I think infrastructure in some places in the U.S. ends up looking a bit like a ponzi scheme.
Example city--Charlotte, NC. Down south in Charlotte there is an area called Ballantyne. Ballantyne has good schools, new everything, etc.
Ballantyne also has high taxes.
So what do people do?
Move 5-10 minutes down the road into South Carolina where there is abundant land. They start developing. More people move in. Schools are built. They fill up. They build new ones. People complain about the old two lane country roads so they are expanded.
Taxes go up to support this.
Then either people keep playing the move game to a new undeveloped area or the ROI calculation that nobody does on infrastructure catches up with the town. Some can support it, others can't and it's a downward spiral.
I'm not sure I've explained this well. I mostly think about this from the human POV, which I didn't even mention above. The rational thing for someone living in the high tax area is to go to the new area as it is developing and everything is new and then to decamp before things go so far downhill that property values drop.
Game theory? Tragedy of the Commons? What all is at play here and then as importantly, how do we do better?
Completely agree. Add to this the tiny (wealthy) municipalities built into existing communities that create favorable tax scenarios for themselves while living close to and using public infrastructure that they effectively aren't paying for. The Westlake and Rollingwood municipalities in the Austin area come to mind.
2019 taxes paid on a $1M home in Rollingwood: $2,053 [0]
When I put your values into this calculator (https://tax-office.traviscountytx.gov/properties/property-ta...), I found that the house in Rollingwood would have about 2K in City of Rollingwood taxes (just as you said), but the house in Austin would only have about 4K in City of Austin taxes, not 20-30K. All other property taxes were the same between the two properties. The overall property tax burden in Austin (adding county, school, etc taxes) for a million dollar house would be 20,298, while in Rollingwood (with the same additional tax categories), it would be 18,388. Certainly the taxes in Rollingwood are lower, but with hardly as big of a gap as you wrote. How did you get your numbers?
Aren't there county property taxes in addition to city taxes that should create a more balanced situation? If I recall correctly, the places I've lived in (where those weren't the same entity) had both.
County funds don’t pay for city infrastructure. They’re two separate entities with different financial responsibilities. They don’t just share tax revenue with each other.
I realize that, but there's no universal definition of "city infrastructure." It really doesn't mean anything consistent.
Many municipal projects that are accessible to non-residents of a city (e.g. roads but not typically schools) are partially funded by counties, states, and the federal government.
Sprawl taxes are badly badly needed in the united states.
Really it's just the inherent assumptions of the "science" of economics. Nature and wildlife are worthless, except maybe as backdrops for the bay window of a McMansion. Maybe a park provides tourism?
Oh you mean destroying all the wildlife and natural preserves of the world might destroy us all in a couple centuries (but a blink of the eye on geological timescales)? Nah, no concern. We only care about the quarterly revenues.
It's not just the tragedy of the commons. That old economic saw is just about inconveniencing your fellow humans by shitting on things they need. It still doesn't encompass any notions of conservation.
Game theory is misapplied reductionism and oversimplification of the real world (which is what economics is too, which is why that is the darling math discipline of economics).
Uh... Economists advocate making carbon and land prices reflect their true costs. Identifying, studying and correcting market failures, internalizing externalities etc are some of the most fundamental concerns of Economics as a field.
That is a niche movement, especially the one publicly espoused by "economics". The public face of economics, and therefore the one used to justify policy enaction is highly skewed by think tanks, endowed chairs, consultancies, and restricted hiring into the fed and other economics policy seats.
Economics can only produce costs on what it can measure and accurately estimate.
Economics can't even produce accurate estimations on the restricted space of human economic activity.
How can it POSSIBLY produce accurate estimations for the multiple orders of magnitude more complicated biological and natural worlds?
In fact all that does is provide fear, uncertainty, and doubt to the regressive economists and the polluters, and allow them plenty of denial room as they externalize costs of pollution and dumping and destruction on society as a whole.
This is a "science" where the mere mention of any regulation is still considered fundamentally wrong to a powerful, well-funded, and very public sizable portion of the intellectuals. And since that aligns with the rich and privileged of the world, it will continue to be the most public and pronounced aspect of the "science".
Sprawl might be reversing. The younger generation are having smaller families and don't like driving. This means less "big house" buying and shorter commutes. They are more open to the idea of crowding toward the center of a city. The Great Recession taught them how to avoid big expenditures.
It's sort of a "Tragedy of Systems." It's very easy for negligent or malicious actors to make bad decisions in a system context, but to have the consequences of those decisions not manifest in the same time or place as where the decision occurred. This makes it really easy to screw things up without suffering the consequences in complex systems, and people often make decisions for their personal benefit ignorant of or willfully ignoring the consequences.
I think all of the above comments hint at this but don't state this explicitly:
One of the general problems with growth is that it always and necessarily plateaus, and the growth stage has different dynamics compared to the plateau stage. When your town/business/country is growing it is easy to leverage the future because there is more wealth to spare.
In the growth period, investing in a new park/office space/spending program is totally rational if it helps improve growth and quality of life now, given that repaying that debt will be easy later. But once growth slows down, our expectations of progress must also wane. This is hard for many people to accept because they think that past growth was paid for with past success, when the reality is that it was paid for with current success.
> because they think that past growth was paid for with past success, when the reality is that it was paid for with current success.
Wow, great contribution. I appreciate so much when anyone can pull a nugget out of my ramblings and explain it back to me in a clearer way.
To add on to what you said and to bring this back to infrastructure, I think another challenge in the plateau phase is that you either need to spend a lot to keep old infrastructure working or massively reinvest to upgrade the infrastructure. If you've plateaued without expectations of future success, where do you get the funds to do either?
I like how you phrased that and take it to the system level to think about it.
It reminds me of Indianapolis, Cleveland, and their metropolitan areas. In 1969 Indianapolis created a "Unigov" merging with its surrounding county, and all of the suburbs within it.[0]
The Unigov concept has been studied a lot. General view is it was a net positive, with one of those benefits being a shared vision, shared tax base, etc.
Contrast that with the city of Cleveland and its metropolitan area. The city and its suburbs are distinct places. Suburbs on the east side and west side compete with downtown to give economic incentives to draw businesses away from each other.
For example, American Greetings (the card maker) moved its long-time HQ from Brooklyn, Ohio (a Cleveland suburb) to Westlake, Ohio (another Cleveland suburb). Westlake lured American Greetings with incentives that Brooklyn could not match.
The net benefit to the region is likely nil, but the benefit to Westlake, and the loss to the other suburb is demonstrable.
I think "externalities" are the tragic part of many systems.
It would be interesting to have a "simcity" or "simearth" that a democratic society could run before making decisions about taxation or climate laws or policy.
It might also be good to implement policies with an expiration date, and update the model as things play out. Then cancel policies that haven't met the promises.
>the ROI calculation that nobody does on infrastructure catches up with the town
This is municipalities using cash accounting instead of accrual accounting. Infrastructure has a known lifespan, and instead of amortizing the cost of replacement over it, the cost is realized all at the end when it must get replaced.
Pretty simple solution: infrastructure investment is handled at the State-level.
If there are infrastructure investments that go beyond a state's borders, you rely upon National-level government to debate and allocate infrastructure investment.
> Game theory? Tragedy of the Commons? What all is at play here and then as importantly, how do we do better?
Market failure. Independent actors working for their own self-interest will create a failure in long-term thinking. You address this the same as any other market failure: you create a larger, 3rd party entity which is trusted. This trusted entity allocates funds and makes bigger decisions that the smaller groups of people cannot do efficiently.
Larger level government authorities are not more trustworthy than local ones and are likely to have their loyalties further from me geographically than the untrustworthy local government.
The alternative is to live with market failure: watching your locality make poor investment decisions that transfers wealth to neighboring cities and counties.
If you want to work together, the cities need to form up a larger scale contract and work together. If you are willing to compete against your local cities, you are allowed to do that as well.
The market transfers your wealth away to those who are willing to provide services for a cheaper price. At some point, you gotta work together if you want to counteract this force.
The market allows me to voluntarily trade my wealth for goods and services that I perceive as having equal or greater value than what I'm giving up in trade. Every single voluntary purchase is a net benefit to both me and the seller.
The same can't be said for involuntary trades, like those that filter through the government. This is the situation we're discussing right now. The government took your money and spent it on some pet project, probably tied to a donor. They then opened that project to "the public," some of whom use it without paying in. That is definitely a problem. But it is not solved by moving up to the next tier of government. That only makes the situation worse, because the pet project/donor is more likely to be even further from you geographically. At least with the local government there is some chance you will benefit from the project, and you have more ability to oversee and change local political priorities.
And yet, such situations lead to market-failure situations.
For the most part, I'm a free-market capitalist. But every philosophy has an error if you take it to the extreme. In the case of pure capitalism, you cannot deal with "market failures" (in particular: externalities, monopolies, cartels, tragedy of the commons...) with purely market-driven economics.
Its a known fact. The only solution to market failures is to stop using the market as a tool.
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Government policy should be to default to capitalism, but if an externality (or other market failure) is identified, you should use the Government as a tool to correct the market failure.
Ideally, you should minimize the Government's enforcement. Regulation is poorly accepted by the lay population who fail to understand its importance. But since 3rd party intervention are provably the ONLY solution to a market failure (indeed: its the DEFINITION of a market failure: when a 3rd party has to intervine)... your choices are as follows:
1. Accept the market failure as reality. (Ex: allow monopolies to exist. Allow externalities to warp the costs. Etc. etc.)
