124
votes
The United States can't build infrastructure. The reason: it refuses to learn from other countries
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- Title
- Pete Buttigieg, Bent Flyvbjerg, and My Pessimism About American Costs
- Authors
- Alon Levy
- Published
- Aug 6 2023
- Word count
- 9960 words
Alon Levy's recent blog on US attitudes toward transportation infrastructure spending contains some high-level comments on American construction costs, which are dramatically higher than in other developed countries. Levy, a seasoned urban planner and consultant with the Transit Costs Project (among other organizations), provides a few main reasons:
Here's a quote that sums it up:
Levy comes from a highly international background and these comments have been a theme in his work for some time. He's correct: infrastructure costs far more in the United States than it does in Europe or Asia. Anecdotally, I agree with his assessment that the "people in charge" are xenophobic and inherently skeptical of literally any infrastructure project, policy, or design choice used in other countries, regardless of how obviously successful it would be in the US. Even the US cities with the best transit systems have consistently terrible cost overruns and unnecessarily high absolute costs, largely for the reasons laid out in this blog.
The Transit Costs Project has studies for several such cities. The solution is ultimately for Americans to psychologically recognize that the US is not the greatest country in the world, nor that our ideas are necessarily the best, and in fact that we can learn from other places. The extremely prevalent (and equally false) idea that literally nothing done in Europe or Asia can possibly translate to the US harms us more than we realize.
People wonder why voters don't trust our government to do more for us, this is it. Anything they touch results in overspending and subpar work. Yet those are the same people who don't pay attention enough to hold elected officials accountable. I feel like we're too focused on national politics, maybe if the state representatives handled national business we'd care about the local stuff that affects us more and realize not everything is the president's fault. It's a lot like a European country blaming the EU for all their issues and mostly ignoring their own country's government while it turns to crap.
Just a heads up that I believe Levy is non-binary and goes by they/them.
Thanks for the note. I had seen both pronouns on various websites and was unsure.
A fun rule of thumb that I’ve been using is just to use they/them as a default and only use she/her or he/him if I know that one of those is correct
Big thumbs up, I’ve been trying to do the same, and honestly most people I talk to in person don’t even seem to realise that I do it until half way through a conversation they go to use a pronoun and realise they’re having to guess
Far better this than underbuilding. I've seen far too many projects end up under capacity because the responsible governance police (a.k.a. voters) demanded "exactly the right capacity with not a cent wasted" and then acted surprised when they needed to consider expansion within five years.
It isn’t necessarily far better. Budgets are zero-sum and if you overspend on a subway station then you don’t have enough money to build a new bridge somewhere else. This extremely lackadaisical approach to government waste ensures that the US doesn’t have public transportation.
For example, California High-Speed Rail was envisioned by politicians, not engineers. They stipulated that the route must be
entirelyprimarily constructed for 220mph service (even when that’s not strictly necessary or reasonable for the budget) in order to reach a specific trip time between LA and SF. They also expanded the project scope, increasing the number of parallel tracks they wanted to build along the whole route. This is great and all, but it dramatically increased the cost of the project. Now, because of the organization’s mismanagement of funding, the only high-speed section set to be completed within the next decade is between the minor population centers of the Central Valley—not the big cities it needs to serve. Because there was so much insistence on doing everything absolutely perfectly to a gold star standard, the project has about an $80 billion funding shortfall to complete Phase 1—and the route they’ve built is not in a great position to easily expand. Had they not specified sky-high design standards that made it impossible for them to start construction anywhere other than the middle of the desert, it’s possible we would be on a better timeline. Whereas now, it seems like this project will only inch along.I’m not advocating for underbuilding. I’m advocating for “building.” Because if you do reasonable engineering capacity studies, you can determine exactly what you need—and not waste a billion dollars on a massive concourse that can’t conceivably be adequately utilized. You can also design structures in ways that allow for expansion without costing billions of dollars. American designers don’t do this: they make complicated, non-modular infrastructure not suited for expansion and then complain about it being expensive to expand or integrate with other projects. The difference is literally an order of magnitude, unfortunately. That means we are capable of building 1/10 the amount of infrastructure we could be.
Levy’s “Assume Normal Costs” article on what New York City could build if we were cost-effective with design and construction is enlightening.
Regardless, the issue of construction costs isn’t just overbuilding. There’s a lot going on. I encourage you to read the article in this thread, as well as the ones I’ve linked above.
