10 ms·

Having lived in Shanghai during 2005-2012 and seeing the construction boom there, I noticed some differences immediately after arriving in the US. It's common t

Having lived in Shanghai during 2005-2012 and seeing the construction boom there, I noticed some differences immediately after arriving in the US. It's common to hear about transportation projects taking decades to expand a few stations here. Mean while, since the time I left the Shanghai subway station has opened 21 new lines composed of 516 stations. Certainly, the air/water was worse in China but workers also had to work much harder (later nights, weekends, etc). But perhaps most importantly, the government would waste no time in getting land that it needed, and it certainly wouldn't ask for your consideration if it needs to do construction on a Saturday morning. While I appreciate that there is an inherent trade off between environmental consideration and speed, I think the author makes it clear that it's reached comic proportions in the US. The article is short, but I think the main premise is overwhelmingly accurate: The system exists to protect the status quo. There's also the reliance of transportation agencies on consultants: https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2016/10/21/mbta-o21.html https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2016/10/21/mbta-o21.html

rubicon33 4y ago
The problem is the massive bureaucracy / government we have today. Massive swaths of government workers literally being payed to sit all day in zoom calls on "meetings" talking about approving projects and budgets, from local infrastructure to schools, to medical, etc. Source: Live with someone with said job. See them in meetings all day long, accomplishing nothing other than getting their paycheck.
- throwaway4220 4y ago
  My department has four managers that do this and I work in a private hospital. We’ve been asking for a break room for two years.
  - agumonkey 4y ago
    I'm curious if it's not time to solve the chronic manageritis in large workplaces. It pains me to know end that resources are wasted on babbling while people doing the work are on their knees.
- whimsicalism 4y ago
  It's not the massive bureaucracy. It's that civil service-style systems (as in China) and pay-for-performance are both basically illegal in the federal government. Big government is not necessarily flawed, but big govt as we have structured it is just incompetent.
- tchock23 4y ago
  It’s funny. My partner has a government job and works much harder than anyone I know in private industry (as do her co-workers). Also, it is a better organized place to work than most enterprises I’ve consulted for. Goes to show YMMV and it’s not worth making sweeping generalizations about a sector of workers.
  - rubicon33 4y ago
    Of course "sweeping generalizations" aren't always right. That's obvious. It doesn't mean that generalizations themselves aren't worthwhile, and sometimes accurate enough to frame a problem. Exceptions to the rule shouldn't completely invalidate the rule. In this case I also never said anything about them working hard per se. No doubt they work very hard, but seem to accomplish nothing. Working hard, not smart.
  - bluGill 4y ago
    It is possible to work very hard without doing anything worth doing.
    - tchock23 4y ago
      True, but is that unique to government jobs? I know plenty of people shuffling papers around in private industry and academia.
      - chii 4y ago
        In private industry, the owner(s) takes on the losses of such people who get paid doing nothing. With enough losses, the owners will run out of capital and go bust. In public service (and academia i guess, which is often funded publicly), the "owners" don't get a choice and have to eat a loss - it's not as if i can stop paying my taxes. A gov't does not go bust.
        fuzzfactor 4y ago
        Yes, environmental bureaucracy like the article is focusing on is only one of many which have continuously strengthened as they circled the wagons around the status quo more and more in so many other areas besides just public works projects. But public works projects in particular are handled by government bureaucracies, one of the least accountable kind. Environmental is just one of the obvious bureaucracies that was not there for the older ones of us who remember what life was like before the EPA was formed. Lots of other little bureaucracies had already been established decades before anyone living at the time had been born. People were just expected to accept those because no remaining person could say whether things were better or worse beforehand. It could often be seen that they were still in the relatively flat portion of a multigenerational exponential growth curve, and so it goes. Remember people have to build things and after the mid-1970's there was no more money to do that with inflation. Before then people who worked manufacturing or construction jobs in the US had never