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 4 hours 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 2 hours 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.
Woah, this is really a “worst person you known just made a great point” moment for me.
presentation 2 minutes ago [-]
Curious, what do you dislike about him? I find many of his takes to be pretty reasonable, though he gets temperamental and snarky sometimes.
rob74 3 hours ago [-]
> the tunnelling machines that had all the pieces replicated inhouse
Wait... did you build your own tunnel boring machines? Or just spare parts for them?
chmod775 2 hours ago [-]
If you have the capability to manufacture heavy machinery, building it by copying an existing design is not rocket science. They're not crazy complicated and often built or adapted to a dig specific tunnel anyways.
Now, operating a tunnel-boring machine, that's a different beast, but you'd have to do that either way. Probably should get outside help if your engineers and scientists haven't planned and dug a tunnel in their life.
thatmf 10 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 6 hours 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.
KaiserPro 43 minutes ago [-]
Its much more pernicious than that.
Timetables, expansion any kind of change to rail running is approved centrally in DfT. The private operators are just that, they only run the trains to spec, on the track provided. In some cases they don't even run the stations they stop at.
What is criminal, and why the same mistakes that keep on being made, is that there little apatite or budget to retain expertise in house. This means that the DfT is reliant on consultants for most things.
THis would be fine if the people making the decisions were not people like chris grayling or grant schapps, who have no care for long term issues, only short term career success.
It costs a shit ton more, and there is less accountability. Its basically like asking claude to design the system for you. Sure it appears faster, but in the end it you'll have to redo all of it manually with no context.
The whole great british railway shit is basically just re-branding the regional franchises, and nothing more.
mentalgear 5 hours ago [-]
It's the standard privatisation playbook, also used with the NHS: first, politicians (often Conservatives) underfund and fracture a world-class public system (e.g. healthcare). Then, once it's struggling, their private-equity and investor allies swoop in to 'save the day' by privatizing it for profit as the 'only option to restore quality'.
dspillett 3 hours ago [-]
> often Conservatives
Almost always conservatives, the key exception in recent history being Tony “Tory Lite” Blair's time in office (who pretty much ignored many years of promises to undo the direction Thatcher and Major had taken NHS and university/student funding should Labour be returned to power, greatly irritating many of us who voted for them that time around). Unfortunately this is a common pattern: parties like Labour get control and realise how hard it is going to be to fight what has been set in motion so do too little or actively push on in the existing direction (just applying a little lipstick to the pig for public appearances). The current lot are trying to do better in that regard, but are failing so impressively elsewhere that they likely won't have a second term and one term is not enough to build momentum, so their replacement will just put a stop to any good that has actually been achieved. The scary thing is that their replacement (assuming Refrom don't rip themselves apart from the inside between now and the next election, which is something there is still hope of happening) might make the old Tories look extremely moderate.
rob74 2 hours ago [-]
...and then everyone acts surprised that things become more expensive.
Schiendelman 4 hours ago [-]
There are serious issues with that approach. If you don't have continuous funding from the projects, you end up with a big overhead of highly paid engineers without work for them to do. Then you have to lay them off, so you lose the institutional knowledge anyway.
We tried this early on with sound transit in Washington state, and because engineering work is boom and bust on a project by project basis, the model just doesn't work. The good people left for better jobs, and we were left with a team that basically couldn't produce, leading to massive delays on the next set of projects.
0zer0 4 hours ago [-]
I think it is for this reason that Switzerland has a fixed budget for their railway construction. And it seems to pay off, Swiss railway is exceptional.
Schiendelman 2 hours ago [-]
With a small country, stable government, and national level funding, that's perfectly feasible. I wish that would work in the US, but we have hundreds of transit agencies that do capital projects.
BDPW 47 minutes ago [-]
Has nothing to do with size, see Japan and China.
inglor_cz 3 hours ago [-]
What about renting them out to other cities? There are dozens of cities in Europe alone that are planning extensions of their metro systems, or even building ones from scratch (Cluj-Napoca in Romania, recently. Krakow in Poland soon.)
A morbid equivalent from the Middle Ages: bigger medieval cities had their own headsman, and they solved the risk of underemployment by sending him on external "jobs" to smaller towns where executions were rare.
