Devolution Best Practices
British commentators on infrastructure have spoken about overcentralization in their country, often also related to other state capacity issues. This led to a false belief that the United Kingdom (or just England) is too centralized, and to a discourse on devolution that I think doesn’t really get what the success and failure cases are. Beyond very small states like Israel and Singapore, we see extensive devolution of the management certain functions, like health, education, and local public transport, but not others, like intercity infrastructure, social insurance, and most taxes. Germany and Canada both have thriving Land- or province-level politics through having large enough units that democratic elections can be meaningful, and through devolving many functions to the same level that those elections are in fact meaningful. The United States suffers from a severe local democratic deficit because of wrong scale and because each function is devolved to a different level so elections are lower-salience and turn on personalities.
The local democratic deficit
Any devolution has to be to a level high enough that it meaningfully represents how people live their lives. People do not live and work in neighborhoods but in cities and metropolitan areas. This is true regardless of municipal boundaries: a once independent small town that has become a suburb of a major city has the same status as a neighborhood, with only a minority of its employed population working within its jurisdictional limits, and as such is not a good geography to devolve functions to.
The reason for this is that to be meaningful, elections need to be contested in boundaries that people can reasonably discuss with their social circles and peers. Otherwise, people cannot be sufficiently informed. It’s bad enough that I’ve repeatedly seen Germans whose social circles are predominantly immigrant and English-speaking barely know the name of the mayor and not be able to name a single policy that the current Berlin government is responsible for. When there are different jurisdictional limits, this effect is magnified and hits people even if they are very aware of political trends.
Scale
Devolution requires the services devolved to be at the right scale for the level of government. The military, for example, relies on national and even supranational scale, to the point that there are flailing attempts in Europe to involve the EU more. Pensions and social transfers, heavily dependent on a locality’s tax base and age distribution, are almost always national, and if they’re devolved it’s with extensive equalization payments, as in Canada.
In contrast, health and education are both attractive targets for devolution.
Schools don’t really benefit from scale beyond that of the individual school or small group of schools. They rely so much on teacher autonomy and subsidiarity that the state can merely provide loose supervision, for example by setting high school leaving exams. States can still be centralized on this matter – France infamously used to have one class schedule for the entire country – but there are few benefits from this, so in practice this gets devolved, and in France primary, middle, and high schools are devolved respectively to communes, departments, and regions. Even on values matters, for example requirements for teaching sex education over religious objections, there is nothing a ministry of education inspector can do to coerce a community where there’s consensus among the teachers and administrators to the contrary. The American problems with the devolution of education are not about scale (for one, they affect large urban departments if anything more than small suburban ones), but about the above issue of the local democratic deficit and sub-metropolitan devolution.
Health care is similar. Nordic single-payer health care systems are not centralized the way the National Health Service in England is. Finland is divided into 21 health care regions (“Hyvinvointialueet,” or well-being services counties), with state funding and standards but local management; there’s emergency reciprocity in the sense that a Helsinki resident who gets hit by a car in Oulu will get treated in Oulu without getting charged more than if they were hit by a car in Helsinki, but the same Helsinki resident will need to find a primary care doctor and therapist in Helsinki and not in Oulu. This works, since the scale of health care doesn’t extend much beyond the hospital or network of doctors.
This, in turn, has led to a decentralist mentality that views the state as centering coercion and prefers to center care at a much local level. But pensions are care and rarely devolved. Conversely, police is coercion and almost always is, since good police work requires cultivating local ties and community trust and therefore the police is ideal for devolution even as far down as a municipality, and even national police forces are organized by region (for example, the Paris Police Prefecture).
I bring up the care-coercion dichotomy and New Left and NGO attitudes, because infrastructure is usually care-coded, but cannot be devolved beyond the level that it serves. Decisions on local and regional transport have to be done at the metropolitan level, which in Germany is that of the Verkehrsverbund and in Scandinavia is that of the county or region, the latter offering better democratic oversight than the purely intergovernmental Verkehrsverbünde. Intercity transport cannot be devolved at all: high-speed rail and tightly integrated medium-speed rail in the Swiss style both require tight top-down prioritization and lend themselves to national rail bureaucracies, even in generally devolved countries like Germany. Just as the EU flails at military integration, it flails at rail integration, with nobody proposing a coordinated rail system and only some activists, generally regarded as idealistic and reformist like Jon Worth, even discussing regulations like passenger rights and booking harmonization.
Co-devolution
There are functions comprising a substantial share of the public-sector budget and its decisionmaking that can be devolved, and can be devolved to wildly different levels. After all, between the school and the province there are multiple orders of magnitude of population. To reinforce democratic elections, it is best if as many different functions are devolved to the same level, to heighten the salience of its political issues. These may include all or most of the following:
- Primary and secondary education
- Tertiary education if the units are large enough
- Health care management (with state funding to deal with differences in resources and age pyramids)
- Road transport
- Public transport
- Police
- State administration (for example, the population registry in Germany is devolved)
- Zoning and development in general
Germany and Canada don’t devolve the same functions. For example, universal health care in Canada is administered by the provinces, whereas in Germany it’s regulated federally with a system of national Kassen and private insurers. However, they share a tendency to devolve multiple high-salience functions to the first-level federal units. Canadian provinces are thus stronger than American states compared with both the federal government and local governments.
In both countries, this interacts with the scale of these units, all large enough to be coherent units of how people live and not too local, to allow for competitive elections. In Germany, that some areas are more left-wing than others just means that the possible coalitions under the proportional system are different, and in truly left-wing places like Hamburg, SPD and the Greens compete for first place. In Canada, there are provincial parties separate from the federal ones, so that even Alberta has competitive elections where federally it is safely Conservative.
The United Kingdom has consistent, coherent regions to devolve to in Northern Ireland, Wales, and Scotland. But in England outside London, it’s never been sure what to do, and the result is that its devolution practices have been a mess of different tiers of authorities, whose boundaries shift with every generational government review. The Metropolitan Counties are popular as of late as subjects of devolution, since they are coherent metropolitan areas and have sufficient population for scale, with population levels between that of Northern Ireland and that of Wales. One can even speculate that counties, or regions comprising a few counties with strong historic ties like East Anglia, Yorkshire, and possibly a Greater Lancashire region including both Greater Manchester and Merseyside, could succeed if many functions are devolved to them at once. In all cases, that politicians who win in these regions can be considered strong candidates for the prime ministership, with Boris Johnson having so ascended from London and Andy Burnham mooted in the media as a replacement for Keir Starmer, underscores that this devolution can lead to the election of strong politicians rather than petty managers of local gossip.
