5 ms·

As a Civil Engineer myself, I feel like people don't realize the amount of underlying stuff that goes into even basic infrastructure projects. There's layers of

by prions 10y ago

As a Civil Engineer myself, I feel like people don't realize the amount of underlying stuff that goes into even basic infrastructure projects. There's layers of planning, design, permitting, regulations and bidding involved. It usually takes years to finally get to construction and even then there's a whole host of issues that arise that can delay even a simple project. Case in point: I was the principal inspector for a small pump station project, estimated two weeks of construction and it took just over 3 months. There's definitely room for improvement though. A big part of the issue is the mismatch between the private and municipal sides of the project. As someone on the private side as a consultant, it can be really frustrating to constantly jump through bureaucratic hoops that come across as massive wastes of time and money.

JumpCrisscross 10y ago
Is there a role for technology to play in simplifying this problem for the decision makers?
- prions 10y ago
  Absolutely. In fact I've developed some Python programs for my own firm that have really sped up our productivity. It's actually led my to leaving civil engineering and going for my masters in CS soon! I hope one day I can make some wide changes in the industry but the market for it is quite small. The issue with technology in municipal governments is with budgeting and the "It works, why do we need to change it?" mentality. Governments will still insist on things sent in formats that were modern 20 years ago, why should I have to send 5 paper copies by mail to the DEP or mail a CD? The civil engineering industry as a whole is still very paper based as well. Paper copies are signed and sealed by hand and sent in copies out to clients/bidders. Having to spend time printing everything gets extremely time and resource consuming. The argument for this style though is that some projects have a big public liability and records must be kept. There are pushes in the right direction, but change is slow and many don't see the incentive of upending entire systems even though they can provide a real benefit.
  - enraged_camel 10y ago
    >>The argument for this style though is that some projects have a big public liability and records must be kept. I don't get it... It's much, much easier to preserve records in digital format than in paper format.
    - Spooky23 10y ago
      No way. Digital records are exponentially more complex to maintain in the long term. You need to deal with formats being unreadable, turnover of media, etc. Future generations will find this era to be a black hole. All of the primary sources are electronic in formats that will be long forgotten centuries from now.
      - enraged_camel 10y ago
        >>Digital records are exponentially more complex to maintain in the long term. You need to deal with formats being unreadable, turnover of media, etc. No they aren't. There are many open, non-proprietary formats that have existed for many years and will continue to exist for decades. TIFF is a great example. In contrast, paper records cost a ton of money to store (they take up physical storage space, which means paying rent and/or opportunity cost) and they are also very easily destroyed in accidents such as fires or earthquakes. Oh, you want to create backups? Good fucking luck making copies of all the crumbling pieces of city legislation from 1960s.
        mikepurvis 10y ago
        The "black hole" argument is real, though. Think of a catastrophe (natural or otherwise) which yielded a long-term interruption to the power grid— all those cloud-archived images and documents carefully striped with redundancy across multiple disks in different availability zones? All gone. And yet a stack of papers in a fire-proof safe will be there and perfectly readable for centuries, with no intervention or maintenance required, and no special technology (at all) on the receiving end.
- Retric 10y ago
  Some of this seems to be designed for US style graft which is not handing people bags of money, but exchanges of favors.
- walrus01 10y ago
  Things can be made a great deal easier by employing highly knowledgable GIS system experts and building a GIS backend operational infrastructure designed to scale up to large projects.
- nkoren 10y ago
  Absolutely. I worked as a transport infrastructure planner for both public and private clients in 14 countries. On the side, I started a couple of software companies, and saw how collaboration tools like Google Docs and Github made the decision-making around complex engineering problems SO much easier. (Yes, I've seen lots of stupid flame wars on Github issue trackers. Trust me: on infrastructure projects, it's stupider). So I started another software company to solve this problem: https://www.podaris.com/ https://www.podaris.com/. The website is crap (we're bootstrapped and our priorities are currently elsewhere), but what we're developing is very, very cool, and will make infrastructure planning a lot more like using modern collaboration tools for document editing or software engineering.
