Most airports, most of the interstate highway network, most subway systems, bridges, tunnels, and dams were built from the 1930s and on to the 1970s. The railroads are even older.
And after that; Silence. It's like you didn't even care to maintain it.
First time I arrived in America, I was taken aback by how old and run down everything was. The only places in Europe I had seen worse roads were in Eastern Europe shortly after the fall of the Wall. In the middle of Manhattan some streets were in a state that in Europe you would only witness in the Balkans or in rural areas. The airports and the link from airports to the city were even worse. The subways didn't even have info tables saying when the next train would arrive. At the same time in Europe, many cities were switching to driver-less trains.
Clearly, the US could afford to expand and maintain the infrastructure. And the US is usually on the forefront of technology. So it's about priority, more than ability. Public infrastructure is just not prioritized that much in the US.
Not all infrastructure consists of roads, bridges, and tunnels.
I agree with the parent poster that infrastructure like roads, drainage systems, and passenger trains are built with minimal planning for maintenance and support, but it is worth remembering that those systems aren't the end of the story.
Train usage in particular is a misleading complaint. It's true that the US has worse passenger train support than many nations, but that largely comes down to a sensible cost-benefit choice. The US isn't especially well-suited to train travel - lots of obstacles, diffuse populations that require branching tracks or non-train final steps, long distance travel that requires sleeper cars. So instead, we have an exceptionally large amount of freightage on trains. It's a vastly more natural use - scheduled, hub-to-hub transit, bulky products, no need for food/sleep provisioning - but it's less visible so it disappears from the conversation.
You are right that the US has lower population density than most of Europe, but Canada doesn't and it doesn't have the same lack of infrastructure maintenance as the US.
Population maps of the US [1] and Canada [2] highlight the problem with this argument, though. Canada has low total density, but it's overwhelmingly concentrated around the southern border of the country. The US concentrates population along three coastlines and the Great Lakes, and has more population to support in the low-concentration areas. (For example, Salt Lake City and Las Vegas exist.)
So southern Canada has better-than-US infrastructure at higher-than-US population density, while much of northern Canada has exceedingly limited infrastructure. Outside of Alaska, there's no territory in the US comparably written-off to much of Nunavut and the Northwest Territories.
An example: US highways are nationwide [3], while Canadian highways simply stop [4]. And despite the look of that projection, that's more than a quarter of Canada which is further from a highway than any point in the continental US.
[1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/21/US_popul...
[2] http://www12.statcan.gc.ca/census-recensement/2006/as-sa/97-...
[3] https://www.mapsofworld.com/usa/usa-maps/usa-road-map.jpg
So - on a state by state / province by province basis, Americans live more close together than Canadians and should have better opportunity for maintaining infrastructure.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_by_populat...
And just like Canadians tend to cram together close to the coasts and the Great Lakes, Americans also cram together close to the Great Lakes and their coasts. Go 50 miles inland from either coast, and it's vastly less populated than near the coast, with the rivers as an exception. Take a drive from Buffalo to NYC, and you'll see that it's populated near Buffalo (Great lakes), somewhat near Albany (Hudson river) and again once you get near NYC (East Coast). The rest of NY State is rural.
Take a look at this map of US population density by county: http://i.imgur.com/hY8tpOn.jpg
30% of Canadians live in Ontario. About half of Ontarians live in the Toronto metro area alone. Overall about half the population lives in the top ten metro areas.
http://www12.statcan.ca/census-recensement/2006/as-sa/97-550...
A single rail line from Quebec City to Winnipeg, through Ottowa, Toronto, and Calgary, with a spur to Edmonton, would cover all eleven of Canada's largest cities, with 30% of its whole population. That's within those municipalities (i.e., people can take local transit to the inter-city rail line). You cannot draw any similar line that encompasses anywhere near that percentage of the U.S. population. Even if you connected America's 11 largest cities, you'd only have about 26 million people (about 8% of the country).
