What slows down development in the U.S. is accommodating competing interests in a democratic society. My parents, who live in the area, were among the people who strongly opposed the overland route and wanted a tunnel through Tysons, which would have cost another billion dollars and jeopardized federal funding. That tunnel fight took up a lot of time. There are environmentalists who care a lot more about the impact on the environment than the economic or convenience benefits of the new line. There are folks who remember when Fairfax County was a pretty sleepy place and strongly objected to any line at all. In the U.S. we try to reconcile competing interests as much as possible. In China, pro-development officials steamroll over everyone else.
Not to mention, the GDP per capita in the Tysons area is about 8x that of Beijing. We spend a lot more on safety because we have a lot to lose.
I'm a pro-development kind of guy, but the Chinese model of unelected technocrats dictating what gets built isn't the right answer. We should be looking to Western Europe, where development like public transit gets done because there is widespread public support to push things through the democratic process.
> I'm a pro-development kind of guy, but the Chinese model of unelected technocrats dictating what gets built isn't the right answer. We should be looking to Western Europe, where development like public transit gets done because there is widespread public support to push things through the democratic process.
Except in our history the major projects that got built were built in exactly this way. Robert Moses[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Moses] is perhaps the most famous example of this, but we've had many others. The technocrats get either a public official, or a private multi-billionaire and make their vision happen, and damn the consequences.
I'm not familiar with the history of urban development in Europe, but I would not be surprised to see similar figures behind the first few systems before the benefits were obvious to everyone else.
Democracy is really good at forcing the system to take, or pretend to take, competing needs into account, but end of the day in basically every system "he who has the gold makes the rules".
Not to mention, the GDP per capita in the Tysons area is about 8x that of Beijing. We spend a lot more on safety because we have a lot to lose.
I'm a pro-development kind of guy, but the Chinese model of unelected technocrats dictating what gets built isn't the right answer. We should be looking to Western Europe, where development like public transit gets done because there is widespread public support to push things through the democratic process.