2. Create a 3rd party (usually Government) to regulate or force people to leave the market driven approach.
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> The same can't be said for involuntary trades, like those that filter through the government. This is the situation we're discussing right now. The government took your money and spent it on some pet project, probably tied to a donor.
Case in point for market externality: City A uses up too much water from a river, such that City B no longer has enough water to survive. Gathering water from a river is extremely cheap, and maybe City A and B lived in peace before... but today cities can grow exponentially. And the increased usage by City A has led to City B's downfall.
This is a realistic situation on the Colorado River, where cities upstream have taken so much water that the Colorado River no longer flows to the ocean. To ensure that cities downstream even get enough water, there is a multi-city and multi-state agreement to ensure that Nevada, California and Arizona split the water appropriately.
Unfortunately, the agreement is flawed. But some agreement is better than no agreement at all.
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The free market "solution" is that City A gets all the water, because its upstream. There's no reason for City A to cooperate with City B, any cooperation at all means that City A (from a free-market perspective) "loses" water that it feels like it deserves.
When people talk about infrastructure built by one municipality being used by people who avoid taxes by living across a political boundary they don't usually mean rivers. What are you talking about?
> avoid taxes by living across a political boundary
If you're really worried about that issue, then just use toll roads owned by the local municipality. Sometimes there's a simple market solution to some problems. So I'm not really concerned about problems where the market has a solution.
The issue with your way of thinking: is that in general... you will eventually come across an externality which cannot be addressed by market-driven thinking. Realize that capitalism is a tool that works in specific circumstances (basically any circumstance without a market failure / externality).
You're arguing against things I didn't say and don't believe. All of my comments assume the context of this discussion which is people moving just beyond political borders to avoid taxes and then using the public infrastructure of the place with the high taxes. Nothing I've stated was intended to be universal or without exceptions.
Alright. So its an externality. At the end of the day: the people who benefit from the infrastructure aren't paying for the use of it.
Public infrastructure needs to be built, but if a local government builds it, other people come and the local government fails to get paid. Local government needs to tax those other people somehow, but they're outside the jurisdiction.
So the solution is to use the state-government taxes (or national government taxes, if it crosses state lines) to pay for the infrastructure.
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I mean, do you not agree that its a market failure situation? If you agree its a market failure, the only solution is a 3rd party enforcing its will to override the market.
Its proven. The free market cannot solve any externality. Its a true market-failure situation.
Not really. The important bit is that some-degree of resource should be left to higher-level stuff.
Ex: Few people bats an eye at FAFSA, which encompasses a nation-wide accreditation system for colleges and nation-wide student loan assistance.
There are national-level Police forces: ICE, FBI, and ATF to name a few. Obviously, political groups have taken issue with how these agencies operate, but their efficacy cannot be denied: they can do things more efficiently than local police forces.
Colleges get their tuition from students, so the location of where the student's family lives is mostly irrelevant outside of in-state vs. out-of-state.
Schools are funded by local property tax and the districts are drawn pretty locally, as are police and fire. They are also subject to the same vicious cycle of people move in -> demand better services -> local taxes go up -> the rich childless leave -> tax base suffers -> local taxes go up, etc.
> If we made the assembly of steel, concrete, and asphalt cheaper, do you think suburban mayors would stop demanding we build them big box interchanges?
I generally agree with many of Strong Towns' arguments, but this really seems to miss the mark. The reason why major infrastructure projects like regional/urban rail systems, tunnels, etc are so expensive vs other developed countries isn't due to the cost of commodities like concrete or steel.
It's due to the lack of sufficient domestic expertise in designing, managing, and building such large scale works.
Because we don't build that scale of project frequently in the US, when we do it, we don't do it as efficiently. A recent example would be the use of the incorrect grade of steel in San Francisco's new Chinatown subway line.
OTOH, we have huge amounts of experience building big box stores, parking lots, and freeways, which are the sort of infrastructure that the Strong Towns perspective says (correctly IMO) that we don't need so much of.
We need to build infrastructure with higher utilization, which therefore doesn't need to rely on what Strong Towns describes as the Growth Ponzi Scheme, but unfortunately that's exactly the sort of infrastructure that we are not very good at building.
1. The US has a large NIH attitude and is unwilling to adopt overseas experience or standards.
2. Somehow we have to move away from building infrastructure as stepwise huge mega projects. And start building infrastructure as an ongoing incremental and reliable program into perpetuity. E.g. instead of CAHSR designed largely as a dedicated rail system with huge up front capital costs the benefits of which can’t be felt until it is all spent, set up a state rail agency to consolidate and consistently fund incremental improvements to the rail system, with incremental ROW purchases and improvements that over time reach the really big HSR goals. Imagine for example CAHSRs capital budget of $80 billion but instead going to fund an agency for 30 years that can then hire engineers and project managers and allocate it to its projects that have the best ROI over 30 years.
That last one seems to primarily be a political challenge though. Nobody likes state run agencies and everyone loves defunding them.
> Nobody likes state run agencies and everyone loves defunding them.
I think you've hit the nail on the head. Ever since Saint Reagan said, "Government isn't the solution to our problem; government is the problem," people believe that any sort of dedicated government oversight is "bad." But the reality is, unless you carve out an agency/committee/trust to manage long-term projects, the oversight for it falls to the whims of whoever happens to be in office at the time.
I think you need to understand this from the perspective of those of us who lean fiscally conservative. Large government projects like The Big Dig and Second Avenue Subway have a history in this country of being horribly mismanaged and wasting enormous amounts of money. And you're basically arguing that this augurs that we should be funding these projects more not less.
Analogously imagine you have a relative who gets sloppy drunk and wreaks havoc every time he's around alcohol. Then he makes the argument that it's because he doesn't have enough alcohol. That maybe if he had a constant secure supply he wouldn't feel the need to binge every time he gets his hand on a bottle of vodka.
I'm not saying that your argument is wrong. But poorly run government projects prima facie justify less government spending not more. If you want to make the case that it's the opposite, there's a pretty high burden of proof.
So I also lean fiscally conservative, but as I read the argument, it's not that more money should be thrown after bad projects, it's that "if you're going to do something, do it right". Hire people who know what they're doing, pay them well, and give them time horizons long enough to actually complete the projects instead of thrashing about as a new politician comes into office.
I'd actually agree with that - I think the government should do fewer things, but do them better. Infrastructure is one of those things where there's a good economic reason why the government needs to do it (privately-funded infrastructure tends to run into tragedy-of-the-commons and diffused responsibility problems), so if responsibility for infrastructure is going to rest with the government, they might as well get it right.
Americans are fundamentally incompetent and unable to govern themselves. People keep blaming “Reagan” but it’s blue cities and states where infrastructure projects fail spectacularly. The Second Avenue subway was built in New York not Montana. The California HSR was in California not Texas. These projects are not underfunded. They’re funded more heavily than comparable projects in Europe. They’re also not undertaken by small organizations on shoestring budgets. The NY MTA has a surplus of highly competent career administrators and engineers.
> The NY MTA has a surplus of highly competent career administrators and engineers.
Does it? Or are the competent administrators (and engineers, but particularly the administrators - managing big projects is hard!) all getting paid bank at the most lucrative private companies?
If you want transparency and cost effectiveness and speed you need some really fucking good management.
I wouldn’t argue that. Other countries have similar issues, but either are politically inclined to ignore them Like many west African nations, or simply power through the issue via the strength of their economy like the European powers.
Any large infrastructure project isn't going to be done by a single private organization. It is way too big of a gamble, it has to be funded and overseen by the United States government. The only reason a transcontinental railway was built in the U.S was because of government subsidies. These subsidies were competed over by Union Pacific and Central Pacific, whoever built the most rail first got the most land grants and cash. You could argue that the quality was low because of the initiative but it was iterated on and improved over time.
Private organizations build the infrastructure behind the internet, but that’s because it is simpler than other infrastructural systems.
Ultimately people have finite time, and the people responsible for oversight should be those who benefit the most from the project coming under budget and on time.
No, the idea is that you actually need to properly fund and train the people overseeing the projects. Fiscal conservatives have been understaffing executive offices for years and then point at them when they fail. The DMV wouldn't suck if they just gave a bit more money and hired more people, but it will suck forever because everyone thinks it just sucks because Lol government sucks.
The US spends more per unit of service almost every public sector program than European countries. Overall, our non-military government spending per person is actually slightly more than Canada’s. At the local level, it costs NYC twice as much per passenger mile to operate almost an identical subway system to London’s.
Moreover, by your logic, infrastructure would be better in liberal cities and states. But it’s not. Baltimore hasn’t had a republican mayor since 1967. The city council hasn’t had a republican since 1942. Where can I find a republican to blame for the fact that it’s infrastructure is a disaster? San Francisco hasn’t had a republican mayor since 1964, has just a single republican in city-wide elected office, and the entire Bay Area currently has no republican representatives in either the state legislature or the Congress. DC has never had a republican mayor. These places should have great public services, right? If not transit (where Democrats sometimes have to share power with republicans at the state level) but schools, local public services, etc., should be fantastic and well funded, right?
> At the local level, it costs NYC twice as much per passenger mile to operate almost an identical subway system to London’s.
> Moreover, by your logic, infrastructure would be better in liberal cities and states. But it’s not.
NYC and London, both liberal cities, the latter arguably more liberal as regards public transit funding, yet NYC costs twice as much per passenger mile of subway. Seems like being a liberal city doesn't really explain the difference.
