Pete Buttigieg, Bent Flyvbjerg, and My Pessimism About American Costs
A few days ago, US Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg appeared together with Bent Flyvbjerg to discuss megaprojects and construction costs. Flyvbjerg’s work on cost overruns is, in the English-speaking world, the starting point for any discussion of infrastructure costs, and I’m glad that it is finally noticed at such a high level.
Unfortunately, everything about the discussion, in context, makes me pessimistic. The appearance was about establishing a Center of Excellence at the Volpe Center to study project delivery and transmit best practices to various agencies; but, in context with what I’ve seen at agencies as well as federal regulators, it will not be able to figure out how to learn good practices the way it is currently set up, and what it can learn, it won’t be able to transmit. It’s sad, really, because Buttigieg clearly wants to be able to build; with his current position and presidential ambitions, his path upward relies on being able to build transportation megaprojects, but the current US Department of Transportation (USDOT) and the political system writ large seem uninterested in reforming in the right direction.
What Flyvbjerg said
Flyvbjerg’s studies are predominantly about cost overruns, rather than absolute costs. The insights required to limit overruns are not the same as those required to reduce costs in general, but they intersect substantially, and in recent years Flyvbjerg has written more about absolute costs as well. The topics he discussed with Buttigieg are in this intersection.
In latter-day Flyvbjerg, there’s a great emphasis on standardization and modularity. He speaks favorably of Spain’s standardized construction methods as one reason for its famously low construction costs – costs that remain very low in the 2020s. We found something similar in our own work, seeing an increase of 50% in New York construction costs coming from lack of standardization in track and station systems; in our own organization, we conceive of standardization as a design standard, separate from the issue of project delivery, but fundamentally it’s all about how to deliver infrastructure construction cost-effectively.
To an extent, the American public-sector transportation project managers I know are aware of the issue of modularity, and are trying to apply it at various levels. However, they are hampered both by obstructive senior managers and political appointees and by federal regulations. For example, to build commuter rail stations, modular design requires technology that, due to supply chain issues, is not made in the United States; this requires a waiver from Buy America rules, which should be straightforward since “not made in the US” is a valid legal reason, but the relevant federal regulatory body is swamped with requests and takes too long to process them, and the federal regulators we spoke to were sympathetic but didn’t seem interested in processing requests faster.
But Flyvbjerg goes further than just asking for design modularity. He uses the expression “You’re unique, like everybody else.” He talks about learning from other projects, and Buttigieg seems to get it. This is really useful in the sense that nothing that is done in the United States is globally unique; California High-Speed Rail, among the projects they discussed, was an attempt to import technology that already 15 years ago had a long history in Western Europe and Japan. But that project was still planned without any attempt to learn the successful project delivery mechanisms of those older systems. And the Volpe Center, federal regulators, and federal politicos writ large seem uninterested in foreign learning even now.
What we’ve seen
Eric, Elif, Marco, and I have presented our findings to Americans at various levels – not to Buttigieg himself, but to people who I think may regularly interact with him; I can’t tell the exact level, not being familiar with government insider culture. Some of the people we’ve interacted with seem helpful, interested in adopting some of our findings, and willing to change things; others are not.
But what we’ve persistently seen is an unwillingness to just go ahead and learn from foreigners. The new Center of Excellence is run by Cynthia Maloney, who’s worked for Volpe and DOT since 2014 and worked for NASA before; I know nothing of her, but I know what she isn’t, which is an experienced transportation professional who has delivered cost-effective projects before, a type of person who does not exist in the United States and barely exists in the rest of the English-speaking world.
And there’s the rub. We’ve talked to Americans at these levels – regulators, agency heads, political advisors, appointees – and they are often interested in issues of procurement reform, interagency coordination, modular design, and so on. But when we mention the issue of learning from outside the US, they react negatively:
- They rarely speak foreign languages or respect people who do, and therefore don’t try to read the literature if it’s not written in English, such as the Cour des Comptes report on Grand Paris Express.
- They have no interest in hiring foreigners with successful experience in Europe or Asia – the only foreigner whose name comes up is Andy Byford, for his success in New York.
- They don’t ever follow up with specifics that we bring up about Milan or Stockholm, let alone Istanbul, which Elif points out they don’t even register as a place that could be potentially worth looking at.
- They sometimes even make excuses for why it’s not possible to replicate foreign success, in a way that makes it clear they haven’t engaged with the material; for a non-transportation example, a New York sanitation communications official said, with perfect confidence, that New York cannot learn from Rome, because Rome was leveled during WW2 (in fact, Rome was famously an open city).
Even the choice of which academics to learn from exhibits this bias. Flyvbjerg is very well-known in the English-speaking world as well as in countries that speak perfect nonnative English, including his own native Denmark, the rest of Scandinavia, and the Netherlands. But in Germany, France, and Southern Europe, people generally work in the local language, with much lower levels of globalization, and I think this is also the case in East Asia (except high-cost Hong Kong). And there’s simply no engagement with what people here do from the US; the UK appears somewhat better.
You can’t change the United States from a country that builds subways for $2 billion/km in New York and $1 billion/km elsewhere to a country that does so for $200 million/km if all you ever do is talk to other Americans. But the Volpe Center appears on track to do just that. The American political sphere is an extremely insulated place. One of the staffers we spoke to openly told us that it’s hard to sell foreign learning to the American public; well, it’s even harder to sell infrastructure when it’s said to cost $300 billion to turn the Northeast Corridor into a proper high-speed line, where here it would cost $20 billion. DOT seems to be choosing, unconsciously, not to have public transportation.
Pedestrian Observations 
Historically the USA has from time-to-time learned from overseas examples, in the 1880s the US Navy sent personnel to Europe to learn about modern naval design and technology to build the modern steel navy, as naval tech and the supporting industrial base had atrophy after the US Civil War.
The most successful large passenger rail project in the United States right now seems to be Brightline, which shows you can build and run a European/East Asian intercity “higher speed” service over an existing North American freight rail and highway right-of-way, while Brightline often cites the Acela as an inspiration, I would have to think they looked overseas for inspiration and expertise, for example bringing Italian Box-Jacking tunnel technique to a highway underpass, saving time and money while keeping road traffic flowing.
Yeah I suspect that you just say you learned from Acela or that you came up with the ideas yourself but actually learn from abroad.
Brightline officials have been doing a lot of interviews, and they do cite European and Asian examples, but I think they go with Acela because being in America it’s a intercity service which is well known to Americans.
Alon – America’s credit rating was DOWNGRADED on August 1, 2023. The last time the U.S. experienced a downgrade was under President Barack Nobama in 2011. They cited America’s high debt and a steady deterioration in standards of governance and the standard of living over the last 20 years. Bad government has real costs, and America is letting its debt rise to catastrophic levels. Their record-breaking debt is not just a reflection of poor leadership but of poor morals in the nation as well. That’s also how EMPIRES COLLAPSE, just as the Romans did back in 477AD.Because of all of this nonsense no high speed rail will ever get built due to the special interest groups and their donors and lobbyist that fund their campaigns.
Also, here’s something to cheer you up – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i1hf5m_7N_Q&ab_channel=IGmuzik
Have a nice weekend as well.
The only voters who would care about policy specifics such as learning from other countries would be the wealthy.
