11 votes

How Santiago, Chile builds effective transit, the fastest in the Americas

Posted by scroll_lock
Tags: urban planning, chile, railways, transport.public, author.reece martin, videos, rmtransit
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HxiYhk1zRNQ

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Title
How This American City Builds Transit on a Budget
Authors
RMTransit
Duration
10:05
Published
Sep 19 2023

3 comments

  1. [3]
    scroll_lock
    (edited )
    Link
    Americans are obsessed with the United States. They are interested in the Anglosphere, especially the United Kingdom, and are taken with Western Europe. They could not care less about the rest of...

    Americans are obsessed with the United States. They are interested in the Anglosphere, especially the United Kingdom, and are taken with Western Europe. They could not care less about the rest of the world, except occasional exotic glances at places like Japan. This US-centric mindset is harmful when urban planners only take inspiration from the US, and not anywhere else. This issue is extremely pervasive, even though planners are educated and otherwise qualified. As I commented on in a recent thread, the United States can't build infrastructure. The reason: it refuses to learn from other countries.

    RMTransit's most recent video looks at Santiago, Chile as a prime example of a transit development model that the United States could learn from, being careful to account for relative costs. The city has seen incredibly rapid growth in its rail network over the last few decades. Chile is not a country most Americans could place on a map (many have probably not even heard of it), yet its urban infrastructure is some of the most modern and efficient in the hemisphere. What gives?

    American culture is rooted in the idea of "American exceptionalism," this idea that the US is fundamentally so different from the rest of the world that it deserves its own way of doing just about everything. This false belief has bled into the way Americans engage with even basic questions about relevance. To some extent, it manifests as racism as many Americans look down on infrastructure built in South America and Asia, even though it's often dramatically better than that in the US.

    In addition to recognizing specific areas of improvement in our own networks, it's valuable for us to re-evaluate what it means to be generally open-minded: we have to be proactive about learning not just from American transit projects but also from projects around the world, even if project reports were originally written in languages other than English, and even if their users are not English-speakers. American urban planners should try to take inspiration from places they don't currently look at. We all stand to benefit.

    5 votes
    1. [3]
      Comment deleted by author
      Link Parent
      1. DynamoSunshirt
        Link Parent
        What feels anti-US about that comment? I do a lot of reading in the transit space, and this is hardly the first time I've seen the idea that American planners actively ignore wisdom from other...

        What feels anti-US about that comment? I do a lot of reading in the transit space, and this is hardly the first time I've seen the idea that American planners actively ignore wisdom from other countries. For example:

        And there’s the rub. We’ve talked to Americans at these levels – regulators, agency heads, political advisors, appointees – and they are often interested in issues of procurement reform, interagency coordination, modular design, and so on. But when we mention the issue of learning from outside the US, they react negatively:

        • They rarely speak foreign languages or respect people who do, and therefore don’t try to read the literature if it’s not written in English, such as the Cour des Comptes report on Grand Paris Express.
        • They have no interest in hiring foreigners with successful experience in Europe or Asia – the only foreigner whose name comes up is Andy Byford, for his success in New York.
        • They don’t ever follow up with specifics that we bring up about Milan or Stockholm, let alone Istanbul, which Elif points out they don’t even register as a place that could be potentially worth looking at.
        • They sometimes even make excuses for why it’s not possible to replicate foreign success, in a way that makes it clear they haven’t engaged with the material; for a non-transportation example, a New York sanitation communications official said, with perfect confidence, that New York cannot learn from Rome, because Rome was leveled during WW2 (in fact, Rome was famously an open city).

        (https://pedestrianobservations.com/2023/08/05/pete-buttigieg-bent-flyvbjerg-and-my-pessimism-about-american-costs/)

        Just because someone observes a flaw in American reasoning doesn't mean they're anti-US or "ranting". But it is a serious issue that we refuse to learn from other countries that have successfully built far superior public transit at much lower costs. The first step in improving our infrastructure is... getting city planners to admit that there's an issue in the first place! Which very few are willing to admit today in the USA.

        2 votes
      2. scroll_lock
        Link Parent
        The video focuses on Chile with some references to high American costs (the narrator cites Levy, for example). I share it on this English-speaking site with the goal of giving people who speak...

        The video focuses on Chile with some references to high American costs (the narrator cites Levy, for example). I share it on this English-speaking site with the goal of giving people who speak English a little more exposure to a transit system in a city whose inhabitants mostly do not speak English.

        My comment, which is my opinion and not just a summary, is indeed a rant. As an American sharing this content by an American on an English-speaking site, I also want to contextualize the video in a way that is tangible to people here. The United States has some of the highest costs to build public transportation infrastructure anywhere in the world, meaning that less transit is actually built per dollar spent. This leaves millions of people stranded in urban transit deserts and forced to rely on expensive private automobiles for transportation, severely limiting their disposable income and thereby hurting their quality of life. The reasons for this are completely unnecessary and completely solvable. It is necessary to be critical of the American philosophy of infrastructure when it actively harms individuals and communities, as it currently does.

        I'm not "anti-American." I was born here and I love my country for the good it offers me and others. But there is a lot to improve here.

        2 votes