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How Madrid built its metro cheaply (2024)

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Re: How Madrid built its metro cheaply (2024)

#71

Post by cladopa »

As an engineer myself working for them 20 years ago, we were certainly not well paid like the article said. Quite the contrary: I was still on University(had not finished the final project) and had to do most of the hard technical work myself for someone else to just overview the results and sign. My salary was miserable.

Once I had finished I could earn 3 to 4 times more on several places.

They were also extremely creative taking foreign systems, studying the patent and modifying it to pay zero to the creators of the patents. This was done with things like the aluminium beams for electricity delivery that I think was developed by Italians, or the tunnelling machines that had all the pieces replicated inhouse.

Re: How Madrid built its metro cheaply (2024)

#72

Post by thelastgallon »

aianus wrote: post #60
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…

Why would anyone prefer public transit over a self driving comfortable personal car?

Why would anyone prefer a car that YOU have to drive over an autonomous all terrain comfortable personal horse?

A horse knows how to navigate any kinds of terrain, while a car requires constant microsecond attention, extremely stressful, if you lose focus, might end up dead, worse kill a lot of other people! Horses don't need roads to be built, or the elaborate supply chains of fossil fuels, and trillions of dollars per year in subsidies.

Re: How Madrid built its metro cheaply (2024)

#73

Post by zelphirkalt »

Having been in Madrid and having used the metro, I was also impressed by how well it works. Seemingly always on time, and very good price service ratio. You can buy "rides" and one ride means get in at any station and get out at any other station of the whole network, interchange as many times as you want. For, at the time, 1.16 Euro. Compare that to Berlin, where you can pay some 4 Euro or so for limited amount of stops or time. Madrid metro >> Berlin public transport.

Re: How Madrid built its metro cheaply (2024)

#74

Post by i_love_limes »

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…

This is a pretty egregious misreading of both Hardin and Ostrom, where on earth did you get this from?

Hardin did not argue that private industry was more efficient. His paper described that with an unmanaged, private, unregulated open pasture that has no property rights, individuals will exploit it until it collapses. It wasn't used used as justification for privatization, if anything it was the opposite.

Ostrom did not argue that unmanaged resources don't collapse. Instead, she showed with data a third way of organising which was more involved with self-governing, communal rules to manage shared resources without resorting to either a private corporation or government control.

Re: How Madrid built its metro cheaply (2024)

#75

Post by zelphirkalt »

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…

About rolling out standardized infrastructure in China: One can also see this in their high speed train stations in capitols of provinces. Manny of them look of feel the same with their 28 tracks.

Re: How Madrid built its metro cheaply (2024)

#76

Post by Aerolfos »

cladopa wrote: post #71

As an engineer myself working for them 20 years ago, we were certainly not well paid like the article said. Quite the contrary: I was still on University(had not finished the final project) and had to do most of the hard technical work myself for someone else to just overview the results and sign. My salary was miserable. Once I had finished I could earn 3 to 4 times more on several places. They were also extremely c…

Sounds like Spain all right.

The article also makes a big deal out of country-level factors like the system of autonomous communities, governance, in-house expertise etc.

But all of those should apply to Malaga as well, which also built a metro in the 2000s. But that one became a city-wide joke for always being supposed to open "this year" and that continued for at least 5 years...

There was definitively none of the cheap or fast involved in that project, a relatively limited line to make travel to the airport more convenient which still couldn't deliver. Today it actually operates, but I think the rest of the network (it was supposed to be a "proper" metro system and not just isolated lines) is still vaporware. Haven't lived in Malaga in many years, though.

Re: How Madrid built its metro cheaply (2024)

#77

Post by alkyon »

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/296888725_Geology_a...

The article is in French, but geology is the key factor. Do you need to bore rock or sandy soil with tar? Is the area seismically active like in Los Angeles? This affects the cost and timeline of metro construction more than just wages.

Re: How Madrid built its metro cheaply (2024)

#78

Post by stymaar »

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…

> Yet people still quote it.

It's worse that this: It's being taught to pretty much every student of economics during the first few classes, Ostrom sometimes being quoted as a counterpoint but not always.

Re: How Madrid built its metro cheaply (2024)

#79

Post by Schiendelman »

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…

There are serious issues with that approach. If you don't have continuous funding from the projects, you end up with a big overhead of highly paid engineers without work for them to do. Then you have to lay them off, so you lose the institutional knowledge anyway.

We tried this early on with sound transit in Washington state, and because engineering work is boom and bust on a project by project basis, the model just doesn't work. The good people left for better jobs, and we were left with a team that basically couldn't produce, leading to massive delays on the next set of projects.

Re: How Madrid built its metro cheaply (2024)

#80

Post by miguelxt »

fer wrote: post #50
gib444 wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the UK infrastructure projects are about creating jobs and making their friends rich first, and providing some kind of useful infrastructure last (and also optional) There is so much thievery of public funds it's just corruption disguised as incompetence and the public believe it every time

In Spain it is the same, the Metro de Madrid being an anomaly rather than the norm (for now). Some flagrant cases: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ciudad_Real_International_Airp... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castell%C3%B3n%E2%80%93Costa_A... https://maps.app.goo.gl/8BRnx8eQFfihvHmv5 https://english.elpais.com/elpais/2019/05/17/inenglish/15580... The 2008 crisis had a special flavor in Spain, cajas de ahorros (privat…

To say they were "privately owned" doesn't sound right. Cajas de ahorros had no shareholders so profits were not distributed to any "private owner". Leaders and executives of the Cajas were appointed by a mix of local councils, unions, autonomous regions, and other non-private organizations. Juridically, they were "private organizations", but factually, they were just a form of state-owned company, as it was the municipalities and regions that made the important governing decisions.
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