And the wealthy would almost certainly be in favour because it reduces costs (and therefore reduces their taxes).
I think its more wealthy “should” be in favor. But what if you are wealthy enough to have a vibes based politics*.
Voters probably only care about the “made in America/X” bit if it all. But I do think that FTPT binary politics reduces scope for somebody to come in with governance reforms that don’t line up the binary choice of ideological packages.
*Actually you don’t need to be wealthy to have a vibes based politics see Uttar Pradesh politics.
Voters don’t care about any of this. The sort of obstructive bureaucrats who say things like “foreign comparisons… I don’t know” are caricature villains; nobody cares about them or their way of doing things. All that matters is results.
Completely agree Alon. Definitely my impression from talking to the voters.
My impression of wealthy voters is that they are well informed and are making fairly rational decisions.
The ones operating on “vibes” are probably the older “working class” voters. But to be honest I think in a big picture sense those voters in Britain have generally done pretty well at judging things.
But also in Britain the Conservative vote share dropped meaningfully over both Partygate and Liz Truss. But in America even January 6th wasn’t enough to get a similarly meaningful change out of America Conservative voters.
Incentives for wealthy Americans largely go in the opposite direction. They aren’t subject to meaningful levels of taxation to begin with, and many of them “make” their money by selling overpriced goods and services to government.
High costs are most definitely a feature for a class that hopes to profit from them.
This is an important point. When costs are high for transportation infrastructure or any other kind of government procurement, a substantial part of that is in the form of rents extracted by various suppliers and contractors. They have extremely strong incentives to take whatever possible actions will maintain their ability to extract these rents, including everything from outright bribery (the mafia) to more conventional lobbying and campaign contributions.
Wouldn’t that look very different from what Alon & co (sorry) have been finding? It doesn’t look like prime contractors are taking 90% margins or something, it looks like the excess costs are spent on, generally speaking, mostly fairly compensating people for them having to do more work than would be necessary? It’s not a luxury car brand, just the government buying a SUV when what they needed is a subcompact, and letting their son tick the boxes for all conceivable extras.
Contractors make more by doing more work. If they have 10% margins (number chosen to make math easy, not to be realistic), then a 1 million dollar contract is 100,000 in profit, with the other 900,000 going to expenses – mostly the fairly compensated people that work for them. If the contract is 10 million, that is 1 million in profit and 9 million in expenses to fairly compensated people. Thus the large contract direct benefits them.
Yes, but in the time they went back and forth with the MTA over change orders, they could have had more contracts.
In utility regulation they call the phenomena Henry is describing “gold-plating,” where you are allowed to earn X% return on your invested capital, so if the rate is in excess of your actual cost of capital, you invest as much as possible (i.e. overbuild).
HS2 is definitely gold plated. There’s a 900m bridge over a 5m wide stream on effectively flat terrain.
That said that is undoubtedly the spec/HS2 Ltd/department of transport, not the contractors doing the work.
This was kind of my point in response to your “How to Ensure You Won’t Have Public Transportation” post. It’s very clear that the problem is that Americans have no world-leading domestic examples to usefully learn from, and it’s also very clear that we aren’t really interested in non-Anglo international examples. I think you’ve touched on some of the reasons why this might be before, and you hint at them here–American ignorance of the international past, with or without negative exceptionalism, with or without fake self-criticism.
Granting that post was aimed more at better advocacy, it applies a least as well to the people actually in a position to make actionable decisions. Even if someone like Buttegieg wants to build good infrastructure, that must be a secondary goal to whatever else if he’s not ready to really toss all of his assumptions out the window to do it. I have to think that at least part of the shortfall is that politically, he’s very establishment, and all that implies. I.e., (with some caveats) America is the Best; we have nothing to learn from Those People (non-white non-Americans, though I’m sure this is unconscious in someone like Buttegieg), and to the extent we do it’s only going to be on things that aren’t Serious; and that what’s needed is tweaks around the edges, not to toss out the whole dead-ended project of domestically-grown good governance.
I don’t propose to have a solution to this puzzle, and it seems you’re now understanding that the obvious and correct one–bring in new people from elsewhere–is at best a hard sell, if not just straight-up impossible without even more undeniable evidence of America’s structural deterioration.
The problem, I feel, is that this is not a public transportation problem, I see a similar pattern appear in various domains I know a bit about.
• Payments, wire transfers are black magic in the US, IBANs and SEPTA work reliably in Europe. There is a general push in the EU to have machine readable version of bills inside PDFs (ZUGFeRD) to avoid manual input.
• Company identification, the EU has a public registry of VAT numbers and their ownership with a public API (EPREL). The US has DUNS…
• Credit Cards, chip + two factor authentification are a done deal in Europe, last time I was in the US (pre-pandemic) there were shop still using the magnetic strip.
• Logistics – the US is still relying on the deprecated US specific 12 digits codes (UPC) while the rest of the world uses 13 digits GTINs. In theory this would be an advantage for US companies as, 12-digits codes work in the 13 digit world, but I think it mostly makes everyone miserable. Also books are in the 13 digit space (ISBN-13), so you need a distinct system for them. More generally, the world is moving away from linear 1D codes (UPC) to richer 3D codes, which contains stuff like lot number and expiration date.
@wiesmann
I agree. That’s a version of my theory about metricisation (autocorrect insists it should be ‘metrication’ but that sounds weird to me). It is reinforced by very little scientific & technical experience in leadership in the Anglosphere. Buttegieg is a Rhodes scholar and that means an Oxford PPE. And more, it means he is infected with the same Anglo-American group-think on most issues.
It is very weird for countries that historically have been technological leaders but perhaps that past success reinforced the notion that you don’t need technical knowledge at the top to make the right decisions, to ‘guide the ship of state’.
Andy Byford for next Sec DOT. Even has a higher degree from France:-) Yeah, I’d bet he avoids making that common knowledge amongst his new peer group and masters.
Britain is pretty much a metric country though. And the rest of the Anglosphere other than America is too.
I just don’t think road signs being in miles and beer and milk being sold in pints is particularly meaningful.
That’s why I referred to Anglo-Americans. And why in my earlier remark about this phenom, Canada and Australia being metric helps explain why they aren’t as nutty on these other issues either.
That is typical of the “reasoning” that has left your country in this ridiculous limbo for the last 40 years. And Brexit.
@michaelj – in nominal GDP we are still (slightly) ahead of France as we have been for 25 years.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nominal)
@Matthew Hutton
What?
I guess that means they can spend hugely more on ≈500 km of HSR than it cost to build the 3,500 km in France and Germany combined?
But you really are a glutton for punishment. I note that those are 2021 data, and I recall seeing a recent one that puts France marginally ahead (like you say, for the first time in a while), probably a combination of Brexit-induced economic effects plus the relentless downgrading of the GBP. You may want to hide from the next few years figures. Oh, and also because the Brit population is a bit more than France, the p.c. figures, even for 2021, are closer. Of course there is the reliance on the international finance racket. It is why they so protect that toxic industry which is tied into the Londonistan thing/property as a means to launder dodgy money thing.