  - pinot 10y ago
    I run construction projects for my company, but rely on a lot of outside players (arch, CivE, Struct, MEP, GC). Huge part of my job is just managing the individual strands, and finding out when one of those subs talks to each other but doesn't update me/my company. I've had almost no luck having these groups sign up for something like a light collaborate work tool. Instead it's all e-mail and face-to-faces (at their high billing rates). Slows me down so much compared to my internal projects where we can have a Slack chatroom or google-docs/evernote organization system to keep track of everything.
marter 10y ago
These comment is just saying stuff is difficult. I agree, stuff is difficult.
walrus01 10y ago
As a network engineer, it's amazing the amount of work and money that it costs to do high capacity long distance singlemode fiber between major metro areas. Doing something like a 288 strand cable from Boise to Salt Lake City along railway and highway right-of-ways is a huge project that involves massive, heavy equipment, tons of people, GIS experts, civil engineers, dozens of county governments, state governments, road closures, electrical system coordination, property leases for fiber huts, diesel generators, bucket trucks, bulldozers, excavators, trenching machines, flatbed trucks, spool trucks, traffic flaggers... I could write a 5 page list with just individual single line item bullet points of all the factors/sub-contractors/sub-systems to take into consideration for a successful inter city fiber project. And that is just at OSI layer 1 before you even start lighting the fiber.
- mikepurvis 10y ago
  I'm in the Waterloo region, which is partway through a multi-year light rail construction project. The line is really relatively simple and not all that long (19km), but took over a decade of fighting to get approved, costs almost $1B, and has been a huge undertaking to build (not to mention all the nonsense from Bombardier, who are supposed to be building the trains). But it's been fascinating to compare this to how inner-city rail projects went in the early 20th century— basically some company would get permission, lay down a bunch of track in the middle of the street, and be running trains within a few months. You see similar stuff with early electrification projects, where basically whoever could just come along and string their wires between lamp posts. I totally see that that's insane, and we can't have a wild west with our infrastructure, but I do also wonder if there's not a middle ground that would allow somewhat more agility with these things.
  - walrus01 10y ago
    As things get more rural, and literally more wild west, it's possible to bring down the cost of OSP fiber infrastructure significantly. There's ISPs in rural western states building GPON networks along roadways/right of way (trenched/duct and aerial) with crews that consist of basically two guys and a bucket truck with a spool on it, and a $3000 fusion splicer from china.
AceJohnny2 10y ago
This is actually one of the most fascinating aspects of modern society to me. I can't resist opportunities to tour local infrastructure. I think it's NYT who a few years ago had a series of articles about the work of maintaining the underground aqueducts that bring water to NYC, and in building a new one. [1] It was to me a more engrossing read than any OS deep-dive article, despite the latter being more in-line with my passion and work. It's also why I loved the fantasy book "Two Serpents Rise" [2] by Max Gladstone, because it's basically about the water infrastructure of Los Angeles. Which has a fascinating real-world history of its own! [3] [1] can't find NYT, but here's a related article: http://www.theverge.com/2013/10/19/4853636/underground-with-manhattans-new-water-tunnel-three-photo-essay http://www.theverge.com/2013/10/19/4853636/underground-with-... [2] http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/16059411-two-serpents-rise http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/16059411-two-serpents-ris... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Water_Wars https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Water_Wars
- thomasvarney723 10y ago
  Doesn't California City have something to do with Los Angeles's water infrastructure history?
  - theoh 10y ago
