How Madrid built its metro cheaply (2024)

Post by tsimionescu » Thu, Jun 18, 2026, 6:49 AM UTC

thomasfl wrote: post #47

thelastgallon wrote: post #19

Meanwhile, bay area has companies with market cap of 30T (50T?), has nonexistent/incompatible and the slowest public transit. 1) BART 'works' for a subset of the population. 2) ACE train is one route only, from Stockton to San Jose. 3) Caltrain is one straight line. Caltrain has a bullet train that takes an hour for ~20-30 miles. 4) There is a ferry service for some parts of north bay. There are probably dozens of ot…

Private companies and competition, solve a lot of problems in the society. Like making food supply work. Planning and building cities and public transport is something the public sector is better at solving. Clean, nice and walkable cities with a good working public transport system, is important for the local economy to work. City planning is the art of compromises - no body get’s what they want, but overall everybo…

Post by Symbiote » Thu, Jun 18, 2026, 6:58 AM UTC

gene91 wrote: post #23

anovikov wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I understand housing construction, but why would a NIMBY be against metro construction? Being close to a metro station means real estate prices skyrocket and that's what NIMBYs are after.

In metropolitan areas, people want to be close but not too close to train/metro stations or railroad/tunnels. 5-10 minute walk is ideal. Anything closer, people have vibration/noise and crowd/security concerns. In US suburbs, a lot of people are going to drive even if they live next to a train station. So there’s no convenience or property value benefits. To them, they only see downsides.

Post by nephihaha » Thu, Jun 18, 2026, 7:03 AM UTC

tormeh wrote: post #27

jmyeet wrote: post #21

In 1968, Garrett Hardin wrote a paper called "The Tragedy of the Commons" [1]. Many people seem to think this term dates further back to Adam Smith or earlier it does not. Well, this became hugely influential in noeliberalism and was used as the justification for governments to sell off their assets in the 1980s and 1990s in particular, all based on this (flawed) idea that private industry was more efficient. This wa…

Visited China recently and it's pretty astonishing what can be achieved if you just ignore the whiners, complainers, environmentalists, and local governments. NIMBYs? Get lost. Have unique local culture? Funny but no. There's a special kind of beetle living there? Tough shit. It's ugly? So is your face. Etc. This is how the West built its infrastructure back in the day - nobody consulted NIMBYs or the native American…

Post by frollogaston » Thu, Jun 18, 2026, 7:21 AM UTC

gavinsyancey wrote: post #20

anovikov wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I understand housing construction, but why would a NIMBY be against metro construction? Being close to a metro station means real estate prices skyrocket and that's what NIMBYs are after.

* Disruption while it is being built * Fear that a metro will bring in "undesirables" (i.e. poor / lower-class people) * Concerns about noise (whether real or imagined) * Some people just hate change

Post by darreninthenet » Thu, Jun 18, 2026, 7:28 AM UTC

thatmf wrote: post #8

> Unlike infrastructure projects in Britain or America, which are heavily reliant on external consultants to handle all stages of the project, this group of well-paid in-house engineers led much of the Madrid Metro expansion. The team stayed largely the same throughout the different projects, meaning that they were able to learn from their experience and apply it to future projects. Imagine that: building expertise i…