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Madrid’s metro was 71 miles long in 1995. That would be the world’s 51st longest today, reasonable considering Madrid is the 57th largest city by population.
Yet over 12 years, the metro would ~3x in length at costs much lower than was thought possible. Here’s how they did it🧵
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There exists a popular sentiment that we can’t build as well as we used to and our best days are behind us. But when we choose to, we can still build beautiful and interesting developments.
Here’s a tour of 10 new projects that are creating a better built environment. 🧵
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1760:
🇫🇷25 million people
🏴5.5 million
2025
🇫🇷68 million
🏴56 million
If France’s population growth had kept pace with England’s, France would have 250 million people.
What happened? 🧵
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What if a lack of housing is at the root of all of our problems?
The housing theory of everything: worksinprogress.co/issue/the…
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There is a Moore's law for mining copper. In ancient Rome, it took 40 years of labor to make a tonne of copper. By 1800, it was down to 6 years. Today, it takes just 21 days.
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The West has been below replacement level fertility before. By the 1920s, more than half of European nations had fertility rates below 2.1. But fertility recovered – often to far above replacement level – in the famous Baby Boom. How did we pull it off? (🧵)
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One principle makes nuclear power unaffordable. That’s Linear No Threshold: the theory that there is no safe level of radiation.
It's wrong.
But on Friday, the US President signed an executive order to reconsider it. 🧵
worksinprogress.co/issue/the…
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Far UVC can cut airborne bacteria by 98.4 percent, and could do the same for viruses, preventing diseases spread in public spaces.
But it is held back because it is unpatentable, which means it is unproven, unregulated, and untrusted.
We can fix this. worksinprogress.news/p/flipp…
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Professor Donald Shoup died on February 6th.
He has a strong claim on being the scholar who will have had the greatest impact on your day-to-day life by focusing on an impossibly boring problem that was completely neglected before him: where we park our cars. 🧵
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Airplanes today fly no faster than they did in the 1970s. In many countries, road speeds have decreased. Flying cars never showed up. In developed countries, the tallest buildings have only inched higher. Most rich countries produce less energy per capita than they did 20 years ago, and the cost of building new physical infrastructure like railways seems to rise inexorably. Yet cruise ships continue to grow.
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We can still build great things, at least in some places.
Here’s a run down of 10 major new infrastructure projects that have happened recently.
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The UK’s grid is broken.
There are 15-year queues for new connections. One substation fire shut Britain’s busiest airport. More than £1bn a year is spent to pay wind farms to NOT generate electricity. And the country came close to blackouts this winter.
So what went wrong? 🧵
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The Baby Boom holds important lessons for boosting birth rates in today's demographic winter. The best way to improve fertility rates may be to make parenthood cheaper and easier through better technology, healthcare, and housing.
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Madrid’s track record has left the city transformed. It has higher per resident ridership than London or NYC, with higher satisfaction rates. Madrid also has the largest area accessible by public transit within 30 minutes of its center of any American or Western European city.
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Yesterday, a large-scale blackout swept across Spain and Portugal, likely the biggest in Europe’s history. Within five seconds, a major portion of the Iberian electricity transmission system went dark. While we don’t know what happened, we have some clues about why. 🧵
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A bigger factor was housing. Post-war housing construction booms across the West made it easier for couples to create and have more children. In the US, homeownership rates among men over 18 jumped from less than 30% in 1940 to 52% by 1960.
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When environmental assessments for railways in Britain can reach 18,000 pages for 3.3 miles of track, Madrid’s 4 mile extension of Line 11 had just a 19 page long assessment. Per mile, that’s 1,142 times shorter.
To re-open 3 miles of track to Portishead, the local council had to complete a 79,187 page long planning application. If printed out, that's 14.6 miles of paper (4 1/2 times the line itself!). Then they had to wait 3 years for approval.
Yet now this project may be scrapped.🧵
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But the biggest factor was the simplest: pregnancy was killing vastly fewer women. Between 1936 and 1956, America's maternal death rate fell by 94%, from 51 deaths per 10,000 live births to less than 3.
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Terra cotta has been revived in wonderful ways in NYC in the last decade.
The ultimate example is The Fitzroy, a luxury condo building just off the High Line.
