Default to Yes
First: if you didn’t click last time and read the Levitsky and Way piece in Foreign Affairs, their accompanying podcast episode is also very much worth a listen. Their take is scary, but it’s the one I think we should be paying attention to. That’s a lot more important and urgent than my little slightly related political musing here.
Onto lighter things.
Because I’m me, I’ve spent some time recently reading some of the cases from the excellent Transit Costs Project from a team at NYU.
I’ve become a real public transport nerd over the last few years, and, especially as I’ve spent more time traveling, you really begin to wonder why we can’t have nice things here in the US. Visit Copenhagen and go into a metro station, and you never have to wait more than about 90 seconds for a train in the city center. Yes, you read that right.
If anything, we have more money sloshing around here in the US than they do in Denmark. So why don’t we have great infrastructure like that?
Cost is one big reason. We may have more money, but that doesn’t make up for the fact doing transport projects costs way, way more in the US when we can get together the political will to do them. The new Second Avenue subway in New York isn’t just more expensive than similar projects, it’s way more expensive.
Phase 1 of that project ran a cool $1.7 billion per kilometer. Phase 2 is set to cost even more, if it ever happens. Compare that to Madrid, where similar projects cost closer to $80 million per kilometer. That’s two orders of magnitude cheaper. That’s the difference between a computer in 1995 and one today.
The reasons for this difference are, of course, complicated and varied. It would be folly to claim “one small change” would make all the difference.
But if I were going to highlight a problem with the US versus places that do transport projects well, it’s politics. Not the “big” politics that we see on CNN, but the small politics that animate our cities and towns.
Digging out a new subway line intersects with every possible group you could imagine. There are the people who live on the route. The businesses with premises on the route. One authority may control the street, a different one takes care of the sidewalks, and a third might control the street lighting. There are electrical lines. Sewers and water. Telecoms.
And each of those groups will have complaints, wants, and ideas.
Negotiating, redesigning, working around those different groups has literal costs — in producing documents, paying lawyers, or doing major redesigns — and indirect costs through delays.
In their research, the team at the Transit Costs Project identified that places that do transport projects well take serious steps to resolve these political squabbles, which hugely reduces delivery time and cost.
And I particularly liked one approach that was taken in Montréal where the city recently launched a new metro system called the REM. They defaulted to yes.
When there was a squabble between the agency building the REM and, say, the local residents around the route, they had a maximum of 60 days to sit down, meet, and try to resolve the problem. If the REM team had a reasonable solution to the residents’ complaint, they did it. But if, after 60 days, they were still at an impasse, the case was closed and the REM team was allowed to move forward. Action and progress were the default.
This is in such stark contrast to what happens in so many projects here in the US. We default to no.
It means change happens incredibly slowly, even when we desperately need it and want it. Or it never materializes at all.
Consider the launch of the iPhone in 2007. I had one, and it was lightyears ahead of its competitors. Looking back, though, it was pretty terrible. That first iPhone didn’t even have a 3G radio. Browsing the Internet on EDGE data — which maxed out at a leisurely 128 kbps — could be painful.
It was even worse in saturated markets like San Francisco and New York City. Because the iPhone was actually good, the amount of data being pushed over the air in major cities exploded. Carriers desperately needed to add more cell sites and upgrade existing ones to cope with the rising demand. People on those networks were crying out for more capacity. Often, you couldn’t get anything to load, however slowly, because the network was so saturated. But the ridiculous local politics of big cities got in the way.
By some accounts, there was a four-year delay between AT&T realizing it needed to expand capacity and actually delivering it. Putting up a new cell site isn’t as easy as planting a tree. It also shouldn’t take years to find a site, run a few hundred meters of cable, and stick a metal box on the side of a building. The problem was the army of people saying “no” when AT&T came knocking.
More pressingly, this is also a major problem that holds up housing projects in the most expensive places like Boston or New York City. From a purely technical perspective, it’s not exactly a walk in the park to build a new apartment building in a complicated place like Manhattan. But it’s not that hard. The petty politics of dealing with grumpy residents, greedy utilities, and endless interest groups saddles projects with extra costs and delays, which increase risk, compounding the cost problem by increasing the cost of financing.
We shouldn’t be surprised when the only projects lucrative enough to put up with these frustrating — and expensive — barriers are luxury condo buildings.
We can wish as much affordable housing into existence as we want. Or we could make some changes to actually make it possible.
A system like that used in Montréal for the REM feels like it strikes a nice balance. We’re not going China-style and simply steamrolling everyone who has a complaint. If someone has a problem, there’s a way for them to get their voice heard. But it can’t stop the project in its tracks. The default is to keep going.
This also helps keep costs down because it shifts the balance of power. In our system that defaults to no, objectors know they have the upper hand, which often compounds the explicit cost overrun (paying for lawyers and consultants to fight the issue, and paying for changes) with giveaways extracted to make the arguing stop.
Take just one example from the New York City Second Avenue subway project. During construction, the people who oversee the city’s street lights thought it would be a good idea to switch to fancy new LED lighting. Which meant that every street light that needed to be replaced on the subway route suddenly went from being around $160 to over $1,000. Multiply by the number of street lights along the new subway line, and that’s a huge expense. Multiply by the number of similar petty disputes, and you can see how the project costs exploded.
The street light people were able to extract this demand in large part thanks to the “default to no” system that operates in the US. Eventually the team building the new subway line gave in, because they knew if they didn’t, the project would never be able to move forward. If there’s pressure to make a decision and you know the default is yes, you’re less likely to press your luck.
Do I think that this will solve all our problems? No. Will there be some unfortunate losses to a system like this? Yes, of course.
Equally, it’s impossible to make everyone happy all the time. What we really need is to strike a balance. And I don’t think we’ve got the balance right in the US. I want high-speed trains. Or for housing to be cheap enough that people don’t have to live on the street.
Denmark consistently ranks as among the least corrupt, most politically free, and happiest countries in the world. Yet they’re also able to deliver projects like the relatively new Copenhagen metro at a reasonable cost. That subway system that has trains that arrive every 90 seconds? It cost about $225 million per kilometer to build. Not cheap to be sure, but also almost eight times cheaper than the tiny Second Avenue project that only added three new stops to the New York City subway system. And that had been discussed for almost 100 years before it happened.
Montréal isn’t exactly a bastion of authoritarian governmental abuse either.
Clearly it’s possible to swing this balance a little more toward action and create this “default to yes” without completely trampling civil liberties or running roughshod over minority groups.
If you ever have a chance to visit the UC Berkeley campus, there are a few spots where when you look out across the bay you get a great view of the Golden Gate Bridge. In our modern age, if the weather is good, there are usually lots of people snapping photos of that landmark piece of infrastructure. It’s funny to contrast that with the people who I’m sure existed back in the 1930s who vociferously objected to the project. Too expensive. A scar on the landscape. The ferry was good enough. But we said yes to things back then. The bridge opened ahead of schedule and under budget. And now, people travel from all over the world to take a selfie with it in the background.
It’s time we changed the default to yes. We deserve to have nice things, too.