Low Spanish Costs are not About Decentralization
An article by Ben Hopkinson at Works in Progress is talking about what Madrid has been doing right to build subways at such low costs, and is being widely cited. It sounds correct, attributing the success to four different factors, all contrasted with the high-cost UK. The first of these factors, decentralization in Spain compared with its opposite in England, is unfortunately completely wrong (the other three – fast construction, standardized designs, iterative in-house designs – are largely right, with quibbles). Even more unfortunately, it is this mistake that is being cited the most widely in the discussion that I’m following on social media. The mentality, emanating from the UK but also mirrored elsewhere in Europe and in much of the American discourse, is that decentralization is obviously good, so it must be paired with other good things like low Spanish costs. In truth, the UK shares high costs with more decentralized countries, and Spain shares low ones with more centralized ones. The emphasis on decentralization is a distraction, and people should not share such articles without extensive caveats.
The UK and centralization
The UK is simultaneously expensive to build infrastructure in and atypically centralized. There is extensive devolution in Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland, but it’s asymmetric, as 84% of the population lives in England. Attempts to create symmetric devolution to the Regions of England in the Blair era failed, as there is little identity attached to them, unlike Scotland, Wales, or Northern Ireland. Regional identities do exist in England, but are not neatly slotted at that level of the official regions – Cornwall has a rather strong one but is only a county, the North has a strong one but comprises three official regions, and the Home Counties stretch over parts of multiple regions. Much of this is historic – England was atypically centralized even in the High Middle Ages, with its noble magnates holding discontinuous lands; identities that could form the basis of later decentralization as in France and Spain were weaker.
People in the UK understand that their government isn’t working very well, and focus on this centralization as a culprit; they’re aware of the general discourse from the 1960s onward, associating decentralization with transparency and accountability. After the failure of Blair-era devolution, the Cameron cabinet floated the idea of doing devolution but at lower level, to the metropolitan counties, comprising the main provincial cities, like Greater Manchester or the West Midlands (the county surrounding Birmingham, not the larger official region). Such devolution would probably be good, but is not really the relevant reform, not when London, with its extreme construction costs, already has extensive devolved powers.
But in truth, the extreme construction costs of the UK are mirrored in the other English-speaking countries. In such countries, other than the US, even the cost history of similar, rising sharply in the 1990s and 2000s with the adoption of the more privatized, contractor-centric globalized system of procurement. The English story of devolution is of little importance there – Singapore and Hong Kong are city-states, New Zealand is small enough there is little reason to decentralize there, and Canada and Australia are both highly decentralized to the provinces and states respectively. The OECD fiscal decentralization database has the UK as one of the more centralized governments, with, as of 2022, subnational spending accounting for 9.21% of GDP and 19.7% of overall spending, compared with Spain’s 20.7% and 43.6% respectively – but in Australia the numbers are 17.22% and 46.2%, and in Canada they are 27.8% and 66.5%.
American construction costs have a different history from British ones. For one, London built for the same costs as German and Italian cities in the 1960s and 70s, whereas New York was already spending about four times as much per km at the time. But this, too, is an environment of decentralization of spending; the OECD database doesn’t mention local spending, but if what it includes in state spending is also local spending, then that is 19.07% of American GDP and 48.7% of American government spending.
In contrast, low-cost environments vary in centralization considerably. Spain is one of the most decentralized states in Europe, having implemented a more or less symmetric system in response to Catalan demands for autonomy, but Italy is fairly centralized (13.9% of GDP and 24.8% of government spending are subnational), and Greece and Portugal are very centralized and Chile even more so (2.77%/8.1%). The OECD doesn’t include numbers for Turkey and South Korea so we can merely speculate, but South Korea is centralized, and in Istanbul there are separate municipal and state projects, both cheap.
Centralization and decisionmaking
Centralization of spending is not the same thing as centralization of decisionmaking. This is important context for Nordic decentralization, which features high decentralization of the management of welfare spending and related programs, but more centralized decisionmaking on capital city megaprojects. In Stockholm, both Citybanan and Nya Tunnelbanan were decided by the state. Congestion pricing, in London and New York a purely subnational project, involved state decisions in Stockholm and a Riksdag vote; the Alliance victory in 2006 meant that the revenue would be spent on road construction rather than on public transport.
