Item — HN Reader

I think there are two factors at play here.

1) We have the curse of being first. Our cities are old so our infrastructure is old.

2) We can't just say, "Your land is ours, get the fuck out, construction begins in one week"

They can also cut corners on safety and pollution. The ends always justify the means.

7 comments

Your country is not even 250 years old. There are older cities with better infrastructure.

Exactly. You see the high speed rail in Italy, Japan or China and think about just how old those countries are. All have excellent high speed rail.

It isn't limited just to the outskirts either. For example, Rome itself has an amazing metro train system.

The problem isn't the age of the country. The problem is bureaucratic dysfunction.

Firebombing tends to.tear down old infrastructure pretty effectively

By the time they started planning the bullet train, that was long in the past. This is what the surroundings would have looked like when the bullet train started.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:0_series_Yurakucho_1967...

> We can't just say, "Your land is ours, get the fuck out, construction begins in one week"

didn't they say that when they arrived 400 years ago

> didn't they say that when they arrived 400 years ago

Didn't x say y 1,000 years ago?

You're talking about different people: literally, morally, culturally - in most every way in other words. What does the average American today have to do with someone that came over from the British Empire in September 1620? The Pilgrims were not a mixture of German, African, Mexican and Chinese. Today is not 400 years ago.

Because you benefit from what they said/did 400 years ago.

> 2) We can't just say, "Your land is ours, get the fuck out, construction begins in one week"

You kinda can, via eminent domain. Maybe the will isn't there, but the way is.

Not in a week -- months or years of process to get eminent domain, and it costs a fortune

Japan has great high speed rail, without cutting corners and even with much weaker eminent domain powers. There are other factors at play here. Why is building rail infrastructure 5x more expensive in the US than it is in continental Europe?

If either of these things were actually the factors blocking high speed rail in the US, Europe wouldn’t have trains either. Eminent domain exists, and US infrastructure only feels old because we never spend money on it.

That's not exactly accurate. Western Europe installed its high-speed rail decades ago. They could not do it today. The US also could have done it in the 1960s or 1970s and made a disastrous decision not to.

You can see proof of that in the fact that Western Europe is barely maintaining its infrastructure properly today. Their spending on such has frequently fallen below US spending levels as a share of GDP.

That's even while having the ability to raise incredibly cheap - often negative yield - debt. Germany refuses to spend and it is starting to badly need infrastructure spending.

EU infrastructure spending as a share of GDP is at 1.8% - 1.9%. The US is at 2.3% - 2.5%. In Greece it's 1.1% (it used to be over 2%). Italy is seeing a similar problem right now as its infrastructure crumbles and they have to fight over spending rules constantly.

From the World Economic Forum's competitiveness report looking at 1998-2017 infrastructure spending and results:

https://i.imgur.com/2jV5Zay.png

EU and Eurozone spending on infrastructure has widely been below proper maintenance levels since the great recession a decade ago. The EU as a whole needs to spend a lot just to catch up to where it should have been right now with its basic infrastructure.

They aren't doing that, and they would build high-speed rail today? There is good reason to be skeptical of that premise.

"Europe’s spending on infrastructure at ‘chronic’ low level"

"Spending at 20-year low threatens region’s prosperity, EIB report warns"

https://www.ft.com/content/51524ab4-cf77-11e7-9dbb-291a884dd...

"According to Statista, the percentage of GDP spent on infrastructure for UK, France and Germany ranged between 2% and 2.2% in 2013 marginally below USA who has been spending 2.4%."

Note: it's not good to be marginally below the US on infrastructure spending in any regard.

https://medium.com/fitch-blog/the-infrastructure-footrace-wh...

"Investment in infrastructure in the EU is today at 1.8% of GDP, according to the EIB Investment Report 2018. This is 20% below pre-crisis levels"

https://voxeu.org/article/addressing-europe-s-infrastructure...

Why can't/don't they (the government) simply invest? what exactly has changed that prevents it? Where else is spending up/revenue down?

It seems like just about every government function has had it's budget effectively reduced over the years - where is it going?

The US doesn’t really have problems cutting corners when it comes to safety and pollution as well. For safety, look at the standard US power outlet and compare its safety with practically any other outlet in the world, of which all of them are considerably safer (albeit at the expense of being more complex and/or larger). For pollution, look at the current US Government actions.

>For safety, look at the standard US power outlet and compare its safety with practically any other outlet in the world, of which all of them are considerably safer

You judging the U.S for something they did first is only proving the point. It'd be great if we could up our voltage from 120 and change the plugs, but after a point it's just too expensive to change. And it's not as if tens of thousands are dying due to 3 prong outlets...

> Your land is ours, get the fuck out, construction begins in one week

My understanding is in China the government owns all the land to begin with, you lease it from them. But I guess in this case it would be "your lease is terminated, thanks"