Other developed countries tend to have parliamentary systems where policy making requires multi-party coalitions. When you need to get three or more parties on board there is less opportunity to get park-barrel spending passed without _someone_ crying foul.
You're describing the rest of the US, not New York. New York is the other way around, where extreme corruption and disenfranchisement means elected officials have no reason to pay attention to their constituents. Sheldon Silver was one of the strongest advocates for cutting bus service, even though his district has no subway service, so they all depend on it.
Outside of city subways: Amtrak's Acela service (which is what passes for "high-speed" though I understand this is weak in comparison to Europe and Japan) was built and established in the early 2000s, and boosted Amtrak's share of the air/train travel on the NYC-DC corridor from 37% to 75%. Boston's Big Dig project, which for all its faults was certainly impressive, spanned a couple decades and was finished around 2004 or so.
Two main things you'd do if you had money and political will to speed this up:
1. Tear out old bridges (some have been "urgently in need of replacement" for a decade already) and replace with modern ones. Locals like how the old bridge looks? Great, hand over the money for a new one that looks the same. No money? You get a generic reinforced concrete bridge rated for 120mph and suck it up. This can be done in 24 hours per bridge for a short bridge, shut the railway, smash the old bridge, drop the new one in, test it, re-open the railway. If you have the manpower you can do ten bridges at once.
2. Eliminate at-grade crossings. These are unsafe even for lower speeds, they're lethal for High Speed Rail and must be closed. If practical add a bridge or tunnel. If not, too bad, close them anyway and people have to go round.
Several large cities in Europe have built new high speed tracks in tunnels under the city.
The track between London St Pancras and Stratford stations in London (and from Stratford further east) is an example. St Pancras is the end of the line, so the speed is necessarily limited by the acceleration and braking capability of the train, but [1] says the speed is 230km/h = 142mph. [2] says speeds in tunnels are limited to 270km/h (168mph), they probably mean a bit further out of the city.
Other than the last 1km or so, the whole track of this route is new.
Realistically, any city worth spending so much money on will have every train stopping at it, so there's no need for higher speeds in under-city tunnels.
[1] https://www.railforums.co.uk/threads/hs1-maximum-permitted-s...
I don't understand why not? Japan's high speed rail was added into multiple major cities without tearing up the whole city. What did they do that can't be done in the US?
There is one fundamental difference between the two systems and that is that the London Tube stops service overnight while the New York City Subway remains open 24/7/365. Having a nightly maintenance window of several hours in which they can do preventive maintenance is likely a big factor in keeping costs down. Throw that in with the reduction of labor with limited hours of operation and I bet those two make up a solid portion of the difference in cost per rider.
Although that's only on Friday and Saturday.
As of 2014 over 100,000 MTA workers in New York City were making over $100,000 a year each, not counting benefits or pension costs.
https://www.empirecenter.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/MTA-...
Take the time to see how many pages of police offers you have to scroll through in Nassau County New York alone before you get to a page where they start making under $200,000 a year.
http://data.newsday.com/long-island/data/nassau/payroll-2015...
I'm all for paying people a living wage, but its not hard to understand how, when you are spending countless billions (that increase every year) on paying countless cops and other public service workers $200,000+ a year how there is no money left over for maintaining (or, god forbid, upgrading) equipment. It doesn't matter which corporate party you vote for - Democrats and Republicans are both corrupt to the core and falling over themselves to secure these service-union votes. As a result our infrastructure is going to continue to crumble and our debt will continue to rise until we reach a breaking point which won't be pretty.
http://www.seethroughny.net/payrolls/city-of-new-york
I do wonder how many of these are one-offs -- the cop making 650k (Adrian Schoolcraft) is on a closer look way less egregious than it sounds. He was something of a whistleblower in a way that fellow cops disliked, and this culminated in his house being raided and an involuntary hospital stay; the 650k is a settlement for all that. Daniel Carione is a cop on there for 450k, but that seems to be from a settlement after he was forced onto disability/retirement when he started wearing a hearing aid.
Even so, that list is amazing. Most of the entries are guys clocking a ton of overtime. The organization clearly wants to show public employees are overpaid, but it seems accurate. The NYT has cited them in the past.
Is the crime rate even that high? Isn't Nassau County one of the richest county's in the United States?
My two cents: things are more expensive in the United States due to us insisting on being so different in two major ways:
1.) Different safety and road standards. All of Europe, as well as many other countries have completely or partially adopted European road and rail safety standards. For example: in the United States if a passenger rail line shares track with freight trains the passenger cars are required to withstand collisions with heavy freight trains with a minimum of deformation. This makes everything heavy and unique. Emissions standards likewise mean that if you're still running diesel equipment that's all going to be very unique.
2.) We don't believe in social services in the United States. The NY MTA has to fund health care (via insurance) as well as pensions. TfL sure ain't subsidizing health insurance for its employees, although they may be funding a pension.
As it turns out the bigger your pool of risk, customers, whatever... the cheaper things get.
That's part of the reason why the cost of an employee is so much higher than the salary, and it's one of the costs you save by having nominally independent contractors instead of employees.
TfL does have good planning, though, and is largely able to fix things before they grow too expensive.
