Speed is affected by process, and process evolves in reaction to abuse. In the beginning, it's quick to do everything, but as people take advantage - routing contracts to friends, taking safety shortcuts - rules get put into place and those rules affect the time to complete.
For New York specifically there's another factor that it's strange the article omitted: Robert Moses.
Prior to the mid-1960s, it was fairly simple: if Robert Moses wanted something built, it was built. If he wanted it blocked, it was blocked. This made the process of getting approvals a known factor. Moses chaired a wide variety of authorities including NYC Planning Commission, the Parks Department, and more. He was the sole authority to negotiate with the Federal government for NYC projects.
This kind of central oversight allows certain projects to be completed much faster than it would be in other setups, but it also allows for a number of bad outcomes - corruption, ignoring the public good, environmental destruction, and more. As such, over time more process gets added. It's easy to criticize process, but many of the rules were written in blood with the best of intentions.
This reminds me of what Dan Carlin called "rolling the monarchy dice" in his Hardcore History podcast.
If you get a good dictator, things get done with little friction, because the power rests on a single person's shoulders. But if you get a bad one, you're stuck with it.
Democracy might be slower and less inefficient, but it's reliably slower and less efficient.
Interestingly, in situations where a bad roll of the monarchy dice isn't a big deal because people can just leave, dictatorship tends to become the preferred form of government. See for example open source projects with their BDFL; if you have a bad BDFL the project gets forked with new leadership. Another example are small to medium sized businesses, where customers and employees can just go elsewhere if the CEO turns bad. Notably once a company reaches a critical size it tends to become more like a democracy, with both investors and employees demanding a seat on the table, because "just go somewhere else" becomes less of an option.
I saw this effect directly in Eve Online. In the early days there was a lot of experimenting with how exactly to organize these large groups of players. Some groups tried democracy of some flavor or another, others dictatorship. Dictatorship easily won out in the end.
Most "dictators" in Eve actually end up being pretty good at their job, because it is a cutthroat market, and the most precious currency is players willing to fly for you and they can easily leave to join another group should you piss them off and not take care of them.
It's really annoying that HN has resorted to the same hivemind behaviour as Reddit. You're asking a reasonable question, because you didn't follow, and you're greyed-out from downvotes.
If someone has a bad take, downvote them. If someone doesn't understand, but wants to, either upvote or don't vote. It's really that simple.
That person should actually read a comment instead of pushing back against a point that was articulated already. /that/ is Reddit hive mind behavior, not downvoting irrelevant or bad comments
Ironically, this is the most reddit sentence I’ve ever read.
To add more substance and avoid be-redditting this thread even further: I think the crucial difference in a good forum culture is that “bad takes” aren’t reflexively buried - they’re dismantled, disproven, and alternatives are submitted. That way anyone else with similar “bad takes” is guided to a better POV. This is actually productive.
Downvotes are for irrelevant material, which isn’t productive.
The key is having an accountable "dictator". There are two interpretations to democracy: you can emphasize "representation", and parliamentary system, or you can emphasize "accountability" and singular leaders. The idea being, if you rolled the dictatorship dice badly, you minimize damage and reroll it.
The U.S. was clearly designed with the second interpretation in mind. The revolution was a result of taxation by the British Parliament, and their anger at the British crown was that the king did not stop the parliament. The president / executive branch is a single person, and it represented their view of preferring an accountable monarch over distributed accountability dispersing Parliament.
They also designed the house seats with very lower upper bounds on the number of people represented by a single person, and the design of voting districts reflects a view of accountability over representation.
However, the prevailing meta game of politics is using the representation interpretation. And the design of the U.S constitution is quite bad when that is the understanding. It's just not designed for it. And the pubic has been trained, in almost pavlovian way, to interpret the "accountability" interpretation as "populism" with negative connotation.
The US design was a bit more than that. It was designed, first, so that the entire system had strictly limited power. Second, it was designed so that within the system, there was nobody who had power that someone else could not block. It was very much not a "dictator" design.
For example, the President could appoint the cabinet and judges, but the Senate has to approve them. The president could negotiate treaties, but the Senate has to approve them. The president could veto a bill, but Congress can override it. And so on, and so on. That's not a dictator.
The president has been moving closer and closer to a dictator, though, because Congress has become more and more useless. They have become so tied up in political trench warfare that they can't actually govern. They often can't even pass a budget, which is their most basic job. So the president rules more and more by executive order, which is very much not the way the system was supposed to work.
The president has become more of a dictator because Congress has abdicated a majority of their law making authority to the executive by creating administrative agencies. There is no real check on administrative agency rule making. The judiciary can block a rule but often defer to the expertise of the administrative agencies making the rules.
> His stories about George Washington, none of which I knew, are even more fascinating. Bueno de Mesquita claims, quite plausibly, that a huge part of George Washington’s motive for fighting the Revolutionary War was to protect his substantial, and critically placed, landholdings in the Ohio Valley. I’m not saying that I agree with him, but his story made me realize that a large part of my belief in GW is romantic: because I learned about him so early in life, that romantic view is harder to shake and I’ve been less willing to put GW under the public choice microscope than with any current or recent president.
> An excerpt about GW’s wealth:
>> His last position, just before becoming President, was President of the Patowmack Canal Company–the Potomac Canal, as we know it, from the Potomac River. What that canal did was bring, make it possible to bring produce from the Shenandoah Valley–which George owned–up to the port in Alexandria, which had been built by Lawrence, by the Ohio Valley Company, in which George had a direct interest, and shipped goods out. So it was a very profitable undertaking–or so he thought it would be, in the long run, for him. And that’s what motivated him. Most people think of Washington as–besides a great hero, which he certainly was–as kind of a gentleman farmer. Economists have estimated the worth in real dollars adjusted for inflation, not appreciated, of George Washington’s estate, in contemporary terms; and it’s about $20 billion dollars. He is by far the wealthiest President. He is the 59th wealthiest person in American history. Three of the American founding fathers are in the list of the top 100 wealthiest Americans in all of history: Hancock, who was wealthier than Washington–made his money smuggling; and Ben Franklin, who was not quite as wealthy, who made his money because he had a monopoly on the printing press. These are the folks who led the Revolution. These were not the downtrodden. These were not the oppressed. These were people who stood to lose huge amounts of wealth because of the King’s policies. And so they fought a Revolution. Which was, by the way, not very popular. Sixty percent of the colonists either were neutral or opposed to the Revolution.
This seems like a pretty irrelevant derail of the GPs point, no? Regardless the revolution was about their rights as Englishmen being infringed upon, not the amount of taxes paid.
Spending the 1770s paying doing business as usual and paying taxes would have made all the big personalities much wealthier than dragging armies across their place of business and having a country to show for it wound up making them.
I agree the design wasn't about representation, and does seem to have been designed with being able to kick people out being important, rather than representation (think about the fact that per the original constitution, the only federal office voted for by citizens was the House of Representatives). However, describing it as optimizing for concentration of power in comparison to British parliament seems to be incorrect (as others in this thread have pointed out). From my readings of The Federalist Papers, it seems more that they were trying to design a system which forced cooperation between its members instead of individuals with massive power. The executive is an individual, however, because actual execution is always better done with an individual on top. Of course, changes to the constitution and the world in the meantime have massively weakened the original design.
What's an example of a good "dictator"? I can think of are individuals who willingly gave up power or set up a democratic system after they left, i.e., George Washington, Ataturk, etc. I can't think of a single historical example where someone actually improved the people's situation in their country, but that could be my bias when I think of someone who is good or my ignorance.