In a sense, the norm in unitary European states like the Nordic ones, or for that matter France, is that the dominant capital has less autonomy than the provinces, because the state can manage its affairs directly; thus, RATP is a state agency, and until 2021 all police in Paris was part of the state (and the municipal police today has fewer than 10% of the total strength of the force). In fact, on matters of big infrastructure projects, the state has to do so, since the budgets are so large they fall within state purview. Hopkinson’s article complaining that Crossrail and Underground extensions are state projects needs to be understood in that context: Grand Paris Express is a state project, debated nationally with the two main pre-Macron political parties both supporting it but having different ideas of what to do with it, not too different from Crossrail; the smaller capitals of the Nordic states have smaller absolute budgets, but those budgets are comparable relative to population or GDP, and there, again, state decisionmaking is as unavoidable as in London and Paris.
The purest example of local decisionmaking in spending is not Spain but the United States. Subway projects in American cities are driven by cities or occasionally state politicians (the latter especially in New York); the federal government isn’t involved, and FTA and FRA grants are competitive and decided by people who do not build but merely regulate and nudge. This does not create flexibility – to the contrary, the separation between builders and regulators means that the regulators are not informed about the biggest issues facing the builders and come up with ideas that make sense in their heads but not on the ground, while the builders are too timid to try to innovate because of the risk that the regulators won’t approve. With this system, the United States has not seen public-sector innovation in a long while, even before it became ideologically popular to run against the government.
In finding high American costs in the disconnect between those who do and those who oversee, at multiple levels – the agencies are run by an overclass of political appointees and directly-reporting staff rather than by engineers, states have a measure of disconnect from agencies, and the FTA and FRA practice government-by-nudge – we cannot endorse any explanation of high British costs that comes from centralization.
If the policy implications of such an explanation are to devolve further powers to London or a Southeast England agency, then they are likely to backfire, by removing the vestiges of expertise of doers from the British state; the budgets involves in London expansion are too high to be handled at subnational level. Moreover, reduction in costs – the article’s promise of a Crossrail 2, 3, and 4 if costs fall – has no chance of reducing the overall budget; the same budget would just be spent on further tunnels, in the same manner the lower French costs lead to a larger Grand Paris Express program. Germany and Italy in the same schema have less state-centric decisionmaking in their subway expansion, for the simple reason that both countries underbuild, which can be seen in the very low costs per rider – a Berlin with the willingness to build infrastructure of London or Paris would have extended U8 to Märkisches Viertel in the 1990s at the latest.
One possible way this can be done better is if it’s understood in England that decentralization only really works in the sense of metropolitanization in secondary cities, where the projects in question are generally below the pay grade of state ministers or high-level civil servants. In the case of England, this would mean devolution to the metropolitan counties, giving them the powers that Margaret Thatcher instead devolved to the municipalities. But that, by itself, is not going to reduce costs; those devolved governments would still need outside expertise, for which public-sector consultants, in the British case TfL, are necessary, using the unitariness of the state to ensure that the incentives of such public-sector consultants are to do good work and push back against bad ideas rather than to just profit off of the management fees.
The first-line effect
The article tries to argue for decentralization so much it ends up defending an American failure, using the following language:
But the American projects that are self-initiated, self-directed, self-funded, self-approved, and in politically competitive jurisdictions do better. For example, Portland, Oregon’s streetcar was very successful at regenerating the Pearl District’s abandoned warehouses while being cutting-edge in reducing costs. Its first section was built for only £39 million per mile (inflation adjusted), half as much as the global average for tram projects.
To be clear, everything in the above paragraph is wrong. The Portland Streetcar was built for $57 million/4 km in 1995-2001, which is $105.5 million/4 km in 2023 dollars, actually somewhat less than the article says. But $26.5 million/km was, in the 1990s, an unimpressive cost – certainly not half as much as the global average for tram projects. The average for tram projects in France and Germany is around 20 million euros/km right now; in 2000, it was lower. So Portland managed to build one very small line for fairly reasonable costs, but they were not cutting edge; this is a common pattern to Western US cities, in that the first line has reasonable costs and then things explode, even while staying self-funded and self-directed. Often this is a result of overall project size – a small pilot project can be overseen in-house, and then when it is perceived to succeed, the followup is too large for the agency’s scale and then things fall apart. Seattle was building the underground U-Link for $457 million/km in 2023 dollars; the West Seattle extension, with almost no tunneling, is budgeted at $6.7-7.1 billion/6.6 km, which would be a top 10 cost for an undeground line, let alone a mostly elevated one. What has changed in 15 years since the beginning of U-Link isn’t federal involvement, but rather the scope of the program, funded by regional referendum.
