[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.