"A provision in the Urban Mass Transportation Act of 1964 mandates an open-ended review whenever federal funding would affect jobs, effectively blocking the automation of legacy subway systems. Amending the statute to explicitly guarantee worker protections
"
You don't want to give the workers protections at all. Automation is good. Getting rid of unnecessary jobs is good. That's how you control cost.
Public transit is not a jobs program. It's a program to move people from place to place
I assumed they meant that any current workers would get some sort of buyout as guaranteed protection if they lost their job, but keeping their job around would no longer be part of the planning process. That’s an improvement for both the workers and the transit agency and riders, even if it results in higher costs for the agency and riders than some other possibilities that might get bogged down in litigation.
The article gets into that a bit. The proposed idea would be to guarantee the protection of *workers* without necessarily protecting their *jobs* - via retraining, redeployment, generous severance, that kind of thing. The author thinks that might be a way to get a foot in the door for automation without incurring too much union wrath, and points to the automation of the Paris metro as an example of that approach working.
I agree with you in principle, but something something art of the possible something hard boards.
I see that most of the comments on this are saying, “why are you making all these proposals about making the process better instead of just punishing the people I think are to blame?”
You left the most important item. It’s the lawyers. I suspect that the job of all the environmental groups is really to just say no. To everything. NEPA and the lawyers have been very effective at stopping all sorts of modernization projects.
Unless we somehow curb judicial review and endless lawsuits none of what you proposed will help as long as lawyers have the money to sue.
Refuses to address out of control labor costs driven by union capture. The great railroads weren't built by no-show jobs and mob controlled contracts. Break the unions and make things again
"The great railroads weren't built by no-show jobs and mob controlled contracts."
Agreed on the "no-show jobs" part, but it takes a really selective reading of the history of American railroading to not notice a lot of what, in modern terms, would be considered corruption (both political and breach of fiduciary duty by corporate executives) in contracting.
Based on a quick read of the playbook's introduction, and the Slow Boring summary, I don't see an important point: how do we decide what transit projects we need?
Building bus rapid transit lanes, for example, can disrupt surface traffic for months or years. When buses on existing roads carry handfuls of passengers, what is the business case for BRT?
If a taxpayer investment produces a broad benefit, political support usually follows and third parties can't easily slow things down. If the benefits don't outweigh the direct and opportunity costs, it's easy to delay or derail the project.
Ask Baltimoreans whether the Red Line should get any funding before the Key Bridge is rebuilt.
It's fair but leaves out a major element of cost. Pursuing the wrong projects creates a downward spiral of direct/opportunity costs and insufficient benefits leading to less political support for other projects.
The business case for BRT when existing buses have only handfuls is like the business case for a bridge when only handfuls of people cross the river by boat.
BRT makes taking the bus much more attractive due to enabling high frequency and shorter transit times. You can't judge how many people will take a BRT route based on how many people take the pre-BRT version of the route.
The Flatiron Flyer BRT connecting Boulder to Denver is a good example. Ridership has consistently exceeded expectations and now it's one of the most ridden routes in the Denver area.
The root cause is that too many people are personally invested in the waste and bloat and earn their livings from maintaining and expanding the waste and bloat. At the same time, the people who pay -- mostly taxpayers -- either don't care or don't have access to a mechanism that could reduce the bloat.
Politicians have every incentive to promote huge infrastructure projects -- great photo ops -- and no incentive to follow-up with the dirty details or to insist on performance to budgets. Contractors want to charge as much as possible, not produce more bang for the buck and they have employees and subcontractors who want more bloat. Bureaucrats need forms, approvals and studies to justify their jobs, regardless of any value added by paper pushing. Community activists earn their salaries by opposing projects, not by pushing them or demanding lower costs: many of the donations come from employees and contractors working on the projects.
Another way to frame this is that the right doesn’t want to invest in most forms of government-driven infrastructure, while the left is captured by rent seeking bandits: unions, environmentalists, NGOs, lawyers and bureaucrats.
One doesn’t want to build, the other can’t do so without feeding all the pigs.
These incentives apply equally in other countries though, and yet they have lower construction costs and less waste and bloat all the same, so I don't see this as some insurmountable obstacle to reform.
I think this post is wonderful, but has about a zero percent chance of ever happening, since a more efficient transit system is simply not a priority of U.S. politicians in a country where over 90% of people drive everywhere.