Schiendelman 2 hours ago [-]
At that point, you're just hiring an engineering firm, so there's no real benefit to government doing it.
inglor_cz 1 hours ago [-]
There is, because your own projects always get a priority. Plus, the institutional history. If the same group of people projected your metro for the last 40 years, they carry a lot of local know-how in their heads.
gib444 7 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 6 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.
To say they were "privately owned" doesn't sound right. Cajas de ahorros had no shareholders so profits were not distributed to any "private owner". Leaders and executives of the Cajas were appointed by a mix of local councils, unions, autonomous regions, and other non-private organizations. Juridically, they were "private organizations", but factually, they were just a form of state-owned company, as it was the municipalities and regions that made the important governing decisions.
flr03 4 hours ago [-]
At least Spain has something, UK has something to show for it the numbers are crazy.
KaiserPro 41 minutes ago [-]
> the UK infrastructure projects are about creating jobs and making their friends rich first,
So out and out corruption is rare in the UK. For example Farage has just received 5 million in dodgy money, which is more money than all of the previous political money scandals since Mandelson.
But to your point, most of the time and money in uk infra is spent trying to navigate planning laws and nimbys
thewhitetulip 10 hours 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
I guess this is what vibe coding in the real world looks like.
boxed 6 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 6 hours ago [-]
So it’s nobody’s mistake?
boxed 2 hours ago [-]
No, that's the opposite of what I'm saying. I'm saying they are all blame worthy, and their culture itself is also blame worthy.
sieve 6 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.
thewhitetulip 1 hours ago [-]
metro construction is delayed in every state ruling party or opposition
Look at the memes for Pune metro line 3 and for Karnataka metro (forgot which line)
porridgeraisin 8 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.
thewhitetulip 1 hours ago [-]
Some metros are PPP
Some are by contractors
However, all are perpetually delayed
Pune metro line 3's construction status was 85+% for over 1yr now
Land acquisition was over a long time ago. Progress on road is just invisible despite being built by a private company which will operate it for the next 30yrs
porridgeraisin 32 minutes ago [-]
All Indian metros without exception are managed by SPVs.
Land acquisition is not something that gets over. It is a continuous process. Then the court cases if any always show up with some delay, and that can revoke transfers. Then you have to look for alternative land parcels, which may involve minor reroutes in the worst case. It's the same with finances, everything comes in tranches, land, money, everything.
> Pune
You can see this entire documentation[1], make sure to click on the two section headers to reveal content. While no doubt the document might mislead you about the extent of the delay, and really % done means nothing in these projects where the unknowns are unknown, you can clearly see it's the exact coordination issues I had mentioned earlier: utility coordination, handling expanding flyovers/roads, etc.
> All are perpetually delayed
Because, it's not an internal organisation issue or a personnel issue (i.e "hire more engineers"). The exact organisation does not matter when the problems are of the external kind mentioned above.
Now, the problems mentioned in TFA don't occur here because the SPVs house long term employees with - for government standards - fairly robust institutional knowledge.
If you want real private efficiencies, you have to give the entire responsibility of many departments to the private company. So, a near-private whole sub-municipality. Just making the metro SPV private is meaningless, although definitely better than having it under PWD...
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 6 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 6 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 5 hours 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 5 hours 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.
sillyfluke 4 hours ago [-]
>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.
It's also said that four companies control 85% beef market in the US, which normally should make people rather queasy I would think.
tirant 5 hours 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.
notarobot123 3 hours ago [-]
> Like making food supply work
Producers make what will sell but without any incentives, subsidies or regulation this would be a mess of profit chasing, unsafe practices and fragile supply chains.
In my view, the value of the public sector is in setting the rule of the game for private actors in exactly this kind of way (rules and incentives) instead of the politics of picking winners and losers directly or making direct decisions about what to build where, etc. Rule makers play the meta-game of designing how the game works and they leave agents free to play as they wish.
SJC_Hacker 8 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
kj4211cash 17 minutes ago [-]
The two things you reference are very loosely related. I studied Transportation Engineering in the Civil department at UC Berkeley. I have always been very interested in public transportation. But I work as a Data Scientist in Silicon Valley rather than at one of the public transportation agencies. Because it pays roughly 10x as much. Every single one of the smartest people I went to school with is also now working in tech in Silicon Valley. A lot work on stuff like advertising optimization. Sigh.
frollogaston 7 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 8 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_ 7 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 7 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?
rsynnott 12 minutes ago [-]
Well, first of all, there is no such thing.
