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Why is transit in the US so expensive?
The starting point for this video is an upcoming report on why transit, most notably subways, cost so much more in American than in other developed countries. However, the discussion covers much more than just transit, and discusses how cost disease effects pretty much all public works projects, from roads to sewage. While there are many individual pieces that contribute to inflated prices (outside consultants, unions, red tape, bureaucrats, etc.), they don't really like this explanation. As Chuck points out shortly after 31:00, each of the 2 major political sides can point to a few of these issues to fuel their particular narrative. But, he says, they're incomplete, and miss the real underlying causes. If I were to summarize their description, it seems like the question is mostly one of attitude:
No one cares about cost. People will say they do, but their actions say otherwise. Voters don't, especially with the ability to borrow from the future by issuing bonds. Which means politicians don't, because why would they? And the appointed heads of agencies don't consider it their responsibility to account for cost; they treat cost as fixed and let the legislature decide how to pay for it. Possible sub-point: We treat a lot of these projects as jobs programs and so end up hiring more people than necessary.
There's an underlying assumption everywhere that everything has to be the best, no matter what. Roads in rural areas, that in other countries would be very narrow and winding, are in the US flat, smooth, paved asphalt with 2 lanes in each direction. We don't treat money as a constraint, we just decide we want a thing and then go and get it without regard for the future. Of course, this attitude depends on what one is used to. Boomers, especially, are not used to having these sorts of constraints; Millennials also feel a certain sense of entitlement, but at least have more experience with these constraints. (The latter sentence seems to be more or less speculation, they don't cite any research here).
The conclusion is that nothing will really get fixed until it accumulates to the point of a major economic recession or depression, at which point we'll be forced to actually do something, but not until after we have wasted enormous amounts of time, effort, and resources on poorly planned public projects. Or, if we collectively decide to actually care about these things before then.
Oh boy. This is one of my pet political peeves. It got discussed a few times on /r/slatestarcodex with the head of this project (Alon Levy) even chiming in a few times. I've got a bunch of ideas.
1. Institutional incuriosity
Transit agencies in the USA and Canada are super myopic. There are of course entire regions of the world where transit is built and operated cheaply and effectively, but very curiously North American transit agencies seem to make absolutely no attempt to figure out how they do it. When you read about the planning reports done for projects in North America, what they are compared to are almost always other North American projects. Right down the line, from things like technologies to bid structuring to consulting to public-private partnerships to art design, the "best practices" that are emulated are not in fact the best practices, but the best North American practices (which pretty severely limits your potential from the get-go). I could draw from dozens of examples in this regard, but maybe the most egregious case study for this is the California high-speed rail project which decided to ignore the accumulated six decades of HSR experience elsewhere in the world in lieu of creating a "made in America" solution to every problem they encountered. Part of this institutional incuriosity I think is a result of over-regulation; in the past North American rail projects were severely handicapped by onerous safety rules which forced them to use trains much heavier than those of Europe and Japan, but those regulations were spiked during the Trump administration so it's no longer an excuse. It also doesn't help that since there have practically been zero privately-run new rail projects since the 1970s in North America, an entire generation of people who might have had experience working with this has disappeared.
2. Infighting between relevant governments/agencies
There's a German planning proverb that goes "Organisation vor Elektronik vor Beton", literally organization before electronics before concrete. The idea being that when you want to do a project, the biggest gains in productivity and cost savings come from getting everyone on the same team first. North American transit politics often sees the opposite: where different transit organizations that overlap in jurisdiction see each other as competitors for funding and riders. In lots of North American cities the different transit organizations are downright hostile to each other; they refuse to share transfers, they won't show each other on their route maps, they bicker and fight about everything and won't share any infrastructure. Meanwhile in cities like Tokyo where most of the transit is privately-run the various organizations see each other as complementary hubs in a wheel, vital to the other's success.
This translates often into poorly-run transit with little cooperation, obviously, but also contributes to cost overflows. Amtrak wanted $10 billion (read: actually $30 billion) to dig a new tunnel under Philadelphia for high-speed rail... because SEPTA refuses to give them any space in their under-capacity 4-track tunnel.
Or in Europe and Japan you often see regional transit authorities band together when ordering new buses or trains, because the economies of scale offer significant savings when they order 200 trainsets together rather than each insisting on bespoke custom runs of 10. That kind of larger-scale cooperation effectively does not exist in North America. Not only is there a lack of standardized design and operational practices, there is outward hostility to any form of cooperation.
3. Inability or unwillingness to manage cost overruns
There are political dimensions to it. Part of it is I think that in the North American context, especially in the age of diminishing state capacity, politicians kind of like to throw big amounts of money around - it's a proxy for how much they care. Therefore it's not really a bad thing if you spend $5 billion on a project that should cost a quarter of that - look how important transit is!