From a partisan standpoint, Democrats see a more efficient transit system as way down in the priority list, and not worth spending political capital or compromising other progressive priorities to achieve. And Republicans, simply don't want transit to become more efficient because it would weaken their argument that all government services are bloated and filled with waste. They would rather simply cut funding for transit, and leave all the bloat in place for what money remains, so they can use that bloat to get people to vote for Republicans in the next election.
I wish I were wrong here, but I just don't see it.
There are lots of bad stakeholders and conflicts that cause these problems, but at a fundamental level it is mainly a matter of competence. Infrastructure schemes would work much better if a few senior people learned easily available lessons and were better at their jobs.
It seems like this will be opposed by an awkward alliance of people who don't want it to be built *at all* (nimbys, conservatives, some environmentalists) and people who either don't care about the price or want it to be expensive (anyone who profits from the construction). How do we crush both groups simultaneously?
Here in Glendale they recently pushed through a Bus Rapid Transit project from Pasadena to North Hollywood that makes very little sense. The project will cost over $400 million and largely involves implementing bus-only lanes through the heart of cities along the way like Glendale, converting major thoroughfares from 2 x 2 traffic lanes to 1 x 1 traffic lanes.
I’ve been riding the buses along this route over the past few weeks to get some idea of current rush-hour traffic flow. Traffic flows just fine, and giving buses exclusive-lane access will achieve very little. Project advocates have trumpeted a “44%” time savings resulting from the project, but they’re comparing the project’s 22-stop “express” service with the current system with approximately 90 stops, which is a completely misleading comparison. They could accomplish the project’s time-saving objectives merely by running a 22-stop express service along the route, without any need for lane closures. But they’ve rammed the project down people’s throats and use the slur term “NIMBY” to anyone who opposes it.
"A provision in the Urban Mass Transportation Act of 1964 mandates an open-ended review whenever federal funding would affect jobs, effectively blocking the automation of legacy subway systems. Amending the statute to explicitly guarantee worker protections
"
You don't want to give the workers protections at all. Automation is good. Getting rid of unnecessary jobs is good. That's how you control cost.
Public transit is not a jobs program. It's a program to move people from place to place
I assumed they meant that any current workers would get some sort of buyout as guaranteed protection if they lost their job, but keeping their job around would no longer be part of the planning process. That’s an improvement for both the workers and the transit agency and riders, even if it results in higher costs for the agency and riders than some other possibilities that might get bogged down in litigation.
The article gets into that a bit. The proposed idea would be to guarantee the protection of *workers* without necessarily protecting their *jobs* - via retraining, redeployment, generous severance, that kind of thing. The author thinks that might be a way to get a foot in the door for automation without incurring too much union wrath, and points to the automation of the Paris metro as an example of that approach working.
I agree with you in principle, but something something art of the possible something hard boards.
Wonderful work, thank you! Next: building the coalition that will support rather than resist these reforms.
I see that most of the comments on this are saying, “why are you making all these proposals about making the process better instead of just punishing the people I think are to blame?”
You left the most important item. It’s the lawyers. I suspect that the job of all the environmental groups is really to just say no. To everything. NEPA and the lawyers have been very effective at stopping all sorts of modernization projects.
Unless we somehow curb judicial review and endless lawsuits none of what you proposed will help as long as lawyers have the money to sue.
Refuses to address out of control labor costs driven by union capture. The great railroads weren't built by no-show jobs and mob controlled contracts. Break the unions and make things again
"The great railroads weren't built by no-show jobs and mob controlled contracts."
Agreed on the "no-show jobs" part, but it takes a really selective reading of the history of American railroading to not notice a lot of what, in modern terms, would be considered corruption (both political and breach of fiduciary duty by corporate executives) in contracting.
Based on a quick read of the playbook's introduction, and the Slow Boring summary, I don't see an important point: how do we decide what transit projects we need?
Building bus rapid transit lanes, for example, can disrupt surface traffic for months or years. When buses on existing roads carry handfuls of passengers, what is the business case for BRT?
If a taxpayer investment produces a broad benefit, political support usually follows and third parties can't easily slow things down. If the benefits don't outweigh the direct and opportunity costs, it's easy to delay or derail the project.
Ask Baltimoreans whether the Red Line should get any funding before the Key Bridge is rebuilt.