But seriously, GDP is an awful measure and you’ve shown one facet. If that measure meant anything one might expect France & UK to be comparable on most things, but they’re not and we know in which direction. Both the US and UK have high GDP p.c. but the UK has the worst inequality of the rich Europeans, and the US is at the very bottom of the developed world (only Singapore and HK are below it). France is one of the better Europeans, only bettered by the Nordics, on inequality measures. For rich countries that is a far more important measure. And health, lifespan, quality of life, and low E.coli counts in waterways … Not to mention something of more relevance to this blog: public infrastructure.
Australia’s per capita GDP is 40% higher than the UKs but I wouldn’t boast about it. Too much comes from stuff dug out of the ground and exported without a cent of added valued. Then again, quite a bit of that wealth flows back to Blighty (at least to individuals, not sure how much benefits the nation); eg. some 60% of shares in the two big mining companies (Rio Tinto, BHP-B world’s biggest) are overseas owners, mostly Americans and Brits. At least we too have a better equality measure. Yes, we’re letting the Anglosphere down! The just finished ten years of our own conservatives tried their best to reverse this … (and two of their three PMs were Rhodes Scholars like Buttigieg …).
Toronto at this point builds more expensively than London and with the latest cost overrun announcement I think so does Sydney. Then there are metric Singapore and Hong Kong, which can’t really build but which British Thatcherites still worship without letting the facts confuse them.
Yeah. I think I’ve told you before that when I first arrived back in Oz after the millennium it was still a low-cost country but the last few decades has seen massive cost inflation in projects of any size. HSR to connect our east coast cities has/was inflated to undoable (alll outsourced of course, probably a Clayton’s job).
However, while the Sydney NorthWest and SouthWest Metro were very expensive they are nothing like London Crossrail to which they are comparable project-wise (both extend >50km from the centre and involve huge amounts of deep tunnel).
For the massive WestConnex road tunnels in inner-Sydney, costs became so high and out of control that private interests couldn’t do it anymore (due to risk premiums it became uninsurable) so the (conservative) government built it and then sold it off to Transurban, creating a monopoly of toll roads in Sydney and eye-watering tolls.
@michaelj out of the open lines I suspect our high speed rail network cost less than the French one adjusted for inflation 🙂. Don’t forget anything old above 200km/h is a high speed line and we have a fair few of those.
And our long distance train network has more passengers than the TGV as well.
@Matthew Hutton
That only works if you accept, which I don’t, that 125mph (! yikes) is HSR. It was probably defined like that under insistence by the Brits.
But the whole point is moot. I’d even agree with some of it. The UK Inter-City network is pretty good. I used it all the time for ≈50 minute trips between Brighton-London and Oxford-London. But the point is that it no longer functions well enough. In fact I don’t necessarily believe HSR (close to 300kph) is the solution though a separate HSR spine always made a lot of sense. Other than reversing the disaster of privatisation, implementing a double-decker train system would have vastly improved service. I never really accepted the naysayers who whinge about the loading-gauge problem and the tunnel & bridges problem. In fact a German group has produced a workable duplex train, and I recall even won an award in the competition that was held for designing such a solution for HS2 trains (the idea being to enable those HSR trains to transition to regular track and thus serve many more destinations more efficiently–yes, sounds bloody French! HS2 is being built with modern loading gauge). But it costs a bit more than a single-deck train so on this dubious ground it has not been adopted for HS2 (I suppose the story is more complicated but it seems the Brits are shooting themselves in the feet all over again).
“German group has produced a workable duplex train”
In no part of this duplex train could you stand up fully on the upper deck, and you also cannot stand at your seat in half the lower deck. That is how an airplane works, and while people put up with it on airplanes they hate it, so “we made our trains more like an airplane” isn’t a good strategy (doesn’t help they also note “airline style bathrooms”).
Also, no one “produced” anything, this was the work of a design studio who made a mock up, no actual rolling stock from an actual train manufacturer was built. Their advertising mentioned things like “virtual coupling” and a “robotic baggage system” which sounds like vaporware.
The legacy British rail network is too small for double deck trains, just deal with it. HS2 is being built to continental GC gauge so as the HS network expands duplex will become an option, but for now running all 400m single deck train sets on HS2 should provide Britain with plenty of capacity. Of course as noted in a previous thread if you are worried about capacity it would help immensely if HS2 had planned for through running at Birmingham, Manchester and Leeds so a slot for a 200m train from Glasgow or Newcastle to London could instead be a slot for a 400m train with half its capacity available for Leeds or Manchester to London.
@Onux
What nonsense. It’s only the upper deck and doesn’t affect you once you are seated. It increases the capacity significantly. Apart from this sole feature it is luxury; like you said yourself many superluxe small jets have the same issue. Don’t American gallery cars have the same thing? It’s better than people standing for hour-long journeys at peak times, or in fact simply not being able to get on a train at all.
Plus, given that more pax are carried per train, costs would be lower and perhaps (a wild notion I know) they could reduce fares a bit!
At the very least, the government should have commissioned a full-scale version and tried it out on the rails and given pax a vote. I know what they would say (hmmm, maybe not, I seem to be on the wrong side of every Brit argument like Brexit, metrication, change the electoral system, abolish the House of Lords etc etc.) There has been solid German engineering input so it is not some brain-fart toy. It would actually do the job. But no, we can’t have some foreign idea …
Seriously.
@michaelj, it wasn’t a favour to us. We don’t refer to our 125mph trains as high speed rail. We should because it would be good marketing. But we don’t.
@michaelj, if the fares or reliability were big problems we wouldn’t have more long distance passengers than the French.
Same with the House of Lords – yes its an anarchism, but at least we have a consultative and pragmatic chamber. The cross bench actually is very effective.
@Matthew Hutton
Yikes, I rest my case. Words like “consultative” and “pragmatic” do not come to mind when I consider the politically-appointed, entitled sods that actually rarely even bother to take their seats. Maybe there aren’t enough seat because there are 755 peers which apparently is a world record on a per cap basis.
Unless by pragmatic you mean self-serving the way Lady Mone (appointed by Boris, friends from Oxford days) who secured an billion pound contract for covid PPE (that was so bad it ended up being incinerated) that wasn’t even tended, for her family owned company?
Try the French Senate which is not directly elected but consists of politicians already elected to other local jurisdictions like Councils and departments. Half of the members of the senate are up for election every three years and no member can serve for longer than six years.
Democratic and Representative of the whole country. Experienced politicians with built-in turnover. The exact opposite of the class-ridden cronyism of the House of Lords.
If you can’t bring yourselves to look at a French version, then just look at the rest of the Anglosphere. Australia’s PR-elected state-based Senate of 150 isn’t bad. It is genuinely pragmatic because no one has total control; at the moment 12 Greens and a clutch of independents have balance-of-power which means the government has to genuinely consult and engage with them.
What’s nonsense is you not looking at a few links that show the actual layout. Yes, there are seats on the first deck with low headroom. Try this cross section: https://fft-keymodernrailways.b-cdn.net/sites/modernrailways/files/styles/article_body/public/imported/2020-03-24/img_50-2.jpg?itok=rnQbsJQJ
from here: https://www.modernrailways.com/article/aeroliner-3000-double-deck-train-british-loading-gauge.
Yes, superluxe small jets have low headroom. They also fly at Mach 0.8+, don’t stop along the way, don’t cram you close to others, have armrests on both sides of every seat, and servants providing personal service. This train would have none of that, so comparing it to a private jet is foolish, even if the inside is nice (and if you believe any rail company will spend several million per car for a private jet level of finish I have a railway bridge to sell you….)
