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  cladopa
  As an engineer myself working for them 20 years ago, we were certainly not well paid like the article said. Quite the contrary: I was still on University(had not finished the final project) and had to do most of the hard technical work myself for someone else to just overview the results and sign. My salary was miserable.Once I had finished I could earn 3 to 4 times more on several places.They were also extremely creative taking foreign systems, studying the patent and modifying it to pay zero to the creators of the patents. This was done with things like the aluminium beams for electricity delivery that I think was developed by Italians, or the tunnelling machines that had all the pieces replicated inhouse.
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  thatmf
  > Unlike infrastructure projects in Britain or America, which are heavily reliant on external consultants to handle all stages of the project, this group of well-paid in-house engineers led much of the Madrid Metro expansion. The team stayed largely the same throughout the different projects, meaning that they were able to learn from their experience and apply it to future projects.Imagine that: building expertise in-house and within the governmental org results in better planning and management and thus outcomes.
• alkyon
  https://www.researchgate.net/publication/296888725_Geology_a...The article is in French, but geology is the key factor. Do you need to bore rock or sandy soil with tar? Is the area seismically active like in Los Angeles? This affects the cost and timeline of metro construction more than just wages.
• zelphirkalt
  Having been in Madrid and having used the metro, I was also impressed by how well it works. Seemingly always on time, and very good price service ratio. You can buy "rides" and one ride means get in at any station and get out at any other station of the whole network, interchange as many times as you want. For, at the time, 1.16 Euro. Compare that to Berlin, where you can pay some 4 Euro or so for limited amount of stops or time. Madrid metro >> Berlin public transport.
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  thelastgallon
  Meanwhile, bay area has companies with market cap of 30T (50T?), has nonexistent/incompatible and the slowest public transit.1) BART 'works' for a subset of the population.2) ACE train is one route only, from Stockton to San Jose.3) Caltrain is one straight line. Caltrain has a bullet train that takes an hour for ~20-30 miles.4) There is a ferry service for some parts of north bay.There are probably dozens of other bus systems and ferries and what not, all incompatible and disconnected.When people from bay area (and the big tech companies) tell you they are the greatest minds on the planet solving (or going to solve) world problems, look at their public transit and think. Then weep/laugh.Source: I lived in the North bay, East bay and South bay.
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  neil_s
  What would need to be true for SF to replicate this? Would we need alignment at the mayor, state assembly and SFMTA levels?
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  rr808
  A lot of the price difference between Europe and USA now are wages. US wages for construction workers in NYC or SF are 2 or 3 times that of Madrid. Lots of things are cheap just for this reason alone.
• nephihaha
  Where does he discuss geology?
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  jmyeet
  In 1968, Garrett Hardin wrote a paper called "The Tragedy of the Commons" [1]. Many people seem to think this term dates further back to Adam Smith or earlier it does not. Well, this became hugely influential in noeliberalism and was used as the justification for governments to sell off their assets in the 1980s and 1990s in particular, all based on this (flawed) idea that private industry was more efficient. This was the era of public-private "partnerships". What that really means was privatizing the profits and socializing the losses while guaranteeing profits.Utilities were generally public prior to this. Now we have private equity buying up utilities because the profits are guaranteed [2]. While electricity prices are regulated, capex on infrastructure isn't so they can simply boost profits by "investing" in the network ie creating extra capacity for data centers to be sold electricity at sub-market rates.Lots of expierments were done and empirical data analyzed on the tragedy of the commons and it never matched the theory. Ultimately, this resulted in Elinor Ostrom winning the 2009 Nobel Price for Economics for disproving it with empirical data. Yet people still quote it.Look at the list of metro systems sorted by length [4]. They're almost all Chinese. The 4th largest is in Chengdu, which only opened in 2010. In 16 years it's now the 4th largest in the world.Pretty much any argument you can use about how China is different will have a contradiction by counterexample. Difficult terran? Chongqing. Old cities? Beijing, Shanghai. City too large? Good one.It's not any single factor that allows for this. It's managed at every single level. For example, China has standardized rolling stock to a handful of variants so you avoid an entire procurement process (and grift). The UK spends billions of pounds to build an otherwise completely unnecessary tunnel under the Chilterns to protect the views of something of the most expensive property in the country [5]. Not in China. Audits of the Second Avenue Subway showed a host of corruption such as so-called "ghost jobs" [6]. Beverly Hills and Santa Monica fought the LA Metro extending into their areas because it might bring in the poors.[1]: https://www.garretthardinsociety.org/articles_pdf/tragedy_of...[2]: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/pe-buys-utilities-power-ai-18...[3]: https://www.forbes.com/sites/artcarden/2019/08/07/elinor-ost...[4]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_metro_systems[5]: https://www.theguardian.com/business/2026/jan/19/hs2-tunnels...[6]: https://secondavenuesagas.com/2018/01/01/inside-times-deep-d...
• andrewvu0203
  [flagged]
• anon
  undefined
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  awinter-py
  tldr cut and cover?
• kleiba2
  By using cheap labor from Africa?