do it at all.
  - pibaker 4mo ago
    > Cost of labor is insanely high due to cost of housing This is not the reason. Labor is expensive even in parts of the US with low housing costs. The real, simple reason is the US has a more prosperous economy where the average worker has more opportunity than their Spanish peers. Just look at unemployment rates. The US is at 4.3% right now compared to Spain's 10%. Even at the peak of the GFC the US barely had over 10% unemployment. In the meanwhile Spain has had over 10% employment almost the entire time the past four decades. Of course labor is cheap when that many people are jobless.
    - jaggederest 4mo ago
      U-6 is 8.1%, but spain uses a pretty comparable base employment rate (u-3 equivalent), so fair cop that US unemployment is easily less than half. Relevant: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol_effect - drives a lot of effects in the US where automation paradoxically makes non-automated industries insanely expensive (though not the whole story for certain niches e.g. healthcare and education)
    - BrenBarn 4mo ago
      I mean, if you can have higher unemployment but still build good subways and overall have a good quality of life, maybe that suggests unemployment isn't a great metric for evaluating societies.
      - joe_mamba 4mo ago
        >if you can have higher unemployment but still build good subways and overall have a good quality of life How are you having a great quality of life if you're unemployed? >unemployment isn't a great metric for evaluating societies. IDK man, being unemployed is not great. Not having money sucks. What metrics do you think are better?
    - presentation 4mo ago
      So does that imply that there is a Goldilocks zone of prosperity where society are wealthy enough to afford good infrastructure but not too wealthy so as to become unable to build infrastructure cost effectively? Interesting that too much prosperity would actually lower living standards.
- nextos 4mo ago
  It is difficult. I think the key is that Spain has a large corps of civil engineers working for the government. They plan all projects with great detail and then oversee their execution. Agile regulations against NIMBYism and a world-class civil engineering industry with HQs in Madrid also help. A good analogy is to ask what would need to be true for Madrid to replicate the AI hub in SF? Great VC, top engineers, certain risk-taking mentality, etc. So, it's not easy. The environment that creates a fabric for radical innovation is quite different from a statist mentality, although hopefully, both are not mutually exclusive.
  - rayiner 4mo ago
    The sibling comments explain the regulatory differences. But another factor is that competent engineers and executives have much lower opportunity costs to work for the government in Spain because private sector opportunities are far less lucrative than in the U.S. An ironic downside of America’s leadership in tech and finance is that there is tremendous brain drain out of the public sector.
  - saguntum 4mo ago
    > I think the key is that Spain has a large corps of civil engineers working for the government. I agree with this. In general jobs with the government are seen as high quality jobs from my understanding. Another commenter mentioned that the high salaries in the private sector in the US brain drain away from the US public sector. In Spain salaries are much lower, so this is perhaps less of an issue in certain fields.
- JumpCrisscross 4mo ago
  Aggressive deployment of eminent domain and exemption from CEPA and all the other “think of the children” NIMBY rules.
  - anovikov 4mo ago
    I understand housing construction, but why would a NIMBY be against metro construction? Being close to a metro station means real estate prices skyrocket and that's what NIMBYs are after.
    - gavinsyancey 4mo ago
      * Disruption while it is being built * Fear that a metro will bring in "undesirables" (i.e. poor / lower-class people) * Concerns about noise (whether real or imagined) * Some people just hate change
      - frollogaston 4mo ago
        The "undesirables" they're concerned about are robbers, teenage gangs, or people on drugs who loiter around train stations. The lower-class people don't want to be around them either.
    - gene91 4mo ago
      In metropolitan areas, people want to be close but not too close to train/metro stations or railroad/tunnels. 5-10 minute walk is ideal. Anything closer, people have vibration/noise and crowd/security concerns. In US suburbs, a lot of people are going to drive even if they live next to a train station. So there’s no convenience or property value benefits. To them, they only see downsides.
      - pjerem 4mo ago
        > vibration/noise That’s not true of most modern metro lines that are generally bored and not cut and covered. Bored metro lines create no noise on the surface and are preferred nowadays because there is barely any constraint on the routes you can create. Cut and covered are only used when creating whole new districts.
- thelastgallon 4mo ago
  San Francisco Tried to Build a $1.7 Million Toilet. It’s Still Not Done: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/24/us/san-francisco-toilet.html https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/24/us/san-francisco-toilet.h...
  - arkits 4mo ago
    It opened in 2024 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noe_Valley_public_toilet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noe_Valley_public_toilet
    - frollogaston 4mo ago
      Hm so at least they scaled the cost down to $200K, which suggests that the bad press did something, but that also relied on the whole prefab toilet being donated.
- ak217 4mo ago
  For many years, I observed the San Francisco Caltrain DTX (Downtown Extension, recently rebranded "The Portal"). This is the most important transit missing link in Northern California that is expected to connect two of the highest ridership transit arteries in the Bay Area and eventually unlock single-seat rail transit between Sacramento, San Francisco, San Jose, and points south. DTX is a two-mile tunnel planned to connect the rail line terminus south of San Francisco downtown to Market Street, where the BART subway has the 4 highest ridership train stations in Northern California. The combined project (DTX and Transbay Terminal, the already built train station it's supposed to connect to) is about 15 years late and many billions of dollars over budget. What struck me is a complete lack of urgency and accountability, combined with out-of-control meddling by politicians pursuing completely unrelated goals. The project spent several years in EIR and initial planning, which is to be expected. Then for over a decade, San Francisco's board of supervisors held the project