The United States has consistent boundaries of its states, counties, and municipalities as well. But each function is devolved to a different level. State administration is done by states or counties, schools are done by districts that vary between the municipality and the county, policing is done by a combination of overlapping jurisdictions generally at the municipal level, roads are a mix of county and state programs. State and local parties do not exist, and in safe states, governors get ahead not through good management of the state but through partisan outrage bait and performance of resistance to federal authority that indicates either the governor or a member of the federal cabinet broke the law and ought to be in prison.
Infrastructure and devolution
Good infrastructure programs can happen at any level. Usually the same countries that have low infrastructure construction costs for local urban rail also have low costs for high-speed rail; the main exceptions are that Italy has high high-speed rail costs and low urban rail costs and France has low high-speed rail costs and medium urban rail ones, and neither of these patterns is about devolution. It is far more important to follow good procurement practices and keep in-house expertise in the public sector than to optimize which level makes decisions on infrastructure. Indeed, in highly unitary France, RATP (state-owned) will contract smaller cities to offer them public-sector consulting services for infrastructure projects of the type that are generational for them but routine for Paris.
It’s important to avoid devolving the basic functions of the state, which in this case include procurement standards, engineering standards, contract law, and homologation. On the last one, it is notable that vendors at InnoTrans have come to list the countries where their products have been homologated, because it’s not a single EU-wide process and this weakens the Common Market.
It’s equally important to understand that this conversation, especially in its British context, is not really about infrastructure. It’s about other functions. English centralization produces poor outcomes in construction; so do Canadian federalist devolution to the provinces and American hyperlocalism. The commonalities to the three countries lie elsewhere, chiefly in project delivery and engineering standards that ensure high costs and poor outcomes.
Pedestrian Observations 
I always thought the regions of England https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regions_of_England would make a good basis for devolution within England. Their populations range from 2.7 to 9.6 million, making them large enough for healthy democracy while being roughly comparable in size to Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales.Local government in England (and Britain more generally) suffers from Westminster reorganizing them every decade or two and from different powers being devolved to different governments at the same level.
It might be the least bad option, but it isn’t perfect. Does the South West end up being too Bristol focused for example? Does the South East end up ignoring Kent?
That’s a feature. If you reorganize things every census or so the deck chairs on the sinking ship are arranged differently and can’t be compared.
The NUTS1 Regions are worthless gerrymanders Gordon Brown created to isolate 1997 Tory voters from 1997 Labour voters and direct EU structural readjustment funds to the latter (they were the EU parliament constituencies). I stress 1997 because that world is gone.
Do we really think Hertfordshire and Essex have more in common with East Anglia than London/Rest of home counties?
It also causes insane statistics that Professional Northerners love since it allows you to divide SE of England rail spend by only 8-9 million of its nearly 25 million residents. They also do breath taking things like count TfL’s fare revenue as central government spending.
I have a saying on devolution in general, amateurs talk boundaries, professionals talks finances. And here the discussion is nowhere because the whole point of the UK is looting SE’s agglomeration economies for the decaying peripheries. You read any devo proposal produced in the north and its vapourware or explicitly discriminatory, e.g. Labour Together’s “Barnett Formula for the North”.
English devolution is DOA no matter what happens as.
What regions would you do? London, Home Counties, East/East Midlands, West Midlands, Wessex, Devon and Cornwall, Yorkshire, North East, North West?
I don’t care so long as I get to impose PR and fiscal regime of indirect taxes paying for localised services. Welfare and direct taxes left to the national government.
I lean toward the Ceremonial counties, most of them are actually quite decent in size and economic logic (yes even the suburban ones), and have real identities behind them.
But the UK fundamentally doesn’t think people have a right to be judged as they are. Its why the political culture is so transphobic too. John Bull cannot be John Bull it must be Britannia because it was at birth or something nonsense like that.
I guess you could do large ceremonial counties and I think that would work, like Berkshire, Buckinghamshire and Oxfordshire. Or Yorkshire. That would be a bit more meaty.
I said Ceremonial not Historic
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ceremonial_counties_of_England
If I can get Berkshire, Essex and Surrey I don’t care about Bristol or Rutland making the thing untidy. And Leicestershire poster child for how Labour and Tories inflame racial and class tensions deliberately in order to have non-competitive districts, esp Labour which in Leicester is run a by a family.
My version of that requires more regions but the concept is good. I tie it into abolishing the House of Lords and replace it with an upper house, a senate, with only elected members and with the regions roughly of equal population. Or at least without the grotesque inequities the US and Australia have (inevitably Wales, Scotland & NI will have higher representation per cap but nothing as extreme as Montana v CA, or Tasmania v NSW or ACT). Election is by PR and one could even consider term limits. The objective, other than getting rid of the Lords (all of it, not just hereditary peers but appointed ones especially), is to have a proper democratic upper house with some authority and which brings some level of representation to the regions which the UK is lacking. (A properly democratic lower house would be nice too but another topic.)
Of course, in the context of this discussion, the idea is that with real political representation and power there would be natural devolution. in function. I quite like the French senate and as I have commented on this blog I even see benefit in dual mandates, eg. mayors of cities having automatic membership of the senate.
This is true in cities, it is less true in the countryside.
You can also get very different politics between a city and the surrounding region, which can be difficult to fairly reconcile.
In Dallas, Dallas Area Rapid Transit provides bus, light rail, and commuter rail services in 13 member cities: Dallas, Richardson, Addison, Farmers’ Branch, Carrolton, Irving, Plano, Glenn Heights, University Park, Highland Park, Garland, Rowlett, and Cockrell Hill. The cities have appointed representatives on the board. Some smaller cities share board members. Some members are quite good like Patrick Kennedy who is also an Southern Methodist University professor. Others are awful like Rick Stopfer who is also the mayor of Irving. DART is a special district meaning it is not directly part of any city or the state of Texas.
This governance structure has led to disputes over the allocation of the 1% sales tax within the DART service area. Many want to use that sales tax to fund roads since property taxes are unpopular and many in the state want to limit the amount that cities can raise property taxes. Last year, some of the cities went to the state legislature to try to pass HB 3187 and SB 1557 which would redirect 25% of the sales tax away from DART towards a “general mobility fund” which could be used for any transportation purposes. One catalyst for this is an Ernst & Young study that found that cities such as Plano put in more money to DART than the amount of service they received. This study didn’t account for the Silver Line which opened after the study or the value of cross-municipal services. This bill died after lobbying efforts by transit advocates at the state capitol. After the failure of HB 3187, many city councils passed resolutions calling withdrawal elections including Plano, Irving, Farmers’ Branch, Addison, University Park, and Highland Park. DART would strike a deal where 25% of the sales tax from a member city would be redirected back for their own transportation projects in exchange for cancelling their withdrawal elections and not pursuing anti-DART legislation at the state legislature. Farmers’ Branch, Plano, and Irving cancelled their withdrawal elections but Addison, University Park, and Highland Park refused. The elections are on Saturday, May 2nd.
