[netrus]

One city has a millionaire who builds a yacht for 100M dollars in a local shipyard and uses it for holidays. The neighbor city has a millionaire who spends 100M dollars to build 10 ferries he gifts to the city. The general population is clearly better off in the second case, even if it does not matter for the workers in the shipyard.

[xhkkffbf]

Cute gambit to talk about ferries, the one mode of transport that doesn't have insane land-use debates. (Although they do need waterfront property on both ends.) I'll give you a point for that one.

But let's be serious. Ferries have a very limited use in only a few cities. Even then, the appeal is limited because they're relatively slow.

I submit that the most common result of replacing one yacht with $100m of public transit spending is that the unions and the bureaucracy will eat up the $100m in a few minutes.

The theory here is that diverting more smart people into "good" careers like urban planning will be great. But if we look at the last 100 years in the United States, the rise of careers like urban planning have been correlated with an explosion in construction costs.

Yet back in the bad old days when there weren't urban planning degrees and only a few effete twits went to college, private capitalism was able to build two big urban transit systems in NYC. No book smart people. Just sandhogs and profit motive. How much did it cost to add just a few stops to the NYC subway over the last two decades?

[threetonesun]

Yes, when you don't care about the environment or safety regulations or displacing people poorer than you, infrastructure is a very easy problem to solve. Fortunately for you, we seem to be heading back towards that way of thinking.

Also, I live near a city that had one of those ridiculous, way over budget projects where sure, some money was funneled to unions and bureaucracy or whatever evil monsters you've concocted here. No amount of billionaire pet projects could match the amount of good it did across the number of people it affected. Sometimes the inefficiencies of human cooperation are greased with money, and that's perfectly fine.

[laterium]

Is 75% of the country zoned SFH because of safety regulations or environmental reasons?

[gertlex]

That seems very lucky of the second city. Let's hope we get lucky with some generous billionaires soon!

I don't claim that regulations are simple, and incentives couldn't be created to result in infrastructure investment by the wealthy... but I won't hold my breath.