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thatmf 5 hours 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.
darreninthenet 57 minutes ago [-]
The UK used to have that with its railway projects - the old government owned British Rail had massive and extensive knowledge on large rail infrastructure projects and no need for expensive external "consultants". That all got lost when the Tories tore it apart into private companies... hopefully now they are being renationalised as their contracts expire, at some point in the future they can regain all that expertise in-house again.
mentalgear 15 minutes ago [-]
[dead]
gib444 2 hours ago [-]
In the UK infrastructure projects are about creating jobs and making their friends rich first, and providing some kind of useful infrastructure last (and also optional)
There is so much thievery of public funds it's just corruption disguised as incompetence and the public believe it every time
fer 2 hours ago [-]
In Spain it is the same, the Metro de Madrid being an anomaly rather than the norm (for now).
The 2008 crisis had a special flavor in Spain, cajas de ahorros (privately owned, but politically controlled banks) worked with politicians -surprise- to grant mortgages (i.e. lending someone else's money) to buyers of the housing constructions they themselves had their fingers in, at a time regular banks were already wary of the direction of the housing market. It wasn't uncommon people being told which bank to go to to obtain a mortgage that'd be usually refused.
I guess this is what vibe coding in the real world looks like.
boxed 2 hours 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 58 minutes ago [-]
So it’s nobody’s mistake?
sieve 2 hours ago [-]
Depends on the state and the political environment. Some people will deliberately sabotage projects for political reasons. The biggest problem with metros in India is the inability to provide last mile connectivity. Some cities will run buses in competition to metro lines, or provide free bus travel to women. Both actions compete against a fast mode of travel.
So, it is an India problem, not a government problem.
porridgeraisin 3 hours ago [-]
Metro doesn't use PPP or directly public in any Indian city I can think of, they setup SPVs and actually have stable engineering and finance teams across contracts. And most of the engineers are taken from railways only in any case. And it's a really good promotion path, ministers are known to select successful metro spv administrators for lucrative roles in the state secretariat. They even have lateral movement between SPVs of different cities, e.g many top CMRL people are ex-DMRC. So the talent problem is not there.
The reason for delays are more boring: land acquisition, coordination among nhai, state pwd, railways, utilities, etc etc. But overwhelmingly land acquisition is the main bottleneck. If land acquisition fails or isn't exactly as you planned then you have to tweak the project itself which ripples delays all the way into the construction contracts, safety approvals, NOCs etc etc. After you resolve that, flyovers and roads are simultaneously being constructed in most cities since they are all expanding so you have to coordinate with that. And india from pre-independence has utilities placed under the middle of the road, as opposed to the sides of the road. Now this is not an iron clad rule (nothing is, in india) but it's generally true. This means that you also have to coordinate with utilities. And most of them were laid in the last century without any record left of where they were laid, so you can't even plan ahead you dig and you find out you've slashed a utility line. Each coordination point above is an NOC and all put together it takes time.
thelastgallon 4 hours 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.
thomasfl 2 hours ago [-]
Private companies and competition, solve a lot of problems in the society. Like making food supply work. Planning and building cities and public transport is something the public sector is better at solving. Clean, nice and walkable cities with a good working public transport system, is important for the local economy to work. City planning is the art of compromises - no body get’s what they want, but overall everybody is better off in the end.
tsimionescu 2 hours ago [-]
> Private companies and competition, solve a lot of problems in the society. Like making food supply work.
Is there any food market in the developed world that is not heavily subsidized by the state?
raybb 40 minutes ago [-]
New Zealand and Australia have very minimal subsidies.
I do wonder what it would be like if our system was designed to feed people rather than to make money.
It's baffling that in Florida the land of oranges you see little cups of pealed that say product of Spain and packaged in Thailand. I know supply chains are complex and labor costs are a big factor but still.
jerojero 14 minutes ago [-]
Its natural for companies to push boundaries for better and better profits. It's sort of their nature.
Things might be fine in Australia and NZ right now, but as the hydric crisis deepens we might see a need for government to step up.
I think a problem is that, if you have a market-first approach you run the risk of the businesses growing so large and powerful that when you do need to intervene, it has become an impossible task. This happened with banking, it is happening with consulting in the UK and big tech in the US. Not to mention big pharma pretty much everywhere.
So I think its a very careful balance of carrot and stick that the government needs to have over its industries.
tirant 24 minutes ago [-]
If including tax breaks, New Zealand and Australia are not subsidized in total terms.
But the level of efficiency achieved thanks to the development of technology by private companies is what keeps them efficient around the world.
SJC_Hacker 3 hours 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 2 hours 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.
SJC_Hacker 4 hours 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_ 2 hours 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.
kurthr 2 hours ago [-]
The morning "bullet" trains (503/507/511) from San Jose Diridon take 1hr to go 48miles with 10 stops. I think electrification and widening to 3 tracks improved times and reduces the likelihood of delays. Certainly, they run more often now, about every 10 minutes at rush hour and every 30min off hours and weekends.
