15 ms·

Why We Can’t Figure Out Why Infrastructure Is So Expensive

190 points by jseliger 7y ago

chimeracoder 7y ago
Kind of weird to use a picture of the East Side Access project in New York as the lede. New York is a whole different case from the rest of the country. We do know why infrastructure in New York is so absurdly expensive. Outright theft and fraud is a big culprit: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/nyregion/new-york-subway-construction-costs.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/nyregion/new-york-subway-... > The budget showed that 900 workers were being paid to dig caverns for the platforms as part of a 3.5-mile tunnel connecting the historic station to the Long Island Rail Road. But the accountant could only identify about 700 jobs that needed to be done, according to three project supervisors. Officials could not find any reason for the other 200 people to be there. > “Nobody knew what those people were doing, if they were doing anything,” said Michael Horodniceanu, who was then the head of construction at the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which runs transit in New York. The workers were laid off, Mr. Horodniceanu said, but no one figured out how long they had been employed. “All we knew is they were each being paid about $1,000 every day.” > The discovery... occurred in 2010 and was not disclosed to the public This sort of behavior is unfortunately commonplace.
- the_duke 7y ago
  Why would that be different from everywhere else though? Infrastructure projects are always a prime danger for corruption. (large sums of money with customers that aren't under financial pressures like a company, actual or effective cost-plus contracts, chance for politicians to get "lobbied" and make lasting connections, ...) I think it's the same everywhere in the world, with varying degrees of dubiousness.
  - chimeracoder 7y ago
    > Why would that be different from everywhere else though? Corruption in New York is a whole different animal than any other state. New York has, hands down, the most corrupt state government in the country.[0] As just one example, the governor of New York, Andrew Cuomo, a Democrat, openly orchestrated an illegal[1] coup to ensure that Republicans maintained control of the state senate, despite losing control in the then-recent elections. He did this because it ensured that he had unilateral power to decide which laws were even brought to a vote in the state legislature, so he could essentially pre-veto any legislation behind closed doors, instead of having to veto a potentially popular piece of legislation openly after the legislature passed it. Or, on the topic of public transit, Cuomo stole $5 million from the MTA (public transit for NYC metro area) and gave it to upstate ski resorts that he has a personal interest in[2]. [0] https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/05/how-new-york-became-most-corrupt-state-in-america-117652 https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/05/how-new-york... [1] A judge later ruled that the caucus was illegally formed and ordered them to return the money, though I don't know if they ever actually did. [2] https://gothamist.com/2017/07/10/mta_tips_down_k_val.php https://gothamist.com/2017/07/10/mta_tips_down_k_val.php
    - User23 7y ago
      Can confirm. New York crookedness is so advanced I can’t help having a grudging admiration. It’s been like that longer than any of us have been alive too.
    - ameister14 7y ago
      I think Illinois gives NY a run for their money. Remember Blagojevich trying to sell the senate seat?
      - chimeracoder 7y ago
        > I think Illinois gives NY a run for their money. Remember Blagojevich trying to sell the senate seat? Blagojevich is an amateur. He got caught. The ones who are the best at corruption are the ones who can keep it up for years - decades - successfully.
      - dsfyu404ed 7y ago
        Money is really good at masking systemic problems (like government run by idiots, corruption, etc) because you can just throw money at wherever the problem rears it's head. I don't know if Chicago is more corrupt or they're just less able/willing to put up an expensive front of propriety. Everyone loves to cite the number of politicians that get prosecuted or go to jail for corruption. To me that says the corruption doesn't run very deep.
        ameister14 7y ago
        >Everyone loves to cite the number of politicians that get prosecuted or go to jail for corruption. To me that says the corruption doesn't run very deep. Meh, it could also simply be deep local corruption and shallow Federal corruption. If the FBI is coming, that doesn't mean that your State government isn't corrupt, just that it doesn't have enough power to influence federal.
        asdff 7y ago
        Local government in Chicago is designed to make corruption as efficient as possible. The alderman are like mini dictators.
- jdc0589 7y ago
  get out
- ComputerGuru 7y ago
  Regardless of whether it is cost effective to do so or not, each and every one of the beneficiaries from such corruption should be investigated and prosecuted to the fullest extent possible under the law, no matter how expensive it gets, to set a precedent so others might think twice in the future.