been getting ahead at all very often unless they were unionized, but this was the straw that broke that by driving manufacturing to other countries and construction to unskilled workers from other countries. It was strong enough to break the unions so you can imagine the devastating effect it had on everyone else. At this time it was still accepted that an American manufacturing worker, maybe with overtime, would be earning more than an average office worker since it was just plain harder work. University education was not yet common enough to be structured into the systems as very much of a ticket to higher pay. And government office workers had always had to accept lower pay than their counterparts in the private sector, since less skill & work was actually required and these were the candidates who couldn't quite get hired by bureaucracies like Sears or big insurance companies. Either way the need for people sitting in offices accomplishing nothing can spiral out of control, even without the occasional effort to consume increasing yearly budgets or risk losing the yearly increases. And government workers got the upper hand with earlier formalization of university requirements for so many positions, at the same time the private sector had so many challenges to survival of its revenue streams that the governments did not face. By now this trend has government workers making more money than their counterparts in the private sector, plus having more institutional power dedicated to preservation of the institution itself rather than what the institution should actually stand for. Much less what the institution should accomplish if that means physically building something. Stagnation became the acceptable foundation on which to instead build virtual structures ever more resilient to change. At one time the people who built stuff had generations of bulding legacy and knew how to do it already, they were the backbone of society, and got paid more than the people in the offices who shuffled the papers which expedited the process. Now the people in the offices who don't know how to build stuff get paid more than the unskilled workers who try to do it anyway, after the bureaucrats finally finish shuffling the papers needed to delay or derail the project according to somebody's agenda in a chain of command that didn't previously exist when things could actually get done only a few decades ago. Bureaucrats can be most skilled at building more bureaucracy, and they are good at it after making multigenerational efforts, so that's what they more often build.
ip26 4y ago
Yeah, this framing was taken in a piece a few years ago about the failure to revitalize a rail project [1] in New York, which ultimately pinned the blame on tipping the balance too far in favor of private property rights. A single person/holdout can grind a project valuable to millions to a halt. It's the most compelling explanation I've read. In short, if private property has absolute veto power, you can never get big public projects done. (This is why eminent domain exists) There's a balance between private property rights & public good; in the times of great public works, the public good was given more sway, while recently private property rights have been given more (and stifled public works). [1]: I think it was https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/nyregion/new-york-subway-construction-costs.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/nyregion/new-york-subway-...
- parineum 4y ago
  > In short, if private property has absolute veto power, you can never get big public projects done. (This is why eminent domain exists) I wish they'd modify the language of eminent domain to reward double, triple or even quadruple market rate. I want people being _happy_ to have their property seized.
  - IggleSniggle 4y ago
    Don’t want them to be TOO happy to have property seized. Creates a bunch of perverse incentives
  - rootusrootus 4y ago
    Given how the sheer amount of money wasted when even one property owner holds out, it shouldn't be terribly difficult to justify a serious premium on the amount paid to those whose property is seized. In most cases I imagine it's just a small part of the overall cost of the project.
  - icelancer 4y ago
    Exactly. "Market rate" is ridiculous, and justifiably private property owners should be able to hold out sine market rate doesn't factor in switching costs, both financial and emotional. I think 3x market rate is a decent starting place.
gernb 4y ago
I'm sure Japan is not at China's levels but in the time I lived there are I saw several lines get completely, several stations get rebuilt (A good example would be Shinagawa Station) and an 11km underground highway built. Meanwhile it's taken SF 10 plus years for SF to build a tiny 4 station line (the Central Line) and it's not done.
secondaryacct 4y ago
