When you put in a transit line, the surrounding land values go up -- it's as old as the railroads. The governing body needs to capture the increase in those land values. This is how transit is funded in many Asian countries -- the transit project goes from being a cost boondoggle to a profit center that pays for itself, either by taxing the uplift in land values, or the governing body owning that land and leasing it out to e.g. shops.
Need to be clear on this as theres a lot of bad assumptions below
The best answer is not a standard 'tax' but a payment that is required when land surrounding new transit is redeveloped to higher density. This is the clearest, cleanest solution. Homeowners dont have to pay if they stay and developers just factor the cost in when buying property which removes the problem of money just ending up with existing landowners when they sell the land.
This idea has been around for a long time but not widely implemented in the west yet because the politics is hard. Whichever country does it first will have a massive head start for the future imo
The director of the Switzerland rail real estate told me they went around the world studying existing systems and copied the Japanese way of building stations.
The government owned the stations and leased retail spaces out to businesses in a repeatable templated way. Their goal was for users to never have to leave the station on their way to and from work. So they standardized metro/train stations to have a grocery store, dry cleaning, etc. This was highly profitable and successful.
A lot of rail systems focus on the costs but don’t think about how to design it so that humans want to use rail.
Isn’t this a disincentive to densifying the land? It seems like the tax should occur at least on any sale, not just when redevelopment happens.
A single family home near transit is far more valuable than a single family home away from transit. There’s no reason existing homeowners should capture all of the value of that increase when they’ve paid nothing and done no work to make it happen.
95% of the time the only difference will be developers pay less for the land to start with and then pay this saving to government at time of development.
A small amount of cases the owners wont want to sell for those lower prices. So yes its a disincentive but only a minor one.
Yes existing homeowners get benefit without paying for it but the usual argument is we cant tax them as they didnt ask for it and some will not be able to pay. Forcing pensioners out of lifelong homes is not seen well
In broader terms we are always looking for some way to deliver owners rights as well as socialised community outcomes. No system can deliver all but this is as clear a compromise as can be made in the view of most I've seen who have looked into it in detail
Imagine a railway line/station is built 10 mins walk from me.
I'm not interested in the railway line. So I rent out my home and use the proceeds to buy or rent a larger one in a different location without said railway line.
Trying to capture that value I think would result in some sort of weird rent control / rent tax central planning nightmare that would have pretty bad side effects. It'd probably end up looking a bit like California's Prop 13(?) where people just stay put.
Personally I don't want to live in a society in which homeownership is not possible. I could get behind an LVT on holiday homes, second parcels of land, etc. I wouldn't like it, but I can see why it may be needed.
But a primary residence being subject to an annual tax which can change and outstrip the ability of the owner to pay just means that there's no meaningful way to build stability. I think that's a pretty awful side effect of a flat LVT on everything; I'm invested in my neighbourhood and improving it based on the fact that it's actually mine for life (rather than being temporarily mine).
How stable should property ownership be in an area experiencing growth? I think this could be tunable with short term price increase caps that expire 5-10 years out, and reset when the property is sold or the owner starts paying the full market LVT again.
People take risk buying undeveloped land. It’s a chicken and egg problem. You want to build transit where people live and people want to live where there’s transit. The party that makes the first plunge will potentially make a lot of money.
This is correct - I think it's called R+P (Rail + Property). The government doesn't pay for the project at all and grants exclusive development right to the transit operator, which in case for Hong Kong is MTR. They then negotiate revenue sharing with commercial and residential developers on rent etc.
This works well and these transit operators make more money from real estate (about 2/3) than transit fare (about 1/3). The tricky thing (other than population density) is that the developer will have to assume the risk of the revenue forecast not panning out. I doubt that any transit operators in North America would be willing to do this.
It is worth noting that the HK model only works because of artificially high land prices. Virtually all land in Hong Kong is leasehold and the government uses lease revenues to keep taxes low.
Hong Kong’s projects are also not immune to cost issues. Per km they have the same cost issues described in the article. Recent projects have had massive cost blowouts, and even before then scope was dropped from projects to save money. The recent Sha Tin to Central Link dropped a station in Central to save money, and the new stations were only built to handle 9 cars instead of the rest of the line’s 12 cars to save money.
> The recent Sha Tin to Central Link dropped a station in Central to save money, and the new stations were only built to handle 9 cars instead of the rest of the line’s 12 cars to save money.
One speculation is that, it is harder to move 12 cars uphill, than to move 9 cars uphill, after the train crossed the harbor.
The trains are multiple units, so each car has its own powered motors. (Other than trailer cars, but it's pretty trivial to just add more motors.)
The logic is pretty simple. Less train cars means less people per train, which means you can have shorter/narrower platforms, less escalators, fewer exits, etc. and significantly reduce the structure size.
So in this case, the project cost rise is born by MTR, rather than the government (aka tax payer) which would often be the case in North America. I think it would be much easier for public to back transit projects with setup such as this.
Vail Resorts uses this model of ski lifts on (generally) leased national forest land to drive the money making base area timeshare real estate development.
That is if the land there actually wants the traffic and is ready to adapt. Here in SF it feels like no one wants public transport to get to them, and they definitely don't want to build housing or reserve ground units for shops and restaurants
I feel like SF residents' aversion to new transit projects is unfortunate but totally reasonable... walk anywhere in SF near a BART (subway) stop and you face open drug use, trash, and other problems nobody wants in the neighborhood they call home. It's not like these are intractable problems - other major cities manage to keep their subway stops and surrounding areas clean & pleasant to use.
The case against BART expansion is made by the experience & externalities of existing BART.
Except most BART stations are fine. Even 24th and Mission, the most notorious, is actually really not that bad. Once people use it, they'll hate it less. However, most people will steer clear for their entire lives.
Man, that's not even remotely close to my experience. I used that station (and 16th st) regularly and saw:
- frequent drug use
- frequent drug sales
- congested and filthy station entrances/exits
- zonked out naked dudes starting fights on the platform (yes more than once or twice)
- liquid poop on station stairs
I wish I was exaggerating but... this is just how it is around those stations.
Depends on your definition of bad. Urine smells, homeless people, and knowledge that muggings typically happen around that area?
I’d call that bad. I’m with you - we need more public transit in the bay. But there’s a huge swath of people where that Bart experience just isn’t going to work.
> knowledge that muggings typically happen around that area
I witnessed one in a bus near tartine in the mission. Safety is really this thing that only becomes an issue after you witness it or become victim of it.
Not that bad? Hate it less? What an exciting pitch for the new nuisance in your neighborhood.
I'm not familiar with that area but I can infer that it must be pretty miserable for people who care about their surroundings, respect public spaces, and work hard to maintain a high standard in the environments they occupy. More power to them.
I feel like it changed noticeably around 2012-2014. Before then it was okay, and since then it's terribad. Basically, in lockstep with the skyrocketing cost-of-living in SF associated with the city's tech boom.
It's pretty simple - don't tolerate this sort of behavior around public transit stations. Transit riders deserve a safe and clean commute. In the absence of that, they'll retreat to the safe clean cocoon of their cars.
No one thinks “hey every place should not be safe”. That’s obviously what everyone wants. However, given that in practice we have huge swathes of places that are in bad condition you need to start by prioritizing. And it obviously makes a lot of sense to prioritize a public transit station, which not only has much higher usage than a random sidewalk, and is far easier and cheaper to keep safe because it has a much more limited geographic footprint and the major sections are not wide open easily accessible spaces but are controlled by gates that require tickets, than it is to do a wide open sidewalk.
It obviously makes sense to start with the space that gives you the most return for the lowest cost and that would be any public space that has the highest usage and density, such as public transit stations.
Even better, imposing safety in those transit stations will also have a significant effect in improving safety through the length of the actual BART train ride because access to the train is limited to the few stations.
Well the people who smoke fent off of a piece of foil aren't going to disappear so you have to put them somewhere. If you were to put them somewhere in Pac Heights where the residents actively work against public transit that'd displease them, so they go where the community is less civically engaged and less powerful, like next to public transit. In effect there's a feedback loop where the area next to BART is only going to get grimier and Pac Heights are going to get NIMBYer.
You're correct, of course, but the public good from improving the safety/cleanliness of shared infrastructure like transit has a much higher ROI than your "average" public space. Both have societal good but improving transit stops (especially rail) deserves higher priority than your average sidewalk
Our eldest (just turned 13 :eek:) walks down an "average sidewalk" to the railway station, rides a train (alone) into town, and walks an "average sidewalk" to his school, and back. Every weekday. He commented on drunks hanging around the (in-town) station in the late afternoon just a few days ago.
That's pretty much me. I tried public transport when I moved to SF (came from Europe, didn't even have a driver license) and ended up being like "nope". Got my driver license and use uber mostly. I'm not putting myself in danger, fuck it, I'll just spend my money on a car + uber.
> It's pretty simple - don't tolerate this sort of behavior around public transit stations.
IIUC, it's only that simple at a very superficial level. I.e., the complexity arises when you have to answer what you do about the offenders.
TL;DR:
(I'm not actually from SF, so apologies if I've misunderstood residents' views on this.)
Do you punish them? I get the impression most San Franciscans see drug addicts as pitiable victims of bad choices or the opioid epidemic. So behavior modification via punishment would be evil.
Do you put imprison the drug users for the safety of others? That sounds like punishment, which again most SF'ers reject.
Do you put the drug users in mental institutions / forced rehab? I suspect this reminds people of the dark days of abusive mental institutions, and is therefore rejected.
And what about people who are clean and sober, aren't homeless by choice, but for whom public housing isn't available? I.e., they're not mugging anyone, but they can't find anywhere else to sleep, poop, or pee? You have the sticky question of whether or not residents are legally obligated to have a home.
