How Madrid built its metro cheaply (2024)

I share your frustration, but having seen the last two governments, can you, hand on heart, actually see them _deliberately_ trying to keep planning laws the same to benefit certain companies? I mean you can see them try, but actually succeed and keep it a secret? [1]

They do not have the cognitive capacity to run a party, let alone a secret conspiracy.

The sad truth is this: Planning law is a huge tangled web of laws, and common law. It is painful to unpick because one of the biggest drivers of local anger from voters is a new development of x. ( be that housing, shops, turbines, industiral unit, path, sign anything) The same people that make local pressure groups are the same people that vote.

Any change to planning law is hard, and ripe for smear campaigns.

"We want lower power bills"

ok we need to build some infrastructure

"POWER LINES ARE BAD, DOWN WITH POWER LINES"(sad picture in the newspaper, the new power lines block my view [powerlines are 4 miles away from their house] they are an affront to us living here. When we moved here they wern't there [when they moved there it was cheap because they are 5 miles away from a massive power station])

"kids have nothing to do, lets have a new playground"

Ok, let me plan that out

"NEW PLAYGROUND DUBBED THE TEENAGE DRUG PALACE HAS A BILL OF 450K" (angry photo of a man outside an empty field. "I don't like the noise" said many wearing two massive hearing aids)

Worse in the facebook age, its now a hate campaign where people are accusing others of being peadophiles for holding any kind of opposing view on local planning.

[1] yes yes, Jenrick and section 106 money.

I grew up in Florida and that's been a rough situation for a while. Crazy that they haven't been able to figure anything out over the decades it's been going on. I grew up with many citrus trees just around the neighborhood. I wonder if those have got it too.

people making this argument always forget the most critical aspect - people generally need healthcare when they are not working, almost always when retired.

Your argument is then essentially that people should be working indefinitely.

We’re talking about how labor costs impact subway construction costs. Retirees aren’t relevant to that. (And the U.S. has universal healthcare for them anyway.)

In tamil nadu atleast, building housing for workers nearby the workplace is not the part that causes issues. The way it typically happens is that the business bears the costs, and at the least gets to do the maintenance contract themselves. And the state government provides security (especially when its a lot of women workers) and other utility services. Fairly smooth. The issue primarily is in the earlier negotiation and things like subsidies.

> SEZ dealing with SARR, but atleast its the state governments that face the headache and not the businesses

Can't underestimate the benefit of this difference, it's massive.

> It works until it doesn't

Yep, the failure modes are also of the ugly kind.

> Urban villages, abadis, bastis, jhuggis, and other informal settlements should be demolished and expropriated to development authorities if India wishes to replicate the Asian model.

I don't think we will replicate that model. I am not entirely sure what the model will be, since it's extremely unique. From my weak knowledge of asian countries, I think they took up, loosely speaking, individualistic capitalism, way more than I see among indians, income level and opportunity cost held equal.

I haven't yet seen an explanation for this, and the easy ones (e.g language, community) don't hold up to what I have seen.

I mean even most slums these days don't really have dirt poor people living in them. Dismantling it is not something the state can do and then just ignore the "powerless slum dweller" The people who used to live in the slums in the 70s decided to keep it that way (since they know the land is worth millions) and live in a standard apartment in a standard neighbourhood and treat the slum land as generational wealth. If you bulldozed it you will have money and lawyers coming at you. Not to mention they use tactics like building small temples and/or local hero memorials. So demolishing it becomes a news item on top of that. The new batch of city immigrants then stay in the actual slum asbestos houses, but after cities expanded most of them don't _really_ stay there. Some are also managed as a tourist attraction which leads to, let's say, artificial occupation. The problem with it is that it's forced, but that's another conversation.

It's the same with most urban issues - it only gets solved when the people (or more precisely, the swing voters) get rich enough to implicitly solve it. Electricity became better in TN only when majority of rural people became dependent on the mixer-grinder for making breakfast+lunch to take to work for husband and wife, all in the morning, enabling new behaviour. Until then they didn't really care if electricity went off. Note that city dwellers dont matter as much in elections, and less so back then. Flood management became much better since vardah was the first time majority of houses actually started having valuable things that get damaged! Before that, rural households simply kept their jewellery in the loft and moved to higher grounds. Only the urban dwellers actually suffered. Roads and storm-water mgmt became better only after most people started owning two-wheelers. It's still bad, but not as bad.

This is of course much slower, but there is also some surety to it. If there is a real incentive backing it, it ends up being executed better (by govt execution quality standards). And where I have seen it happen in front of my eyes in a rural town I frequent (now quite well-equipped I admit), it gets executed with a certain "fear of next elections" that I personally enjoy.

One interesting tidbit: of all things, internet connectivity is one such thing today. All rural households depend on it to such a degree that they would hanker more if "data is not there" versus even water not being there. Have observed people seeing water connections having issues, and temporarily reverting to the decade-ago norm of fetching it from a nearby pump with pots and mostly just... accepting it. But they go complain the same day when "data" goes out. To be fair, they use it for almost everything and not just leisure like we urban dwellers do, so it's understandable, but still.