It shimmers in the daytime and broods enchantingly in jazz-age sophistication at night.
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Catfiddle Street in Charleston, South Carolina is rare as it wasn’t built all at once, but each new home rose organically alongside its neighbors over 20 years.
It’s a marvel of ‘inner-block urbanism’ where development happens within the block rather than on the streetfront.
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Planes aren’t getting faster. Buildings in the developed world aren’t getting taller. Roads are getting slower. But the world’s largest passenger ship record has been broken 9 times this century. They show what is possible w/o the constraints that stifle progress on dry land. 🧵
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Madrid had a group of well-paid in-house engineers that led the expansion, not external consultants. The team stayed the same and learned as they went on. With 8 tunnel boring machines operating, the leadership captured expertise and lessons.
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You can read @Ben_A_Hopkinson's full piece on Madrid’s metro expansion here, with plenty of detail on how the anglosphere currently fails to build cheaply and what to do about it. worksinprogress.co/issue/how…
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We have a new home @stripe! Read more about it here worksinprogress.co/works-in-…
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In June, the Polish Government announced plans to build a new transport hub in the heart of the country, with a new airport, high speed rail links, and more highways. The airport could grow to four runways and 100 million passengers a year, more than London Heathrow or Istanbul.
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Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee has transformed its campus over the last two decades from a nice-but-unremarkable place to one of the most attractive destinations for higher learning.
E. Bronson Ingram College continues this fine tradition.
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Land value taxes are once again becoming a popular all-purpose solution to housing issues. But implementing them in early 1900s Britain destroyed the then-dominant Liberal Party.
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A wonderful transformation of a dreary structure, Wellington House in Wimbledon, London is a delightful mixed-use office building.
The glazed ceramic tiles and sawtooth brickwork and the rounded windows that honor the corner make this building extraordinary.
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To deliver the projects in the 4 year electoral cycles and get the political rewards for doing so, community engagement remained limited and top-down
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By building quickly, there’s less time where the project is exposed to global shocks, inflationary pressures, or chopping & changing by different politicians. Madrid removed environmental impact requirements, sped up approvals, and worked round the clock to finish building.
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Madrid could build so much because of its low costs. The 35-mile 1995-1999 programme of works cost around $2.8bn (in 2024 prices). For the same amount, New York built just 1.5 miles of track. London’s Jubilee Line extension cost nearly 10x more per mile than Madrid.
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We often hear about infrastructure boondoggles, projects delivered far over budget or outright canceled. Yet around the world countries are building and improving people's lives.
Here’s a thread of 10 recent infrastructure marvels: tunnels, railways, airports, and more. 🧵
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In the eighteenth century, France was a superpower. It had the world’s second-largest empire, after the Spanish.
One in 25 people worldwide was French.
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Spain has 17 autonomous communities that function like an American state. The Community of Madrid is a little larger than Delaware and has an elected parliament, which can levy taxes and fund metro expansions.
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France's population fell far earlier than most of the rest of Europe.
This decline kept France from being a modern-day superpower: if its birth rate had tracked that of the UK, France would have over 250 million citizens today.
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In procurement, Madrid focused on value for money rather than just cost. US and UK projects can be too focused on the lowest bid, but that incentivizes contractors to under-report their expected costs to win the bid, knowing they can raise them later.
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Contrary to popular belief, the Baby Boom was not triggered by soldiers returning home from WWII. It began in the mid-1930s, before the war, and swept over many nations that were neutral in the war, like Switzerland and Sweden.
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Madrid recognised that trade-offs matter. Wanting the fastest, grandest, most innovative designs comes with high price tags. Stations were simplified and standardized with design, “focused on the needs of the users, rather than architectural beauty or exotic materials.”
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Unlike British & American infra projects, which often agree on a fixed price for the entire job to offload risk to the private sector, Madrid agreed fixed lump sum payments and a bill of quantities so that any additional work could be easily priced and agreed, avoiding disputes.
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It is natural to assume that there is some ‘deep’ cultural explanation for the differences between Chinese and American apartment buildings.
However, it actually comes down to zoning rules and building codes.
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The earth’s core is hot. So hot, that if we drilled deep enough, we could power the world millions of times over with cheap, clean energy.