I live in China, I think the best way to summarise everything we do at all level is: the end justifies the means. Need to seize power ? Murder all members of the former power. Need to make poor peasants rich middle class ? Build entire cities, put them there, and done. Need to build a metro station ? Take the land, build it. Need to make Hong Kong a more physically integrated part of the country ? Build a gigantic bridge to Zuhai even if nobody actually need to use it. The problem ofc is that sometimes the means is more costly than the benefit of the end result, and also that the goal of the end result is never debated, but I suppose that will change eventually, once we've incurred too high a cost for too little a benefit overall.
- phendrenad2 4y ago
  Somewhere between US stagnation and China/UAE building for the sake of building lies a happy medium.
  - chii 4y ago
    i bet that happy medium is not a stable equilibrium because any force on one side (or the other) pushes the balance. There's no restoring force.
  - maxcan 4y ago
    Yes, and its called Singapore and Japan.
- caycep 4y ago
  I also somewhat worry the attention to safety standards make Aperture Science seem like a paragon of OSHA compliance....
  - Yaina 4y ago
    Remember: Alert your supervisor! https://www.deviantart.com/orbital-vector/art/Portal-2-Remember-Alert-Your-Supervisor-Sign-857953438 https://www.deviantart.com/orbital-vector/art/Portal-2-Remem...
- 4y ago
dixie_land 4y ago
> government would waste no time in getting land that it needed by blackmailing, intimidation, and literally murder by bulldozing houses with people in them when they refuse to leave
- robinjhuang 4y ago
  I think this is a question worth asking. Should we let a small number of people hold hostage over public projects?
  - jdasdf 4y ago
    Offer to pay them what they want.
    - Dylan16807 4y ago
      That's an awful solution. Some small fraction of people in the way shouldn't get an enormous multiplier over market value, in some kind of giant prisoner's dilemma auction. If you offer the group a certain percentage of market value, that could work out well. But unanimous consensus is not a reasonable way to get land for big public projects.
      - kortilla 4y ago
        > an enormous multiplier over market value “Market value” requires willing participants. If a seller doesn’t want to sell at a particular price and the good isn’t fungible (which housing is not), they aren’t getting market value by being forced to sell at a price determined solely by the buyer.
        Dylan16807 4y ago
        Do you want me to say "taxable value*" instead? If you think it's impossible to assess the value of a property, the whole legal world disagrees with you. And yeah, the point of eminent domain is to force the sale on unwilling participants. If used sparingly and without discrimination, it's a good power, and part of living in a community that will undertake community projects. * the underlying assessed value, excluding artificial caps like prop 13
nouveaux 4y ago
"an inherent trade off between environmental consideration and speed" It's not just environmental consideration. Speed also incentivizes corner cutting, nepotism, and all sorts of corrupt behavior. Evergrande is a great example of speed. Banks in China made the same mistakes that banks in US made in 2008. If banks in China had tight regulations for the last 20 years, real estate growth would be significantly hampered. China should be given credit in that their leaders learned from other countries and leveraged their population size to grow with incredible speed. However, I would argue that China's rise to power has less to do with their efficiency and more to do with laws of growth. If we exclude Covid, I am willing to bet that China will not be able to sustain double digit growth ever again. In fact, I am willing to bet my house that when China achieves US's per capita GDP levels, China will never achieve double digit growth ever again.
- analyst74 4y ago
  > Speed also incentivizes corner cutting, nepotism, and all sorts of corrupt behavior. Compare that with SF bay area politics, I don't think speed has any effect on corruption.
- xvector 4y ago
  I would counterargue that corners are often cut just as terribly in the US. The corners are simply cut slower, because everything here is done slower. For example, electronics built in the US are typically shittier than electronics built in China, despite taking significantly longer to build and employees being paid orders of magnitude more (as noted by companies like Apple, Purism, etc.) Within our culture in the US there is a clear and comically obvious problem of bureaucracy and red-tape. This doesn't really exist in software yet, but the day our government gets its claws into the software industry is the day that innovation in the US can be put to rest. (Well, it's already happening - if you try to create a software startup that processes user data, you are probably breaking tens of laws you don't even know exist.) There is also a cultural difference. One thing I have noticed when working with my Chinese coworkers is that they do not bullshit nearly as much as my other coworkers. They get straight to the point, deal in metrics and facts, and don't try to inflate their accomplishments. Maybe that's just my current work environment, maybe it's a cultural thing - I suspect the latter.
