AlonJul 2, 2023

Some places can build infrastructure; others can't. But then some places want and others don't, and it's not in perfect correlation.

Can't, doesn't want to: New York, most of the US in general.
Can't but wants to: Los Angeles, Toronto, UK - look how hard they try to build those few lines.
Can, wants to: France, Spain, China, many others.
Can but doesn't want to: Germany, to some extent also Japan - this is seen in low costs per rider, i.e. lots of good value left on the table.

Show threadAlonJul 2, 2023

Category 2 - can't but wants to - seems to comprise places where the increase in costs is recent, as in the last 20-30 years. They still have big plans but can't execute them, so the timelines keep slipping, and politicians keep butting in to change things and always make things worse.

Germany has had flat construction costs in the last 40 years; I don't know if it's causally related - Italy has lower costs now than it did in the 1980s and is firmly in the can-and-wants-to category.

Show threadColin ParkerJul 3, 2023
@Alon The cost increases are recent in a lot of the rest of the US too I thought, but some of us seem to have followed that path into can’t/doesn’t want instead. It makes me wonder if there was a period of can/doesn’t want (locally the MARTA to Cobb you were referencing, but also maybe light rail being chosen over a true metro in Portland/Seattle). It could be a warning of possible “can’t” in Germany’s future?
Show threadAlon
@Colinvparker So, in Germany the construction costs have barely risen in 40 years - so it's not at all in the can't spot. The elements that lead societies to be unable to build are just not here - there's no privatization of the state, no design-build, etc. There is a lot of NIMBYism, but I don't think it's getting worse the way it is in the UK (which is converging to US levels of endless studies). The main problem here is that the people who are supposed to push for green infrastructure don't.
Jul 3, 2023 at 2:30pmWeb
Show threadColin ParkerJul 3, 2023
@Alon Yeah, I get that’s where we are now, but the fear is that not wanting to build, given long enough, will erode the capacity. Perhaps that takes a long time and is tied to explicit efforts like privatization (that would be great because those could be reversed in the high cost countries), but perhaps those are downstream of a general apathy/incompetence/learned helplessness, which would be bad because it would set in after not building for a while and be harder to reverse.
Show threadAlonJul 3, 2023
@Colinvparker Right, but Germany does build things, it's just slow as fuck. So the construction costs per km of Stuttgart-Ulm are not that terrible, and ditto the next tranche of projects like Hanover-Bielefeld and Erfurt-Hanau, there just aren't enough of them. And then the environmental movement is apathetic or even opposed, for a host of reasons, most of which are bullshit.