> I feel like SF residents' aversion to new transit projects is unfortunate but totally reasonable
SF residents don't have an aversion to funding transit and transit projects, see measure L that just passed with 2-1 support.
> walk anywhere in SF near a BART (subway) stop and you face open drug use, trash, and other problems nobody wants in the neighborhood they call home
Singling out BART subway stops in your anecdote is disingenuous when you consider that there are only 8 BART stops in San Francisco, 3 of which are similar to what you describe, but there are _113 MUNI stops_. Additionally, MUNI has ~90 million annual riders while BART only has ~27 million while covering a geographic area 10X the size of MUNI
Only Civic Center and 16th Mission are like this. 24th can be a bit gross, but not always. The rest of the system is fairly clean. The problem is that everyone judges the BART by its worst stations but nobody decides whether or not to drive by the horror of a car crash, and that's a cultural issue. Americans culturally erase car trauma but amplify transit trauma.
It's reasonable to judge a transit system based on its worst stations. If those happen to be the stations that a traveler will be using, then what's going on at those stations will have a significant impact on that traveler's experience.
Sure but those stations generally don't have "nice folks" (hate using that term, given that I grew up in an area that would be avoided by these nice folks, but most on HN are generationally upper-middle class so) living near them. 16th and Mission is the exception because of the rapidly gentrified Valencia street, but Civic Center is very much not where upper-middle class folks live. The BART station nearest to me is clean and nice. Proximity to BART generally increases property values and rents.
Huh? This is publicly available information published by BART. Civic Center is used a lot, but isn't in the top 3. 16th St is more on par with stops in Berkeley or Oakland and isn't used much. 24th St is used even less. Civic Center is used much more often as an exit station (e.g. to commute to) than an entry station (e.g. where people live.) The most used stops are Embarcadero, Montgomery, and Powell.
I’m curious, have you waked near a BART station recently? If so, which?
If you go to an average BART station, say, Balboa Park, or North Berkley they are completely fine, not noticeable different then other areas in the same neighborhood. If you go to a newer stations (say Dublin / Pleasanton) this is even less so.
And for that matter I’m not sure your parent is actually providing any correct insights. I’m not aware of much backlash from immediate residents against new transit projects in their neighborhood (such as the muni realignment near SF state or the Van Ness BRT lane).
> I’m not aware of much backlash from immediate residents against new transit projects in their neighborhood
The Geary Bart extension was famously killed by local opposition. Although that was more a reaction to the store closures caused by the market street subway construction, not drug use or crime.
> walk anywhere in SF near a BART (subway) stop and you face open drug use, trash, and other problems nobody wants in the neighborhood they call home.
Is there any evidence these problems are actually related to BART? The Tenderloin district has equally bad or worse sections away from the Civic Center station. Market Street as a whole below Castro has had serious issues for decades.
I would posit that if the city had a direct interest in the land value immediately surrounding the transit station -- as is the case in many successful Asian transit projects -- they would have a much stronger incentive to make that land value go up, by making it cleaner and safer and more well maintained.
the case against BART expansion is that the urban core is underserved, as a direct result of BART hoovering up all transit funding and available ROWs
what you're describing is a you problem. SF residents who are well served by transit overwhelming favor transit expansion, it's the residents who are underserved (sunset, outer richmond) who oppose
In NYC, all the places along the new Second Avenue line shot up immediately once it looked like construction was beginning again, and shot up even more once it opened.
We do tax them, but it's indirect, because property taxes go up. You could do it by say taking 25% of increased property taxes and remitting them to transit costs. That's an interesting idea I never heard of before.
In California this is broken -- property taxes are assessed using the price when last sold, plus a 2% annual increase. Any property in California that hasn't changed hands recently is likely very under-taxed. Basically it amounts to a subsidy for sitting on property and not developing it.
Basically it amounts to a protection to people so that they won't be forced to sell their home just because property values go up, something that happened quite often before prop 13 went into effect. But hey, let's kick out people from their homes, that they can afford, because they can't afford to pay the Sheriff of Nottingham when he comes to collect his taxes.
That reasoning is how it was sold to the Californian voter in the 70s during the era of popular rebellion against taxes. The writers and underwriters of that ballot initiative knew what they were doing, keeping grandma in her house was merely a pretext.
The average homeowner benefits directly from Prop 13 and fails to see how it has impacted other aspects of their life.
The implications for the municipal governments have been disastrous. Municipal tax inflows went from being ~95% property taxes to being closer to 40% in the present day. The rest of the income comes from new taxes and fees invented to fill the gaps.
Prop 13 is a major (but not sole) reason why CA has underbuilt housing for the last four decades. The tax assessed has no relation to the value of the land it sits on, so the trend is to underuse and underdevelop land. If your house is taxed at $1500 a year and keeps appreciating, why sell? Have that 4br/2ba to yourself, or rent it out and make a net gain of $60,000/yr. Either way it makes no sense to sell the property and allow it to be redeveloped into something that could house 10x the people.
I know property owners who bought for $40k in Berkeley and are now sitting on 2.4MM$ in value, doing the minimum in repairs while renting the unit for $6k/mo. This is not unusual. These people do not deserve your pity, and they do not deserve a massive systemic wealth transfer in their direction.
Unfortunately I think the dysfunction in California will have to reach catastrophic levels before Prop 13 repeal becomes politically^Wemotionally feasible for CA voters. The knock-on effects of P13 are too far removed from the average voter -- most won't connect increased crime, failing schools and public services, increased cost of living all the way back to it.
Even if the "old lady gets kicked out" were a major issue, you could at least repeal Prop 13 for commercial properties, and implement other "prevent from being kicked out" rules.
But Prop 13 will never change, it's a political 3rd rail now.
Which leads to rent control, which leads to a reduce in supply of rental properties.
Being fair to the people already here leads to being unfair to people newly moving in, which effectively includes young people just starting out and looking for places of their own.
No, I believe the way it's done in Asian countries is that public transportation is run by (usually) private companies that have the right to develop the land. Thus the incentive is to put things on top of transit which align with what commuters need. In Singapore, for example the pad around every station typically has a hawker stand (food court), drugstore, supermarket, which are the things you might need on your way home.
This will have to be handled very carefully, lest people catch on and vote against rail expansions for this reason. Maybe don't raise taxes on residential properties, only commercial and industrial.
luckily it does solve it, because most of the cost is due to low volume.
construction in the US is very labor intensive and has low-productivity.
plus the permitting process is also very low-throughput. (too many possibilities to stop the process by appeal/suing, and the whole jurisprudence of what is considered a sufficiently detailed environmental assessment is fucked up. the law needs a bit of tweaking to focus more on cost-benefit, include cost of rejecting a project, etc.)
and this is also why nuclear power plants are super expensive.
I mean, there is correlation -- whatever we do spend on is extremely expensive, so we get less, whereas other nations that spend more efficiently get more, and therefore there is a correlation between efficiency of spending and quantity obtained, but that's not an argument that if we spent a lot more, we would get better value. A case needs to be made beyond this correlation.
A good example is bus service. One can't plausibly argue that US cities have no experience with bus service. Or that it's a difficult engineering problem (unless maybe, you are talking about trolleylines in the Swiss Alps) - but let's see how efficient they are. San Francisco spends 1.3 Billion on SFMTA, with 5700 employees and average weekday ridership (pre-pandemic) of 800K. That's 1 employee per 140 weekday riders.
Let's compare to the canton of Zurich, which has 1.5 million people, and 670 square miles (of Swiss mountains). VBZ (Verkehrsbetriebe Zürich) is responsible for all of the transit in this canton - bus, trolley, light rail. It provides rides to 900K daily riders (post-pandemic) that travel 1.7 million kilometers per day, but this is achieved with only 2300 employees, or 1 employee per 390 daily riders, and a budget of $560 million dollars (converted to USD).
Now maybe it's "like a nuclear power plant" and if San Francisco were to spend a lot more on bus service, they'd eventually figure out how to deliver it efficiently.
But my guess is that if San Francisco were to spend a lot more on bus service, they would deliver it even less efficiently than they are now.
So you still have a problem of inefficient delivery in the U.S. Then we can talk about why it cost the city over $300 million to create a single BRT line along Van Ness. Perhaps painting a lane red is like building a nuclear power plant, but I suspect that's not the issue here. https://www.sfchronicle.com/sf/article/S-F-s-Van-Ness-transi...
But it's very much like that. The approval process is extremely inefficient in the US. As you said, "building" the red line is not hard, but getting it through the permitting gauntlet is.
After a certain level of saturation these things just get easier. See road construction, expansion, etc. It's the default, yet it's clear that "just one more lane" won't solve traffic.
Regarding buses (and public transport in general): what's the utilization of the existing capacity for SF and Zürich? It would be interesting to compare number of buses, total distance driven, and other parameters for these rider numbers. Also do you happen to know anything about cost breakdown? (My guess is that Zürich is simply a lot more dense, and public transport is just the default there, whereas it's not in SF.)
> The governing body needs to capture the increase in those land values.
No. The governing body needs to not burn taxpayer funds like it's candy.
Justifying the grotesque over-spending and timelines of these projects by saying "we'll come up with a way to charge you more money in taxes to make-up the difference is the root of all problems with so many projects.
Why is it that the first reaction isn't to say do not spend my money that way!
EDIT:
Interesting to see how this is misunderstood. Let's see if I can make it simpler to understand.
1- There is nothing wrong with demanding that government use our money efficiently. This should not be controversial at all. Would you pay 4x or 10x for someone to build you home or sell you a car? Why not? Why can't we demand the same fairness from government?
2- Do not give more drugs to a drug addict. You are not going to improve the cost-effectiveness of government projects by giving them ore taxes. First make them more efficient. Then we can talk about using the savings for other projects.
3- No. Our (people) reason for existing isn't to pay taxes. Taxes should be the minimum required to do the business we require, not a cent more.