The three cities that are now holding elections are geographically small. Most passengers at Addison Transit Center are moving between cities meaning that they can’t vote in these elections. Addison is a major job center so many commute from nearby municipalities and also can’t vote in these elections. Both Highland Park and University Park are rich enclaves within the City of Dallas. University Park is home to Southern Methodist University with shuttle buses from SMU/Mockingbird Station across from US-75. SMU is a private school meaning their students come from wealthier backgrounds. Transit advocates from the three cities are now pushing voters to vote yes for staying in DART.
There are other issues with this governance model. It makes coordination between levels of government difficult. There are almost no bus lanes in Dallas and its suburbs meaning buses often get stuck in traffic and delayed. DART also prioritized the Silver Line, a tangential line from Plano to DFW International Airport, over a Downtown Dallas light rail tunnel. The tunnel would’ve allowed capacity for Calgary C-Train levels of service with two lines per trunk. Despite this DART did not plan to increase line frequencies beyond 20 minutes which is its current level. It also creates a reverse branch with the existing Cityplace tunnel which runs 3 lines. Patrick Kennedy, a board member from Dallas voted against the Silver Line due to its low projected ridership in comparison with the tunnel. Addison was one of the cities that pushed for the Silver Line and just after it opened they called for a withdrawal election. The Silver Line only has around 1.8k weekday riders which is lower than some DART bus routes. It runs every half hour at peak and every hour off-peak. DART has historically also overprioritized suburban extensions over urban rail and a good bus network. This was especially true prior to Jarrett Walker’s bus network network in 2022. Currently, there are 5 bus routes that run every 15 minutes and one that runs every 12 (a shuttle bus to the University of Texas at Dallas). The Trinity Railway Express which runs from Dallas to Fort Worth, two of the biggest cities, runs every half hour at-peak, every hour off-peak and Saturdays, and none on Sundays. All of this has resulted in DART having lower ridership than Winnipeg Transit which serves a much smaller metropolitan area with just buses.
What could be done to help alleviate this problem. Should a regional government be created and have control over regional transportation? Should the State of Texas be involved even though their transportation policy has been car-centric?
One thing I missed, one of the motivations behind the withdrawal elections are allocating them to economic development corporations. These EDCs try to attract jobs to suburbs leading to more job sprawl. AT&T is moving from Downtown Dallas where it pedestrianized a section of Akard Street to Legacy West in Plano. The suburbs are also trying to pull the hockey team Dallas Stars and the basketball team Dallas Mavericks away from their location at the American Airlines Center near Victory Station. The DFW Metroplex already has legendary job sprawl causing its transit ridership to vastly underperform cities with similar sizes. DART member cities therefore have a conflict of interest where they want to attract jobs away from the city center therefore decreasing transit ridership and more car use which is against the supposed goal of transit.
I do think roads (as opposed to streets – here I define roads as larger highways people use to travel longer distances, and streets as what you use for “the last mile” between your start/destination to a road) belong to a larger metropolitan government, as do transit. Often things like water and sewer service belong at this level, depending on how local water exists at the geological level sometimes a large plant makes sense other times each township can have their own. (Township is mostly unused in US cities, the important part is they are small enough for kids to walk to school in the 1700s.)
I’ve seen lots of different ways cities handle this level, and I don’t like any. I think this group should be directly elected and have tax power. This needs to match the actually limits of the city though – borders should change every time a farm turns into a development (and in dieing cities they might shrink)
Your naivete can be glaring.
Where schools benefit is things they can buy from a private company (school books). Indeed there is a place where schools benefit from not scaling: if you don’t like the sex ed content of on set of books you are not forced into it because we tried to scale too large.
The textbook publishers, both of them, have the sales agents trained to not giggle when a clueless Real American(tm) schoolboard member asks if they have a version without reality in the textbook.
IIRC, most US textbooks are built to fit the demands of either California or Texas boards of education, because there is not enough market to support a separate textbook for smaller markets. So you are forced into one of two sets of books, no matter what your district wants.
Wales and Scotland have their own exam boards, so it should be possible.
School systems benefit (depending on viewpoint) from scale at a few touchpoints:
But other than that, I would ask: wait a moment, other than reading, writing, and three of the four elementary operations (but not division), which AFAIK are all elementary-school subjects, what can members of the general population be relied on to retain into adulthood? As in, do people reliably remember anything from the middle- or high-school curriculum? Because to the extent they don’t, and we can round off middle and high school to be a massive waste of time from a society-scale point of view, it doesn’t matter how they are organized.
Sputnik caused a panic that children were being left behind. And because the children were being left behind, the country was too. I feel very lucky that my district was …. frugal… enough that I was spared the New Math. The 70th anniversary of Sputnik will be next year and we are still discussing the same things they were panicking over in 1958. And the same things they were trying to solve with …. No Child Left Behind. And have been poking at, repealing, enacting again and… I’m glad I was spared the New Math. It was a revelation when my fifth grade teacher realized we were the victims of the New Grammar and taught us how to diagram a sentence. I digress.
I lived most of my life in New Jersey. Where the 1947 Constitution guarantees a through and efficient education to residents between the ages of 5 and 18. Schools were passing out diplomas to people who couldn’t read. The first lawsuit over that was in 1981. Abbott v. Burke. Apparently they are up to “Abbott” XV. The drafty 1890s classroom I was spared New Math in has been replaced, there is that. 1981 was 45 years ago. I’m sure there are people who have made whole careers out of that innocuous looking phrase in the constitution. Insert an innocent look here. I suppose not leaving children behind with old math or new math or something more differenter can be a career too. Insert an innocent look here.
Lots of people, for lots of different reasons, don’t want testing because that measures, poorly, but it measures, how badly the system is failing. And things like science tests or history tests can be especially fraught. …. abstinence only advocates don’t want to results to be examined. That doesn’t require the school to test anything but statistics can be examined…
Most teachers are tenure serfs. Luckily, most states when the district decides to re-imagine things and they get imagined out of a job the pension benefits are transferable.
…You overestimate the ability of many people to do the readin’, ritin’ and ‘rithmetic stuff.
Finland has a national matriculation exam even with extensive subsidiarity and decentralization of school administration to municipalities. The more conservative parts of the country don’t teach sex ed or evolution and there’s little anyone can do about it except maybe create a stronger job market in Helsinki to incentivize urbanization of the population.
Schools fail students when they don’t teach reasoning, numeracy, and social intelligence IMO. By numeracy, I don’t just mean arithmetic but also a basic grasp of how statistics and large numbers work; you can see the results of poor numeracy everywhere. I do think that the standard mathematics pipeline including trigonometry and calculus is wasted on most students.