hostage because they wanted to demolish a freeway south of where the actual project is, while bolting on an unrelated and unrealistic tunneling project (the "Pennsylvania Avenue alignment") and taking over the governance of the Caltrain board (Caltrain is the least dysfunctional transit system in the Bay Area, so the Caltrain board was not too keen on this proposal). Eventually, after wasting many years and tens (hundreds?) of millions of dollars, the balance of power on the BoS shifted and they agreed to stop holding the project hostage, restructure the board (TJPA), and re-hire staff to actually plan the tunnel. I've seen multiple project managers/directors come and go, and countless community input meetings happen discussing completely hypothetical project concepts. The money set aside for the project from the original Transbay budget is long gone, and numerous funding opportunities have passed by because the TJPA and its stakeholders were not ready to plan and submit a viable proposal in time. Here are some things I would want to change going forward: - Transit projects should be centrally planned by the state government (i.e. a regional subdivision of an agency similar to Caltrans) with structured opportunities for resident feedback and authority to override most input from local governments. This should include exemptions from CEQA and other review, and strong eminent domain powers. - The Caltrans-like agency should have independent regional metro divisions (i.e. Bay Area, LA area, etc) with dedicated sources of regionally collected funding as well as a mandate to own and lease out land adjacent to transit stations as part of its funding. The divisions should have budgets to retain project management staff who accumulate long-term experience and manage multiple projects. They should have the independent authority to issue bonds and be required to publish construction efficiency and ridership statistics. - Labor unions should be systematically prevented from influencing the course of planning, construction, and project execution. Unions meddle and cause many delays and project complications. Unfortunately, even a structure like that is not a panacea. If you look at CHSRA, it actually has some of the features that I listed above. When CHSRA was first started, the planning process fell victim to meddling from state legislators (most famously the one who forced the route to go through Palmdale), followed by many wasted years fighting NIMBYs and doing useless planning. Ultimately, the only hope I see is to insulate the planners from political interference, set them up with independent funding, have one agency head who is responsible and accountable, and reduce the veto powers that California grants to citizens and governments.
rr808 4mo ago
A lot of the price difference between Europe and USA now are wages. US wages for construction workers in NYC or SF are 2 or 3 times that of Madrid. Lots of things are cheap just for this reason alone.
- hnav 4mo ago
  What came first, the wage or the cost of housing?
  - rr808 4mo ago
    Even states like Mississippi and Iowa have low housing costs and wages much higher than Spain.
    - Shitty-kitty 4mo ago
      If you want to do a real comparison then you have to include the cost of healthcare.
      - rr808 4mo ago
        Yes that is another reason, high healthcare costs for employing workers means higher construction costs in the USA.
      - rayiner 4mo ago
        Yes, but that cuts in the other direction. In the U.S., skilled work like subway construction will provide employer-paid healthcare. U.S. employers pay $1.3 trillion a year in healthcare benefits. You have to account for that on top of the reported wages. So that makes U.S. workers even more expensive relative to workers in Europe, where healthcare will be paid from taxes on the wages paid to employees. Total compensation in the U.S. construction industry is about $46/hour on average: https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/ecec.pdf https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/ecec.pdf. That's almost $92,000 for a 2,000-hour year.
        4mo ago
awinter-py 4mo ago
tldr cut and cover?
- Mashimo 4mo ago
  Inhouse talent
- rsynnott 4mo ago
  Nah, I think most/all of their new lines are single broad (9m diameter) bored tunnels.
thatmf 4mo ago
> Unlike infrastructure projects in Britain or America, which are heavily reliant on external consultants to handle all stages of the project, this group of well-paid in-house engineers led much of the Madrid Metro expansion. The team stayed largely the same throughout the different projects, meaning that they were able to learn from their experience and apply it to future projects. Imagine that: building expertise in-house and within the governmental org results in better planning and management and thus outcomes.
- thewhitetulip 4mo ago
  In India metro is either built by private companies in a Public Private Partnership Or by govt orgs by contracting it out. Both styles have resulted in massive delays so much so that it has become a meme that metro will be inaugurated 100yrs into the future Maybe if Govt hired actual engineers like they do for railways then metros will be prioritised
  - thelastgallon 4mo ago
    India has the most interesting construction projects: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZcRDsIjG3g8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZcRDsIjG3g8 I guess this is what vibe coding in the real world looks like.
    - boxed 4mo ago
      I would guess this is a consequence of people following orders. There's many people that should have refused the work along the way, but only the planner gets the blame, while I'd bet the planner was only following orders also.
      - csomar 4mo ago
        So it’s nobody’s mistake?
        boxed 4mo ago
deleted 4mo ago
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thelastgallon 4mo ago
Meanwhile, bay area has companies with market cap of 30T (50T?), has nonexistent/incompatible and the slowest public transit. 1) BART 'works' for a subset of the population. 2) ACE train is one route only, from Stockton to San Jose. 3) Caltrain is one straight line. Caltrain has a bullet train that takes an hour for ~20-30 miles. 4) There is a ferry service for some parts of north bay. There are probably dozens of other bus systems and ferries and what not, all incompatible and disconnected. When people from bay area (and the big tech companies) tell you they are the greatest minds on the planet solving (or going to solve) world problems, look at their public transit and think. Then weep/laugh. Source: I lived in the North bay, East bay and South bay.
- SJC_Hacker 4mo ago
