[nerdjon]

Well... I feel slightly better about Boston constantly pushing back being able to use our phones as tickets after seeing the timeline for the transition and how just that they are still doing this.

What is it about public transit in the US that it is so... bad? Inadequate funding seems to be the easy one, but the MBTA (Boston) doesn't even handle the funds it has well. Yeah it needs more funding but there is also just a core issue to how it's run.

It is sad to see the state of public transit in this country, particularly in dense urban areas where we should be discouraging Car use as much as possible.

I am very curious what other countries are doing that we are not.

[roody15]

I am an elected official (12 years and elected six times in Illinois) unfortunately seeing this process work over 12 years is discouraging. For example President Obama allocated 8 billion dollars for high sped passenger rail service improvements. By 2017 almost 2 billion of this money had been spent on railroad improvements / railroad crossings and line inspections. Fast forward to 2024 no high speed rails have actually been built. For example Chicago Illinois was to get a line from Iowa City to Quad Cities to Chicago (straight line). This project was fully funded at one point but Iowa and Illinois had (still have) a disagreement on bridge repairs connecting the states.

Now Governor Pritzer has authorized a new high speed rail commission to try and get this project going again.

In a nutshell .. Rail project between Iowa City and Chicago was fully funded as of 2016… all that actually happened is some rail road crossing were improved.. lines were inspected and no actual new lines constructed. Instead 1 out of the 2 billion was spend on “engineering” costs and compliance paperwork … which now has expired and need to be redone if the project is to be completed.

The amount of money spent on compliance paperwork and “engineering” is staggering. Many six figure salaries depend on slightly altering existing engineered projects to meet compliance requirements for projects that are never built. From waste treatment upgrades, water treatment, road improvement, traffic studies, on and on. The amount of money spent on services that are not finished or lead to an actual project is absolutely staggering … entire industries depend on this inefficiency and lobby effectively to keep things “obtuse”.

[TheJoeMan]

From someone who's seen the other side... every time the engineer has to quabble over email with the permitting departments over matters such as "you sent it to the wrong bureaucrat so I'm ignoring instead of forwarding it" or "the permit admin wrote the wrong 1 of 50 Comcast subsidiaries on the paperwork so now I have to get a skip-manager's signoff" it's billed at $400/hr.

[nerdjon]

I feel like Boston has had similar, we have contracts with companies to complete a thing by a specific time, they don't but we are stuck paying them even more to complete a project so it ends up being over budget, late, and possibly not done well as is evident by our green line extension that opened last year that was shut down to redo it because the tracks are the wrong width.

It just feels like the money is going to the wrong places like you said.

I would probably argue that we still need more funding even if we fixed how we used the money, but we need to fix how we use it first.

[nomel]

This is what happens when the repercussions for poor performance/failure is more money. Privatization, with some regulations, and reduction of monopolies, seems like a good idea. But, the system will never choose to harm itself.

[simfree]

The current engineering ecosystem is largely private, and it's poorly functioning, costing us way more money than just hiring engineers as public employees rather than paying a contracting firm to do initial and final design on each rail system segment.

Just go look at the RFPs and responses each municipality has four expansion of their current system. It is all outsource to private industry, at great cost compared to doing it inside government.

[coryrc]

Design-Build contracts. As stupid as the downtown Seattle highway 99 tunnel was [0], apparently we got away without paying the overages.

0: two lanes of traffic each way and an 8-lane stroad for >$2B instead of fixing the 3-lanes-each-way viaduct for $1B

[nomel]

I would claim that the problem is that they're doing it for government, which is what makes the chain of accountability lead to nowhere.

[lmm]

The lack of accountability happens because the government is not allowed to build up the in-house expertise they'd need to manage projects like this, because of this bizarre American idea that government=bad private=good. So the government agencies end up having to outsource absolutely everything - and not only is that expensive, it's also doomed to failure, because understanding and accountability by its nature can't be outsourced. And that's only compounded by a lack of trust, low-bid rules and the like.

