[tvanantwerp]

I travel to Hong Kong every few years to visit family. Each time, there are more MTR stations--and on some occasions, entirely new lines. The MTR is just as complex as BART, if not moreso. I think it's worth considering why some places can build things like a metro fast, but others can't.

[foolfoolz]

before they build a new station....

do they do environmental impact studies? was enough time given for the study to complete and people to challenge the results? possibly with another study? are there community meetings to discuss the impact? does everyone in the area have a chance to voice their opposition at an open hearing? do all workers on the construction team have strict safety regulations? require certified training for specific tools? the company selected must pass random workplace safety visits? are they allowed to impact existing traffic flows during construction?

we did this to ourselves

[fanzhang]

That's probably also the answer to the time series question as well -- i.e. why construction is more costly today in the US than 100 years ago.

Interestingly, I think those complexities are not imposed by any monolithic person or organization, but is a the bulk result of lots of little regulations. I'm not sure any one specific person is saying "on the whole, this system of complexity is worth it" but rather each one by itself has a specific good (e.g. environmental study) without explicit accounting of the costs.

To be silly and meta, perhaps in addition to a mandatory environmental impact study of each large construction project, there should be a mandatory economic impact study on the environmental impact study.

[enraged_camel]

Yeah but how does any of this explain the 16-month delay in BART due to the installation of the wrong network equipment?

Something is genuinely wrong when it comes to major projects in America.

[mhjas]

I would guess they do that in Denmark and Copenhagen has a very modern subway system.

[LeonidasXIV]

It is modern but the metro is just 1.5 lines and the new ring line takes forever to build. Some of the other extensions are only planned to open by 2024. So it is quite glacial.

[CPLX]

Western Europe has no shortage of worker safety, environmentalism, or democracy, and they don’t have this problem.

[dash2]

Are you sure? I live there and that isn’t the impression I get.

[atonse]

All this might explain maybe cutting the pace in half or 1/3. Instead, the pace in America is almost zero. ZERO.

[ajmurmann]

There was a very interesting article a few years ago (I've tried to find it several times but cannot) that tried to explain at least some of this. The one factor they circled in on is that the US government stopped enjoying their own experts. Instead even publishing project requirements for different construction companies to bid on have to be outsourced. This causes mainly to problems: if you get the contract for writing the spec you cannot bid on the project. So many big and competent players will avoid writing the spec. The other issue is that the project is lacking holistic oversight by someone who understands what's going on and had incentive to keep cost down. Because nobody has a actual career as a construction expert with the government we see the government putting people in charge of these projects who worked at the contracting company the previous day. They had a few examples of the same construction company finishing projects pretty much on time and budget in other countries but going over a lot in similar projects in the US.

[TheCoelacanth]

I think a big part of Hong Kong's success with metro stations is that they own some of the land surrounding the stations, which means that the huge increase in land values from building a metro station goes back into the metro system, unlike most US systems where most of the increase in land values goes to private land owners.