  The transit times seem long, but often beat driving times especially during rush hour Thw CalTrain being “one line” makes perfect sense because it runs parallel to the Valley No the system is not perfect, but it is still one of the best in the country, except for NYC and maybe Boston
  - msm_ 4mo ago
    >No the system is not perfect, but it is still one of the best in the country, except for NYC and maybe Boston I mean, there are a lot of poorer countries (especially in europe) that manage to solve this in a much better way, so this kind of proves OP point that raw purchasing power is not equivalent to the standard of living.
- SJC_Hacker 4mo ago
  . Caltrain has a bullet train that takes an hour for ~20-30 miles. San Jose Didrion to SFO (4th and Townsend} is 48 miles highway distance. You will not beat the bullet train during rush hour. It would like take you an hour and a half if lucky, probably closer to 2 hours driving
- frollogaston 4mo ago
  BART alone was confusing before they made the trains actually match with the colors on the map, circa 2016. Used to insist on only designating trains by endpoint, except the endpoints changed as they expanded lines, and also changed depending on the day/time. So even a year into daily riding BART to/from work, I took the wrong train a few times. I went to NYC and also various other countries, easily understood the train/subway system even if it was in a language I don't understand. Except for Italy.
jmyeet 4mo ago
In 1968, Garrett Hardin wrote a paper called "The Tragedy of the Commons" [1]. Many people seem to think this term dates further back to Adam Smith or earlier it does not. Well, this became hugely influential in noeliberalism and was used as the justification for governments to sell off their assets in the 1980s and 1990s in particular, all based on this (flawed) idea that private industry was more efficient. This was the era of public-private "partnerships". What that really means was privatizing the profits and socializing the losses while guaranteeing profits. Utilities were generally public prior to this. Now we have private equity buying up utilities because the profits are guaranteed [2]. While electricity prices are regulated, capex on infrastructure isn't so they can simply boost profits by "investing" in the network ie creating extra capacity for data centers to be sold electricity at sub-market rates. Lots of expierments were done and empirical data analyzed on the tragedy of the commons and it never matched the theory. Ultimately, this resulted in Elinor Ostrom winning the 2009 Nobel Price for Economics for disproving it with empirical data. Yet people still quote it. Look at the list of metro systems sorted by length [4]. They're almost all Chinese. The 4th largest is in Chengdu, which only opened in 2010. In 16 years it's now the 4th largest in the world. Pretty much any argument you can use about how China is different will have a contradiction by counterexample. Difficult terran? Chongqing. Old cities? Beijing, Shanghai. City too large? Good one. It's not any single factor that allows for this. It's managed at every single level. For example, China has standardized rolling stock to a handful of variants so you avoid an entire procurement process (and grift). The UK spends billions of pounds to build an otherwise completely unnecessary tunnel under the Chilterns to protect the views of something of the most expensive property in the country [5]. Not in China. Audits of the Second Avenue Subway showed a host of corruption such as so-called "ghost jobs" [6]. Beverly Hills and Santa Monica fought the LA Metro extending into their areas because it might bring in the poors. [1]: https://www.garretthardinsociety.org/articles_pdf/tragedy_of_the_commons.pdf https://www.garretthardinsociety.org/articles_pdf/tragedy_of... [2]: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/pe-buys-utilities-power-ai-183426790.html https://finance.yahoo.com/news/pe-buys-utilities-power-ai-18... [3]: https://www.forbes.com/sites/artcarden/2019/08/07/elinor-ostrom-tragedy-of-the-commons-birthday/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/artcarden/2019/08/07/elinor-ost... [4]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_metro_systems https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_metro_systems [5]: https://www.theguardian.com/business/2026/jan/19/hs2-tunnels-chilterns https://www.theguardian.com/business/2026/jan/19/hs2-tunnels... [6]: https://secondavenuesagas.com/2018/01/01/inside-times-deep-dive-factors-behind-mtas-massive-cost-problems/ https://secondavenuesagas.com/2018/01/01/inside-times-deep-d...
andrewvu0203 4mo ago
[flagged]
kleiba2 4mo ago
By using cheap labor from Africa?
nephihaha 4mo ago
Where does he discuss geology?
cladopa 4mo ago
As an engineer myself working for them 20 years ago, we were certainly not well paid like the article said. Quite the contrary: I was still on University(had not finished the final project) and had to do most of the hard technical work myself for someone else to just overview the results and sign. My salary was miserable. Once I had finished I could earn 3 to 4 times more on several places. They were also extremely creative taking foreign systems, studying the patent and modifying it to pay zero to the creators of the patents. This was done with things like the aluminium beams for electricity delivery that I think was developed by Italians, or the tunnelling machines that had all the pieces replicated inhouse.
- Aerolfos 4mo ago
  Sounds like Spain all right. The article also makes a big deal out of country-level factors like the system of autonomous communities, governance, in-house expertise etc. But all of those should apply to Malaga as well, which also built a metro in the 2000s. But that one became a city-wide joke for always being supposed to open "this year" and that continued for at least 5 years... There was definitively none of the cheap or fast involved in that project, a relatively limited line to make travel to the airport more convenient which still couldn't deliver. Today it actually operates, but I think the rest of the network (it was supposed to be a "proper" metro system and not just isolated lines) is still vaporware. Haven't lived in Malaga in many years, though.
  - throw0101a 4mo ago
    > in-house expertise This is under-appreciated. > I believe that the U.S. suffers from a distinct lack of state capacity. We’ve outsourced many of our core government functions to nonprofits and consultants, resulting in cost bloat and the waste of taxpayer money. We’ve farmed out environmental regulation to the courts and to private citizens, resulting in paralysis for industry and infrastructure alike. And we’ve left ourselves critically vulnerable to threats like pandemics and — most importantly — war. > It’s time for us to bring back the bureaucrats. * https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/america-needs-a-bigger-better-bureaucracy https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/america-needs-a-bigger-better-... Even if you do outsource some level of tasks, you still need in-house folks who know something so you don't get fleeced.