That's the problem. Nobody is interested in holding government accountable for the way they conduct business.
Fun fact -- if we were to tax non-produced assets like land -- which nobody made, and the value of which is created by its neighbors and surrounding community rather than its owner -- then we could LOWER taxes on things like income and sales. So we could make transit pay for itself by taxing land values, instead of bankrupting the city with unaffordable boondoggles through bond initiatives and income and sales taxes, all of which are drags on the economy in one way or another.
I don't know where you live, but I have never lived any place (all in the USA) that doesn't tax land already.
I for one enjoy having open spaces that are not developed - raising taxes on vacant land so high, and thus, force the owners to sell to someone who will develop it seems like a really bad idea.
Trees and open space provide a lot of value to everyone - those that live nearby, even if they don't own it, and to everyone that likes to breath fresh air.
> I don't know where you live, but I have never lived any place (all in the USA) that doesn't tax land already.
The issue is that we tax the land and the buildings together. We should tax only the land. And we're often not taxing it enough.
> I for one enjoy having open spaces that are not developed
I enjoy those spaces too! You know what we have right now? SPRAWL. For miles in every direction. Pavement that gobbles up more and more greenfield spaces, for low-density, low-value uses. Outlying wilderness land is not very valuable, but land in urban centers is very valuable. Because we don't tax that land appropriately, we just encourage people to sprawl out further and further, and because we tax buildings, we discourage people from building densely. This leads to more land consumption and less of the open undeveloped space you like.
Those trees you love? They're being cut down to make way for parking lots and strip malls and self-storage units. Really wasteful uses of land. Denser building would make it so demand for housing, commerce, and amenities are fulfilled on a much smaller footprint.
If we taxed land appropriately, we would have way more undeveloped land, and more appropriate density in the city, and you wouldn't have to commute nearly as far to get to the wilderness.
It’s not about undeveloped land. It’s about low value assets that take up a lot of space such as surface level parking lots or single level big box stores. The more of that stuff you condense into the same space the less traffic you have because everything is closer together and the more viable mass transit becomes.
Not everything needs to be a mega city, but sprawl has massive externalities.
The market determines what’s low value, more specifically peoples willingness to pay land taxes determines what’s low value.
Suppose the annual tax is 100,000$/acre, a warehouse may or may not be worth it depending on how profitable owning it was. Similarly, a billionaire could decide spending 2 million every year for their 20 acre property is reasonable or a waste of money.
Where such scheme’s fail is really the implementation. Few local governments could stick with such a system rather than carving out exclusions.
> The market determines what’s low value, more specifically peoples willingness to pay land taxes determines what’s low value.
How does the market determine the value of something that isn't for sale as well as being relatively unique and difficult to compare? I would think the value of something like that to the market would be zero.
If someone decides to sell then the market determines what a property is worth. If someone doesn’t sell then it’s clearly worth enough to pay the taxes on it.
For a single property it doesn’t give much information, but across a city the market is providing a great deal of information.
> If someone doesn’t sell then it’s clearly worth enough to pay the taxes on it.
That's not a good argument. People don't sell the clothes they have in their closet when they're not using it and it would be laughable to argue for an annual tax on one's closet. Why should this be any different for land? Monetary value isn't the same as worth. There's much more to ownership of land that isn't reflected in "market worth" (however that would be assessed in the cases of purchased land).
> For a single property it doesn’t give much information, but across a city the market is providing a great deal of information.
Cities are few and far between. That wouldn't apply to someone who built a house in the middle of Montana or decided to squat in a ghost town.
It’s easy to assume a dead means you “own” some land, but national borders also define ownership of land by nation states which need things like militaries to defend them but also systems to manage that land such as deed registries, road networks, police and court systems to handle trespassers, and so forth.
Understanding what a deed actually is rather than what it seems like it should help clarify what’s going on here. It’s a landlord setting rent, however governments have more concerns than maximizing revenue.
A government defining what an appropriate rent for land should be has real economic implications for nation states. Under charge and land ends up wasted, charge too much and it ends up abandoned. The sweet spot isn’t about maximizing income it’s about maximizing benefit for society.
Often property taxes are based on total value of the land plus improvements on it which discourages improvements or even maintenance. Thus a sweet spot based on the lands inherent value Aka a land value tax.
In the end land is a finite resource, any nation that wastes it runs into massive problems.
> It’s easy to assume a dead means you “own” some land, but national borders also define ownership of land by nation states which need things like militaries to defend them
For nations, treaties function as the equivalent of deeds and those have enough recognition in and of themselves without paying, say, the UN or some such organization to enforce them on a nation's behalf. That militaries defend their land borders is no different than a well-armed land owner defending the border of his property. In addition, the military isn't funded by property taxes.
> but also systems to manage that land such as deed registries, road networks, police and court systems to handle trespassers, and so forth.
These can all be itemized, and chosen a la carte. Certain states require payment of land registry fees upon purchase of a house. Road networks are paid with gas taxes, and tolls. Police officers are already paid via fines and free money from Washington. Court systems are paid through filing fees and also free money from Washington. Why do I need to pay land/property taxes for a service I'm already charged for either as another tax or as a fee upon use? And if I don't use them, why should I be made a forced rider?
The value (or lack thereof) of these services are distinct from the value of land. Land value shouldn't be determined by people who are in a position or have an incentive to self-deal by threat of force. Either there's an objective value or there isn't. Under any other circumstances, these tactics would be considered racketeering undertaken by mafiosos, but when it comes to government (whether local, state, or federal), the tune changes to deference for the sake of a nebulously defined "society".
> Understanding what a deed actually is rather than what it seems like it should help clarify what’s going on here. It’s a landlord setting rent, however governments have more concerns than maximizing revenue.
A government defining what an appropriate rent for land should be has real economic implications for nation states. Under charge and land ends up wasted, charge too much and it ends up abandoned.
I understand what a deed is [1]. My underlying contention is with the dishonest approach of how local governments are able to get the numbers they do and why they do it. I recognize that governments are are essentially Hobbesian fiefdom but I fail to see the need to preach unsubstantiated drivel about "bettering" society or falsely claiming objectivity. It would be easy enough to claim that the value assessed by the municipality has little to do with the market and everything with how much government can get away with charging you. So peddle fantasy?
> The sweet spot isn’t about maximizing income it’s about maximizing benefit for society.
The latter is often the means to the former and both come at the expense of the individual. .
> Often property taxes are based on total value of the land plus improvements on it which discourages improvements or even maintenance. Thus a sweet spot based on the lands inherent value Aka a land value tax.
Then this "sweet spot" isn't based on inherent value if a third party must rely on a subjective valuation.
>In the end land is a finite resource, any nation that wastes it runs into massive problems.
But the who gets to define waste? One could say that national parks are a waste as the land could be put to better use for property development. One could say that most military bases are a waste as the country hasn't fought foreign invaders on American soil since 1815. One could even say that major metropolitan areas are a waste, as they "rob" tax dollars from rural and suburban areas while benefitting from tax regimes (like SALT) that subsize high state-level taxation at expense of other states competing on low cost of living.
Once again, leaving these choices to government usually results in self-dealing. In such a scenario, there is no objective valuation.
[1] Despite what you claim, it's not just a document that exists to recognize the government as rentier. Deeds, like treaties are contracts and they can have all sorts of arrangements. There have been many that still precede the US government and that are still upheld today, some of which even recognize residence in a separate political sovereignty within US borders.
Because people believe, look at religion or the prevalence of gambling addiction. Humanity isn’t a collection of rational actors optimizing their long term self interest it’s a collection of fools lead around by the best storytellers.
A dictator who wants to maximize their personal power will peddle fantasy just as quickly as anyone running for office because it works.
> not just a document that exists to recognize the government as rentier
Eminent domain means the government can kick anyone off any property to be sold to the government or private party, the deed holder is compensated but they don’t get to say no. So sure old deeds are respected as much as any of them are, but how is that different than maintaining existing leases when you buy a rental property?
Arguably renters have more rights with respect to their landlords than deed holders with respect to the government.
PS: As to your argument about funding for police etc, states vary wildly in stuff like income taxes and sales taxes but in the end they are simply extracting resources from a productive economy the specific form those taxes take are only really relevant due to knock on effects, money is fungible. Taxing fuel or taxing miles driven only matters when EV’s show up.
The combination of low tax rate and low property values is the sweet spot for people on a budget (example: A nearly-retired uncle of mine just moved to Alabama):
Yes! The entire community together actually, not just the immediately nearby neighbors. Land in the heart of New York is valuable because it's in the heart of New York, one of the most valuable cities in the world, a feat achieved by many more people than just the 10 land owners surrounding that particular parcel.
Isn’t it both that we should be more efficient AND contribution should be made locally for local improvements?
I think value capture addresses this somewhat in the sense that if these projects are funded more locally, more attention would be paid to costs and timeline as opposed to the relatively distant federal money for which nobody feels a responsibility.
Governments are not businesses - they should not be thinking about "capturing value." Ideally, projects like this are handled at the minimum level of government: your city's transit system is your city's responsibility, funded through local taxes. This aligns interests the best.
In practice, federal bureaucrats all over the world have figured out how to insert themselves into these kinds of local projects, which causes all sorts of conflict of interest problems, and divorces the person spending the money from the person funding the project (both the people who should be funding it and the people who are) and the person getting value from it.
It is necessary to cede some of your autonomy for cooperation. Cooperation is required for projects that benefit your environment which may serve other people. You have to cede some of your autonomy to serve other people. Anything less is a fantasy and it will hurt you.
It partly has to do with the bidding process - the drive to get the lowest bid. Competent companies know the cost won't work and are unwilling to put up the surety bonds to take on a project. It leaves with the boldest incompetent company to make the lowest bid who gets their foot in the door and then jack up the cost overrun later on. Often the project failed due to cost overrun or sheer incompetence. At the end the cost of doing business go up for all parties involved.