Yes, this is like a gallery car, except worse, because a gallery car allows you to stand up fully on both levels to access your seat, whereas with this design on the top deck you can’t stand up straight even in the aisle. Gallery cars are also an obsolete design, used when passenger cars were built on top of steel flatcar frames with a minimum 48” floor, instead of modern bi-level design using unibody construction, a lower first deck, and acceptable headroom.
If you don’t want people to stand run longer trains or run them more frequently. If people are currently standing then you are already carrying more pax per train so fares could already be reduced. Also, no way are you getting cheap fares if you have to maintain a ‘superluxe’ interior.
This is a foreign idea, but it isn’t a good one. No railway in Germany or elsewhere is running bi-level trains using a sub-Berne gauge profile. In fact, no one even uses Berne gauge; the shortest bi-level in Europe is I believe TGV Duplex which requires GA, and Swiss/German trains like TwinDexx use GC. Andreas Volger Studio is a design/artistic firm, not a rail company with “solid German engineering”.
@Onux
First, it was you who mentioned jets. But what really is the problem in such a solution to a very serious and long-term structural problem with the British network?
In fact, it looks like they are making the upper deck a luxury option, because it has 2+1 seating. Looks like those billionaire Learjet owners/users could find this acceptable. See:
Onux:
From this it is not clear you quite know how bad it has become. The private companies allowed their trains to get so bad their ‘solution’ in failure to meet timetable and to carry all pax was to reduce the number of trains running.
The high cost of fares is a very British thing so my comment was a bit of a throwaway. Of course they won’t reduce prices. They are perfectly happy charging some commuters £4,000 pa for a season ticket being forced to stand the whole journey; or to fine them if they go and sit in the empty seats in First Class section. And I assume they won’t allow standing on the HSR trains.
I suppose it is a very British thing to not even consider a serious design, by Germans no less (and Volger work in aerospace), that promises to greatly relieve the problem. If it really is as awful as you think, and actual passengers give that judgement then ok, but it deserves a proper test. Of course running more trains means having more trains, which is a heck of a lot more expensive than the higher capital cost of these duplex trains (which incidentally are built to a much higher standard will require less maintenance & have longer life). Because there is no way they are going to change the tunnels and bridges, altering the trains is the only option. But perhaps they are devising a Tardis train.
As to your last para, 🙄. Of course Germans or French don’t have such trains because their duplexes don’t need to cope with smaller gauges!
The arguments are reminiscent of those against full metrication! Or Brexit. Or any alternative to FPTP. Or any number of issues. I reckon the NHS needs to micro-dose the entire nation.
………………….
https://www.mylondon.news/news/south-london-news/southeastern-reinstate-trains-taken-out-26371018
Rail minister Huw Merriman has today (Thursday, March 2) confirmed that he will allow Southeastern to reinstate some trains taken out of its timetable following a recasting of services on December 11. It comes after sustained pressure from members of the public, rail campaigners and local politicians to get the Department for Transport (DfT) to allow Southeastern to backtrack.
The train operator is unable to make changes to its services without the DfT’s approval. There have been at least three serious incidents of overcrowding at London Bridge station, the most recent of which was on February 28.
……………….
It’s very unseemly to say I told you so (to Alon + PO commenters in general) but I’m Australian so don’t obey those niceties (and we cheat at cricket!): here’s something I wrote 5 years ago about CrossRail (long before it was named Elizabeth Line):
(the RER-A MI09 trains are duplex):
Here is a selection of articles describing the awful crush the Elizabeth Line is experiencing.
They are partly blaming the signalling system, but this was entirely predictable. The system had to integrate at least two, maybe 3 different signalling systems; in the tv doco I saw about this, there was no real rationale given as to why they didn’t simply upgrade the parts that used the older signalling system as it seemed madness (and expensive; it was partly responsible for the 18month delay in opening and billions of extra cost). Perhaps it is because the outer parts of the line were shared with existing trains/lines.
They are running at 22tph and talking of relieving the crowding by going to 24tph. I believe it is designed for a theoretical 35tph but as one approaches 28-30tph a system becomes fragile and very prone to system-wide gridlock if somewhere has even a minor failure.
Shoulda gone duplex!
@michaelj, Starmer is keen on Lords reform actually – and wants to replace with an elected second chamber, I just don’t think two elected partisan chambers adds much value.
And non-partisan experts are good in any system.
Soda and alcohol have been metric for decades. So are automobiles. Packaging machines aren’t cheap and if it became illegal to sell half gallons of milk they would start selling 1.89 liter cartons and 3.78 liter jugs.
The US is a lot more metric than the rest of the world gives us credit for. Most engineering is done in metric. As a rule of thumb, if it is made in the US it is probably designed in metric, if it is designed in the US for manufacturing in China is is probably not (this isn’t true, but it works surprisingly well). All science is metric only. In the stores many goods are measured in metric units, even though you just buy a box/bottle/can.
You have to know metric (not that there is much to know) to graduate from school. In many states you don’t have to know the other systems at all (though of course you use them), you can look up conversation factors in a book if you need them.
Construction seems to be holding back from metric in general. Though in many cases the units are not real – there is nothing 2×4 about a 2×4, there is nothing 1/2 inch about any pipe.
@Henry Miller
Yes, we know all that and I’ve said it many times. Metric is even the legal measure in the UK (it was legislated in the 70s, just never made the transition). Heck, I’ve noted how many US movies and tv shows use metric (it would be pretty weird for sci-fi to not).
It just makes the situation even more frustrating. I mean, so why not just do it?
It’s been legal in the U.S. since the 19th Century. Customary units are defined in SI units.
I think there’s a reasonable theory that the ability to metricate is a signal of the ability to learn from better solutions from other countries: accepting a better set of measurements, even though they are originally French, is a good sign for a wider acceptance of foreign expertise.
@Richard Gadsden
Yes, and my rationale has extended to …
somebody should tell the French their railroad gauge is English and it’s four feet eight and half inches wide.
@adirondacker
You’re wrong. In every English-language written word about such things it will be referred to as 1435 mm, even by you.
No one denies its English origins but kinda irrelevant. But there is a significance: the metric is defined in physically immutable terms that an alien a zillion light years away would be able to reproduce.
Of course that reinforces Henry’s point: if imperial measure is used in the US and UK, it will have actually gone thru a tortuous path of conversion from metric! (Hence that ridiculous $100 million NASA screw-up.)
The definitions are metric. A yard is 0.9144 meters and a pound is 0.45359237 kilograms. Since the 19th century.
@michaelj no-one in the UK would use imperial for building a spacecraft. They would 100% use metric.
Building houses uses metric here.
Well at least they are getting there.
We’ve all seen the magic-technological-fix not just complete frauds like the Boring company to more well meaning ones like Great Western Electrification’s failed attempt to automate putting up wires. “Modularity” is on the better end of this but… it works because you’ve got the right bureaucratic systems. It makes political sense since the Buttigieg’s are surrounded by such dysfunctional system that they aren’t equipped to deal with. Its also a way to get around learning from those foreigners*.