However, even if such a thing did exist, you still have to contend with traffic and total road capacity. So, for instance, taking local systems (details will vary by city, but not much), a double-decker bus is ten meters long and takes ~100 people. A tram is 55m long and takes about 550 people. A commuter train is 160m long and takes a thousand people (and doesn't share roads, of course). A car is 4-5m long and typically carries one or two people. Take any large city, attempt to replace the public transport with private cars, and there simply _will not be space_.
Fully-segregated metros in particular can also be much faster than cars in urban areas; they don't have to contend with traffic or intersections at all.
vvillena 2 hours ago [-]
Because public transit, done well, is the fastest way to move around. It gets you everywhere, even to places personal vehicles can't reach. It's a lot cheaper. It generates hubs of activity that keep cities lively and relevant. It doesn't get stuck in traffic. It doesn't need to be parked.
The benefits of good public transport are so mind blowing that it's difficult to explain unless you have lived on a city that has it.
gonzalohm 2 hours ago [-]
Hmm I disagree. I lived in Madrid. In fact in one of those cities that this article mentions from the new subway construction.
Subway takes 1h15min to reach the city center. Car only takes 30 minutes.
This is because when you are building a subway every one wants their station. The map above may look like straight lines, but if you look at the real map, the north of line 10 is not straight at all, it's more zig zag.
We are trying to make transportation work for everyone and we end up with transportation that works for no one.
Also, the subway closes at midnight, and by Spanish standards, that's early. I was stranded twice (because different stations close at different times) until i decided that I would never take public transport in Madrid again
anal_reactor 16 minutes ago [-]
It takes 30 minutes to reach my workplace by bike, or alternatively 50 minutes by public transport.
dkdbejwi383 5 hours 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 5 hours 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.
mslate 16 minutes ago [-]
Why would anyone prefer to drive when you can be driven?
mitthrowaway2 5 hours 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.
thelastgallon 5 hours ago [-]
Why would anyone prefer a car that YOU have to drive over an autonomous all terrain comfortable personal horse?
A horse knows how to navigate any kinds of terrain, while a car requires constant microsecond attention, extremely stressful, if you lose focus, might end up dead, worse kill a lot of other people! Horses don't need roads to be built, or the elaborate supply chains of fossil fuels, and trillions of dollars per year in subsidies.
jodrellblank 36 minutes ago [-]
Collectively (as in, the collective action problem):
- Areas with few/no cars are nicer to be in. To breathe, to talk quietly and hear others talking, to walk around safely.
- Transport moves more people in less space and less overall investment. Toronto Highway 401[1] is an eighteen lane road and it moves fewer people per day than Metro line 1.
- Low car areas are better for local economies. People object to reducing traffic saying it will hurt local businesses, and the opposite is true. Where it's nice to exist outside of a car, that attracts people, and local businesses thrive.
- Reduced costs on health services from reduced pollution. Fewer doctor and hospital visits and prescriptions, for lung infections, breathing problems, asthsma and COPD in London after Low Emissions zones.
- Reduced environmental impact of fewer cars, fewer trips taken by car.
- Many people can't drive; all children, many injured or disabled people, many poorer people, many elderly people (can't or shouldn't), some people with e.g. DUI convictions. Some 20% of households in the UK have no access to a car. A matter of fairness and not prioritising the wealthy car owner.
Personally:
- No need to find parking, return to that carpark.
- Transit is more spacious. Being strapped into a carseat, elbows hitting doors, head hitting roof, knees hitting steering wheel, shins hitting dash, feet constrained in footwell, surrounded by explosives "for your protection" is a really unpleasant place to be.
- Less concentration needed. Driving requires constant attention. Even when transit is crowded, you don't have to do anything.
- Implemented well, transit takes priority over cars at turnings, crossings, junctions, roundabouts, and moves faster. Toronto trams do this especially poorly, apparently.
- Freedom. No need for a government approved license and ID. Not beholden to dragging a ton of steel boat-anchor around everywhere with you.
