Pedestrian Observations

Not every western country (although every Anglophone country). There's a whole spectrum of costs - e.g. Spain has the lowest costs and fastest delivery of transit projects in the developed world, by a large margin (maybe an order of magnitude?). Alon Levy at https://pedestrianobservations.com covers this in great detail if you're interested.

This ignores the fact that European countries are able to complete infrastructure projects with better worker protections and tighter environmental controls for a fraction of the cost. I haven’t read the article in question but follow Alon’s blog where he provides ample examples of this… https://pedestrianobservations.com/

The Pedestrian Observations blog is great for construction cost analysis: https://pedestrianobservations.com/

US is absolutely terrible at large infrastructure projects. This article has some good details and statistics: https://www.niskanencenter.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/levy-infastr… In general, Alon Levy's blog has great articles on this topic and he lives in Berlin https://pedestrianobservations.com/

Pedestrian Observations is great for railroad systems https://pedestrianobservations.com/

Piecing together the story from https://pedestrianobservations.com and other places, I would not imitate Japan in this regard. - Japan's terrain is fairly ideal for rail. Yes, mountains make for more work, put people are also naturally congregated near the coast, in valleys, etc. Additionally, the largest cities with the high population form a linear chain from roughly Nagasaki to Tokyo. That means more network effects per distance of rail (there's no penalty separate than time delay for traveling through other cities first). - Japan has perhaps the best policy around land use in the developed world. See https://www.sightline.org/2021/03/25/yes-other-countries-do-housing-be… for some details. This helps greatly with density and clustering around rail stations. - The privatization was triggered by the fright around Japan's big deficits after the 80s boom, and perhaps still maintained with some fear of that. That doesn't make it a good idea, of course, but I'm willing to call it more "defensive neoliberalism" than "offensive neoliberalism", but maybe that makes it a little less ideological given that Japan was the poster child for all the neoclassical economic doomsday predictions? - https://pedestrianobservations.com in particular says the privatization and and general being spooked about more debt holds back some construction on paper, but since the rail is so well established already and operationally profitable, there is less to screw up. In…

Right now it takes between 100 and 120 minutes (scheduled) to go from Poughkeepsie to Grand Central Station or vice versa during peak times. For Riverhead to/from Penn that's 120 - 130. Add travel time on both ends to get door to door times, plus variability on the high side (very little chance of being early). Most people consider that uncommutable though people do it. Poughkeepsie is 73 track miles from GCS and Riverhead is 75.1 track miles to Penn Station. The average speeds that would be need to bring these areas into the reasonable commuting range are not Shinkansen-esque. Even within the official borders of NYC there are some areas with quite difficult commutes to Manhattan. Consider the Bay Terrace neighborhood of Queens. From there to the NYSE stock exchange via public transportation google maps recommends the Q13 bus to the Bayside LIRR station, a Port Washington branch train to Penn Station, and then the number 2 subway. Total trip length: 130 minutes, monthly cost: $330.14. Or consider co-op city in the bronx, from there to the stock exchange google maps recommends a .9 mile walk to the 5 train and then an hour long ride on that subway. If walking that distance was a problem you could take the Bx30 and then the 2 subway for a total trip length of 106 minutes. There are many many sensible transit projects. The big problem is that we have seemingly lost the ability to do transit projects in any sort of reasonable cost or time in the greater NYC area. I've posted…

I love trains! And I agree that they are superior in comfort and ease than flying. But the train still has to generate massive amounts of new traffic that doesn't currently exist to justify its huge costs. The TGV is something of an anomaly, and tough to compare against. It both beats all ridership estimates, and also comes in at half the price of even the Shinkansen: https://pedestrianobservations.com/2023/06/21/why-does-tgv-ridership-o…

https://pedestrianobservations.com/2023/11/24/curves-in-fast-zones/ is a good analysis for anyone who doesn't want to believe jcranmer or wants more detail. (what I linked is a second best approach, but it links to other low hanging fruit like switches)