Dragging to the UK context, the discretionary permission “planning” system makes every bit of infrastructure except bespoke since you need to have a local council grant permission. It makes prefab almost impossible in the UK because you can’t guarantee there will be sufficient market to justify investing the factories because some random councilor can edit almost anything in a proposal. You compare stations built before 1947 and after and you can see the former are more uniform and “mass-produced” in pretty much everything despite the technology going the opposite direction globally.
Some good thoughts here. UK house construction costs have increased hugely over the past 50 years. Probably more modular construction would help.
Not just the UK. I’d like to recommend a blog, Construction Physics, which is mostly about this problem (it has more recently started branching out after basically answering the original question). This idea of “everything else you buy has been made in a factory, why are buildings still built the way they were a hundred years ago” is, by this point, over a hundred years old. The blog has in-depth articles on many particular ones, from the quantitatively still decently successful (US “manufactured houses”) to ones that fell out of fashion (mail-order houses, Levittown), never attained quantity (e.g. “Japan’s skyscraper factories”, a skyscraper assembly plant that climbs the tower as it builds it under itself, or the Lustron homes), as well as shallower ones as parts of overviews of the design space (e.g. of Operation Breakthrough, or the review of Industrialized Building).
The overall answers for why not, as I understand it, are:
1) While buildings are expensive, they are so large (mostly empty volume) that their bulk value density is actually quite low. (They are also heavy, but volume is the bigger problem.) Transportation over longer distances quickly becomes prohibitively expensive (e.g. in the US, each brand of manufactured-home builder has about a dozen plants, each serving mostly the region reachable within a single day of trucking).
1b) Mostly, buildings aren’t designed for transportability, and adding this feature would make them more expensive. (He notes in particular that factory-installed drywall tends to crack in transit, thus commonly it’s only installed on site even in manufactured homes.) Yes, he has an article just on the various folding-based systems, which try to improve the bulk value density by packing the building tighter.
2) Buildings are quite complex products. Just a loadbearing structure — something like a parking garage — is actually pretty cheap. However, people insist on buildings being weathertight, somewhat soundproof, having services (plumbing, electrical, HVAC), finishes (drywall, paint, flooring), etc. Usually none of the individual items make up a double-digit fraction of the total costs, but collectively they are something like 2/3 of the hard costs. In a factory, mechanizing a large variety of processes is not a problem (cars are complex, too) but see 1); on site, mechanizing a large variety of processes is approximately not feasible, you’d need a huge building to justify setting up the machinery there (this was the idea behind “Japan’s skyscraper factories”).
3) At the intersection of 1) and 2), to adequately fulfill its functions as a building, its parts have to fit very precisely. Trying to get a building of a meaningful degree of completion from fitting together panels or modules (notionally, cutting apart the building into parts that ship efficiently) requires very tight tolerances. I expect it to be widely known in the UK that its postwar concrete-panel blocks were plagued by build quality issues of this sort (despite only getting the structure from the panels), and after the Ronan Point collapse, many had to be reinforced.
The peak the of modular construction in the UK was the Council flat/New Town boom of the 1960’s as both got de-facto exemptions from discretionary planning system. Its never reached that peak since whether in the absolute or relative. A lot the work was quite shoddy at the time. But again the UK is just unusually bad because its planning system is based on deurbanisation of England.
Also I wouldn’t call Japan a country of skyscraper factories, the PRC is the world leader in that. Japanese is a leader in mass-produced modular single family homes and low to mid-high rise apartments. We actually had Sekisui try to move into the UK market two years ago, and left because there just isn’t a market for modular parts.
One thing that blog doesn’t get is the degree of regulatory differences across states. New York, California and Illinois have extreme localism and have inserted discretionary elements into a ostensible zoning system. Whereas the Sunbelt states tend to have rigid but much more simplified systems (Florida and Oregon with their state level planning are the obvious ones).
I also think he underestimates the soft-costs and land acquisition issues. “Land” is so unusual in being both “output” and “input”.
“I wouldn’t call Japan a country of skyscraper factories”
Neither would I. I was referring to the article titled “Japan’s skyscraper factories” on the blog, describing a specific and unusual method of construction. The vast majority of Japan’s skyscrapers were NOT built with this method, and it seems to have been discontinued altogether. (The blog also has articles on building systems from the PRC, e.g. the Broad Group’s various ideas.)
“the UK is just unusually bad because its planning system is based on deurbanisation of England.”
I don’t suppose that makes it doubly a failure — by comparison to the US, at least — since the latter achieved far greater success at the same ill-chosen goal, to its detriment?
More seriously, as far as I know, proposals for and some experiments with this idea kept popping up from something like 1870 to 1970 across much of Europe, US, Canada, Australia, NZ. The original Garden City movement, the scourging of the Shire, complaints about “Asphaltkultur”, the conceptual development of the automobile-oriented suburb as a target to be strived towards (usually cited: Ville Radieuse, Futurama, Broadacre City). Narrower in scope, but in terms of transportation policy, it’s indicative that most cities from the Rhine to the Pacific massively reduced their tram and trolleybus networks after WW2 (independently of whether they had been municipally owned for half a century, or still private); likewise, English-language advocates of Dutch bicycle network design emphasize that until the 1970s, the Netherlands followed similarly car-oriented policies as the Anglosphere; that their origin myth is the Stop de Kindermoord protests rather than a continuation of pre-motorization bicycle usage.
Oh no its a complete failure unless its about land prices which have risen above incomes pretty consistently since 1947.
England is a megapolis like the NE corridor or the Jiangnan , but its can’t imagine itself that way because English history is over and its destiny is to be Great Britain’s…territory.
The US is different since cartopia sprawls are still contiguous cities. Its why the US is much more productive than the UK both in construction and pretty much everything else.
“They have no interest in hiring foreigners with successful experience in Europe or Asia – the only foreigner whose name comes up is Andy Byford, for his success in New York.”
Would a sports metaphor help them? You want to scout the Andy Byfords of the world before the big market teams like New York are able to sign them to expensive contracts. (This is a common situation in baseball, where US teams get many of their players from abroad – the Caribbean and Latin America, and a few from East Asia, like Shohei Ohtani current the best player in all of baseball.)
No. I think Byford was a fluke. He got appointed in NYC because of their sheer desperation for some change (or another fall guy), and then he resigned (when they wouldn’t accept that change) but then Cuomo got taken down. So Byford has won the mantle of a political winner. Almost “one of us”. The real question is which route he takes now. Does he still strive for change or just plays safe for status quo? The very fact that he has gone back to DC, I reckon mostly for family reasons (Canadian wife who won’t live in UK, who can blame her) he doesn’t want to jump around much anymore (he’s certainly paid those dues) so will opt for safety. Plus, if there is one thing that DC is very, very good at, it’s co-option. Like Westminster, and Oxford, Harvard …
Also Byford’s career went from London to Toronto to NYC.
If he instead had gone Paris to Montreal would NYC have even considered hiring him?
Of course not. I assume he, or those in NYC who wanted to hire him, airbrushed out the French part of his cv. Like you never heard about Mitt Romney speaking French from his two years living there. The amusing question is, would a Russian speaker have an advantage in Trump’s GOP?
No, because alt-right Russophilia is entirely transferred nationalism. It’s like how Christian Zionists never engage with Hebrew-speaking Israelis (and even Jewish American ones barely do).