The truth is that there’s nothing that can be learned from American projects within living memory except what not to do. There’s always an impulse to look for the ones that aren’t so bad and then imitate them, but they are rare and come from a specific set of circumstances – again, first light rail lines used to be like this and then were invariably followed by cost increases. But the same first-line effect also exists in the reasonable-cost world: the three lowest-cost high-speed rail lines in our database built to full standards (double track, 300+ km/h) are all first lines, namely the Ankara-Konya HST ($8.1 million/km in 2023 PPPs), the LGV Sud-Est ($8.9 million/km), and the Madrid-Seville LAV ($15.4 million/km); Turkey, Spain, and France have subsequently built more high-speed lines at reasonable costs, but not replicated the low costs of their first respective lines.
On learning from everyone
I’ve grown weary of the single case study, in this case Madrid. A single case study can lead to overlearning from the peculiarities of one place, where the right thing to do is look at a number of successes and look at what is common to all of them. Spain is atypically decentralized for a European state and so the article overlearns from it, never mind that similarly cheap countries are much more centralized.
The same overall mistake also permeates the rest of the article. The other three lessons – time is money, trade-offs matter and need to be explicitly considered, and a pipeline of projects enables investment in state capacity, are not bad; much of what is said in them, for example the lack of NIMBY veto power, is also seen in other low-cost environments, and is variable in medium-cost ones like France and Germany. However, the details leave much to be desired.
In particular, one the tradeoffs mentioned is that of standardization of systems, which is then conflated with modernization of systems. The lack of CBTC in Madrid is cited as one way it kept construction costs down, unlike extravagant London; the standardized station designs are said to contrast with more opulent American and British ones. In fact, neither of these stories is correct. Manuel Melis Maynar spoke of Madrid’s lack of automation as one way to keep systems standard, but that was in 2003, and more recently, Madrid has begun automating Line 6, its busiest; for that matter, Northern Europe’s lowest-construction cost city, Nuremberg, has automated trains as well. And standardized stations are not at all spartan; the lack of standardization driving up costs is not about nice architecture, which can be retrofitted rather cheaply like the sculptures and murals that the article mentions positively, but behind-the-scenes designs for individual system components, placement of escalators and elevators, and so on.
The frustrating thing about the article, then, is that it is doing two things, each of which is suspect, the combination of which is just plain bad. The first is that it tries to overlearn from a single famous case. The second is that it isn’t deeply aware of this case; reading the article, I was stricken by how nearly everything it said about Madrid I already knew, whereas quite a lot of what it said about the UK I did not, as if the author was cribbing off the same few reports that everyone in this community has already read and then added original research not about the case study but about Britain.
And then the discourse, unfortunately, is not about the things in the article that are right – the introduction in lessons 2-4 into how the civil service in Madrid drives projects forward – but about the addition of the point about centralization, which is not right. Going forward, reformers in the UK need far better knowledge of how the low- and medium-construction cost world looks, both deeper and broader than is on display here.
Pedestrian Observations 
Ben Hopkinson extolled the benefits of expedited subway planning and construction but overlooked the risks. Madrid metro 7 segment opened in 2007 in Costada and San Fernando del Henares had to be closed 9 times in 15 years. Underground water flows deviated by the tunnel are dissolving a salty layer. In places, the tunnel has sunk 17.5 cm with secondary disruption of stations elevators and on the surface. Eighty seven shops and 183 inhabitants had to leave. Some of the stations have now been closed for over 2 years. Whether the extension can be salvaged is not clear.
The AVE program also encountered a costly mishap when tunneling the Cantabrian mountains without serious hydrologic studies. The Pajares bypass tunnels finally opened in 2023, 13 years late and almost 3 billion Euros over budget.
If we ignore the United States as a special case and compare e.g Britain and France, then the areas where there has been more decentralisation have performed better.
For example the French have more power to build trams at a regional or city level and that has been very successful. In contrast on operations where the British rail sectorisation and then privatisation led to a more decentralised approach the British are ahead.
And yes in America there is more decentralisation but on the other hand as Alon has described before there is effectively court politics in a lot of states. New York isn’t going to elect a non Democratic Party administration, whereas in London the last mayor was Conservative and the current mayor is Labour. It is certainly very believable, especially if they had a combined candidate, that the next mayor could be Lib Dem or Green.