dv_dt 4y ago
While acquiring the property takes more time in America, I can't help but notice once construction starts it also takes a ridiculously long time too. It really seems like the interests of the power brokers in various areas are far outstripping the interests of the utility to society in multiple areas in America.
patentatt 4y ago
Your comment about the Shanghai subway sparked my curiosity. Wikipedia says the Shanghai metro consists of 396 stations across 19 lines, and has been operating since 1993. How does that square with "since [2012] the Shanghai subway station has opened 21 new lines composed of 516 stations"? Especially when Wikipedia also says "During Expo 2010 the metro system consisted of 11 lines, 407 km, and 277 stations." Seems like they opened 119 stations and added 8 new lines since 2012. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shanghai_Metro https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shanghai_Metro
- coolso 4y ago
- dwohnitmok 4y ago
  Parent misspoke. It's been 21 lines consisting of 516 stations in total since inception (really since 2000 since there was a long lull of little activity in the 90s). The discrepancy in lines comes from whether you count certain rail-based transportation lines as part of the subway system or not. The discrepancy in subway stations is mainly due to whether you count interchange stations as single stations or multiple stations. I think the former is the one that is usually quoted for other subway systems in the world so makes more sense (so ~400 is probably the more appropriate number of stations to state). I also wonder if the Wikipedia article may be out of date? IIRC there were some new stations added in the last few months. But even if that were the case it's just a couple of stations, so the numbers should still be close. More impressive to me is the pace of construction in smaller cities which have also been rapidly building out subway systems (e.g. Hangzhou comes to mind, getting around Hangzhou on public transportation has drastically improved in the last five years, likewise I've personally seen the same immense improvements for Harbin).
  - watersb 4y ago
    > The discrepancy in lines comes from whether you count certain rail-based transportation lines as part of the subway system or not. Ah, that makes some sense. Like in San Francisco, there is the regional BART light rail, but also there is the hybrid bus/rail Muni metro transit for local service. https://www.sfmta.com/muni-transit https://www.sfmta.com/muni-transit https://www.bart.gov https://www.bart.gov
joe_the_user 4y ago
The thing is, Europe, where the environment is a significant consideration, also builds subways (and other things) at significantly faster speeds and lower cost than the US. If you look in any detail, it's not a matter of some magic the Chinese or whoever have, it's matter of the corrupt nexus of interests that have come to soak up any transit spending in the US, in particular.
- thiscatis 4y ago
  No they don't. Typical bureaucratic examples: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oosterweel_Link https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oosterweel_Link https://edition.cnn.com/travel/article/berlin-brandenburg-airport-one-year-on/index.html https://edition.cnn.com/travel/article/berlin-brandenburg-ai...
  - joe_the_user 4y ago
    Those are just anecdotes. You can google up ten articles verifying US transit construction costs are higher per mile - and the US is much more spread out too. Random article. https://www.constructiondive.com/news/us-rail-projects-take-longer-cost-more-than-those-in-other-countries/605599/ https://www.constructiondive.com/news/us-rail-projects-take-...
    - thiscatis 4y ago
      maybe because a mile is longer than a kilometer...
      - ryder9 4y ago
zeruch 4y ago
"While I appreciate that there is an inherent trade off between environmental consideration and speed, I think the author makes it clear that it's reached comic proportions in the US." The quote I think that encapsulated it best was: "And this is where I feel that lawmakers of the 1970s made a huge mistake. Rather than accept the need for general rules, or choices by accountable elected officials, the lawmakers built a dispersed power structure filled with veto points that lends itself to analysis paralysis" Given how trash the environment is becoming due to various forms of intransigence, there is an interesting trade off to be made in more ambitious projects that actually move the dial, which ironically might require tinkering with same said systems that currently are at the root of (a phrase change I would make) "decision paralysis".

