I work for the Federal Government (health) and this resonates with what I see. Government staff are buried under dozens of process requirements (like Small business requirements) and leadership measures success as no one yelled at us, not “did we objectively improve things.”
Exactly. It all comes down to too much community/advocacy/etc. input. To get stuff done well, you need to be able to tell a lot of nice folks to pound sand, even when they ask for stuff that, on its own, is reasonable.
In private sector management, it's understood that goals need to be simple, hard to "game", and focused (i.e. not too many.) In the public sector, however, a new goal is added at every meeting with the groups/advocates/community members, and no one thinks through the tradeoffs to the other 500 goals already on the books. No dare objects, because the culture of those groups is to bite your head off if you do, and most of them haven't managed anything with clear deliverables so don't really understand the trade-offs themselves. Also, most people in government are progressives themselves, so don't want to get on the wrong side, socially, of any particular progressive pet issue.
A lot of these problems are downstream of not having a non-progressive party that cares about government service provision. Most "moderates" don't care enough about government to get involved, so you either align with the groups, or you align with the party that just wants to drown you in a bathtub.
I'll say, I think this overestimates social pressure and underestimates legal pressure. The concern I hear is not usually 'people will be mad at us' but 'mad people sue and I want to get this project done, not sit in court.'
The solution to that is the solution to a lot of other problems: make courts more efficient so people are more afraid of losing in court and less afraid of being sued.
If "sit in court" means "go down to court for two days in a couple of months, explain why they are wrong and the court will agree with you and throw the case out" then people would be much more prepared to go to court.
IMO the story here is that society should be defining the goal via democracy, and government should execute on that goal. The problem is that we leave execution up for political debate as well.
Yep, you both are describing the micro dynamics of why a government monopoly on rail travel sucks. I agree 100%. But also don’t know anyone looking to get into that business so not sure the options.
And I agree, we could use a labor party to help fix shit like this. We never would’ve been landed with Trump if those interests had been minded anyway.
Isn't having a party whose basic outlook is premised on handwaving away the existence of inconvenient externalities and minimizing regulatory burdens kind of an odd conceptual fit for urban America? Cities are pretty much externality factories, and leaving the innumerable interpersonal disputes they create up to the court system instead of an ex ante regulatory regime seems like it might even be worse than the regulatory regime itself. Meanwhile mass transit isn't conceptually impossible to privatize but at a minimum has an awful lot of both dependence on public infrastructure and characteristics of a natural monopoly, whereas Libertarianism generally looks askance at the public sector at large.
Note that I'm not saying I don't want an alternative to the urban Democratic machine (bring back the Rockefeller Republicans, I guess?) so much as that I find the Libertarian party / brand to be a particularly unusual proposed standardbearer for one, even if on the margin a great deal of regulatory reform or rollback of public sector over-provisioning would be in line with the Libertarian ethos.
Tell us specifically what a 'moderate Conservative party' wants. I bet it would be pretty unpopular. Much like libertarians are outside their little bubble.
In a pure urban government ecosystem, you want the main party competition to be between a technocratic party that concentrates on effective delivery of government services and a "don't forget minority X" party, because that's the main failure mode of technocracy; the second party can be pretty patronage/clientelist because the technocratic party can counter that problem.
Yeah, at least in New York City (and from what I gather this is pretty ubiquitous in urban Democratic politics across the states) clientelism is pretty much in the position of telling technocratic effectiveness to stop hitting itself.
Does anyone know if the various branches of the military operate in a similar way or are they more efficient (e.g., goals more defined, leadership hierarchy more established)? I feel like the Army Corp. of Engineers has a strong reputation -- what's their secret?
Yes and no, largely depending on what the military is doing. The hierarchy is very established and is generally meritocratic (not perfect, but pretty good as large organizations go). You have a pretty clearly-defined set of interests, and these exist to support the primary goal of training readiness or application of foreign policy when deployed. Logistics, communications, etc. are all subservient to the ultimate goal of applying force in one way or another. There are regulations for most anything, which is where I suspect that the Engineers do well--the Army does a pretty good job of collecting and codifying best practices so that most parts of the Army are interchangeable.
Where I think things go off the rails a bit is where each of those supporting functions intersects with the rest of the government, particularly in terms of acquisitions. I was in Army logistics and 80% of my mental energy was spent playing whack-a-mole with whatever the outrage of the day was over.
The systems for getting stuff and using it (mostly repair parts) just isn't very efficient, and the vendors are neither reliable nor fast. Buying stuff commercial off the shelf (COTS) was a nightmare, and required us to prioritize veteran vendors, "green vendors", etc. There was someone always digging about why we hadn't fixed some vehicle that was missing a backordered part for 120 days, as if I could just yell at the vendor and get them to go faster. Lots of wondering why stuff doesn't work when it's brand-new out of the box, or why a random part like a tire costs multiple times what one would expect given its quality. There's basically nothing that can be done about that at the operational level where things actually happen, so you're kind of beholden to this lumbering inefficient system for getting stuff purchased, fixed, disposed of, etc.
Basically it works overall, but there was a lot of wasted energy on busy work that probably didn't materially improve our readiness or efficiency. That's ultimately an intentional tradeoff to create repeatability and interchangeability and generally seems better than other parts of the government, but it's still not great.
Yup, totally agreed. I think they’re an example of where generally competent meritocracy and codified best practices are a really powerful combination. My own experience was in an infantry BCT, just the regular operational Army.
Yup, my time in the Army was the same way. Make trackers green, don't get yelled at by somebody at division, and remember to only buy things from one of the six special interest groups who charge us 1,000% what something should actually cost.
That's clearly better than alternative models (see the Russian military), but surely we can do better.
The trick (for the regulator, not the implementor) for those sorts of purchasing rules is to write in how much of a price premium you pay for them.
I know UK rail franchising had rules where meeting certain criteria would let you treat the bid as being 5% or 10% less than the actual price. These were combined multiplicatively (so if you got 10 of the 10% discounts, it wasn't treated as -100%, ie free, but -65%, ie (0.9)^6). I'm sure that other sorts of purchasing have these same sorts of rules, but rail franchising is one I have actually looked at. Rail franchising was ended because it collapsed over COVID, so these specific rules don't apply any more, but the general system is used in quite a lot of procurement.
If you say "must prioritise veteran/minority suppliers" then they can crank the price up hugely, but if you say "veterans can change 20% more than non-veterans" or whatever, then they know how much they can get away with.
> And importantly, telling agencies to try to hit a half-dozen different goals … doesn’t ensure that all those things will be done simultaneously. What it ensures is that, with no principled way to evaluate projects or say no to things, costs explode.
The cynic in me wants to believe that agency leaders would like to avoid a simple and objective measure of performance. If they are solely evaluated by ridership/dollar-spent then they could fail to improve on that metric and be charged with bad decision making. In contrast, if they claim to be balancing numerous unquantifiable objectives, then it’s much harder to criticize their performance. For example, if we point out the low ridership volume then they can point to their progress in expanding access and creating good paying jobs.
And I think there is a general tendency for all leaders and workers to resist objective evaluation. For example, I've seen this criticism applied to the anti-testing movement in education where it is alleged that poor teachers simply want to evade detection.
I’ve also seen this aversion to performance evaluation within the tech industry, particularly within discussions on the tech forum Hacker News. While there are many poor approaches to measuring software developer performance (e.g., lines of code count), there still need to be some objective evaluation. Quality measures can include annual peer review using a rubric of dimensions.
Yet there is commonly fierce objection to any evaluation of software engineers within such discussions. Numerous excuses are given for any proposal, while no alternatives are offered. It seems software engineering is conceived as some impalpable art that cannot be evaluated, even by fellow artists. And this extends to strategies and criteria for interviewing prospective engineers. All commonly used methods, such as whiterboarding code exercises, are castigated as inadequate to measure the intangible brilliance and abilities of engineers.
I just think we all have some natural aversion to being evaluated for fear of failure. Therefore our institutions, both public and private, need to be designed to counteract that tendency.
But finding objective performance metrics is extremely difficult. In sport, we have a perfect record about what a player did in a game. It is still difficult to determine through objective means how well a player did.
In soccer, a player could screw up receiving a pass, but what if the player that passed the ball was more at fault for making a bad pass? What about a forward that scores fewer goals than another forward, but was better off the ball and in defensive play? Statistical techniques are still improving. I recall the book Moneyball stating that baseball fielding didn't matter, which seemed like nonsense then and we now know is definitely nonsense.