Numeracy is somewhat easy to test, reasoning is harder and social intelligence is even more difficult. Reasoning needs to be multidimensional (hence why science, literature, and history courses are useful, and we must not just teach rhetoric; though conversely most jurisdictions lack dedicated logic or philosophy courses at a primary or secondary level and this is also a problem in my view). Social intelligence should arise from tasks like group projects, presentations, and so on.
Despite the difficulty, we must attempt to test. And if we must test, then it should probably be reasonably standard.
I think middle and high school often does a barely passable job re: social intelligence, but poor jobs at the other two categories I like. I am not trained in pedagogy, however.
One doesn’t need to know the exact difference separating a cloak and a gown to point out that the king is naked. It was implicit in my comment that one doesn’t need training in pedagogy to point out that the field of pedagogy, having had decades to do research and apply its results in practice has achieved …very little.
On the other hand, given that schools try to and utterly fail to teach trig&calc, I don’t see why they would be any more successful at teaching stats. Given that, I think debating the content of the curriculum is largely pointless. (Same applies to reasoning, economics, etc.)
@adirondacker: I’m not even American (I’m Hungarian), but the apparent inability of schools to teach is quite similar here. One difference is that somewhere in the first half of their 16 years, the Fidesz government dropped the age of mandatory schooling by a few years, more or less explicitly with the reason that it’s a waste of budget to keep semi-illiterate ~16s in school for two more years.
@Alon: yes, you can do that. But given standard exams (and teacher-credentialing), it’s clearly a choice to let the buck stop elsewhere.
Relatedly, the EU has the Erasmus program, so it clearly knows how this works, and does take some steps toward the goal. But since the member states don’t exactly seem to be doing the job voluntarily, I think at some point it should decide it needs more.
They have been discussing it for millennia.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socratic_method
It’s difficult to get young people who are busy discovering puberty to focus on much of anything. Food can distract them, it gives them the energy to explore puberty.
Everybody in my high school classes passed the final exam. In whatever class. I knew trigonmetry had uses before I wasted a year fooling around with it. The few times in my life when it was pertinent I hired experts who know how to use it.
It’s something they go over in earlier grades. And in other ways in the home economics class. And most people forget all about because arithmetic is hard.
…You overestimate the ability of many people to do the readin’, ritin’ and ‘rithmetic stuff.
Well you could cover it in the context of sport for example.
Experts who include builders and plumbers for example. Perhaps it would be better if taught in that context.
History and geography weren’t pointless, but on the former I have the feeling the British are pretty good and only lie by omission.
I also think a lot of people with office jobs would struggle with just primary school level educations.
Your plumber or builder is telling you they needed trig or calculus, actual calculus not using an adding machine to do accurate arithmetic instead of guesstimating, they are lying.
@adirondacker12800
They don’t know it, but they need trig. They just know you measure and then multiply by 1.414. I did construction for a few months and I was multiplying that every few days when I suddenly realized that was the secant of a 45 degree angle. I’m probably the only one on that crew who had enough trig to know that. I’m sure most crews have no clue, they just know 1.414 and think trig is useless.
Nobody multiplies by the square root of two without a calculator. that’s two key presses instead of five.
The physical world exists without your mathematics. Mostly because it isn’t sentient and will continue to exist whether no matter how hard you explain why you math conforms with it’s existence. The physical world has tolerances and unless you are machining precision parts multiplying by three decimal places is likely silly. (square root symbol key) (numeral 2 key) is still less key presses.
The construction team I know do not carry a calculator. They are fragile devices that would get destroyed too fast (there are heavy duty ones that would last, but they are more expensive and not useful enough to the average crew – the foreman might have one). Every house I helped build you can go to the attic today and see where someone wrote a measurement on a board, multiplied by 1.414 by hand and then used that to cut the brace needed. The blueprint could contain that number but it never did in my experience (and in any case the blueprint was in the truck so doing the math by hand is faster)
Again though the larger point is they have no clue that they are doing trig, they just know that one number which they have memorized.
Although I left that field 20 years ago, maybe today everyone carries a calculator. In that case they are pushing the buttons they were told to and have no clue why it works.
I think the workmanship of the British trades is better than e.g the Turkish trades presumably down to better education.
20 years ago they had a flip phone clipped next to the tape measure on the tool belt.
Triangles exist. In all their three sidedness without trigonometry, without geometry, arithmetic or even numbers. They are. Without Euclid, Pythagoras or the cosine anything anywhere.
Without looking at the drawings how do they know it should be a 45 degree brace? Off the top of their head decided it should be knee height? Whose knee did they use? The top of it should be at the knee cap or the bottom of it? Perhaps it’s that the brace should be that-high and braced to the top plate of something else which may not be a tidy 45 degree angle. There are ways of achieving these goals without using numbers. Which can be more reproducible because you can’t make arithmetic mistakes.
…… you want to think they are calculating things to a fraction of a millmeter go right ahead. They aren’t. Competent ones are just measuring – without using numbers in many cases – and making accurate cuts.
There were not caring a flip phone 20 years ago. The boss made you live your phone in the truck at the start of your shift. Unless you had a rugged phone it wouldn’t last more than a month on a job site anyway (eventually everything was dropped off the roof). I worked on the above crew so those were my rules – I can’t comment about other companies, but it appeared the others were the same.
They knew it was 45 degrees because it was always 45 degrees. They would put up a 45 degree brace without checking the engineering document. They went back later to add whatever other braces the engineer required, but until that 45 degree brace is in place the whole is in danger of falling when someone sneezes so that was done as soon as possible. The brace didn’t need to be an exact 45 degrees, once in a while someone did the math wrong by enough that they had to cut a new brace, but typically it was close enough to be in tolerance.
Most of the time they are measuring and making accurate cuts. This is the only instance where math was used. Numbers were always used because if you don’t use the numbers off the blue print you won’t get the house the blueprint is for. (one other exception – to square a wall you measured the diagonals – but again we always used the numbers on our tape measure)
In old building traditions a story stick was often used to measure without numbers. Nothing wrong with it, but I’ve never seen it used in the real world. Might be a regional thing though.
It didn’t need to be exact but they were calculating to a fraction of a millimeter. Okay. Unhuh. Sure.
Is this true when adjusting for the fact that Italy largely has mountainous terrain outside of the Po valley?
To be fair I looked at the spreadsheet and Milan-Turin looked to be pretty expensive and the population density isn’t even that high either.
Florence-Bologna was expensive but is also 94% in tunnel, and most of the others are more reasonable.
Alon is right devolution will not guarantee a restoration of competency in building. TfL is mostly there and cannot build anything affordaby. It cannot even procure rolling stock anymore. And Scotrail modest’s superiority in electrification costs is also matched the least efficient ops in the UK (20x subsidy per rider of Southern commuter lines).