    I didn't know about California City, but the parent post also makes me think of the classic movie Chinatown, inspired by the California Water Wars. On the same topic, another inspiration for fiction is the book Cadillac Desert by Marc Reisner: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cadillac_Desert https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cadillac_Desert
    - NegativeLatency 10y ago
      Great book.
- theoh 10y ago
  One of the most prominent academic theorists of infrastructure, Susan Leigh Star, based some of her work on a study of computer systems and their interfaces ("information infrastructure"): e.g. her papers from the 90s Steps Toward an Ecology of Infrastructure: Design and Access for Large Information Spaces https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/f0c2/2ec49e87aecec1bd54506bf017bad852fbf9.pdf https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/f0c2/2ec49e87aecec1bd54506b... The Ethnography of Infrastructure http://www.imtfi.uci.edu/files/articles/Star.pdf http://www.imtfi.uci.edu/files/articles/Star.pdf
sytelus 10y ago
But do you think regulations are justified? I understand its inconvenience but I rather don't have people building pump stations that are not safe and may cause other problems in community.
- prions 10y ago
  Definitely justified. Most civil engineers are state licensed which is a years long process in itself. Just to become a certified Engineer In Training I needed a 4 year engineering degree and a 6 hour exam. To become licensed you need 5+ years of experience and an 8 hour exam. I'm not arguing against those safeties, but I believe there can be improvement in the regulation process. The NJDEP has only recently moved to a digital permitting system.
wbl 10y ago
In the US this back and forth is orders of magnitude more expensive than that haven of efficiency, Western Europe.
dugmartin 10y ago
I'm constantly amazed at how long large projects like buildings and skyscrapers take to design and build now compared to the 1930s. Is it just that the huge efficencies we've gained with things like CAD and project management tools have been dwarfed by the expansion of bureaucracy and regulation?
- onlyrealcuzzo 10y ago
  I always wonder how, with all the automation and efficiency gains in construction, with how much cheaper (inflation adjusted) materials are now, that the cost to build Skyscrapers per square foot (irrespective of land) has more than double inflation since the 1930s. Maybe this is it? And speaking of, is there any way software could automate this regulation? Seems like it could save a ton of money if so.
  - ajmurmann 10y ago
    I think what makes this regulation problematic is that it's not exclusively the type of regulation where you read the regulation, understand it and now you are good to go. Instead it's largely the type of regulation where you need to write an application/proposal, send it to done government office, call in favors to get it processed in a somewhat timely fashion, argue about interpretation of regulation, update your plans, wait months, have no proper recorded, etc. I think that type of regulation is very hard to automate, unpredictable, very expensive and largely what gives regulations in general a bad rep.
  - pizza 10y ago
    Regulation seems to be a Ω(n) process, where n is the number of people who have some method of influencing the project, i.e. as a member of a constituency or owner of some bridging piece of land. The rules part of regulation is probably the fastest, with civil engineering law firms probably having that aspect mastered.
- pinot 10y ago
  The buildings themselves are far more advanced. Forced air instead of steam registers, better plumbing, telco, seismic, increased floorspans, durable materials, energy efficiency etc etc.
tgrass 10y ago
I was a Civil Engineer in hydrology. I built out a web app that integrated some local, clunky disparate software solutions so one could design detention basins in a matter of minutes to the local code (http://www.drainagebuilder.com http://www.drainagebuilder.com). I met with so much resistance from the local Regional Flood Control District that I finally walked away from the project (it was based on very local specifications, so the market was rather small). They ultimately "upgraded" the existing hydrologic component of what I was working on by making a web based form - but it was a step back from their desktop app (for one, it had no database, so the user is required to download and store hydrologic computations back to their client). I have my PE but ultimately walked away completely from Civil. I understand why Civil is conservative - bureaucrats, especially those in public safety, are incentivized to always say no; such conservatism is not for me. Another recent article on some issues of apps for Gov: http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/11/13/magazine/design-issue-code-for-america.html?_r=0 http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/11/13/magazine/desig...