In software, there are many things that determine how well a worker did. Subjectively, you know Bob is better than Alice, but how do you know that? What objective criteria can you use?
Frankly, these are solved problems. Sports analytics people have done a ton of work to quantify the value of individual soccer players. You can argue there’s more to do because those evaluations aren’t perfect, but the specific problem of distinguishing a good player on a bad team is not intractable at all.
Same goes for software. Most tech companies I’m familiar with have some form of goal-setting and tell engineers “your job is to move us towards the goal, and that means prioritizing working on impactful projects rather than vanity engineering projects.” Now this won’t work perfectly in every case but it would certainly fit a network-effect business - and if there’s a better example of a network-effects business than a *transit system* then I don’t know what it is.
If a team's job is to reduce a certain kind of defect, and that defect rate actually went up, then everyone on that team is objectively incompetent and they should all be fired. Right?
Not really. You're interested in counterfactuals. What would the defect rate have done without that team? What would the defect rate have done with a newly hired replacement team?
In tech we do some amout of A/B testing, but that's usually on the external-facing product level, and causal inference is not simple to get right.
This boils down to the distinction between “not simple to get right” and “extremely hard to even do”. I’m going to say that it is true that getting this right requires some work but it is eminently doable, particularly for the government given where it’s starting.
Off the top of my head, here are some dimensions I’ve commonly seen used
* Technical Skills - At each Eng level, what are the expected capabilities?
* Impact - What degree of contribution is expected for each level?
* Mentorship - For higher levels, the mentorship responsibilities
* Leadership - Again, higher levels, the degree that they should drive the team and interact with other teams
* Collaboration - How well do they help other people get stuff done?
* Interview - For higher levels, how involved should they be in interviewing? How well are their decisions calibrated against other interviewers for the same candidates?
For each dimension, an engineer will be ranked on a scale of 0-5. The rubric will include criteria and examples for each score.
On an annual basis, each team member will review other team members as assigned by their manager. Only the manager sees the results of each review and they combine multiple reviews to create an aggregated performance evaluation. That can then be shared with the team member to learn how well they are performing against expectations and their progress towards promotion.
While never perfect, the rubric is regularly revised in an iterative process using feedback from all team members. The result is a clear description of expectations and current performance for all members on the team.
Not irrelevant, but much less important than previously thought and hard to measure. The best batter is probably ten wins better than the worst; the best fielder is more like three, so you can live with some really bad fielding to get great batting (which was the insight of that era, if not how Michael Lewis put it in the book).
But we got a lot better at measuring fielding than we were in 2003, which means we can actually tell which fielders are three wins better than the others; when Moneyball was written, we could measure fielding so badly that it took multiple seasons of data to realise that Derek Jeter was a below-average shortstop. Now, we'd know within half a season and he'd have been moved to third base.
But I think it is still fair to criticize the stats that are being gathered. And the measurement of performance as a result of bad stats, bad counting, etc becomes far less useful. In baseball the frame rate is one of the lousiest measures of defensive efficiency and it has been given far more credence than the catcher’s ability to hold runners, call a good game etc. it’s gotten several catchers paid far more than they deserve. You could only discover this when you get to see the pattern of strike/ball calls by umpire (most umps miss badly behind the plate and it doesn’t matter who is catching).
EPA and DVOA measures (don’t get me started on o line stats) are really weak in pro football because the way a defense or offense play against one another naturally ends up being a path dependent game…so we lose repeatability.
Most of these issues revolve around an attempt to quantify the individual allocation to teamwork…I used to be a big fan of the use of these statistics but over time I’ve found them lacking over and over again as opposed to just using your lying eyes.
I’m not sure if there are lessons elsewhere other than that the workers in this case don’t generally make the stats…but maybe that doesn’t help in terms of objective measurement?
Slight tangent but there seem to be pockets emerging of individual win/loss match-ups within team games that are very predictive. For example, the shoulder pad accelerometer data is very predictive for wide receiver 1:1 separation and NFL scouting depts. have this for their teams + most power 5 conferences.
When you work in sales like I do however, there are absolutely no problems with evaluating performance, and there's no way to hide from the evaluation either haha. Your numbers are your numbers- it's crystal clear for both you and management- really anyone could glance at the leader board and see exactly how good everyone is
To be clear- I'm talking retained executive search where the board engages us, pays us a retainer up front, then we look through our network of C-level executives. I'm *not* talking about run-of-the-mill recruiting where they just spam out a bunch of messages for a lower-level position. Retained executive search is like a totally different (and vastly more respected) field than 'regular' recruiters like Robert Half or Aerotek or CyberCoders or whoever
This is certainly something I’ve seen in the private sector. At my large tech company, almost all teams have measurable goals against which they’re judged and held accountable. But one team I worked on explicitly (and successfully) resisted setting goals, citing “we don’t have enough control over the outcomes” as justification. But in retrospect it became clear that setting goals would have meant the team would have been scrapped; the lackeys like us working on that team would have found new jobs in the company, but the leadership would certainly have gotten laid off. Any goals they would have set would have been so ludicrously far off from success that they would constitute an indictment of the leadership of the team.
But also, when this organization is run from the outside, with 1001 interests screaming at you, you tend to serve those interests and do what it takes to balance making everyone happy that’s screaming at you.
What’s required to make this service more appealing is some risk taking and experimenting. This will necessarily piss some people off, so its not well executed by government. You need a profit motive driving or else its necessarily going to be catering to everyone. And as is sadly the case in my experience, nearly everyone has an astonishing lack of vision and appetite for trying new solutions.
I think you're right, the 1 clear metric is actually an advantage in this case though. Every transit official can now shrug their shoulders at all the local screamers and say "sorry it doesn't increase ridership, that goal was set with someone above me, take it up with them."
Tech executives are looking for simple, objective metrics that they can evaluate mechanically at scale. If you had a panel of subject matter experts review each one of your changes in depth, in light of its context, then you could do a pretty good job evaluating SWEs. In practice nobody’s going to pay for that. The closest you can get is asking people about their coworkers. But they don’t want to ask you about your coworkers. They want a report they can run across thousands of people overnight without any judgement calls, arguing, or potential bias. The SWE community rightly contends that there is no such report that would be even vaguely aligned with how practitioners understand being good at their jobs.
Things are a little less dire at the team level since you can check if the product a) was built, b) works well, or c) has the intended effect on the business. However an and b run dangerously close to asking “was the estimate accurate / budget sufficient”? Estimation is a different craft from engineering, and most of us are pretty pessimistic about the possibility of estimating well unless you have already done a very similar thing (in which case why don’t you just reuse it?). Poor quality happens when you are pressured to cut corners to meet an underestimated deadline. And products can fail to make make business impact because they are badly implemented, but more often they fail because they were bad ideas in the first place. You want to hold SWEs accountable for, what, not quitting a team in protest because the product manager’s idea was bad?
I agree with you that "(transit) agency leaders would like to avoid a simple and objective measure of performance", but for a much simpler reason: these investments are rarely justifiable based on that metric. Here in Los Angeles there's huge political will to build out a public transportation system (we voted to raise sales tax to pay for expansion). What we don't have is people willing to ride the trains once they're built. Our newest subway line is estimated to take $435 in upfront spend per trip, per year, which puts the payback period at 300 years for a $1.50 ticket.
If you're in charge of a transit agency, you have your peers saying that LA would be a much better city if it had a public transit network. The people of Los Angeles, to who you're ultimately accountable to, are saying they want trains built (for other people to ride). Even if you were the world's greatest transit genius and could lower costs by 90% to sub-Euro levels, it's still not a great payback on investment.
So what do you do? Pack it up and say it's not worthwhile? Tell the city council to get back to you in 50 years when NIMBY issues have been solved and there's enough density? Nope! You, I, and anyone else hired would do the same thing - build what you can then invent enough new metrics to justify the spend post-hoc.
Not enough density, and the density that exists is spread over multiple office and residential hubs which makes each additional route low value-add.
It's relatively easy somewhere like NYC where (pre-COVID) all the jobs were in Manhattan and cheap(er) housing was in Brooklyn or Queens, so you can have a hub & spoke system in downtown. LA doesn't have that center of gravity since jobs are spread out in Santa Monica, Century City, DTLA, El Segundo etc.
I fall into the same thinking often when considering government services and policy, my biz brain I guess. But these are most often not meant to function like a profitable business, but rather to provide for common good…for overall lower costs for society, promotion of unity and order and prosperity too.