I've seen transit projects with hundreds of millions budget fell apart with nothing to show at the end, and have seen a transit project that doubled the cost and tripled the schedule to get to completion, and that was a good project.
Where I am (a Canadian municipality) transit and other municipal-led projects have several features that tend to keep them on budget and schedule (or at least closer to it):
- Unit price contracts (much easier to track growth in cost, helps to identify and mitigate issues earlier)
- Vendor performance management (Contractors and consultants are given a score after project completion, shapes how bids are evaluated on future projects)
- Qualified bidders (contractors and consultants are evaluated beforehand, only allowed to bid on projects if they've done something of a similar scope/content before - ties in with the point above, smaller projects will allow bidding by contractors with less history/lower scores)
The system isn't perfect (since it relies on vendor history, it only works well with projects of scope and type that they do regularly - i.e. roads and sewers mainly), but it's a lot better than a simplistic "lowest bid wins"
Reform of the bidding process is probably the most actionable change that can be done. Even if we keep the core principle of a "lowest bidder" process, there are bound to be lessons to be learned from how other countries implement the process.
Many peoples' stamps are needed for any infrastructure being built. Engineers(electrical, structural, environmental, etc), architects, contractors, consultants, politicians and more, I presume. My rural county with 20,000 residences had 3 backwoods culverts replaced pre-pandemic(2 lanes, < 50 cars/day) & they each had price tags between $0.8 - $1.5 million USD. A million bucks to install new culverts & repave over... and the cheapest one wasn't even paved. Must be nice to get a slice of that pie.
Can you give some more info on the size of this project? Hard to understand why a culvert on an unpaved (and presumably small water source) would cost much.
Almost any project on a highway costs a million dollars.
Take a peek down the rabbit hole. As a recent transplant, I, too, have a hard time understanding the cost(s). It is literally a creek, but it does get swollen when it rains. The other projects were on Holbert Cove Rd, in the same time frame.
Taking a look at that contract (I am not a professional), I note that the "culvert" is specified as a huge aluminum box culvert (19'5" span by 6'11" height) with concrete headwalls. It also includes the removal of an existing concrete structure with asbestos abatement. That plan also has a 36" diversion pipe 120 feet long.
I'd also add that any sort of stream crossing will have pretty stringent restrictions for working in the wet - you're limited to time of year, weather events, need to maintain safe overflow at all times, fish passage, etc - all of these add cost, and limit how many people will bid on the project (they need to dedicate schedule time to the work - can't push it off a month because of delays on another project, or it'll take them out of work period).
I couldn't tell if it also requires the maintenance of road traffic at all times - if it does, even maintaining one lane at a time (with automated signals) would easily add $100k to the price (culvert needs to be removed and installed in sections, then extra work to join them together, much smaller paving operations, etc etc)
It looks like the kind of project that might work better cost wise if you could lump say 10+ replacements together and have a 3-4 year long project.
Thanks for the insight, SECProto. IANAEngineer, either, but for the costs involved, I would imagine building a bridge would eliminate some degree of complexity(there are several spans on that same road, already). The road was closed for over a year, work stopped for some time due to the pandemic, too. I can only imagine what the cost over-runs added up to.
The other 2 projects on HC Rd were controlled with auto signals and occasional, brief closures. Unsure of time-frames, as they were already underway when I arrived.
it would be fun to personally work along with this project and understand the costs as they are happening. I feel like this would help me get a better feel.
I did wander down from time to time to monitor the progress. It was definitely a slow process where equipment and materials sat untouched for weeks at a time, outside of the pandemic shutdown. I presume they were awaiting inspections between phases.
> Port added the money, if approved, would go to install a 5 to 6-foot-wide pipe between Market Square and the Merrimack River.
It’s not 5-6 feet long, it’s 5-6 feet wide.
You need heavy machinery to move those culvert sections into place, heavy machinery to dig the trench, you can only get a couple 20’ sections of 5-6’ diameter concrete culvert on a semi so factor in lots of freight costs too. If you cross any roads or sidewalks, those need to be sawcut and removed, and then replaced afterwards. $655k sounds reasonable to me, if you include all the engineering/utility/heavy machinery/manpower/material costs.
Right - and in union-heavy countries like Germany and France, the costs are often much lower than in the US. There could be something to the structure or organization of US unions that impacts things here, but it's clearly not the root cause.
There is very little discussion around this underrated topic. In India, the places where unions have a strong presence have lost a lot of industries. They have become notorious for getting any work done in those places, as some unions have morphed into gangs. This is not to imply anything about the benefit/tradeoff of unions in other countries.
> There could be something to the structure or organization of US unions that impacts things here, but it's clearly not the root cause.
Yes. US unions are very different from European unions. Without getting into the details, US unions can be very destructive, while European unions are far more wholistic or cooperative.
To be clear, this is not about union members. It's about union leadership and the "mafia" how they do business. Union members are along for the ride, are sold entire narratives they have to support and can end-up losing big. Entire industries have been seriously damaged by our unions.
Source: I was in a union for about a decade. In addition to this, I have had this conversation with members of other unions, some of them as post-mortems after years of union damage caused job losses to China and, ultimately, the companies they worked for to shut down.
Solution? I can't think of a single simple idea. These are engrained cultural things. People rarely wake up to the reality of what's going on until the are suffering, take the time to think it through and ultimately realize where the pain came from.
You'd have to replace the companies with something like a co-op: from my experience with EU unions they're much more like what we would call a co-op; they're working with the business and the customer for the best possible solution all-around.
Of course, in the US it's also become a huge political thing.
For the US, there may be historical cultural reasons as well. Some unions were actually run by mafias. These are the same kinds of groups that would go around neighborhoods asking for “protection” money. If you don’t pay, you don’t get protection from their henchmen ruining your store.
Of course, the US also has a history of anti-union forces effectively being armed paramilities who would break up even the lightest of strikes or labor movements with public violence.
In Europe it's generally understood that it has to be a mutually beneficial relationship. Once it becomes parasitic, the parasite risks killing the host (no matter if it's the company having their employees walk out, or the employees/union forcing through demands that make their employer uncompetitive and close down).
That's harder to implement in a more individualistic society like the US, and the history of violent union busting surely didn't help either.
Probably because unions in France and Germany aren't as powerful as US construction unions.
Also in the EU there is internal competition between countries for construction projects that brings costs down overall. Unions in Germany jacking up your costs? Maybe there's a construction company in Poland or Czechia willing to do it for less. In Austria I see many construction sites are full with companies from Slovenia.
US labor laws focuses on all or nothing union control of a workplace. And once they have control, they get a lot of legal power.
Europe has a different model where unions do not have to have any sort of majority vote to be recognized. As such, membership tends to be more fluid. So the unions themselves have less specific control, but the unions can be larger, and be more recognized without as much antagonization.
Also, US unions have a lot of power over healthcare in the US. Usually being a function of the state in Europe, there's a lot less cost at stake when dealing with a European union.
So I think it's largely an apples to oranges comparison.
The number of visible strikes is a sign of union FAILURE,not success. The way unions work in the English speaking world is quite toxic and one of the major reasons they have such a bad reputation with so many people.
Not saying they are all 100% bad but the big anti-union push and negative perception is not some pay-op like some people seem to think it is. It is based on assessing their behaviour and for many deciding it is quite unreasonable.
There's even a German word, "Warnstreik," that refers to a short strike (as short as a few hours) carried out just to send a warning to company management that the union means business.
The unions in the transit sector are extremely active in Germany and France. As we speak, Paris is at standstill because of a massive transit strike.[0]
More strikes indicates the union is less powerful - a powerful union never has to strike, because they always get what they want just through fear of a strike.
Unless the threat is exercised every once in a while, it is not taken seriously.
German and French companies know that unions are capable of and willing to go on strike if their demands are not met. That gives companies a much larger incentive to make concessions.
The Warnstreiks I mentioned earlier are a tool for reminding companies every once in a while that the possibility of a strike exists. They're often used during contract negotiations, when the union doesn't feel the company is giving enough.
Not really. Unions in Germany are like a partnership to the company management, while in the US are like the enemy of the management focused on total control and can get away with a lot more stuff than what they can in Germany. At least in the construction business.
I agree that unions are probably not a universal cause for costs, but I'm not sure I buy into this 100%. The author is equating right-to-work with union representation which isn't accurate. And different unions can incur different types of costs on different projects.
All these analysis just wind up concluding in a different politically correct phrasing of "y'all mfers piss a hell of a lot of money away on stuff that would be overt graft if it weren't an official part of the process and there wasn't some service exchanged with a plausibly deniable reason"
The whole system from top to bottom is a money sieve and it's so diffuse nobody is responsible so nobody has any incentive to clean it up and everybody has some token reason why their bit of pork is necessary so an outsider without tons of inside experience that tends to also result in deep investment in the status quo can't hope to accurately clean it up without breaking everything.
Better title: "why are US urban rail projects so costly?"
The subject is way more niche than "transit". A big part of it is economies of scale. Europe, and other developed parts of the world also built a lot more urban passenger rail per mile.
Now compare the cost of US freight rail - something the US does build and operate at scale - and it's much more competitive. Costs are often under $1M a mile, depending on factors like load, ground leveling, etc.
Countries are better at the types of transit they build the most, and the US doesn't use a lot of urban light rail.
I buy this. Even from a pure equipment allocation standpoint it would be more difficult for a particular state or region to spin up a job, let alone somewhere that has literally no existing rail infra to speak of.
In the article, they mention that Italy has something like a SWAT team of rail planning and designing consultants at the national level that swoop in on local projects and offer guidance. That’s just not something you get to unless you have a preponderance of rail projects under your belt.
