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Notes -
A short post about Metrolinx, Ontario's incompetent transit authority
I enjoy talking about public transit. Not just because I advocate for it to be better, but also because I think it sits at the nexus of a number of problems in the Anglosphere: crushing regulatory barriers, unwieldy bureaucracy, land use and housing, GHG emissions, and the declining state capacity to envision and build projects that better the lives of its citizens. As has been discussed much before, the Anglosphere has a problem separate from other western countries with respect to its construction costs, and this is particularly egregious for transit. Similar projects to those accomplished in Spain or Norway or Italy are - when attempted in Canada, the UK, or the US - considerably more expensive (often 10x more, per km), take longer to build, and when finished have inferior performance. If you live in the Anglosphere and are barely aware of local issues you can probably think of a few local examples off the top of your head.
The Eglinton Crosstown is a classic example. Originally intended to open in time for Toronto's hosting of the 2015 Pan Am games, this light rail line was subsequently cancelled, revived, and redesigned before construction eventually began, with a greatly inflated budget. The project's completion date had previously been announced as 2020, then '21, then '22... in September 2023 a news conference was called by Metrolinx to announce they had no update for when it might be operational. Ostensibly it will be this year, but no one would bet on it. There is presumably some fault with the construction (informed speculation points to leakage and erosion in some of the stations near the intersection with the Yonge-University subway line) that is not being publicly announced due to legal wranglings with the P3 contractor. All in all it's a gross failure, and a pathetic one.
Which made it all the more unbelievable that Metrolinx decided to launch a PR campaign mocking those who complained about delays. Sometimes you get a glimpse of someone's personality by some action they take that seems to reveal in a moment all you need to know about them, and I get the feeling based on the public reaction this substantially hardened people's opinions. Now I know some people who have worked in or with Metrolinx, and I was aware of their general incompetence, their paralyzing bureaucratic approach, their malaise of indecision. I was not aware they were so contemptuous of the public. This 30 second advertisement and its accompanying campaign cost $2.25 million and was immediately pulled due to the response (all told, one of their more on-target projects).
But the real reason I wrote this is so I can share the amazing parody of the Metrolinx ad campaign that perfectly captures the passive-aggressive sanctimony.
There are two major categories of construction-related problem in the Anglosphere.
The first is environmental regulation, particularly the ability of local groups (farmers, old people, landowners, rich retirees who don’t want a railroad near their country home etc) to exploit environmental rules at relatively modest cost to stymie construction. A $100bn project can be held up because some of these people band together, commission a $90,000 study on some local rare bird that (of course, because it’s written by the leading academic fans of said bird) concludes that the construction would do irreversible damage to its habitat, triggering a state investigation, triggering a 4-year delay and endless legal action before construction can restart, costing hundreds of millions or billions because the contracts were already signed, people need to be paid etc. Anglo countries allow for individuals or groups to mount legal challenges to the state much more aggressively than other nations, and judges are much more likely to grant injunctions, freeze construction etc while those cases progress.
The second problem is that eminent domain rules are much stricter in Common Law jurisdictions, ie the Anglosphere, than in the rest of the West. Civil law countries don’t see eminent domain as (as) adversarial, it’s often just a matter of calculating compensation, processes are streamlined, there is no widespread belief that the state isn’t allowed to expropriate the land, only that they should pay for it. In a lot of common law jurisdictions, objectors can often demand to know why their land has to be taken, or demand to propose alternate routes, and can tie up negotiations over compensation in years of legal wrangling that has to be resolved before construction can be started instead of seizing the land first, starting construction, then resolving squabbles over compensation later.
A third, secondary problem is that the Westminster system and the altered version practiced in the US grant more power to local politicians than many continental European electoral systems, which either have party list systems and/or stronger executives. For example, a huge reason the California high speed rail has been a disaster is because inland state politicians forced the state to reroute the railroad (which should have taken the direct coastal route from Los Angeles to San Francisco) via a bunch of shithole cities nobody wants to go to, delaying the project by decades by compounding with both of the above issues.
In the nicest possible way, I think that's the most eloquent and convincing argument for common law land rights I've ever heard. I get that it causes problems but gosh, the alternative sounds pretty bad.
I mean, the Texas high speed rail is delayed more or less indefinitely because a bunch of ranchers on the route didn’t get the appropriate concessions to acquiesce to eminent domain, so they convinced the Texas nationalists it was a George Soros WEF plot to bring in a UN occupation to provide political cover to their lawfare.
Now obviously the Texas high speed rail could have bargained with the farmers(they wanted more stops to provide local employment and a few concessions on cattle-crossing logistics and were willing to waive their compensation rights if those conditions were granted, both of which seem like they could have come to a reasonable agreement on), but still.
And of course on the third hand the project may well be more an exercise in green fetishism rather than a practical idea; the Dallas-Houston route is well served by commuter flights and luxury buses which puts an upper floor on the price tag for rail tickets.
I've long been wondering whether a better application of HSR wouldn't be to urban centers directly, but to major airports. Ideally, the airport already has transit options into the city available, are generally on the outskirts of town where routing rail travel would be easier, and, while airlines might be unhappy about losing short flights, there are lots of short connections to hubs that could probably be faster by train than an extra connecting flight. Austin and San Antonio to Dallas or Houston, Chicago to Milwaukee, Oklahoma City to Dallas, Phoenix to Tuscon. All these flights are about an hour, and fly more than half a dozen flights daily each way, many of which are, I assume, to take a much longer flight from the larger airport, because driving would take a similar amount of time and solve getting around at the destination.
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