rubicon33 4y ago

The problem is the massive bureaucracy / government we have today. Massive swaths of government workers literally being payed to sit all day in zoom calls on "meetings" talking about approving projects and budgets, from local infrastructure to schools, to medical, etc. Source: Live with someone with said job. See them in meetings all day long, accomplishing nothing other than getting their paycheck.

throwaway4220 4y ago
My department has four managers that do this and I work in a private hospital. We’ve been asking for a break room for two years.
- agumonkey 4y ago
  I'm curious if it's not time to solve the chronic manageritis in large workplaces. It pains me to know end that resources are wasted on babbling while people doing the work are on their knees.
whimsicalism 4y ago
It's not the massive bureaucracy. It's that civil service-style systems (as in China) and pay-for-performance are both basically illegal in the federal government. Big government is not necessarily flawed, but big govt as we have structured it is just incompetent.
tchock23 4y ago
It’s funny. My partner has a government job and works much harder than anyone I know in private industry (as do her co-workers). Also, it is a better organized place to work than most enterprises I’ve consulted for. Goes to show YMMV and it’s not worth making sweeping generalizations about a sector of workers.
- rubicon33 4y ago
  Of course "sweeping generalizations" aren't always right. That's obvious. It doesn't mean that generalizations themselves aren't worthwhile, and sometimes accurate enough to frame a problem. Exceptions to the rule shouldn't completely invalidate the rule. In this case I also never said anything about them working hard per se. No doubt they work very hard, but seem to accomplish nothing. Working hard, not smart.
- bluGill 4y ago
  It is possible to work very hard without doing anything worth doing.
  - tchock23 4y ago
    True, but is that unique to government jobs? I know plenty of people shuffling papers around in private industry and academia.
    - chii 4y ago
      In private industry, the owner(s) takes on the losses of such people who get paid doing nothing. With enough losses, the owners will run out of capital and go bust. In public service (and academia i guess, which is often funded publicly), the "owners" don't get a choice and have to eat a loss - it's not as if i can stop paying my taxes. A gov't does not go bust.
      - fuzzfactor 4y ago
        Yes, environmental bureaucracy like the article is focusing on is only one of many which have continuously strengthened as they circled the wagons around the status quo more and more in so many other areas besides just public works projects. But public works projects in particular are handled by government bureaucracies, one of the least accountable kind. Environmental is just one of the obvious bureaucracies that was not there for the older ones of us who remember what life was like before the EPA was formed. Lots of other little bureaucracies had already been established decades before anyone living at the time had been born. People were just expected to accept those because no remaining person could say whether things were better or worse beforehand. It could often be seen that they were still in the relatively flat portion of a multigenerational exponential growth curve, and so it goes. Remember people have to build things and after the mid-1970's there was no more money to do that with inflation. Before then people who worked manufacturing or construction jobs in the US had never been getting ahead at all very often unless they were unionized, but this was the straw that broke that by driving manufacturing to other countries and construction to unskilled workers from other countries. It was strong enough to break the unions so you can imagine the devastating effect it had on everyone else. At this time it was still accepted that an American manufacturing worker, maybe with overtime, would be earning more than an average office worker since it was just plain harder work. University education was not yet common enough to be structured into the systems as very much of a ticket to higher pay. And government office workers had always had to accept lower pay than their counterparts in the private sector, since less skill & work was actually required and these were the candidates who couldn't quite get hired by bureaucracies like Sears or big insurance companies. Either way the need for people sitting in offices accomplishing nothing can spiral out of control, even without the occasional effort to consume increasing yearly budgets or risk losing the yearly increases. And government workers got the upper hand with earlier formalization of university requirements for so many positions, at the same time the private sector had so many challenges to survival of its revenue streams that the governments did not face. By now this trend has government workers making more money than their counterparts in the private sector, plus having more institutional power dedicated to preservation of the institution itself rather than what the institution should actually stand for. Much less what the institution should accomplish if that means physically building something. Stagnation became the acceptable foundation on which to instead build virtual structures ever more resilient to change. At one time the people who built stuff had generations of bulding legacy and knew how to do it already, they were the backbone of society, and got paid more than the people in the offices who shuffled the papers which expedited the process. Now the people in the offices who don't know how to build stuff get paid more than the unskilled workers who try to do it anyway, after the bureaucrats finally finish shuffling the papers needed to delay or derail the project according to somebody's agenda in a chain of command that didn't previously exist when things could actually get done only a few decades ago. Bureaucrats can be most skilled at building more bureaucracy, and they are good at it after making multigenerational efforts, so that's what they more often build.

ip26 4y ago

Yeah, this framing was taken in a piece a few years ago about the failure to revitalize a rail project [1] in New York, which ultimately pinned the blame on tipping the balance too far in favor of private property rights. A single person/holdout can grind a project valuable to millions to a halt. It's the most compelling explanation I've read. In short, if private property has absolute veto power, you can never get big public projects done. (This is why eminent domain exists) There's a balance between private property rights & public good; in the times of great public works, the public good was given more sway, while recently private property rights have been given more (and stifled public works). [1]: I think it was https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/nyregion/new-york-subway-construction-costs.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/nyregion/new-york-subway-...

parineum 4y ago
> In short, if private property has absolute veto power, you can never get big public projects done. (This is why eminent domain exists) I wish they'd modify the language of eminent domain to reward double, triple or even quadruple market rate. I want people being _happy_ to have their property seized.
- IggleSniggle 4y ago
  Don’t want them to be TOO happy to have property seized. Creates a bunch of perverse incentives
- rootusrootus 4y ago
  Given how the sheer amount of money wasted when even one property owner holds out, it shouldn't be terribly difficult to justify a serious premium on the amount paid to those whose property is seized. In most cases I imagine it's just a small part of the overall cost of the project.
- icelancer 4y ago
  Exactly. "Market rate" is ridiculous, and justifiably private property owners should be able to hold out sine market rate doesn't factor in switching costs, both financial and emotional. I think 3x market rate is a decent starting place.

