Low Spanish Costs are not About Decentralization | Pedestrian Observations

Apparently in the public-transport-planning-o-sphere, an article has been going around that attributes the low cost of buliding metros in Spain to four factors: - Decentralization, - Fast construction, - Standardized designs, - Iterative, in-house designs

The author of this piece alleges that the first of these is completely wrong. The original article is really long and I don’t really want to read it. I’m going to leave the link here though, in case: https://worksinprogress.co/issue/how-madrid-built-its-metro-cheaply/.

The UK’s centralization does not matter

The UK is both very expensive to build infrastructure in and atypically centralized (whoo!). Our centralization is weird: we have devolution, but 84% of the population lives in England. Attempts to devolve by region failed because there’s not that strong regional identity, at least not in ways that overlap with where you’d want to make borders. (ie, cornwall too small, “The North” too large).

Oh no do I have to care about the difference between county, metropolitan area and official region?

Such devolution is nice, but not really relevant here. After all, London has extensive devolved powers to manage itself, and incredibly high construction costs :(

The UK shares high construction costs with other English-speaking countries (send tweet that speaking english exposes you to more neoliberal bullshit and thus permanently damages your country irreprably. Cardiacs sound good in any language. Cut your losses.)

In most Anglosphere countries, other than the US. Costs rose sharply in the 90s and 00s as more privatized and contractor-centric procurement became the norm. Devolution doesn’t matter here. (e.g., Singapore and Hong Kong, New Zealand are all too small to decentralize, or city states aleready, Australia and Canada are decentralized, and also very expensive).

One way to measure decentralisation (the way the OECD does it) is to measure subnational spending. Here’s a table:

I wonder what Pandoc will do with this…

New York cost 4x as much to build in the 60s and 70s as London, German and Italian cities did.

In contrast, cheap to build countries vary widely in centralization. Spain, for, ahem, historical reasons, is extensively decentralised. Italy is fairly centralised (low subnational spend). Greece and Portugal are fairly centralised, and Chile is extremely centralised.

Centralisation and Decisionmaking

So, decentralisation in terms of spending doesn’t seem to be very relevant to how much it costs to build infrastructure, but that’s only one sort of decentralisation.

We also have centralisation of decisionmaking. e.g., in Nordic countries, welfare and related programs are decentralised, but decisionmaking for capital city megaprojects is centralised (e.g., metro projects were decided on by the state in Stockholm, and congestion pricing required a Riksdag vote, which got to decide where the money went (roads, not public transport!))

In non-devolved European states, like the Nordic countries, or France, the dominant capital has less autonomy than provinces because the state is based there, and manages its affairs directly. Thus the Paris police are employed by the state. In terms of large infrastrucutre projects, the state has to be involved because budgets are so large they fall under the stat’s perview.

In contrast, subway projects in the US are decided entirely by the cities they are based in (whoo!). Excepting New York, state politicians are rarely involved, and federal government are not involved. Federal grants for such construction are competitive, and not decided by the people building things.

This separation means regulators are uninformed about realities on the ground, and builders are too timid to innovate because of the risk regulators won’t approve. There has been no public sector innovation in the US for a long time. In the US, the agencies deciding on funding are rad by political appointees and staff, and not engineers.

So what

So. High British costs have nothing to do with centralisation. So what. If we believed this, and thus devolved more, then we would remove expertise of doers from the state (tbh, not entirely sure what this means).

Reducing costs does not reduce the overall budget, it just means you can afford to dig more tunnels/make a bigger metro.

In England, decentralisation only works if it means metropolisation in secondary cities; since then the relavent projects are below the pay grade of ministers or high-level civil servants. (Apparently this means devolving to metro counties, rather than municipalities (no idea what this means)). Local government in the UK seems very complicated.

Additionally, such projects will require outside expertise. Luckily, TfL has such experts already publically employed. Since they’re part of the state, they should save us money and do good work, rather than profiting from management fees. (they should hire martin).

the first line effect

Often what happens is a decentralised authority has permission to build its first infrastructure, it does so; it’s small, well-planned, developed and executed in house. it is percieved as a success, and then the subsequent project is much larger in scope, and no longer effective in house. Costs skyrocket, it goes badly and everbody is sad :( This is the first-line effect and happens everywhere. Oh hey, this is why Nottingham never finished its tram!

The three cheapest high-speed rail lines were all the first lines built by their respective countries. Subsequent lines were reasonably costed, but never as low.

learning from everyone

The article he’s criticising focuses on one good example, and thus over-fits to it. Better insights are found by looking at a number of successful projects and seeing what they have in common.

Standardised stations are not automatically spartan, because the murals and sculptures and nice things are cheap, compared to escallators and stairs and so on (which is what ought to be standardised).

This seems like a really good blog.

my takeaways

• so, decentralisation does not explain high British infrastructure costs: data shows costs are not related to decentralisation.
• decentralisation of decisinomaking is more relevant
• british local government is extremely complicated.
• public transport planning is complicated and very interesting.
• when thinking about this sort of thing, don’t over-learn from single examples. you need to consider a broad range of example projects and see what they had in common.