4 ms·

It's amazing how terrible we've become at public works. The Golden Gate Bridge was built in 4 years. Ahead of schedule and under budget! The Bay Bridge took 5

• gok 8y ago
  11 construction workers died building the Golden Gate Bridge, and 28 died building the Bay Bridge. There is something to be said for modern construction standards just being much safer, although also slower. Environmental impact studies and staggeringly high labor costs also make things more expensive, of course.
• JPKab 8y ago
  Monopolistic bureaucracies incentivize risk avoidance over accomplishment of goals, especially government bureaucracies. That's the core issue with big projects. Private entrerprises accomplish them all the time, as long as its THEIR MONEY and their gain. Governments in the US have, over time, allowed for more and more red tape that primarily exists to minimize risks and liability to the government employees overseeing contractors on large projects. This red tape creates a maze of rules and regulations that ensure that only contractors whose primary expertise is navigating the maze get the work. The secondary expertise of actually accomplishing the task is secondary to both the enterprise and the government managers. This is an observation that I make as someone that once upon a time had to deal with the FAR (Federal Acquisition Regulations) when building software for the US Federal Government. Reducing risk is like everything else: Eventually, you hit a point of diminishing returns, and the government red tape, especially for large entities like the California DOT, only grows more complex over time. You never see anyone trying to simplify it.
• mapt 8y ago
  Largely because we decided not to build public works. When we do get one, the pressure is so high to succeed and to cut costs that people reliably focus on outsourcing responsibility and notional cost-savings, and then when that falls through on recrimination and fixes. We pressure private profit-seeking companies to make "bids" without putting up any kind of collateral, on the chance that if we did it we might waste money employing some extra labor or employ a union. Something like 50% of the politicians in this country simply doesn't believe we should do anything as a public work. They do not believe in public works. They will actively sabotage public works in the hope that they will go overbudget and prove their philosophy correct. Compromising with these people instead of cleansing their ideology with holy fire nets "public-private partnerships" and "bid processes" and "inquests" and "deadlines" and "being cancelled in disgrace" and thus further anxiety about the next project, but an inability to compensate with higher bids. Things would be a lot easier if we just wanted to build things, and paid people to build things, even if this meant getting into the business of building things. Instead, we want to be dramatic in our compromises, pretend that waterfall infrastructure planning is viable and can achieve perfect efficiency and predictability, treat limited liability corporations as moral actors which can be held culpable for giving us the lies we asked for, and regularly re-avow our faith in the market.
  • yummypaint 8y ago
    This nails it
  • DuskStar 8y ago
    Oh, let's not let the other half of the politicians off the hook entirely either. I mean, there's a reason that some proportion of each contract must go to minority owned businesses, or that employers must be union shops that pay at least the median wage, or... And if we were still willing to kill people when making those projects, they might go a little bit faster.