Trump and gang tried to push this same thing in terms of the Post Office, and I thought that was/is tremendously short sighted especially as to the speed of commerce for our nation with so much payment and billing still executed by mail.
So the question really becomes, will the cost of construction+ operation cause enough usage to displace the costs of other transit displaced. So costs to consider against that “$10” include fuel+vehicle depreciation+road depreciation+ externalities of carbon pollution from driving+ benefit of reduction of congestion on highways (maybe) +\- commute time benefits for riders.
You're right, it is subsidized - prices probably should be closer to NYC / SF ($2-$3+) level to account for operating costs. Part of that $8.50 is the consumer surplus though, you can't capture all of that.
I believe this has been addressed a couple of times in other slow boring articles but the LA Transit buildout is coming with nearly zero land use changes and this is causing a lot of problems. There's absolutely zero effort going into upzoning around stations, building TOD or doing land value capture for future funding like BART has spent the last decade doing.
It sort of fits into the theory that one reason government is more dysfunctional than it needs to be is that modern GOP has become so hostile to government itself. Famous example is FEMA and "heckava job Brownie". But without buy in from both parties, you get a situation where one party ends up being able to pander to all of its interest groups with impunity with resulting excessive cost overruns.
Classic example and maybe most impactful example is environmentalism (which is obviously related to public transport). Pre 1990, GHWB administration was able to find a more economically efficient way to deal with acid rain because in part they actually believed acid rain is a problem and said government can play a role in solving it. Today, in theory GOP should be the loudest voices in favor of eliminating or reforming zoning or limiting delays caused by environmental impact studies. But instead because of their stance towards government in general, there is this missing voice for reform.
>If Dems are the only ones pulling for transit and applying to work at the agencies
I disagree entirely. This assumes rail is not a huge factor in commerce and freight, which it is, having worked in beverage, it is essential for low-cost density item transportation. Rail is not wholly pushed by Democrats. And the workers of Amtrak, while perhaps skewing urban and low income and therefore lots of minorities, are not wholly Democrats either not by a long shot. I would venture a large majority of Amtrak workers didn’t vote in 2022 elections, but admittedly have as little data as you do on this
I might agree that the cure is worse than the disease, but let's not pretend that the reason that there are a billion forms and reviews is right wing groups nutpicking. Historically there has been a lot of corruption in government and progressives in the late 1800s and early 1900s ran repeatedly on campaign promises to clean up government by getting rid of corruption. Similarly in the 60s and 70s, progressives were the driving force behind limiting government power to bulldoze communities by instigating environment and community reviews. They were the instigating force behind these requirements far more than right wing groups.
I’ll generally agree with this. My general conclusion (when I was a government employee) was that the many measures in place to stop very low level fraud actually were more expensive than the potential fraud they were combatting.
I think its perfectly fine to get mad at right wing groups for lots of things. But this doesn't make sense to me. Most right wing groups generally don't want more red tape, they want government to get out of it entirely - often foolishly!
But its progressives who use forms and procedures to rationalize or defend government action.
Many of the places where this is the worst are places where right wing groups have no power at all. If they were behind this at all, it wouldn't be AS bad there. But since this is primarily driven by progressives - its the worst where they have the most power.
I think you can make a case that this is also about ridership. I like the Jane Jacobs theory that the best way to police antisocial behavior is to have lots of people around. A subway car with 1 crazy person and 90 not-crazy people feels much safer than a car with 1 crazy person and 10 not-crazy people.
Planes are a terrible enough comparison so as to be useless. You literally need to go through a security screen to get on a plane.
Do you have a lot of experience riding transit? I really do not mean this as a slight, but if that comparison even occurs to you, it makes me think you are not someone who has ever used transit regularly. It's just not the same thing at all.
I suspect this is a reason that light rail ridership in Los Angeles refuses to take off. The ratio of unpleasant people to normal commuters is just too high and that deters other potential commuters from giving it a try and thus changing that ratio for the better.
This is the classic feedback loop of a social network: the antisocial person reduces ridership, which causes fewer people to be around, which amplifies the ridership-reducing effects of the antisocial person. There’s a reason social/commercial network businesses tend to focus on user growth above all else (including revenue/profit more often than not): once you’re in that downward spiral you’re in trouble. Conversely if you can sustain an “upward spiral” you can make enormous money.
I think this would be particularly effective on the west coast. Once Covid hit the busses were filled with homeless people. The people who cleaned the busses were finding lots of dirty needles. The number of discarded needles declined significantly… because people switched to fentanyl. And people smoking fentanyl on transit became a thing.
One thing that was very frustrating was that these perfectly rational concerns were dismissed as the obsessions of the privileged. And we should just ignore it because the people doing stuff linke that must be desperate. Except that the people who were most upset about this were not affluent. Often they weren’t white. And the people excusing this antisocial behavior tended to be people who didn’t take transit.
I agree its an issue, but the biggest? I would say poor frequency and bad routes are a much bigger issue in reducing ridership than anti-social behavior. Not to mention antisocial behavior becomes less of a problem with higher ridership- more of a buffer.
CCTV on buses is much cheaper than cops on buses. And having the ability to spot trouble and route a cop to the bus and have CCTV as undisputable evidence goes a long way. Every bus in London has CCTV, for instance.
Also provide an easy, fast, anonymous way for people to report antisocial behavior. When a report is received, footage from the time and vehicle can be viewed to figure out who caused the problem and their pass/credit card/email can be blocked from future use.
Definitely--on the L in Chicago, you have to get up and press an obvious "help" button. Good luck not becoming the latest object of attention for whatever crazy shit is happening on the train!
You put some people in housing (we need more housing) other people in mental health care facilities and others in prison. All of the anti social behavior I have seen on public transit comes from mentally ill or drug addicted (or both) homeless people. So much doesn’t get fixed until the American metro areas with massive homeless problems deal with the issue directly and not commission the 134th “study group” to analyze the issue and do nothing. I’m sick and tired of people saying it’s too hard to solve. It’s not, it just requires some grit and willpower y’all. That’s true of a lot of problems in America.
I was about to write exactly this, then read down.
Start shunning the (universally privileged and often white) faction who regard the basic maintenance of law and order as a sin.
They should have rotten fruit thrown at them every goddamned time they dare to open their imbecilic, ignorant mouths.
Only once that entire set of beliefs is a social net negative and not some kind of post-scarcity, status-elevating hipster stance, will people stop holding it.
>>Start shunning the (universally privileged and often white) faction who regard the basic maintenance of law and order as a sin.
Yes, it's incredibly annoying that a certain section of people treat tolerating antisocial behavior on transit as a badge of city life authenticity...but they're not themselves the ones who are the problem
I don't mean those folks, except insofar as they overlap with the ones who actively believe the police enforcing the law is bad and the very concept of coercion is illegitimate regardless of what it's in service of.
In NYC, at least, Plenty of antisocial behavior is *also* engaged in by unusually able-bodied young men who do acrobatics to music. This is a combination of “not enough cops” as well as the (usually extremely minor, IME, I don’t get the impression it’s especially lucrative, but it’s probably a lot more fun for the doers of it than working in an Amazon warehouse) financial support of a small number of riders for it.
I want to just sit (or, more likely, stand) and listen to my audiobook in peace instead of being involuntarily subjected to shitty loud music (also, I prefer to not to risk being kicked in the face). This is, conveniently, also the societal consensus and unambiguous law. I'm pretty sure "breaking the law against doing exactly what you're doing in order to cause a nuisance for a car full of people who didn't ask for it in hopes of maybe getting a few dollars" counts as anti-social behavior.
(Also, I don't think "Showtime" belongs in the same conceptual bucket as sitting-with-a-guitar busking.)
A couple months ago I was on the Seattle light rail at 7 am and a man was staring at me and masturbating. Fortunately he got off when the fare enforcement people got on.
I wasn’t in danger but it was gross and really gave my day a lousy start. The guy seemed homeless and was likely on drugs. this is one of those lousy things that happen to women. We should still try to make it as rare as possible and kick people off the train or bus whe. They do this
I don't think it's a lack of grit or will. I don't think it's bureaucratic sclerosis. I definitely don't think it's a handful of overly earnest, naive hippies, as David R. suggests below. It's money. That's why they commission 134 study groups: the appearance of action on a problem that is too expensive to begin solving. This country needs millions of mental health, drug treatment, elder care, and homeless shelter beds. It needs hundreds of thousands of new psychologists, nurses, orderlies, guards, social workers, and probation officers. It is all massively expensive. The money isn't there, there is no constituency demanding that those services be provided, and no one wants to raise the taxes needed to make any of it happen. And we've allowed these problems to become so big, even if we started doing everything we needed tomorrow it would be years before the public effects would be noticeable. Charles Adams wants to round up the crazies, and brags that the governor is providing 50 new beds. 50 beds? It's spitting in the wind.