When I worked at the US DOT, I pushed to do an audit on construction costs and got nowhere. Senior management thought it was too hard and our auditing system was not easily adapted to draw on examples in other countries. Even if we had done it, I think I would have run into excuse after excuse about how “unique” we are and nothing would have changed. Even getting the FAA to learn from the Canadians, my office even made an international trip, was a challenge because it wasn’t invented here. Meanwhile they have computers while we use paper flight strips to manage planes. The only way we will ever make progress is for the older managers to leave so Alon, I suggest trying to reach the younger project managers instead.
That’s absolutely wild.
Perhaps if the older managers are fired, or threatened with firing, the same result could be achieved. That is where Buttigieg, who is effectively the CEO for those managers, could come into play.
The US construction companies and civil servants like higher costs because it provides more jobs and higher wages/benefits/pensions. Pete B is a Democrat, which translates to receiving large campaign contributions from unions, both private industry and government. Hint: CAHSR, the most expensive infrastructure project in the world, is located where Democrats “run the show”.
You would probably spend more on infrastructure with lower costs as you could justify doing more stuff.
Yep. Classic Jevons paradox
Well, yes, because it’s the only state that has tried (and no, the rest of the world doesn’t call Brightline, nor Arcela, HSR). Just like all the cities with even a pretence at a “Euro-style Metro” are blue. But then they prove they are true-blue American by spending a fortune and screwing it up.
I can’t even tell what is happening with that mirror-image of CA, the Texas Central HSR. Is it dead, or a zombie or a vampire?
What is wrong with Brightline? As a private entity, it controls costs (optimizes the cost/benefit ratio). It doesn’t have the infinite well of money-per-mile that CAHSR has.
Flyvberg repeated in one of his books (with editorial comment) the political-speak about unlimited costs made by San Francisco mayor Willie Brown (Democrat).
Willie Brown, former SF mayor, San Francisco Chronicle – July 28, 2013
“News that the Transbay Terminal is something like $300 million over budget should
not come as a shock to anyone. We always knew the initial estimate was way under the
real cost. Just like we never had a real cost for the [San Francisco] Central Subway or
the [San Francisco-Oakland] Bay Bridge or any other massive construction project. So
get off it. In the world of civic projects, the first budget is really just a down
payment. If people knew the real cost from the start, nothing would ever be approved.
The idea is to get going. Start digging a hole and make it so big,
there’s no alternative to coming up with the money to fill it in.”
Rarely has the tactical use by project advocates of cost underestimation,
sunk costs, and lock-in to get projects started been expressed by an
insider more plainly, if somewhat cynically.
January/February 2017
Policy Report
Megaprojects: Over Budget, Over Time, Over and Over
By Bent Flyvbjerg
@Reedman Bassoon
I didn’t say there was anything wrong with Brightline. Just that it isn’t HSR and shouldn’t be included in discussions of HSR (as some people are want to do). If you build such a line between SF-LA it wouldn’t serve any purpose at all.
Concerning the Willie Brown notion, he spoke the truth, for which brownie points (sic!). The question is whether it is a valid approach. In the US and maybe the whole Anglosphere, I’d say yes, it is valid. We seem to have endless arguments and partisan bullshit, often quite unrelated to the project or its merits, and they roll on and on, meanwhile costs mount and more toxicity is poured into the arguments etc etc. There is a case for the French system in which, after plenty of consideration by politicians, voters, economists, technologists, the state makes a final pronouncement called a “declaration d’utilité publique” ie. a project has achieved the stature of irreversible great national interest from the highest political level. After that there can be little resistance.
Anglospherians doubtless will blather about ‘lack of democratic accountability’ blah, blah but there is a strong case for such a mechanism. We have seen throughout the Anglosphere how such projects get mired into cycles of self-destruction. In the context of the movie Oppenheimer, what if that project was nitpicked to death? In the USA (NEC & CaHSR, Texas Central), UK (HS1, HS2) and Australia (East Coast HSR) the same scenario unfolded. The CA and Australian cases are remarkably similar in that both received an early (like 4 decades ago) offer by the French to build the line at a cost that amounts to a rounding error in today’s calculations (even with inflation adjustment). Everyone in those countries knows HSR should have been built eons ago but here we are. There is much sneering at France’s predilection for mega projects, by economists and politicians, yet I cannot recall one that was an unmitigated failure. I mean think of the TGV, nuclear power, the RER. Perhaps the Phoenix breeder reactor is a failure, yet another version of ‘Next-gen’ nuclear, the ITER, is being built on the same site as Phoenix. Is this a bad model to follow?
France’s TGV program was not without plenty of controversy, prevarication and naysayers; it was at least one decade old by the time a firm decision was taken, in the mid-70s, then it went like a rocket with the Lyon-Paris line opening in 1981.
Today’s example is Grand Paris Express (orbital Metro) which again was at least a decade in gestation but then the declaration d’utilité publique was made and it has forged ahead. Of course it too has blown up in cost, though hardly the end of the world and it won’t stop the project–as it shouldn’t unless there are commenters here who disagree?
On Bent Flyvbjerg, I have that report (a bit of a mega-book, and expensive!) and have actually read it, not just press summaries. I have commented several times on Alon’s blog that I found it surprisingly odd and unsatisfactory. Flyvbjerg is an “economic geographer” and unfortunately he confirms my view of economists in general. He really is a bean-counter and appears to know the price of everything but the value of nothing. Among the projects he never would have built were the Channel Tunnel and the Sydney Opera House. It is the kind of mentality that kills all progress, because essentially all real ‘progress’ will necessarily involve risk, especially financial risk. It is simplistic to say the least. Toxic negativism. Furthermore he has no real constructive alternatives except an economists flim-flam. He talks of the ‘power and rationality’ but his world would be a pretty dismal thing if he controlled it. Further his “iron law of mega projects” is hardly very revelatory but in fact simply descriptive without much in the way of insight … except seemingly, they shouldn’t be attempted (until ‘real’ costs are nailed down, etc sheesh). Except of course those mega projects people like him would pre-approve! I wish people would stop citing him as some guru and as if merely citing his name lends weight to the negative case on a particular project (this is essentially what happened with his interview last night on Oz tv), without actually explaining alternatives to all the mismanaged projects. In some ways I even blame him and his ilk for debacles like the CaHSR because that kind of ‘thinking’ killed it being done decades ago when it was eminently doable.
Everyone in those countries knows HSR should have been built eons ago but here we are.
A significant fraction of the population thinks that anything other than automobiles is a Communist plot. And say that or something like it, out loud.
Firing for incompetence is unheard of in the federal government and many state and local governments because it requires a lot of time and effort to make the case and support it with strong evidence per civil service protections. Threats would ring hollow. I would say you have to commit a crime but I know people who falsifies timesheets and still got to resign because I suspect they couldn’t be fired since someone higher up had poorly supervised them.
If you have evidence of wrongdoing you can either go through the process to fire them, or you can just point out that if they resign now they won’t have fired for wrong doing on their record. Most companies when they discover something bad but not extremely bad will offer to let you resign – easier for them than ensuring all the legal process for firing someone was done right, it avoids law suits for wrongful termination (you quit), and you don’t have to say anything bad about someone else.
