. @alon_levy at NYU: >10x cost differences in subway construction across the world. Other countries get vastly more subway construction for amount spent than the US does

Why Spain’s Madrid Metro CEO thinks they build cheaply

Alon has put together this nice primary database of construction costs across >200 projects in 40 countries. Going online soon

Cut and cover: blast open the street, build the subway, cover it up. How NYC subways got built initially. Lower costs by factor of ~1.5-2ish; relative to mining the stations and tunnels bw stops. Which has become more standard in developed countries

2nd Ave Subway spent $750m on each station mining, could have saved tons of money through cut and cover

In the cross section, costs are similar within cities and counties.

In the time series, costs are rising everywhere: but not at the same rate everywhere

What’s expensive?
- the Anglosphere
- ex colonies, of which Philippines the most
- Taiwan, Japan

What’s average?
- W European continental law counties
- China
- Broad mix in E Europe

What’s cheap?
- some E Europe
- Nordic countries
- Mediterranean
- non colony Developing

What is *not* driving costs?

- geography. Costs similar w/in counties across geographies
- unions. Note Singapore makes strikes illegal and has high costs.
- corruption (!). Note low costs in *Russia* and high costs in Singapore

Now much of this is familiar to people following Alon. What’s new here (at least to me) is this within Canada comparison across Quebec and Toronto.

Doesn’t seem like common law - or other political factors - explain the Anglosphere premium

A plausible reason is that Anglo public officials are don’t realize what’s going on in the rest of the world and only read English. This is evident from their hilariously inaccurate and slightly racist characterizations of foreign transit systems

I really can’t emphasize enough the absurd implications of this thesis. Americans do go on vacations! The folks running things pride themselves on cosmopolitanism!

But they are literally unable to learn from people who speak different languages and so we pay >10x more

Anyway here is how to fix the system - improve contracting and improve in house project management skills within public agencies. Change America’s system of adversarial legalism. Address US/UK unions siege mentality resisting change

Alon: everything in this country that is not used by 9-5 managers sucks. Also high quality people all go to the private sector.

Note that even countries with fairly poorly functioning public systems in general (Greece...) manage to carve out islands of excellence with respect to certain core civil service functions. Which the US does not in infra