A big reason is that most people who live "in Dallas," for example, don't actually live in the city. Dallas and Ottawa are similar-sized cities of about a million people each. But Ottawa encompasses 70% of its metro area, while Dallas encompasses less than 20% of its metro area. Look at a satellite map of each city. Dallas is sprawl for about 40 miles in each direction from the city center. 40 miles from Ottawa is nothing in every direction (and for the most part, so is 20 miles).
The obvious question is how many infrastructure hubs (cell towers, train stations, highways, etc.) are needed to cover X% of the population. And following that, how closely connected those hubs would be.
Suggestions like "Canadians live near the border, but Americans live near the coast so it's similar" completely ignore that reality. The Acela corridor (D.C. to Boston, including Philadelphia and NYC) is the most efficient population-coverage route I know of in the country, but it can't possibly touch the efficiency of that Quebec City to Winnipeg line. Among other things, America has two coasts, and also vastly less urban density than Canada.
I can't speak for the latter, but we took the Canadian from Vancouver-Winnipeg for a family reunion a few years back. It was a great trip, except for the 6h delay sitting just outside Winnipeg due to backed up freight traffic (I believe VIA leases access to most of the track, and has to yield to any freight trains) that meant we were getting off the train and had to find a hotel at midnight, instead of getting picked up by family at a reasonable hour.
I'm saying that the raw number isn't meaningful, and you have to zoom in to find value and evaluate it in context.
The point is that Europe did all that and more.
By the looks of it Europe just does public infrastructure better.
But to your point, I would argue that US achievements on the internet and cell networks are more impressive than Europe's because unlike Europeans Americans invented those technologies from scratch. And other than Russia, the US is the only country with a GPS infrastructure at all.
I don't dispute the claim that European nations and the EU have generally done a better job investing in public infrastructure, but I think the gap isn't as bad as some in this thread have made out, especially when you consider the vastly different conditions under which those policies were made. I've lived in a lot of countries, including the US and two European nations, and I've worked in project finance, so I have some direct experience with this. That said, the US desperately needs to invest in bridges and several other categories of infrastructure.
Wrong; there are three operational global navigation satellite systems: GPS (US), GLONASS (Russia), and Galileo (EU). China has a regional (Asia-Pacific) system that they are in the process of upgrading to global coverage, as well.
Trucks are another thing entirely, and I'd be delighted for them to be both taxed at a higher rate for road wear & tear, and to be somehow limited. But that's road design, and that's not going to be solved for a long time.
"Abuse" is the right word. Perhaps it's worth rethinking how much of this abuse we allow. Giant trucks parading through Manhattan at will, tearing up the pavement, endangering cyclists and pedestrians, and generally lowering quality of life for residents is a policy choice, not some natural and unchangeable fact about the world.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congestion_pricing_in_New_York...
I'd actually just settle for enforcement of existing law. 53' trucks are illegal in NYC, as is driving a truck down a street that is not a truck route. The NYPD could generate a lot of income if they simply enforce the laws on the books. You constantly see 53' trucks driving around (they even literally say "53'" on the side) and no one cares... until they make a turn and get stuck and block up traffic for a mile.
Note I havent been to the south of Rome
I'm not sure the overall comparison here holds, but this is overwhelmingly true. America has made a huge amount of funding available for new infrastructure, while constantly underbudgeting (and underspending) on maintenance. The result is a steadily growing liability that would render most suburbs and many cities insolvent if depreciation were honestly accounted for. [1]
The founder of Strong Towns was in fact a civil engineer who started the group in a fit of remorse over doing exactly that. [2] Hired to repair a suburban drainage system, he realized that the maintenance was too expensive for the town to pay, and federal grants were unavailable for small-scale maintenance. So instead he found a massive grant (9x the maintenance cost) to expand and modernize the system. It covered costs, but set up a needlessly large system with vastly more costs to cover down the road.
