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Comment by fatnoah | Hacker News Reader

I love that they talk about 40k people, possibly growing to 400k, and the only transportation improvements they mention are effectively that "most people who live there will work there" and that they'll upgrade some local roads. Feels like a big miss for a "forever" kinda plan.

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One of the greatest successes in US urban planning in my lifetime is that they extended the DC metro intro areas that were not developed so when they did develop they became transit friendly neighborhoods.

One time when we were going to a family party in Maryland we stayed at a hotel right near the end of the metro line (Shady Grove) and then rode into DC to see the National Mall and get lunch around Dupont Circle. Shady Grove had some major apartment developments as well as great shopping and dining and riding in on the metro I could see many other developments around stations that seemed to be equally successful.

This is being built in Kansas City

https://cpkcstadium.com/

and people are saying "there is nothing there" but there is transit so quite possibly this could become a nucleus for further development. It would be great to see more of this in California

Centralized planning doesn't work even if the people doing the planning achieved the centralization via otherwise free market means. This is obviously true of communist countries that have never shown compelling evidence that centralized planning is beneficial. It's also true of large multinational corporations that slowly fossilize with bureaucracy, paralysis, and lack of innovation as they become ever larger and concentrated the management of ever larger amounts of capital.

Society works best when small, individual property owners make good decisions regarding their properties and come together organically for the sake of organizing the meta structure of society.

> This is obviously true of communist countries that have never shown compelling evidence that centralized planning is beneficial.

USSR evacuated the large chunk of industry East during first months of Germany invasion in 1941 in a centralized manner, and that industry quickly started to work for the army.

NASA solved the problem of sending men on the Moon in 8 years in a centralized fashion.

Centralized planning does have its strengths.

You chose two pretty out-there examples to prove the point; I'll leave it to the class to determine why.

Your first example is a rosy picture of a military strategy whose only metric is "have we lost the war"?

Your second example is a project with a very clear and fixed and time-bounded outcome which has no externality or had any requirement to serve as infrastructure.

It makes as much sense to claim your examples as proof central planning works as it would be to claim the bulk of the automotive industry is capitalist and everyone drives cars. It might be true, but ignores all the negative externalities of the existing transportation network.

high-five

China has the worlds largest high speed rail network. Europe is full of (lower quality, but still good) rail, mostly built during the time of centralized monarchies.

The US barely has any passenger rail because that would need large scale centralized planning.

Small, individual property owners can only make small, individual changes. It optimizes for local maxima. To get past those, you need centralized planning.

IIRC large portions of China's high speed rail might be a boondoggle... so not sure that's the best example.

I can't speak for all of it, obviously, but I've taken some of it and it seemed... pretty good? What's wrong with it?

It's losing billions of dollars.

It's easy to make something people like... if you're willing to burn money.

Infrastructure is a public service that shouldn't need to make money, which is another reason why central planning is necessary for some things.

It was funded privately, not publicly.

The US federal highway system loses tens of billions of dollars a year, doesn't it? Perhaps that is a boondoggle, too.

China used private investment to fund its rail ways, so someone is going to take a loss on this, it won’t be the Chinese government.

> It's losing billions of dollars.

The US's roadway network is also a money pit. What's your point?

> IIRC large portions of China's high speed rail might be a boondoggle... so not sure that's the best example.

I think you need to revisit China's high speed rail. There was indeed a fair share of fraud and dubious construction options, but the end result was still the largest and most extensive high speed rail network in the world, and developed in record time.

They have working world-class infrastructure, which in case of railway also has a big impact in national cohesion and nation-building.

In the meantime, the US barely has conventional railway.

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