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Pedestrian Observations
Personal blog · pedestrianobservations.comeconomicspoliticsculture
Pedestrian Observations is a personal blog at pedestrianobservations.com about economics, politics and culture. Since 2017, 130 different Hacker News readers have linked it 287 times, most often “Why American Construction Costs Are So High”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-11-01, and you can follow it by feed.
Sometimes recommended · 11 of 40 sampled comments recommend it?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Alon Levy's blog on transit and infrastructure, especially construction costs and rail network planning, often to back claims about why US and European projects differ in price.
- Recommended for · 11 comments
- Called 'great' for construction cost analysis and railroad systems, a 'good blog' on transit, 'a great read', and 'serious investigation'.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 40 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
For Walkability and Good Transit, and Against Boondoggles and Pollution
Most-linked posts?
- Why American Construction Costs Are So High13 people · 15 mentions · first linked 2019-03-05
- /12 people · 13 mentions · first linked 2020-01-01
- US Rail Construction Costs7 people · 8 mentions · first linked 2017-10-27
- /construction-costs/5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2017-12-22
- /2019/07/22/new-report-on-construction-costs-misses-the-mark/4 people · 9 mentions · first linked 2019-07-24
- A Plan for American High Speed Rail4 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2021-03-22
- Elon Musk’s Ideas About Transportation are Boring4 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2017-12-16
- /4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2020-01-01
- /2011/06/02/comparative-rail-safety/4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2017-12-21
- Who Do You Learn From?4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2020-03-17
What Hacker News says?
https://pedestrianobservations.com/2019/07/22/new-report-on-... I forgot about this joke yesterday, but it is a better reply than my previous ones.
Comment linking /2019/07/22/new-report-on-construction-costs-misses-the-mark/
on “All the best engineering advice I stole from non-technical people”Submitted The Need to Remove Bad Management as a story · 263 points
HN discussionI would check out https://pedestrianobservations.com/ for information on other but analogous cost disease. Basically, no, it's not just a meme. American managerial culture (or even Anglosphere at large, as alleged there) really does suck. And no amount of crafty mechanism design gets around the fact that least exploitable system seems to be one where the civil service isn't maimed and the work is done in-house. Basi…
Comment linking /
on “CDC website built by Deloitte at a cost of $44M is abandoned due to bugs”Submitted Why American Construction Costs Are So High as a story · 204 points
HN discussionThe SAS is a joke, putting its name on the same list as actually impressive feats like the proof of Fermat's Last Theorem insults everything else on the list. It's the most expensive subway line worldwide per mile, ever, despite the existence of technology that made tunnelling easier. Inflation adjusted, it costs more per mile than hand-digging one of the PATH tubes with 1900s technology [1]. Its cost and duration a…
Comment linking /2023/12/09/the-mta-sticks-to-its-oversize-stations/
on “Slow”Submitted How Many Tracks Do Train Stations Need? as a story · 148 points
HN discussionReminds me of this article I just read. In a totally different domain, but if there is so much wealth, it is easier to just a part of it, instead of creating new wealth. https://pedestrianobservations.com/2020/11/13/surplus-extrac...
Comment linking /2020/11/13/surplus-extraction/
on “Intel's disruption is now complete”Submitted Getting High-Speed Rail Wrong as a story · 146 points
HN discussionLevy addresses this, and agrees with you: https://pedestrianobservations.com/2021/03/22/high-speed-rai... Basically, Amtrak started out with the existing rail network, which is going to be oriented to early-20th-century population centers, and so New Orleans is well-served by Amtrak standards. But a modern network in the South would be oriented more towards those parts of the South that have grown - Texas and the Pi…
Comment linking /2021/03/22/high-speed-rail-followup/
on “How far can you go by train in 5h?”Submitted The United States needs to learn how to learn as a story · 143 points
HN discussionor Levy's 2021 version for the whole US and adjacent bits of Canada: https://pedestrianobservations.com/2021/03/22/high-speed-rai... , which follows They did the math and decided to connect Florida to the main Eastern component (based on there being enough demand for Atlanta-Florida travel), so there are four components - the main Eastern component, Texas, California (+Vegas, Phoenix), Pacific Northwest (Portland to…
Comment linking /2021/03/22/high-speed-rail-followup/
on “How far can you go by train in 5h?”Submitted Elon Musk’s Ideas About Transportation are Boring as a story · 141 points
HN discussionSee for example Alon Levy's map of proposed HSR for the Eastern United States: https://pedestrianobservations.com/2019/02/10/high-speed-rai... They've actually done serious investigation of what's viable given typical costs and ridership of high-speed lines elsewhere in the world. The high-speed bits they propose are basically a Boston-Atlanta-Chicago triangle with some ornaments (Chicago - KC, Chicago - Minneapolis…
Comment linking /2019/02/10/high-speed-rail-for-the-eastern-united-states/
on “How far can you go by train in 5h?”Submitted Why American construction costs are so high (2019) as a story · 129 points
HN discussionStrong towns is a terrible source of numbers and has been debunked many times. Streetcar suburbs have been sustaining themselves for 140 years - rebuilding their infrastructure. Infrastructure is a tiny % of any government budget ( https://pedestrianobservations.com/2024/10/07/taxes-are-not-... ) and so infrastructure spending could go up a lot.
