johnfabian
1d ago
I think that the much more relevant cultural difference is that France and a lot of the other mainland European transit agencies/governments have retained significant state capacity. They have much greater institutional knowledge on how to design and build projects, and these institutions have some degree of political and financial independence that shields them from long-term uncertainty and partisan politics. They do not need to outsource very basic functions of their mandate to private companies, nor are reliant on politicians to provide them funding or direction.
johnfabian
1d ago
If you haven't been following Canadian politics, Carney is essentially creating the legal apparatus for large projects - "projects of national interest" - to essentially bypass most pre-existing regulation constraining infrastructure development. While he has said he is committed to keeping the burdensome regulations imposed by the previous Trudeau government (bill C-69 is the one to google if you want some background info), there is now the legal process in place for the federal and provincial governments to sidestep those almost completely. The upcoming Bill C-15 may go even farther in giving many private companies the ability to do the same.
johnfabian
1d ago
Certainly so far Carney has established very different messaging with respect to First Nations' involvement in infrastructure projects. It's been made very clear they no longer have a veto, and that the duty to consult does not mean the duty to acquire their consent. We'll see what that actually looks like in action, and at some point the courts are going to wade in and have their say, but the flip from the Trudeau government is quite notable - so far.
johnfabian
1d ago
I thought the bulk of US (and, for that matter, British) rail construction in the 19th century was due to the private sector, not public works, hence the rise of the so-called robber barons.
The railroads themselves were built by private operators, but they typically involved some level of state involvement; usually in order to acquire the rights-of-way they were built on either the land was seized and then granted/sold to them by the government, or they were granted limited powers of eminent domain by the state. So in either case they were still operating within a similar legal environment. In Canada and the US the government was fond of subsidizing railway development by offering massive land grants that the railway companies could then develop/flip/use to their purposes.
johnfabian
1d ago
A dash of optimism: preliminary plans for Canadian high-speed rail
Canada has had an awful recent history of infrastructure projects, especially transit projects. Delays and cost overruns are typical, which is very bad because the costs that are being inevitably overrun are themselves inevitably on the order of 3-5x more expensive per km than comparable projects in Europe. Toronto's first new rapid transit line in 20 years (the Finch LRT) has turned out to be somewhat-less-than rapid and has sparked genuine public backlash, and the soon-to-open Eglinton LRT has become a punchline for government incompetence given the long, ridiculous saga of its construction (I wrote about it before, here).
So part of me has always been skeptical about the high-speed rail project underway in Canada. It originally had life under Justin Trudeau's government as a "high-frequency rail", which promised slow but frequent service in the Toronto-Québec corridor, but when they engaged actual experts they rightfully told the government it was ridiculous to spend $20 billion on a slow and not-entirely-electric train service that would not be able to compete against air travel. So it got revived at the very end of JT's tenure to be a genuine high-speed rail project. I had reasons to be skeptical: there are a couple of questionable partners in the project, including Air Canada who has a somewhat glaring conflict of interest given that HSR is meant to be the airplane killer. The budget was expensive for a system of this type, and with Canada's record you know it's bound to get worse. And more than anything else rail transit in Canada has been crippled for decades by an overbearing urge to think small and find a "made in Canada solution", as if we aren't the global laggards. It's bad to have poor transit. It feels insulting to spend so much money on it and have it still be so bad.
But ahead of public consultation ALTO (the consortium of planners for the project) have released their initial plans and it actually... looks good? There are various things I take issue with, but in general they seem to be avoiding all the classic mistakes these kind of plans get saddled with in North America. It certainly seems that this is a practical-minded group that is intent on replicating the best practices of existing HSR systems rather than trying to reinvent the wheel.
I always worried that Canadian HSR would turn into a mirror of Californian HSR: a gargantuan exercise in pork barrel politics, meant primarily to allow every private concern to feast at the public trough and somewhat secondarily (or tertiarily) deliver a functioning rail network. That's still possible, and the projected budget still seems high for what we'll be getting, but I have an actual genuine spark of optimism. This is something very important to both the little boy and the big boy in me, so I'm trying not to get too emotionally invested... but it would be a genuine sign of changing times if Canada was actually able to properly deliver a new infrastructure megaproject. We need it really really badly; not just because Toronto-Québec is maybe the most obvious use case for HSR and it is frankly absurd it has taken this long, but just to show that as a nation we can actually build something real again.
johnfabian
7d ago
If you zoom in on the profile pic, you can tell it is obviously AI-generated by the books in the background.
Good bet that whole profile is being run from Russia.
johnfabian
8d ago
As I see it, the crux of the matter is the Revolutionary Guard. Unless you can somehow displace them as the primary powerbrokers/guards/corrupt overseers of Iran and its economy, it's hard to imagine meaningful improvement that is worth the number of bodies that will pile up. The system only changes if the guys with guns want it to change.
johnfabian
13d ago
Remember that "citibike Karen" incident that went viral a while back? Where a group of young black men accused a white pregnant woman of stealing a bike from them? I remember a lot of the response to that, even before it came out it was all bullshit, was "how fucking dumb can you be, how ideologically motivated, that your narrative of events could completely upend what everybody knows about how the world works." Or things to that effect. And they were right.
Now we have an incident where the same people who were making those (ultimately correct) mocking posts have turned around and decided that it was more likely that a mother of three decided to go out in a blaze of glory killing ICE agents with her car, rather than a bunch of twitchy gung-ho goons lit her up with little provocation.
johnfabian
13d ago
Saw a report that one or more of the agents were injured in the incident. Of course it could have been after the shooting and the person losing control of the car, but it does indicate that the person was driving towards an agent at the time.