Without meaning to start a flamewar, I'd give a shout to Napoleon. Took over when France was in chaos, and turned it into a wealthy powerhouse, spread Enlightenment values, built incredible cultural treasurehouses. He was a great general and administrator and leader. Yes, some of the family members he appointed to run parts of the empire weren't great, nor were his successors. And yes, invading Russia was a mistake. But still seems a good example of "rolling the dictator dice".
Honestly this kind of reminds me how a large application grows. You get a polished application out and discover a bug, but you can't rewrite the whole app so you put a patch in. Then another bug is found, so another patch gets pushed out.
Over time legitimate bugs and requirements at the time fall by the wayside but the code remains. I don't know how we fix that problem when it comes to legal code though.
I think there's been some writing on this - where others have suggested we need to regularly "refactor" the legal code. I mostly agree, and you could think of courts/case law in this way.
However, there isn't much incentive for it. A law getting struck down has no negative effect on Congress or state legislatures. That's a problem IMO
I like the idea of expiration dates on laws. Another good idea is requiring Congress to remove old laws in order to pass new laws. But, the second idea is much easier to game.
Yeah, check out the audiobook, it is great and was worth the wait. I have the physical book but it has so many pages and is so heavy that it is hard to hold and read, especially lying down. It probably should be sold in a box set.
> It's easy to criticize process, but many of the rules were written in blood with the best of intentions.
Respectfully, we already know this part. It's at the top of every single thread like this.
The more important questions are:
* Are all of these rules still necessary?
* Are any of these rules more obstructive than beneficial?
* Could any of these rules be refactored for a better benefit to obstruction ratio?
The problem will not be solved as long as every time it's discussed, it becomes a "should we have any rules or no rules at all" discussion. We know the vast majority were put in place because something prompted them. What's less discussed is how to fix it, or at least stop making it worse.
> What's less discussed is how to fix it, or at least stop making it worse.
Isn't the point of the U.S. checks and balance system that it's basically impossible to 'fix' 'bad rules' that are viewed as beneficial by at least a quarter of the population?
Regardless of how 'bad' it's considered by the majority?
The problem is that the pro-process people usually have some concrete reason, no matter how bad, outdated or obviously irrelevant for their process. The anti-process people don't have anything because there is no identical control group without the dumb rule.
There’s another very important factor about Moses that people overlook.
They did things in-house. There’s an anecdote in the book about how they had a building on Randall’s Island with 100 draftsmen on call at any time. The minute the federal government announced more money was released they’d whip up designs for highways or bridges before anyone else and have the proposal in.
There’s a lot of stories like that. Moses and his organization actually built shit, they designed and project managed their own stuff.
We don’t do that any more. It’s not just that we hire construction companies, we hire companies to manage the construction companies and then another company to manage the managers. None of those people have an incentive structure that rewards building fast and on budget.
This problem is endemic to every government function at this point. I am convinced we could solve half the problem with public works by just like building a government department to actually deliver the government services themselves instead of what we do now. Which, of course, is how governments mostly used to function before neoliberalism and general corporate dominance took over.
> It’s not just that we hire construction companies, we hire companies to manage the construction companies and then another company to manage the managers. None of those people have an incentive structure that rewards building fast and on budget.
this is a giant issue in the angloshere
And noone own the outcome for quality of the result.
When an issue arises, before anything is foxed there are 15 years of lawsuits between these companies to figure out who's fault it is
In Britain, we had 100's of highroses built non-cpmpliant with fire safety, apparently the builder, the owner, the fire inspector and the local government are not responsible for compliance.
The leaseholder of the individual apar5ment has tonpay for fixing it.
Some people bought partial ownership, i.e. 25% of the apartment, the rest is owned by investors. Well, theybare responsible for 100% of the maintenance (this is a government scheme)
So some people have bought an asset for £40k and now much pay 100k to fix it. And they cant say no
Exactly the same thing happened in Australia. We lived in an apartment with flammable cladding in Melbourne that would have cost $50-100k to replace. Luckily we were just renting, so it wasn't our responsibility (we moved out shortly thereafter anyway).
Having family members who worked inside government and having (briefly) done so myself, I completely agree with the grandparent. Government departments are basically just sprawling hierarchies of middle-management. Very few people who actually do things or take responsibility for anything. Those who want to are likely to get fed up and leave very quickly.
It's all about contracting things out to the usual suspects of consulting firms, who inevitably are only interested in dragging things out for as long as possible and leeching as much money as they can.
There was a recent report comparing metro construction in Italy with the USA that came to the same conclusion. They concluded that in-house expertise is by far the biggest factor in delivering large-scale projects on time and on budget.
My pet theory, not fully fleshed out yet, is that it's a consequence of "job creation" being a fundamental task of government. Or at least one we assign to it by virtue of constantly holding it accountable for "the unemployment rate" and other such statistics.
I think there's also an analogy with the way software gets slower as hardware gets faster. That is, pointless bureaucracy and wasteful work grows as technology allows a smaller number of people to get the "real work" done. As long as the final result is acceptable (company doesn't go bankrupt / software slowness is tolerable), nothing is done about the waste.
Edit: that includes overly complicated arrangements of sub-sub-sub-contractors with 5 layers of management, all passing messages around before the one guy with a hammer can actually do anything. Kind of like the modern web stack.
It's difficult to imagine anyone on HN, who's been around since 2014, and also not aware of the existence of Switzerland or Germany. So it does seem like mindless boasting.
When each level of company extracts it’s profit, and is doing what it can to maximize profit, it’s not surprising what the end result is.
Cities used to/should have public works departments. Not hire a contractor who hires a paver who rents the machinery to fix a pothole. The city should just own it all and hire someone as it will forever need to fix potholes.
> building a government department to actually deliver the government services themselves instead of what we do now. Which, of course, is how governments mostly used to function before neoliberalism and general corporate dominance took over.
This is how things were done for a long time, but anywhere the government delivers value is quickly "privatized" the next time a conservative government is elected.
This is a simplistic take. European and East Asian democracies build infrastructure far faster and cheaper than the U.S. Often with even more stringent safety regulations and higher standards of quality.
The question we are tasked with answering is: why?
Basically all of them, and at 1/2 to 1/10 of the cost. Spain, Italy, the Nordic countries, and Turkey are all much more efficient at building infrastructure than the US.
Wow it takes effort to be slower than Italy. :) There are some infamous cases here of highways taking decades to complete (and also some positive experiences such as an awesome high speed rail network).
I think it depends heavily on which infrastructure you're talking about though and what parts of the project you're considering. Some countries may be faster at obtaining permits and/or finding the money, and others may be faster at actually building the thing; my impression is that Italy absolutely sucks at the former, but some projects are also slowed down by the sheer amount of archaeological finds that you stumble upon when digging under Rome or Naples.
Yeah, we are much worse than Italy. There is basically no example of a major transit project in the US being done fast and on budget in the last couple of decades. Here in Maryland we are almost 5 years behind schedule building a light rail line through some suburbs: https://www.washingtonpost.com/transportation/2023/01/19/pur.... For the same money, and in far less time, Copenhagen built an entire fully automated subway under the city.
Copenhagen is in Denmark how does that say anything about Italy?
Anyway, European countries have plenty of boondoggles. Germany’s Berlin Brandenburg Airport was a 30 year project requiring multiple legal battles etc. construction took 11 years where the initial €2.83 billion budget over ran to €6.5 billion due to massive design flaws, construction issues, poor management, multiple lawsuits etc.
Asia has similar issues, China for example does plenty of big infrastructure projects because its infrastructure is so behind, but it’s projects have massive issues. The Three Gorges Dam for example ballooned from $8.35 billion to $37 billion.
I’m pretty sure he’s aware of which country Copenhagen is in but was simply pointing out as an example a much harder large, complex project in a dense urban environment built in far less time.