Because of the lesser impact on land usage, fuel usage, noise, ...?
the_gipsy 3 hours ago [-]
Why would anyone prefer airline transit over a comfortable private jet?
globular-toast 2 hours ago [-]
Why would anyone prefer a self driving comfortable personal car over teleportation?
badpun 2 hours ago [-]
SF Bay Area (land) has population density of a third of New York metro area or an eight of Tokyo metro area. The population density does not justify a world class public transit system. Not to mention there's a large body of water in the middle, which precludes building a lot of connections.
zelphirkalt 4 hours 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 5 minutes 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.)
gonzalohm 1 hours 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)
gjulianm 3 hours 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.
rr808 11 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 10 hours ago [-]
What came first, the wage or the cost of housing?
contubernio 7 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 10 hours ago [-]
Even states like Mississippi and Iowa have low housing costs and wages much higher than Spain.
Shitty-kitty 10 hours ago [-]
If you want to do a real comparison then you have to include the cost of healthcare.
rayiner 9 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 7 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.
sofixa 2 hours ago [-]
The price difference isn't 2 or 3 times though. We're talking about x10 easily.
brunorro 3 hours 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.
neil_s 11 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 10 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 10 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 10 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 10 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 9 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 8 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)
BrenBarn 4 hours 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 2 hours 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?
ak217 8 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 9 hours ago [-]
Aggressive deployment of eminent domain and exemption from CEPA and all the other “think of the children” NIMBY rules.
anovikov 9 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 9 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 6 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.
6 hours ago [-]
contubernio 7 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.
dkdbejwi383 5 hours 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
pjerem 7 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 9 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 6 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.
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 4 hours 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.
nephihaha 6 hours ago [-]
Where does he discuss geology?
throw0101a 2 hours ago [-]
See also perhaps "The Transit Abundance Playbook":
that gives specific recommendations to makes things quicker (in the US?).
jmyeet 9 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.
This is a pretty egregious misreading of both Hardin and Ostrom, where on earth did you get this from?
Hardin did not argue that private industry was more efficient. His paper described that with an unmanaged, private, unregulated open pasture that has no property rights, individuals will exploit it until it collapses. It wasn't used used as justification for privatization, if anything it was the opposite.
Ostrom did not argue that unmanaged resources don't collapse. Instead, she showed with data a third way of organising which was more involved with self-governing, communal rules to manage shared resources without resorting to either a private corporation or government control.
tormeh 9 hours ago [-]
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 8 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 6 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.
zelphirkalt 4 hours ago [-]
About rolling out standardized infrastructure in China: One can also see this in their high speed train stations in capitols of provinces. Manny of them look of feel the same with their 28 tracks.
stymaar 4 hours ago [-]
> Yet people still quote it.
It's worse that this: It's being taught to pretty much every student of economics during the first few classes, Ostrom sometimes being quoted as a counterpoint but not always.
hollerith 9 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 9 hours ago [-]
NZ: Electricity, gas, public transport, telecommunications.
hollerith 1 hours ago [-]
And have any of those NZ utilities been privatized?
Where are these utilities that were public, then were privatized? Not AFAIK in the US where the intercity and freight rail lines, telegraph lines, telephone systems, natural-gas-distribution networks, electrical grid, cable-TV grid and last-mile internet networks started out private. Maybe in Britain? But if so, the person I replied to should make it clear that his critique applies only to Britain.
andrewvu0203 7 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
9 hours ago [-]
awinter-py 10 hours ago [-]
tldr cut and cover?
rsynnott 5 hours ago [-]
Nah, I think most/all of their new lines are single broad (9m diameter) bored tunnels.
Mashimo 6 hours ago [-]
Inhouse talent
kleiba2 6 hours ago [-]
By using cheap labor from Africa?
Rendered at 12:58:24 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
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.
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.
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-...
Even if you do outsource some level of tasks, you still need in-house folks who know something so you don't get fleeced.
Woah, this is really a “worst person you known just made a great point” moment for me.
Wait... did you build your own tunnel boring machines? Or just spare parts for them?
Now, operating a tunnel-boring machine, that's a different beast, but you'd have to do that either way. Probably should get outside help if your engineers and scientists haven't planned and dug a tunnel in their life.
Imagine that: building expertise in-house and within the governmental org results in better planning and management and thus outcomes.
Timetables, expansion any kind of change to rail running is approved centrally in DfT. The private operators are just that, they only run the trains to spec, on the track provided. In some cases they don't even run the stations they stop at.