I think it would be naïve to discount organized crime elements here. At least in Toronto the 'Ndrangheta silently have their hand in just about every public works contract (for a good laugh check out which Ford donors own land along the proposed new highway 413). If there isn't an organized crime element to how much we pay for transit than we're getting ripped off much worse than we think, especially because Italy actually builds transit quite cheaply.
There's also some institutional culture going here. There has been more and more investigative journalism about the extent to which governments rely on private consulting to make decisions for them; where to put the benches and exits in stations, notes about architecture, technology choice, etc. Part of this is in general an erosion of state capacity: the best and brightest don't work for the government, and there aren't many to begin with. (By contrast the Paris transit corp RATP has about 2,000 engineers on-staff). But the worse element, at least according to the people I know who've worked in these roles, is that the consulting groups are paid to provide cover for the people in charge when decisions go wrong and costs inevitably balloon. Then you can trot out this study you paid $15 million for and say well, this was what was suggested to us, we just confirmed their decision.
4. Political interference
Municipal politicians tend to have a lot more influence in what does or does not get built in North America. This is generally the opposite of what happens in Europe, where long-term plans are either established by arms-length governing bodies or by some kind of binding referendum. But largely what does not happen is that some new person gets elected and the existing plans get chucked. Planning is done for the long-haul, not for short term changes in opinion or cash windfalls. Part of this is the distribution of revenues and funds; transit organizations in Europe tend to get long-term budgets which give them the capacity to chart their own course with respect to new projects and maintenance, instead of hapharzardly injecting funds according to campaign promises.
The role of individual politicians in the transit-building process also increases potential for corruption and lobbying. It's not that NIMBYs don't exist in Europe: they do, and they try their best to hamstring projects (like the UK's probably ill-fated HS2, or Stuttgart 21). But the political levers they have at their disposal tend to be larger (like referendums) rather than things like the environmental assessment process or community engagement which are more vulnerable to people who disproportionately care (meaning: hate) the project. Common law might have a role in this.
I could go on about all this forever. But my general point is that North America desperately needs to look inward on this. If the idea is that we have to shift our transportation off fossil fuels (and we do), and that a good chunk of the transition to electric transport means new transit (and it does), then we have to get much better at getting bang for our buck, because right now it is downright pathetic. Look to the countries that build transit cheaply (Spain, Sweden, Italy, Korea, are all positive examples). Look to the countries that build transit expensively (North America, China, Russia). Figure out what people are doing right, and what people are doing wrong, because in general the correlations between high-cost and low-cost countries are not wages, or systems of government, or geology, but rather institutional competence.
Supposedly the 'Ndrangheta here in Toronto is on equal footing with the original in Calabria.
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I loved the story from California's HSR where they talked about the french rail builder coming to the US to bid, throwing in the towel after finding their time here wasted, leaving, and completing a new HSR project in Morocco, while California spent twice their expected budget to build nothing.
If that's not a great illustration of the US problems, I don't know what a better one would be.
OTOH, the French company's recommendations -- such as to run the route along Hwy 5 in the Central Valley rather than Rte 99, where people actually live -- would not have effectively served Central Valley residents. It is easy to save money by building a less effective system.
This (as I understood it) was actually part of a policy dispute about what the HSR project even was for. Was it supposed to be primarily a replacement for LAX-SFO flights? If so, travel time is one of, if not the major consideration, which would be negatively impacted by significant stops in, or meandering routes around, the Central Valley. Or, is it a commuter tool to facilitate Central Valley exurban travel into the major coastal metropoli? That would require, yes, building stops and stations where people actually live in the Central Valley, but do we really need a bullet train for that? And what would the ridership really actually be? And why would it need to run from LA-SF in that case, rather than just building out from existing metro centers in a hub-and-spokes model? Lord knows we don't actually have this in LA yet...
Well, the argument in favor in the ballot pamphlet (see link here) -- said that the proposition would "bring California . . . Routes linking downtown stations in SAN DIEGO, LOS ANGELES, FRESNO, SAN JOSE, SAN FRANCISCO, and SACRAMENTO, with stops in communities in between. —High-Speed Train service to major cities in ORANGE COUNTY, the INLAND EMPIRE, the SAN JOAQUIN VALLEY, and the SOUTH BAY."
As for why we need a bullet train for that, or what the ridership would be, I voted no, so IDK
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California HSR is LA->SF, that is close enough to 100% of the economic value. Failing to serve central valley residents is entirely irrelevant.