What makes you think London is more liberal? Most of Europe is more conservative in many respects than the U.S. in terms of transit funding. For example, for the most part trains in the U.K. and continental Europe are operated by private companies that are expected to cover their operational costs. (Though the government often covers capital costs.) By contrast, transit in the U.S. universally runs at a significant operating loss. Both London and New York, for example, cover capital costs for their subway. But the Tube runs at a slight operating profit, while the NYC Subway only recovers about half of its operating costs. (Tube fare, for example, starts at higher than the NYC subway fare, and for longer distances is almost three times as much.)
> What makes you think London is more liberal? Most of Europe is more conservative in many respects than the U.S. in terms of transit funding.
Are you using the political meaning of "liberal" or the financial meaning, "not very worried about overspending"?
I mean liberal in the political sense of government being ultimately responsible for the execution and success of infrastructure projects. Such a scenario could be financially conservative in the sense of providing transit service on budget, which London appears to do. Or it could be inefficient (or financially "liberal") like the examples we've discussed.
I think the real difference is that in places like London, well off people take transit more than is typical in the United States (due to a history of class and race coding around transit in the US), so there is more political incentive in London to ensure that the government agencies that build efficient, comprehensive, and effective transit.
Similar cultural priorities and even better transit systems can be found in Germany and other parts of Europe.
Or to put it simply, in London, bankers take the Tube. The same kind of people in the US usually drive cars, because the mass transit option is underinvested and hence slower, less maintained, and used mostly by poorer people. This is the case for many municipal bus agencies in the US.
I’m using the political/economic meaning of “conservative.” Requiring the subway to run at an operating profit (London) is a more politically conservative model than treating it as a public service that is heavily-subsidized to keep ticket prices low (New York). Other models typical in Europe are even more conservative. Stockholm’s subway system is operated and maintained by private companies, including MTR (the Hong Kong transit operator). France is trying to privatize the Paris airport and SNCF, the French rail operator. Deutsche Bahn, the German rail operator, is owned by the German government, but operated as a for-profit corporation rather than a government agency. It has operations in numerous other countries, and its CEO is paid over 1.5 million euro per year (4x as much as Amtrak’s CEO).
Indeed, the EU had a directive encouraging deregulation of rail: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_European_Railway_Dire.... It encourages separating the infrastructure from the operating companies, and opening the operations to international competition. If we had that in the US, a private company in Omaha could bid to operate commuter rail service in New York or Chicago. That’s a very politically conservative (neoliberal) approach.
> Requiring the subway to run at an operating profit (London) is a more politically conservative model than treating it as a public service that is heavily-subsidized to keep ticket prices low (New York).
Agreed, but raising ticket prices to ensure that a transit system runs a profit requires that the alternatives (driving, taxi, uber) are sufficiently expensive by pricing in their externalities.
It also requires that your average transit rider have enough income, and that the transit system be clean and comprehensive, which requires investment.
You can't build a great transit system by starving it of revenue.
> It also requires that your average transit rider have enough income,
London incomes are substantially lower than New York incomes, while transit fares in London are substantially higher.
> and that the transit system be clean and comprehensive, which requires investment.
London’s and New York’s subways have almost identical track mileage in cities that are similar in population and density. London’s system is expanding more now, but again that’s due to more liberal policies in New York. The US has some of the strongest public sector unions in the world, which drives up capital costs. It also has stringent environmental review and public participation laws for transit projects, which again drives up capital costs. These are all “liberal” policies.
As to cleanliness, cleaning is an operating cost, and that’s an example of something that the US does in a “liberal” way (cleaning staff typically are government employees), while Europe often does in a “conservative” way. In the case of London, cleaning is an operating cost Transport for London is required to pay for through ticket revenue, while in New York the government covers half the cost. And in Stockholm, cleaning, along with most other operations, is done by private companies.
> You can't build a great transit system by starving it of revenue.
New York spends twice as much per passenger mile as London in operating costs, and several times as much for equivalent new infrastructure. In no way is New York’s system starved of revenue. Same for DC, Chicago, Boston, etc. None of these systems are “starved for revenue.”
> London incomes are substantially lower than New York incomes, while transit fares in London are substantially higher.
Right, which is why I agree NYC subway fares should be higher, and shouldn't be a flat-rate no matter where you are going, which is what they are today IIUC.
But lower incomes than NYC that also means the London underground's labor costs are lower. Londoners make do with the higher fares despite their lower incomes because driving is even more expensive.
> London’s and New York’s subways have almost identical track mileage in cities that are similar in population and density. London’s system is expanding more now, but again that’s due to more liberal policies in New York. The US has some of the strongest public sector unions in the world, which drives up capital costs. It also has stringent environmental review and public participation laws for transit projects, which again drives up capital costs.
Without a citation (I'm genuinely interested) for a comparative strength of transit unions for NYC and London and the resulting effect on capital costs, there is nothing backing this statement besides what appears to be your general anti-union ideology.
London Underground workers are part of a national union [1], and have organized a number of strikes, as recently as 2017 [2]. Regarding environmental reviews TfL has to do those also [3]. Please provide some references to support the assertion that their reviews are sufficiently less onerous than NYC's.
Ultimately, Londoners pay a higher price for a higher quality of public transit service. Setting up the system to work that way that way isn't the result of a religious adherence to "liberal" or "conservative" policies, it's a decision to make public transit a priority and establishing whatever structures and incentives are needed to achieve that.
>Moreover, by your logic, infrastructure would be better in liberal cities and states. But it’s not.
What metric are you using to make this claim? I don’t even know of any non liberal cities. And whatever their faults may be, liberal cities and states are more desirable to live in or near, based on price data.
Rich people tend to congregate in blue cities and states, but on the whole they suffer from massive domestic out-migration (more residents leaving for other states than residents of other states coming there). New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, and Illinois are all losing large numbers of residents to other states: https://amp.businessinsider.com/images/5a57cab528eecc1d008b4....
This is not really a broad political point, but a very narrow response to the idea that infrastructure and public services suck in the U.S. "because republicans." When you live in a city like New York, DC, or SF, where 80% of people vote for the democratic candidate year-after-year, you can't really blame Reagan for the fact that the schools suck, the transit is falling apart, etc.
Sure you can, they need federal aid and aren't getting it. A city can't be by itself like some type of city state, a modern city needs huge federal investments. Which brings back the argument "because Republicans". Try again.
Why do cities need federal aid to pay for purely local services like schools, subways, buses, water/sewer, etc? Maybe you can blame republicans for the lack of high speed rail between New York and DC, but how do you blame them for the terrible schools in those cities, the awful experience of dealing with government agencies, etc?
Also, it’s not clear to me that transit projects in other countries receive dramatically more national funding. The French National government is paying for only 20% of Paris’s new regional transit extension: https://www.thetransportpolitic.com/2011/05/27/paris-region-.... That’s consistent with what similar projects in the US receive. (For example, the next phase of the Second Avenue subway is eligible for up to $2 billion from federal sources of a $6 billion total cost. And the federal government is paying $900 million of the $6 billion purple line in Maryland.) More important, it’s a small enough percentage of the overall budget that federal republicans withholding federal support shouldn’t make or break projects.
Exactly. Underfunding agencies and programs, then blaming them when they inevitably fail and using that failure as an argument to push for privatization has been the Republican modus operandi for several decades now.
And before anyone says that the big dig was a success because it made traffic suck less and the waterfront got rich...
Anything they did would have made traffic suck less. With the influx of rich people back into the cities in the late 90s the waterfront was gonna get rich no matter what they did.
With the benefit of hindsight it seems clear that the original 1950s/60s plans (themselves adaptation of 1940s plans) for expanding the highway and subway systems should have been followed (in no particular order so long as it all got done) and they should have tossed in a beltway line (so that literally everyone who needs to get across the city doesn't need to go downtown to do it) of some sort. They had a plan and they didn't follow it. They basically assembled 80% of the puzzle and then left it. That's why none of the major road/rail arteries in Boston link up in a sensible manner. IMO had Boston and the state not shot itself in the foot by repeatedly neutering its transit plans throughout the 20th century (killing I695, not pursuing the North/South station connector, making the silver line a bus line instead of a proper subway, the list goes on) it could have been as economically developed as the DMV area or the NYC/NJ area.
Don't get me wrong, it's nice that the highway is below ground but it has its costs. Literally an entire generation of people grew up not knowing what regular infrastructure maintenance and upgrades looked like because the state was pouring all that money into a bunch of holes under Boston. It was not worth the cost. Given the choice of two ugly highways in downtown Boston bundled with any one of the planned subway developments (maybe the North/South station connector) or what we have today the choice is obvious.
Roundabouts seem to bypass American NIH and get straight to our native anti-intellectualism. Probably the most common comment I hear from people encountering them for the first time is that they are too hard to figure out. To be fair, signage can be very poor, but still.
Lets talk about “roundabouts”. Near my home town they built one in the middle of nowhere because why not. Then they had to rebuild it because they hadn’t made it big enough for semis to get around. You can probably count on one hand how often each week two vehicles end up there at the same time.
Near me now there are several “roundabouts”. One is a curb in the middle of what is otherwise a normal intersection. One direction has no signs. The other has stop signs.
Another is three sawhorses with an arrow sign and a circle painted on the road around them. The arrow signs might as well just say “good luck”!
No one uses them the way they are supposed to be used because no one trusts other people to use them the way they are supposed to be used. And with the ones near me they can’t possibly even function that way.