New York City had a non-Democrat mayor ten years ago. And a Republican State Senate until 2018. It’s not the Democrat’s fault the Republicans have been taken over by Dixecrats and nut-jobs.
Sure, but Canada does not have the same single-party court politics as the US, and yet its costs are very high too.
In France, the TERs are rather decentralized in the sense that they are the responsibility of the regions, but things are still not good.
Good points I think.
There has to be a cultural part too, e.g. the regions of France don’t want to learn from Britain or Germany? And perhaps also the regions of Britain are too culturally cringey towards London?
And perhaps the disability regulations could favour ramps over lifts, why does a small station (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reston_railway_station) need unreliable lifts for disabled access rather than a ramp?
So your explanation for the fact that streetcar projects in Western/Sunbelt cities have often been delivered for reasonable costs is that they start out as small-scale projects that a city-level government is capable of managing, but then subsequent stages balloon in scope and rapidly become unmanageable, thus leading to heightened costs?
If that’s the case, then why don’t these cities commit to a series of a small-scale expansions after the initial line is opened?
Do turnkey projects exacerbate this issue? Once an initial network is established, is it cheaper to build extensions, new stabling and rolling stock purchases as separate projects, rather than bundling them all together into a single package as is often done now?
Several parts.
First, the first {technology} line is almost always built on the route that is the best fit in the city (country, etc.) for that technology. Subsequent lines and extensions generally speaking are built later because, well, they aren’t as desirable on their own as the first line. (There can be synergies, where an extension/branch/intersecting line gets better ridership per cost because passengers connect to the now preexisting line. But in that case it would be fair to recalculate the first line’s performance to include these same connecting passengers.)
Second and related to the first: optimistically, many first {tech} lines are the result of someone thinking “huh, this route would be a good fit for {tech}”. Which is to say, route and technology are chosen based on technological parameters, not connotations. Whereas, cynically, many followup projects (and, yes, some first projects) are largely driven by connotations: “we, too, want a {tech} line to put this neighborhood/city/country on the map!” (or, particularly in the case of buses in the US, sometimes “take this {tech} line away, or at least hide it few view!”) rather than technical parameters. Inertia can play a related role in other cases (“we know how to do ‘commuter rail’/’subway’, we have a century of experience doing it”).
Third, it is simply unnatural to do that. Advocates (both technologically and politically oriented) have had to spend a lot of time to convince TPTB for the initial line to be given the go-ahead. Obviously they have ideas for more. Perhaps more importantly, all the people they have convinced in the process of getting there, and those convinced simply by the success of the line — “the proof of the pudding is in the eating”, and this pudding tastes very well — are now quite open to the idea of more pudding. It would be profoundly weird for the advocates to say “slow down” at this point. Unfortunately, the result is:
– Honey, you were right, this “baby” thing is wonderful, let’s make ten more next year.
Fourth, the parasites come. While the first project is being planned, some of them have no idea what it is. Others recognize that the project is teetering on the edge of nonexistence, which means that if faced with resistance, it will either be cancelled outright, or else will spend time and effort, rather than money, on hacking its way through the resistance. Thus no money is to be had by resisting. However, once the people have tasted pudding and ask for more, there is social support and money to “build build build”, thus it is more attractive to just throw money/concessions at the opponents, because that is faster and easier. This creates an incentive to oppose the subsequent projects.
Re my explanation: yeah, I think so; we’ll know more as we look into Seattle’s cost explosion. And technically Seattle did do small-scale extensions – U-Link was one. But then its success led to demand for more, and then with the community process being the way it is, the package grew rapidly and everyone wanted more spending.
Re turnkey projects: I’m not sure. I think it matters why a project might be turnkey – the Canada Line used a different technology from the Expo and Millennium Lines and thus came as a single package, but it was also a PPP with what looks like high concessionaire payments judging by the difference between the putative operating costs on the two systems.
Example, in round numbers: The Hudson River Gateway tunnel will cost $16 billion for two miles of tunnel. Of that, $7 billion is coming from the federal government (this doesn’t include “loans” from the feds that may or may not be paid back). If the nations taxpayers are footing the largest part of the cost, then it should be a “centralized” project.