  - chimeracoder 7y ago
    > Regardless of whether it is cost effective to do so or not, each and every one of the beneficiaries from such corruption should be investigated and prosecuted to the fullest extent possible under the law, no matter how expensive it gets, to set a precedent so others might think twice in the future. I think you underestimate the extent of corruption in New York state government. New Yorkers unfortunately can't do anything about it, because a combination of state laws have ceded electoral power to a handful of local pay-to-play clubs[0] which determine which candidates are permitted to run (unopposed) in elections. [0] Each district is controlled by a local club; membership in these starts around $1000/year, and these clubs are responsible for deciding when a local candidate receives a primary challenge. If the clubs don't approve a challenge, then the primary election is cancelled.
    - twunde 7y ago
      1) I don't know whether NY is any more corrupt than other states, I'd imagine other states that are largely controlled by party machines have similar levels of corruption. If you look at historical political machines (Tammany Hall, Kansas City), it seems that there used to be more corruption. 2) While many districts are controlled by local party machines, they are not invincible. It's still possible to get on a democratic primary ballot without the support of Dem machine, you just need to get the required number of signatures by registered Dems and file the paperwork (funnily enough, in some areas the local Rep party will help with this. NY's rule allowing candidates to run on multiple parties helps with this).
      - chimeracoder 7y ago
        > If you look at historical political machines (Tammany Hall, Kansas City), it seems that there used to be more corruption. Tammany Hall still exists. My own local Democratic club, for example, literally compares itself to Tammany Hall. > It's still possible to get on a democratic primary ballot without the support of Dem machine, you just need to get the required number of signatures by registered Dems and file the paperwork The laws around which signatures are considered valid are absurdly stringent, to the point of disenfranchising actual registered Democrats, with the intention of making right-to-ballot petitions infeasible in most districts. > NY's rule allowing candidates to run on multiple parties helps with this. Fusion voting is a way for major parties to exert control over third parties, not a way for voters registered with a party to exert political pressure against the party establishment.
- reallydude 7y ago
  The California High Speed Rail was also corruption. It's all over everywhere, because nobody is accountable for it, except the people over-charging, while simultaneously pointing out that they are taking all the liability when things go wrong (and someone actually tries to prosecute).
  - geggam 7y ago
    Given the spread of corruption and looking for the commonality one cant help but conclude govt overall is creating corruption. eg power corrupts
  - jonahhorowitz 7y ago
    From my conversations with people who worked on HSR - a lot of the problem was we outsourced the decisions to expensive consulting agencies, and those agencies saw the project as a place to stash their most useless staff members. So basically we had a bunch of very expensive idiots running an outsourced project. If they had kept the whole project in house, we'd have the initial operating segment already. See also, CEQA is a terrible law that mostly blocks good things and rarely blocks bad things.
    - rsj_hn 7y ago
      I think rather than generally blaming "corruption", nowadays I prefer to blame "lack of competence", although there is a lot of overlap. That's because I see a lot of bad decisions -- stupidity over greed. It only takes a few bad decisions made by people with power to completely sink a project. Now imagine building an airport or a subway. How many of these do we build? They are basically one off projects. Following a manual to repave a road doesn't require much competence, as it's a project that's done over and over again -- but doing a one-off project with unique challenges -- that requires serious competence. And lack of competence is a much harder problem to solve than corruption. The incompetent person doesn't admit or know they are incompetent. The incompetent person can't be scared with lawsuits or investigations to become competent. No amount of sunshine will help. The only solution is to get rid of the incompetent person and put someone competent in charge. But that doesn't work at the national level -- if there is a shortage of incompetent people, or if our hiring systems aren't able to hire the competent person. So the solutions are very long term and painful: * change how governments hire and promote staff to focus more on competence and less on passive traits like seniority/diversity/etc. * reduce the need for competence by focusing on standardized projects built in a steady cadence. For subways, make every subway the same, or pick just 2 variants, and develop a team of people with experience working on these all across the country, with standardized best practices and a pool of skilled workers who have experience working on these projects. All of that requires some pretty radical reforms of how our projects are funded and what role cities have to play in building them, as well as upsetting a lot of government unions. Then there is the issue of Federalism. The Swiss have a highly efficient infrastructure system and have strong federalism, as does Germany, but you're not in a situation where each state has completely different zoning/eminent domain laws, or separate licensing so an engineer in one state may not be able to even work in another. This makes it harder for us to adopt more standardized practices across states for big infrastructure projects as well as a national pool of experts that can go state to state and build standardized projects.
