Coalplating
Published on 25 August 2026
When I sit opposite another fully-grown man on my local commuter rail, we must interleave our knees together due to insufficient leg-room. Many people likely imagine that someone has ran the numbers and decided this level of discomfort is worth it given the cost of providing more leg-room, but I don’t think this is the case.
Trains, for people who are unfamiliar with them, are giant indestructible steel locomotives which run on low-friction tracks and can be used to transport extremely low-value bulk goods (like sand) long-distances over land very cheaply. Most metropolitan train services are electrified and do not need conductors or drivers thanks to advances in signalling.
The biggest costs for trains are fixed-costs, building the lines and stations and setting up timetabling systems and so forth. Increasing peak-throughput might require some new rolling stock or duplication of tracks, but off-peak doesn’t require even that. Which isn’t to say that we could increase leg-room overnight, the whole network is built around the assumption that there will be no leg-room, so in terms of stabling yards and network topology and signalling systems and platform lengths there’s quite a few obstacles. But those obstacles are mostly self-inflicted; we’ve built our networks around the assumption that we don’t need leg-room.
There’s two somewhat related reasons for this in my view. Firstly, there’s a species of public servant who think ‘efficiency’ means delivering a utilitarian and sparse service to the public. In principle they might be interested in driving down costs, but due to innumeracy and general incompetence this entirely takes the form of making sure the final user experience is poor. Even worse, their intuition for a sensible amount of leg-room is informed by air travel, which has radically different cost-economics (jet fuel is expensive and increased leg-room increases fuselage-length which increases drag).
Secondly, public transport suffers from what a Rand researcher once coined ‘suboptimization’, which refers to the optimisation of a sub-system which may in fact harm the performance of the overall system.
The big decisions which drive efficiency of public transport, like new infrastructure or fare policy, tends to be in the hands of elected officials. Transport planners are given the relatively minor task of tweaking the timetable where the total number of services is fixed. A natural metric to use for this is service ‘productivity’; essentially the more people aboard a service, the more productive it is. In these circumstances it is not a terrible metric (although it tends to lead to overly long wait-times during off-peak), but it has a very pernicious effect where the public service increasingly regards the biggest source of potential waste in the transport service is a relatively empty train. This occupies far too much of their headspace even when advising on things that actually do matter.
But to return to the first problem. In one sense it’s natural enough, people tend to infer how expensive things are by how expensive they feel. Managers do the same. And things which are expensive are often more expensive than is pareto-optimal. But taken to it’s extreme (and I’d argue it has been), it leads to this very perverse situation where public service managers effectively try to minimise the quality of the output relative to the inputs. They’re quite literally minimising efficiency.
In some ways this is the inverse of goldplating, where a base metal is plated with gold to give the impression it’s more expensive than it really is. Government projects instead have the gold on the inside; they’re completely cost-insensitive when it comes to administration, engineering, procurement, consultation, etc. so those things are done in the most expensive fashion possible. Only those elements which are directly perceptible by taxpayers are then subject to vicious cost-cutting, guaranteeing that the whole project feels cheap.
I’ll give two concrete examples to prove my point, but it’s such an endemic problem you’ll see them everywhere if you take an interest in public policy.
The national broadband network was announced by then-opposition leader Kevin Rudd in 2007 in my home-country, promising 98% coverage (although not in a position then to know what was a sensible number). When it was finally implemented, little cost was spared, for instance famously three premises cost $100k to connect to the network because they had to drill through 300 meters of solid rock.
Despite this massive capital outlay, the experience of consumers was rather poor. The government built for abundance but then priced it for scarcity. Not only were consumers priced out of using anything but a minuscule fraction of available bandwidth, but the pricing model with retailers caused them to skimp on backend which resulted in congestion during the evening. Government was fine spending the money but recoiled at the prospect that this spending might be noticeable to the general public in the form of a consumer surplus.
Or to give another example, my city recently built several new metro stations. Upon entering them one’s eyes are assaulted by bright migraine-inducing advertisements which cover all the walls. Now you think might ‘well they’re trying to get bang for their buck’ but of course they didn’t show any concern about cost-savings elsewhere. In fact the state government intentionally turned a blind eye to billions of dollars being siphoned into the pockets of organised crime on these projects, resulting in astronomical cost overruns.
The moral of the story is that there’s no substitute for competence, and in particular the necessity of number-crunching. Simply having economy (as in thriftiness) as a ‘value’ of the public service can not and will not improve efficiency, indeed in its most common manifestation seems to be greater inefficiency.
So the next time you’re on-hold for a long time while ringing up a government service, don’t assume it’s due to lack of funding per se. Rather there are people in government who think that good service delivery is itself a sign of largess, so the wait-time is almost structurally-baked into how the government operates.