It seems that requiring (and enforcing) a fare is a good step, anecdotally free public transit tends to attract people who are unpleasant to be near.
A clear means to report antisocial behavior and a quick way to block problem people from using transit would help. "If someone is behaving badly on the train, text us at 888-555-1234" signs. Use cameras to confirm the problem and ban any passes/credit cards problem people might use to access transit.
There actually is an easy-ish solution. It's a) have a critical mass of riders and b) have effective transit policing (which doesn't mean a cop in every bus or train car; it's more like "enough cops that people know they're around + good emergency response mechanisms)."
And I know it's an easy-ish solution because it was effectively implemented in most American cities with OK-to-good transit - NYC, SF, DC, Chicago, Boston, Philadelphia - from about the 1990s until Covid. When Covid happened, ridership plummeted, and it's only partially recovered. Crime went up, and I think you could argue policing has become less effective. So, fewer riders + more crime in general + less effective policing = more antisocial behavior on transit, at least proportionally.
And this was effective, too! At least at first: in most of these cities ridership went up in the 90s and the 2000s, but it stagnated in the 2010s, even though transit was still largely perceived as safe. There are several reasons for this, but I think a big one is that American transit, even in cities with good-by-US-standards transit, actually isn't that good. The low-hanging fruit was gone and operations had to be improved.
In cities outside of those six plus maybe a couple of others, I refer you to point a) above. In Austin or Cleveland or Miami, transit ridership is a rounding error, and skewed towards people who are unable to drive or afford cars, so of course you are going to see proportionally more disorder on transit. Jane Jacobs has her flaws, but the "eyes on the street" thing is a real insight, as anyone who has ever walked down a deserted street at night can attest. So more riders would especially help solve the problem in these cities!
But as someone who rode the NYC subway almost every day for 15 years in the 2000s and 2010s, basically no one outside of very very sheltered people from the outer suburbs and poorly-informed tourists thought of the subway as unsafe. That's not to say that there was literally zero crazy people. But it was - correctly - viewed as not something that one should be concerned about. There were a few times riding the subway when I was made to feel kind of uncomfortable due to a crazy person, but I literally never felt like I was actually threatened.
Definitely not true. If you’re in NYC and antisocial people deter you from taking the train, you’re going to be effectively deterred from leaving your house. The single biggest cause of low ridership is that the trains are slow with long headways and frequent delays. Removing all the homeless people from the NYC transit system would probably have about as much effect as making the trains 3% faster.
And increasing reliability. I don’t take public transit in the Bay Area because I’ve been stranded too many times when the bus has just not shown up. How am I supposed to rely on public transit when there’s a one in five chance it won’t arrive or will arrive late?
I agree with everything you've written here, but you've focused, perhaps, on the wrong anecdotal examples in the NY Subway expansion. The choice to tunnel instead of cut-and-cover wasn't the main reason for cost-overruns. Nor was opting for the double-wide station model. These things certainly added costs, but compare them to similar projects in other countries and see that you could have all the things and still avoid the cost-disease in American-style transit.
Case-in-point: the MASSIVE, MULTIPLE-tunnel-digging project that's unfolding to expand several lines of the Stockholm metro as we speak. (One right next to my home and I don't notice it at all). You've already mentioned, I believe, how Swedish rail is roughly 1/10th per km the cost of American rail construction. It's a similar story for the very difficult/expensive work of digging tunnels DEEP underground in the archipelago that is Stockholm, an old city with many of the same issues as NYC, plus far less tolerance for disruptive surface noise. Also, all of these expansion projects have included stations and auxiliary offices/maintenance facilities that are generally larger and nicer than the grubby and cramped NYC Subway. So, how can Sweden extend three separate, really nice and spacious subway lines via tunneling in its biggest city under budget and ahead of schedule?
Clearly there are other reasons that are more salient than the decision to tunnel or not. Chief among them, seemingly, are all the things you've written about previously: entrenched NIMBYism, weaponizing of environmental reviews, multiple-juristiction governance, lack of economies of scale in one-off projects (Sweden is constantly rolling out these projects in modular fashion, leaving an existing production base and experienced labor force), and a budgetary process that is really short-termist and volatile, with constantly shifting priorities and budgets.
My take-away from your (extremely informative, by the way) comment is that, at the end of the day, Sweden **really** values the particular public service in question (and so makes getting it right a massive priority) and America, alas, does not.
One factor that's very consistent with Matt's original essay: The Swedish transit model very much focuses on ridership.
There's an expansive metro system in Stockholm, plus trams, ferries, commuter light rail, and legacy narrow-gauge commuter rail, and buses. Between them, you simply don't need a car anywhere in the city, inner suburbs, or even in many of the outer suburbs/exurbs. That's justified by the relative population density of Stockholm Metro Region. There ridership of all these systems is high and so is the performance. The budget isn't just in the build, either, but also in the maintenance, which helps keep them safe, functional, and decent to use. So people ride them because they're affordable, convenient, and pleasant. Which makes it easier to sell investment and usage of expansions.
Crucially, unlike in the US, national and local transit planning is also very proactive, planning out where the demand will be in the 2030s and 2040s, not where the unmet demand has been for the last few decades that we only now, latterly, meet when it's an emergency. So, Stockholm's current active transit projects will, some of them, not even finish until 2040, serving areas that aren't even developed or upzoned yet.
But Sweden doesn't just have some big government fetish for transit. The investments are prudent and meet actual or reasonably expected future demand. Stockholm's is the country's only underground metro. There isn't one in the country's second- and third-largest cities. Which makes sense, given their smaller populations. These other, smaller cities have trams, light rail, and buses. Which are also optimized by ridership and with performance in mind. Which, again, feeds a positive feedback loop of people riding transit because it works and is affordable.
All is not ideal, though. When it comes to intercity passenger rail, the performance/affordability is merely decent. We have a single high-speed rail line that goes from Stockholm to Oslo, but it's only marginally faster, in practice, than the regular one, for the same reasons as Acela doesn't leave the Northeast Regional in the dust: frequent stops, weather-related delays, relatively high cost, and navigation of multiple jurisdictions (in this case, including crossing an international border). Long-distance rail in Sweden runs into the same demographic/geographic problem as the US, with a huge country and sparse population, especially in its "frontier half" (which here, is the North, rather than the West). Unlike with Amtrak, though, Sweden's public rail system doesn't bother serving areas where there isn't population/demand. You can take the train overnight way up to the Arctic Circle, yes, which is IMO really cool, but only to areas that are relatively heavily populated or touristy. Even there, the passenger performance isn't nearly as good with the more densely-laid systems in the population centers, but, compared to Amtrak, it's a delight. It's not really billed as a commuting alternative to flying because it isn't. Long-distance rail here is not glamorous, but it does the job it's intended to: mostly moving tourists and families around. Conversely, Amtrak tries to please everyone to garner as much interest-group support as possible and ends up pleasing nobody.
I work for the Federal Government (health) and this resonates with what I see. Government staff are buried under dozens of process requirements (like Small business requirements) and leadership measures success as no one yelled at us, not “did we objectively improve things.”
Exactly. It all comes down to too much community/advocacy/etc. input. To get stuff done well, you need to be able to tell a lot of nice folks to pound sand, even when they ask for stuff that, on its own, is reasonable.
In private sector management, it's understood that goals need to be simple, hard to "game", and focused (i.e. not too many.) In the public sector, however, a new goal is added at every meeting with the groups/advocates/community members, and no one thinks through the tradeoffs to the other 500 goals already on the books. No dare objects, because the culture of those groups is to bite your head off if you do, and most of them haven't managed anything with clear deliverables so don't really understand the trade-offs themselves. Also, most people in government are progressives themselves, so don't want to get on the wrong side, socially, of any particular progressive pet issue.
A lot of these problems are downstream of not having a non-progressive party that cares about government service provision. Most "moderates" don't care enough about government to get involved, so you either align with the groups, or you align with the party that just wants to drown you in a bathtub.
