
Transit Costs Project - plc95
https://transitcosts.com/about/
======
dnhz
This Dec 2017 nytimes article is a relevant read:
[https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/nyregion/new-york-
subway-...](https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/nyregion/new-york-subway-
construction-costs.html?referrer=masthead)

> France’s unions are powerful, but Mr. Probst said they did not control
> project staffing. Isabelle Brochard of RATP, a state-owned company that
> operates the Paris Metro and is coordinating the Line 14 project, estimated
> there were 200 total workers on the job, each earning $60 per hour. The
> Second Avenue subway project employed about 700 workers, many making double
> that (although that included health insurance).

It seems like transit bureaucracies in the US don't have the expertise to
manage massive construction projects and little incentive to control costs.

I was unable to browse the link because the site is overloaded, but I'm
familiar with Alon Levy and his blog. Hopefully the data makes a difference
but bureaucrats often to respond that their situation is unique and not
comparable to other countries.

~~~
vlovich123
Wouldn't that give foreign companies an advantage in bidding for American
contracts?

~~~
dnhz
What do you mean? What would give foreign companies an advantage? If a transit
construction project can be done at lower cost, isn't that a good thing, for
the local government and for riders? And construction is something that hires
local workers anyway.

~~~
brutusborn
If the foreign companies can bid lower and with faster schedule, then they
have an advantage to win the contracts over US firms

~~~
bobthepanda
Foreign firms do bid, just not with lower costs or faster schedules. Skanska
from Sweden is in charge of NYC's East Side Access, which was originally
forecasted to be completed in 2007 at a cost of $4B, and has morphed into the
world's most expensive per-mile rail project at $12B with a completion date in
the 2020s.

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jamestimmins
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/](https://pedestrianobservations.com/).

~~~
Ericson2314
Holy shit that blog is good. Thank you!

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supernova87a
It's an important topic, yet unsexy for the general public, which is why it
needs more attention.

Cost just seem to slowly ratchet up in the US, with each piece of the
process/org taking their little chunk of $. I'm sure rising standard of living
is part of it, risk aversion, outsourcing public infrastructure capabilities
(and responsibility) to private contractors. Add to it also the important
topic that we've fallen out of practice (as a country) of having large numbers
of people who are capable of working on these kinds of infrastructure -- so it
gets more expensive to find them.

It's a big loss. We could have 2x or 3x the new infrastructure we do, if it
didn't cost so much.

~~~
bonestamp2
I wonder how it works in Tokyo. They have the most impressive infrastructure
of any city I've ever been to, and it seems that is because they never stop.
At that point, it makes sense to just salary everyone involved and not deal
with the corruption that comes from outsourcing. The most popular vehicle on
the road in Tokyo appears to be the concrete mixer.

~~~
adrianN
I've heard that the railway companies in Tokyo own a lot of the real estate
around the stations. They cross finance public transport as a means of making
the buildings they own more attractive.

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fmajid
It’s not just transit. All local government projects in the US suffer from
cost disease. No doubt corruption and waste plays a part, as do rapacious
unions, but there is also the whole machinery of public participation designed
to prevent future Robert Moses from steamrollering their pet projects, which
worked all too well.

~~~
joshmaker
> rapacious unions

Worth noting that Paris has famously powerful unions and yet still manages to
build transit projects for much less than New York City.

~~~
earthboundkid
The nice thing about a large dataset is it can disprove (or prove) everyone’s
pet theory for why the US is so broken.

~~~
labster
At least we all agree the US is broken.

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mcint
It has been hugged to death. Neither archive.org or google's web cache have
it.

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bleepblorp
It's not in archives because it was just published today.

~~~
mcint
Well, archive has 2 snapshots today... but they’re both of the resource limit
exceeded page.

Anyone can add it to the archive. Archive.is makes it easy. Many posters
snapshot a page in order to share it... for exactly this hug-of-death reason

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xoxoy
feels like Covid has put a serious dent on interest in mass transit...used car
sales are through the roof. and people seem to be moving out of urban areas to
suburbs.