Plus, transit brings development. It might be the case that people currently live on rt 99, but once transit to places that matter becomes available, folks may choose to live near it. This is literally what happens in China: they build a subway stop in an empty field and a few years later it's a walkable mass of 20 story mixed use buildings. Then again, China has legalized the construction of 20 story mixed use buildings, unlike California.
Well, as I noted in my response to Supah_Shemendrick, the official ballot pamphlet argument in favor of the 2008 bond initiative explicitly said it would serve downtown Fresno and the San Joaquin Valley in general. Since CA courts look to the ballot argument in order to interpret ballot initiatives, People v. Floyd, 31 Cal.4th 179, 187 (2003) ["Our construction is also supported by the ballot argument distributed to voters for the November 2000 General Election."], that implies that CA HSR was not supposed to be LA->SF.
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I don’t know, 1 train line to nowhere seems more cost effective than 0, especially when people can build around the new infrastructure.
I doubt there would be much building around the new infrastructure; Hwy 5 is 50 miles from downtown Fresno, for example.
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Yes. Some examples of countries that have managed to build high-speed rail: Morocco, Uzbekistan, Indonesia, and Turkey. Kazakhstan, Iran, India, and Egypt all have projects under construction. Meanwhile in North America all there is so far is CAHSR, which at present seems unlikely to be completed. The Texas HSR project shows promise though.
The California project was quite devoted to "made in America" solutions and seemed very hostile to European technologies and perspectives. One of the big boondoggles of the project was the attempted creation of their own signaling system "CBOSS", which cost over $200 million before they abandoned it in favour of the off-the-shelf European tech.
The Texas HSR project is currently held up by political opposition while being fully funded.
No really, the group building it raised the money then tried to eminent domain a bunch of rural ranch land to build a nonstop Dallas-Houston route. Good idea, except Texas’ political system gives ranch owners a lot of say, and the HSR group laughed off their demands and just generally alienated them. So they declared it part of the new world order and dragged in the Texas nationalist movement(actually an important political machine that can swing state specific issues, especially if aligned with other interests) to hold up permits for eminent domain.
If the HSR group decides to negotiate with the ranchers then they’ll call off the nationalists and everyone will be happy. Instead there’s a knock down political fight and both sides have some portion of the blame.
The original offer was to waive their rights to compensation under eminent domain law in exchange for more stops in rural areas/small towns- in other words, they want more of the economic benefit, proportionally, going to rural areas. This is, by the by, a reasonable demand- if you’re extracting resources from rural areas(in this case land), requesting that the rural areas see some benefit is the least you can do.
I’m not an expert on cattle/train interactions, but I believe the situation is considerably more complex/inconvenient for ranchers than that, btw- the track almost certainly has to be fenced off which requires designated crossing points which makes moving the herd considerably more complicated.
From some quick back of the napkin math hitting a 1300 lb Steer at 120 mph yields an impact energy on the order of 850 kJ, probably not enough to derail a train, but enough make a mess out of even a fairly substantial steel structure. Accordingly I would expect the rails to be fenced off, out of concerns about safety.
Cattle also don’t move in groups of one, so a train hitting a 1300 lb steer is probably hitting multiple 1300 lb steers, which ranchers don’t want because it’s losing money and train operators don’t want because it’s damaging the trains.
So, in effect, the ranchers were offering to let the HSR group bisect their land for free on the condition that the trains made additional stops, which wouldn’t benefit the ranchers but would benefit whatever towns the trains stopped at. This seems to me to be the kind of civic mindedness that we should laud of our community leaders.
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Separated grade HSR? Are you certain they will be allowed to cross?
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The Venn diagram of people who ranch and people who take trains is illustrated by two separate circles. How these two groups get along with one another is not even an exercise left to the reader - we need but look at the retarded slapfight downthread to figure it out.
Well no, the ranchers weren’t objecting to building a train to begin with- they had a set of requests for the train, those requests were rejected, either because they were unreasonable to begin with or because the blue tribe technocrats involved thought they shouldn’t have to compromise with stupid hicks. There’s probably a compromise that will would make them both happy, but we haven’t reached it.
In any case ‘not having one of the state’s biggest political machine declare it their pet issue’ was an entirely achievable outcome because the ranchers showed up eager to negotiate and put major concessions on the table up front(and if you think that high speed rail enthusiasts were going to call in Texas nationalists under any circumstances, I have a bridge in Brooklyn to sell you).
Yeah, so the 'urban train-lovers' part of the equation here was the one that got unwilling to negotiate. Sure. I believe it.
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Thanks for the additional information! I had only just heard of Levy and didn't realize this work was discussed in detail on /r/SSC. Any chance you have a link to it?