zelphirkalt 4mo ago
Having been in Madrid and having used the metro, I was also impressed by how well it works. Seemingly always on time, and very good price service ratio. You can buy "rides" and one ride means get in at any station and get out at any other station of the whole network, interchange as many times as you want. For, at the time, 1.16 Euro. Compare that to Berlin, where you can pay some 4 Euro or so for limited amount of stops or time. Madrid metro >> Berlin public transport.
- rsynnott 4mo ago
  Though in practice if you live there you probably have a Deutschland-Ticket; the 4 euro fee would be primarily for visitors. Even as a visitor you should just buy an X-day pass in the terrible app if you're going to be using it a lot, assuming that the terrible app deigns to let you do that and doesn't just throw cryptic errors. (What is with German public transport ticket-buying apps? They all seem to be very broken.)
alkyon 4mo ago
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/296888725_Geology_and_the_Construction_of_the_Metro https://www.researchgate.net/publication/296888725_Geology_a... The article is in French, but geology is the key factor. Do you need to bore rock or sandy soil with tar? Is the area seismically active like in Los Angeles? This affects the cost and timeline of metro construction more than just wages.
fsloth 4mo ago
On the topic of public engineering projects overall, I'm wondering are there better books on this topic than Robert Caro's "Power broker"? Which is basically "Soul of a new machine" for municipalities with all the political mess this implies. How do you get stuff done - and at what price.
gjulianm 4mo ago
I am not sure how much do I trust an article about Madrid's metro that doesn't mention the fact that one of those expansions (Line 7, in San Fernando de Henares) was done with political instead of technical criteria, ending up in several hundreds losing their homes and a metro line that has to close every once in a while for repairs. I am also heavily distrusting of the "75 percent of passengers described themselves as ‘very satisfied’". The infrastructure might be ok now, but the frequencies are getting worse (except when the pope visits, in that case they apparently have the money) and in rush hour everything is packed.
brunorro 4mo ago
Well, it grew up really well but that was "geologically easy". Madrid lies over a granitic floor, tunneling there is easier and faster than it would be in Barcelona, Amsterdam or London. So, after having lived in Barcelona and Madrid... Both metros are excellent, but besides covering a smaller area, I still prefer Barcelona metro than Madrid one. IMHO, Barcelona metro looks more like the one in the german cities and Madrid metro looks like London one. Said that, this year Madrid metro users have been quite angry at some line closures at the same time than tunnels were fixed at the same time in the city. It is mostly a managing problem as well, as some of the trains (quite old in some cases) are still being rented instead of bought. Line 7B grew up as well but in San Fernando de Henares some buildings got structural cracks and some houses (over 50) had to be bulldozed. Metro works from 06:00 to 01:00, but there is nothing before of after that time. In Barcelona, for instance, Monday to Thursday works 5:00 to 00:00, on Friday 5:00 to 02:00, and from 05:00 on Saturday to 00:00 on Sunday non-stop. That has been for some years now and means lots of drunk people not taking the car. In Barcelona, metro schedules are tighter as well. In Barcelona, in rush hours you may have a train every 2,5 minutes, in some cases less than 2 minutes. In Madrid it's more like 4 minutes. Trains are newer in Barcelona, too (and wider because most lines use iberic gauge), but that was because until the 90s Barcelona trains had some asbestos on them. Anyways, a metro is not only about the trains, it's also about the stations. Most of Madrid ones have conditioned air and have better lighting than not only the Barcelona ones, but the European ones as well. But, again IMHO, signage in Madrid metro is HORRIBLE. Most of the signs are on the walls, when you are walking on a crowded corridor is easy to take the wrong direction. I need a magnifier to read the metro plan on the wagons. Also, it takes some time to understand that it "drives on its left" in a country where everything else "drives on its right". Not a big thing, but if you come from somewhere in Europe it may take you some time until you get used to all of it.
throw0101a 4mo ago
See also perhaps "The Transit Abundance Playbook": * https://ifp.org/transit-abundance-playbook/ https://ifp.org/transit-abundance-playbook/ that gives specific recommendations to makes things quicker (in the US?).
gonzalohm 4mo ago
What this article misses is that the line 10 expansion to the north was a clear attempt at gaining votes and not an attempt at designing a good subway. If you look at the physical map, you will see that it visits multiple towns that are not in a straight line from Madrid. This causes the line to "zig-zag" and what should take 20 minutes in a straight line becomes a 1h 15min ride. People use it because Madrid has started being hostile to cars and the only two alternatives are trains (which is pretty good, takes 30 min) or buses It's also not 24/7, closes at midnight (and if you are going out in Spain, you will stay way later than that)
BrenBarn 4mo ago
The part about political accountability made me kind of chuckle. > The PP candidate for Assembly President, Alberto Ruiz-Gallardón, promised to deliver 30 new miles (48 kilometers) of metro by the next election, compared to the 14 miles (23 kilometers) the PSOE had delivered during their previous 15 years in government. With this pledge, the PP won a majority and Ruiz-Gallardón was duly elected president. It's hard to see that working in the US, even if we eliminated the jurisdictional patchworks, because what will happen is one candidate will promise 1000 miles and the other will propose destroying existing infrastructure, but they'll also make competing promises on homelessness, affordability, and various culture war issues, while jockeying for supremacy in media prominence, and then whichever one gets elected will build 0 miles and say it was somehow the other one's fault. It's just hard to imagine any sizable electorate in the US actually voting based on an issue like how quickly and cheaply public transportation is built. If we had the kind of people who care about stuff like that, we wouldn't have the problems we have.