All of these roundabouts only exist because people hear how great roundabouts are and demand them. And I’m sure they are great, but you need educated drivers, proper signage, enough space, and consistency. And they need to be used in spaces they’ll be effective. We get none of that anywhere in the states I’ve ever seen.
We just got one in my area. It's obviously the first time many people have seen one. And as you said, they are too hard for some people to figure out on the first time. I've seen people stopping in the traffic circle in places that don't even make sense to stop, under any circumstances. There is too much signage, if anything, and the left lane sign indicates it is for a left turn (not a sickle shaped, 270 degree left turn). Thankfully I haven't seen anyone making a left.
One problem with traffic circles is they require a wider carve out in what would be the corners of a 4-way stop. This involves eminent domain or prior government ownership; either making retrofitting difficult.
Compared with most European countries, the bar for being granted a driver's licence in the US is extremely low. It makes sense that it would be this way, given how difficult life is without a car in most places here, but I am often shocked at the standard of driving. In particular, the level of disregard for users of the road who are not in cars. But then, that also makes sense, since many people do not have much experience with using the road without a car.
The disregard is universal. Those people who disregard bicyclists and pedestrians are also disregarding drivers. A lot of it is ignorance and incompetence. And it works both ways. Pedestrians and bicyclists (most of whom are also drivers) equally have disregard for others. It’s just that usually they’re only going to hurt themselves or inconvenience someone.
Just in the past two days I’ve seen:
A driver turn make an unprotected left through traffic going straight in the other direction and through pedestrians in the crosswalk.
A bicyclist skip a stop sign and turn left in front my car. (It’s rare I see a bicyclist stop for stop signs at all.)
A pedestrian standing on the corner pointed at an angle towards the intersection giving no indication to any of the traffic if he was intending to cross and in what direction.
A driver run a red light full seconds after it was red.
A driver stop in the middle of the road for no apparent reason. (Uber/Lyft drivers frequently do this even when they could pull out and in easily.)
A driver pass someone in the turning lane while skipping a stop sign and then doing about 2x the speed limit.
A bicyclist give a driver the finger when the driver was making a legal right on green and the bicyclist was trying to pass on the right.
In your final example, the cyclist is justified because drivers are supposed to wait for cyclists when they make a right turn, just as they are supposed to wait for pedestrians.
Most of your examples are of drivers making mistakes and, when drivers make mistakes, the odds are higher that a large mass of steel will hit people at high momentum. This is not the case when pedestrians or cyclists make mistakes. We should focus on why we have so many cars on the road and why they are driven by people who are not responsible.
Actually, no. Drivers here are required to yield to a bicyclist already in the bike lane and then enter the bike lane and turn from the curb. He did. The cyclist showed up later and tried to pass on the right, in the legal sense.
The heavy focus on “cars suck” isn’t realistic here. The reasons why are well known. The cities and especially the suburbs were built around cars. You won’t catch me arguing against much more difficult to acquire licenses or more bike lanes or better crosswalks. You won’t even catch me arguing against fewer cars. But it’s going to be a long time before there’s significantly fewer cars.
The idea that drivers are the only ones out there responsible for safety is reflected in the dangerous and inconsiderate behavior of bicyclists and pedestrians. The reality is all three groups need education. But culturally the bicyclists don’t care and the pedestrians are lead to believe drivers are always at fault, causing them to do things like step into a crosswalk unexpectedly after a car is already halfway through the intersection.
> causing them to do things like step into a crosswalk unexpectedly after a car is already halfway through the intersection.
Every place I’ve lived in the US, the pedestrian’s right of way is maintained as long as they enter the crosswalk before the car does, and the status of the adjoining intersection is immaterial. In California law, there’s legally a crosswalk at every intersection with sidewalks, even if there aren’t any markings on the road. A green signal doesn’t absolve a driver of these responsibilities; just like with a blind corner, drivers must slow down to a speed where they can react appropriately to pedestrians.
Pedestrians are so rare, however, that cars don’t know how to deal with them. I’ve never seen a driver in the US stop for someone who is waiting to enter a crosswalk, only ones that have actually started to cross.
Pedestrians aren't rare in my area. Also, there's legally a crosswalk at every intersection, not just intersections with sidewalks.
The part most pedestrians seem to miss is that they also have a duty of care. That means, even if the driver should yield right-of-way, you can't just step out in front of them. If you do, you'll probably be found partially responsible, which will reduce the amount you can win in court.
> I’ve never seen a driver in the US stop for someone who is waiting to enter a crosswalk, only ones that have actually started to cross.
I do this all the time and see it fairly regularly. About 5% of the time, the person isn't even trying to cross. (Waiting for an Uber maybe?)
Pedestrians need to make their intentions known. It's actually really easy. I do it all the time. Stick your hand out in the direction you're trying to cross and try to make eye contact.
Not exactly. In America, distances are too long for bikes to effectively cover in most places that are not the east and west coasts. However, this also means that when inconsiderate bicyclists max out at 20-25mph on a 55mph road, they slow every one else down too (even those in cars). When you fail to drive the speed of traffic and slow every one else down, you have no business on the road and are a hazard. Bicyclists ought to stay off roads faster than they can ride.
You know we have fast roads and long rural stretches of road between cities in Europe also? Yet there are cyclists on those too here, including on 70mph dual carriageways. Sure, people sometimes complain about the inconvenience of being briefly stuck behind a cyclist, but people still mostly drive courteously around them and try not to kill them. Indeed, nearly all roads have a higher speed limit than most cyclists are capable of - though with the new e-bikes/s-pedelecs that's beginning to shift.
The fundamental problem is that in order for infrastructure to be built, people need to first start cycling. If there are enough cyclists on those roads for it to become a traffic problem, eventually politicians and urban planners will build cycle paths, then hopefully more people will use them, etc.
However I think in the US you have more than anything a cultural affinity toward the car. In the UK and much of western Europe, the roads (besides motorways) predate cars. Cars have to share that space with cyclists, horses, pedestrians. And generally speaking, the more vulnerable and untrained road users have the legal priority and the drivers of the fast metal boxes owe them a duty of care.
I personally find incompetent drivers to be far more hazardous than cyclists. Your point in defence of drivers here doesn't seem to address my issue of the ease with which drivers get licenced to drive but calls to question a matter of lack of infrastructure for cyclists. That would be great. It would also be great to improve everyone's driving.
For #1 there were mayors literally obstructing the HSR project unless the agency chose a contractor from their town. Going back to your constituents and saying "I brought you the jobs I promised" guarantees reelection. The french offered to build the entire california hsr for a remarkably reasonable price but were turned down because local politicians wanted to score easy political points with their myopic base rather than provide infrastructure.
Right on! Was just driving Oakland to Sacramento last week and lamenting the fact there isn’t a semi-high speed train tracking the freeways all the way out there. So much of our exurban sprawl puts people on 2 hour commutes along that route, seems like a perfect candidate for an incremental rail system.
Yeah, Capitol Corridor is great! I wonder what it would take to convert a bunch of those folks who jam up 80 and 680 every day into riders ... I suppose it’s more complicated than just moving the right-of-way and stations into the more populated areas.
Off peak travel time, and my destination was waaaay past Sacramento. For journeys like that, a two lane highway would be totally adequate. But the massive crush of traffic at commute time is another story...
The observation was really about freeways being built on valuable land taken under eminent domain by the state while passenger rail is mostly relegated to being a second class citizen on freight routes laid out 150 years ago.
Yet there's no shortage of foreign talent. A friend works for a major engineering firm in the US. At one point his office had thirty engineers and technicians. They came from thirty different countries and none were American. The dysfunction seems to be at a higher level.
There was a recent thread, about a paid talk at blackhat, by a scam company, and the audience's pushback. It included a thought, something like, that there are communities of professionalism, and communities of "bs", and they are intertwined interestingly in companies and society.
I fuzzily recall reading years ago, a comparison of subway construction management and cost in various countries. One city that worked well, had the professional expertise to manage the project within the government, able and willing to discipline contractors, and a city culture that this was an area for professionalism, not a playpen for political graft and grandstanding.
Cultures have norms of "this you just don't do". A recurring example is espionage during the cold war. You might kill someone. You can certainly seduce their wife. But you don't otherwise mess with their kids.
I've seen some pretty intense loathing of political subculture, from people in scientific subculture, based on conflicts in such norms (around climate change, and "this is useless research" stories).
Boeing's root failure is said to have been an engineering-centered culture being displaced by another.
So I'd like to see work on how subcultures negotiate and accept boundaries of influence. We frequently discuss examples: the sales team that sells software that doesn't exist, and looks to engineering to magically manifest it. And we name local phenomena, like moral hazard. But I've not seen a vocabulary and theory for discussing such at a larger scale, as instances of larger patterns. Which makes it harder to explore what boundaries might enable less dysfunctional execution of large projects.
Perhaps that's one way to explore "dysfunction [...] at a higher level"?
I think this makes a lot of sense in large organizations, particularly because these different units you speak of are not incentivized to work together, but to compete with each other. They fight each other for the budget so their leaders can advance their careers instead of working together to make the company more efficient overall.
>Nobody likes state run agencies and everyone loves defunding them.
I think there is a general sense of american exceptionalism when it comes to bureaucratic incompetence. It is hard for citizens to point to any well managed government agency.
Sometimes this is a self fulfilling prophecy due to defunding, but more often I suspect it is due to lack of accountability and negligence.
Take the CA DMV for example. No one is accountable for the horror show that is our backlogged paper based system .