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Weesperglide in Holland breaks the mold of suburbia with a bold use of natural materials. It’s familiar, but with a twist.
Designed for families and oriented around courtyards, it is much denser than American developments, but remains genial, attractive, and comfortable.
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When Vancouver metro’s Canada Line was being constructed, the project saved over $400m in construction costs (16% of the entire budget) by changing from bored tunnel to cut and cover. Yet almost all metro projects use tunnel boring machines. Why? worksinprogress.co/issue/why…
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Yale has also built beautiful residential colleges. With rooms for 904 students and dining halls, lounges, study rooms, classrooms, and multi-purpose space, Pauli Murray and Benjamin Franklin Colleges are exceptional places at the confluence of ambition, prosperity, and skill.
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Fort Greene Five in Brooklyn, NYC are indistinguishable from their predecessors that rose more than a century ago.
We should not always mimic the past, but where context and will demand it, we can build as well as we once did, and in some respects, we can even build better.
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In 1700, one in five Europeans was French.
If French births had tracked England's during the Industrial Revolution, there would be 250 million Frenchmen alive today.
Why did England have a baby boom and France a baby bust in the 18th and 19th Centuries?
worksinprogress.co/issue/fra…
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The metro expansion provides lessons for cities that aspire to improve their transit systems. These advances take time and there will always be challenges when building metros, but perhaps the most important lesson is to consider how successful cities deliver large projects.
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The metro leadership explicitly tied the benefits of building quickly with reducing disruption, so the public was willing to accept 24-hour working schedules as it meant they would get a brand new metro extension much quicker.
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Decisions requiring political input, like station locations, were often made within 24 hours, compared to months or even years in other countries. E.g. design changes and safety improvements to Green Park station in London had to go through Parliament as a bill and took 3 years.
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The level of detail and ambition of design in the Museum of Meenakari Heritage in Jaipur, India is all but non-existent in contemporary building practices.
The Jodhpur red sandstone is an exquisite building material honored perfectly by the latticework ornamentation.
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Modern materials, like carbon fiber composites, are born in labs. At first only a single gram is produced in a day at a cost in the millions. But to be commercially viable 1,000s of kilograms must be made each day cheaply in a factory. How do materials bridge this gap? 🧵
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Located adjacent to a DC Metro stop, Chevy Chase Lake in Maryland is likely the finest collection of new mid-rise buildings in the country.
The fantastic transit-oriented-development is even more remarkable given it is in an affluent and historically anti-development suburb.
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These reduced costs of childrearing likely worked together to temporarily overpower the depressive effect of rising incomes on birth rates. As their pace slowed, fertility declined again, and today, no European country has a fertility rate above replacement level.
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What happened? Birth rates declined.
Specifically, even though every European country’s birth rates started declining in the nineteenth century, France’s birth rates started declining a century earlier.
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The winner of regional assembly elections has all the levers of control over a project at their disposal. They can approve new projects, fund those projects by borrowing, and oversee the construction to deliver them. Politicians could pledge, and then deliver, metro expansions.
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War wasn’t the cause. Was it household appliances? It probably helped. In just 20 years, the share of American households with a refrigerator increased by 70 percent. But the Amish, who lacked those appliances, felt the baby boom too, so the explanation must be more complicated.
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It's nearly an iron law of fertility that higher incomes mean lower birth rates. Rising living standards make other leisure options more attractive, and mean that the wages women give up to leave the workforce are ever higher.
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If the fertility transition had come a century later, there would be 250 million people in France – more than Russia or Japan or Brazil. There would also be 320 million people of French ancestry abroad.
570 million Frenchmen.
But even though it is no longer a superpower, the demographic decline didn’t hold back France’s economy. It is still a major economic power, and its GDP/capita kept pace with England.
Demographic decline does not inevitably lead to the death of civilisation.
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🚨 It's time for a new issue of Works in Progress🚨
Read Issue 16 to find out:
- How we can gene edit mosquitoes out of existence
- Why lab diamonds are better than natural ones
- What's special about drip coffee
& much more!
worksinprogress.co
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What happened? The Catholic Church started to hold less sway over the population.
