> Unlike infrastructure projects in Britain or America, which are heavily reliant on external consultants to handle all stages of the project, this group of well-paid in-house engineers led much of the Madrid Metro expansion. The team stayed largely the same throughout the different projects, meaning that they were able to learn from their experience and apply it to future projects.
Imagine that: building expertise in-house and within the governmental org results in better planning and management and thus outcomes.
Metro doesn't use PPP or directly public in any Indian city I can think of, they setup SPVs and actually have stable engineering and finance teams across contracts. And most of the engineers are taken from railways only in any case. And it's a really good promotion path, ministers are known to select successful metro spv administrators for lucrative roles in the state secretariat. So the talent problem is not there.
The reason for delays are more boring: land acquisition, coordination among nhai, state pwd, railways, utilities, etc etc. But overwhelmingly land acquisition is the main bottleneck. After you resolve that, flyovers and roads are simultaneously being constructed in most cities since they are all expanding so you have to coordinate with that. And india from pre-independence has utilities placed under the middle of the road, as opposed to the sides of the road. Now this is not an iron clad rule (nothing is, in india) but it's generally true. This means that you also have to coordinate with utilities. And most of them were laid in the last century without any record left of where they were laid, so you can't even plan ahead you dig and you find out you've slashed a utility line. Each coordination point above is an NOC and all put together it takes time.
Meanwhile, bay area has companies with market cap of 30T (50T?), has nonexistent/incompatible and the slowest public transit.
1) BART 'works' for a subset of the population.
2) ACE train is one route only, from Stockton to San Jose.
3) Caltrain is one straight line. Caltrain has a bullet train that takes an hour for ~20-30 miles.
4) There is a ferry service for some parts of north bay.
There are probably dozens of other bus systems and ferries and what not, all incompatible and disconnected.
When people from bay area (and the big tech companies) tell you they are the greatest minds on the planet solving (or going to solve) world problems, look at their public transit and think. Then weep/laugh.
Source: I lived in the North bay, East bay and South bay.
It is difficult. I think the key is that Spain has a large corps of civil engineers working for the government. They plan all projects with great detail and then oversee their execution.
Agile regulations against NIMBYism and a world-class civil engineering industry with HQs in Madrid also help.
A good analogy is to ask what would need to be true for Madrid to replicate the AI hub in SF? Great VC, top engineers, certain risk-taking mentality, etc.
So, it's not easy. The environment that creates a fabric for radical innovation is quite different from a statist mentality, although hopefully, both are not mutually exclusive.
> I think the key is that Spain has a large corps of civil engineers working for the government.
I agree with this. In general jobs with the government are seen as high quality jobs from my understanding. Another commenter mentioned that the high salaries in the private sector in the US brain drain away from the US public sector. In Spain salaries are much lower, so this is perhaps less of an issue in certain fields.
The sibling comments explain the regulatory differences. But another factor is that competent engineers and executives have much lower opportunity costs to work for the government in Spain because private sector opportunities are far less lucrative than in the U.S.
An ironic downside of America’s leadership in tech and finance is that there is tremendous brain drain out of the public sector.
For many years, I observed the San Francisco Caltrain DTX (Downtown Extension, recently rebranded "The Portal"). This is the most important transit missing link in Northern California that is expected to connect two of the highest ridership transit arteries in the Bay Area and eventually unlock single-seat rail transit between Sacramento, San Francisco, San Jose, and points south. DTX is a two-mile tunnel planned to connect the rail line terminus south of San Francisco downtown to Market Street, where the BART subway has the 4 highest ridership train stations in Northern California. The combined project (DTX and Transbay Terminal, the already built train station it's supposed to connect to) is about 15 years late and many billions of dollars over budget.
