My previous career was as a consultant for public transport infrastructure. I was involved in consultations in roughly two dozen countries, depending on how you count, including India, Brazil, Saudi Arabia, and other localities not well-known for efficiency and innovation. Of these, however, public-sector America was overwhelmingly the least efficient and least innovative.

(I'm American myself, but emigrated to the UK to find less crazy-making work in this sector.)

This isn't just a New York problem, although the 2nd Avenue Subway is a really excellent example. It's a problem everywhere in America. I feel like this article does an excellent job of digging into some of the lower-level symptoms, but only touches lightly on the root cause.

At its core, this is a product of not just a broken political system, but of two broken political cultures. Rhetoric has polarised into "we need to spend more money on the public good" (health care, infrastructure, etc.) vs. "we need to spend less money on the public good" -- Democrats and Republicans, respectively. I say "rhetoric" because what either side says has very little bearing on what they actually do, spending-wise, but nonetheless the rhetoric is important because of what it excludes.

Missing from this dichotomy is: "we need to get smarter at spending money on the public good" -- independent of any argument about whether more or less should be spent. One simply isn't allowed to make this statement: the "spend more money" crowd reads such a statement as being fundamentally in opposition to a funding increase, while the "spend less money" crowd takes umbrage because of its implicit endorsement of spending money on the public good in the first place. Everybody hates the argument that spending can and should be done more smartly. It has no real supporters.

But why not? Digging deeper, I submit that this isn't a broken system, but one which is working precisely as intended. It boils down to campaign finance: politicians need campaign funds to be re-elected, and unions and planning/engineering/construction companies are both major campaign contributors, on a bi-partisan basis (unions skewing Democratic of course, and the companies mostly skewing Republican). If public funds were spent more efficiently, they would get less money, full stop. Therefore they don't give campaign contributions to politicians who advocate such positions, and therefore there are no such politicians.

So what we get is a system intended to redistribute money to major campaign contributors. It is working exactly as intended. In infrastructure this enriches both unions and corporates; in healthcare it enriches doctors, health insurers, drug companies, medical device companies, and lawyers. Those are the stakeholders that the systems are designed to serve. Recipients of actual transport / health care services are a tertiary concern at best.

This problem won't be fixed until those "stakeholders" are held to better account, required to do more work for less money. And that won't happen as long as they are able to buy influence in the political system. Everywhere else in the world, the kind of influence-buying that happens in America is regarded as corruption and is highly criminalized; in America, corruption is legal as long as it goes through the right channels, and this is the result.

So nothing will change without major campaign finance reform, and that seems to be a very distant prospect.