232 points by trymas 4mo ago

What would need to be true for SF to replicate this? Would we need alignment at the mayor, state assembly and SFMTA levels?

hnav 4mo ago
- Figuring out NIMBY-ism. Anywhere you run a tunnel you're gonna have people suing you and stalling for decades. Less so if you use a tunnel bore machine, but cut and cover is pretty much a non-starter. - Cost of labor is insanely high due to cost of housing. Short of jumping straight back into the 19th century, setting up temporary housing and bringing in guest laborers this is pretty much non-negotiable. - Not a ton of expertise left in the country since there's 2 new subway tunnels a decade AFAIK. - The grift has got to be worse here than in Spain. There if you get $40k in kickbacks that's a nice bonus, here that barely covers your rent for the year. And then even if you bring the costs down, you have to figure out the taxation. Several billion per mile is the running rate and you may be able to bring that down but then you have ongoing costs. Muni's farebox recovery is only 1/4 of its budget so unless you're making existing lines redundant, there's new ongoing cost. Obviously the choices there will be to go into the pockets of the middle class or not do it at all.
- pibaker 4mo ago
  > Cost of labor is insanely high due to cost of housing This is not the reason. Labor is expensive even in parts of the US with low housing costs. The real, simple reason is the US has a more prosperous economy where the average worker has more opportunity than their Spanish peers. Just look at unemployment rates. The US is at 4.3% right now compared to Spain's 10%. Even at the peak of the GFC the US barely had over 10% unemployment. In the meanwhile Spain has had over 10% employment almost the entire time the past four decades. Of course labor is cheap when that many people are jobless.
  - jaggederest 4mo ago
    U-6 is 8.1%, but spain uses a pretty comparable base employment rate (u-3 equivalent), so fair cop that US unemployment is easily less than half. Relevant: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol_effect - drives a lot of effects in the US where automation paradoxically makes non-automated industries insanely expensive (though not the whole story for certain niches e.g. healthcare and education)
  - BrenBarn 4mo ago
    I mean, if you can have higher unemployment but still build good subways and overall have a good quality of life, maybe that suggests unemployment isn't a great metric for evaluating societies.
    - joe_mamba 4mo ago
      >if you can have higher unemployment but still build good subways and overall have a good quality of life How are you having a great quality of life if you're unemployed? >unemployment isn't a great metric for evaluating societies. IDK man, being unemployed is not great. Not having money sucks. What metrics do you think are better?
  - presentation 4mo ago
    So does that imply that there is a Goldilocks zone of prosperity where society are wealthy enough to afford good infrastructure but not too wealthy so as to become unable to build infrastructure cost effectively? Interesting that too much prosperity would actually lower living standards.
nextos 4mo ago
It is difficult. I think the key is that Spain has a large corps of civil engineers working for the government. They plan all projects with great detail and then oversee their execution. Agile regulations against NIMBYism and a world-class civil engineering industry with HQs in Madrid also help. A good analogy is to ask what would need to be true for Madrid to replicate the AI hub in SF? Great VC, top engineers, certain risk-taking mentality, etc. So, it's not easy. The environment that creates a fabric for radical innovation is quite different from a statist mentality, although hopefully, both are not mutually exclusive.
- rayiner 4mo ago
  The sibling comments explain the regulatory differences. But another factor is that competent engineers and executives have much lower opportunity costs to work for the government in Spain because private sector opportunities are far less lucrative than in the U.S. An ironic downside of America’s leadership in tech and finance is that there is tremendous brain drain out of the public sector.
- saguntum 4mo ago
  > I think the key is that Spain has a large corps of civil engineers working for the government. I agree with this. In general jobs with the government are seen as high quality jobs from my understanding. Another commenter mentioned that the high salaries in the private sector in the US brain drain away from the US public sector. In Spain salaries are much lower, so this is perhaps less of an issue in certain fields.
JumpCrisscross 4mo ago
Aggressive deployment of eminent domain and exemption from CEPA and all the other “think of the children” NIMBY rules.
- anovikov 4mo ago
  I understand housing construction, but why would a NIMBY be against metro construction? Being close to a metro station means real estate prices skyrocket and that's what NIMBYs are after.
  - gavinsyancey 4mo ago
    * Disruption while it is being built * Fear that a metro will bring in "undesirables" (i.e. poor / lower-class people) * Concerns about noise (whether real or imagined) * Some people just hate change
    - frollogaston 4mo ago
      The "undesirables" they're concerned about are robbers, teenage gangs, or people on drugs who loiter around train stations. The lower-class people don't want to be around them either.
  - gene91 4mo ago
    In metropolitan areas, people want to be close but not too close to train/metro stations or railroad/tunnels. 5-10 minute walk is ideal. Anything closer, people have vibration/noise and crowd/security concerns. In US suburbs, a lot of people are going to drive even if they live next to a train station. So there’s no convenience or property value benefits. To them, they only see downsides.
    - pjerem 4mo ago
      > vibration/noise That’s not true of most modern metro lines that are generally bored and not cut and covered. Bored metro lines create no noise on the surface and are preferred nowadays because there is barely any constraint on the routes you can create. Cut and covered are only used when creating whole new districts.
thelastgallon 4mo ago
San Francisco Tried to Build a $1.7 Million Toilet. It’s Still Not Done: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/24/us/san-francisco-toilet.html https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/24/us/san-francisco-toilet.h...
- arkits 4mo ago
  It opened in 2024 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noe_Valley_public_toilet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noe_Valley_public_toilet
  - frollogaston 4mo ago
    Hm so at least they scaled the cost down to $200K, which suggests that the bad press did something, but that also relied on the whole prefab toilet being donated.
ak217 4mo ago
For many years, I observed the San Francisco Caltrain DTX (Downtown Extension, recently rebranded "The Portal"). This is the most important transit missing link in Northern California that is expected to connect two of the highest ridership transit arteries in the Bay Area and eventually unlock single-seat rail transit between Sacramento, San Francisco, San Jose, and points south. DTX is a two-mile tunnel planned to connect the rail line terminus south of San Francisco downtown to Market Street, where the BART subway has the 4 highest ridership train stations in Northern California. The combined project (DTX and Transbay Terminal, the already built train station it's supposed to connect to) is about 15 years late and many billions of dollars over budget. What struck me is a complete lack of urgency and accountability, combined with out-of-control meddling by politicians pursuing completely unrelated goals. The project spent several years in EIR and initial planning, which is to be expected. Then for over a decade, San Francisco's board of supervisors held the project hostage because they wanted to demolish a freeway south of where the actual project is, while bolting on an unrelated and unrealistic tunneling project (the "Pennsylvania Avenue alignment") and taking over the governance of the Caltrain board (Caltrain is the least dysfunctional transit system in the Bay Area, so the Caltrain board was not too keen on this proposal). Eventually, after wasting many years and tens (hundreds?) of millions of dollars, the balance of power on the BoS shifted and they agreed to stop holding the project hostage, restructure the board (TJPA), and re-hire staff to actually plan the tunnel. I've seen multiple project managers/directors come and go, and countless community input meetings happen discussing completely hypothetical project concepts. The money set aside for the project from the original Transbay budget is long gone, and numerous funding opportunities have passed by because the TJPA and its stakeholders were not ready to plan and submit a viable proposal in time. Here are some things I would want to change going forward: - Transit projects should be centrally planned by the state government (i.e. a regional subdivision of an agency similar to Caltrans) with structured opportunities for resident feedback and authority to override most input from local governments. This should include exemptions from CEQA and other review, and strong eminent domain powers. - The Caltrans-like agency should have independent regional metro divisions (i.e. Bay Area, LA area, etc) with dedicated sources of regionally collected funding as well as a mandate to own and lease out land adjacent to transit stations as part of its funding. The divisions should have budgets to retain project management staff who accumulate long-term experience and manage multiple projects. They should have the independent authority to issue bonds and be required to publish construction efficiency and ridership statistics. - Labor unions should be systematically prevented from influencing the course of planning, construction, and project execution. Unions meddle and cause many delays and project complications. Unfortunately, even a structure like that is not a panacea. If you look at CHSRA, it actually has some of the features that I listed above. When CHSRA was first started, the planning process fell victim to meddling from state legislators (most famously the one who forced the route to go through Palmdale), followed by many wasted years fighting NIMBYs and doing useless planning. Ultimately, the only hope I see is to insulate the planners from political interference, set them up with independent funding, have one agency head who is responsible and accountable, and reduce the veto powers that California grants to citizens and governments.