What struck me is a complete lack of urgency and accountability, combined with out-of-control meddling by politicians pursuing completely unrelated goals. The project spent several years in EIR and initial planning, which is to be expected. Then for over a decade, San Francisco's board of supervisors held the project hostage because they wanted to demolish a freeway south of where the actual project is, while bolting on an unrelated and unrealistic tunneling project (the "Pennsylvania Avenue alignment") and taking over the governance of the Caltrain board (Caltrain is the least dysfunctional transit system in the Bay Area, so the Caltrain board was not too keen on this proposal). Eventually, after wasting many years and tens (hundreds?) of millions of dollars, the balance of power on the BoS shifted and they agreed to stop holding the project hostage, restructure the board (TJPA), and re-hire staff to actually plan the tunnel.
I've seen multiple project managers/directors come and go, and countless community input meetings happen discussing completely hypothetical project concepts. The money set aside for the project from the original Transbay budget is long gone, and numerous funding opportunities have passed by because the TJPA and its stakeholders were not ready to plan and submit a viable proposal in time.
Here are some things I would want to change going forward:
- Transit projects should be centrally planned by the state government (i.e. a regional subdivision of an agency similar to Caltrans) with structured opportunities for resident feedback and authority to override most input from local governments. This should include exemptions from CEQA and other review, and strong eminent domain powers.
- The Caltrans-like agency should have independent regional metro divisions (i.e. Bay Area, LA area, etc) with dedicated sources of regionally collected funding as well as a mandate to own and lease out land adjacent to transit stations as part of its funding. The divisions should have budgets to retain project management staff who accumulate long-term experience and manage multiple projects. They should have the independent authority to issue bonds and be required to publish construction efficiency and ridership statistics.
- Labor unions should be systematically prevented from influencing the course of planning, construction, and project execution. Unions meddle and cause many delays and project complications.
Unfortunately, even a structure like that is not a panacea. If you look at CHSRA, it actually has some of the features that I listed above. When CHSRA was first started, the planning process fell victim to meddling from state legislators (most famously the one who forced the route to go through Palmdale), followed by many wasted years fighting NIMBYs and doing useless planning. Ultimately, the only hope I see is to insulate the planners from political interference, set them up with independent funding, have one agency head who is responsible and accountable, and reduce the veto powers that California grants to citizens and governments.
- Figuring out NIMBY-ism. Anywhere you run a tunnel you're gonna have people suing you and stalling for decades. Less so if you use a tunnel bore machine, but cut and cover is pretty much a non-starter.
- Cost of labor is insanely high due to cost of housing. Short of jumping straight back into the 19th century, setting up temporary housing and bringing in guest laborers this is pretty much non-negotiable.
- Not a ton of expertise left in the country since there's 2 new subway tunnels a decade AFAIK.
- The grift has got to be worse here than in Spain. There if you get $40k in kickbacks that's a nice bonus, here that barely covers your rent for the year.
And then even if you bring the costs down, you have to figure out the taxation. Several billion per mile is the running rate and you may be able to bring that down but then you have ongoing costs. Muni's farebox recovery is only 1/4 of its budget so unless you're making existing lines redundant, there's new ongoing cost. Obviously the choices there will be to go into the pockets of the middle class or not do it at all.
> Cost of labor is insanely high due to cost of housing
This is not the reason. Labor is expensive even in parts of the US with low housing costs.
The real, simple reason is the US has a more prosperous economy where the average worker has more opportunity than their Spanish peers. Just look at unemployment rates. The US is at 4.3% right now compared to Spain's 10%. Even at the peak of the GFC the US barely had over 10% unemployment. In the meanwhile Spain has had over 10% employment almost the entire time the past four decades. Of course labor is cheap when that many people are jobless.
U-6 is 8.1%, but spain uses a pretty comparable base employment rate (u-3 equivalent), so fair cop that US unemployment is easily less than half.
Relevant: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol_effect - drives a lot of effects in the US where automation paradoxically makes non-automated industries insanely expensive (though not the whole story for certain niches e.g. healthcare and education)
I understand housing construction, but why would a NIMBY be against metro construction? Being close to a metro station means real estate prices skyrocket and that's what NIMBYs are after.
In metropolitan areas, people want to be close but not too close to train/metro stations or railroad/tunnels. 5-10 minute walk is ideal. Anything closer, people have vibration/noise and crowd/security concerns.
