dewayne@warpspeed.com
Date: February 5, 2019 at 4:00:40 PM GMT+9
[Note: This item comes from friend Robert Berger. DLH]
The infrastructural humiliation of America
Jon Evans, TechCrunch, 3 Feb 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
Milbrae 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.