I'll say, I think this overestimates social pressure and underestimates legal pressure. The concern I hear is not usually 'people will be mad at us' but 'mad people sue and I want to get this project done, not sit in court.'
The solution to that is the solution to a lot of other problems: make courts more efficient so people are more afraid of losing in court and less afraid of being sued.
If "sit in court" means "go down to court for two days in a couple of months, explain why they are wrong and the court will agree with you and throw the case out" then people would be much more prepared to go to court.
IMO the story here is that society should be defining the goal via democracy, and government should execute on that goal. The problem is that we leave execution up for political debate as well.
Or...just pick leaders by democracy and let them work. Basically the system as it was envisioned (I think, I'm no historian...)
Yep, you both are describing the micro dynamics of why a government monopoly on rail travel sucks. I agree 100%. But also don’t know anyone looking to get into that business so not sure the options.
And I agree, we could use a labor party to help fix shit like this. We never would’ve been landed with Trump if those interests had been minded anyway.
Very astute observation
Isn't having a party whose basic outlook is premised on handwaving away the existence of inconvenient externalities and minimizing regulatory burdens kind of an odd conceptual fit for urban America? Cities are pretty much externality factories, and leaving the innumerable interpersonal disputes they create up to the court system instead of an ex ante regulatory regime seems like it might even be worse than the regulatory regime itself. Meanwhile mass transit isn't conceptually impossible to privatize but at a minimum has an awful lot of both dependence on public infrastructure and characteristics of a natural monopoly, whereas Libertarianism generally looks askance at the public sector at large.
Note that I'm not saying I don't want an alternative to the urban Democratic machine (bring back the Rockefeller Republicans, I guess?) so much as that I find the Libertarian party / brand to be a particularly unusual proposed standardbearer for one, even if on the margin a great deal of regulatory reform or rollback of public sector over-provisioning would be in line with the Libertarian ethos.
I’m convinced the Republican brand is toast in most cities and that that this could be the doorway for a moderate conservative party to emerge.
Tell us specifically what a 'moderate Conservative party' wants. I bet it would be pretty unpopular. Much like libertarians are outside their little bubble.
In a pure urban government ecosystem, you want the main party competition to be between a technocratic party that concentrates on effective delivery of government services and a "don't forget minority X" party, because that's the main failure mode of technocracy; the second party can be pretty patronage/clientelist because the technocratic party can counter that problem.
Yeah, at least in New York City (and from what I gather this is pretty ubiquitous in urban Democratic politics across the states) clientelism is pretty much in the position of telling technocratic effectiveness to stop hitting itself.
Does anyone know if the various branches of the military operate in a similar way or are they more efficient (e.g., goals more defined, leadership hierarchy more established)? I feel like the Army Corp. of Engineers has a strong reputation -- what's their secret?
Yes and no, largely depending on what the military is doing. The hierarchy is very established and is generally meritocratic (not perfect, but pretty good as large organizations go). You have a pretty clearly-defined set of interests, and these exist to support the primary goal of training readiness or application of foreign policy when deployed. Logistics, communications, etc. are all subservient to the ultimate goal of applying force in one way or another. There are regulations for most anything, which is where I suspect that the Engineers do well--the Army does a pretty good job of collecting and codifying best practices so that most parts of the Army are interchangeable.
Where I think things go off the rails a bit is where each of those supporting functions intersects with the rest of the government, particularly in terms of acquisitions. I was in Army logistics and 80% of my mental energy was spent playing whack-a-mole with whatever the outrage of the day was over.
The systems for getting stuff and using it (mostly repair parts) just isn't very efficient, and the vendors are neither reliable nor fast. Buying stuff commercial off the shelf (COTS) was a nightmare, and required us to prioritize veteran vendors, "green vendors", etc. There was someone always digging about why we hadn't fixed some vehicle that was missing a backordered part for 120 days, as if I could just yell at the vendor and get them to go faster. Lots of wondering why stuff doesn't work when it's brand-new out of the box, or why a random part like a tire costs multiple times what one would expect given its quality. There's basically nothing that can be done about that at the operational level where things actually happen, so you're kind of beholden to this lumbering inefficient system for getting stuff purchased, fixed, disposed of, etc.
Basically it works overall, but there was a lot of wasted energy on busy work that probably didn't materially improve our readiness or efficiency. That's ultimately an intentional tradeoff to create repeatability and interchangeability and generally seems better than other parts of the government, but it's still not great.
Yup, totally agreed. I think they’re an example of where generally competent meritocracy and codified best practices are a really powerful combination. My own experience was in an infantry BCT, just the regular operational Army.
Yup, my time in the Army was the same way. Make trackers green, don't get yelled at by somebody at division, and remember to only buy things from one of the six special interest groups who charge us 1,000% what something should actually cost.
That's clearly better than alternative models (see the Russian military), but surely we can do better.
The trick (for the regulator, not the implementor) for those sorts of purchasing rules is to write in how much of a price premium you pay for them.
I know UK rail franchising had rules where meeting certain criteria would let you treat the bid as being 5% or 10% less than the actual price. These were combined multiplicatively (so if you got 10 of the 10% discounts, it wasn't treated as -100%, ie free, but -65%, ie (0.9)^6). I'm sure that other sorts of purchasing have these same sorts of rules, but rail franchising is one I have actually looked at. Rail franchising was ended because it collapsed over COVID, so these specific rules don't apply any more, but the general system is used in quite a lot of procurement.
If you say "must prioritise veteran/minority suppliers" then they can crank the price up hugely, but if you say "veterans can change 20% more than non-veterans" or whatever, then they know how much they can get away with.
> And importantly, telling agencies to try to hit a half-dozen different goals … doesn’t ensure that all those things will be done simultaneously. What it ensures is that, with no principled way to evaluate projects or say no to things, costs explode.
The cynic in me wants to believe that agency leaders would like to avoid a simple and objective measure of performance. If they are solely evaluated by ridership/dollar-spent then they could fail to improve on that metric and be charged with bad decision making. In contrast, if they claim to be balancing numerous unquantifiable objectives, then it’s much harder to criticize their performance. For example, if we point out the low ridership volume then they can point to their progress in expanding access and creating good paying jobs.
And I think there is a general tendency for all leaders and workers to resist objective evaluation. For example, I've seen this criticism applied to the anti-testing movement in education where it is alleged that poor teachers simply want to evade detection.
I’ve also seen this aversion to performance evaluation within the tech industry, particularly within discussions on the tech forum Hacker News. While there are many poor approaches to measuring software developer performance (e.g., lines of code count), there still need to be some objective evaluation. Quality measures can include annual peer review using a rubric of dimensions.
Yet there is commonly fierce objection to any evaluation of software engineers within such discussions. Numerous excuses are given for any proposal, while no alternatives are offered. It seems software engineering is conceived as some impalpable art that cannot be evaluated, even by fellow artists. And this extends to strategies and criteria for interviewing prospective engineers. All commonly used methods, such as whiterboarding code exercises, are castigated as inadequate to measure the intangible brilliance and abilities of engineers.
I just think we all have some natural aversion to being evaluated for fear of failure. Therefore our institutions, both public and private, need to be designed to counteract that tendency.
But finding objective performance metrics is extremely difficult. In sport, we have a perfect record about what a player did in a game. It is still difficult to determine through objective means how well a player did.
In soccer, a player could screw up receiving a pass, but what if the player that passed the ball was more at fault for making a bad pass? What about a forward that scores fewer goals than another forward, but was better off the ball and in defensive play? Statistical techniques are still improving. I recall the book Moneyball stating that baseball fielding didn't matter, which seemed like nonsense then and we now know is definitely nonsense.
In software, there are many things that determine how well a worker did. Subjectively, you know Bob is better than Alice, but how do you know that? What objective criteria can you use?
Frankly, these are solved problems. Sports analytics people have done a ton of work to quantify the value of individual soccer players. You can argue there’s more to do because those evaluations aren’t perfect, but the specific problem of distinguishing a good player on a bad team is not intractable at all.
Same goes for software. Most tech companies I’m familiar with have some form of goal-setting and tell engineers “your job is to move us towards the goal, and that means prioritizing working on impactful projects rather than vanity engineering projects.” Now this won’t work perfectly in every case but it would certainly fit a network-effect business - and if there’s a better example of a network-effects business than a *transit system* then I don’t know what it is.