Hearing about an Italian SWAT team for rail development just makes me think: "hire them."
I wonder if it would be cheaper to just hire all of the talent, and then just buy Italian rail components if they are available and work. That is essentially what the tech industry in the US does now anyway.
I guess certain "Buy American" protections get in the way of that, for good and bad reasons; but it's annoying that one solution is basically touching the third rail (sorry couldn't resist the train joke) in the country. Hire or import talent from abroad and learn from them, America's whole industrial history is basically a loop of that over time.
Rail is particularly expensive to build in the US because of the lack of living experience and economies of scale, but all construction projects from roads to housing are more expensive in the US than in other comparable nations.
>some of the design, planning and early engineering is within the realm of what a professional civil servant could do.
There's nuance to consulting costs. The government GS pay scale poorly accounts for specialized labor. It the government cannot pay to attract talent in a competitive fields, it must instead pay consultants.
LA metro is in a similar bind. They have to go with certain contractors because these contractors have hired all the talent that is qualified to build to LA metros own specifications for designs. They literally can't afford to understand their own specs.
It's common in other countries to hire a separate professional firm (for each specialty) to supervise the work of the general contractor. Does LA do this?
Government can easily get rid of bad employees. They have to be fair but it’s far from the impossibility popularly claimed.
What tends to be the case is that the management creates a mess and then complains that they can’t sack some scapegoat. Following fairness rules would allow the employee to say that they were following policy or had their judgement overruled, so instead they’re left alone and labeled “unfireable!”
It’s also important not to have too rosy an impression of a sector. Most of us here have seen private sector managers who were untouchable or managed to shift blame to others. They just didn’t have public oversight and usually don’t make the news.
At one point my wife worked for the state and she had many friends that also did that I spoke to. My wife's job was intense, but a number of her friends would talk about the shows they spent 20hrs binge watching at work in the past week. I've been at privileged tech jobs that were somewhat relaxed, but nothing close to that. If someone is so useless that you don't notice when they're screwing off 50% of the time... Even if the government can fire pathetically low performers, they often don't!
There’s plenty of that in the private sector, too (thinking of multiple guys earning 6 figures because they were reliable golf buddies) but in every case the problem comes down to management. For example, were those people being asked to do more? Were they getting negative reviews?
> but in every case the problem comes down to management.
This is remarkably naive and misses the big point. If a private company wants to dilute its profit by keeping on a bunch of unproductive or outright parasitic employees, then it is entitled to do so. It is competing in the market and this behaviour will be punished overtime.
There is no comparable incentive mechanism in government where they do not need to make a profit (they are funded off taxes which leads to far less end accountability to the people paying for the service) and in most instances it is explicitly illegal to start a business offering to do the same thing that governments do (as an example, I cant start up an alternative to the DMV to certify someone is fit to drive on the road).
The lack of competition and lack of market pressures allow for much greater inefficiencies to exist in government enterprises compared to private ones. This isn't to say government will inevitably be bad but any assessment of the problems of government vs private sector action need to take into account the important differences between their structures.
> If a private company wants to dilute its profit by keeping on a bunch of unproductive or outright parasitic employees, then it is entitled to do so. It is competing in the market and this behaviour will be punished overtime.
That's one option but it's far from the only one. Market pressure only works in markets where there's an efficient feedback mechanism for this kind of thing.
That doesn't work very effectively if there are barriers to switch (many ISP customers) or the only choices are very comparable in price and quality (most of the other ISP customers). They might also work to increase the difficulty of switching or rely on their ability to get customers because nobody else can claim to offer all of the things certain buyers need (tons of enterprise software of the Oracle/SAP/etc. persuasion).
Most commonly, this is a problem but it'll stay below the threshold of being fatal. A company with a really profitable core business can tolerate staggering amounts of inefficiency everywhere else as long as it doesn't get core customers to leave (e.g. Google). Value generated isn't always equal, either — many organizations with some kind of seasonal component might have to tolerate periods of higher and lower utilization if it's not trivial to rehire because they need to staff for peak demand. You can hire workers in the summer and drop them in the fall if you run a hotdog stand but if you need specialized workers or have a lot of internal business process to train them on that doesn't work so well.
My point was simply that there's a big tendency to blame workers rather than the senior level managers whose policies those workers are following. In the case of governments, you don't have the same kind of market feedback as a commercial entity but you do have public oversight to a degree most companies do not and frequently things like caps on how much money can be paid to employees, etc. which would never fly in the private sector. In all cases, you can find examples which are good or bad (e.g. compare the government of Norway to Saudi Arabia, or Apple to Comcast) so rather than observing that your apples and oranges aren't the same it's usually more interesting to ask how you could get the ones from Denmark instead of the Belarusian equivalents.
It's really not easy. They more or less have tenure. They can only be fired for cause and they have a right to due process. These are legal rights that normal at-will employees just don't have.
Non-unionized employees don't have, but yes, it's true that they require a fair process. In this thread we're talking about people who are performing badly enough to matter — that sounds like giving someone an unacceptable rating, telling them what they need to do better at, and firing them if they don't improve. The government managers I know who've done that hate the insinuation that it's impossible since that's basically saying they can't do their jobs.
I dunno, I serve on a standards committee where one of the other volunteers works for the U.S. Govt, she's taught me a lot about a field I thought I was an expert in it.
Consulting margins aren’t enormous either. When they pay consultants, they are paying the certified overhead costs + the hourly rate of the consultant and usually a limited percentage fee. A government employee really only saves you that fee which is 10-20%.
in the case of Los Angeles its a combination of factors hobbling rail at any level. First, NIMBY suits every now and then that threaten minor stretches of the project and require significant funds to combat, or restructuring the program entirely so as to avoid the town in question. this added YEARS to the purple line expansion in LA and ensured it could not go through Beverly Hills or Westwood. Second, deliberate political boondoggling from Republicans ideologically opposed to any public transit, mass or otherwise. They know they cant defund or sanction it, so they get elected on platforms to "form a committee" or put a measure on the ballots to "fund an investigation and research" into things like delays or budgets for the program, which inevitably saps resources and time from the program and slows things down.
IMO its largely NIMBYS though. California in particular has a bold cadre of arrogant holdouts for practically ANY expansion project. pull up google maps and look at the 710 freeway. Notice anything? yep, it stops deliberately before it gets to Pasadena. this lawsuit lasted nearly a decade and forced the city to give up entirely on the project, ending it right around el sereno and safely away from rich people.
say what you will about communism, but the central planning committees get things done.
China's transit projects are extremely well done, in general.
Chinese high-speed rail carries about 2 billion passengers a year and has a similar safety record to commercial aviation. Chinese underground systems are much more modern (and cleaner) than anything in the US or Europe.
I once worked construction at a state park, I made prevailing wage which was 4X more than my regular hourly wage.
Talk about the slowest moving construction project, everyone was incentivized to take breaks and milk their hours. We turned a 4 hours job into a 2 day project.
I worked for a private roofing company one summer in high school. The crew I was on would take two hour long naps under their trucks in the shade. I asked about it and one dude said, "The longer the job takes, the more we get paid." I can only imagine this attitude is amplified for government work.
Just wondering why does it affect the total cost though. I think the total cost is stated in the contract? So if you want to pay premium for the workers you are free to so that but that premium should be out from your pocket?
california regulations mandate prevailing wages for all public works projects [1]. it affects the total cost because, the government should be looking to save taxpayers money by offering the contract to whichever GC that can get the project done in the fastest + cheapest fashion.
prevailing wages essentially maps out to be the _highest negotiated union rate_ in the same geography so the mandate basically shoots, in the foot, the ability for the project to collectively bargain.
Doesn't seem like it would be hard to come up with Objective metrics. The main reason televisions get cheaper is because their quality/output/reliability can be objectively measured.
Yes, this is exactly how it works. All the public construction projects I’ve ever bid (sub or prime contractor) have been fixed price, and everyone factors the cost of the prevailing wage labor into their bid. The union local we hire from is actually paid a bit more than prevailing wage, so I’m already factoring those costs into non-public bids so it doesn’t change much for a union shop.
It's simple, right? If you can make $x and your apparent return is $y, I will take as much of your surplus $y-$x as I can. To make it acceptable, I will use other words, but I'm really just trying to capture your surplus and I will get it because you will tell people that $y is much greater than $Y (these true return) because you must inflate $y by some amount to represent the gain to you $y-$Y politically. An exploitable principal-agent situation.
Now, both you and I, without overt collaboration will align and help us both at the cost of the other guy who is paying for the whole thing. We can sucker him a little, because he's a gormless fool and his friends are useful idiots who will join in the deception.
The conventional wisdom in the U.S is that the only way to fix transit is to vote for politicians who will increase spending on transit projects. This ideology of just spend more money has lead to spiraling costs in health care, education, and government. I'm glad someone's actually looking into what the heck actually costs so much money and not how to spend more money.
well, one very important piece of the puzzle is that the US is very rich, but very unevenly (income and wealth inequality), and the US spending on services compared to disposable income is not that high.
another important piece is diminishing returns. the US leads in healthcare spending, but that also means that it suffers the most from diminishing returns.
then there's the Baumol effect too (increase in wages [due to productivity increase] in one sector pushes up wages in other sectors - especially when unemployment is low), which explains some part of the cost increases.
and of course both healthcare and education (and construction) are labor intensive sectors with almost no mass production. (prefab housing would help, but there's just not enough density for that)
the US is very credentialist, which (plus the aforementioned inequalities) push up the value of a "good education", so people pay a lot for it.
and finally, healthcare in developed countries is very much determined by environment ("lifestyle"). many people work their asses off, sit in traffic, live near pollution sources, become obese/ill, spend a lot on insulin/meds, and then get into bankruptcy at the end of their lives, and no amount of direct healthcare spending can help with that.