The real issue is that the central state plunders the benefits of development on the tax side (council tax captures very % of new development income) and revenue side (councils have to pay for social care without government support). The fastest building localities in England are among the ones that have gone bankrupt. Newham, Slough, Woking, Thurrock for a reason. (Manchester has avoided this because Burnham got a sweetheart deal to keep business rates 100%, compared to London only getting 67%). And then it tells councils to loot developers and thus the underpropertied through Section 106. This also happens to projects like HS2 or Crossrail, as councils try to steal back what has been stolen.
London has built more than the rest of the UK because only london has cash flow (fares) and a willingness to accept high taxes to fund infrastracture (congestion charge, Crossrail rate precept, Crossrail CIL precept). Everywhere else is either balkanised (home counties) or ideologically opposed to paying any taxes (North, Celtic Fringe*)
There is a structure here, that Anglos share, we are all inheritors of 17th century England’s property tax based local gov services. And modern technology has broken the relationship between population and rateable values. YIMBY systems have local government focus on infrastructure not welfare, paid by indirect taxes. I.e. taxes the poorest pay for services that even the rich use maximise political support for YIMBYism. It is not accident that the states in the US with the more indirect tax systems generally have the highest building rates i.e. Texas, Florida and Washington.
*Yes those place are more anti-tax than the South of England. Thats been the record since 1999. Wales/Scotland vs London is clear. As is Manchester vs London. And every labour government has deliberate cut the taxes northern property owners face, they removed housing income from income tax in 1945, created the capital gains loop hole in 1967, broke traditional rates in 1968, did sod all 1997-2010 and now refuse to raise any taxes northerners and celts might pay.
Probably essential to keep the mildly NIMBY public on side.
Other more sensible countries have something called taxes which everyone knows development pays.
Section 106/Planning gain emerges immediately after Thatcher finishes off rates. That is no accident.
The public are right to be NIMBY in England, the system doesn’t reward you. It rewards looting.
Respectfully disagree. I don’t think indirect taxation is the main driver. Other states with high building rates have income taxes: North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia. I think there’s more of an influence on building rates from permitting, available land, lower starting values, lower density, lower wages, a longer construction season, milder temperatures, and a default to road infrastructure. Sales taxes are regressive; and lastly two of your three examples are beneficiaries of considerable federal largesse to plug holes in the state budget they undercharge their own residents for, while providing fewer services and having their scumbag political leadership push their venal agendas nationally. Florida is no one’s example of a forward-thinking state. Yes, they built a lot of houses. I’m sure you know what they bulldozed and flattened to do it, and I’m sure those houses will be of cold comfort when the coastline arrives in Gainesville.
The way to be YIMBY is to be YIMBY, not to do it indirectly.
Finally, speaking for my state alone here (one would have to dig into what the structures are for the other 49) – local property taxes only partially fund local services in most instances. State funding grants to municipalities with less valuable property aim to balance the scales and at least nudge toward more equitable outcomes. Some local functions are centralized at the state level. It may not work that well, but it’s a damn sight better than if those cost sharing formulas or centralization didn’t exist.
Yeah but its about relative fiscal incentives. Those states not only have lower income taxes, but get less for them because they don’t have the insane income tax machine of NY or SF. I’m simplifying since US is sometimes like 50 different countries on these issues.
And yes ability to grow into sprawl with unincorporated areas is a structure. Although the places in the US that have moved the dial on density are those same no income tax states, Texas, Washington and Florida. I wouldn’t say its good YIMBYism. But there isn’t good available yet.
That’s my point. Precisely because these taxes are regressive they incentivse building, because poor/rich people’s marginal revenue/cost benefit is less different. There is more to life than YIMBYism. And if you want a welfare state you fundamentally need a national government with an income tax. And it also matters a lot what services these local/state taxes support. If its water/roads/police etc, rather than welfare (education in the middle there) then the marginal benefit of having more poor people is more positive from the point of view of the Urban planning tier of government.
N/B Florida’s retirement economy is the system kind of working, elderly people from New York moving to a cheaper but less productive locale, leaving more space for the working age in NY.
Its not perfect of course given insurance issue etc. And certainly the sunbelt’s growth does have an element of parasitism on the few pre-car transit cities the US has, which make a disproportionate share of its income tax base because they have higher productivity than Edge Cities.
Lower?
The population density of Harris County Texas is 2771 per square mile. The population density of Nassau County New York is 4905. Dallas County is a bit denser than Harris at 2999. Delaware County Pennsylvania is 3138. How ’bout Cook County Illinois. Which has more people than the Combined Statistical Area of Seattle. 5580? How about… nah you don’t want check densities of New Jersey counties.
They’ve permitted higher density new builds and not mostly single-family detached in a statistically significant way? Good for them. I’d imagine those came with lots of parking, though. Which leads me to a question: When greenfield developments are created in transit-rich countries, are provisions for transit part of the development process?
I think it’s more fundamental than incentives and taxes. I think it’s a philosophy of governance that favors “filling the trough,” so to speak (I’m struggling to find the words here to define what I mean – it’s like maybe capitalizing on the resource abundance of the land? until the metaphorical trough is full – i.e. the desirable land is fully developed, or exploited – at which point the same flaws that compromised governance in wealthy Democratic states like CA, MA, CT, NY, MD assert themselves. Which gets us to the present day, where the obstacles to further development are primarily political everywhere.
England has a strong unitary culture. “Postcode lottery” is a frequent phrase mentioned when services differ between places even though they do already. Regional inequality is high so even with a sensible fiscal transfer system there would likely be visible differences in quality over time. Unless economic forces move away from agglomeration economies being dominant, I can’t see much economic convergence happening in England.
The biggest problem is that the suburban/exurban middle class would be strongly against merging with the cities they pretend they’re separate from with movement of some tax and planning to said city. England’s small size and centralisation means that regional capitals aren’t pragmatically accepted like in other countries.
Not really sure how you would handle the Home Counties either, doesn’t make sense to merge it all with London but it’s not really separate either. Another expansion of London would likely absorb Surrey and probably Hertfordshire but that still leaves a fairly large area.
It may be worth considering something akin to Paris’ Ile-de-France region; what I like about it is that it brings the whole metropolitan area into one government, while still allowing for Paris to be substantially different from the suburbs (and the suburbs to be different from each other; Saint-Denis is worlds away from Chessy).
Another interesting comparison is China’s cities. Typically the city manages quite a lot of the surrounding countryside, with the countryside managed as large chunks while the urban area is divided into districts similar to a borough or arrondissement. I like this structure as the districts can also be different to each other while you still have transit planning at a metropolitan level.
“England has always been centralised” is just wrong. English local government was consistently more powerful/independent than most European states until the 1970’s (Germany as ever the big exception). That’s why the last attempt to impose at Royal absolutism was centred on Borough council charters 1680-1688. Its why the franchise was decided by how much you paid in local councils property taxes “rates”. Its why every major expansion of the franchise was paired with major local government reform.