What is criminal, and why the same mistakes that keep on being made, is that there little apatite or budget to retain expertise in house. This means that the DfT is reliant on consultants for most things.
THis would be fine if the people making the decisions were not people like chris grayling or grant schapps, who have no care for long term issues, only short term career success.
It costs a shit ton more, and there is less accountability. Its basically like asking claude to design the system for you. Sure it appears faster, but in the end it you'll have to redo all of it manually with no context.
The whole great british railway shit is basically just re-branding the regional franchises, and nothing more.
Almost always conservatives, the key exception in recent history being Tony “Tory Lite” Blair's time in office (who pretty much ignored many years of promises to undo the direction Thatcher and Major had taken NHS and university/student funding should Labour be returned to power, greatly irritating many of us who voted for them that time around). Unfortunately this is a common pattern: parties like Labour get control and realise how hard it is going to be to fight what has been set in motion so do too little or actively push on in the existing direction (just applying a little lipstick to the pig for public appearances). The current lot are trying to do better in that regard, but are failing so impressively elsewhere that they likely won't have a second term and one term is not enough to build momentum, so their replacement will just put a stop to any good that has actually been achieved. The scary thing is that their replacement (assuming Refrom don't rip themselves apart from the inside between now and the next election, which is something there is still hope of happening) might make the old Tories look extremely moderate.
We tried this early on with sound transit in Washington state, and because engineering work is boom and bust on a project by project basis, the model just doesn't work. The good people left for better jobs, and we were left with a team that basically couldn't produce, leading to massive delays on the next set of projects.
A morbid equivalent from the Middle Ages: bigger medieval cities had their own headsman, and they solved the risk of underemployment by sending him on external "jobs" to smaller towns where executions were rare.
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)
So out and out corruption is rare in the UK. For example Farage has just received 5 million in dodgy money, which is more money than all of the previous political money scandals since Mandelson.
But to your point, most of the time and money in uk infra is spent trying to navigate planning laws and nimbys
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.
Look at the memes for Pune metro line 3 and for Karnataka metro (forgot which line)
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.
However, all are perpetually delayed
Pune metro line 3's construction status was 85+% for over 1yr now
Land acquisition was over a long time ago. Progress on road is just invisible despite being built by a private company which will operate it for the next 30yrs
Land acquisition is not something that gets over. It is a continuous process. Then the court cases if any always show up with some delay, and that can revoke transfers. Then you have to look for alternative land parcels, which may involve minor reroutes in the worst case. It's the same with finances, everything comes in tranches, land, money, everything.
> Pune
You can see this entire documentation[1], make sure to click on the two section headers to reveal content. While no doubt the document might mislead you about the extent of the delay, and really % done means nothing in these projects where the unknowns are unknown, you can clearly see it's the exact coordination issues I had mentioned earlier: utility coordination, handling expanding flyovers/roads, etc.
> All are perpetually delayed
Because, it's not an internal organisation issue or a personnel issue (i.e "hire more engineers"). The exact organisation does not matter when the problems are of the external kind mentioned above.
Now, the problems mentioned in TFA don't occur here because the SPVs house long term employees with - for government standards - fairly robust institutional knowledge.
The top comment now has content refuting the article: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48582433
> Look at the memes for Pune metro line 3 and for Karnataka metro (forgot which line)
The same memes exist everywhere: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48582563
> Even though private
If you want real private efficiencies, you have to give the entire responsibility of many departments to the private company. So, a near-private whole sub-municipality. Just making the metro SPV private is meaningless, although definitely better than having it under PWD...
[1] https://www.pmrda.gov.in/en/pune-metro-line-3/maan-hinjawadi...
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.
It's also said that four companies control 85% beef market in the US, which normally should make people rather queasy I would think.
But the level of efficiency achieved thanks to the development of technology by private companies is what keeps them efficient around the world.
Producers make what will sell but without any incentives, subsidies or regulation this would be a mess of profit chasing, unsafe practices and fragile supply chains.
In my view, the value of the public sector is in setting the rule of the game for private actors in exactly this kind of way (rules and incentives) instead of the politics of picking winners and losers directly or making direct decisions about what to build where, etc. Rule makers play the meta-game of designing how the game works and they leave agents free to play as they wish.