If a team's job is to reduce a certain kind of defect, and that defect rate actually went up, then everyone on that team is objectively incompetent and they should all be fired. Right?
Not really. You're interested in counterfactuals. What would the defect rate have done without that team? What would the defect rate have done with a newly hired replacement team?
In tech we do some amout of A/B testing, but that's usually on the external-facing product level, and causal inference is not simple to get right.
This boils down to the distinction between “not simple to get right” and “extremely hard to even do”. I’m going to say that it is true that getting this right requires some work but it is eminently doable, particularly for the government given where it’s starting.
As a former manager, I’ve spent a lot of time on rubrics for peer review of technical workers. Here’s a recent article from Gergely Orosz about the topic that I generally agree with, “Performance Reviews for Software Developers”, https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/performance-reviews-for-software-engineers/
Off the top of my head, here are some dimensions I’ve commonly seen used
* Technical Skills - At each Eng level, what are the expected capabilities?
* Impact - What degree of contribution is expected for each level?
* Mentorship - For higher levels, the mentorship responsibilities
* Leadership - Again, higher levels, the degree that they should drive the team and interact with other teams
* Collaboration - How well do they help other people get stuff done?
* Interview - For higher levels, how involved should they be in interviewing? How well are their decisions calibrated against other interviewers for the same candidates?
For each dimension, an engineer will be ranked on a scale of 0-5. The rubric will include criteria and examples for each score.
On an annual basis, each team member will review other team members as assigned by their manager. Only the manager sees the results of each review and they combine multiple reviews to create an aggregated performance evaluation. That can then be shared with the team member to learn how well they are performing against expectations and their progress towards promotion.
While never perfect, the rubric is regularly revised in an iterative process using feedback from all team members. The result is a clear description of expectations and current performance for all members on the team.
Not irrelevant, but much less important than previously thought and hard to measure. The best batter is probably ten wins better than the worst; the best fielder is more like three, so you can live with some really bad fielding to get great batting (which was the insight of that era, if not how Michael Lewis put it in the book).
But we got a lot better at measuring fielding than we were in 2003, which means we can actually tell which fielders are three wins better than the others; when Moneyball was written, we could measure fielding so badly that it took multiple seasons of data to realise that Derek Jeter was a below-average shortstop. Now, we'd know within half a season and he'd have been moved to third base.
But I think it is still fair to criticize the stats that are being gathered. And the measurement of performance as a result of bad stats, bad counting, etc becomes far less useful. In baseball the frame rate is one of the lousiest measures of defensive efficiency and it has been given far more credence than the catcher’s ability to hold runners, call a good game etc. it’s gotten several catchers paid far more than they deserve. You could only discover this when you get to see the pattern of strike/ball calls by umpire (most umps miss badly behind the plate and it doesn’t matter who is catching).
EPA and DVOA measures (don’t get me started on o line stats) are really weak in pro football because the way a defense or offense play against one another naturally ends up being a path dependent game…so we lose repeatability.
Most of these issues revolve around an attempt to quantify the individual allocation to teamwork…I used to be a big fan of the use of these statistics but over time I’ve found them lacking over and over again as opposed to just using your lying eyes.
I’m not sure if there are lessons elsewhere other than that the workers in this case don’t generally make the stats…but maybe that doesn’t help in terms of objective measurement?
Slight tangent but there seem to be pockets emerging of individual win/loss match-ups within team games that are very predictive. For example, the shoulder pad accelerometer data is very predictive for wide receiver 1:1 separation and NFL scouting depts. have this for their teams + most power 5 conferences.
When you work in sales like I do however, there are absolutely no problems with evaluating performance, and there's no way to hide from the evaluation either haha. Your numbers are your numbers- it's crystal clear for both you and management- really anyone could glance at the leader board and see exactly how good everyone is
To be clear- I'm talking retained executive search where the board engages us, pays us a retainer up front, then we look through our network of C-level executives. I'm *not* talking about run-of-the-mill recruiting where they just spam out a bunch of messages for a lower-level position. Retained executive search is like a totally different (and vastly more respected) field than 'regular' recruiters like Robert Half or Aerotek or CyberCoders or whoever
I do executive recruitment now, for CTOs and CIOs and whatnot. In the past I sold commercial real estate
This is certainly something I’ve seen in the private sector. At my large tech company, almost all teams have measurable goals against which they’re judged and held accountable. But one team I worked on explicitly (and successfully) resisted setting goals, citing “we don’t have enough control over the outcomes” as justification. But in retrospect it became clear that setting goals would have meant the team would have been scrapped; the lackeys like us working on that team would have found new jobs in the company, but the leadership would certainly have gotten laid off. Any goals they would have set would have been so ludicrously far off from success that they would constitute an indictment of the leadership of the team.
I think you’ve hit a valid human tendency here.
But also, when this organization is run from the outside, with 1001 interests screaming at you, you tend to serve those interests and do what it takes to balance making everyone happy that’s screaming at you.
What’s required to make this service more appealing is some risk taking and experimenting. This will necessarily piss some people off, so its not well executed by government. You need a profit motive driving or else its necessarily going to be catering to everyone. And as is sadly the case in my experience, nearly everyone has an astonishing lack of vision and appetite for trying new solutions.
I think you're right, the 1 clear metric is actually an advantage in this case though. Every transit official can now shrug their shoulders at all the local screamers and say "sorry it doesn't increase ridership, that goal was set with someone above me, take it up with them."
Tech executives are looking for simple, objective metrics that they can evaluate mechanically at scale. If you had a panel of subject matter experts review each one of your changes in depth, in light of its context, then you could do a pretty good job evaluating SWEs. In practice nobody’s going to pay for that. The closest you can get is asking people about their coworkers. But they don’t want to ask you about your coworkers. They want a report they can run across thousands of people overnight without any judgement calls, arguing, or potential bias. The SWE community rightly contends that there is no such report that would be even vaguely aligned with how practitioners understand being good at their jobs.
Things are a little less dire at the team level since you can check if the product a) was built, b) works well, or c) has the intended effect on the business. However an and b run dangerously close to asking “was the estimate accurate / budget sufficient”? Estimation is a different craft from engineering, and most of us are pretty pessimistic about the possibility of estimating well unless you have already done a very similar thing (in which case why don’t you just reuse it?). Poor quality happens when you are pressured to cut corners to meet an underestimated deadline. And products can fail to make make business impact because they are badly implemented, but more often they fail because they were bad ideas in the first place. You want to hold SWEs accountable for, what, not quitting a team in protest because the product manager’s idea was bad?
I agree with you that "(transit) agency leaders would like to avoid a simple and objective measure of performance", but for a much simpler reason: these investments are rarely justifiable based on that metric. Here in Los Angeles there's huge political will to build out a public transportation system (we voted to raise sales tax to pay for expansion). What we don't have is people willing to ride the trains once they're built. Our newest subway line is estimated to take $435 in upfront spend per trip, per year, which puts the payback period at 300 years for a $1.50 ticket.
If you're in charge of a transit agency, you have your peers saying that LA would be a much better city if it had a public transit network. The people of Los Angeles, to who you're ultimately accountable to, are saying they want trains built (for other people to ride). Even if you were the world's greatest transit genius and could lower costs by 90% to sub-Euro levels, it's still not a great payback on investment.
So what do you do? Pack it up and say it's not worthwhile? Tell the city council to get back to you in 50 years when NIMBY issues have been solved and there's enough density? Nope! You, I, and anyone else hired would do the same thing - build what you can then invent enough new metrics to justify the spend post-hoc.
Just astounding to me there isn’t enormous appetite for those trains with all that infuriating LA traffic
Not enough density, and the density that exists is spread over multiple office and residential hubs which makes each additional route low value-add.
It's relatively easy somewhere like NYC where (pre-COVID) all the jobs were in Manhattan and cheap(er) housing was in Brooklyn or Queens, so you can have a hub & spoke system in downtown. LA doesn't have that center of gravity since jobs are spread out in Santa Monica, Century City, DTLA, El Segundo etc.
Watch - the transit stops will make centers of gravity around them.
I think its a really great investment but will require some of that LA advertising salesmanship to get people rolling into it.
I don’t think this is right. Implicit in building this is a subsidy. The true value of a ride to a given rider is clearly less than $1.50.
The question is: if the true value is $10, is the construction worth it? The fact that it receives an 85% subsidy is kind of irrelevant.
Really excellent point.