I think you are incorrect to think of this as a US/non-US problem instead of a here/not here problem. Look at what happens if you suggest New York should follow Philadelphia’s lead in through-running – “oh no, couldn’t happen here, totally different situation, NIMBYs have roped Andy Byford into their plot to destroy Penn Station expansion”.
New York is uniquely solipsistic, yes. But Boston just hired a mediocre LIRR head to run the MBTA and he’s bringing people he knows from the LIRR, and in general there’s quite a lot of learning from around the US, it’s just all bad ideas circulating.
After decades of telling passengers what a fabulous idea through running was, Philadelphia gave up.
They still have through running. Just not assigned fixed lines.
(Philadelphia is uniquely bad for assigned fixed lines because the Penn and Reading lines overlap in the territory they cover so it’s the rare journey that is best done by going through the downtown and back out again. Philadelphia still benefits greatly from through running in that all trains from all directions serve all the trunk stops – 30th St, 15th, 11th, Temple. But to achieve that benefit you don’t need to know where the train is going once it leaves the trunk.)
They overlap if you have a car. The only place they overlap is between Chestnut Hill East line and the Chestnut Hill West line and then only if you are in some very specific places between the two.
Going one stop beyond the former main station, for most trains, isn’t through running. It’s going one station beyond the epicenter.
I wasn’t (just) talking about lines that are walking distance from each other. There are many other parts of the system where the Penn and Reading lines are close enough that taking the train into the city center and out again is an extremely long detour with (assume a sensible level of bus service) a big time penalty. For example Main Line to Norriston Line, or Trenton Line to any of the Reading lines.
That happens when it’s more complicated than an North-South Blue Line and an East-West Red Line.
It’s almost like having to translate things into “American terms” in order for them to understand something foreign nowadays. I think of it as, imagining if the US had to setup an occupied temporary administration like they did post-WW2 across Western Europe and parts of Asia. How would they form and interpret agencies related to transportation infrastructure in those occupied territories?
There’s a Gen-Z analogy to this albeit somewhat far fetched and different from this topic; When someone shares a long story on TikTok or try to explain an experience they’ve gone through on the platform, you may come across comments underneath the video reading “bro explain in Fortnite terms” or “bro explain in Minecraft terms” since the viewers belonging to gen-Z and gen-Alpha demographics are more familiar of having whatever they could not comprehend by the uploader being explained in video-game related terms that they are familiar with, yet still explaining the same thing.
Although not the best example to use, the point I am trying to make is that the USDOT and other government staff want it explained in “USDOT terms” and “American terms/USGOV terms”. In addition to that they have a bias against anything foreign, which makes it even more difficult.
The best thing I can think of is to establish a policy center/think tank that seeks to “Americanize and Globalize with American flavor” foreign institutional concepts such as the Autobahn -> Interstate Highway system.
The first computer and idea of computers originated in Europe but now in IT-related discussions both in hardware and software-sector, people directly associate it with America despite many manufacturers and distributors being based in Asia and Europe.
Americans simply want to dominate any field they are willing to consolidate into institutions and their society. This type of exaggeration and arrogance in the institutional and socio-political level is rare anywhere else.
The problem with this is that translational research still implies that foreign countries are worth learning from. This is hard to swallow if you’re, say, Janno Lieber, a late career (hopefully end-of-career). In practice, what happens in such cases is that the people presenting the translational research are not listened to, in similar vein to what happens when organizations have an insulated team work on red-teaming the rest of the company’s ideas.
So the people staffing such a group would quickly learn that they’re not being listened to. Why would they stay with the outfit when they, by the nature of their work, can get private-sector consultant positions at higher pay and prestige?
This is different from the “explain in Minecraft terms,” because of the power differential inherent in that question. The reply guy who demands an explanation in video game terms knows that he’s ignorant and puts himself in a position of weakness compared with the original poster. In contrast, the manager who demands the same kind of explanation (“ELI5”) is in the exact opposite position of power, and the person who’s being demanded a simple explanation knows this. In the first case, there might be some learning. In the second case, there is at best zero learning, and at worst negative learning.
It’s not just rail that is too expensive. So are airports and roads. 8 billion to rehab LaGuardia, a billion dollars a mile to rebuild the NJ Turnpike Extension between Newark Airport and the Holland Tunnel. A bit over 100 million a gate for new Terminal A at Newark Airport. With a lousy connection to the amusement park ride people mover. Which is going to be replaced for 2 billion dollars. And a two year delay according to Wikipedia.
Yes, the US can’t build infrastructure in general. (This includes freeways – the US has an underbuild freeway tunnel system by any European standard.) People can just nope out of any part of the country that requires infrastructure, like the big cities, and deurbanize to places that just keep going on at lower productivity. It takes a long while for this to be visible in GDP statistics.
My experience has been that the resistance to foreign ideas is proportional to the size of the stage that one is on, or that someone thinks they are on. I can think of a number of minor things that I imported and that were accepted or even improved upon by colleagues. Sometimes we just did things and nobody realized the source of the idea. And, yes, sometimes we attributed it to a domestic source.
Trying to get ideas adopted on the grand stage is different. I will always remember elected officials snorting with amusement at a retired University of Colorado professor in a public meeting. He was advocating that as our LRT line was starting from zero — and we had already chosen Siemens/DuWag cars — that we should build the line on the metric system. I recall thinking that it was a reasonable idea to consider; in the U.S. Army we used both measurement systems. Digital drafting systems were already in use that could toggle back and forth. The professor left crestfallen.
In the 1970’s, City of Edmonton “human resources” people nixed my first application to work as a service planner because I was an American and it might be controversial. Edmonton Transit wanted to hire me due to my background with German transit and electric rail and bus systems. But that’s okay, because previously the county personnel people in Salem, Oregon had nixed hiring my Canadian wife because their rules prohibited hiring foreigners. As was the case in Edmonton, the library executives liked her professional experience. The xenophobia was at higher levels.
People are much much less racist than they were in the 1970s though.
Racism and Xenophobia aren’t necessarily the same thing. The former primarily exists as a within nation caste system.
Anti-racist activists are often extremely xenophobic and committed to their national “exceptionalist” narratives. I encountered this at Universities where Asian and African studies departments are being replaced with Anglophone exclusive “Decolonisation” studies departments.
Are you sure this isn’t just about budget cuts to the humanities?
Oh its definitely about that too. But priorities in a pinch are always telling. My favourite example is Bengali studies, we don’t have single position let alone department on it. 300 million people speak Bengali in two very important emerging economies, there are 1 million people of Bengali descent in the UK, we ran the place for just under 200 years and we have huge amount Bengali artistic heritage and documentation. Including stuff people don’t expect, the first significant Bengal state the Pala Empire had an intimate relationship with Tibet, and the British Library has a huge amount of those sources too.
The current history wars are mostly different factions of English trying to evade the reality that the British nation state is as much of a failure as the British Empire that preceded it. Its much easier to fantasise overthrowing Empires that don’t longer exist then thinking about “how does a densely populated island state succeed in NW Europe”. National dysphoria is shit.
Or heck we could learn about the virtues of Bangladeshi urban planning which luckily managed to dodge the bullet of British urban planning by getting independence in 1971 which means small pedestrian streets, more apartments and more land released for factory development. But nooo, our corrupt Bangla mayor of Tower Hamlets governs like a typical corrupt NIMBY inner city Labour council, just with fewer manners and Sexism.
