Comment by digital-cygnet
6 hours ago
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.
There are plenty of countries winning gold medals for massive infrastructure projects while the richest one can’t even get into college
The comment I replied to said:
> Funny how every other developed country manages to build more infrastructure cheaper despite having stronger unions and stricter regulations.
I picked a handful of absolutely colossal overspends on massive infra projects to point out that no, not every other western country is doing so. All countries have their success stories and mega disaster projects