Most of them were related to cost disease, so they can be tough to track down because they were tangential to other discussions. But here's a couple examples, including links articles from Levy's blog (Pedestrian Observations):
1 2 3 4 5
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I have some recent experience with this. I was at a meeting yesterday afternoon with a state park that an outdoor nonprofit whose board I serve on deals with extensively. Towards the end of the meeting, after all the main items of business had been discussed, the whole thing always devolves into a general Q&A/Airing of grievances with the park and the topic of bathhouses came up. The park is primarily known for whitewater and built a bathhouse several years ago following visitor complaints about bare asses in parking lots. Part of this complaint was making outfitters stage on their own property while the park would provide a bathhouse for private boaters. A friend of mine who serves on this board owns an outfitter and built a nearly identical bathhouse on his property the same year the park built theirs. The park's bathhouse cost $750,000. His cost $35,000 and required more earth work. The topic came up because the bathhouse the park built was torn down a few years ago as part of a PennDOT redevelopment project that everyone was against. Part of the project was that PennDOT would replace the bathhouse they tore down, which still hasn't happened 3 years later. The cost of the new bathhouse? $1.9 million.
The explanation that we got for this kind of discrepancy is that it's the nature of the open bid process. When using outside contractors, the specifications are strict and inflexible, prevailing wage rules apply, there are strict time constraints, etc. This is much different than one guy trying to get a building constructed who can make compromises at his discretion and hire his brother-in-law's company without raising ethics concerns. For stuff that doesn't involve a bidding process, the costs are fairly reasonable. For instance, one of the items at this meeting was that we wanted to construct a couple of information kiosks. We were really just looking for the park's permission to build and install them ourselves with perhaps some guidance into how they want them to look. At the very least we expected to have to kick in some money. Instead we were told that the park maintenance department could build them during the slow winter season with lumber that they either had on hand or could acquire cheaply from their distributor.
This is a topic that really makes me mad. Government spending is 40-60% of GDP (i.e. of all money spent) and they overspend by 10-20x on just about everything they do. Conservatively that's 36% of GDP wasted, every single year. And that's not even mentioning all of the delays government regulations add on to private construction. Why should a permit take more than a week to come through?
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I have another explicit example of the same. A public restroom on Alki Beach in Seattle was recently rebuilt. This is a three stall restroom, entire building is something like 250-300 square feet. Cost? $638,000. Look at the photo. For this price, in the private world, you can buy a quarter of acre, hire a contractor to build a high quality 2000 sq ft 3 bed/3 bath house with great finish, and sell it with a good profit. The restroom took an entire year of construction time, not even counting planning.
It can get a lot worse: San Francisco was planning to build a $1.7 million toilet before the story went semi-viral and they paused it.
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Addendum, entirely my own opinion: One reform that I would like to try is to make lawsuits default to "loser pays." Almost every other developed country requires the losing side in a lawsuit to pay for the other side's legal fees. I think it's generally well known that lawsuits are often a tool used to bully people into complying by making that cheaper than defending the lawsuit. Meritless lawsuits are still very expensive to defend, and almost every story I read about cost inflation seems to mention lawsuits at some point. Suing over a missed period in an environmental impact review as is common in CA, or suing because a building would be taller than surrounding "historic" buildings like in Miami, or for minor procedural limitations like with Austin's CodeNext, or Cambridge suing Boston because of "visual impact" of a bridge redesign during the Bid Dig, is very common. I think this happens in medicine, too: Malpractice insurance isn't cheap, but probably far more expensive is the vast amount of extra tests done for reasons of "CYA." Loser pays would discourage lawsuits that are likely to fail, but costly to defend.
(The only thing preventing me from declaring this the Solution to All Cost Disease is that I haven't seen a lot of discussion of lawsuits in educational cost disease. However, one might also think about the attitudes described above in both of those contexts: Do we insist on expensive and impressive-looking inputs, regardless of cost or efficacy? Are we highly insensitive to price? Is it considered unethical to reject the "best" solution because it's costly? Do bears shit in the woods? etc.)
But also, I think you can see similar attitudes reflect in the people filing those lawsuits, or otherwise being obstructionist (such as county officials who drove up the price of CA's HSR by demanding it take circuitous routes). They would rather tank an entire project to benefit millions of people, than not get their pound of flesh or deal with a minor inconvenience of something changing or having their property appreciate in value slightly less quickly. Even as a libertarian who's usually very suspect of "people being selfish ruin everything" style arguments, it seems like borderline narcissism or sociopathy.
The classic rebuttal to this, which I haven't really seen a solution for, is that this effectively makes corporations immune to anything but a very well-funded class action lawsuit, since no individual can afford to pay Disney or Microsoft's legal fees (or that of, say, their hospital) if they lose a lawsuit.
Isn't the classic rebuttal, "cap the payment at the minimum of the two sides' legal fees"? This might take away a lot of the benefit of the proposal too, but it seems to take away most of the downside.