> well, one very important piece of the puzzle is that the US is very rich, but very unevenly (income and wealth inequality), and the US spending on services compared to disposable income is not that high.
Comments like these usually don't take federalism into account, or they just assume that because we have lower levels of benefits that we must be spending less. But let's look at the data:
US Federal + State and local spending, as a percent of GDP[1]:
* Pensions (Social Security + Other govt pensions) 9%
* Healthcare 9%
* Education 6%
* Welfare 2%
* Defense 5%
* All other 2%
Let's compare this to the OECD average:
* pensions[3] 8%
* healthcare[2] 9.5%
* education[4] 6%
* welfare[5] 2%
Or we can go to a completely different source, which compares social spending as a share of GDP[3], showing the OECD average is 20%, and the US is right in the middle at 19%, spending more than Canada, Australia, Netherlands, Switzerland, but less than Germany, France, UK.
What people don't want to admit to, as it is a painful realization, is that while the US spends as much as other countries, it delivers so little for that spending, because our delivery of healthcare and education is extremely inefficient.
This creates a type of loop, where people compare the lack of comprehensive benefits we receive in the US, and decide we must increase subsidies further, which results in even more inefficient delivery, and then we go back to square 1, leaving people convinced that the US spends so much less on these things than other countries.
Our problems lie not in too little social spending, but in obtaining too little social value from the amounts that we do spend.
> it delivers so little for that spending, because our delivery of healthcare and education is extremely inefficient.
And why is that? Is something different in the soil or the air in the US than in ... let's say Finland? How much is it due to federalism? (Is 50+ different markets less efficient than a few big ones, like Germany or the UK?) Is it simply because entrenched interests rent-seeking?
There are countries in the world smaller than many US states, and they manage to handle healthcare and education just fine, so no, I don't think federalism is even remotely a problem here.
For example, for education, it boils down to US resistance to tracking and insisting that everyone should go to college and study whatever they want. If they can't afford it and don't have a scholarship, we'll give them a loan. There are many other factors, but this is the main one.
Europe made a decision to provide 3 years of inexpensive education to the best 1/3 of its students. The US decided to make 5 years of expensive education available to 2/3 of the population (although only 1/3 or so actually graduate, the rest drop out).
Because the European schools are selective, they don't offer remedial classes and have accelerated, slimmed down degree programs that can be completed in 3 years. You don't get a lot of freedom to choose your classes. There aren't many electives outside your major. They also have much fewer non-academic staff - US universities have about as many non-academic staff as academic staff. In Europe it's closer to 1:10. No sports, few campus life programs, no community outreach centers, etc. It's really just education (Pro-Tip: go look at a German university's job listing page, and compare to an American' university's job listings). Students apply to a degree program and cannot change their major once admitted. Three years and they're done. But they graduate with the equivalent of a masters degree in the U.S., because the first two years of a four year degree they cover in gymnasium -- the prep high school system, which also has rigorous admissions and screens people out, and is provided more cheaply than U.S. college prep high schools. There are "math" gymnasiums,"history" gymnasiums, etc. My mother went to a music gymnasium. Then from the music gymnasium you can go to vocational training in music or study music theory at a university, but you can't go study, say, engineering at a university - there is tracking and specialization. That means when you are 16 your options are already limited much more than in the U.S. You are basically focusing on your major already.
The remaining 2/3 of the population are not routed into college-prep style gymnasiums but into more vocational oriented schools. They still get a good education, but there is also practical education, and then 2 years after graduating high school they will have a career - for example, a trained machinist - but not a college degree.
There are options to change -- for example, night school -- so that someone who decides later to go to college can do so. But it's not an easy road, it's a narrow road, not the wide road. Most of the population doesn't do that.
For a lot of cultural reasons, the U.S. wont adopt such a system. They will keep telling everyone college is the best option for them, that they can change majors whenever they want, and then they will make colleges offer a lot of classes that should be given in high school, and they will maintain a bloated system of administrators. Many will find themselves with useless degrees and lots of student debt. It also leads to absurd levels of overstaffing in American colleges and absurd understaffing in vocational education.
There are other reasons for the other inefficiencies. It's interesting to look for even more underlying reasons -- say trying to explain why Healthcare in the US is so much more expensive than in Europe, whether it is similar problems to Education, or just random chance that both of these are in the U.S.. I do think there are underlying reasons that tie it all together, mostly related to the U.S. being a rich, idealistic country that had a lot of surplus wealth, and now that things are changing, we find ourselves unable to afford such extravagant systems, but they are too embedded and politically powerful to change. You can find plenty of people who advocate that more money be spent -- but people willing to adopt European spending rules, lower salaries, and restrictions on personal choice -- not so many takers. Bottom line, having the government "pay for education" so no one needs to pay out of pocket requires a massive restructuring of how education is delivered. Same for healthcare. This restructuring is unpopular in the U.S.
I spent a few years in the Hungarian higher-education system (post 2006, when we switched to the Bologna system). We had a lot of freedom to choose classes, and it's possible to switch your major. (At least it was not unheard of, not many people wanted to anyway; and it is not hard to simply submit your application the next time there's admissions.) There's (very little) sports and (a lot of) campus life. (Maybe US "campus life" is paid in a large part by the institution? But even if it is a few kegs and random DJs are not expensive.)
3 years is just bachelors. But it's possible to do extra classes so the masters then only takes +1 year.
I know that Germany has vocational schools besides the gymnasiums, but I haven't known about the different types of gymnasiums. (In Hungary in almost all high-scools students can choose to prepare for the GCSE and pick specialization courses for the last 2 years, and with that it's possible to apply for any higher ed institution all around Europe. Of course if someone wants to get a scholarship then an in-country institution has the best chance for that. I have a friend who did a music high-school, probably picked math instead of music as specialization, and then right after that went to do a CS degree at a university.)
Anyway, I think the basic supply-demand argument (student loans) explains the fundamental difference between the costs, and then feedback loops explain the rest. (Sports and other non-teaching activities. Though, as far as I know, academic sports is profitable in the US.)
> They will keep telling everyone college is the best option for them,
This reminds me of the many posts/tweets where folks say "look at how much more graduates make, so go get a degree", which is of course partially the correct strategy, but also obviously it's not magic, the degree is more of a symptom.
That said it seems to me that the US labor market is more credentialist, more places blindly ask for a degree.
> and restrictions on personal choice
I don't really know what do you have in mind, but there's a big healthy private sector in Europe for healthcare too :)
> Bottom line, having the government "pay for education" so no one needs to pay out of pocket requires a massive restructuring of how education is delivered.
Definitely. I think one very important aspect is the big income/wealth inequality in the US, which somehow makes a lot more people feel like "sharing" with others will make them worse off.
The most important thing to understand is transit projects in the US are so costly on purpose. You can't fix anything until you fix the on purpose. If you manage to squeeze in one spot, new costs will pop up in another spot. It won't change until projects are cost efficient on purpose.
The sepulveda transit project will be an underground heavy rail project at the end of the day, unless the metro board is truly corrupt that is, but you have these homeowner groups who must be appeased (1), a monorail company that wants to use the transit construction opportunity to steal from the public purse by offering an objectively worse technology that the public will be saddled with forever (2), and despite all of this 93% of the actual public wants the underground heavy rail anyhow which offers the fastest end to end time (3).
Despite this, LA metro is spending labor and time to come up with and market these alternatives that are complete farces—3 of which are monorail based which serve as appeasement to above groups. Now imagine how much more efficient this could be if they could just build what any engineer would select as the best option (the fastest end to end option), and not have to do six times the planning to appease certain groups anytime they planned to do anything at all? Metro can't even paint a bus lane without this massive community engagement process that only serves to hamstring transit from being most optimal for commuters, to the least likely to piss off car drivers or busybodys looking out their window (4). Oh and this one single bus route was funded by the taxpayer 6 years ago and ground was supposed to be broken 2 years ago. Considering the route was planned even before taxpayer funding was approved, its been probably a decade at least of squawking and politicking and not a drop of paint has been put to the road surface yet.
This is one of the most traveled corridors in the united states. The nearby expo line is a light rail and already reaches capacity, and already runs at the maximal headways possible with the built infrastructure. Heavy rail is the only transit technology there is to serve the capacity needs of the sepulveda route especially once it extends further south in the future and links directly with the expo line or even down to LAX and beyond.
not to make this political but this is more political than not. people vocally want certain things (eg. prevailing wages) more than they want efficient costs so there's little incentive to make things cheaper.
a good case is always california's railway vs. florida's brightline. the differences are stark:
Labor costs are between 20-40% of the cost of construction. The Florida brightline project uses existing rail. The california project is all new rail and requires the purchase of land.
It's also worth noting that private sector contractors in CA know how to game the bidding process and often politicians or their families have stock or personal relations with the contractors.
you're right that labor is only a part of it. but part of the reason why the CA project saw huge rises in costs is because of project planning and scope increases in the planning -- both of which are politically driven.
part of the politically driven issues stem from NIMBY-ism but the other (arguably more heinous) part is how the cities can force the plan to be re-routed [1]. not only do costs rise and opening dates delay, the hypothetical "high speed" nature no longer rings true.
I don’t understand, was there ever an option not to put a stop in Palmdale? Skipping Palmdale would honestly be a huge lack of vision. There are like 3-400,000 people that live in the Palmdale / Lancaster area that would be in a nice transit distance from that station. The current Antelope Valley metrolink linke services like 6000 daily commuters even though it takes like 2 hours. Shortening this distance to like 20-30 minutes will surely increase this number by a lot.
This is also the logical location for a connecting station to a future train to Las Vegas.
Also this station will have passing tracks, so not every train will stop there. Even if only 2-3 of every 10 trains stop there, it will be a huge improvement to so many people. Honestly, if they were to skip it, they would probably realize that mistake and add it as an infill station, which would be even more expensive.