- bluedino 7y ago
  >> “All we knew is they were each being paid about $1,000 every day.” Assuming a 5-day work week, $270,000 a year is a crazy amount, isn’t it?
  - jandrese 7y ago
    Multiply by 200 people and that's $5.4 million out the door every year.
    - sokoloff 7y ago
      $54 million, not $5.4 million.
  - bluGill 7y ago
    Not quite that crazy. There is a lot of overhead that comes out of that 1000/day. Medical benefits, retirement, the accountant to track their pay - they are still make 6 figures for sure, but it isn't 270k/year.
makotech222 7y ago
Nationalize construction industry. Give workers salaries and remove profit incentive. No more waste, no more bidding contracts, no more graft.
40acres 7y ago
I'm no expert, but I would wager that costs are so high due to a mix of: state capture, a complex regulatory scheme, and relatively minor process inefficiency throughout the value chain that when taken as a whole slow down large projects. The Congressional Act cited in the article explicitly states a timeline of 9 months for the GAO report to be delivered and yet it was 7 months late. Many state budgets have not reached pre-2008 levels and regulatory agencies are ripe to be exploited by labor groups, lobbying, private property owners, etc.
xt00 7y ago
A couple of facts that should at least provide a baseline for costs (like the best case scenario): Shenzhen metro: 198 stations, about 180 miles of track (soon to be more like 250 miles), majority of it built in past 10-12 years. All I can find so far on cost is the phase iii cost which says it will cost about 20 billion. Phase I was quite small. So maybe they have spent about 30 billion to get almost 200 miles of rail and lots of stations? I’ve used the Shenzhen metro and it’s pretty nice. Also used the Shanghai metro as well. Often in the US, stations are cited as a big cost. Would be interesting to get a pie chart for costs between US and China like land acquisition costs, labor, raw materials, management, etc. A bit disappointing that the report essentially ended in a “it depends” type of non-informative report.
- elithrar 7y ago
  > Would be interesting to get a pie chart for costs between US and China like land acquisition costs, labor, raw materials, management, etc. Safety, incidents/deaths, etc... (Although I believe that the costs for large infra projects are ballooning for a lot of reasons, comparison to China continues to ignore the human cost and history there)
- lotsofpulp 7y ago
  China doesn't have to worry about liability and cover-your-ass costs, which are huge.
  - topkai22 7y ago
    Also presumably land acquisition/NIMBYism is easier to deal with.
    - goodcanadian 7y ago
      Labour costs are much lower . . .
  - oblio 7y ago
    > cover-your-ass costs Everything in a Communist Party in power in any country in the world, at any time, has been about cover-your-ass stuff. At least policies, if not costs.
notadoc 7y ago
Really? Are we sure we can't figure this out? Who believes that? Private contractors seem to be very expensive. No-bid contracts are obviously not competitive. And when the tax payer is picking up the bill, is there really any incentive for a contractor to keep costs low? Who advocates for the taxpayer? And how much corruption, kick-backs, lobbying, political favoring, porking, and other questionable activity goes on behind the scenes that increase costs? This isn't rocket science, it's mostly about accounting and accountability.
- bps4484 7y ago
  But wouldn't all those same problems you outline be the case in other countries? I think the question isn't "Why are infra costs so high?" which I think your list answers, but instead "Why are infra costs so high in the united states?"