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I've seen that as well, but don't find it a convincing argument. It seems to me like that's the exact same situation as exists today. No individual can afford to bring a suit against a giant corporation even without having to pay their legal bills if they don't win.
That's...really not true. The big companies get involved in legal disputes constantly. There are employment disputes, products liability, premises liability, derivative shareholder actions, contracts claims, etc. etc. etc. You just don't hear about it much because:
not every legal dispute turns into a suit; sometimes the initial discussions after a demand letter is sent reveal one side or the other to be obviously correct, and so a resolution is reached before any suit is filed,
many disputes get swept up in binding arbitration (aka a civil suit's less-formal and more-biased cousin) rather than the actual courts, and
well-north of 90% of the matters that make it into civil court settle, almost always with confidentiality/non-disclosure clauses in the agreement.
Almost everything about the civil courts in the U.S. is designed to encourage this result; would you want your complex, potentially multi-million dollar civil suit to get decided on by a handful of whatever random weirdos weren't smart (or busy) enough to get out of jury duty this week?? Of course not! Also, lawsuit procedure is, as you say, expensive, both to the litigants and to the state (thus the taxpayer). There's a lot of people and infrastructure that go into running modern courts, and fighting modern lawsuits. It's also time-consuming and complicated, and not just for the lawyers you hire to handle the case for you! Discovery procedures can be quite invasive, and do you really want to spend your/your employees' time searching through years and years'-worth of documents to determine what's responsive to the other side's fishing-expedition-style requests**, particularly when you could get in real trouble if you screw it up and miss something? Do you want to have to hire expensive experts to testify to the scientific validity of things that you know, the other side knows, you know the other side knows, etc. etc.? Do you want to have to waste days in preparation for, and then actually sitting for, depositions? No, legal procedure sucks. You don't want to rely on it to resolve all your disputes if there's more efficient ways of doing so.
(Of course this begs the question of why civil procedure got so complicated in the first place, and what the point of the court system is if it's encouraging people to find alternate mechanisms of doing the one thing that courts are allegedly there for in the first place - authoritatively and conclusively determining the various rights and obligations of disputants, and satisfactorily resolving disputes. But this is not a history of American law, nor a treatise on jurisprudential theory, so I'll stop there).
** for the other lawyers on this board, yes I know discovery is supposed to not be a fishing expedition, but let's be real and call a spade a spade here.
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As a practical matter, it's very hard for any individual who's not very wealthy to afford a long, expensive lawsuit. Unless your lawyer thinks the chances of a big payoff are high enough to take it on contingency. But, right now sometimes that happens. People can sue big companies, and sometimes they even win. I don't think the problem of frivolous lawsuits is great enough to justify removing one of the few tools available for making corporations publicly accountable.
I disagree. The cases where a lawyer is going to take the case on contingency are vanishingly rare compared to all the cases where companies use the legal system to bully those with shallower pockets than themselves. And if your case is really that good, then a lawyer should be willing to take it on contingency even under a "loser pays" system. I think that there is very little downside to a "loser pays" system - yes, there will be very rare cases where someone will not sue a megacorp because they can't take the risk, but there will be far more cases where megacorps can't use the threat of legal fees to shut down competition like they can today. It's well worth it, IMO.
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Well, no. If you have a decent case your lawyer will take it on contingency and front the expenses and take on all the risk. There are some caveats, like you have to accept reasonable settlement offers (so you can't tilt at windmills), but it works fine for most people. Most companies settle.
Yeah, no. It's not exactly easy to get lawyers to take cases on contingency. The system does not in any way work fine for most people today, and legal recourse is available only for those with deep pockets.
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Loser pays doesn’t seem realistic at all. It works if Exxon is suing BP over a contract dispute. How does it work if local non-profit is suing big local developer? Just set up a non-profit with limited assets to do the actual lawsuit so that the non-profit is bankrupt if they lose. Or for medical malpractice most Americans have like a month of savings. You think losers paying?
And loser pay sets up a different issue. Suppose small oil producer and by small I mean they have $100 million in assets has a contract with Exxon. Exxon wants out of that contract and let’s say the legalize is in debate and Exxon has a 70% chance of losing. Ok so Exxon tells the other firm their spending $100 million defending the case. Now it’s a bet the company case for the smaller but well capitalized firm. Sure you can have a second arbitration on some reasonable costs standard. A real world example of this would be Epic Games (very rich) suing Apple (no limits on money) on the App Store. Expert witness and lawyers in the case are even without trying to drive up costs from loser pays are in the tens of millions. Realistically under loser pays Epic would no doubt try to fund a similar case with a similarly harmed company with far lower assets that is easy to bankrupt. And if that case wins Epic then sues under that precedent. You would basically create an entirely new legal profession - setting up firms that have standing and no assets to sue larger firms.
