> what makes the USofA so poor at delivering functional public transport?
Not a complete answer but it is notable that several subway systems (Istanbul, Bogota, Hanoi, Singapore) were built by Chinese companies. Countries which have a far less adversarial relationship with China.
Of course inviting the Chinese into America to dig holes under our cities would be a political nonstarter. So part of the answer is, we insist on building things ourselves and we’re not very good at it.
Singapore's MRT has been mostly built not by the Chinese, but by a mix of British, German, Japanese, Korean, and Singaporean construction companies, who generally employ construction workers and headmen from South Asia (specifically, Tamil Nadu and Bangladesh). Only the rolling stock has recently begun to move to CRRC Qingdao-Sifang, and even then these are limited to joint ventures with Japanese, French, and German companies. Many lines run Alstom, Bombardier, Kawasaki, Nippon-Sharyo, and Siemens rolling stock.
For the record, to see Singapore's real stance on geopolitics, look at its armed forces: all NATO standard, with HIMARS, Aster, Sidewinders, and a glut of F-16s, F-15Es (Singapore has its own designation, the F-15SG), and new orders for the F-35B.
>Of course inviting the Chinese into America to dig holes under our cities would be a political nonstarter. So part of the answer is, we insist on building things ourselves and we’re not very good at it.
I don't think this is really accurate. Surely Chinese companies didn't bring tens of thousands of Chinese laborers to dig subway tunnels in Turkey and Colombia; they hired local labor, right? The Chinese companies' jobs would have been with engineering and such.
If the US wanted, they could get Japanese companies to build subway systems. The Japanese have far longer experience at it than the Chinese, and there surely wouldn't be a political problem with Japanese companies doing such infrastructure projects under American cities as with Chinese companies. But I don't think Japanese companies would do much better than American companies. They'd still have to hire local labor and subcontractors and deal with all the crazy laws and regulations that exist in the US (and probably don't exist in Bogota). So it's not that "America isn't very good at building things", I think it's that America has intentionally made itself a place where it's very difficult and expensive for anyone to build things, no matter where the construction company is located.
Not a complete answer but it is notable that several subway systems (Istanbul, Bogota, Hanoi, Singapore) were built by Chinese companies. Countries which have a far less adversarial relationship with China.
Of course inviting the Chinese into America to dig holes under our cities would be a political nonstarter. So part of the answer is, we insist on building things ourselves and we’re not very good at it.