[chitowneats]

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?

[esperent]

> European and East Asian

You just basically named two continents and said they build faster than the US and you're accusing someone else of simplistic takes?

Which European country builds infrastructure faster than the US?

[pchristensen]

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.

Alon Levy is the most accessible source for this kind of cross-national comparision. https://transitcosts.com/ and https://pedestrianobservations.com/2023/03/03/we-gave-a-talk... is a good place to start.

[bonzini]

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.

[rayiner]

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.

[Retric]

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.

[acdha]

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.

[bluGill]

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)

[lostlogin]

>Turkey

How well build that infrastructure is/was built is debatable, and a massive loss of life has just occurred.

https://www.bbc.com/news/64568826

[ryan_lane]

Turkey may not be an example you want to choose here.

[dolmen]

Italy is also famous at destroying infrastructure quickly: Genoa bridge.

[klooney]

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.

https://pedestrianobservations.com/ and the less feisty https://transitcosts.com/ are the canonical sources on comparative infrastructure costs.

[wozniacki]

With Italy, we may not want to use 'quickly' and 'cheaply' too soon.

The collapse of the Ponte Morandi / Polcevera Viaduct was just a few years ago and is still fresh in the minds.[1][2]

[1]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ponte_Morandi#Collapse

[2]

Police release new footage of doomed Morandi Bridge collapse in Genoa https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V479srTBlAk

Genoa motorway bridge collapse caught on camera https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Pl0rsVdXxM

[renewiltord]

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

[throwaway2037]

Spain's high speed rail is criminally underrated. It is an amazing achievement.

[dazc]

Is laying rail across a desert that hard?

[amval]

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.

[eru]

Huh? Spain is rather hilly.

[llampx]

Ask any state west of the Rockies. California for example.

[klipt]

Probably helps that wages are lower in Spain. Americans want cheap infrastructure but also want high wages and that's probably an impossible combination.

[ClumsyPilot]

you cant blame slowness on wages

[Spooky23]

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.

[klooney]

Transit Costs' full analysis (https://transitcosts.com/executive_summary/) decomposed the 2nd avenue subway costs into

- station sizes (causing spend on stations to increase by a factor of 2)

- nonstandard systems (elevators, escalators, etc) (causing an increase over nominal best practices of approximately 1.35)

- inefficient procurement (how contracting works) (increase by a factor of 1.85, although this is a squishy)

- soft costs (design, planning, construction management, contingencies) (factor of 1.2, again fairly squishy)

- labor costs (factor of 1.5 over a well run transit system baseline)

so it's both the case that the labor costs are outrageous and that they're insufficient to explain the outrageous project costs.

[bluGill]

Wages are lower in Spain, but not by anywhere near enough to explain the cost difference.

[bigDinosaur]

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.

[etblg]

Berlin made great progress on the Brandenburg Airport, a shining example of German efficiency and construction prowess /s

[MengerSponge]

People who'd like to understand the /s should check out "How to F#€k up an Airport" from Radio Spaetkauf: https://www.radiospaetkauf.com/ber/

[throwaway2037]

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.

[winter_blue]

What's their secret? How do they keep their standards up, but still build so fast, and so cheap (compared to the US)?

It would be amazing if someone could research this, and publish a paper on exactly what reforms the United States needs to make†.

† to get to the same speed/quality/cost-efficiency as these countries

[janalsncm]

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.

[HPsquared]

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.

[BurningFrog]

There is no secret. They're pretty normal developed countries.

The weird outlier is the US!

[concordDance]

And the UK.

[pchristensen]

Check out https://transitcosts.com/ - it's a huge study of projects in many countries, broken out by budget line item.

[notahacker]

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.

[mike50]

A functional central government comes to mind.

[eru]

I wouldn't mention Malaysia and Singapore in the same breadth. Even if compared to Singapore, they both look fast.

[ChrisMarshallNY]

Japan (Tokyo, at least), is crazy fast.

I remember staying at the Shinagawa Prince, three years in a row, and it overlooks that big-ass office park, on the other side of the station.

One year, I look out, and there’s a huge empty lot.

The next year, there’s a steel frame, for several buildings.

The next year, the lights are on, and the buildings are obviously occupied.

Also, their standards are very high. They weather massive earthquakes, quite well.

[drchickensalad]

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.

[ChrisMarshallNY]

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).

[cpursley]

Hell, just look at the new metro ring line that was opened in Moscow. It’s 45 miles long and the stations are absolutely gorgeous and unique:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-txmGH11sh0

https://www.rbth.com/travel/335939-moscow-metro-big-circle-l...

And this is all under massive sanctions and a less democratic and more corrupt system.

[hoseja]

That's just a totalitarian vanity project. People live in squalor and die by the thousands on the warfront meanwhile.

[MagnumOpus]

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...

[EntrePrescott]

> 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.

[MichaelZuo]

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.

[EntrePrescott]

> 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.

[cpursley]

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.

[soperj]

corruption.

[rootusrootus]

On which side? The faster side, I'm guessing?

[sixo]

both. corruption favors the powerful. in established cities the powerful own land and don't want it changed, in new ones it's the developers and govt.

[eru]

Europe's cities are arguably more established than American ones, aren't they?

Tokyo has also been around for ages.

[birdyrooster]

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.

[AbrahamParangi]

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.

[birdyrooster]

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.

[eru]

> 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.

[kiba]

Across the board we just sucks. Can't be explained by environment being different if US states all exhibit the same pathologies.

[ClumsyPilot]

> They share the same environmental challenges whereas in the US the challenges are vastly different depending on which coast you are near

Ah yes, Norway and Greece are known for having the same climate.

The temperature range is literally 100 degrees Centigrade - record in Greece ks 48 Degrees C

Record in Norway is -51 degrees

[bobthepanda]

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.

[bradDonniger]

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.

[bluGill]

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.