The key thing to understand is that while other countries have some boondoggles, the United States does almost nothing else despite spending massive amounts of money. The Purple Line mentioned was ostensibly going to be cheaper due to a public-private partnership but that ended in delays and greater costs as those almost always do, and the same was true of a highway expansion Maryland was trying to do with an Australian partner, and just about every other major American road, rail, bridge, bus station, etc. project is similar. Even our bike lanes take ages to build for the relatively small amount of work.
I agree with the theory that much of this is due to hollowing out the civil service as a “cost savings” measure – these projects sound like what I’ve seen at large organizations where they want a software project without hiring developers so they bring in one consulting company to do the work, and after the first round of failures, a second to oversee the first. Even if everyone is actually acting in good faith it’s just inefficient when you have multiple parties and difficulties sharing or acting on institutional knowledge.
US does plenty of large construction projects without major issue.
One World Trade Center a public/private partnership started construction April 27, 2006 and opened on November 3, 2014 at the cost of 3.9 billion. Which is easily in line with similar projects around the world, even though it was much slower than such projects back in the 1920’s.
It’s a more complicated building than those 1920’s designs booth from modern standards + features like AC, but also because it was designed to survive an attack.
PS: The Copenhagen Metro has been a 28+ year project that’s gone well but it’s hardly that amazing on its own. Planning began in 1992, the first construction started in 1996, first line opened in 2002 and the project is still continuing with only 12.7 miles in operation. By comparison the DC metro system is currently 129 miles long of which about 50 miles are underground with construction starting in December 9, 1969 and the first 4.6 mile segment opening in March 27, 1976.
We’re talking about infrastructure projects, which tend to be harder because they have more shared points of contention – e.g. the one rayiner mentioned was repeatedly held up by questions like whether homeowners who’d illegally fenced public land into their backyards had some right to keep it, which had to be fought up to the highest court in the state. The NIMBYs also tried things like claiming that it was uniquely endangering a rare amphipod, unlike the houses and roads they did support, etc.
WTC did not have anything like that to worry about and an exceptional level of political will to keep it on schedule.
I wonder to what extent this is due to unique features of the US political system, which most other Western countries lack. One is that local governments are much more numerous and powerful in the US, while in most other Western countries they are fewer and less powerful, with many issues dealt locally in the US instead being centralised in state/provincial or even national agencies. Another is that having a presidential rather than parliamentary system (at both the state and federal level) tends to make the executive weaker, and the legislature and executive tend to have a more disjointed/competitive rather than cooperative relationship. Yet another is a very hard two party system combined with very weak party discipline within both parties, which the existence of primaries arguably contributes to. Is it plausible that some of these distinctives could make the US a much more difficult political environment in which to successfully pull off major infrastructure projects?
WTC had a great deal of will to build something, but also a lot of political meddling because it would be so iconic. You can read up on many of the details but by the initial plan was heavily altered by many stakeholders for to add office space, security concerns, etc.
For more classic example consider say the $252 million 2.8 mile Marc Basnight Bridge which started construction July 27, 2017 scheduled to be completed on February 2019 and actually opened on February 25, 2019. While huge it was politically uninteresting compared to WTC and much cheaper, so while it ended up on time and budget nobody paid much attention.
That bridge is much closer to the typical major project in the US than the kind of things people remember because they made the news and ran wildly over budget.
The design should have added time (since is was a new thing and thus who knows how long before they can design something that works - this may require building labs to simulate things in). Everything else should just be a month extra. There is more to do not, but you can put the AC in on lower floors while placing beams for upper floors. Plus we have a lot of automation that has been made before this, so a lot of labor should go faster. A taller building will of course take longer to build than a short one, but it should be years difference.
Where are you getting that should from? The base took a long time and was literally built like a bunker, but the actual floors went up at roughly 1 floor a week. However, there was a significant gap between all the glass on exterior being up and the building being ready for occupancy.
Part of this is tall buildings simply run into issues with workforce sizes. The same happens for developers building thousands of single family homes run into similar issues. They can build individual homes vastly faster than they can finish a large subdivision.
How are you getting those numbers? The original line M1 is 13.9 km. The total length of all lines adds up to 20.4 km counting the shared 7.7km section used by M1, and M2 once.
“The metro consists of four lines, M1, M2, M3 and M4. M1 and M2 share a common 7.69-kilometre (4.78 mi) section from Vanløse to Christianshavn,[3] where they split along two lines: M1 follows the Ørestad Line to Vestamager, while M2 follows the Østamager Line to the airport. The metro consists of a total route length of 20.4 km (12.7 mi),[3] and 22 stations, 9 of which are on the section shared by both lines.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copenhagen_Metro
Also, the DC metro area is much larger than the area served by the metro system which is why the keep expanding it. In terms of actual daily riders the systems are surprisingly close, though DC gets swamped occasionally for things like Obama’s inauguration etc.
I read the first line of the second paragraph ("The original 20.4-kilometre (12.7 mi) system opened in October 2002") and the "System length: 38.2km (23.7mi)" bit from the infobox.
The paragraph you quoted mixes up the situation from before M3/M4 opened with the situation after. I also see where you have taken 13.9km for M1, but on M1's own article page it says 14.3km. Danish Wikipedia gives different figures again.
M1's total length is around 14km, M3 is 15.5km. Christianshavn to the airport is 7km by road, Østerport to Orientkaj about 3km, so the total is roughly 40km.
57 million annual riders on the Washington Metro doesn't seem so much for such a large city. There must be a good chance of getting a seat :-)
Copenhagen's metro claims 107 million annual riders, but the older and more extensive S-train also has 116 million annual riders. Supposedly the total comes to 183 million riders of either/both annually.
Italy had a corruption problem a few decades ago. They have done some major reform and things are better, but the reputation remains.
Note that Italy is not perfect. And like all cases of corruption it is worse in some areas than others. The construction costs project is about mass transit where Italy does fairly well, but they don't look at highways so we cannot say anything about how they do highways from the data here. (I'm sure someone reading this knows more than I do about Itally's highways and can comment)
Spain is the outlier for fast/cheap/good, but I hear that even Italy has gotten its act together, and the recent Rome subway was done quickly and cheaply. The Nordic countries also have a good reputation. England is pretty bad/comparable to the US in speed and cost.
Yeah, but Americans built a bridge that fell on people. American rails can't keep their trains on them (a crucial functionality of trains and Rails) and American pipes have poisoned thousands.
Fast, cheap, good. Pick none. The American construction mantra.
So far it's worked because of the reserve currency and technological progress. But the time of the American monopolar world is coming to an end. In twenty years, the bill will come due and instead of acting to liberate themselves, Americans will fall over themselves to justify their status quo - unable to reconcile the existential shame they feel at the thought that they inherited power the likes of which the world had never seen before and transformed it to impotence.
"The billionaires", "we do it to be safer", "the X are ruining it". All the while they drift into irrelevance, raging hopelessly at shadows while their own choices drive them to destruction
Spain is the second most mointanous country in the European Union after Austria. And not a desert. It also seems to be particularly efficient at building infrastructure.
Probably helps that wages are lower in Spain. Americans want cheap infrastructure but also want high wages and that's probably an impossible combination.
Sure, but wages + census makes a difference. The NY Times did a comparison of the construction of the 2nd avenue subway project after the governor took the 5th or 6th victory lap.
As I recall, the TBM used in NYC was “mannned” by 5x more workers than an identical machine in Paris. We’re talking like 50 people. France isn’t known for labor efficiency, but between the various labor agreements, minority/women owned employee and subcontractor requirements, etc that many extra hands were being paid. Whether they did anything is another story.
France does a vastly better job than America at things like HSR and one could hardly call the highly unionised and regulated labour environment 'cheap' over there.