This was not restricted to intellectuals or the bourgeoisie. Ordinary Frenchmen paid less attention to the teachings of the Church.
We know this from language used in wills: did testators refer to God and Paradise and ask for perpetual Masses? Or did they use secular language?
Ideas, not Napoleon, were what caused France to stop being a superpower.
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How do you mine copper?
First, you blow up a mountain.
This is the story of how copper became cheap and plentiful 🧵
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France’s demographic power was matched by military might.
Between 1792 and 1815, France fought most European countries at once, fielding over a million soldiers. Even though it was outnumbered, it took 23 years before France was finally defeated.
But 55 years later, France was no longer a superpower. In 1870, France was defeated in one battle by one country – Germany.
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In 1764, a pineapple would cost the equivalent of $16,000 today to grow. For centuries, the fruit was a supremely expensive luxury item in Europe.
Yet today you can easily buy pineapple bits in cans in any grocery store for next to nothing. What changed? 🧵
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In England, fertility started going down in about 1850.
In France, the decline started around 1750.
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🚨It’s time for a new issue of Works in Progress 🚨
Read Issue 19 to find out:
- What we can do to eliminate lead in the developing world
- How Japan successfully densified its cities
- The best way to build good railway networks, cheaply
And much more! worksinprogress.co
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After 600 years, nuclear waste is only dangerous if you eat it. It's easy to store until then, and there isn't much of it. So what's all the fuss about?
worksinprogress.substack.com…
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Humans are a violent species with a façade of civilization that masks a brutal tendency to kill – or so many think.
Yet new research suggests that most of our ancestors avoided conflict. But this made them vulnerable to a few psychopaths who exploited their peaceableness.🧵
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🚨 There is a new issue of Works In Progress out today! 🚨
It could be our best yet, and features articles from @manosijm_, @HannesMalmberg1, @bomalmb, @davidfromterra, @petersuderman, @_westerlywinds, @markothoughts, and @ulkar_aghayeva
worksinprogress.co
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This was true in Europe in the 19th century. As incomes rose following the industrial revolution, birth rates fell in tandem.
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This chemical reaction could change the world. Olivine can react with CO2 in the ocean to form a harmless silt, trapping it. This natural process offers a cost-effective solution to climate change.
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In just twelve years, Madrid tripled the size of its metro for 10 times less per mile than London. @Ben_A_Hopkinson wrote for Works in Progress about what lessons Madrid has for other cities looking to build quickly and cheaply.
Madrid’s metro was 71 miles long in 1995. That would be the world’s 51st longest today, reasonable considering Madrid is the 57th largest city by population.
Yet over 12 years, the metro would ~3x in length at costs much lower than was thought possible. Here’s how they did it🧵
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🚨 It's time for a new issue of Works in Progress🚨
Issue 15 is out now!
Read it to find out:
- How we conquered drunk driving
- Why no one uses prediction markets
- How NYC finally did congestion charging
& much more!
worksinprogress.co
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Huge technological advances mean we may be able extend women’s fertility window, giving them the option to invest in their careers and have children later.
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Ten years ago, humanity discovered a way to completely rid the world of malaria.
To date this technology has gone unused, sentencing millions of children to an early and preventable death.
That technology is the CRISPR/Cas9 gene drive.
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To learn more about the history of the Baby Boom and its causes, read the full article by @ASarygulov and @PMArslanagic:
worksinprogress.co/issue/und…
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In China, new residential buildings must get a minimum number of hours of direct sunlight a day in the winter.
This has effectively put an upper limit on density in Chinese cities as buildings have to be spaced further apart to get sunlight to the lower floors.
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Second Home, Hollywood is a breath of fresh air amidst the highways and parking lots in Los Angeles.
The colorful pods that make up the office complex blur the line between indoor and outdoor, with 360 walls and garden workspaces to take full advantage of the California sun.
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Vietnam has approved an ambitious $67 billion high speed line between Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City. It will stretch for 957 miles at a cost of ~$70m per mile (roughly 7 times cheaper than Britain’s HS2). Construction will start in 2027 and the first services could run in 2035.
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Only France’s scientific academies have recommended abandoning LNT. Most regulators stick with it.