If you look at the entities that have actually managed to get stuff like this done (which is something most developed countries around the world manage), it's not private industries, it's governments - but governments that were enabled and trusted to build-up effective in-house teams for doing large projects.

[verteu]

But why are other countries able to build successfully, despite the same chain of accountability?

[coryrc]

The problem is the government doesn't know what to ask for.

[baggy_trough]

Wasting money on favored constituents is the point of these projects.

[harpiaharpyja]

Wasting money on special interests would be more accurate.

[asdff]

I think about this all the time every time I see an lcd screen in my local train stations. If people who designed them actually used transit, maybe they'd have the signs you can only see as you walk out of the station say something about the bus lines you'd transfer to, instead of when the train behind you that just departed from is set to arrive. At some stations the screens they installed don't display anything useful at all, not when the next train will come, just the date and time as if everyone doesn't have that in their pocket, and this needs to be displayed every 25 feet on the platform.

A lot of transit could be fixed by just taking a regular routine user, empowering them to become a dictator for a week and point out all the friction points they hit actually using the system. But then that would make the entire bureaucratic system that is the transit agency look like idiots who don't understand their own jobs, so it will unfortunately never be done.

[wpietri]

For sure. I think a lot of this is just about how heavy the planning cycles are. A lot of stuff like that is developed through big, waterfall planning efforts and large outsourcing contracts. Most of the choices were made before they had their first user, and once it's all installed any revision would be a) expensive, and b) a black eye for the people in charge.

And in some ways I don't blame people for doing this, because you need really supportive stakeholders to work in an iterative fashion. Otherwise you get a ton of nitpicking that amounts to a lot of "why didn't you guess 100 perfectly everything up front" and "how can we start if you can't give me a full plan and a firm price?" In a blame-hungry environment, waterfall is the safest choice for the people doing the project.

[asdff]

I think a lot of projects have adopted a ritualism around an ideal that only exist in renders vs actual learned pragmatism as well. Despite these glaring shortcomings that I really must not be the only one to realize, the system still creates new stations or other infrastructure beholden to the same shortcomings. Pro transit journalists have their work cut out for them: it's so easy to ding these builds on a usual laundry list of items, but somehow the engineers are like automatons who blindly follow prescription probably from a higher form of government and one again, never seem to test the system beyond simulation I'd presume. How do you fix this? It seems so fouled from the top authority mandating stupid infrastructure to the bottom subcontractors who are hired to implement these plans and use their influence to perpetuate such byzantine planning, where they will be the most qualified contractors to bid on future projects. The inertia of these maligned incentives seems insurmountable. Everything seems so rotten and hard to fix without a total reset.

[wpietri]

For sure. One way I'll talk about this is, "The biggest fantasy novels I've read are project plans." Everybody coalesces around a vision quite detached from reality and then just kind of lives in it for years. It's a weird sort of collective arrogance/faith.

There are alternatives, though! In Rother's "Toyota Kata", he describes a Toyota practice where they pick some far-off goal (which I think is called a "target condition"). That can be something that nobody knows how to do. Then they take one step in that direction and reassess. Over time the path might be somewhat wandering as they learn what works and what doesn't. Or they might revise the goal based on new knowledge. But they keep going, step by step.

That's a lot like short-cycle iterative software processes. Which I know work, because I've used them for many projects. But even software, which is infinitely soft, often gets the same sort of fantasy-driven planning.

I think you're right that the ultimate problem is how authority behaves, and at least in the US there's a terrible managerial culture that this is embedded in. My solution has been to find small pockets of sanity, but I've not figured out how to scale that up. But you might find some hope in this Mary Poppendieck talk, where she explains that it hasn't always been this way: https://www.infoq.com/presentations/tyranny-of-plan/

[mncharity]

"Which way do I go?" orientation signage in the Boston subway system has been less than wonderful. A lot of "the obvious thing needed here is ..." not happening. Places you could stand to help confused and grateful tourists. So tempting to do a self-adhesive-vinyl signage project. And then the DNC did.