rr808 4mo ago

A lot of the price difference between Europe and USA now are wages. US wages for construction workers in NYC or SF are 2 or 3 times that of Madrid. Lots of things are cheap just for this reason alone.

hnav 4mo ago
What came first, the wage or the cost of housing?
- rr808 4mo ago
  Even states like Mississippi and Iowa have low housing costs and wages much higher than Spain.
  - Shitty-kitty 4mo ago
    If you want to do a real comparison then you have to include the cost of healthcare.
    - rr808 4mo ago
      Yes that is another reason, high healthcare costs for employing workers means higher construction costs in the USA.
    - rayiner 4mo ago
      Yes, but that cuts in the other direction. In the U.S., skilled work like subway construction will provide employer-paid healthcare. U.S. employers pay $1.3 trillion a year in healthcare benefits. You have to account for that on top of the reported wages. So that makes U.S. workers even more expensive relative to workers in Europe, where healthcare will be paid from taxes on the wages paid to employees. Total compensation in the U.S. construction industry is about $46/hour on average: https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/ecec.pdf https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/ecec.pdf. That's almost $92,000 for a 2,000-hour year.
      - 4mo ago

awinter-py 4mo ago

tldr cut and cover?

Mashimo 4mo ago
Inhouse talent
rsynnott 4mo ago
Nah, I think most/all of their new lines are single broad (9m diameter) bored tunnels.

thatmf 4mo ago

> Unlike infrastructure projects in Britain or America, which are heavily reliant on external consultants to handle all stages of the project, this group of well-paid in-house engineers led much of the Madrid Metro expansion. The team stayed largely the same throughout the different projects, meaning that they were able to learn from their experience and apply it to future projects. Imagine that: building expertise in-house and within the governmental org results in better planning and management and thus outcomes.

thewhitetulip 4mo ago
In India metro is either built by private companies in a Public Private Partnership Or by govt orgs by contracting it out. Both styles have resulted in massive delays so much so that it has become a meme that metro will be inaugurated 100yrs into the future Maybe if Govt hired actual engineers like they do for railways then metros will be prioritised
- thelastgallon 4mo ago
  India has the most interesting construction projects: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZcRDsIjG3g8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZcRDsIjG3g8 I guess this is what vibe coding in the real world looks like.
  - boxed 4mo ago
    I would guess this is a consequence of people following orders. There's many people that should have refused the work along the way, but only the planner gets the blame, while I'd bet the planner was only following orders also.
    - csomar 4mo ago
      So it’s nobody’s mistake?
      - boxed 4mo ago

deleted 4mo ago

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thelastgallon 4mo ago

Meanwhile, bay area has companies with market cap of 30T (50T?), has nonexistent/incompatible and the slowest public transit. 1) BART 'works' for a subset of the population. 2) ACE train is one route only, from Stockton to San Jose. 3) Caltrain is one straight line. Caltrain has a bullet train that takes an hour for ~20-30 miles. 4) There is a ferry service for some parts of north bay. There are probably dozens of other bus systems and ferries and what not, all incompatible and disconnected. When people from bay area (and the big tech companies) tell you they are the greatest minds on the planet solving (or going to solve) world problems, look at their public transit and think. Then weep/laugh. Source: I lived in the North bay, East bay and South bay.