  - noobermin 7y ago
    Bribery is legalized in the US in the form of campaign contributions. In fact, the Supreme Court determined it was speech, something whose freedom is enshrined in the constitution.
ambicapter 7y ago
> The usual way you produce journalism or policy research on a technical question like this is that you hire someone with expertise in journalism or public policy to produce a report. That person calls up relevant experts and asks them to talk, for free, about their areas of expertise. This is one of the great perks of my job: I call up lawyers and other professionals who ordinarily charge hundreds of dollars an hour for their services, and they talk to me for free, whether because they find it interesting, because they have a message they want to get out in the world, or simply because they like seeing their names quoted in print. This is probably uncouth for Hacker News, but let me just say: Aaaahahahahahahahahha. Is there really an expectation of accuracy if your method is calling up an expert and asking him to pontificate for a little bit? Whatever happened to accounting? Shouldn't the way you go about this is run the numbers, find the differences in isolated segments AND THEN ask the expert why such a difference exists? I think it a large discredit to this journalist and the organization he/she works for if they think this is how they're going to spread important, useful information to the masses.
- tdb7893 7y ago
  The experts often have already done that work already, often that's how they became an expert.
  - Spellman 7y ago
    Which then means why redo the work when you can call the expert and get things pre-digested for you.
  - Allower 7y ago
    Reviewing numbers is not something you need an engineering expert for..
- yellowstuff 7y ago
  I think the basic idea of investigatory journalism is that the journalist is not necessarily an expert in the topic they write about, but is good at finding informed sources, getting overlapping information from all of them, and determining who can be trusted on which facts.
atotic 7y ago
"why is American infrastructure so bad?" has been a topic I am curious about. The above article does not answer the question. I'd prefer not to care about American infrastructure costs. Unfortunately, I occasionally have to leave my house, and the consequences of bad infrastructure stare me in the face: people living in their cars, traffic jams. The best attempt to actually answer the question I've seen has been "Pedestrian Observations" blog. Their take on the same GAO report is: [New Report on Construction Costs Misses the Mark](https://pedestrianobservations.com/2019/07/22/new-report-on-construction-costs-misses-the-mark/ https://pedestrianobservations.com/2019/07/22/new-report-on-...) "The GAO report is out now, and unfortunately it is a total miss, for essentially the same reason the RPA’s report was a miss: it did not go outside the American (and to some extent rest-of-Anglosphere) comfort zone"
- rthomas6 7y ago
  Check out strongtowns.org.
tomohawk 7y ago
A family member in the DOT told me this as but one of many tales of woe. Several hundred miles of an interstate were going to be rehabbed. There was a proven technique to redo the joints between the concrete slabs, which were in good shape. A contractor was hired to do a small number of miles as a test, but they had a learning curve. The first few joints that they redid were not done well, but they rapidly improved and the approach looked really good. However, the state selected a different approach which required tearing up the road and redoing it. The excuse was those first few bad joints. There was also the unstated matter that the contractor favored by the state did not know how to do this technique. The result was billions of wasted money to redo the road with an inferior material. That material failed within a few years, and they now need to redo it again. And this is not just a cost issue. Its estimated that failure to adhere to known safer pavement designs is resulting in 10,000 - 15,000 unnecessary deaths a year.
- koolba 7y ago
  > There was also the unstated matter that the contractor favored by the state did not know how to do this technique. I’m gonna bet this was the deciding factor.
- daenz 7y ago
  The further you are removed from "other people" with regards to "other people's money", the easier it is to waste/pocket/embezzle. Fixing that problem would go a long way.
  - afarrell 7y ago
    The solution to that problem in many places is currently to have lists of approved suppliers.
    - dsfyu404ed 7y ago
      And once you're on the list it's basically a license to print money so the last thing you want is changes to the system.
    - 7y ago
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
keerthiko 7y ago
A hard-to-capture cost factor is keeping highly used services operational or replaced while doing work on it. A super-fancy new subway with lots of stations in Shenzhen where people weren't already taking trains and expecting to use stations for their daily commute will be much cheaper than disrupting a line service to open a new station in London or New York City. Replacement bus bridge services, network-wide service advisories, staff and enforcement training, are all costs that are not easy to quantify or justify because it doesn't directly manifest in the construction of the infrastructure. Of course there are other factors that vary a lot across cultures: * China's heavy-handed governmental decision-making leaves no room for inefficiencies via neighborhood antagonism towards the constructions or zoning; * Car culture differences create different magnitudes of popular roadblocks to investment in non-automobile infrastructure, which can result in large expenditures on lobbying and campaigning; * Significantly more arbitrary middlemen making their way into the process because of "let the market figure it out" does, in fact, create some process inefficiencies in supply chains and contract pipelines. Few countries are as aggressively market-based for things meant for public good as the US.