I fall into the same thinking often when considering government services and policy, my biz brain I guess. But these are most often not meant to function like a profitable business, but rather to provide for common good…for overall lower costs for society, promotion of unity and order and prosperity too.
Trump and gang tried to push this same thing in terms of the Post Office, and I thought that was/is tremendously short sighted especially as to the speed of commerce for our nation with so much payment and billing still executed by mail.
So the question really becomes, will the cost of construction+ operation cause enough usage to displace the costs of other transit displaced. So costs to consider against that “$10” include fuel+vehicle depreciation+road depreciation+ externalities of carbon pollution from driving+ benefit of reduction of congestion on highways (maybe) +\- commute time benefits for riders.
You're right, it is subsidized - prices probably should be closer to NYC / SF ($2-$3+) level to account for operating costs. Part of that $8.50 is the consumer surplus though, you can't capture all of that.
I believe this has been addressed a couple of times in other slow boring articles but the LA Transit buildout is coming with nearly zero land use changes and this is causing a lot of problems. There's absolutely zero effort going into upzoning around stations, building TOD or doing land value capture for future funding like BART has spent the last decade doing.
It sort of fits into the theory that one reason government is more dysfunctional than it needs to be is that modern GOP has become so hostile to government itself. Famous example is FEMA and "heckava job Brownie". But without buy in from both parties, you get a situation where one party ends up being able to pander to all of its interest groups with impunity with resulting excessive cost overruns.
Classic example and maybe most impactful example is environmentalism (which is obviously related to public transport). Pre 1990, GHWB administration was able to find a more economically efficient way to deal with acid rain because in part they actually believed acid rain is a problem and said government can play a role in solving it. Today, in theory GOP should be the loudest voices in favor of eliminating or reforming zoning or limiting delays caused by environmental impact studies. But instead because of their stance towards government in general, there is this missing voice for reform.
>If Dems are the only ones pulling for transit and applying to work at the agencies
I disagree entirely. This assumes rail is not a huge factor in commerce and freight, which it is, having worked in beverage, it is essential for low-cost density item transportation. Rail is not wholly pushed by Democrats. And the workers of Amtrak, while perhaps skewing urban and low income and therefore lots of minorities, are not wholly Democrats either not by a long shot. I would venture a large majority of Amtrak workers didn’t vote in 2022 elections, but admittedly have as little data as you do on this
I might agree that the cure is worse than the disease, but let's not pretend that the reason that there are a billion forms and reviews is right wing groups nutpicking. Historically there has been a lot of corruption in government and progressives in the late 1800s and early 1900s ran repeatedly on campaign promises to clean up government by getting rid of corruption. Similarly in the 60s and 70s, progressives were the driving force behind limiting government power to bulldoze communities by instigating environment and community reviews. They were the instigating force behind these requirements far more than right wing groups.
I’ll generally agree with this. My general conclusion (when I was a government employee) was that the many measures in place to stop very low level fraud actually were more expensive than the potential fraud they were combatting.
I think its perfectly fine to get mad at right wing groups for lots of things. But this doesn't make sense to me. Most right wing groups generally don't want more red tape, they want government to get out of it entirely - often foolishly!
But its progressives who use forms and procedures to rationalize or defend government action.
Many of the places where this is the worst are places where right wing groups have no power at all. If they were behind this at all, it wouldn't be AS bad there. But since this is primarily driven by progressives - its the worst where they have the most power.
Reducing antisocial behavior on public transit would probably increase ridership.
I think you can make a case that this is also about ridership. I like the Jane Jacobs theory that the best way to police antisocial behavior is to have lots of people around. A subway car with 1 crazy person and 90 not-crazy people feels much safer than a car with 1 crazy person and 10 not-crazy people.
yes but having 0 crazy people is a reasonable goal (planes seem to do *okay* at this)
Planes are a terrible enough comparison so as to be useless. You literally need to go through a security screen to get on a plane.
Do you have a lot of experience riding transit? I really do not mean this as a slight, but if that comparison even occurs to you, it makes me think you are not someone who has ever used transit regularly. It's just not the same thing at all.
I suspect this is a reason that light rail ridership in Los Angeles refuses to take off. The ratio of unpleasant people to normal commuters is just too high and that deters other potential commuters from giving it a try and thus changing that ratio for the better.
This is the classic feedback loop of a social network: the antisocial person reduces ridership, which causes fewer people to be around, which amplifies the ridership-reducing effects of the antisocial person. There’s a reason social/commercial network businesses tend to focus on user growth above all else (including revenue/profit more often than not): once you’re in that downward spiral you’re in trouble. Conversely if you can sustain an “upward spiral” you can make enormous money.
There has been considerable debunking of the Kitty Genovese story: https://www.thecut.com/2016/04/how-the-false-story-of-kitty-genovese-s-murder-went-viral.html
I think this would be particularly effective on the west coast. Once Covid hit the busses were filled with homeless people. The people who cleaned the busses were finding lots of dirty needles. The number of discarded needles declined significantly… because people switched to fentanyl. And people smoking fentanyl on transit became a thing.
One thing that was very frustrating was that these perfectly rational concerns were dismissed as the obsessions of the privileged. And we should just ignore it because the people doing stuff linke that must be desperate. Except that the people who were most upset about this were not affluent. Often they weren’t white. And the people excusing this antisocial behavior tended to be people who didn’t take transit.
This is the biggest issue reducing ridership and there's no easy solution.
I agree its an issue, but the biggest? I would say poor frequency and bad routes are a much bigger issue in reducing ridership than anti-social behavior. Not to mention antisocial behavior becomes less of a problem with higher ridership- more of a buffer.
It certainly could be a problem in some cities.
There are easy solutions, but those solutions aren't supported by voters where public transit is prevalent.
what are those easy solutions though?
Cops on every bus --> super expensive and police state-ish
Fewer antisocial people --> mass incarceration is worse
Some social credit situation --> administrative/logistical overhead
Higher prices for fares --> lower ridership overall
CCTV on buses is much cheaper than cops on buses. And having the ability to spot trouble and route a cop to the bus and have CCTV as undisputable evidence goes a long way. Every bus in London has CCTV, for instance.
Also provide an easy, fast, anonymous way for people to report antisocial behavior. When a report is received, footage from the time and vehicle can be viewed to figure out who caused the problem and their pass/credit card/email can be blocked from future use.
Definitely--on the L in Chicago, you have to get up and press an obvious "help" button. Good luck not becoming the latest object of attention for whatever crazy shit is happening on the train!
Some mix of 1, 2 & 4. They are easy, but not supported.
that's the problem -- reducing antisocial behavior isn't an idea, it's a solution. How you actually do that seems impossibly hard.
You put some people in housing (we need more housing) other people in mental health care facilities and others in prison. All of the anti social behavior I have seen on public transit comes from mentally ill or drug addicted (or both) homeless people. So much doesn’t get fixed until the American metro areas with massive homeless problems deal with the issue directly and not commission the 134th “study group” to analyze the issue and do nothing. I’m sick and tired of people saying it’s too hard to solve. It’s not, it just requires some grit and willpower y’all. That’s true of a lot of problems in America.
I was about to write exactly this, then read down.
Start shunning the (universally privileged and often white) faction who regard the basic maintenance of law and order as a sin.
They should have rotten fruit thrown at them every goddamned time they dare to open their imbecilic, ignorant mouths.
Only once that entire set of beliefs is a social net negative and not some kind of post-scarcity, status-elevating hipster stance, will people stop holding it.
>>Start shunning the (universally privileged and often white) faction who regard the basic maintenance of law and order as a sin.
Yes, it's incredibly annoying that a certain section of people treat tolerating antisocial behavior on transit as a badge of city life authenticity...but they're not themselves the ones who are the problem
I don't mean those folks, except insofar as they overlap with the ones who actively believe the police enforcing the law is bad and the very concept of coercion is illegitimate regardless of what it's in service of.
In NYC, at least, Plenty of antisocial behavior is *also* engaged in by unusually able-bodied young men who do acrobatics to music. This is a combination of “not enough cops” as well as the (usually extremely minor, IME, I don’t get the impression it’s especially lucrative, but it’s probably a lot more fun for the doers of it than working in an Amazon warehouse) financial support of a small number of riders for it.
I like buskers; I don't think their behavior qualifies as anti-social.