Right, but TfL is paying into a system that every working Briton pays into. What the New York MTA pays into (mostly) is a scheme that benefits a much smaller group.
Similarly with Racist Sheriffs and problems with local police forces happen the Home Secretary can sack the senior police officer in charge.
If the subway service in, say, London or Tokyo or Paris became as bad as some of the systems in the US, it would be a major political scandal and the people running the city would fear for their jobs. That doesn't happen in the US, even in places like New York where a majority of commuters use public transit regularly.
Punish them how? Here in America (and especially New York) we have a "two-party" system that works arm in arm to steal as much money as possible to line their own pockets. Voting for a different party doesn't mean getting a different policy - it simply means that patronage money is going into the pocket of different politically connected cronies.
I think the difference in the US is much more fundamental, pluralism is baked in to the culture in a way that is pretty unique anywhere in the world, so people have very strong reactions to members of other tribes seeking authority over them. This has gotten very explicit recently, but the dynamic was always there.
All of these things remain exactly the same no matter how much people cry about Trump, or wear pussy hats, or scream about 54 different genders or how "white supremacy" is the problem. All of these substantive policies would have been identical (and run by many of the same people) had Hillary won the election. In reality, the .00001% of the people who own this country and both corporate parties are laughing at all those people while they continue to rape the people and steal our freedoms.
If the MTA were simply a city agency for which the mayor was directly responsible, it would be possible to channel voter anger (and there's plenty of voter anger, by the way) into action. But it's the governor who really has the most control, and he's responsible to a wide swath of voters outside the New York City region (who tend to want less spent on the MTA in any case). Plus many voters don't really understand how the MTA is structured, and elected officials can hide behind this independent-agency arrangement.
I remember reading here a few years ago that one example of this is how writing the proposals for big projects for which construction companies than put offers have to be outsourced because all experts have been fired by the government. This apparently frequently leads to the government getting a much worse deal than anybody else would. I think another thing that happens is that do much oversight gets added that all costs explode. You can't iterate on anything because if the first version isn't perfect it surely was a waste of tax payer money when you need to go back for the next iteration. So you better have several committees and a long proposal process to make sure everything is perfect and no money gets wasted. Great example is the TSA iPad app for random screening selection that was a big topic a few years ago. The app randomly showed a left or right arrow and and cost millions to make if I recall correctly. I think the government being inefficient is somewhat of a self fulfilling prophecy.
As for why, that's a much harder question...
What are the feedback loops involved? Are there consequences for poor performance? Are they the same? How often is feedback measured? Do the reward/punishment systems reflect the goals of the people paying for the org to operate?
I'm not going to go down the rabbit hole here. Instead I leave it to the reader. It's not rocket science to figure out. I've worked in and around government bodies of all sizes (including some that I considered very well run) and the bad ones are all bad for most of the same few reasons.
I wonder why?
Oh and I should mention large seemingly-private orgs that win all contracts, especially that are highly unionized without competition, are essentially government orgs and suffer the same issues.
It always surprised me how few employees there are in busy NY stations. Those that I see always seem busy and exhausted.
In Montreal, there were some newspaper articles about how a few bus/metro drivers make $100k/year by doing a lot of overtime, blaming unions. However, this was an intentional policy from management who consider it more cost-effective to encourage staff to do more overtime, rather than hire more people (who may not have a full workload).
You can see it right now in the current tax bill. There is plenty of discussion about what will happen to whose tax rates, but almost none about what services, including infrastructure, will be cut if revenue is reduced. For one party, revenue reduction is, ipso facto, a good thing.
And to even more strongly contrast the current mindset with reality, there is almost no discussion about what government can do to help its citizens except for security.
If you're going to blame Republicans, you should probably make sure there are enough to make a difference..
0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City_Council
1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_State_Assembly
2 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Governors_of_New_York
First, the question the GP addresses is about the U.S. in general, not NY subways:
> I don’t understand why American governments are so bad at providing public services.
Second, the GP discussed problems in the voting public and in both parties, while putting a preponderance of the responsibility on one party - a conclusion that seems hard to escape. The Democrats aren't radically cutting revenue and spending everywhere they are in office.
Finally, the NYC subway is operated by the state, not he city, and I believe it is funded in large part by state. Much infrastructure funding also comes from the federal government.
I think also looking at it simply as a party problem hurts things, because there can be a lot of difference within the party, but people tend to overlook these things (and again, not just in terms of the amount of money that's spent, but also in terms of how it's spent).
The GP comment didn't describe it simply as a party problem; it put some accountability on both parties, and blamed the voters and everyone else participating in public discourse.
But sure, one party has made it a policy to cut spending, including on infrastructure. While the parent might be right that there are a lot of differences within the GOP, those differences aren't meaningful because they result in no differences in votes, laws, or public debate. They vote in lockstep and almost always speak in lockstep.
Meanwhile every individual (politician or voter or working poor) acts in an individually rational way, furthering the problem.
[1]: https://www.census.gov/population/socdemo/voting/SB91-23.pdf
[2]: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2649215
So while this would be a plausible argument outside NYC, it’s a ridiculous one given the parent article.
This doesn’t really work in New York City, where most people are exposed to the subway directly or through the crowding of our shitty roads.