~~~
jeffbee
> used car sales are through the roof

There doesn't seem to be data supporting this assertion in the US. Used car
sales were slightly up in June 2020 vs. June 2019, but May was flat and April
and March were way, way down.

[https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/fredgraph.png?dwnld=0&hire...](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/fredgraph.png?dwnld=0&hires=1&type=image/png&bgcolor=%23e1e9f0&chart_type=line&drp=0&fo=open%20sans&graph_bgcolor=%23ffffff&height=450&mode=fred&recession_bars=on&txtcolor=%23444444&ts=12&tts=12&width=1168&nt=0&thu=0&trc=0&show_legend=yes&show_axis_titles=yes&show_tooltip=yes&id=MRTSSM44112USN&scale=left&cosd=2015-06-01&coed=2020-06-01&line_color=%234572a7&link_values=false&line_style=solid&mark_type=none&mw=3&lw=2&ost=-99999&oet=99999&mma=0&fml=a&fq=Monthly&fam=avg&fgst=lin&fgsnd=2020-02-01&line_index=1&transformation=lin&vintage_date=2020-09-01&revision_date=2020-09-01&nd=1992-01-01)

Sales of all cars are way, way down
[https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/TOTALSA](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/TOTALSA)

~~~
wrkronmiller
This data is only thru dealerships, I believe.

Anecdotally: I know no one who takes public transit in NYC anymore. They
either bicycle, bought a car, left the city, or stay home.

Generally: Many people have fled the city to suburbs where, presumably, they
will need cars.

~~~
epistasis
Going beyond anecdote to data shows the US transit ridership is down, but I
don't think this is based on the reality of transmission possibilities.

When people get scared, they retreat from that which culture tells them to
fear, which includes transit for the US. However, when you look at other
places that use lots of transit, like Japan and Korea, we don't see much
spread on transit. So the fear is not so much reality based. In plain
contrast, churches are shown to have had many super-spread events, including
in South Korea, yet people seemingly can't wait to get back to church, perhaps
because it is a place that they view as intrinsically safe even though the
evidence shows otherwise.

In short, humans are really bad at evaluating risk, especially in our current
media environment which is has a very low Signal to noise ratio.

~~~
throwaway0a5e
>In short, humans are really bad at evaluating risk, especially in our current
media environment which is has a very low Signal to noise ratio.

Isn't this just a nicer way of saying that the unwashed masses don't have the
same priorities the experts want them to?

We live in a democracy, shouldn't social consensus do the lion's share of work
in defining what is and isn't good risk assessment? If the overwhelming
majority of people would rather be scared of a rare disease than a car crash
then doesn't that kind of define what our priorities are even if guarding
against the latter looks better on the metrics?

~~~
michaelt
There are some questions that are clearly questions of fact. For example,
"Which killed more Americans last year, car accidents or terrorist attacks?"

There are some questions that are clearly questions of opinion. For example
"Should we spend more money on reducing car accidents than we spend on anti-
terror efforts?"

There are also questions that straddle the border - for example "Should lives
shortened by pollution count as deaths caused by cars?"

While questions of opinion are the domain of social consensus and democracy,
it's not particularly elitist to say the purely factual questions need a right
answer rather than a popular one.

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chabad360
It appears that the website is currently undergoing the hug of death.

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travisporter
This is great!

But I don't know if it's because of 2020 or I'm just a cynic, but getting
gov't or even the private sector to implement solutions that come out of such
a think tank is going to be tough. I feel that people in power are becoming
very nearsighted

~~~
throwaway0a5e
Organizations that are poor and have no choice but to perform efficiently are
the only ones that do. The catch is they get less done because they're poor.
Buffalo doesn't have a subway but if they did you can bet your ass they'd get
more for your dollar than than the MTA does. Likewise your local dirt and
scrap haulers are making their trucks go further per dollar than the high
dollar urban construction outfits could ever hope to. When you don't have a
lot you care about how it gets used.

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supernova87a
Fitting. "There will be a small project delay of 8 months to get the website
to a state where it's able to serve active web visitors. Also, please increase
our budget by 20%."