Why would anyone prefer public transit over a self driving comfortable personal car?
dkdbejwi383 27 minutes ago [-]
In addition to the other good reasons also raised, PT has much more optimal land-use than private cars. Train stations or metro stations take up relatively little land and can be integrated with business and services or have nice public plazas and small parks. Compared with multi-lane highways, parking lots, giant intersections that are hostile to pedestrians and active transport.
tirant 21 minutes ago [-]
Because it’s available to everyone, including kids and elderly, and does not need high upfront payments.
I can just move to Madrid and move anywhere in the city for around 1-2€ per trip without upfront investment of 20.000€ for a car, plus insurance, maintenance, fuel and taxes.
mitthrowaway2 36 minutes ago [-]
Trains don't get stuck in traffic, and some of them have restrooms and space to walk around in. They're also better for the people outside of the vehicle.
wasmitnetzen 35 minutes ago [-]
Because of the lesser impact on land usage, fuel usage, noise, ...?
neil_s 6 hours ago [-]
What would need to be true for SF to replicate this? Would we need alignment at the mayor, state assembly and SFMTA levels?
nextos 6 hours 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 6 hours 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 5 hours 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.
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.
hnav 6 hours 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 4 hours 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 4 hours 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 - 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)
ak217 4 hours 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.
JumpCrisscross 5 hours ago [-]
Aggressive deployment of eminent domain and exemption from CEPA and all the other “think of the children” NIMBY rules.
anovikov 4 hours 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.
gene91 4 hours 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.
Symbiote 1 hours ago [-]
Living directly in view of a metro entrance within the inner city will be have noise from people using it, but one minute walk away is considered perfect in Europe.
Many people who visit me for the first time comment on this.
On the very quietest summer night, when there's no ventilation systems running etc, I can sometimes hear an occasional dum-dum, dum-dum when I lie in bed. The tunnel is directly under the building.
In suburbia closer is also better, but away from the track is better than along the track of it's above ground.
The idea of security concerns sounds ridiculous to me.
1 hours ago [-]
dkdbejwi383 25 minutes ago [-]
Surely you'd be _more_ secure near a station as there are more "eyes on the street" near an activity hub than tucked away in an isolated suburban node
contubernio 3 hours ago [-]
False. I live in Madrid and being near a metro station a. Has no issues (for almost all stations) and b. is considered highly desirable. 10 minute walk is considered a lot (mine is 5, to either of the two nearby stations - at 10-12 minutes I can walk to four stations). These are genuine underground metro. They're deep and vibrations are mostly not an issue.
The article paints a somewhat biased view of the construction process. It gives too much credit to Gallardo and the pp and conveniently ignored the serious issues in the sam Fernando de Henares área created by too rapid construction that ignored environmental and design issues in the Sandy soil near the Jarama river. Several hundred apartments have been condemned because of it and a whole neighborhood affected ...
But it is the best metro I've seen in Europe or north america. Most usable and cheapest to use.
pjerem 3 hours 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.
gavinsyancey 4 hours 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 1 hours 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.
rr808 6 hours 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 6 hours ago [-]
What came first, the wage or the cost of housing?
contubernio 3 hours ago [-]
In Madrid where the average monthly pretax salary is below 1500 a shared room with four strangers costs 400-709 a month and small aprtments in bad neighborhoods cost 3000-4000 a square meter to buy.
rr808 5 hours ago [-]
Even states like Mississippi and Iowa have low housing costs and wages much higher than Spain.
Shitty-kitty 5 hours ago [-]
If you want to do a real comparison then you have to include the cost of healthcare.
rayiner 4 hours 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.
Yes that is another reason, high healthcare costs for employing workers means higher construction costs in the USA.
whatever1 3 hours ago [-]
The US project prices are not just 3X the EU project prices. It’s just that the construction companies & consultancies overcharge. In the US the overhead is insane. From construction, to universities, to hospitals. Insane overheads everywhere.
nephihaha 1 hours ago [-]
Where does he discuss geology?
jmyeet 4 hours 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.
Visited China recently and it's pretty astonishing what can be achieved if you just ignore the whiners, complainers, environmentalists, and local governments. NIMBYs? Get lost. Have unique local culture? Funny but no. There's a special kind of beetle living there? Tough shit. It's ugly? So is your face. Etc. This is how the West built its infrastructure back in the day - nobody consulted NIMBYs or the native Americans on railway construction - but now we're too good for this, and we reap the consequences.
I'm still on team democracy, and we'll see how long it takes before China regresses to the norm of dictatorships. Xi has already broken the term limits. Nothing suggests he won't slowly lose his grip on reality like most dictators. But for now China has its charms.
SJC_Hacker 4 hours ago [-]
Rail lines in the US were not great examples of this. Many towns refused to grant right of way to the rail unless a stop was added which basically forced passengers to change trains. As a result, there’s were so many changes it took two to three days to get from say, Chicago to NYC when it should have taken no longer than a day
nephihaha 1 hours ago [-]
The problem with the Chinese system is when there are genuine engineering problems then people are afraid to voice them.
p.s. I don't think Native Americans are a factor in most of the west except Canada and the USA.
hollerith 4 hours ago [-]
>Utilities were generally public prior to this.