This is basically how all urban and transit infrastructure gets done here. Partly for cultural reasons, but largely for financial ones: you can't get emergency funding for new construction, but if you spend maintenance money on upgrades and expansions, then you can go begging for emergency repair funds on what you've built. [3]
[1] https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2017/1/9/the-real-reason...
[2] http://time.com/3031079/suburbs-will-die-sprawl/
[3] https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2017/6/4/this-is-why-inf...
The Houston airport is nice — a lot of work done in the 1990s and a lot of renovation done recently funded by United Airlines. SFO is nice too. CDG in Paris is a shithole airport compared to Frankfurt and SFO and Houston. Heathrow seems pretty nice, at least Terminal 2 but they don’t compare to Seoul Incheon airport.
My point is that generalized statements about the American infrastructure aren’t generally fair since the US isn’t a monolithic organization — things vary widely due to local history. Heavily union places like NY and NJ generally have far worse infrastructure than places that aren’t so influenced by corrupt union “machine” politics. When labor bosses and the mafia have material control of infrastructure politics, you are going to have sluggish development. Another problem in New York is that’s you have seemingly dozens of agencies all stepping on each other: you have the City, the Port Authority, the states of NJ and New York, individual boroughs, multiple unions and then the Feds on top of that — and everyone in that chain has to get paid. It’s a mess.
Aside from that, Democratic party machine politics are starting to get dismantled by a wave of pissed-off progressive and tech-savvy millennials who are realizing the biggest hurdle to progress is coming from the Democratic party... Millennials have been abandoned by all the major institutions (unions, government agencies, religions, etc) so they shouldn't be surprised that we're coming for them on both sides of the aisle.
Very true, but I'd say when talking about roads, that goes for the state level in places like Texas and even down to the metropolitan level. Where I live, there are 75 mph high quality privately-managed roads close to terrible ones.
Most people may not realize what they are missing, as a result of their local/state being crippled by incompotent public management or all powerful unions, as they don't know anything different.
Not surprised to hear that it's not the case everywhere in the more decentralized US. Competence and good laws are possible. Especially when it's in a lower tax state like Texas which shows its not merely a result of lack of access to money.
Power cuts? This comment can not be taken seriously. Power cuts in the US are quite exceptional and generally concern circumstance such natural disasters or a severe heat wave. An "incredible number"? Yeah right.
https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=27892
I've experienced quite a number when I've been there, and it's possible that I've been very unlucky.
My office has more frequent outages, but that's due to heavy construction in the area (shouldn't happen, but it does, I guess).
All people want is lower taxes.
From what I have read, the particular issue around public transit surrounds cultural trends around city population. The middle class left cities in droves after WW2, leaving city budgets starved (I believe the MTA's ridership peaked shortly after WW2 as well). A half century of neglect can do a lot of damage to infrastructure.
Additionally, public investment in infrastructure is not expedient for politicians with a focus on the short term. Investment in the MTA could take years to reap benefits--and most riders will just remember whomever pushed that investment as the individual who closed down the L train for a year. A long term focus makes no sense whenever you just want to get elected for the next term.
Americans are YOLO. Part of me is in awe, there are rules against increasing the deficit and politicians are just wiping their ass with it.
Other countries where you see better infrastructure it’s because the national government has the power to drive the project forward (at least at the time).
Oh, and except for the perception that the USA is very leftist. Really, from a European point of view, it's quite the reverse.
Now if you look at large infrastructure projects, they are much more expensive, and proceed at a glacial pace.
Except in China, of course.
I am not trying to tell that France does better than other countries, I think it's not even close. It is just that I know it best.
I think we tend to take everything that works for granted and forget about the difficulties in the past, only talking about present issues. Maybe the convenient road you are using every day didn't exist 20 years ago, maybe it was delayed several years and went way overbudget, but now, you feel like it has always been here, only paying attention when there is a problem.
Before, someone drew a line on a map, and that was that. Any problems had to be dealt with downstream.