When the Democratic National Convention came to Boston (2004), the subway got a lot of nice "which way do I go? what are these stairs? if not these, then where?" temporary orientation signage. It lingered afterward, with some becoming permanent signage, and others puzzlingly not. Such an event involves massive interdepartmental communication, tight timelines, altered incentives and constraints, and additional resources. Some of the altered communication channels are said to have persisted. I might be interesting to look at events where things are "shaken up", to better understand the steady-state tangle.

[nerdjon]

I feel like almost every screen I just ignore, either it was just put there for ads or it is wrong/broken.

It is now a fairly regular occurrence to have a train show up that the screen had no reference too existing a minute or two before.

But yeah it feels like they were not designed or setup by people that actually use the trains and were setup by a comity thinking they know best.

Maybe that is the big difference, in other countries the people using it are also the ones managing it?

[rtkwe]

The big issue is putting those screens in isn't just a simple task, you need the entire support and switching network to be able to track individual trains which is a relatively new thing in terms of the age of many of the subway swtiching and train tacking (where those even exist) systems in the US.

[asdff]

Honestly a big issue seems to be in other countries, especially ones like Japan people frequently site as the model for public transit, transit is privately run and developed more pragmatically/more profitably. There wouldn't be sense in adding useless screens with useless information, but there sure would be a lot of consideration on how we can make our station more attractive than a competing line's station, paring down overhead to its most base items to further that goal.

Whereas here in the US, its like transit departments are handed budgets generated by tax dollars but no clear direction or plan for how to maximize those dollars. So they have to turn to subcontractors who eat through the pile of money like a vulture eats carrion. This is a system that over time lobbies to further entrench and sustain itself and becomes impossible to rip out and restart. If you go advocating for privatizing the transit system you'd be likened to Judge Doom before people stop and think for a second of what that would actually look like: the shinkansen for example.

[xcrunner529]

Well and lots that don’t even take the transit they manage. It’s just so infuriating.

[asdff]

Metros would rather build a sprawling parking lot for their bus and train operators to park their cars in, than to ask why the local metro system is such a nonstarter to so many of the metros own employees.

[nox101]

Japan's transit is private and semi-competitive. (there are 10+ train companies in Tokyo), (4+ in Kyoto), I haven't counted Osaka's

It works because the companies own land and facilities around every station. Grocery stores, office buildings, shopping centers (stores at many stations), apartments, etc. This creates a virtuous cycle where the more riders the more people use their other services and visa-versa.

As for semi-competitive, at least in Tokyo, Osaka, and Kyoto there are enough lines that you often have a choice. For example Tokyo (area) to Yokohama there's JR, Keikyu, Tokyu, (3 different companies). They have slightly different routes so if you're closer to one you might take one or the other but they do advertise trying to get you ride their's over the other's. To Hanada there's Keikyu and the Tokyo Monorail (it's own company). To Narita there's the Narita Express (JR) and Keisei (a different company) as well as local lines from both. Same in Kyoto. You can go to Kyoto to Nara via JR or via Keihan. You can go Kyoto to Osaka via JR or Hanshin.

So, if one company offers easy pay methods and another doesn't it quickly gets the reputation and "a crappy old line" (who wants to live there, open an office there, etc...)

[nox101]

I'd love to know what incentives make this stuff work in countries with pure "public" transportation. There the obvious "it's the right thing to do" but this American (me) sees that incentives work and I can't see what incentives keep politicians, which are human just like everyone else, from syphoning funds from public transportation to other things, not able to get a large enough budget to upgrade since they need all the other politicians in, not get influenced by industry trying to sell cars, etc..

