The Paris Metro as a Window on America
What We Can Learn About Transit Infrastructure From France
This essay, which was first posted on June 22, 2023, compares the American approach to transit infrastructure to that of France (more specifically, Paris). The author, Michael Koetting, writes a regular column, "Between Hell and High Water," and is an advisor to Civic Way. Michael holds a PhD in Sociology from Harvard and served as VP of Planning at the University of Chicago Medical Center and Deputy Director for Planning at the Illinois Department of Health and Family Services, among other public sector positions. Michael also created and taught “American Democracy and You” in the Honors College at the University of Illinois-Chicago.
Comparing Light Rail Infrastructure
I just returned from a (too short) visit to Paris. We used the Metro extensively. The stops are plentiful, the trains run every few minutes, the stations are clean, everything works, and the people use it—even us tourists.
Part of the secret is the relatively compact nature of Paris. Building that kind of rail density in Chicago would be prohibitively expensive. But, it seems, building any transit in the US approaches prohibitive expense.
Paris is in the process of almost doubling the miles of track serviced by the Metro. The project started in 2018 and the first of five new lines will open next year, with the other five to be opened between 2025 and 2030. The new train lines will all be driverless. The cost for the first stage, in the center of Paris, is roughly $450 million per mile.
In New York, the Second Avenue Subway cost $2.6 billion per mile, in San Francisco the Central Subway cost $920 million per mile, in Los Angeles the Purple Line cost $800 million per mile. One element of the difference is that accommodations in the Metro for the disabled are scarce, but that by no means explains the entire difference.
Comparing High-Speed Rail Infrastructure
When it comes to high-speed rail, the contrast is even starker. France recently passed legislation barring short-haul flights to cut down emissions. They can do this because they have a well-planned transportation system. You can land at Charles De Gaulle airport just outside Paris, take an escalator to catch a high-speed train that comfortably gets you to Provence—on the other side of the country—in a touch over three hours.
The United States has nothing like this, anywhere. The Accela, the train between New York and DC, is the fastest in the country but, even in its best stretches, it wouldn’t qualify as a high-speed train in most developed countries. And it is still stymied by the outdated, unsafe 113-year-old tunnel leading into New York City.
Construction on the new tunnel started in the mid-aughts but was abandoned when Chris Christie diverted the New Jersey share for highways in the state. The newest version will not be complete until 2035 (on the current schedule) and will cost $16B, already up $2B from the original estimate three years ago. The attempt to build high speed railroad in California has become almost a joke as cost estimates continue to rise and the scope of the project shrinks.
The overriding reasons the United States can’t build such infrastructure affordably are no secret—management problems and procedural problems.
Management Problems
Everything about the way we manage infrastructure construction projects is problematic. The fact that funding and oversight is spread over a baffling array of agencies–federal, state and local–gets things off on a bad foot. Authority over the Paris metro system, by contrast, is concentrated in a single agency, the Régie Autonome des Transports Parisiens (RATP), directly created and funded by the national government. Other countries have similar arrangements.
In the United States, less than one-third of public infrastructure expenses are funded federally, the remainder coming from state and local sources. Not only does this create endless funding issues, it makes it less clear who is in charge. Paris and most European systems have a clean line of authority with clear missions and mandates. And it is clear who, exactly, would be responsible for cost overruns.
Moreover, since infrastructure maintenance are treated as ongoing, non-extraordinary events, RATP has established procedures and maintains expertise from one project to the next. In the United States infrastructure projects happen as randomly as rain in the Mohave Desert. When every project springs to life brand new, agencies have to relearn expertise—or try to rent it. Neither of these are optimal.
Moreover, since the Paris Metro has historically managed well, cost overruns and blown schedules are not taken for granted. In the United States, there is evidence managers often pad all budgets and schedules because they expect problems, which of course, become self-fulfilling prophesies. Along the way, the public loses faith in the ability of government to deliver cost-effective transit projects.
Once under way, projects suffer from lack of the tight oversight that makes construction affordable in other countries. There is often insufficient competition in the submission of bids, there is much too much consultant involvement for effective management, and there is insufficient control over unions. In France labor unions may be more powerful than in the United States, but they tend to win their concessions up front rather than relentless nickel and diming that seems to affect US infrastructure construction.
This in part comes back to the fact that in other countries it is clear who is an in charge and what are the marching orders.
Procedural Problems
The other overriding problem is that as a society we have made it very difficult to do anything. Starting in the Sixties, people became disenchanted with government and started to construct all kinds of procedural “safeguards.” (Ezra Klein has a particularly powerful interview with Nicholas Begley about this problem, the consequences of which go well beyond public transportation.) While most were put in place for good reasons—government can be dangerous, particularly when captured—the net effect can have deleterious effects.
Growth in procedural “safeguards” expands the number of veto points, which expands the number of obstacles and demands, and before you know it, time and money are no longer in anyone’s control. Successive court battles result in new project elements and delays that make a shambles of the timeline.
To avoid these kinds of delays, managers will attempt to accommodate everyone preemptively. Not only does this drive up the costs of those projects that do get built, but it also reduces the number of projects. A light-rail line in Baltimore could never get off the ground because of endless citizen objections, some of them it would appear from citizens who were worried about linking Black city neighborhoods too closely to wealthier communities, Black and White, on the edge of the city.
Resisting the Common Good
I could sketch out steps that would make transit constructions in America more like other countries. A number of academics who have studied the issue have done so. Most people would look at them and give nodding assent because they are obviously reasonable. We should pay attention to these recommendations. As long as we spending huge sums of money, no reason to not do so as reasonably as possible.
But I wouldn’t expect much to change.
The fundamental problem is that Americans don’t really value communal expenses. They sort of want the benefits, but they don’t want to make any sacrifices to obtain them. Whether it is paying more taxes or surrendering power to some more centralized agency, Americans are not particularly interested.
America has mediocre infrastructure and doesn’t show any signs of addressing that, the recent infrastructure spending bill notwithstanding. Not only do we get less for our infrastructure construction expenses than other developed counties, but we do less of it—considerably less than France, and about half as much as Japan.
Of course, when I say “Americans don’t value communal responses” I am using the term American a bit loosely. Different Americans have different agendas—and means. These are reflected in their public preferences. The poor Blacks in Baltimore would have much preferred to have a functional mass transit system linking their communities to the places where they worked. But they weren’t calling the shots.
So many Americans have little interest in communal expenditures because their sense of community has been stunted by the heterogenous nature of the populace and their overdeveloped sense of personal freedom. “Community” could typically be translated to mean “people like me in my community.”
As wealth differences between richest and the poorest have become more pronounced, the perceived benefit of public expenditures becomes more localized. Which, in turn, leads to under-investment in infrastructure, particularly transit. (Who needs mass transit when you’ve got Uber at your beck and call—or suburbs designed to accommodate private automobiles?)
Surviving Unfettered Individualism
I don’t see how we survive the looming climate crisis without recognizing that we’re all in this together.
The nature of the solutions is intrinsically communal. People need to understand that in the absence of communal solutions, buying yourself and your family out of the climate crisis will get ever more expensive. And perhaps just not possible—clean air wasn’t available in New York at any price two weeks ago. And, of course, if it gets bad enough, those left out might well rise up.
Getting more mass transit will be helpful to the environment, although in truth it is only a small factor, even if stringing together enough small factors is part of what we have to do.
The more important thing about our infrastructure problems is that they give us a clear window for seeing how far as a society we are from being able to address communal problems.
The Repubs will continue to oppose any aid to cities for transit and lots of other things that would make cities more liveable just because that's what they do