“The US has a large NIH attitude and is unwilling to adopt overseas experience or standards.”
This indeed seems to be a problem. The US always wants to lead and if something works better somewhere else there is always the excuse “we are too big/spread out/not socialists” or something else. Or it just gets ignored. See healthcare or internet availability.
The US has about the same number of broadband subscriptions per household as Sweden. US wired broadband speeds are also in the top 10 in Akamai’s ranking.
It looks like Bahnhhof is $43/month for gigabit, compared to $70-80 in the US for Verizon or AT&T. But income is 50% higher in the US, so in terms of affordability the difference isn’t as big. (Remember, fiber service isn’t a product mass-manufactured in China. Everyone from the guy laying fiber to the guy doing tech support is getting paid much higher US salaries, not lower Swedish salaries.)
Sweden median income is 37000 per person ca 45000 in the US. But let’s close this. I am sure you will find a justification for US health care costs too.
Most of them are much smaller, meaning there is significantly less distance to cover. Of course you can get fiber to the home every where when you have a small nation. Let's look at larger nations:
Canada has worse broadband but better mobile [0][1]. I'd attribute this to population density: most of their population is fairly close to our border because the rest is a frozen wasteland.
Russia has worse speeds by far, and the certain things simply are not accessible due to being blocked.
No, we're not South Korea, but S. Korea is small with most people living in a very concentrated area. Again, no other nation has companies with excellent chances of setting up satellite network infrastructure, which is a good solution for a nation as big and spread-out as America.
I live in LA which as far as I can tell is pretty densely populated. I have one provider to choose from (Spectrum) at $70 for 100mbps. That's it. Why is there no competition in this area?
The feds make ISPs spend money on rural areas which aren't really profitable; that's likely a part of it. But there's no competition because there are a limited number of lines available; they can't tear up the street for every one that wants to.
Reading this reminded me of US stop signs, which are just terrible for traffic and fuel efficiency. I recently went to Europe, and round abouts started feeling "right" so fast I was amazed.
Do civil engineers not learn these things in schools in the US? Is efficiency not considered? So many questions.
Roundabouts are occasionally used in the US, but they are not a panacea. They require much more space than conventional intersections, and can't easily be converted to traffic lights. It's also difficult for visually impaired people to navigate roundabouts, so it can be hard to be ADA-compliant.
The Department of Transportation published a study about 20 years ago about roundabouts [1]; I'm sure most American Civil Engineers doing road design are familiar with it.
Detectable warning surfaces, pedestrian signals, bigger pedestrian refuges are options. There's also a familiarity problem; a guide dog in the US might have never seen a roundabout before and get confused, which is less likely in a country with many roundabouts.
Sort of. The EU ratified the UN's officiously-titled Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities in 2010, but actual disability access comes down to local laws. Only some EU members implement the standards, and they usually apply only to new buildings. In practice, disability access in Europe is terrible: https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/travel/traveling-wi...
I'm not disabled, but even my cursory observation noticed how bad it is. There are millions of wide gaps, high curbs, and narrow staircases with no other accessibility options. Last time I visited the British Museum, several of the few lifts they did have were broken with no workaround. And that's one of the more accessible places. Problems with roundabouts barely even make the list.
UK has decent disability law that I’m sure is comparable to the US’s, where both have exceptions for difficult to adapt buildings. Whether that be the protected and iconic British Museum or the hundred year old Tube stations.
They have some accessibility laws, especially more recently, but the ADA is an extreme outlier in the western world in terms of how demanding accessibility requirements are.
Within traffic engineering there is a distinction between a "rotary" and a "roundabout" [1]. In Massachusetts, every circle-like configuration is called a "rotary" because...
A. Most of them actually are rotaries.
B. The average person is not aware of the distinction.
1. The parking lots, freeways, and such that the US builds so much of, at such large scale, is still very expensive.
2. From the article, Chuck's point is almost the same as yours. We have plenty of expertise -- but our experts have been conditioned by the enormous wealth for almost two generations after WW2 to develop systems that are good at all sorts of metrics, but affordability is not one of them.
Whereas your point is that other countries have more experience building things and having to worry about the budget.
I think the reason that these things get talked about mostly regarding transit etc. is that projects that are uncommon in the US naturally attract more attention / skepticism.
As an anecdote, years ago I remember driving in the Austin area listening to local radio and hearing two segments back to back, which went something like this...
Segment 1: "The local light rail plan is a boondoggle, you know they spent $80 million on that thing and hardly anyone rides it! Just imagine how many new schools we could have built for that money!"
Segment 2: "The DOT is considering a highway expansion to help deal with traffic in Bee Cave... this project is estimated to cost $400M, which sounds like a lot, but it's actually pretty reasonable as a percentage of the state's overall budget..."
For context the light rail line was built, it was the first rail project in the Austin area and spanned some 32 miles but has very few stops, is slow, and has very little capacity (because, surprise, they built it as cheaply as they could).[1]
The freeway expansion project is a plan for just a few miles, really to deal with one funky intersection where US290 stops being a freeway. It hasn't happened yet, and maybe won't.[2]
The point of this anecdote is that the entire conversation around infrastructure projects is pretty strange. We spend huge sums of money on "routine" mega freeway projects all the time, and we just think that's normal. Even "simple" residential streets cost a lot more than people realize, and in most cases a lot more than the taxable value of the homes would justify. But we've been so wealthy for so long that we got away with all that without anyone questioning it.
Now that our wealth is fading, we've got a lot of difficult questions facing us.
The subway rail problem for SF doesn't seem to me to have a root cause of American governments lack expertise (which they do, to be certain) but rather simply that Americans are dishonest. Tutor-Perini thought they could chisel off a couple dollars by using inadequate rails because they didn't think SFMTA's supervising engineers would notice. They were right: it was a third-party audit that discovered the problem.
As a country we basically venerate fraud. This has consequences which could easily have been predicted.
I disagree with the statement in general that Americans are dishonest, but I do agree that Tutor-Perini is one of the most dishonest construction companies in the world.
They've literally never had a project come in on-time or under budget. They're not even all that politically well connected anymore, but keep getting projects because they're one of the few US companies with the experience in massive infrastructure projects.
We also have "Build America" policies that penalize us from bringing in foreign companies with expertise. We have to make a decision, is infrastructure a jobs program for today or an economic investment for tomorrow?
> It's due to the lack of sufficient domestic expertise in designing, managing, and building such large scale works.
> Because we don't build that scale of project frequently in the US, when we do it, we don't do it as efficiently. A recent example would be the use of the incorrect grade of steel in San Francisco's new Chinatown subway line.
No, it's because the government doesn't do it often, because the government is slow and inefficient. Private companies can do it fine; let them do it rather than sending the work to corrupt union shops owned by some one's brother-in-law.
The Strong Towns line is a pretty simple one, and this article simply reiterates on it: Nobody does ROI calculations on infrastructure costs and it will catch up with you sooner or later.
It might be compared to technical debt for the HN crowd: you build fast and break things for a couple of decades (post-WW2) and then suddenly you find yourself with an unimaginably complex, catatonic system that can't pay for itself. The interest payments overwhelm the rest of the system.
However! That doesn't actually answer the question about why _new_ infrastructure costs so much (surely a new subway line doesn't actually care if half the roads are ten years behind their maintenance schedule).
However, sometimes I feel they sideline the point that our government taxes us to provide shared infrastructure (legal, social, transport, hospitals, education, etc) and to prevent the tragedy of the commons.
Money spent to encourage social goals can be worthwhile or not, independent of the financial balance. Spending money that saves everyone time can be worthwhile, even if the tax base is not increased proportionally (the linked article disagrees with this). Edit: if the government taxes me $x for an hour's work, and spends $x to save me more than an hours drive, that is good economics for everyone even though the government hasn't increased tax returns.
Anyone who has been to some poor countries can viscerally understand the value of roading infrastructure, the value of social trust "infrastructure", or the value of safety and health improvements.
We can all see waste and bogus numbers in our governments, but yet most of us wouldn't move to a more anarchic country. We should fight against government waste and misincentives, but we should encourage improvements to our common good (the opposite of a tragedy).
Just FWIW, the Strong Towns team would mostly agree with what you're saying.[1]
Chuck would liken spending public money on things that don't have a measurable return on investment to "ice cream." There's room for ice cream in life. The problem is when its your entire diet.
What we're more worried about is that cities are losing so much money on bad investments that they're increasingly unable to afford "bread and butter," let alone ice cream.
And to be clear, as a response to this problem Strong Towns doesn't advocate stopping all spending/investment, but rather to take a careful approach that seeks to invest in things that produce a return, so the city will have more resources over time, so that there's money to pay for ice cream :)
I understand why you might get your impression though. Strong Towns content mostly is a blog stream and you can read a lot of it without getting the entire picture. Chuck's book is coming out pretty soon [2], and I think that'll help. The book boils down the entire Strong Towns "philosophy" (if you will) into something you can read in a day.
this may just be a part of your analogy, but it doesn't seem like being revenue neutral is a great goal for public infrastructure.
that's not to say one should not evaluate the potential of a dollar spent in a metro area of 25million vs. 2500. but it is to say that that metric of revenue neutrality isn't ideal.
one could easily imagine a situation where $1 in infra leads to $4 in economic growth, or $1.05 in additional tax revenue, or whatever.
but yeah i agree, those are the calculations that need to be done. and yeah it's a bit self reinforcing - rich get richer, economy wise - but this notion that everyone can not pay that much extra yet get their own big ass plot of land, roads and parking spaces - which is what suburbs are, as far as i can tell - isn't sustainable.