I'll bite. He is probably talking about Hongkong, Taiwan, Japan, South Korea, China. They all build infra much faster than the US. If we move south, then Malaysia and Singapore also build very fast. For Europe, France builds much faster than the US, but it is more centralised.
Part of it is the fact that they do it so much so they’re very good at it. China has laid more concrete since 2000 than the rest of the world combined prior to 2000. So the Chinese have a lot of expertise and a lot of the supply chain, and for example in Singapore the Chinese have built a lot.
By the way, much of the same can be said about manufacturing.
In the US a lack of construction has caused the industry to atrophy.
It's a bit like the baby boom. The US built a lot in the 50s and 60s. Especially road construction, most of the road infrastructure was built over a short period around the 50s-60s.
There was a long period where very little maintenance or construction was required.
Now we are seeing the structures all start to deteriorate at the same time.
Singapore has relatively efficient bureaucracy and few private landowners with few rights to challenge projects, but it also has low wage migrant workers from India working all night on them.
Tokyo standards for residential are legendarily low. People demolish and rebuild when they buy a home because nothing is built to last even a moderate amount of time.
I have heard that. I didn't spend much time in homes. I was in offices and factories, and they were robust as hell. My company's original factory was built after WWI, and may have just been knocked down, a few years ago (it may still be standing -they sold it).
The Moscow metro is not just for vanity - the nomenklatura don't take the metro, the people in squalor do...
Besides it is irrelevant for the topic - say you are right, then you are still admitting that even a corrupt country that constructs public transport only for vanity can do it at 10x the speed and 0.1x the costs as we can...
> The Moscow metro is not just for vanity - the nomenklatura don't take the metro, the people in squalor do...
That's like saying the vanity construction projects of Roman emperors weren't for vanity because they were used more by the plebs than by the nomenklatura.
Which group uses it most has absolutely nothing to do with what makes a vanity project. Quite to the contrary, the criterion for a vanity project is that a core motivation for its construction was to embellish the image/popularity/glory of the powerful person who ordered the construction. So yes, it is quite common for vanity projects to be precisely those used more by the plebs than the nomenklatura.
Doesn't that reinforce the parents' point that even a country with 1/10th the GDP and 10x more corruption, still manages to complete their subway projects 10x quicker at 1/10th the cost?
I don't think the explanation is that Russians are 10000x smarter than Americans, so it must be some environmental/organizational difference.
> Doesn't that reinforce the parents' point that (…)
I don't see how it would. The reasons why a country with 1/10th the GDP and 10x more corruption still manages to complete their subway projects 10x quicker at 1/10th the cost is totally orthogonal to whether it's a vanity project or not, or with which group will use it most.
> it must be some environmental/organizational difference.
indeed, it very much is. And for that matter: a construction project ordered by an autocratic dictator in a corrupt second-world country has inherently a much higher probability of being finished in time and within budget than a nominally comparable project in a democratic first world country. It may later turn out to be of totally shitty quality or cause lots of other problems (e.g. safety, environmental, etc) because quality and other standards were sacrificed to the priority of meeting the will of the dictator/party, but when a totalitarian ruler gives an order, people feel they better comply quickly.
A totalitarian state that doesn't give a shit about your rights, the environment etc, can more easily just evacuate or disown everyone who lived in the planned line or area, whereas in a first-world democratic country the construction will be hindered by lawsuits (both for their legitimate right and for nimbyism, particular interests etc). Same for the environment: In Germany, these days, there's almost no large-scale construction project that isn't severely slowed down by activists because (true or false) the project is suspected to harm the habitat of some rare protected species. It drags through the courts, Experts have to evaluate the situation, solutions may have to be found (sometimes very costly), etc.
In a totalitarian country, all of that doesn't exist. The environment is just totally meaningless compared to the will of the dictator or party. Finally, it's not just the rights, legal, environmental and social standards that are much more complicated (and in consequence, costly and slowing things down) in developed democratic countries, but pretty much all standards, including for everything related to the building project. So yeah, a totalitarian state is total shite, but its leadership has waaay fewer obstacles to getting their construction project done in time and within budget.
> I don't see how it would. The reasons why a country with 1/10th the GDP and 10x more corruption still manages to complete their subway projects 10x quicker at 1/10th the cost is totally orthogonal to whether it's a vanity project or not, or with which group will use it most.
Because it removes the explanation of the motivation that it will primarily benefit their personal usage. Since the decision-makers for the project obviously have to share the subway with millions of ordinary commuters.
Even if it was a vanity project, the vanity only accrues to the top leadership, not to the thousands of middle-managers. So it's extra significant that even with a 10x more corrupt structure, where the vast majority of said structure don't benefit from the vanity, it's still completed quicker.
> Because it removes the explanation of the motivation that it will primarily benefit their personal usage.
Does it? I'd say that they have far more benefit of the project than the common commuter… it's just a different use. Their use is not merely commuting (they live in a palace and have a limousine and chauffeur and personal jet) but a tool for asserting and furthering their power and image… So yes, they very much have a personal interest in it. Also, vanity projects in corrupt and autocratic countries are often a way for the dictators and their nephews and goons to fill their pockets from state money. That too is way more benefit than the common commuter.
> the vanity only accrues to the top leadership, not to the thousands of middle-managers
The fact that such a vanity project isn't born from the vanity of middle managers doesn't change the fact that they too have a big personal interest in such projects. Playing your part well in a vanity project is what gets you promoted in autocratic and other totalitarian regimes.
> So it's extra significant that even with a 10x more corrupt structure, where the vast majority of said structure don't benefit from the vanity, it's still completed quicker.
The higher speed of authoritarian regimes when it comes to the decision making processes is nothing surprising but inherent to its nature: no checks and balances, no lawsuits or high standards to slow things down, just a simple top-down order structure. It's not good for the rights and freedoms of people, but it is inherently faster than a democratic system which requires to reach a wide consensus and to comply with a whole lot of complicated requirements.
Vanity? Have you visited Russia within the past 10 years? If you didn't know, Moscow traffic is horrendous. And many Muscovites do in fact, depend on the metro to get to work, school, etc.
Obviously (or I guess not so obvious since I am writing this) that is because of a different density of workers, architects, general contractors, engineers for vastly different biomes in the United States than in Europe. Europe has way more people (more than twice as dense) in a similar geographic area (far less diverse features) so the data and practices honed by one are more efficient and have greater economy of scale despite all of the red tape we share. Nothing really that interesting.
Or you can just go with the simple stupid answer of corruption as if Europe isn't its own cesspool.
I don’t think this is obvious or even necessarily true. Europe has many things going against it as well, language barriers, split markets, generally being quite a bit poorer than the US. Moreover it doesn’t explain the performance of East Asian countries at all.
It would greatly explain the performance of East Asian countries. They share the same environmental challenges whereas in the US the challenges are vastly different depending on which coast you are near. Of course China had less red tape (no pun intended) in some regards for development than the other East Asian countries so it executes even faster than its peers. I think its more of a slam dunk than comparing Europe with the US in these terms, which is commensurate with their ability to churn out infrastructure.
> It would greatly explain the performance of East Asian countries. They share the same environmental challenges whereas in the US the challenges are vastly different depending on which coast you are near.
Huh? East Asian countries differ greatly from each other.
And the bigger countries, like China, differ vastly by region. Just like the US.
I don’t know that biome relevance is particularly relevant given that major US cities are not usually where major weather extremes happen. We are not talking about skyscrapers in Death Valley or Nome.
What do we actually need to build? We have plenty of buildings to shelter people, but use them roleplay career professionals. More than enough roads and highways.
Plenty of farmland. Maybe could use some hospitals.
A real need to rebuild post-world wars seems to have become some mind virus we have to constantly crank out mega projects.
