The U.S. Gets Less Subway for Its Money Than Its Peers • Hacker News Board

Re: The U.S. Gets Less Subway for Its Money Than Its Peers

#131

Post by ska » Tue, Jan 30, 2018, 2:20 AM UTC

humanrebar wrote: post #126

ska wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Almost nothing is a free market - so you have to be careful of the no true Scotsman fallacy.

No True Scotsman is about moving goalposts within a conversation. Bringing up, say, a lack of transparent pricing for commodity services (x-rays or pregnancy tests, for example) isn't a No True Scotsman fallacy.

Ok, it my be pushing it a little bit - but the point is that the US economy is chock full of things like the healthcare system. You can’t easily argue that these are just outliers and the “real” economy is extremely free market. They are, in fact, completely normal parts of how the economy works.

Arguing the converse would be precisely the no true Scotsman fallacy.

Re: The U.S. Gets Less Subway for Its Money Than Its Peers

#132

Post by ska » Tue, Jan 30, 2018, 2:23 AM UTC

adventured wrote: post #129

ska wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Almost nothing is a free market - so you have to be careful of the no true Scotsman fallacy.

Except that's nowhere close to a no true Scotman context. The US healthcare system is extremely far away from being a free market style system. Healthcare hardly even crosses state lines. It's absurdly regulated. It's about as regressive in terms of markets as it gets these days. Over half the US system is government healthcare now, either directly or indirectly; eg heavy subsidies, SSD, Medicare, Medicaid, CHIP, VA,…

I think you missed the point I was attempting to make. So I’ll try again. Yes, the healthcare system is very distorted - but that is entirely common for the US.

The Scotsman here in particular is a truly free market.

Re: The U.S. Gets Less Subway for Its Money Than Its Peers

#133

Post by api_or_ipa » Tue, Jan 30, 2018, 2:36 AM UTC

Rebelgecko wrote: post #128

api_or_ipa wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretty tired of "$REGION is too big and sparsely settled for transit" argument. British Columbia is over 2x the size of California, with about 1/10th the population but the city of Vancouver, the only large urban area in the province, has consistently high transit usage and investment. In fact, projections for transit usage have understated the growth in transit usage.

I'm not very familiar with British Columbia, but does the whole province have public transportation on par with Vancouver? If not, that seems to support the comment about regional sparseness... The city I live in (Los Angeles) covers an area 10x bigger than Vancouver. Even when you compare the metro areas, Vancouver is ~4 times denser

I brought up Vancouver's situation to compare it to New York because they both have large rural areas and comparable rates of urban and rural populations, about 50% of the population of NY and BC live in their largest cities. In addition, both NYC and Vancouver are highly urbanized, dense and developed cities.

If it were truly the case that rural voters down play the importance of intercity public transit, then Vancouver should have the same dismal public transport priorities that plague NYC. In contrast, Vancouver has a long history of progressive public transit initiatives despite being attached to a very large and sparsely populated province which suggests that NYCs problem isn't the upstate voters.

Re: The U.S. Gets Less Subway for Its Money Than Its Peers

#134

Post by api_or_ipa » Tue, Jan 30, 2018, 2:38 AM UTC

adventured wrote: post #123

api_or_ipa wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretty tired of "$REGION is too big and sparsely settled for transit" argument. British Columbia is over 2x the size of California, with about 1/10th the population but the city of Vancouver, the only large urban area in the province, has consistently high transit usage and investment. In fact, projections for transit usage have understated the growth in transit usage.

The lack of population density is a benefit in many regards. Texas is likely going to soon deploy high-speed rail at a cost not much higher than Western European standards or equivalent (adjusting for economic variance). There are two good reasons for that: Texas is far more friendly toward development, and there is a lot of sparsley settled, inexpensive land.

The challenge of public transport is to get the timing exactly right. Ideally, you'd build transit where nobody currently lives but will move to immediately after construction ends. Build it too late and it's really hard to make the necessary infrastructure modifications. Build it too early and the line won't generate enough usage, political opposition will grow and other modes of transportation will replace it.

Re: The U.S. Gets Less Subway for Its Money Than Its Peers

#135

Post by twblalock » Tue, Jan 30, 2018, 2:53 AM UTC

ghayes wrote: post #100

twblalock wrote: post #75

This ultimately has to come back to voter standards. Other first-world countries in Europe and Asia manage to create comprehensive public transit systems cheaper and faster than the US does -- yet they also have environmental reviews, safety standards, unions, contractors, etc. They are able to do it simply because the people running the city fear that they won't be reelected if they fail to provide comprehensive, pr…

When you say Asia, are you including China? It's likely that the situation is different in each country, and grouping "Europe and Asia" versus the "US" leads to a pretty sweeping generalization.

