\n\n“One reason the US isn\u2019t very good at building transit cheaply is that it doesn\u2019t practice.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cIf you look at Paris or Seoul or Shanghai, they\u2019ve been building [transit] pretty much nonstop for decades now. New York, on the other hand, built its subway at a breakneck pace until 1940 and then cooled it,\u201d Goldwyn explained.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Agencies aren\u2019t routinely in charge of building new things, so every time they do, it\u2019s back to the drawing board.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThere\u2019s a learning curve, almost with every city, when they\u2019re introducing rail, because you don\u2019t have a local knowledge base on how to do this,\u201d explained Ethan Elkind, director of the climate program at UC Berkeley\u2019s Center for Law, Energy & the Environment. \u201cWhether that\u2019s on the construction side or the oversight side or public management side. You do see a lot of cities stumble out of the gate when they\u2019re trying to get their first projects done.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Then there\u2019s the complexity of building across multiple jurisdictions. The federal government often provides funding for a project that requires multiple cities or counties to coordinate, all to complete a multibillion-dollar project unlike one they\u2019ve probably ever accomplished before, often without a clearly defined leader \u2014 it\u2019s like the most dysfunctional group project ever.”
…
“\u201cHere in the United States, we as a country are not very accepting of disruption,\u201d Goldwyn told Vox. In Los Angeles, workers constructing the Purple Line could only work weekends \u2014 thenCovid-19 hit, and stay-at-home orders made it possible for them to work 24\/7. The result?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThey completed the project seven months ahead of schedule.\u201d”<\/p>\n\n\n\n
…<\/p>\n\n\n\n
“There are also myriad ways the US needs to streamline the process for developing transit projects. Lewis explained to me that European regulators were often shocked that American transit agencies have to go through their own process to get authorization to shut down a street or prepare an area for construction.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cA lot of the [processes] that we use here in the United States are too slow or too cumbersome and outdated. We need to make it easier to build more and better transit projects,\u201d Lewis explained.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n
…<\/p>\n\n\n\n
“As the Action Committee for Transit, a local pro-transit organization, documented<\/a>, residents of the wealthy DC suburb of Chevy Chase have led a decades-long crusade against the light rail project,which will benefit the entire region, by claiming that a \u201ctiny transparent invertebrate\u201d might be at risk. \u201cWhen no endangered amphipods were found,\u201d the detractors turned to other arguments. However, repeated references to the potential harm to the Columbia Country Club and also a public comment disparaging the needs of people in less affluent communities makes clear that much of the stated concern was likely never environmental or financial.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n …<\/p>\n\n\n\n “Any major project will incur harms on some group of people \u2014 construction can impede traffic, new structures can obstruct a view from your porch, things that reasonable people would agree are annoying or costly. But transportation projects have to go somewhere,\u00a0<\/em>and\u00a0one only has to look at the housing market<\/a>\u00a0to see the costs of allowing individual citizens to derail projects due to real or fabricated harms.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n