It's impressive what China builds - they were decades behind but times changed. A huge parts of Shanghai city were rice field until 1990. Most skyscrappers were build since 2005. And now Shanghai has probably more skyscrappers than any other city in the world. Impressive also the amount of 2 or 3 story highways and the high speed trains.
This is complete nonsense.
https://comptroller.nyc.gov/reports/the-human-cost-of-subway...
Any survey of New Yorkers and government services will tell you how much this matters.
The biggest problem is that the New York government at city and state levels is one of the most corrupt, oligarchic and undemocratic organizations in modern society. I cannot begin to describe how broken it is.
Here's a good example: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/18/nyregion/new-york-politic...
This leaves us with no levers of power over government decisions. When you take into account that the people who most heavily depend on the subway are also the poorest, we have even less power over the elected and appointed government class.
We could have voted to reform the constitution and then stayed engaged enough to pick independent delegates instead of the same old insiders catering to special interests. But we collectively let the insiders and special interests talk us out of our once in twenty years opportunity to fix this nightmare.
With the ridiculous court decisions that have been made, the governor has unlimited, nearly unchecked power via the budget process. If you are happy or unhappy with anything, credit/blame needs to be directed at whomever the governor is from Spitzer forward.
For some reason I still don't quite understand, labor unions were viciously opposed to it, supposedly because they were afraid of losing their pensions.
That's the excuse they gave, but the real reason is simple. Labor unions already wield disproportionately massive power over the legislature in NY. Any attempt to reform NY government and hold elected officials more accountable to voters would inherently weaken some of their power, by comparison.
Labor unions don't want voters to have power for the same reason elected officials don't.
They actively spread misinformation, among other things telling people that the convention would have the power to adopt amendments. Any amendment would still have to go to a direct referendum anyway, so it's not like voters wouldn't have to explicitly approve the amendments. This referendum was about starting the process - arguing against it because lobbyists might propose something bad makes no sense, unless you also forbid the legislature from proposing constitutional amendments too.
And that's why "corporate interests and lobbyists" wouldn't use this process to propose amendments benefiting their own interests, because they already have the ability to do that, through the legislature. The point of the referendum is to balance this - every twenty years, voters are supposed to have an opportunity to check thr power of lobbyists and legislators directly. Since New York doesn't do ballot initiatives the way other states do, it's the only way for New Yorkers to vote directly on statewide policy like this.
In fact, this was literally the argument they used. "Why should we pay millions of dollars for a convention, when we already have a process for amending the constitution?" Of course, this argument conveniently omits the fact that the whole reason this referendum is required to be held every twenty years is to serve as a check against special interest groups capturing legislators... which is exactly what they've already done!
Given that Citizens United is a thing and that Bob Menendez somehow wasn't convicted in a pretty cut-and-dry bribery case, I don't think I want a constitutional amendment any time soon.
Why can't people vote for the candidate of a different party? It doesn't have to be Republican. Why isn't there a "Fix the Subway" single-issue party running candidates that people can vote for?
The internal machinations of political party membership are only relevant if voters no longer have a de-facto choice on election day.
The MTA is a public authority controlled by the governor. Control was kept away from the city due to the city’s fiscal and corruption problems and the machinations of Robert Moses. The subway and busses were ultimately bailed out by the bridges and tunnels, which print money.
Public authorities are quasi-government entities controlled by the the bond covenants. You have to line-up the interests of the bond holders with whomever controls the authority and is desiring change.
With something as broad in scope and rich as MTA is such a deep well of political capital, it's incredibly unlikely that anyone would give up any control. It's such a large enterprise there probably isn't one roomful of people who actually understand how the organization works. The current situation was created when the whole NYC transit system was completely insolvent back in the bad old days!
Read "The Power Broker" by Robert Caro. It will open your eyes to why things are the way they are.
In New York, thars not the problem. The problem is that a combination of different election laws make it basically impossible to win a primary without the backing of the party leadership itself.