Can we get over the ridiculous hallucination we need to “drill baby drill” and grind through all the resources to goto Mars? You and I will be dead before that’s tenable let alone implemented… can we let the future sort itself out a bit?
Why do we still buy into the story of post-war shell shocked paranoids who spent decades huffing leased gas fumes, expropriating the world from everyone else dropping democracy bombs.
Decades of television as a carefully curated propaganda pipeline has messed the last generation up.
Population is expanding in many US cities faster than they are building houses. With houses we need to build schools, stores, parks, offices, and a long list of other things that an expanding population will use more of.
Old infrastructure wears out, and often it fails to meet modern standards and should be replaced (ex old houses often cannot be insulated to modern standards, old bridges we now realize were not built strong enough). Many have for various reasons concluded that some of what we have built in the past was a mistake and so we should tear some things down to replace with something else. (ex replace highways with mass transit)
While we don't need to build or rebuild everything we did in the past, there is still a lot of things that if we would build our life would be better.
I work for a place that designs and manufactures parts for a lot of these NYC projects. There are several factors that slow them down, and every step of the process is horribly inefficient. We start the bid and design process years before groundbreaking because it takes so long to get reviews and approvals. Permitting, planning, and impact studies that should take a few months drag on for years. The land prices are so high and putting lots together so difficult that they build tall skinny buildings. Tall skinny buildings take longer to build than shorter, wider buildings. Everything is so hush hush in the preconstruction phase that we don't even know who exactly is building it or where it's at until a few months before they start demo on the existing structure. Shipping and delivery is a logistics nightmare downtown and crane time is always at a premium. Imagine how hard it is to get around NYC anyway, and then imagine how many hundreds of tons of material have to be delivered 24 hours a day by big trucks that aren't as quick and maneuverable as a car. The whole process is just years of waiting followed by half a decade of absolute madness trying to get it all crammed into a city block.
This is interesting stuff, but the article was focused on the actual construction phase, not the pre-construction planning and approvals. The duration of those is a related problem but not the one Brian was looking at.
That's the delivery part. There is no room to stage anything on the site, so the mad 24/7 logistics nightmare has to happen during the entire construction process. There are 2 million more people in NYC now than there was in the old highrise heyday and that doesn't count commuters. That's a lot more traffic to have to negotiate. Not being able to physically deliver enough materials during the construction phase is an enormous slowdown. Coupled with the new smaller footprint/higher elevation slowdown it winds up being a slog. You can only fit so many workers in a given area. There are other differences that add time and complexity that the old buildings didn't have to deal with as much as well, like the thousands of miles of additional cabling that goes in now for higher electric loads and data. I would also imagine that inspections weren't near as thorough and time consuming in the past. It's death by a thousand cuts. Hundreds of little things add a little time and complexity and it all adds up.
An example from the Netherlands: you have Amsterdam which is 500 years old. It's an infrastructure nightmare.
And there is Rotterdam which was conveniently carpet bombed by the Germans in WW2.
Everyone who wants to find fault with modern constructions trots out the Second Avenue Subway as an example. This subway is an obvious route for convenience and as such was first proposed more than a hundred years ago. At that time analysis of the geology and hydrology along the route as well as the very large amount of infrastructure including other subways already in place resulted in the conclusion that a subway along Second Avenue would be unreasonably expensive to construct. The idea kept being proposed every couple of decades or so and the conclusion was always the same: Far too much complication and expense to reasonably construct. Then in the 90s politicians decided that miraculous new tunnel boring technology would solve all problems and make a subway along Second Avenue easy and cheap to construct. This new technology turned out to have some complications and as a result all the nearly hundred years of cost estimates stating that a subway along Second Avenue would be unreasonably complicated and expensive to construct turned out to be true.
It is to the credit of our modernity that the project was completed at all. The real lesson here is not one of generalized slowing, but of a lack of rational analysis, particularly when a wealth of information is available.
Based on around 100 interviews and many diagrams and reports, we managed to decompose the New York construction cost premium over low-cost countries, which is about a full order of magnitude, into the following items:
The stations are overbuilt by a factor of 3, which contributes an overall factor of 2 cost premium
The systems are not standardized, which contributes a factor of about 2.3 cost premium for the systems and 1.35 overall
Labor costs (including supervisors and other white-collar workers) are 50% of hard costs in New York where they should be about 25%, contributing a factor of 3 premium on labor costs and 1.5 overall
Procurement problems including the privatization of risk, change order risk, agency micromanagement of contractors, general red tape, and profit stemming from too little competition double overall costs
Soft costs are depending on what one counts either 21% on top of hard costs where they should be 7%, or 46% where they should be 20%
I can't speak too much to the first several points, but noting
- agency micromanagement of contractors
- general red tape
is very fitting and a direct contribution to
- too little competition
I worked with a startup company ~8 years ago that wanted to go after government contracts. According to the owners, everyone they demo'd the product to said it was very clearly superior to what they were currently using.
Unfortunately, the people who would use it are not the people that sign off on paying for it. Those people had checklists of irrelevant requirements, slow response times, almost certainly pressure to select "certain" vendors (i.e. those who threw money into lobbying the right folk). It got to the point where they seriously considered hiring a consulting company whose sole purpose was to help others navigate all the red tape that gets thrown in your way when you try to get government contracts.
In the end, they realized that they were better off pivoting entirely to the private sector instead of doing a half and half approach.
I seem to recall a similar tale with the lead pipe retrofitting in Flint, MI... contractors to do the job were picked not necessarily by speed and capability, but by other qualities. Regardless of how they were chosen, though, the city failed to deliver. Despite the crisis starting in April 2014, residents and activists had to sue the city in 2017 to actually get the work completed, and it still isn't done. Mostly done, but not completely... 8 years later.
> the people who would use it are not the people that sign off on paying for it.
Reminds me of a demo I did for some Congresscritters once. The staffer said "It'll take $50k per record to bring this database online" so they refused to look at the live, running demo I had of the database online. I heard, later, that someone else got "$50k per record" as a contract.
> the people that sign off on paying for it. Those people had checklists of irrelevant requirements, slow response times, almost certainly pressure to select "certain" vendors
This reads like a lack of democratic influence and even direct corruption.
That is, these "stakeholders" are not concerned that the voters would be unhappy with their performance, and would fire them (directly or through an action of a newly elected official). They seem to be conveniently shielded from feedback of the population which they nominally are hired to serve.
There is very little democratic influence in the bureaucracy of most governments. Most functions aren't political, and most politicians don't actually have any direct authority to manage a random government employee's job performance.
> Those people had checklists of irrelevant requirements, slow response times, almost certainly pressure to select "certain" vendors (i.e. those who threw money into lobbying the right folk)
That last part isn’t true in my experience, but that makes it harder to solve: every procurement officer I’ve worked with has been very scrupulous about not favoring a vendor but they’re operating under rules for things like fairness and security which are hard to comply with. A huge company can hire a room full of people to document how they’re complying with everything but a startup is going to run into exactly the problem you described. The big guys all support this since it has the effect of limiting options without actually being illegal — who’s going to argue against risk reduction, right?
It is worth noting that the second phase costs even more per mile to build, despite the fact that pretty much all the tunnels already exist from an earlier attempt, are structurally intact, and will be reused.
The second ave subway was supposed to be a replacement for the elevated train they tore out. At this point, they should consider just building a modern elevate train down second ave if digging is such a boondoggle. I think the only reason it was torn down is that business owners thought it to be unsightly.