Why? Because it’s simpler. Because no one wants to ‘prove’ a dose is safe. Because the precautionary principle is hard to argue against.
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Geothermal contributed only 0.35% of global energy production in 2020.
But 0.005% of Earth’s heat could power humanity for a million years.
How can we harness this nearly unlimited heat source and what are the new technology developments? 🧵
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Synthetic diamonds are now purer, more beautiful, and vastly cheaper than mined diamonds.
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LNT assumes radiation damage builds with every dose, like drinking 1 glass of wine every day = 1 bottle in one go.
But the body can repair small damage over time. DNA repair is now a well-established biological process. The 2015 Nobel in Chemistry was awarded for studying it.
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This helped LNT become dogma. And in 1975, the US NRC adopted ALARA — “As Low As Reasonably Achievable” — as the guiding principle of nuclear safety.
ALARA has no cost-benefit logic. Regulators can demand design changes regardless of actual public health impact.
In Wales, a new nuclear plant was required to spend millions to reduce annual radiation exposure by 0.0001 millisieverts — less than a banana a year.
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Population studies back this up.
Nuclear shipyard workers, Taiwanese residents accidentally exposed to cobalt-60, and people living with high natural background radiation (like in Kerala) show no higher cancer risks — and in some cases, lower ones.
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The Fehmarnbelt tunnel will set world records when it opens in 2029. It will be the longest road plus rail tunnel and the longest underwater road tunnel. It will replace a 45 minute ferry with a 10 minute drive and shorten the Copenhagen to Hamburg rail journey by 2+ hours.
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The country of Monaco is growing by 3% as a new six-hectare district called Mareterra is being reclaimed from the sea at a cost of 2 billion euros. It has luxury apartments and villas costing up to $200 million, plus a new park, a small marina, waterfront promenade and shops.
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It's that moment you've been waiting for: a new issue of Works in Progress!
worksinprogress.co/issue-12
Including:
- understanding the Baby Boom could let us create another one
- how architecture is like music
- why property tax is the core of good local govt
& much more
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Degrowthers, be careful what you wish for. @stianwestlake writes for Works in Progress. worksinprogress.news/p/degro…
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The result: delays, cost blowouts, and cancellations. Plants took years longer and billions more to build.
From 1973 to 1980, the average US plant more than doubled its use of concrete and cable. Man-hours per kilowatt tripled. Dozens of projects were abandoned.
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ALARA denies that there is a tradeoff between health risk and abundant green, cheap, reliable energy.
The administration's executive order might be the first step towards reconsidering the science that it is based on.
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Almost as iconic as the Empire State Building or the Statue of Liberty, New York City’s steam network still warms the city after more than a century.
But why does it exist?🧵
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You can read @Cobylefko's full piece on new, beautiful developments around the world here: worksinprogress.news/p/new-d…
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We could use a Donald Shoup on many more issues.
Rest in peace Donald Shoup 1938-2025.
You can read @mnolangray's full obituary here: worksinprogress.news/p/the-p…
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Congratulations to Joel Mokyr, one of the inspirations behind Works in Progress.
BREAKING NEWS
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has decided to award the 2025 Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel to Joel Mokyr, Philippe Aghion and Peter Howitt “for having explained innovation-driven economic growth” with one half to Mokyr “for having identified the prerequisites for sustained growth through technological progress” and the other half jointly to Aghion and Howitt “for the theory of sustained growth through creative destruction.”
#NobelPrize
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The French Government is also committed to new rail freight, with plans to build 22 new intermodal terminals where containers can be moved between trains and lorries. The government hopes to double rail’s share of the freight market to 18% by 2030.
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The tax cost more to administer than it collected, and it was so poorly worded that it ended up becoming a tax on builders’ profits, leading to a crash in the building industry.
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Britain is a test case for degrowth: UK productivity growth has been near zero since the late 2000s, far below pre-2008 trends. Britain's problems are a taste of what global degrowth would be like.
worksinprogress.news/p/degro…
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Scientific papers are filled with jargon, abbreviations and long sentences. They’re also getting harder to read.
The Plain English Movement has helped make laws better-written. Is there an equivalent for science? 👇
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Read the full story in Works in Progress
worksinprogress.news/p/570-m…
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