Comment by lmm
12 hours ago
Funny how every other developed country manages to build more infrastructure cheaper despite having stronger unions and stricter regulations.
12 hours ago
Funny how every other developed country manages to build more infrastructure cheaper despite having stronger unions and stricter regulations.
> Funny how every other developed country manages to build more infrastructure cheaper despite having stronger unions and stricter regulations.
Every country says this about every other country. The UK has HS2, and we point to Germany. Germany has Stuttgart 21 and they point to Spain. Spain has the Sagrada Familia. Spain points to China, and China has the HZMB [0]
This stuff is really really hard, and standards have evolved hugely. The london underground would never be built today, because of the ignored costs. HS2's massive problem isn't that we spent £100m on a Bat tunnel [1], it's that nobody was willing to say no because that decision is pinned to you but the blame absolving is "someone elses problem".
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hong_Kong%E2%80%93Zhuhai%E2%80.... [1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c9wryxyljglo
I'm not exactly sure the point you're making about each country pointing at another as a positive example. The chain you've listed (US->UK->Germany->Spain->China) is a pretty good list of countries in descending order of cost to build infrastructure (it's not a straightforward analysis, but see https://transitcosts.com/new-data/ for example). There are always boondoggles, but the scoreboard is pretty clear -- each country in that list is better than the country before at building rail infrastructure.
Your analogy is like saying that everyone thinks someone else is a faster runner: amateurs point to collegiate athletes, collegiate athletes point to elites, elites point to Olympians. You can find someone in each of these categories who has run a bad race, but that doesn't invalidate the existence of the differences in ability.
No, my analogy is that everyone assumes that everyone else is an Olympic runner, when we’re all just college athletes.
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I mean, I'm not sure that the Sagrada Familia is a good example. It taking a long time to build was arguably part of the _point_, and was planned from the start.
I wasn’t sure if I should leave it in or not, it was more tongue in cheek than anything. The train between Madrid and Barcelona is a real example [0]
[0] https://english.elpais.com/elpais/2014/05/13/inenglish/13999...
Isn't it? Look up the California high speed rail. There is massive corruption, incompetence, and red tape.