I feel like there is value for a property having it be in walking distance to the would be second ave el. It also needn't look like the 100 year old cast iron els in the bronx or brooklyn. Modern elevated rail is fully welded, so no cathunk cathunk or really any screeching, and it usually sits on a cement bed, which is more aesthetically appealing than the old steel beam els that tend to drip stuff that ruins your paint job in nyc or chicago. In Culver city, for example, there is a pocket park under a portion of their elevated expo line: https://goo.gl/maps/fUFW2xQ9z4imj9XE8
This reminds me of political discourse. We solve all the easy problems (murder is wrong, we all agree), and then we're left with the tough questions like abortion and civil rights. It's not that we can't agree, it's that we solved everything that is solvable (without great difficulty).
Maybe we've now built everything that's easy to build, and all that's left is the hard stuff.
Short version: "New York skyscrapers are built at around 50-70% the speed of Chicago skyscrapers. This seems partially due to New York constructing many more skinny skyscrapers with very small floor plates than Chicago does, which take proportionately longer to build."
Why is NYC building skinnier skyscrapers? Is it air rights? Or is it easier to get approval to build such things on the few remaining smaller parcels and shorter buildings (which have to be knocked down first).
Both. In order to encourage existing building owners to keep their existing height, they were able to sell their air rights, which then made it possible to build tall skinny buildings.
Consolidating lots is hard to do, because you have to be able to buy out other landowners, and they have to be willing to sell. Obtaining air rights is far easier. And the basic land plot unit in the New York grid is only 25 by 100 ft.
Many land owners have been around for a while and buying lots. They often already have two lots next to each other. In cases where they don't they may have a different lot that can be swapped (possibly with some dollars if one is in a more valuable location) with some other land owner so that both get two next to each other. while you cannot use the above to build in any one specific place, you can use it to get close enough.
There are many factors. Whole floor units are much more valuable than shared floor units, both for residential and commercial contexts. High floors are more valuable than lower floors. Taller buildings are more prized than other buildings.
Its also, as briefly mentioned in the article, residential use over office use. IMO the two shouldn't be compared theres a big difference in complexity. Residential is much more complicated.
Reminds me of the situation with intercity rail in New York state. It was faster to take a train between Buffalo and NYC in 1890 than it is today.
In 2009, NY started working on a high-speed rail study, which finally completed last month after 14 years. Now, the completed version of the study recommends a 25-year project that will increase train speed from 80MPH to...wait for it...90MPH.
If there is a mission, a shared common goal and a belief that the benefits of the mission will be as fairly shared as the effort then you get the "magic". Corruption is looked down upon, stupidities are challenged.
But if there is no mission, no expectation that the benefits will accrue to "society", then "getting paid" is the most obvious and sensible response - one is resigned to the stupidities of the project and just accepts them.
Basically, a society with a safety net people trust will find it easier to have a mission that everyone believes.
When you're a startup, you build features fast, you're not afraid of breaking things. Big features are scoped out within days, development starts, and everything is done within a couple of weeks or months. It is so different when you start working for big tech companies, in FAANG for instance some of the small features will take developers months to build given all of the process required to do (RFCs, collaborations with other teams for different services etc)
"Homebuilders don’t seem to think the burdens of OSHA and other safety regulations are all that high. Complying with OSHA is the second lowest category of perceived jobsite regulatory costs."
Today we have a lot of tools and automation that we didn't in the past. Those tools should speed things up by far more than tighter safety standards slow things down.
Isn’t this always just a result of existing architecture and kludge? Doesn’t this same thing afflict us here in software engineering?
You can’t build fast on a city that’s been around for a while. There’s too much shit already there. And not just infra, but also simply people, and culture and everything else that comes with human beings occupying a space.
You could probably build the entirety of Manhattan out in the middle of Wyoming somewhere in 10 or 20 years from scratch with a reasonably sized set of resources because there’s nothing around and so little to deal with. It’s just the nature of a place with a lot of people.
Seems like a weird set of metrics whose relevance isn’t clear. Of course approved construction projects are going to take longer - demolishing a 19th century 6 story building is trivial compared to a mid century high rise. Construction is a cutthroat business, so I’m sure that if velocity was the gating factor, the companies would find a way.
I’ve been involved in construction projects as a stakeholder, and NYC isn’t slower to navigate if you have a team that knows how to navigate NYC. I can think of a couple of projects in random suburbia, CA that took longer to permit than the total duration of a NYC project.
Government contracting is totally different, as New York law is knowingly designed to maximize employment. Most government projects do not allow a single general contractor and require separate bids for different components of the building, for example. You also cannot design and build a project in most cases.
I wonder how much of this is regulations and process related? It would be curious to see lines overlayed when new regulation was passed that might affect things.
Not sure anyone would ever be able to prove causation, but it would definitely be interesting to look at. For all I know maybe it’s not a factor at all?
The Stud Pack channel on YT is now essentially a father-son general contracting duo who recently relocated to Houston from somewhere in Louisiana, and are building a new house (and demolishing an old one).
They have excellent general contractor skills, but no experience in whole house construction. It has already been an interesting ride (as of now, they have dealt with soil conditions and dug grade beam trenches for the garage foundation), and there's still 98% of it left to play out over time.
I have the trade skills to do this. Worked as a cabinet builder in my early career and started a short lived construction business with my brother in my 20s. But if I take my total compensation for the year it would take me to build, the cost of the subcontracting I wouldn't do myself (plumbing and electrical) and the materials cost it would probably be about the same as getting it built by someone else.
There's also the very subjective tradeoff between opportunity cost of taking time off from my career vs the benefits of doing more manual labor and learning a lot building a house.
I was surprised to see most construction sites only have one shift working. Sites work around 8->4, 5 days a week. Not sure if that is city regulation or union workforce.
That’s when most people want to work. Do you want to work 4-midnight or midnight-8? Even if you do, many other people don’t want the noise of a working construction site at those hours.
I regularly work until midnight. I'd think lots of construction people are young and/or immigrants without families here. If you offered them a night shift with overtime pay is a good choice.
It seems like so much of society is affected by mutual trust. Without mutual trust, inevitably that gap is made up with contracts, and processes, and laws, and rules, because that's the only way people can coordinate on the same page.
As the US becomes more and more divided on every level: ideologically, religiously, ethnically, culturally, etc this is only going to continue.
For small things, like 10-unit apartment complexes, the number of people available to run such projects in the 70s was probably pretty massive. Since then many people left the trades (presumably to mash their fat fingers at keyboards instead).
Now projects like that are likely harder as the companies that can do it are 1) busy, 2) expensive, 3) not in your area.
there is less space now. if you walked around NYC in the 1980's there were still a bunch of empty lots. these have been built over and so each new project is more expensive as the current building must be purchased, demolished and then rebuilt
Sigh. This is the fate of ALL systems. Once something gets complicated, it gets progressively more complicated to change anything.
NYC is an example of a runaway complexity. So now 1 mile of Manhattan subway costs about the same as 1000 miles of 6-lane freeway.
The correct way to fix it is: don't. Stop encouraging density, instead make sure that other cities can thrive by providing incentives for companies to build in sparse areas.
Sprawl leads to cheaper housing at the cost of more expensive infrastructure costs (mainly roads, but water, sewer, schools becomes more difficult to support without density). It also leads to places that are not very nice to live at.
> Sprawl leads to cheaper housing at the cost of more expensive infrastructure costs
Nope. Sprawl's infrastructure cost is about the same as urban cost over time. This is because maintenance of city infrastructure is way more expensive.
"Expensive roads" are also a myth. As I said, one mile of NYC subway can cost as much as 1000 miles of 6-lane freeway.
Or another point, Seattle is building subway expansion at the cost of $60B. It's projected to increase rideship by about ~100k daily passengers. For that $60B we could have instead built a city, gave 100k people houses for free, and still have enough money left to allow them to live on investment income from that.