- granshaw 7y ago
  > A hard-to-capture cost factor is keeping highly used services operational or replaced while doing work on it. Anyone who does any kindof "building" (whether it be software engineers making schema changes, or a general contractor adding to an existing house vs building from scratch) knows this intimately, so really it shouldn't be any kind of surprise at all
  - rafiki6 7y ago
    But to the article's original point, the people conducting the research to prepare these reports are non-experts. So they wouldn't even know where to look for these figures.
  - keerthiko 7y ago
    Exactly. It's super evident to anyone who works on maintaining SaaS that is in production with at least a hundred users at any given time using it in real-time when you are trying to push features or fixes that even going down for a minute will result in serious service reputation damage. We engineer a lot of reusable scaffolding and reporting tools to modify our services in-situ with minimal/no disruption because it is a huge priority. Operating on public infrastructure is the closest real-world parallel. But to most people who work jobs where their choices don't directly influence customer service uptime (including a construction worker or a surveyor of construction for the same public works, as opposed to the project coordinator/planner/senior architect/engineer), this is an opaque cost.
erentz 7y ago
I don’t fully buy that we can’t work this out. The author gives examples of how it’s difficult to compare, but what those examples show is that yes, to compare properly you need to go very deep on some parts to find out why design decisions were made the way they were. This may be more time consuming and cost more but it’s doable. One other thing we might try is to set aside a hundred billion dollars for a half dozen key “trial” or “learning” projects, and see if we can get some of the agencies from say Japan and France and Spain to execute those projects so we can learn how they do it differently. And they can show up all the things (regulations, interference, etc) that they encounter here that would be different to back home. In the scheme of things it’s cheap, we still get infrastructure out of it, and it’s one sure way to learn.
- roel_v 7y ago
  He's not saying it can't be done, he's saying it can't be done on the cheap.
- lemoncucumber 7y ago
  > I don’t fully buy that we can’t work this out. The author gives examples of how it’s difficult to compare, but what those examples show is that yes, to compare properly you need to go very deep on some parts to find out why design decisions were made the way they were. This may be more time consuming and cost more but it’s doable. That's exactly what the author is advocating for, so I'm not sure what your point is. Heck, the last line of the article is "It would be worth paying to get the answers even if that would be very expensive."
  - ambicapter 7y ago
    Sounded like the author was advocating another mega-project, which comes off a bit weird considering the article they just wrote.
    - mcphage 7y ago
      > Sounded like the author was advocating another mega-project No, they were suggesting that in order to find out why these projects are so expensive, it would be best to hire people experienced with mega-projects and pay them for their time to get answers to these questions.
noobermin 7y ago
May be this is just too much cynicism but isn't it possible the GAO just failed to do what it was supposed to do and is offering that paragraph as a poor way to explain away their failure? The trend of it being more expensive in the US is a real, statistically determinable fact. That hints there are structural reasons for it. They should at least give a stab at it rather than throwing up their hands and claiming there's nothing they can do.
- pas 7y ago
  yes, the report is shit. https://pedestrianobservations.com/2019/07/22/new-report-on-construction-costs-misses-the-mark/ https://pedestrianobservations.com/2019/07/22/new-report-on-... + see the design-build vs design then build comment(s) too.
legitster 7y ago
Let alone cost, one thing that boggles my mind is how slow infrastructure building is in the US. In our area, a multi-billion dollar freeway or subway line will often be constructed with 5 days of a single 8-hour shift. I get that certain work needs to be done at night, but surely the work sites shouldn't sit empty for 16 hours a day! Just think about the cost of equipment being rented, the overhead that is on salary, the amount of work to startup and shutdown the site for the day, and the opportunity cost lost by not having it done 2-3x as fast. It's seems like it would be a no-brainer to have 3x the workers and get the job done in 1/3 the time.