People in New York pay federal taxes. Lots of Federal taxes. It’s just a hand with “Federal” on it’s glove. That then sends the money off to the hinterlands so people in far flung places can have hospitals, paved roads, hospitals, high speed internet and hospitals. The people in New Jersey have two hands with “Federal” on the glove fishing lots of money out their pockets. The subsidy sucking Real Americans(tm) out in flyover country realllly don’t want people paying the bills to start asking questions.
The argument/complaint that people in NY/NJ (and other left wing coastal areas) are unfairly subsidizing people in right wing interior areas fails on three levels.
First, as Alon mention in a post the other day, the vast majority of federal spending is on Social Security and Medicaid. People tend to work in cities when they are younger (which means they are paying income taxes and into social security, while not needing as much healthcare) then retire to other areas (which means they are getting paid social security and need medicare as their health declines with age). The difference in average age alone wipes up much of the difference in net donors vs net recipients.
Second, a lot of federal spending is tied to area and are for the common benefit., and rural places and have more area. For instance, four weather radars cover the northeast corridor across seven states between Boston and Phila., while Montana has four radars alone and N. & S. Dakota have six between them. But this isn’t some special benefit to Montana, etc. More sq km means more radars needed to cover it, plus the storms that hit the NEC are often first detected over the Great Plains as the jet stream carries them east. Similarly, money spent by the Corps of Engineers on Mississippi locks means that people in NY/NJ (as well as almost everywhere else) have wheat and corn to eat.
Finally, the people who use this logic are virulently opposed if it is applied anywhere other than the coastal/inland, urban/rural, left wing/right wing divide. The suggestion that the Upper East Side should keep the money it pays in taxes instead of subsidizing schools in Harlem would be howled at as racist, the idea that Elon Musk should pay less in taxes just to cover the services he uses instead of paying for subways he doesn’t ride or welfare he doesn’t need would lead to screams of the 1% not paying their fair share.
Either it is good for richer areas to subsidize poorer areas or it is not, but you cannot complain just when the poorer areas vote differently than you.
“Common good” works in many directions.
Why not? The subsidy sucking leeches in the hinterlands complain loudly and endlessly about how gubbermint spending is eeeeeeeeeevil as they suck up subsidies. It’s particularly rich when a Republican congressman shows up that ribbon cutting for a project he voted against funding.
They want to ask questions about working for the common good along the eeeeeeeeevil coast that sends them all that tax money the people sending it to them get to ask questions too. Very uncomfortable ones.
I know many of those people. They will tell you they are forced to take subsidies they are against. Taking the high road and refusing them just means that those who do take them are better off and soon they cannot compete and their farm goes under. That is the existence of one person who is for the subsidy taking the subsidy distorts the market and so they are forced to take the same even though they oppose it.
People live in the world as it is not as they want it to be. Sometimes that forces them to appear hypocritical.
I think the main reason the regional distribution vs. taxation of spending gets brought up is simply the hypocrisy embedded in a lot of the arguments from the right. I think you’re objectively right, but two factors have lead to the present situation.
First, there is the common sentiment that taxpayers are due some kind of outsize influence over public spending relative to other citizens or residents. Second, the discourse in the United States and Canada often has the right being particularly critical of some major regionally targeted expenditure rather than the left because the left is just generally more supportive of public spending. The left has started to adopt similar messaging tactics but these positions on highways and airports are fairly new at least in terms of having any kind of broad purchase, and seem only be strongly held by a particular subset of folks who are very online these days. Basically, the left hasn’t been saying that new roads are a waste of money for 40 or 50 years the way the right has about public transportation.
There is a decent argument that in both 1939 and 1945 that the New York Subway was the best against the competitor cites of London, Paris, Tokyo, Moscow and Berlin. Whereas now it’s difficult to say it isn’t the worst managed out of those with possibly the biggest budget?
And there’s a decent argument that various other Asian cites are better than New York as well now.
It is true that right wing states/areas have complained about too much spending even as they are net tax recipients, and when they do they are equally wrong and hypocritical. It is a childish argument, however, that because they are wrong you get to do the same thing, and even more childish to say that when you do it you are correct.
so they get to be hypocritical and the people funding it should just pay for it with no complaints? What makes the Real Americans(tm) so special?
How weird that places that have more people in them might get more public funding than those that have fewer people….I could be wrong, but knowing what the weather is going to be like for a largely empty plains area whose primary population is cows seems less important than knowing what it’s going to be like for major cities full of people.