In US suburbs, a lot of people are going to drive even if they live next to a train station. So there’s no convenience or property value benefits. To them, they only see downsides.
A lot of the price difference between Europe and USA now are wages. US wages for construction workers in NYC or SF are 2 or 3 times that of Madrid. Lots of things are cheap just for this reason alone.
Yes, but that cuts in the other direction. In the U.S., skilled work like subway construction will provide employer-paid healthcare. U.S. employers pay $1.3 trillion a year in healthcare benefits. You have to account for that on top of the reported wages. So that makes U.S. workers even more expensive relative to workers in Europe, where healthcare will be paid from taxes on the wages paid to employees.
In 1968, Garrett Hardin wrote a paper called "The Tragedy of the Commons" [1]. Many people seem to think this term dates further back to Adam Smith or earlier it does not. Well, this became hugely influential in noeliberalism and was used as the justification for governments to sell off their assets in the 1980s and 1990s in particular, all based on this (flawed) idea that private industry was more efficient. This was the era of public-private "partnerships". What that really means was privatizing the profits and socializing the losses while guaranteeing profits.
Utilities were generally public prior to this. Now we have private equity buying up utilities because the profits are guaranteed [2]. While electricity prices are regulated, capex on infrastructure isn't so they can simply boost profits by "investing" in the network ie creating extra capacity for data centers to be sold electricity at sub-market rates.
Lots of expierments were done and empirical data analyzed on the tragedy of the commons and it never matched the theory. Ultimately, this resulted in Elinor Ostrom winning the 2009 Nobel Price for Economics for disproving it with empirical data. Yet people still quote it.
Look at the list of metro systems sorted by length [4]. They're almost all Chinese. The 4th largest is in Chengdu, which only opened in 2010. In 16 years it's now the 4th largest in the world.
Pretty much any argument you can use about how China is different will have a contradiction by counterexample. Difficult terran? Chongqing. Old cities? Beijing, Shanghai. City too large? Good one.
It's not any single factor that allows for this. It's managed at every single level. For example, China has standardized rolling stock to a handful of variants so you avoid an entire procurement process (and grift). The UK spends billions of pounds to build an otherwise completely unnecessary tunnel under the Chilterns to protect the views of something of the most expensive property in the country [5]. Not in China. Audits of the Second Avenue Subway showed a host of corruption such as so-called "ghost jobs" [6]. Beverly Hills and Santa Monica fought the LA Metro extending into their areas because it might bring in the poors.
Visited China recently and it's pretty astonishing what can be achieved if you just ignore the whiners, complainers, environmentalists, and local governments. NIMBYs? Get lost. Have unique local culture? Funny but no. There's a special kind of beetle living there? Tough shit. It's ugly? So is your face. Etc. This is how the West built its infrastructure back in the day - nobody consulted NIMBYs or the native Americans on railway construction - but now we're too good for this, and we reap the consequences.
I'm still on team democracy, and we'll see how long it takes before China regresses to the norm of dictatorships. Xi has already broken the term limits. Nothing suggests he won't slowly lose his grip on reality like most dictators. But for now China has its charms.
Rail lines in the US were not great examples of this. Many towns refused to grant right of way to the rail unless a stop was added which basically forced passengers to change trains. As a result, there’s were so many changes it took two to three days to get from say, Chicago to NYC when it should have taken no longer than a day
Imagine that: building expertise in-house and within the governmental org results in better planning and management and thus outcomes.
Or by govt orgs by contracting it out.
Both styles have resulted in massive delays so much so that it has become a meme that metro will be inaugurated 100yrs into the future
Maybe if Govt hired actual engineers like they do for railways then metros will be prioritised
The reason for delays are more boring: land acquisition, coordination among nhai, state pwd, railways, utilities, etc etc. But overwhelmingly land acquisition is the main bottleneck. After you resolve that, flyovers and roads are simultaneously being constructed in most cities since they are all expanding so you have to coordinate with that. And india from pre-independence has utilities placed under the middle of the road, as opposed to the sides of the road. Now this is not an iron clad rule (nothing is, in india) but it's generally true. This means that you also have to coordinate with utilities. And most of them were laid in the last century without any record left of where they were laid, so you can't even plan ahead you dig and you find out you've slashed a utility line. Each coordination point above is an NOC and all put together it takes time.
