[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.

[klipt]

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

Which is what I said, the difference in labor costs "helps", not that it's the sole explanation.

[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.