The budget for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Agency also know as the weather bureau is infinitesimally small. Bringing that up is distraction. Department of Defense spending can be very interesting. But then there will be yammering about how air forces bases in the middle of nowhere on the otherwise unpopulated plains are for the common good… It always works out that spending in hinterlands is virtuous and spending where the people actually funding it, is eevvvvvvvvul wassssssssteful gubbermint boondoggle.
But maybe New York should make an effort to run its existing stuff at least as well as the competition does? Maybe then there would be fewer objections from people in the countryside.
There have certainly been fewer complaints in the UK about Londons infrastructure spending, that has only recently reached fever pitch but mostly because of quite how tilted the field has been with London getting more projects than the rest of the country combined.
@aquaticko
Except that the way you know what the weather will be like in the major eastern cities is with the weather radars out in the plains. The weather radar by the cities doesn’t tell you much that you cannot know by looking out your window. If you want a 3 day forecast you need the weather radars in the Dakotas because weather patterns tend to move across the US from west to east.
This is why I like this example, although Adirondacker is correct that NWS spending is really small, it is a relatable explanation about how spending elsewhere can benefit cities. It is also an example where the notion that more area equals more spending is clear and concise, everyone can picture a radar screen and how a radar in NYC won’t magically see farther than one in Bozeman.
But this is not a distraction as Adirondacker claims. The same principle is repeated over and over again. Do you fly from NY to LA? FAA radars along the way make your flight possible, even though you “fly over” areas with less population than those cities. Do people in NY eat fresh fruit? It likely came in on a truck driving on an interstate highway. But if that journey was 900 mi across rural areas and 100 mi through urban NJ/NY, that doesn’t mean that 90% of the benefit of the highway accrues to rural residents, or that NY residents would be better off if the highway stopped where the metro area does.
Defense spending is the same, almost all military bases are rural because they need a lot of space, but they don’t exist for only the benefit of rural areas. I assume Adirondacker’s comment about common good was because he feels defense spending is too large, which is a fine political/philosophical position, but the fact remains that spending on a military base does not bring paved roads or high speed internet to nearby communities, as Adirondacker implies.
And of course, bringing up the size of spending brings us back to the fact that even defense is small compared to Social Security/Medicare. The fact that the population is older in non-coastal states and thus receives SS/Medicare payments instead of paying SS/Medicare taxes is a main driver* of the tax donor vs tax recipient states. People paying SS taxes when they work in New York then getting SS payments when they retire and move to Florida does not mean that NY is somehow subsidizing normal municipal functions in Florida.
*Other than age, the other main driver of net taxes is the concentration of wealth in a few cities (Wall St. hedge fund managers in NY, Hollywood stars in LA, Silicon Valley venture capitalists in SF). The majority of taxes are paid by high earners, so its not the average New Yorker sending money to Alabama or Montana. From his posts, I would think Adirondacker would support taxing the super wealthy to support poorer areas. If he is suggesting that hedge fund wealth should stay in the state of New York, he should be careful, because asking questions about keeping money in NY instead of sending it to flyover states could lead to those CEOs asking questions about keeping money south of Canal St instead of sending it to . . . the Adirondacks . . . .
The way you get three day forecasts is from satellites and super computers. North Dakota doesn’t have anything to do with it.
None of your blather changes that those dastardly poindexters along the coasts pay taxes and can expect some of it to come back to them.
High construction costs in Britain specifically *are* about centralisation, to some degree, though. Some examples:
Also worth noting that Britain’s consultant-industrial complex is danced around as a reason for high costs here, as is usual in these sorts of pieces from the new group of ‘why can’t we build things easily?’ neoliberal-aligned British circa-30-year-olds.
The consultants happen because the government doesn’t want to pay half (or maybe 1/3rd) of the number of civil servants twice their current salaries.
In Finland (one of the Nordics) we quite possibly wouldn’t get any metro or light rail projects done with centralization. The national government does (reluctantly) offer max 30% grants for infrastructure, but at least 70% is taxed and paid for locally. It is also unclear whether the capital is that much better off in relation to the national government. There is a long anti-city tradition on the national level. This is in contrast to Sweden where the national goverment takes more interest in cities and pays a much higher share of projects.
So I would claim there is no single correct answer to centralization or decentralization. What you want is ability to deliver and accountability on the same level. This level depends on the system of government. Some systems on government don’t allow for this at all.
Oh and we have no municipal police in Finland. All police are under the ministry of the interior.