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PaperclipPerfector  7d ago (text post)   32054 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 24, 2025

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In Astralcodexten book review contests there was missing a good savage panning of a book.

And he does the classic leftist tactic of insisting upon "democratizing" progresses by increasing public involvement and decentralizing decision-making

What is his argument that this will help rail? I have the stereotype of projects being derailed (ha!) by decentralized and increased public involvement.

His argument in brief is that populations should have control over the services that effect them: so suburban services for a given city should be controlled by the local government, even though his ideal model sees a national, public-owned company owning the rail infrastructure, the rolling stock, hiring the employees, running the trains etc. So ownership should be centralised: planning and operation devolved. He sees this going hand in hand with extensive public consultation: not just at the planning phase but before that, starting at the proposal phase. He thinks (rather axiomatically) that direct education and involvement of the public of the benefits of a given infrastructure project will naturally engender far-reaching support for that project. The only hurdle he thinks that should be removed is any pondering of fiscal sense:

'With emissions climbing, and all the other things that railways can resolve getting worse to boot, now is the time to invest and expand. With power sufficiently distributed and railways democratised, such investment can be rapidly deployed. Forget business cases — so long as there is appropriate environmental and social impact assessment, the worst-case scenario is that a railway remains underused. The likelihood of this greatly diminishes if it is part of a suitably well-developed plan.

We must invest to build the world we want, not dance around the edges of the world we see today, not least as cultures of low investment generally lead to systems that exclude the most vulnerable in society, such as where accessibility changes are deprioritised because the bean counters just don’t see it as “value for money”.'

I think there is some merit to the notion of decentralisation; I think a decent chunk of the cost problems associated with modern transit construction, particularly in the Anglosphere, is the imbalance of revenue generation between municipal and higher levels of government that result in transit projects largely being designed by cities but paid for by higher levels of government; it invites buffet-style planning on the one end and political interference on the other. But I think in general his approach is just naïve beyond belief; the combination of the assumption that local interests will only work in everyone's best interests and abandoning any pretense of fiscal restraint obviously invites endless waste and graft.

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