America is old and developed into a world power long before those countries did. That means the infrastructure is old and no one wants to pay to replace / update it all is what it boils down too in most cases. If they started over today then everything would be much newer / high tech. It all boils down to money and the will to actually spend it on a such a thing.
Beer, sports, television…we don’t care as long as we have these fabulous distractions provided for us while the ruling class rob us and keep us simple, fat and “happy”.
Chinas high tech infrastructure is only located in the costal cities so it is highly concentrated. If you go out West its like living in Afghanistan. The midwest in the US has way better infrastructure than anything in the interior of China or in the countryside of Japan.
Why pay more taxes when you can instead pay for a car and it’s oil changes and it’s brake pads and it’s rotors and it’s tires and it’s gas and it’s windshield wipers and it’s insurance
Politics. If a government wants to build a well-connected rail system linking major cities together, they could easily do so. However as it currently stands, the US government receives tons of financial support from corporations seeking the exact opposite.
Car companies give them money to expand highways, to encourage people to drive and therefore buy cars. Oil companies doing the same to get people to be reliant on gas. Airline companies as well because people will depend on them for long distance travelling. All these means the US government have more monetary incentives to keep those industries happy, which means not investing in a proper rail network that would directly compete with them.
You overvalue “high tech” infrastructure i.e. high speed rail and undervalue air transport. The US is sparsely populated compared to China or Japan and has a lot of ground to cover. Air transport is far superior in this circumstance unless you prefer three or four times the travel time.
Also, the US has arguably the best freight infrastructure in the entire world, which is extremely valuable if you want cheap goods.
Baby boomers (1950s), and their children (1970s), and their children (2000s), grew up with Cars as the only way to get around, cars as status symbols of success, buses being dirty unreliable inconvenient and for poor people, and no trains. Most Americans don’t travel because the USA is oceans from anywhere else, they don’t see much media from around the world – most living Americans don’t deeply know that other ways of living are possible, except things like Moped-hell in Beijing or Mumbai, on the news.
Poor land use and zoning laws makes cities sprawl into the suburbs, makes trams, trains, buses, water, sewers, road maintenance, bridge maintenance, all very expensive as they have to cover lots of area with few people in it. Japan is tiny and dense American cities like New York do have pretty good L-trains and subways and things, in some places at least, which is China-like.
A history of things like Libraries and Universities being funded by rich gift-givers like Andrew Carnegie, rather than taxpayers funding to make life better for everyone.
Investing in high speed trains are not seen as a matter of national pride and achievement, but instead “taking space from MY car and from MY house value, to give socialism to lazy poor people who can’t be bothered to work hard and afford a car”.
The easy explanation is: the US is really big, and large parts of it are rural. Low population areas are not very attractive for commercial companies to make money, and building internet/broadband infrastructure is very expensive. You need the government to make stuff like this happen and the US government (Federal, State, local) is really REALLY bad at making stuff happen.
There is a really interesting interview from John Steward with Ezra Klein recently which went over the Rural Broadband bill and it’s very interesting and telling.
Roughly it comes down to:
It takes a long time to make a bill that gets all the money organized
The bill, to get passed gets a lot of stuff added on to it that isn’t super important to “making broadband happen” adding stuff like “you have to use at least x percent of minority owned businesses to do the work”
Political will. Americans don’t want those things, or at least don’t externalise they want it. Americans also are culturally more selfish, the idea of public transport is against their beliefs, public transportation is by definition a very social project, too risky for private ventures, so they need government investment if not complete government ownership to take off the paper, but Americans in general are against public projects because it required taxes and it helps people other than themselves directly, which is not something they desire.
Besides politics which plays a huge role in it I think it also is culture. Japanese and Chinese culture value the collective over the person. If the collective can benefit they will do it. Take fast trains for instance. Fast trains connect cities throughout China and Japan and make it where they can get from point A to B fast an efficiently. To build those networks required a lot of destruction of housing and such.(You probably saw reports of this in China especially of people unwilling to leave/move and they literally build highways around the house). But it benefits society greatly as people can be much further out and still go to work in the middle of a city.
It also comes down to populations. Shanghai is has something like 40 million metro population. Tokyo is something like 14 million+. They use these fast trains to interconnect the major cities and those train stations are then linked to their subway stations that allow them to move hundreds of thousands of people across the city in very short periods of time. This can’t be accomplished with say cars(traffic) though bus routes do play an important roll as well.
I’ll say last time I was in was in China I was very impressed by their fast train system. They had wifi on some trains and you could be from Beijing to Xi’An in 8ish hours. You show up about 20 minutes early.. throw your bags on a security x ray machine, you pass through a metal detector, they check your passports at the gate and bam on the train. I’ve been told Japan has been like this for many many years and I can’t wait to see it as well.
Comments
People in the US seem really against
shitstuff that would make their life better.Edit: this is eli5 afterall.
the expectation that a government is a for-profit business and so must show growth.
a government is not a business. it does not turn profits. it is a service.
edit: tracking “loss” is just as pointless as attempting to be profitable.