by prions 10y ago

JumpCrisscross 10y ago

Is there a role for technology to play in simplifying this problem for the decision makers?

prions 10y ago
Absolutely. In fact I've developed some Python programs for my own firm that have really sped up our productivity. It's actually led my to leaving civil engineering and going for my masters in CS soon! I hope one day I can make some wide changes in the industry but the market for it is quite small. The issue with technology in municipal governments is with budgeting and the "It works, why do we need to change it?" mentality. Governments will still insist on things sent in formats that were modern 20 years ago, why should I have to send 5 paper copies by mail to the DEP or mail a CD? The civil engineering industry as a whole is still very paper based as well. Paper copies are signed and sealed by hand and sent in copies out to clients/bidders. Having to spend time printing everything gets extremely time and resource consuming. The argument for this style though is that some projects have a big public liability and records must be kept. There are pushes in the right direction, but change is slow and many don't see the incentive of upending entire systems even though they can provide a real benefit.
- enraged_camel 10y ago
  >>The argument for this style though is that some projects have a big public liability and records must be kept. I don't get it... It's much, much easier to preserve records in digital format than in paper format.
  - Spooky23 10y ago
    No way. Digital records are exponentially more complex to maintain in the long term. You need to deal with formats being unreadable, turnover of media, etc. Future generations will find this era to be a black hole. All of the primary sources are electronic in formats that will be long forgotten centuries from now.
    - enraged_camel 10y ago
      >>Digital records are exponentially more complex to maintain in the long term. You need to deal with formats being unreadable, turnover of media, etc. No they aren't. There are many open, non-proprietary formats that have existed for many years and will continue to exist for decades. TIFF is a great example. In contrast, paper records cost a ton of money to store (they take up physical storage space, which means paying rent and/or opportunity cost) and they are also very easily destroyed in accidents such as fires or earthquakes. Oh, you want to create backups? Good fucking luck making copies of all the crumbling pieces of city legislation from 1960s.
      - mikepurvis 10y ago
        The "black hole" argument is real, though. Think of a catastrophe (natural or otherwise) which yielded a long-term interruption to the power grid— all those cloud-archived images and documents carefully striped with redundancy across multiple disks in different availability zones? All gone. And yet a stack of papers in a fire-proof safe will be there and perfectly readable for centuries, with no intervention or maintenance required, and no special technology (at all) on the receiving end.
Retric 10y ago
Some of this seems to be designed for US style graft which is not handing people bags of money, but exchanges of favors.
walrus01 10y ago
Things can be made a great deal easier by employing highly knowledgable GIS system experts and building a GIS backend operational infrastructure designed to scale up to large projects.
nkoren 10y ago
Absolutely. I worked as a transport infrastructure planner for both public and private clients in 14 countries. On the side, I started a couple of software companies, and saw how collaboration tools like Google Docs and Github made the decision-making around complex engineering problems SO much easier. (Yes, I've seen lots of stupid flame wars on Github issue trackers. Trust me: on infrastructure projects, it's stupider). So I started another software company to solve this problem: https://www.podaris.com/ https://www.podaris.com/. The website is crap (we're bootstrapped and our priorities are currently elsewhere), but what we're developing is very, very cool, and will make infrastructure planning a lot more like using modern collaboration tools for document editing or software engineering.
- pinot 10y ago
  I run construction projects for my company, but rely on a lot of outside players (arch, CivE, Struct, MEP, GC). Huge part of my job is just managing the individual strands, and finding out when one of those subs talks to each other but doesn't update me/my company. I've had almost no luck having these groups sign up for something like a light collaborate work tool. Instead it's all e-mail and face-to-faces (at their high billing rates). Slows me down so much compared to my internal projects where we can have a Slack chatroom or google-docs/evernote organization system to keep track of everything.

marter 10y ago

These comment is just saying stuff is difficult. I agree, stuff is difficult.

walrus01 10y ago

As a network engineer, it's amazing the amount of work and money that it costs to do high capacity long distance singlemode fiber between major metro areas. Doing something like a 288 strand cable from Boise to Salt Lake City along railway and highway right-of-ways is a huge project that involves massive, heavy equipment, tons of people, GIS experts, civil engineers, dozens of county governments, state governments, road closures, electrical system coordination, property leases for fiber huts, diesel generators, bucket trucks, bulldozers, excavators, trenching machines, flatbed trucks, spool trucks, traffic flaggers... I could write a 5 page list with just individual single line item bullet points of all the factors/sub-contractors/sub-systems to take into consideration for a successful inter city fiber project. And that is just at OSI layer 1 before you even start lighting the fiber.

mikepurvis 10y ago
I'm in the Waterloo region, which is partway through a multi-year light rail construction project. The line is really relatively simple and not all that long (19km), but took over a decade of fighting to get approved, costs almost $1B, and has been a huge undertaking to build (not to mention all the nonsense from Bombardier, who are supposed to be building the trains). But it's been fascinating to compare this to how inner-city rail projects went in the early 20th century— basically some company would get permission, lay down a bunch of track in the middle of the street, and be running trains within a few months. You see similar stuff with early electrification projects, where basically whoever could just come along and string their wires between lamp posts. I totally see that that's insane, and we can't have a wild west with our infrastructure, but I do also wonder if there's not a middle ground that would allow somewhat more agility with these things.
- walrus01 10y ago
  As things get more rural, and literally more wild west, it's possible to bring down the cost of OSP fiber infrastructure significantly. There's ISPs in rural western states building GPON networks along roadways/right of way (trenched/duct and aerial) with crews that consist of basically two guys and a bucket truck with a spool on it, and a $3000 fusion splicer from china.