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
However, even if such a thing did exist, you still have to contend with traffic and total road capacity. So, for instance, taking local systems (details will vary by city, but not much), a double-decker bus is ten meters long and takes ~100 people. A tram is 55m long and takes about 550 people. A commuter train is 160m long and takes a thousand people (and doesn't share roads, of course). A car is 4-5m long and typically carries one or two people. Take any large city, attempt to replace the public transport with private cars, and there simply _will not be space_.
Fully-segregated metros in particular can also be much faster than cars in urban areas; they don't have to contend with traffic or intersections at all.
The benefits of good public transport are so mind blowing that it's difficult to explain unless you have lived on a city that has it.
This is because when you are building a subway every one wants their station. The map above may look like straight lines, but if you look at the real map, the north of line 10 is not straight at all, it's more zig zag.
We are trying to make transportation work for everyone and we end up with transportation that works for no one.
Also, the subway closes at midnight, and by Spanish standards, that's early. I was stranded twice (because different stations close at different times) until i decided that I would never take public transport in Madrid again
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.
A horse knows how to navigate any kinds of terrain, while a car requires constant microsecond attention, extremely stressful, if you lose focus, might end up dead, worse kill a lot of other people! Horses don't need roads to be built, or the elaborate supply chains of fossil fuels, and trillions of dollars per year in subsidies.
- Areas with few/no cars are nicer to be in. To breathe, to talk quietly and hear others talking, to walk around safely.
- Transport moves more people in less space and less overall investment. Toronto Highway 401[1] is an eighteen lane road and it moves fewer people per day than Metro line 1.
- Low car areas are better for local economies. People object to reducing traffic saying it will hurt local businesses, and the opposite is true. Where it's nice to exist outside of a car, that attracts people, and local businesses thrive.
- Reduced costs on health services from reduced pollution. Fewer doctor and hospital visits and prescriptions, for lung infections, breathing problems, asthsma and COPD in London after Low Emissions zones.
- Reduced environmental impact of fewer cars, fewer trips taken by car.
- Many people can't drive; all children, many injured or disabled people, many poorer people, many elderly people (can't or shouldn't), some people with e.g. DUI convictions. Some 20% of households in the UK have no access to a car. A matter of fairness and not prioritising the wealthy car owner.
Personally:
- No need to find parking, return to that carpark.
- Transit is more spacious. Being strapped into a carseat, elbows hitting doors, head hitting roof, knees hitting steering wheel, shins hitting dash, feet constrained in footwell, surrounded by explosives "for your protection" is a really unpleasant place to be.
- Less concentration needed. Driving requires constant attention. Even when transit is crowded, you don't have to do anything.
- Implemented well, transit takes priority over cars at turnings, crossings, junctions, roundabouts, and moves faster. Toronto trams do this especially poorly, apparently.
- Freedom. No need for a government approved license and ID. Not beholden to dragging a ton of steel boat-anchor around everywhere with you.
[1] https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-IRDiOiNYl9s/UEwAA79O2NI/AAAAAAAAG...
(What is with German public transport ticket-buying apps? They all seem to be very broken.)
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)
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.
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.
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.
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)
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?
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
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.
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.
* https://ifp.org/transit-abundance-playbook/
that gives specific recommendations to makes things quicker (in the US?).
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...
Hardin did not argue that private industry was more efficient. His paper described that with an unmanaged, private, unregulated open pasture that has no property rights, individuals will exploit it until it collapses. It wasn't used used as justification for privatization, if anything it was the opposite.
Ostrom did not argue that unmanaged resources don't collapse. Instead, she showed with data a third way of organising which was more involved with self-governing, communal rules to manage shared resources without resorting to either a private corporation or government control.
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.
It's worse that this: It's being taught to pretty much every student of economics during the first few classes, Ostrom sometimes being quoted as a counterpoint but not always.
Which utilities do you believe were government-funded or government-owned in the West? I will grant you most water supplies. Which other utilities?
Where are these utilities that were public, then were privatized? Not AFAIK in the US where the intercity and freight rail lines, telegraph lines, telephone systems, natural-gas-distribution networks, electrical grid, cable-TV grid and last-mile internet networks started out private. Maybe in Britain? But if so, the person I replied to should make it clear that his critique applies only to Britain.