- rafiki6 7y ago
  Same principle applies here as with any software development effort. There are some natural bottlenecks that can't be avoided/parallelized (for e.g. waiting for a layer of asphalt to dry). Further, more people doing a thing doesn't mean it will get done faster. You have to contend with overhead of planning, context-switching and handover overhead between workers leaving/starting shifts etc. etc.
  - athenot 7y ago
    True but those constraints can result in more creative engineering. Look at this timelapse of a bridge getting replaced in 43 hours. They had the new bridge built next to the orignal and "just" moved it into place—I'm using quotes because of course that is an impressive operation. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vz_j_BEkVCQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vz_j_BEkVCQ
    - thehappypm 7y ago
      This does happen in the US where it's cost effective. The Tappan Zee Bridge was replaced by a new bridge built completely from scratch in parallel, then the old bridge decommissioned.
    - Steltek 7y ago
      You may want to check out how the Comm Ave bridge over the Pike was replaced in Boston. It was pretty quicke although not as fast 43 hours. However, we also couldn't afford to close the lower road (I-90) as above for an extended staging effort. I believe rail lines were only impacted on two weekend pushes. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zNiACLQtHyg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zNiACLQtHyg
arthur5005 7y ago
I’m surprised by the cynicism here. Working in software we know that high complexity projects are _really_ hard to estimate. Hofstadter's Law says it always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's Law. Too many unknown unknowns. If the projects were broken down into smaller chunks, the incremental costs would be better understood as the project progressed.
- bluGill 7y ago
  Construction generally is not doing a brand new greenfield project. Experienced web developers can put together another website for pretty close to budget. As soon as you deviate from the framework and tools that the experienced web developer knows well though estimates go out the window. Big construction projects have a lot of well understood parts. Sometimes you get unexpected rocks or something, but for the most some countries have done much better than others at controlling costs in projects of similar complexity which suggests that the difference isn't because it is hard to estimate.
- pas 7y ago
  https://pedestrianobservations.com/2019/07/22/new-report-on-construction-costs-misses-the-mark/ https://pedestrianobservations.com/2019/07/22/new-report-on-... ctrl-f design-build. basically, if you order a feasibility study, a design and then separately an implementation, you can keep costs under control. if you do it all together, you gonna have overrun time.
jp57 7y ago
The best part of this thread is that the article is about why it's really hard to understand the cost differences, while the top comments all offer unsupported and anecdotal speculation explaining the cost differences in 200 words or less. "HN: Where dilettantes opine."
- FussyZeus 7y ago
  Mmmm, it's a good part, but I think the best part is all the people who have it figured out because in all of recorded history, nobody thought of checking into things like the costs of corruption. It's nice that the city planners include it as a line item, why don't we look there?
- golemiprague 7y ago
  Because it is a bit stupid from the writer to complain about it, you don't need to know the absolute cost of things, just the relative cost a specific procedure can be done. He brings an example for the amount of people operating a boring machine, it is just obvious that less people means less salaries, you don't need to calculate the absolute cost, just find if there is a way to reduce the amount of workers. Same goes for regulations, it seems like in other countries there is less litigation and more common sense applied, you can just compare it to being strict and going to court for every stupid thing and see what's better. The HN crowd is actually right here, when you got a too complex system that you can't calculate you need to go with your gut feeling and everybody actually know what the problems are, someone should be courageous enough to just make the necessary changes without a stupid research to back it up, in an ironic way doing this research is actually the core of the problem itself.
fblp 7y ago
I wonder if someone has found a strong correlation between infrastructure costs and legal or land costs?