By that logic, you should never compare any two countries to each other, because they all differ in so many ways.

Re: The U.S. Gets Less Subway for Its Money Than Its Peers

#136

Post by fatjokes » Tue, Jan 30, 2018, 2:55 AM UTC

"...Rosenthal talked about labor problems: severe overstaffing, with some workers doing jobs that are no longer necessary..."

I learned that in one of the office buildings in NYC, there is one (sometimes two) custodians who press the elevator buttons and call out the next one to arrive. These are modern elevators with indicator lights above them. I learned it was because of a union requirement.

I always liked the idea of unions, having learned about how workers were trampled on "in the old days". After moving to NYC, however, my opinions toward them became a bit more tempered.

Re: The U.S. Gets Less Subway for Its Money Than Its Peers

#137

Post by ucaetano » Tue, Jan 30, 2018, 2:57 AM UTC

ska wrote: post #121

ucaetano wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> All you have to do is look at healthcare to realize this is (at least a) questionable assertion. Healthcare companies are more profitable in the US than anywhere else in the world. Yep, "most efficient private sector" still applies.

You realize that’s not what efficient means, right?

Oh, it is, it extracts profits like nobody else.

I'm not talking about efficiency as in providing the best bang for the buck to consumers, companies and investors don't care about that. I'm talking about returns. Cold, hard cash.

Re: The U.S. Gets Less Subway for Its Money Than Its Peers

#138

Post by ucaetano » Tue, Jan 30, 2018, 3:00 AM UTC

jessriedel wrote: post #116

ucaetano wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It isn't about "enfficiency innovations". You always have to make tradeoffs between the collective and the individual, the private and the public. Allowing private companies to extract economic rents from the public is good for the private sector, bad for the public. And vice-versa. Take social expenditures, for example. The US spends 80%-90% of what Germany, Netherlands and Switzerland spend per capita PPP, yet the…

Economic rents benefit owners of entrenched corporations, but they don't make them more efficient . They also don't explain why US corporate practices make foreign companies more efficient when they are exported. And you haven't addressed the difference in public service efficiency since 10% in scale is not nearly large enough to explain order-unity inefficiencies in the US public sector. (And in absolute terms the U…

> Economic rents benefit owners of entrenched corporations, but they don't make them more efficient.

Efficient at extracting rents and higher profits, yes.

> And you haven't addressed the difference in public service efficiency since 10% in scale is not nearly large enough to explain order-unity inefficiencies in the US public sector. (And in absolute terms the US is larger, anyways.)

Wait, you do know how good social services are in Germany and Switzerland, and how bad they are in the US, right?

If I had to rate social services in DE and CH, I'd give, let's say, an 8 and a 9.

Now in the US, well, maybe a 4 if you're lucky.

And they cost about the same per capita.

Re: The U.S. Gets Less Subway for Its Money Than Its Peers

#139

Post by ucaetano » Tue, Jan 30, 2018, 3:07 AM UTC

ska wrote: post #122

indoordinosaur wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would argue that because healthcare is so regulated its more of a public sector thing. Also, an enormous amount of money going into the healthcare sector comes from public sources (medicare, medicaid, obamacare, etc.) Note: I'm not saying regulation is bad. Just making the point that healthcare is really not a free-market in this country and never has been.

Almost nothing is a free market - so you have to be careful of the no true Scotsman fallacy.

You're mixing free market and laissez faire. Any market without monopolistic forces and where prices are set freely by the balance of supply and demand and competitive forces is essentially a free market.

Re: The U.S. Gets Less Subway for Its Money Than Its Peers

#140

Post by jessaustin » Tue, Jan 30, 2018, 3:24 AM UTC

shard972 wrote: post #111

pcurve wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed, but the article does explain why it costs absurd amount cost per mile. Unnecessary roles that don't reflect modern construction techniques, high union labor costs, regulations, and concession to people to minimize quality of life disruptions, etc. I'm all for fair wages, but $110+/hour or $225,000/year? Give me a break. You'd have lines going out to NJ if they open up the job to everyone at $85,000/year. I wo…

I wish people could start with that premise in healthcare, that there isn't 1-2 big things causing the US healthcare system to be so expensive. So many people seem to always have a point about "Oh if we just moved everything to medicare" or "if we just repealed obamacare" as if there is a silver bullet. The only thing i think we can know for sure about why the US healthcare system is expensive, it's because of what y…

I almost wish we could forget for a moment that health care in USA is expensive, and pay attention instead to how quickly it is getting so much more expensive. Let's just stop the worst of the bleeding, and worry about solving all the problems later.