I think the Palmdale station is kind of a non issue if you compare it to true cost drivers, such as UP and the city of Hanford, both of which have forced giant mega structures to the project, structures that didn’t need to be that large, but were made to be just so that existing infrastructure didn’t need to be relocated with temporary disruptions.
if the goal is having high speed transportation while minimizing cost burden to the taxpayer, palmdale and other similar cities would have been skipped.
likewise, i'm not going to stop using LAX because it's in Inglewood and not koreatown; i'll figure out how to make the commute.
if CA really wanted to build this right without succumbing to the pork granted to all these towns, CA should have probably taken a more incremental approach (eg. first build the cheapest, shortest-distance, and most environmentally-friendly path. then, build secondary rail systems that go through areas with high population density.)
I think CAHSR has been pretty explicit in what the goals of the project are, and it includes servicing under-served communities with jobs and high quality infrastructure. So you might be attacking a straw-man here, as minimizing cost and the speed of travel is only one of many goals here.
But OK lets say that speed and cost was their only goals, I’m actually not sure that the I-5 alignment straight to Bakersfield would be any cheaper. In fact it might be more expensive, as you would probably need to tunnel under most of the Tejon pass. Such a long tunnel is much more challenging—and hence expensive—then two shorter tunnels under the San Gabriel mountains and the Tehachapi. Now if you evaluate this with the benefits of a Palmdale station, this becomes a no brainier.
Bear in mind that a similar situation arises in the north, where there is an option of doing a very long and expensive tunnel under the Pacheco pass, or take a slight detour to do a cheaper Altamont tunnel. Here CAHSR decided with the expensive option. Part of the decision is probably because Altamont is already serviced with good transit options, while areas south of San José, don’t. Also note that a Tejon Pass tunnel would probably be even longer and much deeper then the Pacheco Pass tunnels.
> likewise, i'm not going to stop using LAX because it's in Inglewood and not koreatown; i'll figure out how to make the commute.
I don’t think this is comparable at all. If the CAHSR would skip Palmdale, then people in the Antelope Valley would be forced to go to either Burbank or Bakerfield. For Burbank they can take the Metrolink, but it is extremely slow and has limited runs. For Bakersfield no mass transit option exists, you have to take a bus, and it is also like 2 hours. Going from downtown LA to Inglewood is simply not the same.
> CA should have probably taken a more incremental approach
So we’ve moved the goalpost here a bit, but OK. I think CAHSR actually agrees with you here. The first portion with CASHR funding to open is going to be the Caltrain electrification and modernization from San José to San Francisco. This is the cheapest, shortest distance, most environmentally-friendly path between two very large densely populated urban centers. The only rivaling corridor is probably LA to San Diego, but CAHSR probably realized the impossibility to get funding for that in the Obama era (as the Surfliner already exists; and the extensive tunneling required would be really expensive). After that the central valley is the easiest segment, so that is where they began after Calmod.
"It's also worth noting that private sector contractors in CA know how to game the bidding process and often politicians or their families have stock or personal relations with the contractors."
This is something that only occurs in California?
FLORIDA CONTRACTS GO TO COMPANIES THAT FLOODED RON DESANTIS CAMPAIGN FUND
The California project didn't have to be sold the way it was - but that was the whole point, get the boondoggle started.
They could have spend a fraction of the money on improving the capital corridor and the Santa Barbara - San Diego corridor instead, but that wasn't sexy enough.
It got sold that way because of CA's slightly weird proposition system.
There's no real political willpower for transit in California as a state; it's all located in some of the cities, which are plodding along relatively slowly but consistently (the San Diego Trolley is miles more than it was 20 years ago).
The French company SNCF that originally was helping California with the high speed rail left in 2011 because the state wasn't listening to it's recommendations. They build a high speed rail in Morocco which took 7 years to complete and launched in 2018. They left saying that California is politically dysfunctional. https://www.yahoo.com/news/company-hoping-help-california-hi...
The SF area already has rail corridors that ran from all major cities (San Francisco, Oakland, San Jose, Silicon Valley, Santa Cruz, etc) to Los Angeles. Most of that project is over farm land, where right of way / imminent domain should be straightforward.
Instead, we get the redundant Bart to San Jose (Amtrak has been continuously providing that route for a century or something.), and SF to SFO (caltrain covers that already).
They need to pick one rail technology and move the entire region to it, then dictate the legacy systems operate in a unified way (allowing regional, independent rail authorities to completely override city councils, sacramento and DC), with the understanding that they will be fired if the transition to a unified system takes more than 5-10 years.
Instead, they are doing the exact opposite of everything I just recommended, and all the systems are falling into disrepair.
the technology is irrelevant, it's purely mismanagement and lack of coordination amongst agencies. modern main line EMUs are perfectly capable of matching BARTs performance.
there are many, many problems with BART's SFO extension (courtesy of quentin kopp), redundancy is not one of them. there was no BART to caltrain connection prior to the SFO extension, and caltrain is a completely unserious transit agency running hour headways.
genuine problems with the transit system in the bay area abound, you should pick one of those to complain about instead of some weird fixation on incompatible gauges
Bart to SFO provided a valuable connection from Western SF/Daly City to Caltrain/SFO. It also provides the actual only connection between Caltrain and BART, giving better connectivity to the East Bay.
Although I'm a fan, Brightline also leveraged a bunch of existing rail, whereas the California project is almost entirely new right of way. That makes it hard to compare the projects apples to apples in my eyes. It seems intuitive that building a new rail line from scratch is going to cost more and take longer than building off an existing rail line.
I believe this is also the core of why Brightline has so many level crossings, and thus accident casualties as Floridians become accustomed to at-grade high speed trains. California high speed rail probably won't ever have to reckon with that grim issue, as it's been engineered out.
> people vocally want certain things (eg. prevailing wages) more than they want efficient costs so there's little incentive to make things cheaper
If you look the database they linked you'll see that there's no correlation at all with GDP/capita and $/km of rail line built. Some of the most efficient on costs are countries like Finland, Korea, Spain, Switzerland, It's clearly not all about the wages.
Brightline is basically a conventional (slow) train, whereas the CA project goes 2-3x as fast... totally different design constraints. Amtrak in California is already as fast as the Brightline.
Paris-Bordeaux was €15m per mile for electrified 200mph capable line. $20m / mile doesn't sound amazing for a non electrified line that operates at 79mph now and might have sections that operate at 125mph in the future.
> The consortium invested €3.8 billion, French government, local authorities and the European Union paid €3 billion and €1 billion was contributed by SNCF Réseau (subsidiary of SNCF). Another €1.2 billion was spent by SNCF Réseau on the construction of interconnecting lines, control centres, capacity enhancements at Bordeaux and remodelling the track layout at Gare Montparnasse.
Right now it looks like the current top speed of Brightline is the same as most Amtrak lines in California (79mph). Brightline claims in the future it will have speeds up to 125mph. Conventional Amtrak trains already can go 110mph on sections of high quality track, and do in some places in the USA.
True, but the only place Amtrak gets close to that I know of in California is through Camp Pendleton, and there it maxes out at 90.
A "bright line" style upgrade to the SAN-LAX route would have been entirely worth it, and they're struggling along with it, but at pennies compared to what has been spent on HSR so far.
Other than government interference in the route planning, all private projects seem to be susceptible to all the same issues as government projects in North America.
Like, NIMBY-ism affects private projects too (see: all home construction).
Sidenote: California HSR is slated to travel at about twice the speed as Brightline, I'm guessing that has some non-linear ramifications on cost.
Without even looking into it I am going to say huge price differences between different rail projects are something I really would expect to see. Building, planning and permitting a meter of track in a dense urban center is going to cost magnitudes more than building the same track with the same people through a more rural route even if it was done by the same people in the same system and state.
That aside the trains might run through different terrain and might have to run at different speeds. Building a dirt path through a flat desert is surely more cheap per meter than building a tunnel through a mountain.
So to compare such projects to each other in way that you can draw meaningful insights from the comparison means you have to ganular data science and compare how much of each track is going through which type of environment.
I am not saying your point is not valid, but just comparing the final numbers is not going to cut it here.
This certainly is a political issue, but privatization isn't the solution, it is the problem. US governments at all levels are so ideologically opposed to the idea of doing anything in-house that they overpay for consultants and contractors to do even the most basic things.
Once again, California inflating the national average to insane proportions.
I understand that the issue you're speaking to is farther reaching than just California, but I think we can all agree that it's one of, if not the absolute worst offender.
It is not about legitimate costs. It is about legalized corruption. Projects are super-expensive because the overwhelming majority of money spent goes to line pockets instead of building.
The US's innovation has been to make corruption wholly legal, proof against indictment
Isn't it kind of obvious? The US has a ton of infrastructure already in place, and in heavy use. It's not such an easy thing to build new infrastructure on top of old infrastructure with heavy traffic. It requires notices, permits, diversions, schedules, tons of money, etc. What it boils down to is that it is extremely inconvenient to build transit projects in the US for everyone involved - the builders, the government, the taxpayers.
On the other hand, it's not too bad to build things in places where there's nobody, or no infrastructure. Because it inconveniences nobody. Nobody cares if some new building or railway is erected in a spot where there was previously nothing. This is why Europe's infrastructure is so much better than the US's - because most of it was destroyed in WW2, and Europe was able to essentially start from scratch. It's the same deal with China, which was previously unindustrialized, and has had no problems erecting massive cities and transit networks in all these rural places.
I see no way for the US to get out of this quandry short of a couple things:
- Some kind of weapons or terrorism scare that causes massive city depopulation
- Major transportation revolution that enables mass transit without infrastructure, think flying cars
- Building brand new cities, which honestly probably will not happen unless climate change really fucks things up
So buckle in to your carseats folks, because we're gonna continue to be a car nation for years to come.