- 6nf 7y ago
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RY-mlcgFCc4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RY-mlcgFCc4 Legal costs is definitely an issue sometimes
nisten 7y ago
The author briefly touched on how it's also expensive in countries with similar law-systems like Canada and Australia. It may just be that our laws make it a lot easier for contractors to jack up government contracts. My personal opinion is that managers and regulators in Europe and South Korea are a lot more efficient because they have a lot more freedom to apply common sense and personal judgement without fear of getting sued over a stupid technicality in a contract dispute. Whereas in US & Canada it's common for companies to sue the government over a small/irrelevant technicality and win a big settlement. Thus regulators and contractors interpret rules as literally as possible in order to avoid this legal confrontation and I think it's precisely this that drastically reduces the construction efficiency of public projects. One thing that surprised me in Germany, both in Munich and Berlin was that while the central train & subway stations were quite grandiose (Hauptbahnhof's interior looks like something out of Halo), the stations in the periphery of the city were surprisingly quite "thin and light", built frugally with thin weather shielding and a minimal amount of materials. Whereas in Toronto it's the opposite. We built a $6Billion subway extension, with 6 stations at a billion each, all overbuilt in exactly the same standard. Only half of them actually have any population within walking distance and one is a complete ghost-town. The reason why this happened was because treating all 6 equally was safe and no one complained. It's not hard to see how you can provide the same service for 1/4 of the price.
- mratsim 7y ago
  As an European, I'm always surprised when someone says that our governments are efficient. We're always complaining about them.
  - WC3w6pXxgGd 7y ago
    People who've never lived in Europe think everything's better in Europe.
  - wil421 7y ago
    The grass is always greener on the other side. It’s funny OP mentions Berlin train stations but fails to mention the Berlin Airport.
rayiner 7y ago
There is a saying: it’s good to work on your weaknesses, but don’t dwell on them because otherwise you’ll spend all your time doing things you’re bad at. If we’re bad at centrally planned public infrastructure, we should just do less of it, and focus more on the things we’re good at doing.
- lutorm 7y ago
  Except that just because you're bad at taking care of your health, it does not follow you should spend less time on it. You'll still die early. What you're saying only makes sense if you're talking about things that are optional, not if they're required.
  - rayiner 7y ago
    Centralized public infrastructure is not required. Decentralized infrastructure works.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
g00s3_caLL_x2 7y ago
I'd wager there is plenty of 'dark money' that never gets reported i.e mob, and politicians being bribed.
AcerbicZero 7y ago
I think the answer is in the first few lines actually. >Here are the instructions Congress gave last March: Not later than 9 months after the enactment of this act, the GAO shall report to the House and Senate >Sixteen months later, the GAO has produced its report and it doesn’t actually perform the cost comparisons as instructed. Bureaucracy at its finest. Over promise, under deliver, and make sure its late too, just in case anyone thought there might be a competent system in play.
- mcphage 7y ago
  > I think the answer is in the first few lines actually. Not really, given that the main focus of the rest of the article was about how what was asked of them is difficult to determine, and not even well defined.
  - pas 7y ago
    That's just a long excuse, an appeal for incompetence, to hide the intent of face saving: https://pedestrianobservations.com/2019/07/22/new-report-on-construction-costs-misses-the-mark/ https://pedestrianobservations.com/2019/07/22/new-report-on-...
avanderveen 7y ago
My gut instinct is that the mob might be a (potentially significant) factor here. I could be wrong, but this is their bread an butter after all: bribe politician to get large-scale infrastructure project and then artificially inflate costs (false purchase orders, buying materials from companies they operate in amounts that are far in excess or what's required and not actually shipping them, etc.) so that they can siphon away tax dollars.
jedberg 7y ago
Before we make a report on how our costs differ from other G20 countries, how about a report on how our costs differ from ourselves 100 years ago. In 1900 it took four years to lay nine miles of subway in NYC. The second ave tunnel was just a couple miles and under construction for 12 years. That's just an example. It also took longer to build the new Eastern span of the Bay Bridge than it took to build the whole bridge. I think we should start by figuring out why these things happen.
- jakewins 7y ago
  As I understand it, most of the NYC subway was built by basically just closing of major chunks of streets and excavating them, sticking the subway in and then covering it back up. Compared to boring underground tunnels, you can imagine how much less involved it is to simply dig a hole from above. I'm not sure why they don't do that anymore, though I can imagine it's some combination of where the new routes are (maybe they aren't following the street grid?) and higher impact of year-long closures of streets. The NYP has a good article comparing the methods of construction then and now: https://www.nypl.org/blog/2015/05/04/subway-construction-then-now https://www.nypl.org/blog/2015/05/04/subway-construction-the...
  - sagarm 7y ago
    I think what you are describing it's called cut and cover. Presumably, the idea of inconveniencing motorists for that long "just" for transit is no longer acceptable.