I have been hacking on a better calculation environment for train speed zones. Alon Levy wrote some python code that calculates how long it takes a train to accelerate and decelerate between different speed zones. I have been cleaning up the code and adding more to it. I'm bringing it into a jupyter notebook so transit advocates can better present their routings. So far I have a framework that allows easy expression of alternate options along a segment of track I'm not far off from being able to click and drag track segments on top of a map with ipyleaflet. I also want to hook in an optimizer to recommend the best track routings by cost. There's still a lot of work to do. Is anyone else interested in hacking on this stuff? [1] https://pedestrianobservations.com/2023/10/27/setting-speed-zones/ [2] https://github.com/paddymul/train-calculator/blob/main/Segment-generat…

There is lots of research on that for transport infrastructure at least. https://transitcosts.com/ https://pedestrianobservations.com/

Spain is the outlier for fast/cheap/good, but I hear that even Italy has gotten its act together, and the recent Rome subway was done quickly and cheaply. The Nordic countries also have a good reputation. England is pretty bad/comparable to the US in speed and cost. https://pedestrianobservations.com/ and the less feisty https://transitcosts.com/ are the canonical sources on comparative infrastructure costs.

or Levy's 2021 version for the whole US and adjacent bits of Canada: https://pedestrianobservations.com/2021/03/22/high-speed-rail-followup… , which follows They did the math and decided to connect Florida to the main Eastern component (based on there being enough demand for Atlanta-Florida travel), so there are four components - the main Eastern component, Texas, California (+Vegas, Phoenix), Pacific Northwest (Portland to Vancouver)

On the same blog there’s an article criticising exactly this argument in detail: https://pedestrianobservations.com/2021/06/26/meme-weeding-polycentric… "Looking forward rather than backward, nothing in Germany’s urban geography is an obstacle to a connected high-speed rail network. With central stations and less of the population living in truly isolated rural and small-city communities, Germany can expect to greatly surpass any other Western intercity rail network if it builds high-speed rail, more than reaching DB’s pre-corona 250 million ridership target."

For those interested in a real deep dive, and I mean, deep, check out the blog https://pedestrianobservations.com/construction-costs/. And the comments are super informative! It makes a lot of complex analyses using the best cost information available, and compares projects across countries, states, geography, politics, etc. I'm impressed by the technical engineering analyses. We IT people could learn a thing or two. ;) Like, "this subway project in NYC cost $N billion USD, which cannot be compared to this subway project in France, which cost $M billion EUR, because of the diameter of the tunnel used and the composition of the dirt under the ground."

Strongly agree. We're seeing legislation target the sector of the economy with some of the highest productivity ever seen in human history. Congress needs to look at the sectors with the lowest productivity growth! Home construction, infrastructure, health care, and eduction. Here's a great place for congressional investigators to start: https://pedestrianobservations.com/2019/03/03/why-american-costs-are-s… Though, in reality, many those industries are high cost because of congress

Good blog I sometimes read about public transit/urbanism/etc. https://pedestrianobservations.com/

When we talk about where would rail work there are really only two or three places worth talking about; California and everything east of I-35. As an example, the Midwest has roughly the same population as France, and the TGV network overlaid kind of lines up with major population centers. https://pedestrianobservations.com/2021/04/04/european-urbanism-and-hi…

Thanks, this is a great read[1]. The incuriosity he sees as the reason why nothing is done is something I've seen a lot of, and have been thinking more and more about. As he notes, it's not just lack of interest in making things better, but refusing to believe better is possible even when presented with examples of better systems. [1] https://pedestrianobservations.com/2019/03/03/why-american-costs-are-s…

I'm insanely excited about this. One of the research scholars, Alon Levy, has written extensively about infrastructure costs on the blog https://pedestrianobservations.com/.