US cities have spread and sprawled, and there's no planning except for freeways.
Somehow we can acquire land for massive multi lane behemoths riding over the fields, and build them before the developments come in, but building or extending a train line before that is completely impossible.
no it's not at all obvious and your take is way off the mark.
the first TGV line opened in 1981... france had quite a bit of infrastructure then, it wasn't some freshly cratered hellhole.
> Major transportation revolution that enables mass transit without infrastructure, think flying cars
no, please god no. steel on steel is a modern, mature and extremely effective technology. the only serious attempt to "innovate" in recent memory, the chuo shinkansen, an ongoing effort by the world's second most competent builder and operator of rail systems has been a massive shitshow. in addition to being far more expensive than conventional HSR, it has an order of magnitude less capacity.
there's a word for this: gadgetbahn. just say no to gadgetbahns
if steel on steel sounds too simple to you and isn't scratching some techy itch for technological complexity it's because you're not looking deep enough. there's an entire journal devoted to studying the dynamics of the wheel-rail system [1]
Would it be wrong to say that the US has lost the engineering skills necessary to build this kind of big projects?
During World War II the US was an mind blowingly efficient juggernaut of public projects, but it seems that it has lost is way, and that today its engineering culture lags way behind countries like Japan, Germany, France, Spain, ...
You can only reap what you sow in term of engineering skills.
The best minds in the US are focused on showing marginally more ads, wall street , and lots of other things that pay very well, but not big engineering works.
>Would it be wrong to say that the US has lost the engineering skills necessary to build this kind of big projects?
Yes, that’s not the issue. The US still has many of the best engineering schools in the world and projects very rarely fail in the US because engineers screwed up and couldn’t handle it.
The problem is that the government has lost the backbone to actually disrupt people’s lives in the ways necessary to do large scale projects.
The California rail is not difficult, but it is quagmired in NIMBYism and political trading. The chosen route is not about efficiency or anything engineering related, it’s about scratching the right backs.
>The best minds in the US are focused on showing marginally more ads, wall street , and lots of other things that pay very well, but not big engineering works.
Because big engineering projects don’t ever get greenlit. There has never been a case where we wanted to build mass infrastructure, got all of the approvals, and then went, “whoops, nobody can engineer this”.
I don't doubt that the US can produce good schools and good engineers. Like I said what happened during world war two was unprecedented.
But good engineers from good schools won't stay and become great at their work unless they have big infrastructure projects to work on. Also money and prestige. Their colleagues from Japan, France, Germany and Spain have huge infrastructure projects to work on.
What's the equivalent of that in the US right now?
>What's the equivalent of that in the US right now?
Pick one of those large projects in Japan, France, Germany, or Spain and some big US based company (or international company with a US presence) will have a major piece in it.
The top US engineers get to work on major challenging projects all of the time. They are just not taking place in the US.
I really think this is pretty much solely about politics. The US has plenty of engineering success in the private sector, but public sector projects are weighed down by corruption, environmental requirements, community support requirements, overpaid union wage requirements. Everyone wants a piece of the pie.
Please read the actual article. It's much more complicated than that. France has incredibly strong unions, and yet their costs are a fraction of the US's.
I did. My conclusion is that the issue is over politicization as I said. Every interested party wants a piece of the pie, that includes unions, but it also includes everyone else in a 100 mile radius.
I think your error here is that you assume that politics do not exist everywhere people are involved.
A tram recently got built where my parents live near Paris. They had to involve something like 15 cities, 3 departments, one region, the French state, and the european union. That was lots of people who wanted to have their way. It slowed things down. But it got built anyway and now it works.
I take "over politicized" to refer to what the article was saying about how many of the various departments are elected, and how that causes delay.
The US finds it hard to delegate trust on these things, and parties throw up objections over and over again, either because they want to kill the projector because they want to cover their ass from those that want to kill it.
"Unions" are a generic term, much like "clergy" is.
Generalizations about "clergy" do not make much sense if you want to cover Iranian Ayatollahs and Buryat Lamas at the same time. Same about unions. The context changes across the globe.
The relevant context here is that everything is done to crush any kind of wannabe unions in the united states of America, unlike say in Germany or Northern Europe.
I come from France where the desire from the elite to crush unions is also strong, but the USA is yet another level.
Given that context the unions that do exist today in the USA have been selected for their survival skills more than anything else. Like always you can only reap what you sow
Why be a civil engineer with all of the liability and hard stuff to learn, and earn $35k coming out of school, when you could be CS grad and earn $150k, with way less stress?
>and earn $35k coming out of school, when you could be CS grad and earn $150k, with way less stress?
First, $35k is made up, that’s what someone working full time at In-N-Out now makes.
Second, being an entry level civil engineer is not more stressful than working in CS. You bear no responsibility and don’t do any physical labor. Why is that stressful?
I don't disagree to be honest because there are plenty of US cities where you can't do much in terms of urbanism even if you had the skills to build. They were built at the wrong era, for cars. They are just not dense enough.
As someone who got both degrees from a pretty prestigious US university, this was my reasoning too. I haven't worked a day in Civil Eng since graduation and I don't regret it one bit
I'm sorry $35K? Any source to show that rate? In small-town midwest U.S. the starting rate is at least $60k, so I'd be shocked to see it at anywhere near $35k anywhere in the U.S.
The engineering knowledge is there and growing, and spans borders. Like all construction in the states, the people to construct things are lacking, but that’s not the fundamental cost increase.
Here’s a few things I think are to blame (some as mentioned in the article and some of my own.)
- Desire to minimally disrupt others, this extends beyond rail to other projects, look at the big dig in Boston.
- Planning requirements re ISTEA act, have put engineering in a back seat to local concerns.
- Lack of domestic production/ buy america - leads to paying higher prices and big startup costs on every project
- No standardization of components. Almost every rail vehicle in the US ends up different. Every station is engineered from the start. 150 years ago, stations would come in on a train and be stood up to all look the same. England learned this late with crossrail.
- Political desire and requirements to minimize and mitigate impacts of globally net beneficial projects. Elevated trains are a nonstarter in most cities. If you can’t grade separate more trains mean more delays to cars, which means excuses for ambulances saving lives can be used.
I work on transit projects primarily on the west coast. My experience has been that 50% or more of the engineers were from outside the United States. While I don't disagree that the engineering skills are hard to find within local labor pools, plenty of experienced individuals are willing to relocate.
This is correct, particularly for rail projects, consultants and contractors have to be hired from overseas because there are very few Americans who can do the work.
This theory certainly seems more plausible — he'd hate having to reach an agreement with people he can't order around, whereas selling cars is comparatively easy:
> Musk admitted to his biographer Ashlee Vance that Hyperloop was all about trying to get legislators to cancel plans for high-speed rail in California—even though he had no plans to build it.
People say Hyperloop hasn't accomplished anything, but serving as a scapegoat for the completely unrelated failure of California HSR is more than nothing.
I don't believe Elon ever had any intention to build Hyperloop as originally pitched and the fact that the general public so easily believed that a guy who makes his money selling cars was going to invest in a mass transit project hilarious.
If you have not noticed that many people find it very easy to lie to you, I hope you discover it without suffering much. Elon Musk and Trump fans, e.g., seem not to have noticed.
Elon will still have to contend with the anchor of process that is the public comment period and inevitable CEQA lawsuits by rich busybodies who are afraid the poors will have a more convenient time getting to their jobs in the service industry.
In the US it seems like most problems with big projects are due to responsibility being diffuse across many political groups, and just about anyone with a lawyer has near veto power over almost any project. How is that absolute power?
What I find interesting about this "narrative" is... where is the specifics/proof?
It feels like "something" (the media?) wants us to think that it isn't just a few bad apples ruining the pie. It's the entire pie. It's unfixable.
What's also interesting is... say you do flag someone/something down as an example of corruption. Their side of the story is that they aren't doing anything wrong.
There’s a lot of tension over politics at the moment, I think people have been letting off steam here the past few days as a result, because I’ve noticed it too.
Good news is that a lot of us know how good the dialogue can be. Instead of despairing, why not jump in and raise the conversation?
As a Europerson...i don't really see much difference between this comment section and many others - over several years, at different times, let alone now.
One comment: "I really think this is pretty much solely about politics [etc]."...is what we would refer to as 'social stuff'.
This is the natural outcome when you optimize a society for 1/ lowest taxes in the developed world, 2/ no expectation of a social safety net, 3/ biggest possible upside to start a business, get rich, and become a millionaire or a billionaire.
Planet Money did a whole series of trying to set up an offshore company and realized that despite their reputation, Cayman Islands and the like actually do more due diligence of new companies than Delaware does.
The US is the best place in the world to start a company and get obscenely wealthy. As long as you take the risk that if you are unemployed you might die on the street destitute.
This incentivizes all sorts of antisocial behaviour like whole industries dependent on the lack of structure in the rest of society (the legal field, insurance, healthcare -> none of which are nowhere nearly as big or as lucrative in the rest of the developed world).
It also means every construction project is an opportunity for the enrichment of someone, rather than being done by the state for the betterment of society. Rail infrastructure and good transit in general is an incredible societal equalizer, and works best when it's basic, cheap, but reliable, frequent, and consistent. Which the US is just not incentivized to provide.
So instead, these projects become vanity opportunities to suck up as much wealth and at least help some middle class construction workers make lucrative bank. Good for them I guess. Don't see any other possible outcome in America today, such as it is.
When you put in a transit line, the surrounding land values go up -- it's as old as the railroads. The governing body needs to capture the increase in those land values. This is how transit is funded in many Asian countries -- the transit project goes from being a cost boondoggle to a profit center that pays for itself, either by taxing the uplift in land values, or the governing body owning that land and leasing it out to e.g. shops.