Comment linking /2024/10/07/taxes-are-not-about-urbanism/
on “Germany's 49-euro ticket resulted in significant shift from road to rail”Submitted Why Are Canadian Construction Costs So High? (2018) as a story · 97 points
HN discussionGood blog I sometimes read about public transit/urbanism/etc. https://pedestrianobservations.com/
Comment linking /
on “Ask HN: Favorite Blogs by Individuals?”Submitted Treating the Bay Area as like working in the mines as a story · 90 points
HN discussionWe can treat them the same: hold someone accountable when their project over-spends and under-delivers. Maybe even fire them. It would happen naturally in successful companies, but (at least in the US) there's often no accountability in government for setting money on fire. https://pedestrianobservations.com/2021/08/07/why-its-import...
Comment linking /2021/08/07/why-its-important-to-remove-failed-leaders/
on “The case for expanding rather than eliminating gifted education programs (2021)”Submitted The Future Is Not Retro as a story · 88 points
HN discussion> Vegas also doesn't have a subway system, which was cited as why it spread so rapidly in NY. There's no real evidence to support the thesis that the MTA was a primary vector of spread in NYC. Granular data of infection rate by neighborhood is spotty, but the data that does exist doesn't show any clear trends towards increased infection rates nearer subway lines. And the borough with the highest infection rate is th…
Comment linking /2020/04/15/the-subway-is-probably-not-why-new-york-is-a-disaster-zone/
on “SARS-CoV-2 was already spreading in France in late December 2019”Submitted European Urbanism and High-Speed Rail as a story · 82 points
HN discussionRegarding just the Public-Private-Partnerships: Alon Levy doubts it's benefical (at least for transit), partially due to high ongoing costs https://pedestrianobservations.com/2021/01/15/friends-dont-l...
Comment linking /2021/01/15/friends-dont-let-friends-build-ppps/
on “Why America can’t build”Submitted Stroads and Strails as a story · 81 points
HN discussionThere you go. https://pedestrianobservations.com/2019/03/03/why-american-c... And if one asks Claude.ai , one gets this: Bottom Line: US infrastructure costs are dramatically higher than Europe - often 10-30 times more expensive for transit projects, with subway construction in NYC costing $3.2 billion per kilometer compared to just $100 million per kilometer in cities like Madrid.
Comment linking /2019/03/03/why-american-costs-are-so-high-work-in-progress/
on “Ex-Waymo engineers launch Bedrock Robotics to automate construction”Submitted Deutsche Bahn’s Meltdown and High-Speed Rail as a story · 74 points
HN discussionYeah, the key phrase here is “during rush hour”. For CalTrain, it’s hard to justify buying more rolling stock and employing more staff if that additional capacity is going to sit mostly unused for 90% of the day. It’s analogous to paying for extra racks of servers to handle peak QPS that you only really need to handle on weekday mornings. This blog post has a more analytical take on what makes peak service so expens…
Comment linking /2018/01/22/base-train-service-is-cheap-peak-train-service-is-expensive/
on “$1B for 20,000 Bay Area homes”Submitted Tilting Trains and Technological Dead-Ends as a story · 71 points
HN discussion> Citation? All costs below are in $USD nominal per mile of fully-underground subway system. NYC subway extension, east side: $3.7B per mile. SF Central subway: $928M per mile. Tokyo: $400M Beijing: $240M Berlin: $327M Naples: $194M Milan: $175M This is backed up by a Citylab analysis: Alon Levy at Citylab shows approximate range of underground rail construction costs in continental Europe and Japan is between $100…
Comment linking /2011/08/22/construction-costs-third-world-edition/
on “U.S. rent has increased 175% faster than household income over past 20 years”Submitted Urbanism and Standards of Respectability as a story · 68 points
HN discussion