I guess this is what vibe coding in the real world looks like.
1) BART 'works' for a subset of the population.
2) ACE train is one route only, from Stockton to San Jose.
3) Caltrain is one straight line. Caltrain has a bullet train that takes an hour for ~20-30 miles.
4) There is a ferry service for some parts of north bay.
There are probably dozens of other bus systems and ferries and what not, all incompatible and disconnected.
When people from bay area (and the big tech companies) tell you they are the greatest minds on the planet solving (or going to solve) world problems, look at their public transit and think. Then weep/laugh.
Source: I lived in the North bay, East bay and South bay.
San Jose Didrion to SFO (4th and Townsend} is 48 miles highway distance.
You will not beat the bullet train during rush hour. It would like take you an hour and a half if lucky, probably closer to 2 hours driving
Thw CalTrain being “one line” makes perfect sense because it runs parallel to the Valley
No the system is not perfect, but it is still one of the best in the country, except for NYC and maybe Boston
Agile regulations against NIMBYism and a world-class civil engineering industry with HQs in Madrid also help.
A good analogy is to ask what would need to be true for Madrid to replicate the AI hub in SF? Great VC, top engineers, certain risk-taking mentality, etc.
So, it's not easy. The environment that creates a fabric for radical innovation is quite different from a statist mentality, although hopefully, both are not mutually exclusive.
I agree with this. In general jobs with the government are seen as high quality jobs from my understanding. Another commenter mentioned that the high salaries in the private sector in the US brain drain away from the US public sector. In Spain salaries are much lower, so this is perhaps less of an issue in certain fields.
An ironic downside of America’s leadership in tech and finance is that there is tremendous brain drain out of the public sector.
What struck me is a complete lack of urgency and accountability, combined with out-of-control meddling by politicians pursuing completely unrelated goals. The project spent several years in EIR and initial planning, which is to be expected. Then for over a decade, San Francisco's board of supervisors held the project hostage because they wanted to demolish a freeway south of where the actual project is, while bolting on an unrelated and unrealistic tunneling project (the "Pennsylvania Avenue alignment") and taking over the governance of the Caltrain board (Caltrain is the least dysfunctional transit system in the Bay Area, so the Caltrain board was not too keen on this proposal). Eventually, after wasting many years and tens (hundreds?) of millions of dollars, the balance of power on the BoS shifted and they agreed to stop holding the project hostage, restructure the board (TJPA), and re-hire staff to actually plan the tunnel.
I've seen multiple project managers/directors come and go, and countless community input meetings happen discussing completely hypothetical project concepts. The money set aside for the project from the original Transbay budget is long gone, and numerous funding opportunities have passed by because the TJPA and its stakeholders were not ready to plan and submit a viable proposal in time.
Here are some things I would want to change going forward:
- Transit projects should be centrally planned by the state government (i.e. a regional subdivision of an agency similar to Caltrans) with structured opportunities for resident feedback and authority to override most input from local governments. This should include exemptions from CEQA and other review, and strong eminent domain powers.
- The Caltrans-like agency should have independent regional metro divisions (i.e. Bay Area, LA area, etc) with dedicated sources of regionally collected funding as well as a mandate to own and lease out land adjacent to transit stations as part of its funding. The divisions should have budgets to retain project management staff who accumulate long-term experience and manage multiple projects. They should have the independent authority to issue bonds and be required to publish construction efficiency and ridership statistics.
- Labor unions should be systematically prevented from influencing the course of planning, construction, and project execution. Unions meddle and cause many delays and project complications.
Unfortunately, even a structure like that is not a panacea. If you look at CHSRA, it actually has some of the features that I listed above. When CHSRA was first started, the planning process fell victim to meddling from state legislators (most famously the one who forced the route to go through Palmdale), followed by many wasted years fighting NIMBYs and doing useless planning. Ultimately, the only hope I see is to insulate the planners from political interference, set them up with independent funding, have one agency head who is responsible and accountable, and reduce the veto powers that California grants to citizens and governments.