I haven't had time to read the articles just yet, but I see why we had such sharply different views on the wastes associated with underbuilding vs. overbuilding. What I had in mind was a road being expanded from 2 to 3 lanes because "surely there's no way we'd need more. Besides, we don't want to induce too much demand" and then within a decade the government needs to throw away more money on acquiring the now more valuable right-of-way to upgrade the road to the 4 lanes it needs than if it had simply done a 2 to 5 lane expansion in the first place. Perhaps my cautionary tale is more about selling rights-of-way instead of retaining broad margins for future expansion.
The metric superiorist in me also wants to add that they simply cannot understand the numbers involved so they have no way of knowing whether the projects are superior or not in the first place. 😈
But yeah it's a big problem. And you get it everywhere, but the US in particular have this built-in resistance to any outside influence. Historically there's some sense to it, they were self-isolated as they were people escaping from perspectuion. And from there it got normalized and institutionalized.
I can point to at least a few factors of this mulltifactor phenomenon.
We have many excellent universities. It is rare to study abroad and people who do, tend to choose the UK or Canada. I am close to someone who had a long career in environmental and urban planning. A few times in his career he went to conferences in other US states, but his only experience in Europe was a motorcycle trip at the age of 21. His formal education was entirely within one US state and likewise all his jobs were within the state.
We have a history of assuming superiority, based in part on our identity as one of the first modern republics and as a capitalist economic powerhouse and in the 20th and 21st century a military superpower.
We aren't for the most part trained in languages other than English beyond very basic levels.
I've seen New York Times columnist/podcaster Ezra Klein and talk about this a lot (e.g., here).
His general thesis is that we have built a lot of ways to slow things down and not enough ways to get things done. We've made obstruction easy, which makes it easy for certain interest groups to co-opt those things in bad faith in order to stop things they don't want. Whether that's infrastructure or high-density housing or what have you.
Thanks for this comment. I agree with the conclusions in the quote you provided, at least at a high level, though I am unclear on most of the specific implementations needed for government to become truly effective. To be honest I don't think I'm savvy enough about politics or government to have a qualified opinion on this topic.
On the one hand, I see so much utility in cutting back on endless bureaucracy and regulation so that we can, say, build high-speed rail projects without NIMBYs increasing costs every step of the way. But looking at the absolute devastation caused by the federal government literally bulldozing city downtowns to build interstate highways through them in the 20th century... I have to say I'm skeptical about leaving local advocates out of the picture. I don't want to repeat the destruction of minority neighborhoods just for the sake of building high-speed rail. :/
It's unclear to me exactly how to strike a balance between efficiency and carelessness. Europe seems to do it relatively well (?), but I don't even know where to start with that. The US is intentionally decentralized in a way European countries largely aren't; lots of rights for states are written directly into the Constitution.
I know Levy explicitly talks about state capacity in some of their articles, albeit from a more financial perspective. They identify the government's reliance on consultants as a specific cause of inefficiency in regard to transportation. I enjoyed this comment of theirs in an article shared on Tildes by @skybrian some time ago:
Yeah, me neither. It's something I've heard Ezra Klein talk a lot about in his podcast. It's evidently enough of an issue for him that he's currently taking a few months off from his podcast (and possibly NYT column) to work on a book with someone about this issue.
One of the things that he talks about is that a lot of the legal roadblocks that are available to NIMBYs and the like were created for good reasons, like the neighborhood bulldozering you mentioned. Klein is very left-leaning so he is sensitive to that issue. I think that's why he likes looking abroad to see how other countries handle that balance. I just hope that the issue is getting onto the radar of people with the power to actually do something about it.
Klein touched on this in one of his recent podcasts, a transcript of which can be found here. I'm tempted to quote huge swaths of it, but I'm going to restrain myself.
I hope there is a balance between how we do things now (or don't) and just letting the government run roughshod over anyone who gets in the way of any project.
I really liked this perspective. With my job, I'm very conscious of the impact of years of lobbying and spending by the automotive and related industries to weaken public transit and undermine its viability. I'm fascinated to hear these insights about our systemic resistance to learning from other countries that have such obviously more successful models. Thanks for sharing this.
I'm glad you enjoyed it! Levy has a whole category on his blog about construction costs, as well as an explicit category about good transit systems, among many others. That blog is a wealth of insight by itself—especially because of how frequent Levy posts—and is a convenient place to discover plenty more transportation-related materials (see the sidebar). We have a lot to learn from the rest of the world!
This article is mostly about government-owned infrastructure, like roadways, railways, bridges, tunnels, stations, and rolling stock. It describes the ways that Departments of Transportation stymie progress on their own infrastructure because they are not good at preventing costs from spiraling out of control.
I agree that private monopolies are not beneficial to consumers.
I wonder how much cheaper and efficient construction costs would be if we used the Metric System.
Yes, there would be transition costs, but after that was paid, using the same system as the rest of the world would make imports would definitely help.