So, primaries in New York are meaningless; there's basically no way to unseat a candidate who's supported by the party, no matter how much they're despised.
^ Bloomberg flipped around parties for convenience of elections. In regards to this topic he would be on the conservative side given that he was constantly butting heads with the transit unions.
I'm not sure I understand this. Yes, the hand-picked successor will be able to fulfill the rest of the term, but then he's up for re-election. If people were actually outraged about this, they could vote him out the next time there's an election (just like they could have voted out the predecessor that set this process in motion). If people were really upset about corruption, they could have voted Cuomo out for killing the anti-corruption panel when it started to look in to corruption connected to him (IIRC, this happened just a few months before the 2014 primary).
It's hard for me to believe that these things really bother people when they keep voting back in the people who are doing them.
I don't know what kinds of offices are the issue wrt the MTA, but generally I have the impression that the USA could be better off with some elected offices less: an elected position is inherently unstable as far as careers go, so they appeal most to people with a bit of a gambling mindset. This is unavoidable in the highest ranks ("...worst form of government except all the others that have been tried"), but in the lower, less visible ranks where the corrective qualities elections are supposed to have apparently do not work very well, "low balling" bureaucrats might, on average, be the lesser evil.
However, even if there was widespread agreement over this (I suspect that it is quite a minority opinion), I don't see much of a migration path because a migration from elected to conventionally hired public servants would be beyond pointless if the new guys inherit all the broken culture from their elected predecessors.
I doubt it, mostly because when good candidates run you still see pretty low turnout and the good candidates often lose (and with downballot races, even the few people who bothered to vote have a hard time remembering who they voted for, let alone why). And this kind of apathy is everywhere; it's not uncommon to see some nationally famous political writers who are extremely ignorant about major local elections and don't even seem to care about them. And when it leads to bad outcomes, many people see that as an excuse for even more apathy: "See? We don't have a choice, this is an oligarchy, it's impossible to change things by voting, why bother."
I think you have a decent point about fewer elected offices, but it's hard to make a blanket statement because it's very situational since elected offices vary a lot by state. The political parties themselves could also benefit from fewer elected officials, for what it's worth.
I mean do you also find it hard to believe that people are bothered by Trump? After all, "they" just elected him.
So in 2014, after a fairly serious issue involving Cuomo getting rid of an anti-corruption panel because it was investigating corruption connected to him, only 4% of registered Democrats - four percent! - bothered to show up and vote for someone other than him in the primaries. And this was for governor! Almost 90% of registered Democrats didn't vote at all - they didn't care one way or the other who would be governor. Down ballot races usually get even less attention.
Naturally, I'm not saying that there isn't anyone who cares and acts accordingly. But what I am saying is that the amount of people who care and act accordingly are a minority, and in many cases, a very small minority.
[1] http://www.elections.ny.gov/NYSBOE/elections/2014/Primary/20... [2] https://nypost.com/2016/04/06/ny-voter-registration-barely-i...
New York has low turnout because it has a set of laws that serve to disenfranchise voters in ways that other states could only ever dream of. (Yes, people technically have the right to vote, but because of a set of laws which I've described elsewhere, there's no way for them to use these votes to hold their elected officials accountable, like there is in other states).
Once every decade or so, yes, there's a race that's moderately contested (like the one you describe). But at that point, people aren't in the habit of voting anyway.
By the way, in your example the only reason Teachout ran as a Democrat instead of on the Working Families Party as she'd planned is because of these laws. The Working Families Party was pressured into endorsing Cuomo as their candidate, to ensure that they'd retain their ballot access. Teachout was angry enough that she decided to run as a Democrat, knowing full well that she'd lose, because nobody in New York ever wins a primary without the backing of the major party[0].
Teachout is far and away an exception, not the rule. Even then, her run was purely symbolic, and she herself knew it.
[0] Again, due to a whole bunch of laws that give the party incredible influence in shaping the outcome of primaries.
