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by elbasti 2563 days ago
It seems like the obvious answer is to consider fixing the "cost disease" of infrastructure as the #1 priority. Not more trains, or faster trains or whatever. Just getting the costs in line with the rest of the world. The extra infrastructure should follow, right?

Same spending, 5x the transit.
1 comments
0xffff2 2563 days ago
Okay... and how do you do that? I want to write more here, but I just don't know where to even begin. Where is the money in US infrastructure projects going, and is any of it to things that we can actually agree to eliminate?
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asdff 2563 days ago
A lot of it gets lost to private contractors and consultants. Privatization is nice if you don't have the labor pool to do the work with public employees, but it's very wasteful and costly because everyone down the line needs to get their chunk of the pie. Public can run at cost or over budget and still be a huge success because no one is clamoring for a >30% profit margin. It also invites nepotism.
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rayiner 2563 days ago
European cities also generally use private contractors for construction. The Paris subway expansion, which is proceeding at a fraction of the per-mile cost of New York's Second Avenue subway, is being done by private contractors: https://tunneltalk.com/France-25Oct2018-Grand-ParisExpress-n....
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elbasti 2563 days ago
This might sound like a cop-out answer, but I think the answer is "nobody knows".

So-called "cost-disease" spans infrastructure, education (public & private!) and medicine (again, public and private). All of these things cost 10x what they used to and 10x what they cost in other countries.

There are a few exposés and studies that try to explain the issue but IMHO none of them are satisfactory:

NYT tries to answer the question for NYC (but then why is cost disease a thing in other cities with different contractor/union/transit authority interactions?)[0]

Alex Tabarrok says it's growth in demand and slowdown in productivity growth (but then why is this a US only phenomenon? Does it really "jive" that infrastructure costs 10x what it used to because of "increased demand and slowdown in productivity?" I don't think it passes the smell test) [1]

Slatestar codex says "beats me" [2] and [3]

[0]:https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/nyregion/new-york-subway-...

[1]: https://www.mercatus.org/system/files/helland-tabarrok_why-a...

[3]:https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/02/09/considerations-on-cost...

[4]: https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/02/17/highlights-from-the-co...

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