gernb 4y ago

I'm sure Japan is not at China's levels but in the time I lived there are I saw several lines get completely, several stations get rebuilt (A good example would be Shinagawa Station) and an 11km underground highway built. Meanwhile it's taken SF 10 plus years for SF to build a tiny 4 station line (the Central Line) and it's not done.

secondaryacct 4y ago

I live in China, I think the best way to summarise everything we do at all level is: the end justifies the means. Need to seize power ? Murder all members of the former power. Need to make poor peasants rich middle class ? Build entire cities, put them there, and done. Need to build a metro station ? Take the land, build it. Need to make Hong Kong a more physically integrated part of the country ? Build a gigantic bridge to Zuhai even if nobody actually need to use it. The problem ofc is that sometimes the means is more costly than the benefit of the end result, and also that the goal of the end result is never debated, but I suppose that will change eventually, once we've incurred too high a cost for too little a benefit overall.

phendrenad2 4y ago
Somewhere between US stagnation and China/UAE building for the sake of building lies a happy medium.
- chii 4y ago
  i bet that happy medium is not a stable equilibrium because any force on one side (or the other) pushes the balance. There's no restoring force.
- maxcan 4y ago
  Yes, and its called Singapore and Japan.
caycep 4y ago
I also somewhat worry the attention to safety standards make Aperture Science seem like a paragon of OSHA compliance....
- Yaina 4y ago
  Remember: Alert your supervisor! https://www.deviantart.com/orbital-vector/art/Portal-2-Remember-Alert-Your-Supervisor-Sign-857953438 https://www.deviantart.com/orbital-vector/art/Portal-2-Remem...
4y ago

dixie_land 4y ago

> government would waste no time in getting land that it needed by blackmailing, intimidation, and literally murder by bulldozing houses with people in them when they refuse to leave

robinjhuang 4y ago
I think this is a question worth asking. Should we let a small number of people hold hostage over public projects?
- jdasdf 4y ago
  Offer to pay them what they want.
  - Dylan16807 4y ago
    That's an awful solution. Some small fraction of people in the way shouldn't get an enormous multiplier over market value, in some kind of giant prisoner's dilemma auction. If you offer the group a certain percentage of market value, that could work out well. But unanimous consensus is not a reasonable way to get land for big public projects.
    - kortilla 4y ago
      > an enormous multiplier over market value “Market value” requires willing participants. If a seller doesn’t want to sell at a particular price and the good isn’t fungible (which housing is not), they aren’t getting market value by being forced to sell at a price determined solely by the buyer.
      - Dylan16807 4y ago
        Do you want me to say "taxable value*" instead? If you think it's impossible to assess the value of a property, the whole legal world disagrees with you. And yeah, the point of eminent domain is to force the sale on unwilling participants. If used sparingly and without discrimination, it's a good power, and part of living in a community that will undertake community projects. * the underlying assessed value, excluding artificial caps like prop 13

nouveaux 4y ago

"an inherent trade off between environmental consideration and speed" It's not just environmental consideration. Speed also incentivizes corner cutting, nepotism, and all sorts of corrupt behavior. Evergrande is a great example of speed. Banks in China made the same mistakes that banks in US made in 2008. If banks in China had tight regulations for the last 20 years, real estate growth would be significantly hampered. China should be given credit in that their leaders learned from other countries and leveraged their population size to grow with incredible speed. However, I would argue that China's rise to power has less to do with their efficiency and more to do with laws of growth. If we exclude Covid, I am willing to bet that China will not be able to sustain double digit growth ever again. In fact, I am willing to bet my house that when China achieves US's per capita GDP levels, China will never achieve double digit growth ever again.

analyst74 4y ago
> Speed also incentivizes corner cutting, nepotism, and all sorts of corrupt behavior. Compare that with SF bay area politics, I don't think speed has any effect on corruption.
xvector 4y ago
I would counterargue that corners are often cut just as terribly in the US. The corners are simply cut slower, because everything here is done slower. For example, electronics built in the US are typically shittier than electronics built in China, despite taking significantly longer to build and employees being paid orders of magnitude more (as noted by companies like Apple, Purism, etc.) Within our culture in the US there is a clear and comically obvious problem of bureaucracy and red-tape. This doesn't really exist in software yet, but the day our government gets its claws into the software industry is the day that innovation in the US can be put to rest. (Well, it's already happening - if you try to create a software startup that processes user data, you are probably breaking tens of laws you don't even know exist.) There is also a cultural difference. One thing I have noticed when working with my Chinese coworkers is that they do not bullshit nearly as much as my other coworkers. They get straight to the point, deal in metrics and facts, and don't try to inflate their accomplishments. Maybe that's just my current work environment, maybe it's a cultural thing - I suspect the latter.