The only laws I've seen you describe elsewhere in this thread is the delay in New York if you want to switch parties (was 6 months in 2016, now I believe it's up to ~11 months) and the fusion voting system. Neither of these prevents Democrats from voting in the Democratic primary, so I'm not sure which ones your talking about.
I'm not sure why you think contested races only happen once a decade. The year before the gubernatorial race, there was, (for example) a pretty well contested NYC mayoral race and NYC comptroller race. There have been plenty of contested races in the NY senate, (some connected to the IDC drama, like Tony Avella beating John Liu 6,813 to 6,245 with ~13% turnout) as well as the assembly and downballot races.
Not if they run unopposed in both the primary and general election.
New York election law is incredibly arcane and structurally makes it almost impossible to win a primary without the backing of the party, and the two parties have an agreement not to compete seriously in each other's districts. It's like how Comcast and Time Warner Cable divide up turf, so they don't ever really have to compete for the same customers.
Can you give an example of these election laws? I see you mentioned a delay in switching parties elsewhere in the thread, but I don’t see how that makes it impossible for a candidate to win a primary without party backing.
“Vacancies are filled differently across the country. In 25 states, replacement legislators are simply chosen by appointment, either by the governor (11 states) or some combination of party and local officials (14 states), according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. Varying rules govern the 25 states that hold special elections, but few bestow more influence on local power brokers than New York does.”
So, in 25 states the power to hand off succession is as or more concentrated. This would seem to put NYs succession regulations right square in the middle of the pack.
Want to switch your party registration? Go ahead and do it today - it won't take effect until 2019. Yes, you read that right. This deadline for change of party registration is an order of magnitude larger than the next largest state. New York also uses fusion voting to weaken third parties - they only have any influence whatsoever if they endorse the major party candidates, which prevents any real competition with the major party candidates. (See how Cuomo created the fake "Women's Equality Party" during the last election cycle specifically in an attempt to strip the Working Families Party of its ballot status).
There are a whole range of these laws, and if I were to go into all of them, I'd exceed the maximum length for a HN comment ten times over,. The end result is that New York is, objective, the most corrupt state in the country[0], and the system is also perfectly stable (in the literal sense) - there is no way, short of a federal court case, that any of these laws will ever meaningfully change.
[0] http://www.politifact.com/new-york/statements/2016/sep/19/el...
I live in a particularly stagnant political subdivision, but I’d say in the last 20 general elections, there have been maybe 3 that had something more than nominal opponents. Usually it’s for things like county coroner. They are more affirmation than election.
Did you read the article? The problems began in the 1995 under Governor George Patakis administration. Cuomo has only been in office for 6 years.
TBF NYC does have the exceptional — almost unique — feature that it runs 24/7.
Night Tube (the centre parts of the London Underground running continuously from early Friday to the middle of the night on Sunday) is mostly about re-arranging maintenance and cleaning programmes to avoid Friday and Saturday night closures. They hired a bunch more staff, but there's no infrastructure fix, so still nothing like New York.
But quoting from memory, could well be mistaken.
Politicians should be pushing for serious procurement and labor work rule reforms, otherwise the systemic managerial and operational deficiencies will ensure that the deterioration of service we see now will repeat it self in 5 to 10 years, regardless of how much money or technology is poured into the MTA.
London and Toronto have been able to modernize much of their transit systems in last 5 years and its not because they have more money. Once you fix the top everything else will fall into place.
Look what Andy Byford has been able to do in 4 short years at the TTC. His 5-Year Plan to modernize the TTC focused on transforming corporate culture and updating internal processes, in addition to new equipment. The results of these changes have been overwhelmingly positive with the TTC recently being named best public transit agency in North America and The TR Class of TTC subway cars in May having a MDBF of over 924,000 miles.
If your interested in getting involved with transit activism in NYC I highly suggest you follow @2AvSagas on twitter.