AceJohnny2 10y ago

This is actually one of the most fascinating aspects of modern society to me. I can't resist opportunities to tour local infrastructure. I think it's NYT who a few years ago had a series of articles about the work of maintaining the underground aqueducts that bring water to NYC, and in building a new one. [1] It was to me a more engrossing read than any OS deep-dive article, despite the latter being more in-line with my passion and work. It's also why I loved the fantasy book "Two Serpents Rise" [2] by Max Gladstone, because it's basically about the water infrastructure of Los Angeles. Which has a fascinating real-world history of its own! [3] [1] can't find NYT, but here's a related article: http://www.theverge.com/2013/10/19/4853636/underground-with-manhattans-new-water-tunnel-three-photo-essay http://www.theverge.com/2013/10/19/4853636/underground-with-... [2] http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/16059411-two-serpents-rise http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/16059411-two-serpents-ris... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Water_Wars https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Water_Wars

thomasvarney723 10y ago
Doesn't California City have something to do with Los Angeles's water infrastructure history?
- theoh 10y ago
  I didn't know about California City, but the parent post also makes me think of the classic movie Chinatown, inspired by the California Water Wars. On the same topic, another inspiration for fiction is the book Cadillac Desert by Marc Reisner: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cadillac_Desert https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cadillac_Desert
  - NegativeLatency 10y ago
    Great book.
theoh 10y ago
One of the most prominent academic theorists of infrastructure, Susan Leigh Star, based some of her work on a study of computer systems and their interfaces ("information infrastructure"): e.g. her papers from the 90s Steps Toward an Ecology of Infrastructure: Design and Access for Large Information Spaces https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/f0c2/2ec49e87aecec1bd54506bf017bad852fbf9.pdf https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/f0c2/2ec49e87aecec1bd54506b... The Ethnography of Infrastructure http://www.imtfi.uci.edu/files/articles/Star.pdf http://www.imtfi.uci.edu/files/articles/Star.pdf

sytelus 10y ago

But do you think regulations are justified? I understand its inconvenience but I rather don't have people building pump stations that are not safe and may cause other problems in community.

prions 10y ago
Definitely justified. Most civil engineers are state licensed which is a years long process in itself. Just to become a certified Engineer In Training I needed a 4 year engineering degree and a 6 hour exam. To become licensed you need 5+ years of experience and an 8 hour exam. I'm not arguing against those safeties, but I believe there can be improvement in the regulation process. The NJDEP has only recently moved to a digital permitting system.

wbl 10y ago

In the US this back and forth is orders of magnitude more expensive than that haven of efficiency, Western Europe.

dugmartin 10y ago

I'm constantly amazed at how long large projects like buildings and skyscrapers take to design and build now compared to the 1930s. Is it just that the huge efficencies we've gained with things like CAD and project management tools have been dwarfed by the expansion of bureaucracy and regulation?

onlyrealcuzzo 10y ago
I always wonder how, with all the automation and efficiency gains in construction, with how much cheaper (inflation adjusted) materials are now, that the cost to build Skyscrapers per square foot (irrespective of land) has more than double inflation since the 1930s. Maybe this is it? And speaking of, is there any way software could automate this regulation? Seems like it could save a ton of money if so.
- ajmurmann 10y ago
  I think what makes this regulation problematic is that it's not exclusively the type of regulation where you read the regulation, understand it and now you are good to go. Instead it's largely the type of regulation where you need to write an application/proposal, send it to done government office, call in favors to get it processed in a somewhat timely fashion, argue about interpretation of regulation, update your plans, wait months, have no proper recorded, etc. I think that type of regulation is very hard to automate, unpredictable, very expensive and largely what gives regulations in general a bad rep.
- pizza 10y ago
  Regulation seems to be a Ω(n) process, where n is the number of people who have some method of influencing the project, i.e. as a member of a constituency or owner of some bridging piece of land. The rules part of regulation is probably the fastest, with civil engineering law firms probably having that aspect mastered.
pinot 10y ago
The buildings themselves are far more advanced. Forced air instead of steam registers, better plumbing, telco, seismic, increased floorspans, durable materials, energy efficiency etc etc.

tgrass 10y ago

I was a Civil Engineer in hydrology. I built out a web app that integrated some local, clunky disparate software solutions so one could design detention basins in a matter of minutes to the local code (http://www.drainagebuilder.com http://www.drainagebuilder.com). I met with so much resistance from the local Regional Flood Control District that I finally walked away from the project (it was based on very local specifications, so the market was rather small). They ultimately "upgraded" the existing hydrologic component of what I was working on by making a web based form - but it was a step back from their desktop app (for one, it had no database, so the user is required to download and store hydrologic computations back to their client). I have my PE but ultimately walked away completely from Civil. I understand why Civil is conservative - bureaucrats, especially those in public safety, are incentivized to always say no; such conservatism is not for me. Another recent article on some issues of apps for Gov: http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/11/13/magazine/design-issue-code-for-america.html?_r=0 http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/11/13/magazine/desig...