I want to just sit (or, more likely, stand) and listen to my audiobook in peace instead of being involuntarily subjected to shitty loud music (also, I prefer to not to risk being kicked in the face). This is, conveniently, also the societal consensus and unambiguous law. I'm pretty sure "breaking the law against doing exactly what you're doing in order to cause a nuisance for a car full of people who didn't ask for it in hopes of maybe getting a few dollars" counts as anti-social behavior.
(Also, I don't think "Showtime" belongs in the same conceptual bucket as sitting-with-a-guitar busking.)
A couple months ago I was on the Seattle light rail at 7 am and a man was staring at me and masturbating. Fortunately he got off when the fare enforcement people got on.
I wasn’t in danger but it was gross and really gave my day a lousy start. The guy seemed homeless and was likely on drugs. this is one of those lousy things that happen to women. We should still try to make it as rare as possible and kick people off the train or bus whe. They do this
I don't think it's a lack of grit or will. I don't think it's bureaucratic sclerosis. I definitely don't think it's a handful of overly earnest, naive hippies, as David R. suggests below. It's money. That's why they commission 134 study groups: the appearance of action on a problem that is too expensive to begin solving. This country needs millions of mental health, drug treatment, elder care, and homeless shelter beds. It needs hundreds of thousands of new psychologists, nurses, orderlies, guards, social workers, and probation officers. It is all massively expensive. The money isn't there, there is no constituency demanding that those services be provided, and no one wants to raise the taxes needed to make any of it happen. And we've allowed these problems to become so big, even if we started doing everything we needed tomorrow it would be years before the public effects would be noticeable. Charles Adams wants to round up the crazies, and brags that the governor is providing 50 new beds. 50 beds? It's spitting in the wind.
It seems that requiring (and enforcing) a fare is a good step, anecdotally free public transit tends to attract people who are unpleasant to be near.
A clear means to report antisocial behavior and a quick way to block problem people from using transit would help. "If someone is behaving badly on the train, text us at 888-555-1234" signs. Use cameras to confirm the problem and ban any passes/credit cards problem people might use to access transit.
There actually is an easy-ish solution. It's a) have a critical mass of riders and b) have effective transit policing (which doesn't mean a cop in every bus or train car; it's more like "enough cops that people know they're around + good emergency response mechanisms)."
And I know it's an easy-ish solution because it was effectively implemented in most American cities with OK-to-good transit - NYC, SF, DC, Chicago, Boston, Philadelphia - from about the 1990s until Covid. When Covid happened, ridership plummeted, and it's only partially recovered. Crime went up, and I think you could argue policing has become less effective. So, fewer riders + more crime in general + less effective policing = more antisocial behavior on transit, at least proportionally.
And this was effective, too! At least at first: in most of these cities ridership went up in the 90s and the 2000s, but it stagnated in the 2010s, even though transit was still largely perceived as safe. There are several reasons for this, but I think a big one is that American transit, even in cities with good-by-US-standards transit, actually isn't that good. The low-hanging fruit was gone and operations had to be improved.
In cities outside of those six plus maybe a couple of others, I refer you to point a) above. In Austin or Cleveland or Miami, transit ridership is a rounding error, and skewed towards people who are unable to drive or afford cars, so of course you are going to see proportionally more disorder on transit. Jane Jacobs has her flaws, but the "eyes on the street" thing is a real insight, as anyone who has ever walked down a deserted street at night can attest. So more riders would especially help solve the problem in these cities!
But as someone who rode the NYC subway almost every day for 15 years in the 2000s and 2010s, basically no one outside of very very sheltered people from the outer suburbs and poorly-informed tourists thought of the subway as unsafe. That's not to say that there was literally zero crazy people. But it was - correctly - viewed as not something that one should be concerned about. There were a few times riding the subway when I was made to feel kind of uncomfortable due to a crazy person, but I literally never felt like I was actually threatened.
Definitely not true. If you’re in NYC and antisocial people deter you from taking the train, you’re going to be effectively deterred from leaving your house. The single biggest cause of low ridership is that the trains are slow with long headways and frequent delays. Removing all the homeless people from the NYC transit system would probably have about as much effect as making the trains 3% faster.
There is absolutely an easy solution.
And increasing reliability. I don’t take public transit in the Bay Area because I’ve been stranded too many times when the bus has just not shown up. How am I supposed to rely on public transit when there’s a one in five chance it won’t arrive or will arrive late?
I agree with everything you've written here, but you've focused, perhaps, on the wrong anecdotal examples in the NY Subway expansion. The choice to tunnel instead of cut-and-cover wasn't the main reason for cost-overruns. Nor was opting for the double-wide station model. These things certainly added costs, but compare them to similar projects in other countries and see that you could have all the things and still avoid the cost-disease in American-style transit.
Case-in-point: the MASSIVE, MULTIPLE-tunnel-digging project that's unfolding to expand several lines of the Stockholm metro as we speak. (One right next to my home and I don't notice it at all). You've already mentioned, I believe, how Swedish rail is roughly 1/10th per km the cost of American rail construction. It's a similar story for the very difficult/expensive work of digging tunnels DEEP underground in the archipelago that is Stockholm, an old city with many of the same issues as NYC, plus far less tolerance for disruptive surface noise. Also, all of these expansion projects have included stations and auxiliary offices/maintenance facilities that are generally larger and nicer than the grubby and cramped NYC Subway. So, how can Sweden extend three separate, really nice and spacious subway lines via tunneling in its biggest city under budget and ahead of schedule?
Clearly there are other reasons that are more salient than the decision to tunnel or not. Chief among them, seemingly, are all the things you've written about previously: entrenched NIMBYism, weaponizing of environmental reviews, multiple-juristiction governance, lack of economies of scale in one-off projects (Sweden is constantly rolling out these projects in modular fashion, leaving an existing production base and experienced labor force), and a budgetary process that is really short-termist and volatile, with constantly shifting priorities and budgets.
My take-away from your (extremely informative, by the way) comment is that, at the end of the day, Sweden **really** values the particular public service in question (and so makes getting it right a massive priority) and America, alas, does not.
One factor that's very consistent with Matt's original essay: The Swedish transit model very much focuses on ridership.
There's an expansive metro system in Stockholm, plus trams, ferries, commuter light rail, and legacy narrow-gauge commuter rail, and buses. Between them, you simply don't need a car anywhere in the city, inner suburbs, or even in many of the outer suburbs/exurbs. That's justified by the relative population density of Stockholm Metro Region. There ridership of all these systems is high and so is the performance. The budget isn't just in the build, either, but also in the maintenance, which helps keep them safe, functional, and decent to use. So people ride them because they're affordable, convenient, and pleasant. Which makes it easier to sell investment and usage of expansions.
Crucially, unlike in the US, national and local transit planning is also very proactive, planning out where the demand will be in the 2030s and 2040s, not where the unmet demand has been for the last few decades that we only now, latterly, meet when it's an emergency. So, Stockholm's current active transit projects will, some of them, not even finish until 2040, serving areas that aren't even developed or upzoned yet.
But Sweden doesn't just have some big government fetish for transit. The investments are prudent and meet actual or reasonably expected future demand. Stockholm's is the country's only underground metro. There isn't one in the country's second- and third-largest cities. Which makes sense, given their smaller populations. These other, smaller cities have trams, light rail, and buses. Which are also optimized by ridership and with performance in mind. Which, again, feeds a positive feedback loop of people riding transit because it works and is affordable.
All is not ideal, though. When it comes to intercity passenger rail, the performance/affordability is merely decent. We have a single high-speed rail line that goes from Stockholm to Oslo, but it's only marginally faster, in practice, than the regular one, for the same reasons as Acela doesn't leave the Northeast Regional in the dust: frequent stops, weather-related delays, relatively high cost, and navigation of multiple jurisdictions (in this case, including crossing an international border). Long-distance rail in Sweden runs into the same demographic/geographic problem as the US, with a huge country and sparse population, especially in its "frontier half" (which here, is the North, rather than the West). Unlike with Amtrak, though, Sweden's public rail system doesn't bother serving areas where there isn't population/demand. You can take the train overnight way up to the Arctic Circle, yes, which is IMO really cool, but only to areas that are relatively heavily populated or touristy. Even there, the passenger performance isn't nearly as good with the more densely-laid systems in the population centers, but, compared to Amtrak, it's a delight. It's not really billed as a commuting alternative to flying because it isn't. Long-distance rail here is not glamorous, but it does the job it's intended to: mostly moving tourists and families around. Conversely, Amtrak tries to please everyone to garner as much interest-group support as possible and ends up pleasing nobody.