For nuisance lawsuits loser pays would change nothing. Bankrupt people don’t care about loser pay since they won’t pay. Wealthier clients who are less likely to be nuisance lawsuits would have to pay lawyers more to set up conduits for their lawsuits.
And the judge tells them to knock it off. I am starting to wonder if the real problem is that US civil cases are mostly heard in State courts where the judge is an answer to the joke "What do you call a lawyer with a room temperature IQ? - Your Honor"
With a few exceptions (like the Delaware Court of Chancery), the US is egregiously unable to make sure important civil cases end up in front of judges who know what they are doing. As far as I can see, there are a few things going on that drive this - the thing that is most unusual internationally is elected judges, but I suspect that a bigger deal is the American tradition of handling all first instance cases in the County they are filed in - most states have no equivalent to the English High Court or the Superior Courts in the Canadian provinces as a dedicated first instance court for important civil cases.
I definitely agree expert judges (and even moreso juries) are an issue in our system.
This is especially true for white collar crime. How can 12 average Americans understand the nuances of insider trading laws? Or the accounting of Enron?
Americas adversarial system doesn’t work that well for complexity.
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As I pointed out in the comment, almost every other rich country has this. In spite of this, you and @Amadan seem to think it's pretty much impossible. Have you checked what those other countries do in response to the situations you describe? For example, you write:
The link I posted mentioned caps on recoverable fees--did you not even look at it?
Yeah, every other country has a much different legal system and culture than the US. The question is which is the cart and which is the horse WRT fee shifting.
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I only see a Wikipedia article what are you talking about on caps.
And caps wouldn’t solve the issues I’m talking about. If your suing city of development just create a new entity with no assets. If you lose the entity goes bankrupt. If you win then you also get an extra bonus of your legal fees paid. This would seem to drive up costs for the person being sued.
Theoretically I guess you could require someone to be able to afford insurance to sue. But then someone Poor would basically lose the ability to sue if they could find an insurer at a costs they can afford. Anyone can find a cheap lawyer to represent them like legal aid but they couldn’t afford to post collateral or pay an insurance premium to sue.
Instead of throwing heat and assuming your right maybe you haven’t fully thought this out.
The second link in the post. The sentence "I think it's generally well known that lawsuits are often a tool used to bully people ..." links to https://www.manhattan-institute.org/html/greater-justice-lower-cost-how-loser-pays-rule-would-improve-american-legal-system-5891.html
You mentioned multiple hypotheticals; I responded to one. I even quoted it.
Now you're just projecting. I think you just posted the first objection that came to mind without considering any ways it could be overcome? What do you think happens in the countries where this is the rule, and someone tries what you suggested? Do you have any idea, or did you just assume there is no solution? Do you think everyone in every other country is so stupid that they've never thought of it before?
Your comment reminds me of this xkcd--playing tricks with fake companies is something that you can already do. Sometimes it gets around the law and sometimes it doesn't, but it's not like suing any company is currently pointless because they all have 0 assets and are actually owned by Cayman Island shell companies. If it were trivial to set up fake companies for legal purposes, why don't companies currently all do that?
They do. It sometimes even backfires on them when they try to shift business assets from one sub-entity to another, and I have to tell them that some municipal permit they rely upon to keep running their business is nontransferrable (e.g., some tobacco retailer licenses, entertainment permits, game-machine tags, or other, equally-obscure approvals)
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You never addressed any my points in detail. Sure caps on recoverable fees - which I myself said was a solution - but the actual cap matters. Low and it’s meaningless. High and it makes it too risky to challenge 50-50 cases for many litigants.
Companies DO set up different entities to carve out risks. It’s not hard. What’s your solution?
“double the cost in Germany and more than three times the cost in France or the United Kingdom.”
There lead isn’t even that promising. These countries have lower gdp per capita. So a lot of this is just those countries being poorer. About 70% of US gdp. After adjusting for this Germany 1.4 x US and UK/France are 2. Also have socialized medicine and I believe limits on damages which no doubt accounts for a lot of the differences. So where’s the benefit you haven’t even proven
there systems are cheaper (unless you ban medical damages).
How much of the rest can be solved by just limiting damages like say the $1 billion assigned to Alex Jones.
Also an argument that is rest of the world does things in way X and US does things Y is on its face a bad argument. We are massively wealthier than those countries. Shouldn’t they consider in business doing things our way on most things.
Which isn't real anyway, because he doesn't have $1bn to pay. Getting a judgment is one thing; getting actual recovery is another.