Sure, we'll need to do some small adjustments: switch from giant SUVs to medium-sized and small-sized EVs. Improve pedestrian and bicycle accessibility within suburban villages, etc. But these are all relatively minor changes that can be done gradually.
> It also leads to places that are not very nice to live at.
Most people surveyed (80+%) would prefer to live in suburbs if they could. Yep, very unpleasant places.
The cities that allow for lots of sprawl (eg Houston) are not very nice places to live in many people’s viewpoints. They definitely never make the list of nicest cities. People aren’t clamoring to live in Houston, they are trying to live in Seattle. Turning Seattle in Houston would probably just make less people want to live there (well, that’s one way to solve Seattle’s housing crisis).
Roads are a bad value for what you get. Not only is the throughput not great, they are expensive to maintain. Switching to EVs only really solves pollution and energy usage problems, it doesn’t make traffic somehow more streamlined.
> The cities that allow for lots of sprawl (eg Houston) are not very nice places to live in many people’s viewpoints.
"Many peoples' viewpoints" is a cop-out. You can apply it to ANY phrase: "In many people's viewpoints we should drop a nuke on Manhattan and rebuild it from scratch".
If you look at objective data, Houston beats NYC handily in pretty much any important metric.
Houston commute is 26 minutes vs 33 minutes for NYC. Per-capita income after taxes is similar, and housing costs in Houston are not even in the same league ($3000 average rent vs $1300). Houston also has less income inequality (Gini coefficient of 0.51 vs 0.55 for NYC).
Texas has one of the highest drunk driving scores, and New York has one of the lowest: https://zutobi.com/us/driver-guides/the-us-dui-report. That's just one of the things that makes living in cities with public transportation and less sprawl so much nicer.
> Houston commute is 26 minutes vs 33 minutes for NYC.
I'd take a 33 minute train commute over a 26 minute car commute any day. I'd take a 1 hour train commute over a 26 minute car commute even. When you commute by car you have to be paying attention the entire time. On a train, I can read a book, use my phone, etc. The experience of commuting by car absolutely sucks, and is considerably more expensive.
> Per-capita income after taxes is similar, and housing costs in Houston are not even in the same league ($3000 average rent vs $1300).
You need to also include the cost of transportation, which brings this figure a lot closer ($3100/m vs $2200; see: https://www.nerdwallet.com/article/loans/auto-loans/total-co...). Also, using average here is misleading. You can live in the outer boroughs and pay a lot less than that, and some areas in manhattan drive the average up a lot.
You also have to take into consideration the fact that sprawl forces you into that car pretty often. You need to use the car to go grocery shopping, whereas you can walk to a grocery store in a dense city. I live in Tokyo and used the train once so far this week. I'll be using it again today. On a normal basis, I have everything I need within a 5-10 minute walk.
>> Roads are a bad value for what you get. Not only is the throughput not great, they are expensive to maintain.
> You're making factually false statement after factually false statement.
On a total usage basis, public transportation is considerably cheaper than roads, because as a whole, public transportation tends to be very highly used, when it's ubiquitous enough to be used as a primary method. You can increase throughput by increasing train frequency, which improves commute times. When roads are heavily used, the throughput decreases, commute times increase, and expanding roads doesn't help that situation.
> Texas has one of the highest drunk driving scores, and New York has one of the lowest
And so?
> When you commute by car you have to be paying attention the entire time.
Self-driving software will fix this within a decade. It's technically already legal to read books and watch TV in a car, if you own one particular high-end car model.
> You need to also include the cost of transportation, which brings this figure a lot closer
Cost of transportation is a whole another issue. Because then you need to include the local taxes that are used to build and maintain transportation infrastructure.
> You also have to take into consideration the fact that sprawl forces you into that car pretty often. You need to use the car to go grocery shopping, whereas you can walk to a grocery store in a dense city.
Yes, and? Car also allows me to just do 2 trips a week to the store to get groceries for 4 people for several days. I had to do a grocery run every day when I lived in a dense city. That's easily another 30-40 minutes wasted every day.
> On a total usage basis, public transportation is considerably cheaper than roads, because as a whole, public transportation tends to be very highly used
That's not true. The average bus load in the US is 16 people. This makes it close to the car cost, only just a bit more efficient. It also does not consider the cost of wasted personal time.
> When roads are heavily used, the throughput decreases, commute times increase, and expanding roads doesn't help that situation.
It does, actually. More roads/lanes almost always increase throughput. They don't necessarily increase the average _speed_.
But guess what, the transit speed is _slower_ than cars pretty much everywhere.
Have you personally lived in Houston or another car-oriented city in the US? Or are you just reading the horror stories about "car hells"? Try it yourself to see the drawbacks and advantages.
I personally had lived in Europe and used transit and biking a lot. Including the bike hell of Amsterdam. I got my driving license at the age of 30 and my first car at 32.
> Self-driving software will fix this within a decade.
And it'll be powered by fusion energy!
> It's technically already legal to read books and watch TV in a car, if you own one particular high-end car model.
This isn't true. No car has reached level 5, which means that you're required to be able to take over. I'd really hope you're not doing this. If this is legal anywhere, those politicians are truly idiots.
> Cost of transportation is a whole another issue. Because then you need to include the local taxes that are used to build and maintain transportation infrastructure.
This one actually hurts a bit, because a very large percentage of road infrastructure is funded by federal taxes, which I'd really love to reduce, whereas a majority of public transportation is funded by local or state taxes. Another thing to note is that public transportation is partially funded by usage, whereas road infrastructure is not.
You need to include cost of transportation, because the cost of a car is extremely high, and this disproportionally affects the poor.
> I had to do a grocery run every day when I lived in a dense city. That's easily another 30-40 minutes wasted every day.
> Yes, and? Car also allows me to just do 2 trips a week to the store to get groceries for 4 people for several days.
The grocery store is just one example. You also need to fill your gas tank 1-2 times a week, wash the car, take it in for maintenance, etc. Every restaurant trip is a car ride, when you want to go to a bar, a car ride (or hopefully a taxi/lyft/uber). Thanks to density, I can walk to all of these things in ~10 minutes.
> The average bus load in the US is 16 people.
Again, using an average here isn't reasonable, especially when you're averaging across the US. You need to look at cities that have good public transportation that ubiquitous enough for use. NYC, and SF, for instance have considerably higher bus loads. When you look at train loads it's not even close to comparable.
> But guess what, the transit speed is _slower_ than cars pretty much everywhere.
Not in cities with subway systems, or in cities where transit is prioritized over cars.
> Have you personally lived in Houston or another car-oriented city in the US?
I grew up in New Orleans (until around 30). I've lived in SF, NYC, and Tokyo. I've traveled lots of places. I have enough experience between both to know which is obviously superior in terms of general life quality.
Cities with sprawl are less fun. Commuting sucks (especially during commuter hours, where you get stuck in traffic). Parking sucks. Maintaining a car sucks. Paying the expense of cars sucks. Not being able to walk anywhere because cars are the priority sucks.
Walkable cities are more fun. There's a reason that people go to vacation to these places, and not places like houston.
Just wanted to chime in and agree with cyberax. I’m living in a dense, beautiful European city, in a heritage listed building near the historic centre.
If I got a US visa tomorrow I’d be on the first flight to the Houston or Dallas suburbs. Judging by the growth rates of Texas cities - compared to the growth rates of old European ones - lots of people agree.
Pretty =/= functional. There are costs to density that aren’t immediately apparent, and advantages to having space that people who are used to it may not appreciate.
I want a yard. Well, I want to live someplace with a yard, and I have one. A place with a pool, and room for my dogs to run. I live "in town" but I have a yard. I don't want to live in a dense urban area. Some do, but I'll bet they tend to be younger and don't have kids or have younger ones. People want space. How about we make roads and cars cheaper instead of demonizing owning actual land? That's why suburbs are popular, why they'll stay popular, no matter how much strongtowns.com tries to push something else.