Which utilities do you believe were government-funded or government-owned in the West? I will grant you most water supplies. Which other utilities?
fidonz 4 hours ago [-]
NZ: Electricity, gas, public transport, telecommunications.
andrewvu0203 3 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
5 hours ago [-]
awinter-py 5 hours ago [-]
tldr cut and cover?
rsynnott 42 minutes ago [-]
Nah, I think most/all of their new lines are single broad (9m diameter) bored tunnels.
Imagine that: building expertise in-house and within the governmental org results in better planning and management and thus outcomes.
There is so much thievery of public funds it's just corruption disguised as incompetence and the public believe it every time
Some flagrant cases:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ciudad_Real_International_Airp...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castell%C3%B3n%E2%80%93Costa_A...
https://maps.app.goo.gl/8BRnx8eQFfihvHmv5
https://english.elpais.com/elpais/2019/05/17/inenglish/15580...
The 2008 crisis had a special flavor in Spain, cajas de ahorros (privately owned, but politically controlled banks) worked with politicians -surprise- to grant mortgages (i.e. lending someone else's money) to buyers of the housing constructions they themselves had their fingers in, at a time regular banks were already wary of the direction of the housing market. It wasn't uncommon people being told which bank to go to to obtain a mortgage that'd be usually refused.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Savings_bank_(Spain)
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
I guess this is what vibe coding in the real world looks like.
So, it is an India problem, not a government problem.
The reason for delays are more boring: land acquisition, coordination among nhai, state pwd, railways, utilities, etc etc. But overwhelmingly land acquisition is the main bottleneck. If land acquisition fails or isn't exactly as you planned then you have to tweak the project itself which ripples delays all the way into the construction contracts, safety approvals, NOCs etc etc. After you resolve that, flyovers and roads are simultaneously being constructed in most cities since they are all expanding so you have to coordinate with that. And india from pre-independence has utilities placed under the middle of the road, as opposed to the sides of the road. Now this is not an iron clad rule (nothing is, in india) but it's generally true. This means that you also have to coordinate with utilities. And most of them were laid in the last century without any record left of where they were laid, so you can't even plan ahead you dig and you find out you've slashed a utility line. Each coordination point above is an NOC and all put together it takes time.
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.
Is there any food market in the developed world that is not heavily subsidized by the state?
I do wonder what it would be like if our system was designed to feed people rather than to make money.
It's baffling that in Florida the land of oranges you see little cups of pealed that say product of Spain and packaged in Thailand. I know supply chains are complex and labor costs are a big factor but still.
Things might be fine in Australia and NZ right now, but as the hydric crisis deepens we might see a need for government to step up.
I think a problem is that, if you have a market-first approach you run the risk of the businesses growing so large and powerful that when you do need to intervene, it has become an impossible task. This happened with banking, it is happening with consulting in the UK and big tech in the US. Not to mention big pharma pretty much everywhere.
So I think its a very careful balance of carrot and stick that the government needs to have over its industries.
But the level of efficiency achieved thanks to the development of technology by private companies is what keeps them efficient around the world.
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
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.
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
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.
https://www.caltrain.com/?active_tab=route_explorer_tab
I can just move to Madrid and move anywhere in the city for around 1-2€ per trip without upfront investment of 20.000€ for a car, plus insurance, maintenance, fuel and taxes.
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.
An ironic downside of America’s leadership in tech and finance is that there is tremendous brain drain out of the public sector.
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.
- 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.
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.
Relevant: 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)
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.
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.
Many people who visit me for the first time comment on this.
On the very quietest summer night, when there's no ventilation systems running etc, I can sometimes hear an occasional dum-dum, dum-dum when I lie in bed. The tunnel is directly under the building.
In suburbia closer is also better, but away from the track is better than along the track of it's above ground.
The idea of security concerns sounds ridiculous to me.
The article paints a somewhat biased view of the construction process. It gives too much credit to Gallardo and the pp and conveniently ignored the serious issues in the sam Fernando de Henares área created by too rapid construction that ignored environmental and design issues in the Sandy soil near the Jarama river. Several hundred apartments have been condemned because of it and a whole neighborhood affected ...
But it is the best metro I've seen in Europe or north america. Most usable and cheapest to use.
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.
* 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
Total compensation in the U.S. construction industry is about $46/hour on average: https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/ecec.pdf. That's almost $92,000 for a 2,000-hour year.
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...
[2]: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/pe-buys-utilities-power-ai-18...
[3]: https://www.forbes.com/sites/artcarden/2019/08/07/elinor-ost...
[4]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_metro_systems
[5]: https://www.theguardian.com/business/2026/jan/19/hs2-tunnels...
[6]: https://secondavenuesagas.com/2018/01/01/inside-times-deep-d...
I'm still on team democracy, and we'll see how long it takes before China regresses to the norm of dictatorships. Xi has already broken the term limits. Nothing suggests he won't slowly lose his grip on reality like most dictators. But for now China has its charms.
p.s. I don't think Native Americans are a factor in most of the west except Canada and the USA.
Which utilities do you believe were government-funded or government-owned in the West? I will grant you most water supplies. Which other utilities?