That is important, but I think it’s totally fair for them only to focus on, “Given a desired project, how do we best deliver it”.
It's fair but leaves out a major element of cost. Pursuing the wrong projects creates a downward spiral of direct/opportunity costs and insufficient benefits leading to less political support for other projects.
The business case for BRT when existing buses have only handfuls is like the business case for a bridge when only handfuls of people cross the river by boat.
Your analogy overstates the case.
BRT makes taking the bus much more attractive due to enabling high frequency and shorter transit times. You can't judge how many people will take a BRT route based on how many people take the pre-BRT version of the route.
The Flatiron Flyer BRT connecting Boulder to Denver is a good example. Ridership has consistently exceeded expectations and now it's one of the most ridden routes in the Denver area.
The root cause is that too many people are personally invested in the waste and bloat and earn their livings from maintaining and expanding the waste and bloat. At the same time, the people who pay -- mostly taxpayers -- either don't care or don't have access to a mechanism that could reduce the bloat.
Politicians have every incentive to promote huge infrastructure projects -- great photo ops -- and no incentive to follow-up with the dirty details or to insist on performance to budgets. Contractors want to charge as much as possible, not produce more bang for the buck and they have employees and subcontractors who want more bloat. Bureaucrats need forms, approvals and studies to justify their jobs, regardless of any value added by paper pushing. Community activists earn their salaries by opposing projects, not by pushing them or demanding lower costs: many of the donations come from employees and contractors working on the projects.
I liked Matt's article on this topic from a year ago: https://www.slowboring.com/p/the-stationary-bandits-of-new-york
Another way to frame this is that the right doesn’t want to invest in most forms of government-driven infrastructure, while the left is captured by rent seeking bandits: unions, environmentalists, NGOs, lawyers and bureaucrats.
One doesn’t want to build, the other can’t do so without feeding all the pigs.
That's definitely an important part of the conversation, too! Thanks to you and some others for pointing it out
These incentives apply equally in other countries though, and yet they have lower construction costs and less waste and bloat all the same, so I don't see this as some insurmountable obstacle to reform.
Does anyone have a source for this statement: "Even in car-friendly Houston, more than half of suburban commuters to downtown take the bus."
I think this post is wonderful, but has about a zero percent chance of ever happening, since a more efficient transit system is simply not a priority of U.S. politicians in a country where over 90% of people drive everywhere.
From a partisan standpoint, Democrats see a more efficient transit system as way down in the priority list, and not worth spending political capital or compromising other progressive priorities to achieve. And Republicans, simply don't want transit to become more efficient because it would weaken their argument that all government services are bloated and filled with waste. They would rather simply cut funding for transit, and leave all the bloat in place for what money remains, so they can use that bloat to get people to vote for Republicans in the next election.
I wish I were wrong here, but I just don't see it.
There are lots of bad stakeholders and conflicts that cause these problems, but at a fundamental level it is mainly a matter of competence. Infrastructure schemes would work much better if a few senior people learned easily available lessons and were better at their jobs.
"Environmentalists can celebrate the construction of megaprojects that reduce pollution."
And other fairy tales from the parallel universe of Sane, Reasonable Earth.
It seems like this will be opposed by an awkward alliance of people who don't want it to be built *at all* (nimbys, conservatives, some environmentalists) and people who either don't care about the price or want it to be expensive (anyone who profits from the construction). How do we crush both groups simultaneously?
Here in Glendale they recently pushed through a Bus Rapid Transit project from Pasadena to North Hollywood that makes very little sense. The project will cost over $400 million and largely involves implementing bus-only lanes through the heart of cities along the way like Glendale, converting major thoroughfares from 2 x 2 traffic lanes to 1 x 1 traffic lanes.
I’ve been riding the buses along this route over the past few weeks to get some idea of current rush-hour traffic flow. Traffic flows just fine, and giving buses exclusive-lane access will achieve very little. Project advocates have trumpeted a “44%” time savings resulting from the project, but they’re comparing the project’s 22-stop “express” service with the current system with approximately 90 stops, which is a completely misleading comparison. They could accomplish the project’s time-saving objectives merely by running a 22-stop express service along the route, without any need for lane closures. But they’ve rammed the project down people’s throats and use the slur term “NIMBY” to anyone who opposes it.