- Cost of labor is insanely high due to cost of housing. Short of jumping straight back into the 19th century, setting up temporary housing and bringing in guest laborers this is pretty much non-negotiable.
- Not a ton of expertise left in the country since there's 2 new subway tunnels a decade AFAIK.
- The grift has got to be worse here than in Spain. There if you get $40k in kickbacks that's a nice bonus, here that barely covers your rent for the year.
And then even if you bring the costs down, you have to figure out the taxation. Several billion per mile is the running rate and you may be able to bring that down but then you have ongoing costs. Muni's farebox recovery is only 1/4 of its budget so unless you're making existing lines redundant, there's new ongoing cost. Obviously the choices there will be to go into the pockets of the middle class or not do it at all.
This is not the reason. Labor is expensive even in parts of the US with low housing costs.
The real, simple reason is the US has a more prosperous economy where the average worker has more opportunity than their Spanish peers. Just look at unemployment rates. The US is at 4.3% right now compared to Spain's 10%. Even at the peak of the GFC the US barely had over 10% unemployment. In the meanwhile Spain has had over 10% employment almost the entire time the past four decades. Of course labor is cheap when that many people are jobless.
Relevant: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol_effect - drives a lot of effects in the US where automation paradoxically makes non-automated industries insanely expensive (though not the whole story for certain niches e.g. healthcare and education)
In US suburbs, a lot of people are going to drive even if they live next to a train station. So there’s no convenience or property value benefits. To them, they only see downsides.
* Fear that a metro will bring in "undesirables" (i.e. poor / lower-class people)
* Concerns about noise
* Some people just hate change
Total compensation in the U.S. construction industry is about $46/hour on average: https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/ecec.pdf. That's almost $92,000 for a 2,000-hour year.
Utilities were generally public prior to this. Now we have private equity buying up utilities because the profits are guaranteed [2]. While electricity prices are regulated, capex on infrastructure isn't so they can simply boost profits by "investing" in the network ie creating extra capacity for data centers to be sold electricity at sub-market rates.
Lots of expierments were done and empirical data analyzed on the tragedy of the commons and it never matched the theory. Ultimately, this resulted in Elinor Ostrom winning the 2009 Nobel Price for Economics for disproving it with empirical data. Yet people still quote it.
Look at the list of metro systems sorted by length [4]. They're almost all Chinese. The 4th largest is in Chengdu, which only opened in 2010. In 16 years it's now the 4th largest in the world.
Pretty much any argument you can use about how China is different will have a contradiction by counterexample. Difficult terran? Chongqing. Old cities? Beijing, Shanghai. City too large? Good one.
It's not any single factor that allows for this. It's managed at every single level. For example, China has standardized rolling stock to a handful of variants so you avoid an entire procurement process (and grift). The UK spends billions of pounds to build an otherwise completely unnecessary tunnel under the Chilterns to protect the views of something of the most expensive property in the country [5]. Not in China. Audits of the Second Avenue Subway showed a host of corruption such as so-called "ghost jobs" [6]. Beverly Hills and Santa Monica fought the LA Metro extending into their areas because it might bring in the poors.
[1]: https://www.garretthardinsociety.org/articles_pdf/tragedy_of...
[2]: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/pe-buys-utilities-power-ai-18...
[3]: https://www.forbes.com/sites/artcarden/2019/08/07/elinor-ost...
[4]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_metro_systems
[5]: https://www.theguardian.com/business/2026/jan/19/hs2-tunnels...
[6]: https://secondavenuesagas.com/2018/01/01/inside-times-deep-d...
I'm still on team democracy, and we'll see how long it takes before China regresses to the norm of dictatorships. Xi has already broken the term limits. Nothing suggests he won't slowly lose his grip on reality like most dictators. But for now China has its charms.
Which utilities do you believe were government-funded or government-owned in the West? I will grant you most water supplies. Which other utilities?