Corporate lobbying has repeatedly killed public transit in the US
America is old and developed into a world power long before those countries did. That means the infrastructure is old and no one wants to pay to replace / update it all is what it boils down too in most cases. If they started over today then everything would be much newer / high tech. It all boils down to money and the will to actually spend it on a such a thing.
Beer, sports, television…we don’t care as long as we have these fabulous distractions provided for us while the ruling class rob us and keep us simple, fat and “happy”.
Chinas high tech infrastructure is only located in the costal cities so it is highly concentrated. If you go out West its like living in Afghanistan. The midwest in the US has way better infrastructure than anything in the interior of China or in the countryside of Japan.
Why pay more taxes when you can instead pay for a car and it’s oil changes and it’s brake pads and it’s rotors and it’s tires and it’s gas and it’s windshield wipers and it’s insurance
Which infra are we talking about? Japan, in a variety of ways, has been playing catch up on certain things for a while.
Politics. If a government wants to build a well-connected rail system linking major cities together, they could easily do so. However as it currently stands, the US government receives tons of financial support from corporations seeking the exact opposite.
Car companies give them money to expand highways, to encourage people to drive and therefore buy cars. Oil companies doing the same to get people to be reliant on gas. Airline companies as well because people will depend on them for long distance travelling. All these means the US government have more monetary incentives to keep those industries happy, which means not investing in a proper rail network that would directly compete with them.
You overvalue “high tech” infrastructure i.e. high speed rail and undervalue air transport. The US is sparsely populated compared to China or Japan and has a lot of ground to cover. Air transport is far superior in this circumstance unless you prefer three or four times the travel time.
Also, the US has arguably the best freight infrastructure in the entire world, which is extremely valuable if you want cheap goods.
China? Their infrastructure has a pretty casual relationship with safety and the environment.
Baby boomers (1950s), and their children (1970s), and their children (2000s), grew up with Cars as the only way to get around, cars as status symbols of success, buses being dirty unreliable inconvenient and for poor people, and no trains. Most Americans don’t travel because the USA is oceans from anywhere else, they don’t see much media from around the world – most living Americans don’t deeply know that other ways of living are possible, except things like Moped-hell in Beijing or Mumbai, on the news.
Poor land use and zoning laws makes cities sprawl into the suburbs, makes trams, trains, buses, water, sewers, road maintenance, bridge maintenance, all very expensive as they have to cover lots of area with few people in it. Japan is tiny and dense American cities like New York do have pretty good L-trains and subways and things, in some places at least, which is China-like.
A history of things like Libraries and Universities being funded by rich gift-givers like Andrew Carnegie, rather than taxpayers funding to make life better for everyone.
Investing in high speed trains are not seen as a matter of national pride and achievement, but instead “taking space from MY car and from MY house value, to give socialism to lazy poor people who can’t be bothered to work hard and afford a car”.
In China and Japan infrastructure spending is about providing infrastructure, in the US it is about providing jobs.
You start with a faulty premise. Tofu Dreg country LOOKS like it is high tech and reliable
https://www.youtube.com/@ChinaInsiderWithDavidZhang shows an endless list of unfinished buildings, roads collapsing, generally garbage quality everything
The easy explanation is: the US is really big, and large parts of it are rural. Low population areas are not very attractive for commercial companies to make money, and building internet/broadband infrastructure is very expensive. You need the government to make stuff like this happen and the US government (Federal, State, local) is really REALLY bad at making stuff happen.
There is a really interesting interview from John Steward with Ezra Klein recently which went over the Rural Broadband bill and it’s very interesting and telling.
Roughly it comes down to:
It takes a long time to make a bill that gets all the money organized
The bill, to get passed gets a lot of stuff added on to it that isn’t super important to “making broadband happen” adding stuff like “you have to use at least x percent of minority owned businesses to do the work”
Political will. Americans don’t want those things, or at least don’t externalise they want it. Americans also are culturally more selfish, the idea of public transport is against their beliefs, public transportation is by definition a very social project, too risky for private ventures, so they need government investment if not complete government ownership to take off the paper, but Americans in general are against public projects because it required taxes and it helps people other than themselves directly, which is not something they desire.
Besides politics which plays a huge role in it I think it also is culture. Japanese and Chinese culture value the collective over the person. If the collective can benefit they will do it. Take fast trains for instance. Fast trains connect cities throughout China and Japan and make it where they can get from point A to B fast an efficiently. To build those networks required a lot of destruction of housing and such.(You probably saw reports of this in China especially of people unwilling to leave/move and they literally build highways around the house). But it benefits society greatly as people can be much further out and still go to work in the middle of a city.
It also comes down to populations. Shanghai is has something like 40 million metro population. Tokyo is something like 14 million+. They use these fast trains to interconnect the major cities and those train stations are then linked to their subway stations that allow them to move hundreds of thousands of people across the city in very short periods of time. This can’t be accomplished with say cars(traffic) though bus routes do play an important roll as well.
I’ll say last time I was in was in China I was very impressed by their fast train system. They had wifi on some trains and you could be from Beijing to Xi’An in 8ish hours. You show up about 20 minutes early.. throw your bags on a security x ray machine, you pass through a metal detector, they check your passports at the gate and bam on the train. I’ve been told Japan has been like this for many many years and I can’t wait to see it as well.