[Alex3917]

> Our public services suck, which means that they turn into safety nets instead of something that are broadly used by the population.

If roads, trains, schools, water, electricity, libraries, etc. don't count as widely used, what exactly does?

[rayiner]

Rich people buy bottled water (and our water system is a disaster that’s poisoning poor kids with lead). Rich people either send their kids to private schools, or carve out enclaves with public schools that have just other rich people (while the “safety net” inner city schools deteriorate). Electricity isn’t a “public service.” For the most part, private companies provide electric service in the US using private infrastructure. Nobody uses libraries.

That leaves our roads, which are much crappier than in say Germany or Japan.

[tomjakubowski]

Total attendance, NYPL system in FY2016: 13,867,000 (2M library card holders, 729,000 active)

Total attendance, New York Mets in MLB 2016: 2,460,000

Total attendance, New York Giants in NFL 2016: 630,312

"Nobody" uses libraries, indeed. http://council.nyc.gov/budget/wp-content/uploads/sites/54/20...

[jedberg]

2M library card holders, which represents about 10% of the number of people who are eligible for a library card, and fewer than 1/2 checked out a book.

So 5% of the total eligible population used one.

Don't get me wrong, I love libraries and I go every week with the kids, but I think OP is right -- few people actually use the library.

[Alex3917]

> So 5% of the total eligible population used one.

That's not a good metric to use because everyone who lives or works in New York State is eligible to join, but for most people it only really makes sense to join if you live in Manhattan, Brooklyn, or Staten Island. Otherwise you'd just join your local library.

So really ~60% of all residents (i.e. including young children) have a library card, and the overwhelming majority take advantage of library services and events.

[Alex3917]

> Rich people buy bottled water (and our water system is a disaster that’s poisoning poor kids with lead).

Rich people consume way more public water than poor people. How many poor people have huge single family homes with lawns and swimming pools? How many buy tons of consumer products, own several cars, and are buying large amounts of organic food?

And given that basic filtration removes 99.9% of lead, you'd die of hypernatremia long before it would be possible to get lead poisoning from drinking filtered tap water.

[tptacek]

Our roads are not much crappier than Germany's roads --- or, at least, not much crappier than the roads in Bavaria.

[rayiner]

I know it’s anecdotal, but coming from DC/Baltimore I was pretty amazed by the roads in Munich.

[tptacek]

I drove around Munich for a week, then from there through Austria for a couple weeks and back into Bavaria.

The roads are good. The autobahns are probably better than our interstates --- though not by that much. Traffic congestion was as much a problem there as in the American midwest. Their surface streets are on average not as good as Chicago metro area surface streets (but are probably better than Baltimore's). And I feel a good deal safer on US rural highways than I did on German and Austrian rural highways, which are beautiful, well-maintained, nightmarish death traps.

I think you'd be setting yourself up for a pretty tough argument if you wanted to claim that the US doesn't do public roads well. Do we do them better than Germany? No. But we do public roads anomalously well, especially for the degree of difficulty involved in providing them across a whole continent.

[rayiner]

I'll concede that I don't have data to back up my claim, and that anecdotally roads might be the area of infrastructure where we're least bad compared to Western Europe and Japan.