Every government owns property.
Nava:
Several of the factors mentioned affect infrastructure building in Spain, too, where it’s a debate that comes up often in private but rarely in public (although it can be considered part of the whole “politicians are thieves” pack).
Corruption? Check. Coded bids? (Not mentioned here but I read about it recently re. the US phone market) Check. Bids tailored knowing what other competitors are offering? Check. Rules to “always choose the lowest bidder, even if you already have three ongoing suits against them for shoddy work”? Check. Buying seven smartphones of a type which actually doesn’t make any sense for the place that needs 6, but hey, the General Manager wants one? Check. This last one is a real example from one of those companies which used to be part of the government but which have been “privatized”, and which now combine the worst vices of the private and public sectors.
Subcontracting processes often mean:
a bidding process to choose the designers,
then the design,
then bidding processes for the contractors,
then the building,
then bidding for the QC team,
then the QC,
by which time you’re having bids to see who’s going to do the regular maintenance, and who’s going to reinforce them when needed, and a suit with one or more of the suppliers for shoddy work…
Every new team that joins involves a bidding process, training, room. Often, teams overlap, but of course they’re not going to collaborate: instead, you get territorial fights worthy of a cop drama (“what are the Feds doing here?”). There may be at some point a team who, after a bidding process, gets hired to analyze and figure out how to get your other teams to collaborate; the proposal may involve putting yet another team in place… of course that means another bidding process, which by the way if the organization involved has a lot of wheels to grease will need to get greased as usual…
It’s pretty depressing. Mostly the part where you can’t take the people greasing and being greased out back and shoot them.
Which is interesting because Spain is commonly held up as an example of a country with the most efficient infrastructure spend.
BobLibDem:
I question the premise of abysmal efficiency. There are some entities like the Port Authority that are cesspools of corruption, but by and large public agencies do the best they can. The state DOTs are held pretty accountable by the FHWA and by their own states’ legislatures on how they spend their money and what the results are, how they will make their performance goals, etc. The whole process for planning an infrastructure budget is pretty much corruption-proof.
Even the so called “corruption proof” infrastructure projects routinely come out at much higher $/mile costs to comparable projects in other countries which is why the efficiency is abysmal.
1224rattusrattus:
American Rail transit has some uncommon features that lead to greater expense than those of the rest of the world. I’m not an expert in rail so take this comment with a pinch of salt- but as I understand it the US has a unique way of building trains thanks to it’s safety legislation. American trains are at least double the weight of those in the rest of the world. They are built like tanks so as to minimise the death rate in accidents. This is partly due to the fact that in a country with lots of freight trains (which safety-wise are less regulated than passenger transit) there is an increased danger of serious collisions. Therefore American trains are in theory safer than those of the rest of the world. Sounds great, right?
There is a downside to this though. Because these trains are so heavy they are much slower than they are in other countries, less fuel efficient and less profitable. This inability to attract passengers (trains too slow or expensive to compete with cars) while still breaking even (including with generous subsidies) means the passenger train coverage of America is piss poor. So what do people do instead. Drive to work. And we all know that car travel is massively more dangerous than train travel. As far as I know car travel does not have to conform to the same level of safety standards as rail. So it’s a weird situation where the excessive health & safety legislation which is designed to save lives is actually killing more people in the long run, as it’s hindering the growth of a relatively safe transit mode (trains) for a relatively dangerous one (cars). This paradox also happened soon after 9/11 where people elected to drive long distances instead of taking the plane as “air travel was dangerous”.
This article and the comments in it explain why ‘the feds’ drive up the price of railways.
Feds to push for local transit safety oversight - Second Ave. Sagas
That doesn’t explain light rail or subway systems though which are purely passenger rail and yet are still sickenly expensive.
America is not the only country in the world where infrastructure costs way more than it should- it just seems to be more severe. Are there geological conditions that add to the cost. Skyscraper foundations play havoc with tunnel building, etc.
The Second Avenue Sagas article I linked to seemed to suggest that the Feds wanted to stick their unwanted nose into even self-contained systems like the Washington DC Metro. My question to you would be: are the exclusive right of way subway trains (New York etc) over-engineered compared to their counterparts in the rest of the world? I’m not sure if they are but to my European eyes their gunmetal grey liveries screams heaviness- but that could be my European sensibilities. In the case of the Federal intrusion into the DC Metro their actions run the risk of making the system far too slow, draining it of fare box revenue. I grant that all this isn’t a great example of why these projects are always expensive.
However Britain is no stranger to projects that go over budget. Just like America we have a Not Invented Here Syndrome which ignores the success of foreign schemes. Sheffield has spent a decade or so ‘trialling’ a tram-train combo that the Germans have already proved workable. The bloated management staff & ambulance chasers that have undue influence in the British government are under the impression that England’s railways has unique features that mean we can’t just copy the Europeans. I would hazard a guess that America suffers from this too. There’s also the case of the Edinburgh whose contract was awarded to a firm that were incompetent- the Scottish government had to come in and take things over themselves, and it arrived five years later than planned at over double the cost. And I know the London Underground has had a lot of work done to it in the last few decades but there are more than a few schemes that have been planned for 40+ years and are still decades away from actually being progressed.
1224rattusrattus:
America is not the only country in the world where infrastructure costs way more than it should- it just seems to be more severe. Are there geological conditions that add to the cost. Skyscraper foundations play havoc with tunnel building, etc.
The Second Avenue Sagas article I linked to seemed to suggest that the Feds wanted to stick their unwanted nose into even self-contained systems like the Washington DC Metro. My question to you would be: are the exclusive right of way subway trains (New York etc) over-engineered compared to their counterparts in the rest of the world? I’m not sure if they are but to my European eyes their gunmetal grey liveries screams heaviness- but that could be my European sensibilities. In the case of the Federal intrusion into the DC Metro their actions run the risk of making the system far too slow, draining it of fare box revenue. I grant that all this isn’t a great example of why these projects are always expensive.
However Britain is no stranger to projects that go over budget. Just like America we have a Not Invented Here Syndrome which ignores the success of foreign schemes. Sheffield has spent a decade or so ‘trialling’ a tram-train combo that the Germans have already proved workable. The bloated management staff & ambulance chasers that have undue influence in the British government are under the impression that England’s railways has unique features that mean we can’t just copy the Europeans. I would hazard a guess that America suffers from this too. There’s also the case of the Edinburgh whose contract was awarded to a firm that were incompetent- the Scottish government had to come in and take things over themselves, and it arrived five years later than planned at over double the cost. And I know the London Underground has had a lot of work done to it in the last few decades but there are more than a few schemes that have been planned for 40+ years and are still decades away from actually being progressed.
Britain is commonly cited as the second most expensive for infrastructure projects, coming in at about half the cost of American ones.