> Is your claim that any improvement to the system will inevitably conflict with a centralized authority — like a regional government that has to approve commerce or land use? Is your argument that it’s a political problem because it’s not, actually, distributed?
In the United States, most centralized authorities do not make decisions in the way you imply. There isn't a single decision maker, from President Biden down to any particular state Governor that is able to exercise authority to materialize an infrastructure project. Thus regional governments are themselves highly political in their decision making; you cannot simply get the local magistrate to buy into the project and suddenly the coast is clear.
Let's take a concrete example that is strictly easier. Let's consider broadband internet connectivity. Google attempted to disrupt local internet providers via Google Fiber. They failed at that attempt. [1]
Not only did Google face issue getting approval from municipal governments, they were opposed by entrenched existing interests and faced continuous lawsuits attempting to delay their efforts and increase their costs.
Now consider that any new transportation network would face the same political opposition and be even more controversial. After all, fiber optic cable is a proven technology and there were no technical challenges to deploying it - all of the issues were purely political. Those issues would be an order of magnitude greater with any significant new transportation network.
You're right for Google Fiber's failure being political, but that article is pretty garbage, mainly points 2 and 3 being price and 'partnerships'.
Google's entire plan wasn't to make an insanely popular internet offering that generated an overall profit within 10 years, it was to make internet itself better for _everyone_ so that they can make profit via their other products over the next 10 years - and that meant going into every single market possible and becoming a competitor. They were ready and willing to drop hundreds of millions of dollars in actually getting their network deployed, but at a certain point the lawsuits against incumbents indeed squeezed way too much out of them that it would be truly reckless to continue fighting them in more suburban markets. In this vein, they did succeed in making a lot of people's internet better across the board as ISPs know that municipalities could greenlight access to new ISPs easily or make their own. Now all they need is Starlink to take the bill for rural internet.
The fifth point about outages is also terrible as the example of the world series outage was a problem on the network's end with blown generators[0]. It doesn't seem like outages are any more rare on GFiber.
In the United States, most centralized authorities do not make decisions in the way you imply. There isn't a single decision maker, from President Biden down to any particular state Governor that is able to exercise authority to materialize an infrastructure project. Thus regional governments are themselves highly political in their decision making; you cannot simply get the local magistrate to buy into the project and suddenly the coast is clear.
Let's take a concrete example that is strictly easier. Let's consider broadband internet connectivity. Google attempted to disrupt local internet providers via Google Fiber. They failed at that attempt. [1]
Not only did Google face issue getting approval from municipal governments, they were opposed by entrenched existing interests and faced continuous lawsuits attempting to delay their efforts and increase their costs.
Now consider that any new transportation network would face the same political opposition and be even more controversial. After all, fiber optic cable is a proven technology and there were no technical challenges to deploying it - all of the issues were purely political. Those issues would be an order of magnitude greater with any significant new transportation network.
[1] https://www.techrepublic.com/article/why-google-fiber-failed...