Infrastructure in the U.S. is broken in terms of how it is supposed to be delivered these days. The unfortunate side effect of the freeway revolts of the 1960s putting a nail in grade separated vehicular right of ways in urban areas is that these same legal arguments and protections are now leveled against grade separated transit ways in urban areas by moneyed groups that argue in bad faith. Transit agencies now spend time planning and developing alternative options that are suboptimal, knowing full well 5/6 of these will be wasted efforts and only one will be chosen, just to give these busybodies some semblance of control of large scale engineering projects they aren't qualified to understand.

You should read up all of the drama surrounding the purple line and the eventual sepulveda transit line in la. The issue: subway tunnel boring under a rich neighborhood. Fireworks ensue along with broken understandings of physics and geology but in the end, people used nonscientific arguments to delay the purple line extension in LA for 20 years (1), and are trying to use these arguments to kill a subway line (2) that would bore under a mountain and in no way shape or form affect the complaining rich Bel Air community above it. Somehow you don't hear a peep from the people in the hollywood hills living above the redline subway tunnel, nor see any affect on their property values from having a train move several hundred feet below the parcel offered for sale. Everything takes more money and a lot more time than it should to do anything at all, compared in years previous when people would generally see infrastructure and progress as a good thing.

1. https://www.lamag.com/driver/beverly-hills-finally-loses-cra... 2. https://www.curbed.com/2022/02/bel-air-subway-tunnel-los-ang...

Crossrail involved tunneling under some of the most expensive property in the world, while passing within inches of existing underground tunnels. There are several fascinating documentaries.

Do you remember where to find those documentaries?

Sadly it's no longer on iPlayer in the UK but if you use a bit of search wizardry I'm sure you could find it. The 15 Billon Pound Railway https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b04b7h1w

This is only part of the problem, though it is a factor. See https://transitcosts.com/overview/ (which won't be online for a few more weeks - I was able to read a couple pages a few weeks ago before they took it offline, and it looks very detailed)

Most Transport Agencies are basically just high way construction offices. That is basically why they were created, or at least when state level DoT became massive, to construct highway.

They can build an mind glowingly insane 7 level loop clover with integrated rocket launcher and helipad but they couldn't design a safe and efficient pedestrian crossing if it smacked them in the face.

They are still planning new highways right threw actual real existing cities as if they were Robert Moses. Its literal insanity.

In my collection of things I have a NYC Subway Map* from 2017. This one is special because it was commemorating the "opening of the second avenue subway". At the bottom corner in big fat font is the signature of then Governor Andrew Cuomo. For those unaware, the second avenue subway has been planned since the 1930s. In 2017 they opened phase 1, which consisted of 3 new stations stretching from 63rd St to 96th St. Maybe sometime this century phase 2 and 3 will open. I for one am not optimistic.

Its not for lack of investment that this project has been delayed over 100 years. Plenty of money has gone down that pit. There is a cost disease afflicting infrastructure in the US (and health care, and education).

*technically what I have is a transit diagram, not a map. The difference being it abstracts away the geography and angularizes all the lines.

When the US needs to build infrastructure, they can build it incredibly fast. The replacement I-35 bridge [34] and the fix to the Oroville Dam Spillway [6] are examples.

Usually it gets tied up in years or decades of various fights like the St Croix Crossing which required federal action: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._Croix_Crossing

[34] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I-35W_Saint_Anthony_Falls_Brid...

[6] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ekUROM87vTA

To clarify, when I say "investments", I mean the number of distinct improvements, not $ spent.

I'm a big transit nerd and it's very disappointing. As what should be table stakes, there is no realistic plan to get to 100% accessibility in NYC.

The ADA messed up by not specifying allowed existing buildings have to have a 30 year plan in place to become accessible, with a requirement that if they put this off they place into escrow that years part. (I'm not sure how to write this, but essentially either upgrade 1/30 of your buildings each year, or place in third partt escrow that money). If you own a building you need to do a major remodel every 30 years anyway just to keep it safe and in good shape so for landlords keeping their property up this isn't really much different than what they would do anyway)

I mean, there are definitely stations that the MTA has not rehabbed in the last 30 years. There’s also no realistic plan to renovate every station either. (And they do need it, many stations have water damage and the like)

I imagine that could only happen in a few areas of the East Coast, and maybe one on the West Coast. There aren't many regions of the US with density comparable to the UK (FWIW, UK is smaller than Oregon and has 16x the number of people).

Aren’t there a couple dozen countries in the world with high speed rail? How do we compare to Spain?

Let me save you some time Because we’ve been over this 1000 times… There are plenty of places in the United States with similar population densities as Spain, for example

The US from the east coast to a bit west of the Mississippi, and the west coast are plenty dense. The plains, Rocky mountains, and Alaska really bring down our population density, but if you take those large areas with few people away we have plenty or density.