You accuse others of 'swallowing urbanist propaganda' but that's both highly uncharitable and also grossly ignorant given the extremely high demand for pre-war and denser areas.
> the extremely high demand for pre-war and denser areas.
Of course there is a high demand for urban areas. It's an effect of runaway density. Companies have competitive advantage if they locate their offices in The Downtown of a large city. This in turn makes the area around it more expensive, as people try to move closer to avoid longer commutes.
This is a vicious circle, leading to a sort of "density pollution".
And it should be solved in exactly the same way we dealt with other forms of pollution: via regulation and gradual tightening of rules.
"Nope, sorry, your company's locating here would push downtown density past the limit, you should find a greenfield site on the edge of town and build something new there"
A hard limit on the amount of office space per square mile. You simply can not build any more offices. The market forces then will take care of distributing the office space accordingly.
If you absolutely NEED to have an office in The Downtown, then you will just have to pay $$$$$$$$$. Otherwise you'll have to rent an office in a nearby suburbian village center.
Kind of like we did cap-and-trade for sulfur emissions.
Maybe to ensure that the country is evenly developed, which would make housing more affordable across the entire country. The US is not even that bad - unlike many other countries, it doesn't have a true primate city[1] on a national level. I'm thinking of places like England, where the privileged areas of London (and the Home Counties), Oxford, and Cambridge are the only place to earn a decent salary, but have extortionate housing costs, while the rest of the country has much lower housing costs but such lower wages that people are pushed to migrate into the privileged areas, pushing housing costs there even higher. Densifying the cities would help to some extent, but construction tends to cost a lot more in these cities, and not entirely due to zoning, planning permissions, etc.
I've been observing the discussion on sprawl vs high density in the US from the safety of my commie block and my conclusion is that sprawl is silly, but cities the density of New York are dystopian.
It appears that the same induced demand that makes traffic eventually occupy all lanes, no matter how many you build, works to make dense cities unaffordable and impossible to maintain.
There's a middle ground to be achieved here, really, and it's better than both the extreme views I've been hearing over and over again.
Your choice of metrics is so nonsensical it can only be bad faith. For the other readers, I'll submit some more relevant questions.
NYC subway is more expensive per meter? No shit. What's the ROI? How many passengers per day? What do you think are the economic payoffs for those investments?
What survey showed 80% of respondents preferring suburbs? A suburb versus what? What kind of respondents do you think they got? How do you reconcile this with the market reality of brutal real estate shortages in America's denser cities? (Just pull up some pricing per sqft. How do urban vs rural compare?)
This is all even without taking into account the market distortions (and ponzi schemes) arising from the US's infrastructure sprawl since the 50s. What happens if/when the cities stop subsidizing the completely financially insolvent surrounding areas?
> NYC subway is more expensive per meter? No shit. What's the ROI? How many passengers per day? What do you think are the economic payoffs for those investments?
I don't think infrastructure in NYC is cost-effective. For that matter, infrastructure in Seattle (where I live now) is not cost effective.
Its ROI is in fact negative, as it forces further unsustainable agglomeration of wealth in a small area, while starving smaller cities.
> What survey showed 80% of respondents preferring suburbs?
For anyone reading my response to this incredibly bad faith commenter, note:
- that his own linked survey shows 46% preferring suburbs, not 80%
- that "it forces further unsustainable agglomeration of wealth in a small area" would suggest a very high ROI, actually (and "forces" is an interesting word choice vs "attracts")
- this Lafayette case study shows exactly how denser areas pay for themselves in tax revenue, and how the surrounding ones don't [0]
Sprawl with competing “centres” I think is fine. Sprawl where everyone is trying to get to the centre for work and play not so much. London has good sprawl IMO. I doubt it affects affordable housing.
Although it may make houses more affordable vs. appartments.
There is the widest variety of deep cultural experiences, events, and food next door to you than anywhere else in the world. You never have a reason to drive, but are still in the US; no traffic jam, instead reading hacker news on a relaxing subway ride or walk into work. Retail businesses are no bullshit fast and efficient. Every type of job opportunity surrounds you. It's the safest comparable city in the US.
The only things on your list that you can't get in every other city with more than a couple hundred thousand people is specific museums, seeing Broadway shows immediately upon release, and ultra-high end restaurants.
I wouldn't brag about NYC's beaches and skiing.
I’m not hating on the city, just pointing out that New Yorkers often believe that only NYC has stuff and every other city is a barren wasteland.
If you read the article you would see that the unions are the ones demanding a much larger than necessary number of employees. The unions are the political road block to change.
>Construction companies, which have given millions of dollars in campaign donations in recent years, have increased their projected costs by up to 50 percent when bidding for work from the M.T.A., contractors say.
...
Consulting firms, which have hired away scores of M.T.A. employees, have persuaded the authority to spend an unusual amount on design and management, statistics indicate.
or this:
>"Worker wages and labor conditions are determined through negotiations between the unions and the companies, none of whom have any incentive to control costs."
All they say is that the reason starts with the number of people employed. If you continued reading past that point, they talk about other non-union incentives that drive up costs, like:
>Critics pointed out that construction companies actually have an incentive to maximize costs — they earn a percentage of the project’s costs as profit, so the higher the cost, the bigger their profit.
They also talk about the "soft costs" of NYC construction, like:
>The project plan called for the hiring of 500 consultants from a dozen different companies
And of course bureaucracy:
>Officials have added to the soft costs by struggling to coordinate between vendors, taking a long time to approve plans, insisting on extravagant station designs and changing their minds midway through projects.
So while we can probably agree that unions are part of the problem, it's disingenuous to act like they are the whole problem.
Graft, maybe, maybe not, but the real hallmark of US unions is their general refusal to be political organizations, unlike their counterparts in Europe and elsewhere.
Oh, sure, they throw money in the pot for candidates, but in Europe, unions take actual political positions on important matters. They do not often get their way, but they act as an important counterweight in politics to the interests of the rich and powerful.
This always comes up when unions in America are blamed for these problems. Unions are strong in both France and Germany and they don't have most of these problems.
The answer is corruption. America is horribly corrupt, much like Latin American nations, and unlike western European nations. So unions in Europe actually work the way they're supposed to, whereas in America they're just another corrupt institution, probably much more corrupt in fact than most others, and cause more problems than they solve.
How do you get America to have unions like those in Europe? I have no idea, but I think it's like asking how you can turn Afghanistan into a country similar to Norway.
> How do you get America to have unions like those in Europe?
Easy. Allow the employee to pick the union - you can have more than one union per employer. Or no union at all if that's what the employee wants.
That's the only change needed.
If like, add a second change: It's not longer necessary to make an employer be a "union shop" any employer can have employees represented by unions, if that's what the employee wants.
The major point is ultimately that the organization of labor does not inherently lead to higher project costs. You may be right that the peculiarities of American labor are one potential cause of higher costs.
For New York specifically there's another factor that it's strange the article omitted: Robert Moses.
Prior to the mid-1960s, it was fairly simple: if Robert Moses wanted something built, it was built. If he wanted it blocked, it was blocked. This made the process of getting approvals a known factor. Moses chaired a wide variety of authorities including NYC Planning Commission, the Parks Department, and more. He was the sole authority to negotiate with the Federal government for NYC projects.
This kind of central oversight allows certain projects to be completed much faster than it would be in other setups, but it also allows for a number of bad outcomes - corruption, ignoring the public good, environmental destruction, and more. As such, over time more process gets added. It's easy to criticize process, but many of the rules were written in blood with the best of intentions.