The infrastructural humiliation of America

["Dave Farber" <farber () gmail com>]

Begin forwarded message:

> From: Dewayne Hendricks <dewayne () warpspeed com>
> Date: February 5, 2019 at 4:00:40 PM GMT+9
> To: Multiple recipients of Dewayne-Net <dewayne-net () warpspeed com>
> Subject: [Dewayne-Net] The infrastructural humiliation of America
> Reply-To: dewayne-net () warpspeed com
>
> [Note:  This item comes from friend Robert Berger.  DLH]
>
>
> The infrastructural humiliation of America
> By Jon Evans
> Feb 3 2019
> <https://techcrunch.com/2019/02/03/the-infrastructural-humiliation-of-america/>
>
> I’m flying back to the USA today, and as an infrastructure aficionado, it’s nice to be going home, but I’m dreading 
> the disappointment. I just spent two weeks in Singapore and Thailand; last year I spent time in Hong Kong and 
> Shenzhen; and compared to modern Asia, so much American infrastructure is now so contemptible that it’s hard not to 
> wince when I see it.
>
> The USA is nine times wealthier than Thailand, per capita, but I’d far rather ride Bangkok’s SkyTrain than deal with 
> NYC’s subway nowadays. I’d much prefer to fly into Don Muang, Bangkok’s ancient second-tier airport — which was 
> actually closed for years, before being reopened to handle domestic flights and low-cost airlines — than the hostile 
> nightmare that is LAX. And those are America’s two primary gateway cities!
>
> So imagine what it’s like coming to America from wealthy Asian nations, and their gleaming, polished, metronomically 
> reliable subways, trains, and airports. I don’t think Americans understand just how that comparison has become a 
> quiet ongoing national humiliation. If they did, sheer national (and civic) pride would make them want to do 
> something about it. Instead there’s a learned helplessness about most American infrastructure nowadays, a wrong but 
> certain belief that it’s unrealistic to dream of anything better.
>
> It’s not just those two cities. Compare Boston’s T to, say, Taipei, or San Francisco’s mishmash of messed-up systems 
> — Muni, where I have waited 45 minutes for a T-Third; CalTrain, which only runs every 90 minutes on weekends; BART, 
> which squandered millions on its useless white-elephant Millbrae station — to Shenzhen. And it’s not just age; 
> Paris’s metro was inaugurated in 1900, but its well-maintained system continues to run excellently and expand 
> continuously.
>
> Americans still tend to think of themselves as an example to other nations. Ha. I assure you, over the last few years 
> nobody has flown from Seoul or Taipei or Tokyo or Singapore or Hong Kong or Shenzhen into Newark Airport; taken the 
> AirTrain to the NJ Transit station; waited for the rattling, decrepit train into the city; walked through the 
> repellent ugliness of Penn Station to the subway; waited for its ever-increasing delays; ridden to their destination; 
> and finally emerged into New York City — the nation’s alpha city! — still thinking of the USA as anything other than 
> a counterexample, or maybe a cautionary tale.
>
> This goes beyond transport infrastructure. Airport security measures are much more sensible in Asia. Payments are 
> increasingly separately structured, and better, too — in many places, credit cards (which already barely exist as a 
> concept in China) are beginning to slowly wither away, replaced by Alipay and to a lesser extent WeChat Pay. (Not 
> least because an ever-growing proportion of the tourist population is Chinese rather than Western, nowadays.)
>
> That’s admittedly an example of leapfrogging, not decay, and American infrastructure does still have some bright 
> spots. American roads are mostly still superb. Lyft and Uber are much better than their Southeast Asian equivalent 
> Grab, which, whenever I checked it during this latest trip, was invariably both slower and more expensive than a taxi 
> (never mind a tuk-tuk) despite the infamous Thai taxi mafias. International mobile connectivity is excellent and 
> user-friendly and reasonably priced, at least if you’re on T-Mobile like me, and as an added bonus, due to a 
> technical quirk, mobile data roaming bypasses China’s Great Firewall.
>
> But that doesn’t change the fact that the state of much of America’s infrastructure is appalling on its face, and 
> even moreso when compared to nations which are on paper nowhere near as rich. The money other nations spend on urban 
> infrastructure (don’t even get me started on intercity trains) is instead siphoned off to somewhere else. It makes 
> the USA — still by far the wealthiest country in the world! — seem like an dying empire, one beginning to visibly 
> crack and crumble as it is slowly hollowed out from within.
>
> [snip]
>
> Dewayne-Net RSS Feed: http://dewaynenet.wordpress.com/feed/
> Twitter: https://twitter.com/wa8dzp



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