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Your points prove too much, namely that any such system should instantly become full of shell companies filing free lawsuits against their competitors. Every other country's legal system has not immediately become overwhelmed by these 0-risk lawsuits, so clearly there is something you're missing. I'm not going to address every one of infinitely many hypothetical situations. TBH, these sorts of schemes seem like they have plenty of trivial solutions which you can probably come up with if you gave it an honest thought, rather than just deciding this idea is bad and then writing any argument that supports one side.
Obviously no system is perfect, but we know for a fact that the American system is very abusable so simply saying "the other system might have this hypothetical problem" isn't convincing.
You can't just take random numbers and multiply them together. The ratio given was already a percent of GDP, so why is this a valid comparison?
Your post has a lot of spelling and grammar errors throughout, most of which I can still parse, but this paragraph isn't even comprehensible.
Fair I missed the percent of gdp.
But again you are failing to address ANY point I am making. You just claim their are solutions. To me this indicates a poorly thought out position. And just an opinion that this sounds good without having any detailed understanding of your position.
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Can you address /u/what_a_maroon ‘s argument, who points out that almost every single country other than US has loser-pays rule? If it works for them, why wouldn’t it work here?
He asked him to prove an affirmative claim.
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Do we know it works everywhere else? I don't know what the litigation environment in other countries is like, but expecting we should all accept that "everyone else does it differently" means "everyone else does it better" is a stretch. Do you think perhaps people in those countries might have opinions about how well their system works that are not universally positive?
Also, it's easy to see how an argument like "everyone else does it differently and it works better" would be rejected for issues like health care and gun control, so why shouldn't we assume that the U.S. is sufficiently different with regard to this issue as well?
These are not the same things.
Gun politics: Many people outside US love guns, fight for more expansive gun rights and dream about American style gun freedoms.
The other: No one outside US advocates for American style health care or American style legal system in their country. No one.
But that’s not really a fair comparison. Our legal system isn’t about improving the legal system necessarily but trying to improve transacting or liability. Yes, lawsuits might be expensive but that doesn’t mean the legal system has failed.
So looking at just the input cost (the direct cost of a legal system) doesn’t mean the output (what Bastiat might call the unseen) isn’t worth it.
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I've read Canadian mainstream newspapers favorably comparing the American system (pre-Obamacare) to the Canadian.
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He never addressed my points I can’t argue with a ghost.
Also an argument that is “rest of world does things differently” is a horrible argument. Americas the richer country and the presumption should therefore begin with America does it better . No doubt not always true but by itself everyone else does it differently isn’t a good argument since Americas uniquely rich.
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Where are those smooth 2 lane roads in rural areas? This certainly has not been my experience in Washington state. Most of the roads that are yellow on Google Maps, except actual interstate freeways and certain non interstate freeways in urban areas (like 520 or 169) are single lane. Overwhelming majority of US 101 highway over the Olympic Peninsula, for example, is single lane. Almost all US 2 is single lane. All major highways in northeastern Washington are single lane. One counter example I can come up with is highway 97, which has passing lanes for most of its course, but beyond that, it’s mostly single lane roads except in busiest urban areas and actual Interstates. These are some of the most important roadways in the entire state, the most important ones in their region. Is it any different in other states? Where exactly rural roads are made to be two lane?
edit: found another counter example, highway 395 is double roadway (so two lanes each direction), and given where it’s at, I can’t imagine it getting a lot of traffic, but overall, very few of rural roads in Washington are double lane.
I haven't been to Washington. It's probably mostly interstates they're thinking of (they mentioned ND, so I looked at I-94, and yep, 2 lanes paved in each direction in the middle of nowhere), but for example 87 in Northwest Texas and Northeastern New Mexico is 2 lanes in each direction, through an area with about 6 buildings and more cows than people.
It is certainly the case that not all rural roads are like this, I've driven on many that are not, but they definitely exist.
Interstates are categorically different from other road projects. They are major freight arteries and are partially federally funded because they are inter-state highways. I-94 connects Billings to Bismarck to Fargo to Minneapolis. US-87 that you're talking about in Texas and New Mexico is still a US numbered highway and that section specifically is the main route off of I-25 from Colorado (and Wyoming) into Texas through Raton, NM rather than routing through Oklahoma. Interstates need to be thought of like freight railroads that commuters occasionally drive on (like how Amtrak sometimes runs on freight rail and by sometimes I mean they are a minority of traffic on those rails, the rails are almost all freight owned) rather than as just "roads" and especially not "rural roads".
Ok, but would other countries have such big freight thoroughfares in such sparse areas? Especially on roads, rather than trains? I think this is part of the point they are making: We say "wow, it sure is nice that we have these massive interstate roads connecting everything to everything in a direct way" but the cost isn't really considered. Regardless of the intent of 87, is there enough traffic of any kind to justify making it 2 lanes in each direction?