The main expansion of UK civil governance 1800-1914 was almost entirely about local government based services, e.g. police, libraries, then water/electricity/gas/trams/OG poor laws. And that’s why the central government in the UK failed to develop a technically specialised civil service. It was until 1910’s basically a fiscal transfer system, a judiciary with an army and a navy. What happens is the latter tier cannibalises local government progressive over the course of the 20th century, in the name of turning England into a GREAT BRITISH state, in the name to using centralisation to stop the collapse of the Outer British Victorian social order in the name of remaining a Great Power. It also means it destroys a lot state and social capacity in process even before Thatcher then privatises. Indeed she is very much as extension of the pre-existing Labour supported nationalisation (Labour deliberately broke the rates system in 2 majority governments to benefit its core vote of Outer British rentier machines).
That centralisation barely lasts a generation UK wide its so corrosive, the UK is only a unitary state between 1972-1999. Then after 1999 the UK becomes an extra-ordinarily decentralised polity with regard to the Celtic Fringe. Describing England as “centralised” in that context is almost beside the point, its more like a Union Territory in India or how the US treats DC/Puerto Rico, the insanity being England is most of the state. The centralisation allows the Celtic fringe to exert power over England no Federal state could permit which is why the UK system is melting down.
US states and local government are by the way visibly descendants of this somewhat forgotten tradition of English local government but a lot of state legislatures started as colonial “house of burgesses”.
The problem with a centralised vs localised debate is it assumes a binary zero-sum conflict between tiers of government. Successful systems find compromises and win-win solutions at least for the groups involved. England pre-1914 had something like that, admittedly it was based on a condominium between a declining landed gentry/aristocracy and a rising bourgeoise/labour aristocracy which could survive the changes of the mid-20th century. UK is failed version of modern state, not a archaic remnant. This is another mistake people make.
I agree that municipal government used to be much stronger in England and has eroded over time. Like a lot of modern regional problems in England, it’s related to early industrialisation which also lead to early decline. The interwar decline in “Outer Britain” was too severe as entire towns had their industry collapse.
Until Thatcher letting it collapse wasn’t really a political option leading to increasing centralisation but by the time she was elected the suburban/exurban middle classes that made up her base didn’t want powerful local government in the nearby metropolitan city so Thatcher continued the destruction.
The main point is that local government in England is almost entirely pragmatic rather than identity based so its functions were increasingly eroded by central government. Governments are unlikely to give up their power and create new centres of power unless there’s a political or identity case behind it like in Scotland and Wales making undoing the erosion difficult. In England there’s no such political or identity based coalition pushing for devolution.
If France could do it, anyone could. And just saying Scotland/Wales/NI could do it because they have strong national identities compared to diffuse English local-regional ones is part of the story, but not enough. And I could also add Korea/Japan which have really really strong narratives of nation homogeneity….and very capable local government.
Yeah but the same happens to rural areas across the developed world or soon-to-be-developed world (S.Europe/Littoral E.Asia) , and unlike Outer Britain, those areas are allowed to decline, demographically in particular. Whereas the UK has spectacularly successful at keeping zombie communities alive since WW2. Its because of FPTP interacting with Parliamentary Sovereignty to create an abusive majoritarian illiberalism, but that alone isn’t enough. You have to engage with the centrality of Union politics, the Celtic Fringe are not just exceptions that prove the rule, they make the rules leveraging their separation threat to create a system where they can extract revenue and enforce a veto of English domestic policy.
And if you think that’s silly I would point out that Labour’s current devolution agenda was devised by the guy who Starmer hired to handle English devolution; Gordon Brown.
That said the coming Reform or Reform-Tory coalition is very likely to attempt to liquidate devolution and try to make us into an Erdogan style illberal state with elections. Labour is already moving in that direction. The Outer British White Home Owner without a Uni degree is the master class of Britain and they must be satisfied, their caste’s ongoing demise is terminus with the demise of the UK.
In 1951 Durham County Council did attempt to kill off 114 zombie mining villages designated as Category D, but the policy was a disastrous failure and was abandoned in the 1970s after only 3 of those villages had actually been demolished.
(And that was when coal mining was still going on in other parts of County Durham, let alone in other parts of England.)
I’ve often thought that Alon as the archetypal “rootless cosmopolitan” (not an antisemitic slur, but a term I see as an accurate objective description for someone who has lived in 7 countries on 3 continents) doesn’t understand how difficult it is to get the inhabitants of zombie communities to move elsewhere. And besides, aren’t many of the residents of such places elderly and/or in ill-health, such that moving them somewhere else isn’t going to make them economically productive?
I think the level of investment in the North has been a lot lower than the London region.
And actually yes the operating subsidy of e.g. Northern trains is very high, but if the railway lines into the big cities were sped up a bit and you did an Stockholm Citybahan style solution in the centre of those places you’d reduce the level of subsidy by a lot – maybe you’d be able to run a more ambitious timetable with similar staffing levels to today.
Pretty much all of the transit activists are like this.
With e.g. HS2 adding some rural stops would add ridership of maybe 20% in exchange for 0.5% of the project cost in investment (and arguably less as you’d have to do fewer mitigations)
And with high speed lines in general there are, what, maybe 2 for which you could use all of the capacity to only serve big cities?
*In 1912 UK most cities have steam powered intercity-frieght plus local street cars. Only 5 cities have electric heavy rail.
London; Underground, Met, Watford DC, and what becomes the Southern network.
Glasgow: Subway circle
Newcastle: Tyneside Electric
Manchester: Atrincham branch/Bury Branch
Liverpool: Mersey tunnel, Southport line, Overhead Electric line
Today which cities have transport systems worthy of name?
London, Glasgow, Newcastle, Manchester and Liverpool.
(You could make a case of Edinburgh and Nottingham but 2 tram lines does not a mass transit system make at their scale).
@Borners, national rally in France is doing well because France is too Paris centric.
It also isn’t true that investment can’t help. Manchester and Lille for example are doing a lot better than they were.
Yeah and Switzerland/Austria have done all the investment in all the “right” ways and they were first places the Far Right came back into government and polled above 10 and 20%.
Manchester’s success is “parasitise the rest of your country and region” that economy relies on being able to get sweetheart deals with the UK government (e.g. 100% of Business rates, whereas London is stuck with 67%). I’m also not especially impressed “build several blocks of apartments and a few towers in wasteland within 500m of your CBD”.
Lille looks nicer because the French public realm is always nicer. But that’s because France has a willingness to pay higher taxes and accept a degree of local accountability that would be lethal to the UK state.
Again underinvestment and crappy public infra are not holding back the North, they are keeping it alive. Without the southern English infra crisis the North and Celtic fringe have no economy.
