This is a very good point. I suspect that because decision making is very local, they have functioning feedback loops: so you decided to spend too much money on a new fire truck? Well now you can't pay for the sports field renovations. People eventually learn.

Outside of taxes, it is also a matter of political choices

The Swiss took the decision to develop the train as a first transport choice nationally... Even trucks transiting through Switzerland are loaded on trains.

And the result is there: They have a good network with a good service that unify the country.

That a strategy totally at the opposite of what USA and many European countries chose to do in the 90's: Close as many small train lines as possible and develop road transport.

The US build ever bigger highways (I recall a summit at Stanford on clean energy in 2014 where some guy from McKinsey claimed that the solution to all problems is to increase highway throughout by having self driving cars closer to each other - never would it have occurred to him or anyone on the panel to replace cars with a train or bus) and Germany somehow tries to deal with their bad infrastructure choices after deciding to be car centric in favor of their car industry for many years.

Edit: fun little note: I actually wanted to ask the McKinsey guy what his take on public transportation was, but wasn’t chosen for the q&a since I was sitting in the very back after I arrived late due to some issue on the Caltrain.

The version I read for Germany was that when the mobile broadband spectrum was originally auctioned off, the purchase price for the spectrum was too high. So the pensioners and other investors who bought in demanded a juicy return on investment despite overpaying, resulting in high prices and presumably less money for investments in the network.

For the fixed line broadband network in Germany, its quite substandard despite the country being generally good at infrastructure. The reason can be traced back to corruption, where a decision was made to rollout copper backbone instead of fiber optic, which was the original decision. Article in German but copy and paste with Google translate:

https://www.wiwo.de/politik/deutschland/langsames-internet-i...

The auction could have easily been fixed, by imposing and enforcing strict rules on maximum prices, minimum coverage and mandating in-country roaming. After all the frequencies should benefit the whole public. With such rules the outcome would have been a much better network, allowing for growth in other regions.

The article you've shared is very interesting, would be helpful if more Germans were informed about this.