81–90 of 248 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
France has unions out the wazoo, yet you don’t see nearly the level of cost increases.
France has French unions, America has American unions. Each are run according to different sets of rules and in different social contexts.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Behind the bastards has an episode about Robert Moses. https://www.iheart.com/podcast/105-behind-the-bastards-29236...
Much better is Robert Caro's masterful _The Power Broker_.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
you cant blame slowness on wages
Sure, but wages + census makes a difference. The NY Times did a comparison of the construction of the 2nd avenue subway project after the governor took the 5th or 6th victory lap. As I recall, the TBM used in NYC was “mannned” by 5x more workers than an identical machine in Paris. We’re talking like 50 people. France isn’t known for labor efficiency, but between the various labor agreements, minority/women owned empl…
- station sizes (causing spend on stations to increase by a factor of 2)
- nonstandard systems (elevators, escalators, etc) (causing an increase over nominal best practices of approximately 1.35)
- inefficient procurement (how contracting works) (increase by a factor of 1.85, although this is a squishy)
- soft costs (design, planning, construction management, contingencies) (factor of 1.2, again fairly squishy)
- labor costs (factor of 1.5 over a well run transit system baseline)
so it's both the case that the labor costs are outrageous and that they're insufficient to explain the outrageous project costs.
Everyone who wants to find fault with modern constructions trots out the Second Avenue Subway as an example. This subway is an obvious route for convenience and as such was first proposed more than a hundred years ago. At that time analysis of the geology and hydrology along the route as well as the very large amount of infrastructure including other subways already in place resulted in the conclusion that a subway a…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Alon Levy and the transit costs project are a great source of actual hard analysis on this- https://pedestrianobservations.com/2023/02/25/the-issue-of-c... has a great concise breakdown, pasted here because no one will click through: Based on around 100 interviews and many diagrams and reports, we managed to decompose the New York construction cost premium over low-cost countries, which is about a full order of magni…
I can't speak too much to the first several points, but noting - agency micromanagement of contractors - general red tape is very fitting and a direct contribution to - too little competition I worked with a startup company ~8 years ago that wanted to go after government contracts. According to the owners, everyone they demo'd the product to said it was very clearly superior to what they were currently using. Unfortu…
This reads like a lack of democratic influence and even direct corruption.
That is, these "stakeholders" are not concerned that the voters would be unhappy with their performance, and would fire them (directly or through an action of a newly elected official). They seem to be conveniently shielded from feedback of the population which they nominally are hired to serve.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Sprawl leads to cheaper housing at the cost of more expensive infrastructure costs Nope. Sprawl's infrastructure cost is about the same as urban cost over time. This is because maintenance of city infrastructure is way more expensive. "Expensive roads" are also a myth. As I said, one mile of NYC subway can cost as much as 1000 miles of 6-lane freeway. Or another point, Seattle is building subway expansion at the co…
The cities that allow for lots of sprawl (eg Houston) are not very nice places to live in many people’s viewpoints. They definitely never make the list of nicest cities. People aren’t clamoring to live in Houston, they are trying to live in Seattle. Turning Seattle in Houston would probably just make less people want to live there (well, that’s one way to solve Seattle’s housing crisis). Roads are a bad value for wha…
"Many peoples' viewpoints" is a cop-out. You can apply it to ANY phrase: "In many people's viewpoints we should drop a nuke on Manhattan and rebuild it from scratch".
If you look at objective data, Houston beats NYC handily in pretty much any important metric.
Houston commute is 26 minutes vs 33 minutes for NYC. Per-capita income after taxes is similar, and housing costs in Houston are not even in the same league ($3000 average rent vs $1300). Houston also has less income inequality (Gini coefficient of 0.51 vs 0.55 for NYC).
> People aren’t clamoring to live in Houston
This is rich, because Houston is one of the fastest-growing cities in the US: https://www.click2houston.com/news/2016/03/24/census-data-sh... - it's THE fastest growing city in some measures.
Apparently, nobody goes there - it's too crowded.
> Roads are a bad value for what you get. Not only is the throughput not great, they are expensive to maintain.
You're making factually false statement after factually false statement.
I really find it curious how people swallow the urbanist propaganda without ever bothering to check if it makes sense.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
European style unions are not the same thing as American style ones, despite both being called unions. I wish they had different names because they are quite different.
And what would you say makes them different?
In the US you are forced into a single union for an employer.
In Europe the union is for the employees, they have lots of employees from a wide variety of places, and they offer them services.
In the US the union is for the employer - they stand in between the employee and the employer and purport to decide what's best for the employee.
Speed is affected by process, and process evolves in reaction to abuse. In the beginning, it's quick to do everything, but as people take advantage - routing contracts to friends, taking safety shortcuts - rules get put into place and those rules affect the time to complete. For New York specifically there's another factor that it's strange the article omitted: Robert Moses. Prior to the mid-1960s, it was fairly simp…
There’s another very important factor about Moses that people overlook. They did things in-house. There’s an anecdote in the book about how they had a building on Randall’s Island with 100 draftsmen on call at any time. The minute the federal government announced more money was released they’d whip up designs for highways or bridges before anyone else and have the proposal in. There’s a lot of stories like that. Mose…
This is how things were done for a long time, but anywhere the government delivers value is quickly "privatized" the next time a conservative government is elected.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Behind the bastards has an episode about Robert Moses. https://www.iheart.com/podcast/105-behind-the-bastards-29236...
Much better is Robert Caro's masterful _The Power Broker_.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/28/nyregion/power-broker-tv....