You can tell because of the utter unwillingness of these communities to tax themselves more to pay for anything.
I thought the problem was that they didn’t have a CBD at all. Hmm.
The other way of looking at it would be that the right wing populists in Austria are doing a handful of percentage points better than they were in the 1990s – which is much less well than National Rally or Reform UK or any of the others.
And in Switzerland it requires you to say that the Swiss People’s party, who sit with the Liberal Democrats on the council of Europe are “far right” which seems a big stretch.
Reform’s performance in vote share is about the same as FPO in Austria. Its just lol FPTP.
I don’t think the LDs would ban minarets and burqa’s.
N/B FPO till Kickel was Hard not Far Right. SVP too. Reform so far is more Euro Hard Right than Far Right (Restore UK split is the tell).
Matthew’s idea that the “national rally in France is doing well because France is too Paris centric” is surprising. This party’s leaders are Paris-based. Along with the Gaullists, the Front National fought against devolution (décentralisation en Français). It still favors a strong unitary State. It wants to give more powers to the Préfets, local representatives of the State, over local assemblies. It said that the recognition of local languages was an “attentat”, the term used to describe terrorist attacks, against “l’unité de la France et l’indivisibilité de la République.”
Yup and this how it works in England (to my distress). The England that votes Reform wants an iliberal centralised state that will restore the “Britain” of their childhoods and fantasises, put the minorities, the liberals and the celts in their place subordinate to the true British masterclass (boomers who own property).
France is interesting to me in that its much more like what the English would have liked the UK to be, where England is both the Imperial Union identity, and the main ethno-national identity. But the 3 celtic nations are too large, too organised and also the English too half-arsed at repression. Which by the way is also a sign of the limits of traditional “centralisation” within England and Britain, it couldn’t even kill Welsh and took forever to kill Cornish. Compared to the incredible success the Scots and Irish have had killing off Gaelic.
This is how all Far Right and most Hard Right parties function (there are exceptions on the latter, Lega, Osaka Ishin, Quebecois parties) .
The Front National/Rassemblement National has shown some flexibility. Le Pen Père wanted to return retirement age to 65 when the Socialists lowered it to 60. His daughter promised to return it to 60 when Macron’s reforms raised it to 64. Nevertheless, the National part which needs no translation is a constant. The party wants a strong State and opposes devolution of power to the Régions, Brussels, the Eurozone Central Bank, the NGOs and the Courts.
The two cities where it was in power are among the only French ones untouched by the French tramway revival. The congested 450 000 inhabitants Toulon agglomeration is squeezed between a mountain and the Med. It appeared ideally suited for a modern one. The project was launched by the Front National mayor in 2001. A Déclaration d’Utlilté Publique was obtained but the FN administration, weakened by blatant corruption, lost the subsequent elections. The project was shelved by the next, center right, mayor.
In smaller Perpignan (120 000), a new tram was a key promise of the center right mayor during the 2020 election. The 2020 and the 2026 ones were won by the RN candidate, who is not interested.
My frame of reference is basically that France and Britain are the same, and that UKIP/Reform were in the same European Parliament groupings so they are similar.
And I think the people voting Reform are doing so at least in part because they are anti-Westminster/London.
Now that could be an incorrect reading as that is obviously a simplification – and to be fair I am not sure I really understand the Reform supporters that well.
I think this is a fair analysis.
The British are pretty socially liberal though.
That’s a mistake too, they are comparable for certain. But French national minorities are just much smaller more divided compared to the French-core. Lots of Cornwalls rather than the 3.5 Celtic societies.
They are a lot of things, 28-35% of an electorate is a lot of things. They are the party of resentful boomer, the party of English nativism, and Pan-British Imperial Nationalism with soft-core white predjudice*, a party of Libertarian dreamers, a party of people who didn’t get a degree and a party of nihilists etc.
*Anti-racial minority feeling is a pan-British thing, which is why Reform is doing better than the Tories in Wales/Scotland. While Tories last stand is with Outer London’s mix of wealthy home owners and upwardly mobile Asians. (Homes and Hindutva party). I also kind of defend the soft-core, given Restore UK took the actual Nazis with them.
”This works, since the scale of health care doesn’t extend much beyond the hospital or network of doctors”
But this isn’t really true, quite a lot of health care scales. It is reasonable that people living in Kajaani see a primary care doctor in Kajaani, but does the Kainuu Hyvinvointialueet (population 72k) have its own pediatric ICU and specialized burn ward? Or do people travel for those services to Oulu or Helsinki?
In some ways health care can even be supranational (c.f. Ben Carson traveling the world for specialized neurosurgeries or the hypocritical Canadian politicians who now and again get caught traveling to the Mayo Clinic for treatment).
The problem in Germany is that Länder boundaries often go right through large metropolitan areas (not only around the city states Berlin, Hamburg, Bremen, but also through Rhine-Main, Rhine-Neckar, Karlsruhe…), so that we need intergovernmental Verkehrsverbünde here as long as the Länder are not reformed which is very difficult because it requires a plebiscite. Scandinavian countries have better territorial partitions.
The sizes are also very uneven.
I think your Berlin perspective (Berlin being a city-state) somewhat distorts your view as to the extent to which state elections in Germany are about state issues. Due to the way the Bundesrat is set up (basically like the US Senate pre progressive era with the added wrinkle that state government can tell “their” Bundesrat members how to vote) state elections are “the German way to do midterms” and both media coverage and – according to polls at least – voter behavior often emphasize the federal salience of state elections. Indeed, it’s very hard for state governments to stay in power against federal political headways even if the actual state policies implemented by them and their personnel poll well.
Local elections tend to be more about local issues and much more personality focused than all other elections (a high number of voters will have personally met at least some of the people they’ll vote for and probably one or two of the candidates for mayor) but the low turnout and the structural issues of municipal finances make local politics difficult to consider ideally democratic from an Ivory Tower standpoint. Municipalities are saddled with a bunch of unfunded mandates to the extent that they are structurally under-financed. Add to that that there has been a counterproductive “race to the bottom” with Gewerbesteuer (the main income source of municipalities in Germany) and there’s dire need for deep, structural reform… But NIMTOO…
I’m trying to read between the lines here: state and local parties do exist. Do you mean they’re hierarchically subordinate to, or in other ways not distinct from, the national parties?
Because while that’s partially true, they are distinct organizations with often differing agendas and priorities. Outsiders typically don’t hear about the gritty details and differences if they only read national news outlets. And one of the parties is far less effective at top-down discipline, so much so that Will Rogers quipped in 1933, “I do not belong to any organized political party. I am a Democrat.”
As far as governors in safe states getting ahead: most governors aren’t going anywhere else.
The view from Ninth Ave. is dim.
