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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.
I think there are pros and cons to both systems. But given that Anglo communities and states live in the Anglo system, they should just stop trying to build trains in my opinion. Build lots of busses, build other stuff, but don't force train lines that go years and billions beyond the plan.
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Isn't one of the supposed purposes of high speed rail to permit people from shithole cities and towns to affordably and practically commute to large metro areas to work?
Maybe the California state government indeed proposed that. If so that's quite silly because busses and freeways already exist. In fact I heard on the radio that the small stretch of rail from Merced to Bakersfield hardly services anyone at enormous cost and adds no value over already existing bus routes. At least that's the opinion of Conservative California radio hosts.
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In this case it was primarily in competing with the extremely oft used air route between the two cities, which sit in the sweet spot of distance where intercity train travel is usually both very viable and successful. More stops only make the route less competitive.
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CAHSR did make bad routing mistakes, but going up the Central Valley is not one of them. There is a reason why I-5 goes up the Central Valley, as does the existing freight railway. The Central Valley route is actually straighter (roughly 450 miles vs 470 for the coastal route) and there is a lot more space to build straight and flat.
The big mistakes were how you cross from the Central Valley to the coast at each end of the line. The correct route goes over Tejon and Altamont passes, for the same reasons that I-5 does. In the south, CAHSR proposed to go over Tehachapi Pass - adding 34 miles in length, 15-20 minutes in journey time, and $5-7 billion in tunneling costs. I can't anyone making the case for Tehachapi apart from "relitigating this will just kill the project" fatalism, so I don't know why the decision was made. In the north, CAHSR proposed to go over Pacheco Pass and enter San Francisco via San Jose and the Caltrain route (which would need to be extensively 4-tracked because Caltrain are already using the existing tracks) because Ron Didion wanted direct service to his hometown. You can find people willing to defend Pacheco, but it only makes sense if Caltrain and CAHSR are willing to work together to avoid unnecessary construction, which they are not.
It would be crazy for cahsr to pass by the biggest city in NorCal. Of course, the state of Caltrain organizational capacity is lamentable.
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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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Well, it depends. I don’t think the question of whether some random farmer should be able to block a $100bn infrastructure project that has the potential to improve millions of people’s lives and contribute to higher economic growth and prosperity for many people because of the principle of private property is absolute is an easy one.
Agreed, and I don’t want to suggest it is. Only that (to paraphrase) “the state can take your home without telling you why, there’s nothing you can do, and even if you argue on good legal grounds they’ll ignore you and take it anyway” sounds pretty grim and also open to abuse.
A part of the problem is that, as urbanisation increases, these projects aren’t designed to benefit flyover locals and everyone knows it. Ideally people would be happily giving up their land so that their area can join in the new wave of prosperity from the 100bn project, as (I think?) was the case with the original train system. But instead projects like HS2 mostly exist explicitly for elite urban traffic to bypass you.
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Amusing example recently from Toronto: the process is underway of electrifying the rail network in order to transform it into a German style S-bahn with frequent, fast, bi-directional service all day. This is legitimately maybe the most important public transport project in Canadian history, give or take the construction of the Canadian Pacific Railway. In terms of reducing greenhouse gas emissions it might be the biggest individual project because it will displace tens, perhaps hundreds of millions of car trips yearly.
So it is totally rational for the project to have been delayed because a group of concerned citizens (who incidentally, live near the rail corridor) were worried that the electrification might affect a type of salamander in a nearby ravine. That is not to say the salamander actually lives in the ravine in question: but it might, and the electrification of the railway and the increased train traffic might affect it somehow. No, the salamander isn't endangered. But who knows: perhaps it one day will be?
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I think a lot of the cost disease is down to the way our laws insert themselves in every single decision made even in private companies. And these laws don’t regulate for outcome, but often for specific procedures whether or not they accomplish their actual goals or not. Thus when the construction companies encounter a problem, the law often dictates exactly how it’s handled, which often mean redoing things completely after ripping up the stuff already done, redoing the grading, etc. all of this while still paying wages, renting equipment or even renting specific equipment.
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On the topic of public transit, I recently listened to this podcast on the system in Santiago, Chile. However, the episode is almost twenty years old. It really makes me want to know what has happened since then. Does anybody have an idea of how to find a good source?
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The thing I have been noticing recently is, when a project inevitably blows past all budgets and timetables, people are like "we should just finish it, the cost won't matter decades from now".
Of course, resources are finite and there is, in fact, a cost to doing stuff that is not worth the effort.
Given the politics of Anglosphere infrastructure projects, this is a rational defensive measure. The main way special interests block projects is by using one set of proxies to drive up the cost by lobbying for scope creep (particularly through the environmental review process) and then using another set of proxies to blame the project's proponents for uncontrolled cost escalation and demand that the project be killed for cost control reasons.
If project supporters commit to going ahead regardless of cost escalation, then this doesn't work (until the cost reaches macro-economically significant levels like CAHSR of HS2).
Ironically, CAHSR was the project under discussion.
CAHSR should be finished because it would be an embarrassment not to finish it. Those (already built) giant unused bridges and viaducts in the middle of the central California scrubland would stand like a monument to the catastrophic absence of state capacity in the modern US.
And so they shall.
Given the cost overruns California will not be finishing the project. In your old age you can visit the ruins like Ozymandias' giant stone head alone in the desert.
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My state already has such a monument: https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/satsop-nuclear-power-plant
Cooling towers visible from I-5 from a half-finished nuclear power plant.
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Would that actually surprise you?
You know I actually think they’ll finish it, at least unless the state economy collapses. They’re rich enough and the people keep voting through more spending on it.
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I always assumed that "finishing" CAHSR from Merced to Bakersfield would be more embarrassing than killing it. Most of the value of LA-SF CAHSR would come from end-to-end journeys.
They’re banking on the Merced to Bakersfield run being ‘impressive’, the president and a bunch of congressmen riding it on the opening day and cutting the ribbons on the stations etc, fawning news coverage, and then dropping another eighty billion or whatever it’ll take to cover the rest. Honestly, it’s not even a ridiculous plan, as long as they frame it as an ‘American’ achievement instead of a California one and talk about beating the Chynese and “world’s best railroad” or whatever regardless of truth they might well get it.
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Maybe we need a monument like that to turn things around. Kind of like the end to Planet of the Apes (except there it was obviously too late).
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Seems like part of a broader trend of contempt for the public from public officials. Maybe that's not so unusual in history throughout the ages, but I don't think it was this way 50 years ago. I know some people who work in Congressional offices, and they are full of contempt for the average American -- most of their day is spent dealing with constituents, and the constituents who write to Congress are crazier than average. Likewise, I think a lot of the growing push to censor "misinformation" on the internet is rooted in contempt for what regular people are sharing and thinking.
Yes, it seems unlikely that politicians are actually much worse than the average person. Most I’ve met are personally pretty nice people who genuinely wanted to improve their community in some way. But to be a politician is - as much as being a cop or a nurse is - to deal with the most annoying people that society has to offer, repeatedly. Sure, unlike cops it’s less commonly the actual violent criminal underclass (although it sometimes is). Instead, it’s every imaginable special interest group, especially the most annoying kind of old people, constantly complaining about everything. Even if they’re correct, they have no understanding of the institutional hurdles that prevent what they want from happening, so you have to say no constantly, and that is going to build resentment on both sides, even if the politician agrees that there’s too much bureaucracy.
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