This is de rigeur for police reports. These statements are issued reflexively as a means to pre-empt possible future negative consequences for police officers. Often it's a detail that is simply later dropped if it is no longer required. It only gets media attention if it happens to someone famous, like when Scottie Scheffler ruthlessly dragged a noble policeman dozens of yards the other year.
johnfabian
14d ago
One of the things about the Baltimore setting that has helped Simon and his works avoid being trite social justice fodder is that in a significantly majority black city the racial dynamics aren't oppressor/oppressed. The cops are black, the politicians are black, the wealthy are black, the criminals are black. So while the Gun Trace Task Force (and the Baltimore PD) victimize mostly black men, the GTTF itself is also majority black, and is ultimately investigated and brought to justice by (at least in the show) an all-white team. The white police commissioner who gets sympathetic treatment is fired and replaced by another corrupt black one. Simon has always seen the drug war and policing primarily through a class lens.
Culture war retrospective: We Own This City
I have a habit of not consuming contemporary media. There are so many TV shows, movies, video games, books, etc., and their number is ever-growing. There's an endless list of things you could or would enjoy, and a finite number of hours in your life. Trying to keep up with new releases is practically a hobby in itself. You can just have faith that the cream will rise to the top: quality will endure 5 or 10 or 50 years later, whereas conversely new releases tend to often attract uncritical praise and hype.
So over the Christmas break I watched We Own This City, a 2022 miniseries from David Simon, creator of The Wire. We Own This City was hailed as a sort-of companion piece to that show, a non-fiction story about Baltimore's infamous Gun Trace Task Force: a police unit that took it upon itself to beg, borrow, and steal as much money from the citizens of its city as it could. The show jumps around chronologically and across multiple plotlines, following both the development and deeds of the Task Force, its ultimate investigation and prosecution, reform efforts in response, and the investigation of a murder related to the Task Force. It got glowing reviews at the time, but that was to be expected given its critique of American policing and the bonafides of Simon. I decided to save it for a rainy day.
The show is really pulled together by a magnetic leading performance by Jon Bernthal as a sort of idiot savant corrupt cop Wayne Jenkins, replete with a fabulous white working class Bawlmore accent. He is the axis around which the whole show spins, and it’s hard to see the show working without him being so entertaining. He is simultaneously status-obsessed, disdainful of authority, resentful about a perceived lack of respect, and delusional about his own fallibility. But he also has a canny instinct about who to press and how hard, and things are going great – until they fall apart.
In stark contrast, the show grinds to an awful screeching halt whenever his counterpart (in every way) appears on screen. This is Nicola Steele, a (fictional) envoy from the Civil Rights division of the Justice Department to the city of Baltimore sent to spearhead police reform. She is in many ways an embodiment of the peak of “woke” politics in the United States, and given that I am not one to normally complain about these sorts of things that is an indication of how grating this part of the show is. It’s hard to judge exactly how on the nose this was meant to be, given that David Simon was and is very much not “woke” in the standard progressive sense, but it’s hard not to see a wealthy fat black woman (of course, played by a Nigerian!) delivering trite monologues of 2021-flavour social justice and fight off the urge to roll your eyes back into your skull. Ironically her role in the show as the deliverer of exposition and receiver of Long Monologues About What is Right makes her unintentionally seem like a naïve idiot who sucks at her job. But this itself is a trope of progressive art.
The contrast between her character and Wayne Jenkins appearing in the same show feels very bizarre in terms of how apart both the storytelling styles and quality is. The former is the embodiment of the worst of David Simon’s impulses: moral grandstanding, lectures to the audience, unimpeachable righteousness. The latter is proof of his genius: exciting, propulsive, complex storytelling with great characters and incisive social commentary. The other cast of characters are generally solid, though it doesn’t quite pop with the same kind of rich minor roles that Simon’s other great television work has. Some viewers and critics apparently had trouble following the show’s chronology, which I didn’t: there are a number of inventive ways the show informs you when a given scene is happening from the interstitials, appearance, and background details (something Simon’s shows have always excelled at).
It’s hard not to wonder whether the show turns out better if it’s made even a year or two later. The tidewaters would have receded just that extra little bit to take the edge of the moral righteousness. Certainly it would have been an interesting parallel to draw at the time as the US as a whole was experiencing the same pullback in policing that Baltimore had experienced 6 years previous that resulted in the Gun Trace Task Force being able to escalate its actions. Of course on the flipside, with the looming possibility of another Trump presidential run, things might have turned out worse. Simon has a particular loathing for Trump that makes for bad art (have I ever shared my thoughts on The Plot Against America here?) and he might have been tempted to make things more polemical.
My recommendation: if you enjoyed The Wire you should definitely check We Own This City out, and feel no shame in fast-forwarding through any of the Justice Department scenes. Regardless of the quality, you already know how that story ends! And if you don’t think you want to watch it, definitely still go to youtube and watch a bunch of scenes of Jon Bernthal as Wayne Jenkins. It’s a lot of fun. Here’s an example.
Purely as a use case for HSR, the Canadian set-up is more an ideal case because the cities are spread out: HSR's use case is travelling between city pairs of 150 - 700 km apart, so Canada having a series of its biggest cities lying along a single line each perfectly spaced for HSR is perfect. It lowers build costs and raises average speeds. The US eastern seaboard is in this sense almost too dense: Baltimore is 50 km from Washington, Philly another 150 km further, Princeton and NYC 40 and 100 km more... it's really the NYC-New Haven-Boston side that has more classic HSR stop spacing. The DC-NYC portion would be better served by more frequent and reliable 200 km/h service than 325 km/h HSR.
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