SJC_Hacker 4mo ago
The transit times seem long, but often beat driving times especially during rush hour Thw CalTrain being “one line” makes perfect sense because it runs parallel to the Valley No the system is not perfect, but it is still one of the best in the country, except for NYC and maybe Boston
- msm_ 4mo ago
  >No the system is not perfect, but it is still one of the best in the country, except for NYC and maybe Boston I mean, there are a lot of poorer countries (especially in europe) that manage to solve this in a much better way, so this kind of proves OP point that raw purchasing power is not equivalent to the standard of living.
SJC_Hacker 4mo ago
. Caltrain has a bullet train that takes an hour for ~20-30 miles. San Jose Didrion to SFO (4th and Townsend} is 48 miles highway distance. You will not beat the bullet train during rush hour. It would like take you an hour and a half if lucky, probably closer to 2 hours driving
frollogaston 4mo ago
BART alone was confusing before they made the trains actually match with the colors on the map, circa 2016. Used to insist on only designating trains by endpoint, except the endpoints changed as they expanded lines, and also changed depending on the day/time. So even a year into daily riding BART to/from work, I took the wrong train a few times. I went to NYC and also various other countries, easily understood the train/subway system even if it was in a language I don't understand. Except for Italy.

jmyeet 4mo ago

In 1968, Garrett Hardin wrote a paper called "The Tragedy of the Commons" [1]. Many people seem to think this term dates further back to Adam Smith or earlier it does not. Well, this became hugely influential in noeliberalism and was used as the justification for governments to sell off their assets in the 1980s and 1990s in particular, all based on this (flawed) idea that private industry was more efficient. This was the era of public-private "partnerships". What that really means was privatizing the profits and socializing the losses while guaranteeing profits. Utilities were generally public prior to this. Now we have private equity buying up utilities because the profits are guaranteed [2]. While electricity prices are regulated, capex on infrastructure isn't so they can simply boost profits by "investing" in the network ie creating extra capacity for data centers to be sold electricity at sub-market rates. Lots of expierments were done and empirical data analyzed on the tragedy of the commons and it never matched the theory. Ultimately, this resulted in Elinor Ostrom winning the 2009 Nobel Price for Economics for disproving it with empirical data. Yet people still quote it. Look at the list of metro systems sorted by length [4]. They're almost all Chinese. The 4th largest is in Chengdu, which only opened in 2010. In 16 years it's now the 4th largest in the world. Pretty much any argument you can use about how China is different will have a contradiction by counterexample. Difficult terran? Chongqing. Old cities? Beijing, Shanghai. City too large? Good one. It's not any single factor that allows for this. It's managed at every single level. For example, China has standardized rolling stock to a handful of variants so you avoid an entire procurement process (and grift). The UK spends billions of pounds to build an otherwise completely unnecessary tunnel under the Chilterns to protect the views of something of the most expensive property in the country [5]. Not in China. Audits of the Second Avenue Subway showed a host of corruption such as so-called "ghost jobs" [6]. Beverly Hills and Santa Monica fought the LA Metro extending into their areas because it might bring in the poors. [1]: https://www.garretthardinsociety.org/articles_pdf/tragedy_of_the_commons.pdf https://www.garretthardinsociety.org/articles_pdf/tragedy_of... [2]: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/pe-buys-utilities-power-ai-183426790.html https://finance.yahoo.com/news/pe-buys-utilities-power-ai-18... [3]: https://www.forbes.com/sites/artcarden/2019/08/07/elinor-ostrom-tragedy-of-the-commons-birthday/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/artcarden/2019/08/07/elinor-ost... [4]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_metro_systems https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_metro_systems [5]: https://www.theguardian.com/business/2026/jan/19/hs2-tunnels-chilterns https://www.theguardian.com/business/2026/jan/19/hs2-tunnels... [6]: https://secondavenuesagas.com/2018/01/01/inside-times-deep-dive-factors-behind-mtas-massive-cost-problems/ https://secondavenuesagas.com/2018/01/01/inside-times-deep-d...

andrewvu0203 4mo ago

[flagged]

kleiba2 4mo ago

By using cheap labor from Africa?

nephihaha 4mo ago

Where does he discuss geology?

cladopa 4mo ago

As an engineer myself working for them 20 years ago, we were certainly not well paid like the article said. Quite the contrary: I was still on University(had not finished the final project) and had to do most of the hard technical work myself for someone else to just overview the results and sign. My salary was miserable. Once I had finished I could earn 3 to 4 times more on several places. They were also extremely creative taking foreign systems, studying the patent and modifying it to pay zero to the creators of the patents. This was done with things like the aluminium beams for electricity delivery that I think was developed by Italians, or the tunnelling machines that had all the pieces replicated inhouse.

Aerolfos 4mo ago
Sounds like Spain all right. The article also makes a big deal out of country-level factors like the system of autonomous communities, governance, in-house expertise etc. But all of those should apply to Malaga as well, which also built a metro in the 2000s. But that one became a city-wide joke for always being supposed to open "this year" and that continued for at least 5 years... There was definitively none of the cheap or fast involved in that project, a relatively limited line to make travel to the airport more convenient which still couldn't deliver. Today it actually operates, but I think the rest of the network (it was supposed to be a "proper" metro system and not just isolated lines) is still vaporware. Haven't lived in Malaga in many years, though.
- throw0101a 4mo ago
  > in-house expertise This is under-appreciated. > I believe that the U.S. suffers from a distinct lack of state capacity. We’ve outsourced many of our core government functions to nonprofits and consultants, resulting in cost bloat and the waste of taxpayer money. We’ve farmed out environmental regulation to the courts and to private citizens, resulting in paralysis for industry and infrastructure alike. And we’ve left ourselves critically vulnerable to threats like pandemics and — most importantly — war. > It’s time for us to bring back the bureaucrats. * https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/america-needs-a-bigger-better-bureaucracy https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/america-needs-a-bigger-better-... Even if you do outsource some level of tasks, you still need in-house folks who know something so you don't get fleeced.

