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“We’re proposing infrastructure that we believe will protect the city,” says Richard McGuinness, a senior planning official working on Boston’s response to clim
by jpm_sd 7y ago
“We’re proposing infrastructure that we believe will protect the city,” says Richard McGuinness, a senior planning official working on Boston’s response to climate change. “How do you retreat from billions of dollars of assets? It’s not practical.”
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The city still needs to raise as much as $1 billion for Seaport defenses.
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Having lived in the city during the Big Dig, I'd wager that's a lowball estimate.
- ptah 7y agobureaucrats tend to underestimate costs and durations of projects
- Cthulhu_ 7y agoCall me cynical, but, that's because they own a stake in the parties executing the project; it's in their interest to make sure the contract passes, then gain financially from it and how much it goes over budget.
- dsfyu404ed 7y agoIt's not that they literally own a stake. It's that the people in their social circles have a monetary interest so perpetuating boondoggle pork projects results in people around them appreciating them more which results in campaign donations and all sorts of other perks. It's not quite quid-pro-quo, it's just far enough away to maintain plausible deniability. And of course there's all the people who aren't indirectly connected to politicians but who stand to benefit and the politicians will see that they benefit because votes. Look into the rules for billing hours for state police traffic details during the big dig if you want to see a good example with this. Now imagine that kind of fat in every industry that is related to a project and it's easy to see how costs go crazy.
- lkbm 7y agoNot just bureaucrats. People generally -- it's the Planning Fallacy. If you ask someone how long something will take, they tend to give roughly the same answer as if you asked how long it will take in the best case scenario. Estimating project time is hard, and people are bad at it in general. The best method seems to be to instead ask "How long did the most similar project you've done take?" but that does require the estimator to have done a somewhat comparable project.
- bluejekyll 7y agoHofstadter's Law: It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's Law.
- lancesells 7y agoI typically double my estimate for how long something will take me both in personal and work-related projects. This allows for all manner of unknowns to happen and seems to be more realistic.
- Balgair 7y agoFor me and with projects that I have worked on, I take the estimate, double it, and then move it up a time unit. So 1 day becomes 2 weeks. 3 weeks becomes 6 months. 1 hour becomes 2 days. 1 year becomes 2 decades. Is this overkill? Oh heck yes. But it seems to really put a fire into me to make sure that these things run smoother.
- brlewis 7y agoThis is not always overkill. In fact it's sometimes insufficient. Breaking down a project into tasks and doing the math is the only hope for any semblance of accuracy, and even that doesn't always work.
- TYPE_FASTER 7y ago> "How do you retreat from billions of dollars of assets? It’s not practical." Many of those assets didn't exist ten years ago. You can go back in time using Street View in Google Maps. Look for the Seaport Hotel, and check out the difference between 2007 and now.