Infrastructure should not be weighed on whether or not it is profitable. You don't buy a stapler and think about whether you will return on your $7 investment, you buy it because it's the tool you need.
NYC only has a big subway because it gobbled up all the failed private railroads, still unprofitable today but it's the only way to move the workforce into midtown Manhattan every day.
LA at one point had one of the most extensive rail transit systems in the world (1), but it was ran by a private company that couldn't make any money off infrastructure, cut service, and circled the drain until its doom. The city opted instead to switch to busses, build elevated highways, and tear out rails instead of purchasing and improving existing rail transit. Today, the city is spending millions per mile to build rail over some of those same former railbeds that were dismantled 60 years ago, because rail is the right tool for the job of moving people around a city.
I was thinking the exact same thing. Technical debt accrued at a large engineering organization is very similar to bloated infrastructure costs in the US. That also doesn't explain the _why_.
My very rough take is that physical (and virtual) infrastructure require more labor specialization as the complexity of the existing system increases. In order to get that subway built you need specialists come in to make sure the roads can withstand extra stress from tunneling etc etc. Those specialists are expensive and miss-communicate with other specialists etc etc.
It sounds more like snowballing costs as you deal with technical debt by throwing more Heroku at it.
It has seemed apparent to me for some time that contractors/developers are pumping costs and milking change orders, with cities going along with it, possibly due to limited numbers of contenders. Similar to healthcare costs being a dance of growth between insurance and medical providers.
what these articles lack is the list of costs in a project. there should be law requiring all projects to list all costs in an easily accessible document.
we already require this in the medical field and know full well that those 15 dollar bandaid and insurance premiums are the things that drives ip costs.
I have some family in the large public works business, so I have some persepctive here.
Large public works projects are really expensive and take a lot of know-how to get done properly. It's only been since the 70's that we've had the engineering chops to even understand how ground water works around a dam [0] let alone what to do with the older dams. The computer models of how the soil works around the transbay tube duing an earthquake is basically guessing, we just don't have good data. Heck, even with good models and good firms, you still have to just pray that the rain isn't too bad for a few years.
One of the main issues is that we just do not have a good idea what the ground/climate is doing over a 50 year timeline here in the US. Look at all the cliff-side houses in Santa Barbara, or the houses along the Mississippi, or the houses in Paradise. As such, it's very hard to insure, plan, and estimate what kinds of tolerances the public works should be built to.
To do things properly is basically a guess most of the time. As such, when that gamble fails, the clean-up is really something.
People have lived along the Mississippi for hundreds of years and the river reliably floods beyond its banks every. single. year.
The problem with dwellings along the Mississippi is the "moral hazard" by allowing the US Federal Government to insure these houses without preconditions and never denying a claim, despite the fact that one property has flooded more than 53 times in the last 50 years (claiming on flood insurance every single time).
I would argue that it's just not politically sexy to say "I am going to maintain this X" as it is to say "We are going to build this Y". They are the "blocking and tackling", but the voters are in the stands waiting for the quarterback drops back to pass long.
I once worked with a company where this line of thinking had infected all of senior management. That’s how they ended up with an “intranet” that consisted of a shared excel workbook with hyperlinks to hundreds of other shared files.
But it wasn’t broken, so why spend the money on SharePoint, right?
Your account can only be in one currency. Want to do some listings in US$, and others in CAD$? No yuo. You can only change between your billing currency every 12 months.
That would still be an issue with Oracle, SAP, and Netsuite....
Fundamentally, it's not worth it to build a new financial backend to meet the unusual needs of .001% of their customer base.
If you want to have listings in two currencies, you should create 2 accounts. That is exactly how it is done in most financial systems. eBay is just making that transparent to their sellers.
Cost-benefit analysis is an engineering solution to a political problem - it seems great but it doesn't solve political issues.
In NZ potential changes to the national road system are ranked by cost versus benefit. Only the most beneficial projects are commenced, and low or negative value projects are not funded. Projects must also exceed a minimum benefit vs cost ratio.
The political problem is that national infrastructure project spending and lending is seen as overwhelmingly occurring in Auckland.
Cost-benefit leads to perceived imbalance because costs are massive in Auckland but the benefits are huge too (a large population, multiplied by large congestion).
Is that a political problem? Surely, a person who lives in rural NZ might think, "Oh, my tax dollars are being used to help those in Auckland; I'm being shafted", but if NZ is anything like the United States, urban centers are the producers of tax units and rural areas consume tax units.
It's worth pointing out that Auckland has recently added a regional fuel tax to pay for some of their roading infrastructure.
I haven't lived in NZ for a few years now, but I grew up there. I wouldn't be surprised if your analysis on urban vs. rural centers being producers vs. consumers might be slightly off as the economy is heavily dependent on agriculture etc.
New Zealand has two major problems:
1: Housing is completely out of touch with reality in Auckland (and to a lesser extent in all major centers). Auckland is one of the least affordable cities in the world to live in, and unlike San Francisco, lacks an industry that pays enough to keep up.
2: The regions are suffering from a death by 1000 cuts type scenario.
I have a working theory that the move towards bigger and better and more powerful cities has been one of our gravest errors in modern urban planning.
If you don't live in Auckland, your reckon your taxes are being spent in Auckland on expensive roading projects, and you can see that work isn't getting done on your local roading problems.
Regardless of how optimal for the nation that might be, or even if everyone is actually better off, you can easily end up with many unhappy people outside of Auckland (a political problem).
It's not a straightforward as simple consumption and production of tax units. The question is who benefits?
If Alaska consumes a lot of tax units by having an early warning system for ICBMs, then Alaska benefits in the sense that there is a government jobs program, but the simple calculus of tax units consumed vs produced doesn't factor in the benefit San Francisco and Los Angeles get from the early warning system.
this seems like a natural end to the author's aptly named 'Suburban Experiment'. once these true costs are factored in and some really unpleasant decisions made, it's not unreasonable to think that a lot of smaller tier cities/burbs will fold up due to a cycle of tax increases due to true revenue required => people leave => less tax base => death.
but honestly, that seemingly had to happen. the true cost of 'burbs is just way higher than anyone wanted to admit (or tax). the huge overhead of services + spreading them out over massive areas (relative to dense cities) seems to be untenable long term.
The suburb where I grew up is like this. The city can't get any tenants for vacant commercial and industrial lots. The school district is loosing enrollment and closing branches. Recently trash and recycling has been privatized. The budget hole cannot be closed because the governor cut funding to municipalities. I think it's starting to hit a bottom though. While there isn't any new construction to speak of, as boomers pass or move a surprising amount of younger families are moving in, probably because houses are only 100-200k.
I don't know what the end results look like. More ebb and flow I guess. I will say that this is a middle-middle class suburb; the upper middle class suburb it borders with the excellent school district and an equinox is doing great with homes selling for north of 500k.
i'm an urbanist, but even to me, "experiment" sounds needlessly antagonistic. it wasn't an experiment, but rather a deliberate set of decisions to give citizens what they wanted despite the (possibly foreseeable) problems.
government subsidization was manageable when out-migration didn't demand the resources it does now, in terms of standards/regulations (roads, drainage, electricity, water, sewage, internet, etc.), process (bureaucracy, legal challenges), graft/corruption, and the sizeable population now in (and moving to) the suburbs/exurbs, all in a robustly growing and more equitable economy.
we've since realized that costs go up superlinearly, which makes it a bad use of resources, so instead we advocate denser urban areas, which provide economies of scale on the infrastructure dollar.
Demand for new infrastructure competes with maintenance of old infrastructure, so decades of overbuilding will eventually exhaust the supply of construction services.*
Around here, it's not inaccurate to state that the construction services are the ones who created the red tape. Politicians and construction firms around here concert to keep a steady stream of money flowing to only designated buckets. So not only are they willing to deal with it, but they would very much protest if it weren't there.
I try to keep in mind that it might be for the purposes of creating BS jobs for economic purposes. But here in Wisconsin, and everywhere else too probably, there is definitely a very large element of skimming tax revenue by funneling it to your buddies.
I wish everyone had the knowledge of The Power Broker by Robert Caro in their heads. It's a mammoth book, mainly talks about early 20th century NYC development, but my god is it enlightening into how infrastructure got built.
Demand for new infrastructure competes with maintenance of old infrastructure, so decades of overbuilding will eventually exhaust the supply of construction services.
I know your statement is hyperbole, but this is a completely wrong understanding of how public-financed construction projects work, and the market for them, and other people are taking it for face value.
For starters, demand for new infrastructure at the public level generally requires replacing existing/old infrastructure. This is frequently because decades-old infrastructure was built to older/weaker standards and would need to be upgraded to newer standards, and the upgrade would cost as much or more than simply demolishing and rebuilding brand new.
Also, there is no such thing as a shortage of construction contractors willing to deal with government red tape. The government is the best client: it always pays on time, and it usually pays more than the face value of the original contract.
I see a lot of comments here are missing the point. America just has too much infrastructure (roads for cars), spread way too thin. Walkable, bikeable neighborhoods require much less in the way of paving, highways, interchanges, etc. It's way cheaper to invest in places for people than it is to try to solve every problem with more concrete.