Some I follow: https://apenwarr.ca/log/ - programming, high level perspective https://www.benkuhn.net/ - programming, startups, effective altruism https://danluu.com/ - programming, hardware https://pedestrianobservations.com/ - public transit https://sideways-view.com/ - lots of interesting ideas, very eclectic And plugging my own blog: https://www.jefftk.com - effective altruism, contra dance, diy, not very focused

"why is American infrastructure so bad?" has been a topic I am curious about. The above article does not answer the question. I'd prefer not to care about American infrastructure costs. Unfortunately, I occasionally have to leave my house, and the consequences of bad infrastructure stare me in the face: people living in their cars, traffic jams. The best attempt to actually answer the question I've seen has been "Pedestrian Observations" blog. Their take on the same GAO report is: [New Report on Construction Costs Misses the Mark](https://pedestrianobservations.com/2019/07/22/new-report-on-constructi… "The GAO report is out now, and unfortunately it is a total miss, for essentially the same reason the RPA’s report was a miss: it did not go outside the American (and to some extent rest-of-Anglosphere) comfort zone"

Americans pay a lot into public infrastructure, but we just get much less for our dollar. (An insane 10x less when talking about urban rail.) I don't think the American voter is what is broken here. People still believe in infrastructure projects. It's the public sector that has shown they can't be trusted to complete any worthwhile project for a reasonable amount of resources. The quintessential example of this is urban rail, which is ridiculously expensive in America: https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2018/01/why-its-so-expensive-to… https://pedestrianobservations.com/2011/05/16/us-rail-construction-cos…

I assume you're speaking figuratively. Here's an extremely literal elaboration for the railfans in the thread. The route length of the NYC subway system is 245 miles. Subway construction costs vary across developed countries, but generally fall between $200-$500 million per mile[0]. So under extremely optimistic assumptions, 40 billion would get us to about 80% of the current subway network. For those interested in analysis of subway construction costs, I highly recommend Alon Levy's work at Pedestrian Observations: https://pedestrianobservations.com/construction-costs/ [0]https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2018/01/why-its-so-expensive-to…

Well, that does fit into what I meant -- Outside North America, it seems to be generally (more) taken for granted that public transit and density/mixed-use feed into each other (such that either can be a prerequsite for the other), whereas in North America, because we're in such a car equilibrium, public transit mostly just spends most of its time apologizing for the poor land use. Although it is probably worth noting that e.g. Los Angeles has some places (kind of) like what you're talking about [1], but it's basically a drop in the bucket. [1] https://pedestrianobservations.com/2018/11/11/meme-weeding-los-angeles…

If you're interested in the design/factors in mass transit, I highly recommend Alon Levy's Pedestrian Observations blog. For example, this is a post about bus branching: https://pedestrianobservations.com/2018/07/14/bus-branching/

What's interesting is dozens of message on HackerNews and nobody links to any type of studies or evaluation of Elon's work, just repeating is selling point that because the tunnel is smaller, it will be cheaper. Public transportation and cost is a very well studied topic internationally (outside the US) and we can't just assume that for a fact. Actually, boring is actually not the most expensive part of building a subway. Even this idea of saving 10x the amount of money, actually just works when you compare with other US subway construction projects. Close to 10x saving has already been achieved in Spain and in South Korea, and surprise, it didn't need some new fancy technology. Great article here: https://pedestrianobservations.com/2017/12/15/elon-musks-ideas-about-t… Basically

It's more expensive everywhere than it used to be, but the construction cost inflation is vastly greater in the US than in other developed countries. Construction is getting less efficient over time. https://pedestrianobservations.com/2011/05/16/us-rail-construction-cos… https://www.economist.com/news/business/21726714-american-builders-pro…

This is pretty silly since countries like Sweden, France and Germany have much lower infrastructure costs but equally or more stringent regulations and obviously stronger unions. I'd love to see a source for the 6-7x figure for regulation costs. Alon Levy has a good blog that steadily beats the drum about US costs and what can be done to fix them: https://pedestrianobservations.wordpress.com/category/transportation/c…

As a counterpoint, I'd recommend reading Alon Levy's blog post "Why the Focus On Penn Station?"[1]. The TL;DR is that the 650,000/day ridership number significantly overstates actual ridership, and includes subway ridership that wouldn't really benefit from most proposed improvements. There are far better uses for transit funding in the NYC area. Even within Penn Station, the low-hanging fruit would come by improving the track level (wider platforms/fewer tracks), rather than the concourses. If this piques your interest, Levy's "Eliminate Penn Station" proposal[2] is worth a read, although he admits it's somewhat trollish. [1] https://pedestrianobservations.wordpress.com/2013/05/31/quick-note-why… [2] https://pedestrianobservations.wordpress.com/2015/07/15/eliminate-penn…