why can’t America’s urban cities figure out public transportation

a damn shame

building @revealcam | previously @perl, cofounder SBLY.com, eng at Stripe | alum South Park Commons | peter-kim.com

"Historic preservation" in US cities sounds like a joke in most cases, compared to building the Athens metro, which turned out to be a huge archeological excavation. Some of the stations were actually build as museums, exposing the findings in-place. And believe me there is probably nothing harder in Greece than getting license to build in a place where there are ancient findings. 

And I would guess the same applies for most European cities, like Rome and Paris. I can't imagine digging whole anywhere in Rome and not finding ancient ruins.

Blaming unions is just vibes. 

If unions were the cost driver, Spain or Sweden (or anywhere tf else in EU) would be the most expensive places on earth to dig a tunnel.  Either can build a subway for under $100 M/km NYC is like $2B per km. 

Soft cosrs are huge. We stack NEPA, local zoning, historic preservation, and a dozen community veto points. Every pause compounds bullshit redesigns, new consultants, and inflation. And any politician eats that shit up bc they can line their own pockets. It's not Cali or Texas, it's any of em. Safetism falls into this category and it's used as a tool to delay, which compounds the cost inflations. Safety is good; safetism might be a vestige of your litigation point and is bad. 

There's also the BS buy American mandates that massively inflate costs given the decades of outsourcing and gutting of domestic expertise. 

We are fucking cooked and will never see new functional nation scale infrastructure built in this country in our lifetime. Just more lanes.

Compared to Europe:

Union labor policies result in way more people required to do the same amount of work. 

Huge culture of safetyism in regulatory massively slows stuff down. 

And then the US is way more litigious (trial lawyers are huge Democrat donors, so no reform). 

Ironic, since average Democratic voter is pro public transit. But the policies cause massive downstream effects.

The first question I ask for all things American politics is:  “Is there a consensus that this is a problem that needs fixing?” In most cases the answer is no and that is the root of inaction.