I don’t know or care how things are …organized.. in other states. In New York, for the major parties, each … local jurisdiction… has a committee. Member are nominated by voters in their district. Hypothetically if there are more nominees than seats on the committee there would be an election. They make decisions about local … concerns… They compose the county committee. That makes decisions about the county. They send delegates to the state convention as members of the state committee. That makes state level decisions. Delegates to the Presidential convention overlap to a great extent with the local and state committees but they get elected in the Presidential primary. Paperwork, filings with the state, Democrats checking on Republicans and Republicans checking on Democrats and both of them keeping an eye on the minor parties. Who does what regulated by the state or party bylaws. Which you can’t see from Ninth Ave.
Some states have closed primaries. Some states have open primaries. Some states leave it up to the party and one can have a closed primary on the same date as another party allowing anyone to vote in their primary. Some states have one primary for everyone and the two candidates with the most votes are on the general election ballot.
Governors and attorney generals getting in high dudgeon is what they do. And other stuff that isn’t visible across Ninth Ave. It isn’t what Alon them to do. Oh well.
When does it become appropriate to devolve intercity rail? You state that it requires top down prioritization, but can’t places as big as say, New York state have a meaningful role in their own intercity rail? The population of New York state is competitive with many countries, but most of our infrastructure funds come from the federal government. Could or should we reshape our tax structure to allow states to make decisions on their own, and have cities other than mega cities like NY get to make decisions on their public transport?
Thinking of how Amtrak, the national agency, is obstructing the MTA from running trains to Albany. (Or at least this is the narrative Kathy Hochul and her aides are running with). If it is true that the Governor and state officials cannot schedule a single train a day on Amtrak owned tracks, this seems like a pretty strange way to delegate power.
(Rescued from spam.)
No, for several reasons, some general, some NYS-specific.
1. People live and travel in countries, not states or provinces. Evidently, the biggest travel market involving New York City is to the rest of the East Coast and secondarily to Florida, not Upstate. Devolution would lead to malinvestment as the wrong corridors are prioritized. There are some exceptions like California and Texas, but the Midwest, Northeast, and South are not exceptions, and federal insistence on running intercity rail investment like the Interstates has wrecked the most important non-Northeastern corridor, Chicago-Cleveland/Detroit, because it can’t be planned in-state.
2. Even when state support leads to building a coherent priority, service has to be tightly integrated at state borders, which requires a coordination process that so far has not had any alternative to national planning. EU privatization mandates are based on giving up on any such coordination.
3. The one-time cost of intercity rail tends to overwhelm state budgets, leading to financing mechanisms that further compromise the project, for example the referendum process for California HSR.
This makes a ton of sense. I’m curious though what role then a state should play in the design of the transit system within their borders. None? Should the Governor and state legislature’s roles just be as an advocate to federal agencies?
How do we get projects with local interest, like electrification as outlined in the Momentum report, through the federal disinterest? (admittedly they have to get through disinterested state officials first)
Is the answer just better democracy? If so that’s pretty discouraging.
P.S. Thanks for the rescue from spam limbo
There are a lot more people beyond Newark than there are beyond Yonkers. There can be trains going through either and different trains going through Stamford. The people in greater Newark, Yonkers or Stamford can take aeroplanes to Florida and California. A few of them can take cruise to the Caribbean. And even fewer of them the ocean liner to Europe. S’kay if they make choices without consulting you.
They got what they wanted, not what you wanted. People getting what they want can be a feature of a democracy. People getting what some omniscient technocrat wants, isn’t.
The Federal government offers them money. Up until recently the response was that Real Americans(tm) drive everywhere, trains are icky. The money got reallocated. Just awful the way they didn’t behave they way you want them to. Pitiful. They got what they wanted, not what you wanted.
Perhaps in 1950. It’s not 1950 anymore. There are more people California or Texas. Passenger trains where there are people. What a concept!
It’s worth thinking of devolution in terms of subsidiarity: Every political decision should be made at the lowest reasonable level. That’s because then the decision makers are as close as possible to the issues and voters understand the relevance in local elections.
Scope must be considered more fine-grained than how Alon lists them. Schools are best managed locally but education standards should be national to ensure results are compatible and comparable. In Germany it is difficult to move teachers and children between states because of their different institutional standards.
Health also needs differentiation. Insurance should be national to guarantee efficiency, portability, competition and large risk pools. Hospitals should be planned on a supraregional scale to prevent every small unit of government demanding their own. Instead, hospitals should specialize and provide specialized services to large regions. Switzerland’s canton-based health system leads to an overprovisioning of hospitals, fragmented insurance market and provider choice limited to one’s canton. In Covid times, each canton had their own rules, which was chaotic. However, even in health there is space for subsidiarity in emergency services, care provisioning, reachability, demography, preventive care, etc.
In transport, national rail lines and roads must be planned on the national level, regional infra by state, local infra by municipality. That seems to be a widely used model, if with wider variations for rail. And of course the different levels are allowed to cooperate to optimize interfaces and joint products, e.g., a Verkehrsverbund integrating local and regional transit.
Beyond efficiency, subsidiarity also maximizes democratic legitimacy, accountability and civic engagement by keeping decisions close to the people affected by them.
Yeah but then you risk having the nearest hospital to Cornwall doing brain surgery in Bristol and the nearest one to West Wales being in Cardiff.
I guess maybe you should decide these things at a national level.
Exactly — brain surgery is a good example of a procedure where concentrating expertise matters more than minimizing travel time. You don’t want teams performing it only twice a year; outcomes improve when specialists handle high volumes. That’s why some services should be centralized over a large region, while routine and emergency care remains local. And yes, that kind of balancing act is probably best planned nationally.
If someone is in an accident seconds are counting to get them to a brain surgeon. Likewise someone who has a stroke – seconds are counting to get them to proper treatment before the brain dies. Someone who does brain surgery twice a year close to your accident is better than an expert hours away (who might be in a different surgery adding more time)
Exactly, that’s why we need to differentiate between emergency care and planned, highly specialized procedures. Local hospitals should provide immediate emergency treatment—stabilization, stroke protocols, trauma response—where seconds count. Meanwhile, highly specialized surgeries, like complex brain operations, can be concentrated in regional centers where teams maintain high expertise. The key is coordination: local units handle urgent care, and patients are transferred rapidly to specialized centers when necessary.
Oreg, brain surgery can well be urgent.
Yes — some neurosurgical procedures are absolutely time-critical and must be available locally. So emergency neurosurgical capacity should remain distributed regionally.
But that doesn’t mean every hospital should try to maintain the full range of highly specialized neurosurgery. The challenge is deciding which procedures need immediate local availability and which are safer when concentrated in high-volume specialist centers where teams maintain extensive experience.
Getting that balance right is difficult, but it’s usually better for overall patient outcomes than either total centralization or trying to provide every level of neurosurgery everywhere.