The article gives two reasons. The first starts in the paragraph that begins with
The first underlying driver of U.S. infrastructure costs is that the U.S. has felt so rich as a country that, for decades, we spent freely on infrastructure and never asked serious questions about the return on that investment
And then lists some of the things we spend freely on that aren't really necessary. The second reason is
The second underlying driver of U.S. infrastructure costs is how deeply embedded infrastructure spending is within our model of economic growth.
both of those essentially boil down to we spend so much because the market is set up to encourage us to spend a lot. Probably not the answer you were looking for, but at the end of the day we spend so much money because we have set up the market to enable high prices.
The first reason doesn't explain why infrastructure causes more today (when the US doesn't feel as rich) than it did when the US was making large scale infrastructure investments.
The second reason seems flat out wrong especially when you compare e.g. the large scale infrastructure investments China is making to fuel its economic growth and compare that to the US where economic growth seems to be largely based on quantitative easing.
It is notable, not only China does that. Almost any single country, just within different scales. If you take Japan, Europe, they build infrastructure too, and a lot of it.
The underlying factor really is that the people in charge of spending infrastructure money are not really incentivized to be careful or ask tough questions about how it is being spent. Furthermore, they are often bound by piles of regulations and restrictions on their freedom for contracting the work, so they also lack agency.
Yeah, that's just the old and cynical "everyone-is-corrupt" talking-point.
It fails rather obviously because (a) the article is comparing costs across countries, and other countries haven't found some magic system to increase accountability of politicians and beaurocrats that goes beyond not re-electing them.
And, (b), there are plenty of incentives for decision-makers to keep costs down. Don't you think the governor or Mayor of New York would crow endlessly if they managed to build subway <x> or tunnel <y> for a fraction of the usual costs? Have you noticed how California's high-speed rail project and its cost overruns have been terrible for three governors in a row?
Whether anybody is practicing witchcraft or any other form of magic is beyond the point; it should be obvious to anybody who's not totally naive that some countries have more corruption than others.
Sure, so why doesn't this happen more often? The simplest explanation is that elected politician's influence is small compared to the collective bureaucracy's power to do what it was going to do anyway.
And yes, everyone who is handed a pile of third-party cash to spend on other people does not usually have very good incentives to make the most efficient choices, and doubly so when their personal agency is further restricted by a mass of regulation.
> the people in charge of spending infrastructure money are not really incentivized to be careful
The citizens are the only ones who would have such incentives. They're paying for it & they're using it. They aren't supposed to be piggy banks to jiggle to pay for things, they should also be involved in what gets paid for and how. Expecting a bureaucracy to be efficient is like expecting a monopoly to be fair, so the citizenry needs to be more engaged.
I think the headline for this article is unfortunate. The article didn't focus on answering the headline in the way most readers will expect, but those who have read more of Chuck Marohn's writing probably won't expect it to. It's really about "Why Does Infrastructure Cost So Much?" being a common concern but missing the point. He points out that bad development patterns and misguided regulations lead to roads that aren't economically productive enough to pay for their own maintenance, and that reducing the actual construction costs isn't going to change that paradigm. This probably shouldn't be the first article anyone reads on strong towns, as it jumps to conclusions that are justified in earlier writings.
I believe this article's best explanation of its solution is: My approach ... is for local governments and local communities of people to assert leadership, to take active steps to make their places stronger, healthier, and more prosperous, so that—regardless of what happens with the state and federal economies—our cities evolve to become better places to live.
It seems to me that could mean a whole lot of different things, or maybe nothing at all. It's not really specific advice. IDK. Maybe the book has the details.
Where is a better article? The cost of infrastructure is extremely complicated. People who are experts in construction financing are busy making good money rather than writing articles or donating time to journalists. (and construction/construction finance experts are usually only experts in a specific subfield)
For me it has become habit to read comments about articles before actually reading the articles. The deliberate miss-titling of stories to sucker in readers is now commonplace and I appreciate when I'm afforded a chance to avoid it. Here we're allowed to believe the story might investigate why building infrastructure in the US costs several multiples of what other countries pay, or what the US used to pay for the same result. Instead what appears is yet another naval-gaze about the evils of roads, cars and suburbs.
There was a specific example that is indicative of why it costs so much here. He said, hypothetically, that a road project may have to purchase 5 additional feet of land for the right of way in order to meet some standard like 12 foot lanes, doing this without thinking at all. That 5 feet may not have been needed if you sized the project to 11 foot lanes, but now it must be purchased from a variety of landowners, and each one knows that they can hold out for top dollar. And it's probably low-value land to them anyway if you're building a 5-lane road through it.
This sort of thinking gets in the way of a lot of projects. I read at the time that Acela was proposed as a 180mph train, but the difficulty acquiring and building more right of way to smooth out turns, and the requirements for heavier parts to meet some safety regulations, meant that it could not approximate the speed of TGV. Instead, it goes 150 on some relatively straight sections and usually goes somewhat less. The special trainsets also cost more than European HSR trainsets.
Why do government software systems cost so much? Many of the same reasons, and as the article points out for infrastructure, the players have a desire to fund big projects and act like they're "done" instead of funding little improvements all the time.
* Outright corruption (this one in particular I'd disagree with for US costs, but I have heard people discuss it).
* Price gouging, either via corporate cost-plus contracts raking in money, or via union featherbedding, or some other way in which a lot of money within the contracts are for things that don't really serve any "legitimate" purpose.
* Political consideration forcing all projects to become "megaprojects" that are prone to sunk cost fallacies or scope creep and are not amenable to effective cost-control.
* Antigovernment trends shifting design and engineering work from public agencies, causing the agencies to be unable to effectively manage the construction of projects.
For new infrastructure specifically, it costs a ton in the US because of a combination of non-transparent bidding system from contractors (politicians give their buddies bloated contracts) and construction unions overstaffing construction sites.
In other words, taxpayer money is being taken for a ride. For a good example of the latter situation, look up the rampant overtime abuse that's been discovered at the LIRR. There's little incentive to keep costs down and use funds efficiently, because it's tax payer money.
Environmental regulations. The average infrastructure project in the US spends 4.6 years in environmental review, which provides rich opportunities for NIMBYs to block the project.
The purple line in Maryland, a 16 mile long above ground light rail line through the DC suburbs, is so plagued by litigation, it will cost almost twice as much as Copenhagen’s massive new subway expansion (27 miles of tunnel under downtown Copenhagen).
Why do people subscribe to the myth that US infrastructure is bad? I am Danish and was on a road trip from Houston to LA, to Caspar WY, to Denver CO in 2017 and the roads we were driving on were excellent. Better than even the German highways which are some of the best roads in Europe. Is it the construction lobby that wants more funding and creates this narrative?
People on Reddit and Hackernews seem to be mostly pessimistic. I agree with you. Yeah, we have potholes in places and old bridges that need repair, but we managed to put roads across the entirety of the US in a 100 years.
Most of the shitty roads I've seen in the states are in the cities where there are loads of traffic. I'm not really bothered by it.
The utter lack of public transit is my main issue. Even the cities that have some tend to be very unreliable.
Though to your point, interstates tend to be pretty good, but but a lot of random cities’ surface streets can be pretty bad, there have been public health scares like the lead contamination in Flint, Michigan, and there was a often cited report by the American Society of Civil Engineers that rated the USA poorly on its infrastructure [1].
Reminded me of my mom's place. They've got a multi-year project to dig up the road, replacing main water pipe and other stuff, so whole road is closed off for a few miles. So far in 2019, my mom (who's a pensioner) and me have only seen people working there during weekends or after five in the evening. Mostly sporadically, nothing for a week, then a small group on Sunday afternoon, then nothing again.
Meanwhile all those construction vehicles and tools are just sitting around. Somehow these guys ended up being the lowest bidders.
The costs probably went up for the same reason healthcare, education, and rent/housing* costs have gone up relative to inflation: they have not been able to take significant advantage of automation and outsourcing like most everything else has. It's one of the high-hanging fruits of automation and outsourcing.
(I'm not putting a general value judgment on overseas outsourcing here, only saying that it lowered prices.)
* You can't make land in a factory, barring a collision with Mars.
It's really bizarre to complain about how roads cost "too much" when we are now spending $1 Trillion per year on stock buybacks.
A few executives and directors (who are already the richest humans that have ever lived) are adding orders of magnitude to their hoards with these massive buybacks. Google just broke records by announcing an unprecedented $25B in buybacks for this quarter. Over the same time period they are spending $6.2B for all of research & development.
Expect these buyback numbers to grow wildly in the coming years.
It's not just executives and directors who benefit from buybacks. It's shareholders. I've personally benefited, and I'm not in the 1%. Anyone who has an index fund or mutual fund in their 401k benefits from buybacks. So, you could make a case that buybacks (when used intelligently) benefit retirement accounts, which is a kind of public good.
Now, the question is, how long do the benefits last? And are buybacks always beneficial? I think that's debatable. There's data on both sides of that argument, but I do think that most companies don't use buybacks judiciously. Berkshire Hathaway does-- buying back only when they have cash that can't be put to a better use, and only when their share price is below intrinsic value. But most companies are using leverage to fund buybacks, which is a short-term way to benefit shareholders at the cost of long-term deterioration of the balance sheet.
I certainly hope we don't outlaw buybacks, but I think there's a case to be made that they shouldn't be done via leverage. Good luck trying to legislate that behavior, though. Money has a way of finding loopholes, and such legislation will almost certainly have negative, unintended consequences.
Not really. As an investor you get more tax-flexibility with buybacks, since you can decide when you sell your stock. Lets you defer taxes, unlike dividends, which get taxed even when you reinvest them.