dv_dt 4y ago

While acquiring the property takes more time in America, I can't help but notice once construction starts it also takes a ridiculously long time too. It really seems like the interests of the power brokers in various areas are far outstripping the interests of the utility to society in multiple areas in America.

patentatt 4y ago

Your comment about the Shanghai subway sparked my curiosity. Wikipedia says the Shanghai metro consists of 396 stations across 19 lines, and has been operating since 1993. How does that square with "since [2012] the Shanghai subway station has opened 21 new lines composed of 516 stations"? Especially when Wikipedia also says "During Expo 2010 the metro system consisted of 11 lines, 407 km, and 277 stations." Seems like they opened 119 stations and added 8 new lines since 2012. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shanghai_Metro https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shanghai_Metro

coolso 4y ago
dwohnitmok 4y ago
Parent misspoke. It's been 21 lines consisting of 516 stations in total since inception (really since 2000 since there was a long lull of little activity in the 90s). The discrepancy in lines comes from whether you count certain rail-based transportation lines as part of the subway system or not. The discrepancy in subway stations is mainly due to whether you count interchange stations as single stations or multiple stations. I think the former is the one that is usually quoted for other subway systems in the world so makes more sense (so ~400 is probably the more appropriate number of stations to state). I also wonder if the Wikipedia article may be out of date? IIRC there were some new stations added in the last few months. But even if that were the case it's just a couple of stations, so the numbers should still be close. More impressive to me is the pace of construction in smaller cities which have also been rapidly building out subway systems (e.g. Hangzhou comes to mind, getting around Hangzhou on public transportation has drastically improved in the last five years, likewise I've personally seen the same immense improvements for Harbin).
- watersb 4y ago
  > The discrepancy in lines comes from whether you count certain rail-based transportation lines as part of the subway system or not. Ah, that makes some sense. Like in San Francisco, there is the regional BART light rail, but also there is the hybrid bus/rail Muni metro transit for local service. https://www.sfmta.com/muni-transit https://www.sfmta.com/muni-transit https://www.bart.gov https://www.bart.gov

joe_the_user 4y ago

The thing is, Europe, where the environment is a significant consideration, also builds subways (and other things) at significantly faster speeds and lower cost than the US. If you look in any detail, it's not a matter of some magic the Chinese or whoever have, it's matter of the corrupt nexus of interests that have come to soak up any transit spending in the US, in particular.

thiscatis 4y ago
No they don't. Typical bureaucratic examples: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oosterweel_Link https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oosterweel_Link https://edition.cnn.com/travel/article/berlin-brandenburg-airport-one-year-on/index.html https://edition.cnn.com/travel/article/berlin-brandenburg-ai...
- joe_the_user 4y ago
  Those are just anecdotes. You can google up ten articles verifying US transit construction costs are higher per mile - and the US is much more spread out too. Random article. https://www.constructiondive.com/news/us-rail-projects-take-longer-cost-more-than-those-in-other-countries/605599/ https://www.constructiondive.com/news/us-rail-projects-take-...
  - thiscatis 4y ago
    maybe because a mile is longer than a kilometer...
    - ryder9 4y ago

zeruch 4y ago

"While I appreciate that there is an inherent trade off between environmental consideration and speed, I think the author makes it clear that it's reached comic proportions in the US." The quote I think that encapsulated it best was: "And this is where I feel that lawmakers of the 1970s made a huge mistake. Rather than accept the need for general rules, or choices by accountable elected officials, the lawmakers built a dispersed power structure filled with veto points that lends itself to analysis paralysis" Given how trash the environment is becoming due to various forms of intransigence, there is an interesting trade off to be made in more ambitious projects that actually move the dial, which ironically might require tinkering with same said systems that currently are at the root of (a phrase change I would make) "decision paralysis".