Yes, of course they would, especially if the freight thoroughfare connected two big population centers. Look at Spain or France, for example. And yes, especially on roads, rather than trains: US is the world leader in freight rail, other countries are less likely to use trains for freight than US.
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Enough that the federal government wants to upgrade it to an interstate. That said the FHA thinks it's not that much traffic compared to other major routes. But it's not "nice to have direct connects" so much as the country functions because of the surface freight moving on those highways. And we've seen what happens trying to identify what is or is not essential from a business logistics perspective.
I'm confused. You say that like it's a bad thing (which I would agree with) but the government building freight roads everywhere is doing just that. If you really want to let the market decide what's "essential" then the cost of shipping on them should reflect the actual cost of the roads, rather than being built by the federal government and used for free.
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Probably not, but most other countries don't have to cover the sheer land area that the US does. As I understand it the impetus behind the interstate system is not freight routes (though that's nice), it's "what if we need to transport troops across the country if we get attacked". That's a legitimate need for any country, we simply have more area to cover.
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Interstates are not what people think of when the talk is about rural roads. Interstates are big, because they usually carry significant traffic. I-94 is literally the only interstate going through entire North Dakota. It is not serving local rural Dakotans, it is serving every single resident of ND who needs to get some stuff from elsewhere in the country by a truck, and also people in Minnesota and Montana. How many other two-lane roads are in North Dakota?
I mean, the argument here was that in US, everything (emphasized in the original) has to be best, and what would be a windy shabby road elsewhere is a 2 lane each direction, smooth and straight in the states. You don’t get to claim that and then provide Interstates as an example: these are uniquely unrepresentative of rural roads in US. I think this argument is utterly false.
Are you making that big of a deal out of what I figured, when I watched the video, was clearly an exaggeration?
I am pointing out that the example provided to support the argument is clearly false and does not support it in any way. Not sure what you are getting at here.
I think it's clearly true in that there clearly are wide, straight, paved roads through very sparse parts of the country, and we never really think about to what extent the cost is justified. The existence of much smaller rural roads disproves the literal interpretation of (my summary of, not even the original, which is in the video) a rhetorical flourish.
Sorry, but who is “we”? I certainly don’t really spend much time thinking whether the cost of some particular rural road is justified, but so what? Someone does. I really lost the plot here in this discussion: what’s the argument here? That, uh, infrastructure costs are high because random Joe doesn’t think a lot about costs of random rural roads somewhere?
...do they? I mean, engineers estimate what maintenance costs and write down a number, but who pushes back and says it's too expensive? Or asks if the road needs to be that wide? Who is actually responsible for determining what sort of expense is justified? Who pushes back when the cost of a project is high and the benefits unclear? Maybe you know, and if so, I would like to know who does it.
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Yeah, but that's because the interstate highway system isn't for transit, it's so the military can drive tanks (and troop movers, and other military convoys) from Florida to Washington and Maine to California. Citizens using the roads is a nice bonus, but their purpose is to project the power of the military to every part of the nation.
This probably played a significant role in the creation of the interstate highway system, but I think it is far from accurate to say that this is what interstates “are for”. This consideration plays really rather marginal role today. DoD certainly is not funding or managing the Interstates.
If that's what they were created for, then I think it's fair to say that's what they "are for".
First, this is not what they were created for. This is only one reason for which they were created. In common speech, when we say that "A is for B", it carries implication that B is the single most important reason for A, and other reasons are of little significance. Second, even if they were, in fact, originally built mostly for military transports (which they weren't, though it was important reason to build them), if they are not meant for this use case today, one can scarcely say that they are for it. At best, you can say that they were built for it.
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The ironic counter to the "what about the roads" critique of libertarianism is noting that roads are tools of state military power from the Romans to today. Edit: it should be noted that a significant portion of ground logistics (military and commercial) especially tanks (train loads of tanks only seem to be noticed when people think something is imminent) are handled by rail not truck convoys.
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That's awfully strange. The rural areas I most commonly drive though are mainly unpaved county roads connected by one lane each direction paved state highways. ("Two-lane" is the term for a road with one lane in each direction which might cause some confusion.) These rural areas are also mostly flat so even the dirt county roads are mostly straight lines delineating rectangular farm plots. The only ones I can think of in that part of the country that are multilane are the ones that have decent amounts of traffic especially from big rig trucks. Those mainly being main highways connecting various towns to each other, larger towns or the freeways. Per-mile the unpaveds significantly outpace the paved out that way.
Perhaps--even having 2 full lanes for a road with minimal traffic is arguably more than necessary.
Also, see my reply to wlxd
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