[wpietri]

I think there are a bunch of things causing this problem. Off the top of my head, some factors:

- chronic underfunding - we all know how problems build up when maintenance is deferred

- waterfall planning - Mary Poppendieck has a nice talk on how much trouble this causes: https://www.infoq.com/presentations/tyranny-of-plan/

- political point-scoring - blame-oriented cultures discourage experimentation and incremental improvement

- political polarization - one-party areas can more easily slide into cronyism, and fighting between parties makes it hard to compromise even on things like fixing infrastructure

- classism - in a lot of places, transit is for the poors

- racism - many don't want transit bringing Those People around

- manager culture, not engineer culture - as we see with Boeing, standard MBA thinking doesn't work well for long-term safety and reliability; the focus on short term metrics, mostly financial ones, leads to underinvestment and decay of infrastructure

[J_Shelby_J]

I’m a liberal democrat, but it’s clear that one party politics is not tenable. There has to be an option to the status quo that you can vote for to incentivize competency in government. But with the state of national politics it would be almost impossible for a republican to win in most of urban America. So that leaves just primary challengers from within the Democratic Party which is very difficult. So urban political machines have become absolutely rotten with complacency and now the richest zip codes on the planet have trains running on floppy disks.

One option is ranked choice voting.

[wpietri]

I totally agree we need more actual competition, and also agree that national polarization plus a first-past-the-post system makes that unlikely in the near term.

I would also love to see widespread use of RCV, but as a San Franciscan I don't think it has done tons to fix the problem of complacent political machines here, so we're going to have to do more.

[rangestransform]

other countries don't treat public transit as a jobs program

other cities (in the east, with the best public transit) don't let unions grab the entire city by the balls

government employees in other cities aren't as hellbent on extracting their pound of flesh from the taxpayer

[kiwijamo]

I struggle to understand how unions/government are often seen as the problem. Some of the best public transit I've experienced have been in places with strong unions and more government-owned/managed public transit e.g. much of Europe. Some of the worst in places where unions are weak and "public" transit is largely out-sourced to private entities operating on behalf of public transit agencies e.g. the US, UK, Australia, New Zealand, etc.

I live in New Zealand public transit in NZ used to be incredibly bad during the heights of private operation in the 1990's but has improved heaps over the last 10-20 years as local/central govt have progressively taken back control over more aspects of public transit. However public agencies are still not allowed to directly operate bus or train services which still sees private companies failing to provide good service with no consquences and public agencies unable to take over to provide the service improvements that are needed. It is interesting to compare New Zealand in the 1950's had one of the highest levels of public transit usage per capita under public ownership of buses and railways. This dropped down to embrassingly low levels after out-sourcing to private entities to a low in the 1990's.

It has only been under government leadership that we have seen a revival to the current levels (e.g. doubling to 100+ million trips per annum in our biggest city from well below 50 million in the mid-1990's) due to local government coordinating public transit systems (and contracting private entities to operate to the timetables set by public authorities) that meets the needs of the users and not just private entities making a profit. Unions have been vocal too for improving systems not only for transit employees but also recognising that what's best for transit users also benefit transit employees.

YMMV and possibly depends on the political environment in each country.

[rangestransform]

public/privately operated transit is a completely different topic than unionized/non-unionized staff except in the west where public sector unions have the government by the balls

Consider the cost of Singapore building with imported migrant labour vs NYC building with ~~mafia~~ union labour

[xxpor]

NYC is grabbed by the balls plenty. They still don't have OPTO for example.

[electric_mayhem]

> What is it about public transit in the US that it is so... bad?

Massive money and entrenched behind preserving a car-based life.

Car companies, auto workers unions, railroads can siphon off funds from promised improvements to cover deferred maintenance and give themselves bonuses for being so clever… Hell, AAA which one might expect to spend its income on serving its members instead diverts money to proactively lobbying against improvements in public transit in an ongoing display of cynical self-preservation

It’s basically hopeless.

[KerrAvon]

Nonsense. There is working transit in the US and a huge appetite for more. But it takes decades to do this stuff. "China did massive infrastructure project in two years" -- China is also a communist dictatorship (for some value of those words), and we can't do that here. We could streamline things a bit more, of course, but it's never going to be cheap and easy in the US.

If you want to help, vote. Or even run for something on a pro-transit, YIMBY platform.