With a dividend, you get an amount of income, X, and you get to keep the stock and sell it in the future for even more money, Y. Yes, you get taxed on it both times. But you get two payments of income: X and Y, both taxed at capital gains rates.
With a buyback, you might get X income. But in order to get you X gains the company needs to pay Z (current share price), which is always more expensive than paying a dividend (generally for dividend paying companies, a share trades for 10x-100x the amount the dividend would be for). So the company either pays 100x or it buys back less stock, rewarded fewer investors. Additionally, any shareholder that participates in the buyback is now closed off from getting income Y for any stock sold back. Alternatively, if you don't participate in the buyback, you must hope the company maintains or grows its share price, or else your gains fall below X and you're no longer deferring tax, you're just losing money.
(IOW, for the same amount of cash, a buyback is several times less efficient at returning gains to investors as a dividends. And this means that rather than increasing the price per share, buybacks frequently have the opposite effect, or no effect, because the company also has significantly less cash on hand after the buyback.
Then why do companies love buybacks? Executives love buybacks because it lets them exchange their equity compensation out-of-schedule. This is the primary driving force behind the rise of buybacks. The reason they open buybacks to the public is to avoid running afoul of SEC insider trader regulations.)
>A few executives and directors (who are already the richest humans that have ever lived) are adding orders of magnitude to their hoards with these massive buybacks.
First of all, it isn't "we". This is not public money. It belongs to the shareholders, and buybacks are one way to return the money (tax efficiently). Why should it be horded by the company? If there is nowhere to invest, give it back to the owners to spend or invest as they see fit. Second, buybacks don't magically raise the share price. The number of shares outstanding decreases, but so does the cash on the balance sheet.
There is plenty of literature on stock buybacks and how they work, you simply need to look beyond the populist headlines.
> On Jan. 1, 2018, the biggest, most sweeping U.S. corporate tax cut ever enacted went into effect. A year later, we’re able to see how businesses used all that extra cash.
Trump's tax cut helped big business, that's true. But for each corporate buyback there were thousands of mom and pop shops that benefited and invested.
Buybacks are just money changing hands. A company has extra money that they can’t invest well, so they buy out some of theirs owners instead. The money doesn’t disappear. It goes to owners who can pay taxes with it, invest in bonds to make roads, invest in startups, buy cars.
The idea that companies that can’t invest well should be forced to spend like drunken sailors is a bit silly.
it's not about how much infra costs here - that's a straw man in your comment - it's about economic factors shifting behavior.
stuff like this becomes a part of rational short term behavior for corps with low taxes, cheap debt, etc. why get 2% ROI on R&D when you can get 3% elsewhere?
we know some solutions: higher taxes, nonfree debt. there just isn't political will to do it atm, for numerous reasons.
I tend to think it's lack of competition. The industries that do best in the US are ones that foreign competitors have the easiest ability to compete in. Construction is almost inherently a domestic affair. With efficiencies gained in more competitive the money saved has to go somewhere so it gets spent on construction.
Of course a problem with this is that I don't think all forms of infrastructure spending of gone up in price - look at housing; per square foot I don't think the cost has gone up that much.
But it does not in Europe. America pays about 2-3 times the price per mile for roads and rail than in Germany.
Australia pays even higher prices than in America.
eg Sydney purchased surplus trams from Spain. The Spanish tram system cost USD 115 million for about 40 km (25 miles) and Sydney has already spent nearly $3 billion (USD 2.1 billion) for about 40 km and it will cost another $500 million before a single tram starts. The project is already years behind schedule.
What all these things have in common is that they are labor intensive and must be performed with American labor—and well-trained American labor at that. American labor is expensive because we’re a rich country. So it’s absolutely no surprise these things would be expensive, and not much we can do about it.
At least that’s become my theory and it’s so obvious to me that I don’t know why it hasn’t been analyzed that way.
For a long time our culture seemed to produce honest people doing work for an honest wage. They would be reluctant to "charge more than it's worth". There was an element of honor to it, and avoiding the shameful act of gouging your customer. If something takes 2 days to do, and it costs you $30/day to live, then you charge, say $120 - you're not only living, but also you're saving for a rainy day. It's a good thing.
Cynical market manipulation has soaked into real world work at every level both public and private. Sociopaths with the balls to ask 10x or 100x the traditional, cost based price have succeeded totally, and have lured workers with 2x or 5x wages, essentially starving any potentially honest competition. It stuffs all the good workers into a profit-maximizing corporation that now has a lot of other priorities that often conflict with "an honest days work for honest pay".
The city politicians and admins responsible for actually spending the peoples money are often unable and/or unwilling to actually take responsibility for the projects. Partly this is the moral hazard of spending other people's money; but partly it's passing the buck, not wanting to take on any risk associated with real project execution. The public's awareness is dim and short-lived, so the upside of project success isn't worth the risk. So you hire a firm to hire the firm to do the project, and you have plenty of scapegoats if things go sideways.
I don't think successful projects can just happen. You need individuals, visibly, identifiably, running projects, and building reputations. I think it's wrong for a small town's admins to throw money at a big corp to do an infrastructure project, and pay themselves 6-figure salaries to "oversee" it for 10 years, "darn those overruns!" In fact, I think it would be great if infra project competence was second only to running a self-restrained police force as a topic of city elections (the distant third being capability in running other city services well).
But from what I've seen American voters only show up if they have strong emotions, and don't know anything about government or the people running to rule them. So, this is what you get.
Wait, if we freely spend on infrastructure, and infrastructure assumed to be just a given, then why do we have a D rating on infrastructure by our engineers? Why do we have so much neglect in our infrastructure? Something doesn't make sense here.
The first part is quite good. Those who could be making infrastructure cheaper have no incentive to do so. The comparison to education and healthcare is spot-on.
The second part is a bunch of Malthusian nonsense.
Union contractors and brothers-in-law are most of it. I lived in Houston for a while, which is a very large and bureaucratic city. They can't get infrastructure done right. In the area are a few small towns which incorporated before being sucked up by Houston, and are much more efficient. They are called the Villages, and banded together to run their own police, fire, public works, etc. Instead of dealing with stupid unions, they hire normal private contractors and get things done quickly. Get rid of your horrible union agreements, and be more like the Villages.
As another perspective, a recent draft paper[1] notes a correlation between transportation infrastructure costs and how much community involvement there is on the project. TL;DR, infrastructure was way cheaper when we could just bulldoze through neighborhoods and wetlands without meaningful pushback.
[1] Brooks, Leah, and Zachary D. Liscow. “Infrastructure Costs.” SSRN Scholarly Paper. Rochester, NY: Social Science Research Network, July 31, 2019. https://papers.ssrn.com/abstract=3428675.
It’s not just infrastructure, or cost. After watching Apollo 11 the other night, I can’t fathom how that was done in 8 years.
Also, in the movie, one of the mission controllers looked to be about 70. To think that when we he was born, flight, radio, and computers did not exist. Here he was putting men in the moon.
Here I’m, born a couple of years after that, and seems not a damn thing has happened since. Everyone has a piece of shit in their pocket with which they can sext. Call that progress; Truly depressing.
It was done in 8 years because the US was spending 4% of GDP on NASA, which was probably a mistake in retrospect. The other reason is that it was a greenfield project with competent management, generally.
Also the Moon landing was at least as much defense spending as it was science spending. The Soviets derived a lot of national pride from holding all the major space achievements and beating them had great propaganda value. Also without knowing how useful the moon would be it was deemed unacceptable to risk the Soviets gaining a foothold, exploiting all its resources and defending it as their territory.
It's not hard to make an argument for the Vietnam War. Compare it to Korea. How much would you pay to get another South Korea (GDP per capita something like 30,000) vs. Vietnam (GDP per capita something like 3,000).
Obviously it's a counter-factual. Maybe Vietnam was inherently unwinnable. Maybe victory would have left Southeast Asia just as messed up as defeat.
I don't see it. Vietnam was not invading the US. Rather, they were trying to eliminate a long, ugly history of French colonialism. Ho Chi Minh at first actually thought the US would favor his movement, given the US's own history with British colonialism.
A couple million people's deaths were caused by the US war in Vietnam and Cambodia. I don't see how I could argue in favor of that.
Had it won, it's not clear that the US would have somehow turned the Vietnamese economy into the South Korean economy. That would have been mostly up to the people of Vietnam. I mean, in another light, consider the fact that the US cannot even turn its own economy into the South Korean economy.
The space program was dual-use for getting better at making ICBMs, and we desperately wanted to keep up with the Soviets in our capacity to eliminate all human life on the planet.
It's great that we did something amazing in the process, but that kind of political will came from a very specific arms race.
Example city--Charlotte, NC. Down south in Charlotte there is an area called Ballantyne. Ballantyne has good schools, new everything, etc.
Ballantyne also has high taxes.
So what do people do?
Move 5-10 minutes down the road into South Carolina where there is abundant land. They start developing. More people move in. Schools are built. They fill up. They build new ones. People complain about the old two lane country roads so they are expanded.
Taxes go up to support this.
Then either people keep playing the move game to a new undeveloped area or the ROI calculation that nobody does on infrastructure catches up with the town. Some can support it, others can't and it's a downward spiral.
I'm not sure I've explained this well. I mostly think about this from the human POV, which I didn't even mention above. The rational thing for someone living in the high tax area is to go to the new area as it is developing and everything is new and then to decamp before things go so far downhill that property values drop.
Game theory? Tragedy of the Commons? What all is at play here and then as importantly, how do we do better?