In fairness its not just British Imperialism, we see South Asia through the eyes of the Indian diaspora “middle class” which looks down on Bengalis/Bangladeshis as Communists/Muslims/whatever-Banajee-is and aggressively downplays any distinct regional history (there is not a single book in English on the late Medieval Bengali sultanate…which is like having nothing on the Polish-Lithuanian commonwealth or Ireland). You can say similar for Sri Lanka and Nepal too. Indian Imperial attitudes are easily missed because white people can’t imagine other people have history and agency outside our own psychodramas.
If there are important documents in this field that are not available in English then maybe someone can suggest this new institute hire some translators and publish English versions?
Speaking foreign languages is a skill all of its own. It would be foolish to wait for regulators, agency heads, political advisors, and appointees to suddenly have that skill when most of this country does not. So instead get them the same information in the language they can read.
Maybe some more Spanish speakers can get into high enough positions in the US but I don’t foresee any increase in the ability of regulators and political advisors to read languages like French.
Doesn’t that miss the point? That is, the assumption that if it isn’t in English then by definition it isn’t of interest.
Probably not. Sure, in an ideal world, where agencies (and to some extent regulators, etc.) were explicitly trying to learn from outside the US at all, they would in-house language skills. But given the constraint that they mostly don’t even try to learn from fellow Anglosphere countries, and this task falls on the
shoulders ofon the floor, and advocates pick it up, it’s logical that it would be the advocates who are also the location for the language skills.Compare the theory on consultants’ job being to launder ideas from a source that leaders ignore into an apparent source that the leaders take seriously.
Maybe, but the problem might be that people have no idea what is going on. Having a translation available is useful to help get people to see what is going on who are only somewhat interested. Saying the Spanish know something is different from saying what, or how to find it.
I know some Spanish. If you pointed me at a Spanish document I could wade through it and figure out what they are saying. However I have no idea what the right search terms to put into google would be to find it. I know no Turkish (is that even the language they speak?), so I have no chance.
Even if I know the Turkish are good, to find out what I need to hire some translators on an open ended assignment to find what is useful. This is expensive, and it is really hard to verify that the translators actually find what is useful. I theory I can learn the language, but it isn’t even possible to learn all the languages that people who build/operate transit speak so in practice if they don’t speak English it isn’t worth while to learn (English as opposed to my language: English is the current world Linga Franca, and so it is what we should demand documentation written for the world be in – as opposed to documents only for use in your agency which should be in your local language)
Thus if we can find the useful documents that the Spanish/Turkish/Koreans/Italians/… and get them translated (by someone better than me!), ideally in a form that google will find, that increases the chance that someone a little curious but with little time to deal with translators will find them. It is about odds – it will not be a miracle cure, but if someone in Kansas learns something they can at least show results that are easier to point out to the incurious elsewhere. (though New York is likely to ignore it, it can spread to Portland or Dallas)
People can only consume information that they are capable of reading or listening to. Most of this country is monolingual so unless a document is translated they cannot read it even if they are interested. Trying to increase the US’s percent of multilingual speakers is a much harder fight than having professional translators do the job.
If the concern is that US regulators, agency heads, political advisors, and appointees still won’t be interested in something that wasn’t originally published in English that is unfortunate but having the text being in the language they can read will always be the first step in getting that information in their heads.
I think this would be helpful. I’ve talked to many people who are familiar with Alon’s work and have read the reports but don’t learn from abroad because their projects are not discussed in English publications or media. It’s very easy to say ‘learn from abroad’ but how to do that is not trivial and management doesn’t reward it.
Guess who made it to national tv news tonight? Bent Flyvbjerg. Just a few sounds bites, from an interview. Part of a story, a long-running one here, about the explosion in costs of big infrastructure projects in Australia. Other than the Commonwealth Games (which a bunch of consultants claimed would cost 3x the original budget, thus the pretext for cancelling them) the current scandale du jour is the Inland Rail Freight line, something that should have been built a century ago. (A stupid amount of freight is moved over this vast country by trucks.) Links all three east coast cities but via the flatter/straighter/faster inland route instead of the current coastal routes (shared with pax trains), about 1700 km. Costed at under A$10bn, almost a decade ago. Now the headline likely cost to complete it is almost $31bn. Except it’s not really. That is some hypothetical maximum that a recent government enquiry came up with, conditional on all sorts of unknowns. But it gets the headlines and I’d bet the contractors and consultants involved will make sure it reaches that ‘aspirational’ goal. The whole thing is epically mixed up with politics with the conservatives trying to make it mostly serve the coal industry, some of the extra cost being a ≈300km northern extension to Gladstone one of the world’s largest coal exporting ports. Yeah.
BTW, this was on the ABC, the public broadcaster and I somehow doubt any of it got airtime on the commercial channels.
FYI – per Wikipedia :
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inland_Rail
Looking at the latest data available from the OECD for tonnes-kilometres moved by road and rail, every other developed country has a larger share of freight moved by rail than road than Australia. For example, in Australia roughly twice as much freight is moved by rail than road, versus the USA where ~50% more is moved by road, Germany has 1.5x more by road, India 2.5x, and the UK 8.5x. The only countries in the OECD’s data set where more is moved by rail proportionally than Australia are Slovenia, Ukraine, Georgia and Russia.
@Tom M
That seems unambiguous (and supports what I said) but the the rest of what you wrote seems to say the opposite? Which is it?
Incidentally, one really needs to remove moving iron ore and coal from “freight” because it is absolutely huge (some of those iron ore rail lines in Western Australia hold various world records on tonnage hauled and size of trains etc). Obviously I was talking of non-mining freight.
Typo on the first part. Should have been “…every other developed country has a larger share of freight moved by ROAD than rail…”.
Re iron ore. In 2022 the WA iron ore industry produced 844 million tonnes. The approximate average haul distance from mine to port is 350 km. Doing the math by subtracting the iron ore tonne-km out of the total results in Australia having ~50% more freight moved by road than rail, pretty much line-ball with the US.
When I talk to less knowledgeable public (on internet forums) and suggest we need to learn from Spain or Turkey about construction they always jump back “But what about France or Japan – they have great train networks”. China is starting to break into the list of countries people who want trains think of when they think of great train networks. Once in a while Germany is brought up too. There is no general knowledge about countries with great networks that build at low cost.
Not that the countries they name don’t have great networks, but they are not low cost.
Another dimension to the American cost problem is that the concept of efficient and effective public spending has been largely absent from the US zeitgeist for almost half a century. The baseline expectation that public spending will always mired in waste and/or corruption means that there is no understanding that the American experience is an outlier. Without the basic understanding that something is wrong, there is no willingness to look for solutions.
It’s not clear how any of this could be fixed, given that the trajectory of American sociopolitical development has reached the point of being a mixture of “let’s actually appoint a horse to the Senate” and “that man on a white horse has some good ideas.”
Question for the group: If you were an American planner who happened to speak German, what resources/groups/websites/etc would you point someone to? I’ve searched around a bit, but I’m not sure where to start.
Passenger rail will only succeed in the US, if it has a significant commercial for-profit element. That’s how the US works. Brightline is the model that can work in the US.