zelphirkalt 4mo ago

Having been in Madrid and having used the metro, I was also impressed by how well it works. Seemingly always on time, and very good price service ratio. You can buy "rides" and one ride means get in at any station and get out at any other station of the whole network, interchange as many times as you want. For, at the time, 1.16 Euro. Compare that to Berlin, where you can pay some 4 Euro or so for limited amount of stops or time. Madrid metro >> Berlin public transport.

rsynnott 4mo ago
Though in practice if you live there you probably have a Deutschland-Ticket; the 4 euro fee would be primarily for visitors. Even as a visitor you should just buy an X-day pass in the terrible app if you're going to be using it a lot, assuming that the terrible app deigns to let you do that and doesn't just throw cryptic errors. (What is with German public transport ticket-buying apps? They all seem to be very broken.)

alkyon 4mo ago

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/296888725_Geology_and_the_Construction_of_the_Metro https://www.researchgate.net/publication/296888725_Geology_a... The article is in French, but geology is the key factor. Do you need to bore rock or sandy soil with tar? Is the area seismically active like in Los Angeles? This affects the cost and timeline of metro construction more than just wages.

fsloth 4mo ago

On the topic of public engineering projects overall, I'm wondering are there better books on this topic than Robert Caro's "Power broker"? Which is basically "Soul of a new machine" for municipalities with all the political mess this implies. How do you get stuff done - and at what price.

gjulianm 4mo ago

I am not sure how much do I trust an article about Madrid's metro that doesn't mention the fact that one of those expansions (Line 7, in San Fernando de Henares) was done with political instead of technical criteria, ending up in several hundreds losing their homes and a metro line that has to close every once in a while for repairs. I am also heavily distrusting of the "75 percent of passengers described themselves as ‘very satisfied’". The infrastructure might be ok now, but the frequencies are getting worse (except when the pope visits, in that case they apparently have the money) and in rush hour everything is packed.

brunorro 4mo ago

Well, it grew up really well but that was "geologically easy". Madrid lies over a granitic floor, tunneling there is easier and faster than it would be in Barcelona, Amsterdam or London. So, after having lived in Barcelona and Madrid... Both metros are excellent, but besides covering a smaller area, I still prefer Barcelona metro than Madrid one. IMHO, Barcelona metro looks more like the one in the german cities and Madrid metro looks like London one. Said that, this year Madrid metro users have been quite angry at some line closures at the same time than tunnels were fixed at the same time in the city. It is mostly a managing problem as well, as some of the trains (quite old in some cases) are still being rented instead of bought. Line 7B grew up as well but in San Fernando de Henares some buildings got structural cracks and some houses (over 50) had to be bulldozed. Metro works from 06:00 to 01:00, but there is nothing before of after that time. In Barcelona, for instance, Monday to Thursday works 5:00 to 00:00, on Friday 5:00 to 02:00, and from 05:00 on Saturday to 00:00 on Sunday non-stop. That has been for some years now and means lots of drunk people not taking the car. In Barcelona, metro schedules are tighter as well. In Barcelona, in rush hours you may have a train every 2,5 minutes, in some cases less than 2 minutes. In Madrid it's more like 4 minutes. Trains are newer in Barcelona, too (and wider because most lines use iberic gauge), but that was because until the 90s Barcelona trains had some asbestos on them. Anyways, a metro is not only about the trains, it's also about the stations. Most of Madrid ones have conditioned air and have better lighting than not only the Barcelona ones, but the European ones as well. But, again IMHO, signage in Madrid metro is HORRIBLE. Most of the signs are on the walls, when you are walking on a crowded corridor is easy to take the wrong direction. I need a magnifier to read the metro plan on the wagons. Also, it takes some time to understand that it "drives on its left" in a country where everything else "drives on its right". Not a big thing, but if you come from somewhere in Europe it may take you some time until you get used to all of it.

throw0101a 4mo ago

See also perhaps "The Transit Abundance Playbook": * https://ifp.org/transit-abundance-playbook/ https://ifp.org/transit-abundance-playbook/ that gives specific recommendations to makes things quicker (in the US?).

gonzalohm 4mo ago

What this article misses is that the line 10 expansion to the north was a clear attempt at gaining votes and not an attempt at designing a good subway. If you look at the physical map, you will see that it visits multiple towns that are not in a straight line from Madrid. This causes the line to "zig-zag" and what should take 20 minutes in a straight line becomes a 1h 15min ride. People use it because Madrid has started being hostile to cars and the only two alternatives are trains (which is pretty good, takes 30 min) or buses It's also not 24/7, closes at midnight (and if you are going out in Spain, you will stay way later than that)

BrenBarn 4mo ago

The part about political accountability made me kind of chuckle. > The PP candidate for Assembly President, Alberto Ruiz-Gallardón, promised to deliver 30 new miles (48 kilometers) of metro by the next election, compared to the 14 miles (23 kilometers) the PSOE had delivered during their previous 15 years in government. With this pledge, the PP won a majority and Ruiz-Gallardón was duly elected president. It's hard to see that working in the US, even if we eliminated the jurisdictional patchworks, because what will happen is one candidate will promise 1000 miles and the other will propose destroying existing infrastructure, but they'll also make competing promises on homelessness, affordability, and various culture war issues, while jockeying for supremacy in media prominence, and then whichever one gets elected will build 0 miles and say it was somehow the other one's fault. It's just hard to imagine any sizable electorate in the US actually voting based on an issue like how quickly and cheaply public transportation is built. If we had the kind of people who care about stuff like that, we wouldn't have the problems we have.