- thehappypm 7y ago
  In 1900 the population of New York City was a fraction of its population today and probably more importantly, cars were not widespread as the Model T had not even hit the market yet. It's bizarre to try to compare different eras.
- cestith 7y ago
  How many people died building the Brooklyn Bridge? Nobody knows for sure, but it was around 20 to 30. Could you imagine putting that many human lives into a bridge in 1967 or 2019? I don't know death stats at all for the subway. I do know that it was three different systems operating at least partially independently of one another until about 1940 when they came together under city control.
cosmodisk 7y ago
Here's my simplistic answer to this in three words: incompetence, corruption, self-interest. Having worked on a multiple construction projects and witnessed all 3 abovementioned aspects in various shapes and forms,I'd like to give a real life example. In the second largest city in Lithuania,a retailer got an approval to build a massive shopping center in the very center of the city.An agreement between the city council and the retailer was made and part of the project was to build a small bridge connecting the road outside the shopping center and a small island in the river alongside the road. The contract was won by a company that specialises in road and bridge building..So far so good. The works started. I used to go past the site on daily basis and often observed many people simply standing on the upcoming bridge and not doing much... Eventually a guy I used to know got a job with the company to work on that bridge project.Money was good..He quit after only a month.When I enquired what happened,he said that he is a man of work and can't stand idle. Even thought he tried his best,he couldn't stand the fact that he simply couldn't not work.On his first day,he went to the site manager and asked what he should be doing.He got told to collect a massive spanner and tighten 12 bolts on the metal construction.He returned to the manager in 45min or so and asked what's his next task.The site manager looked at him with anger and disappointment and said: look, it's your first day and you already making mistakes.I have given you a task for the whole day,not just for 45min..So now I now have to come up with something else for you to do.. Don't you ever do this to me again.You need to preserve your work,not rush with it.. Now scale it up to a massive underground project and you'll get the idea where the money is going to..
nova22033 7y ago
This article linked from another Josh Barro piece tells you exactly why it's so expensive https://www.city-journal.org/html/fifteen-stories-under-14105.html https://www.city-journal.org/html/fifteen-stories-under-1410... In Britain and France, only the “miners”—or tunnelers—work in unions similar to America’s. Contractors hire other workers largely as they wish. The jobs pay well but not American-construction-union well. In New York, everyone works by the same union rules, which include hourly wages and staffing requirements that can mean 25 workers per tunnel-boring machine, compared with a dozen or so in a nonunion state and as few as five in countries such as Norway.
- spenczar5 7y ago
  If it that were simple, the GAO report mentioned in the article would surely have found it. It's not just labor cost.
  - pas 7y ago
    https://pedestrianobservations.com/2019/07/22/new-report-on-construction-costs-misses-the-mark/ https://pedestrianobservations.com/2019/07/22/new-report-on-...
rsync 7y ago
I am fascinated to see that 3 hours, 109 upvotes and 107 comments into this story, the word "regulation" occurs only once in the comment thread. I own, jointly with others, a 3 mile long road. If there could be only two things that I impressed upon someone, in relation to this road, they would be the following: 1) You have no idea how costly maintaining a road (any road) is. I didn't. I had no idea. Whatever libertarian fantasies you may harbor about private people coming together to create and maintain anything like first world infrastructure, I am sorry to dash them: we have a group of 20 or so rich, well-educated, smart and hard-working people and it's right at the edge of our capabilities to keep this 3 mile long road in semi-acceptable condition. 2) The difference between doing a safe, reasonable, environmentally responsible and long term fix and doing that very same fix but 100% by the book is a cost difference of 3x to 4x. There are minor drainage fixes we've looked into that required, no shit, the army corps of engineers to be consulted along with several other county and state regulatory and environmental agencies. After paying a third party firm to create an environmental impact report. Do you understand that I am talking about fixing a ditch ? The army corps of engineers. I did not, above, refer to "excessive regulation" because I am not ready nor willing to define that and I don't want to take a political stand on it - I am merely pointing out that the first thought you should be having on this issue is: regulations.
- h2odragon 7y ago
  3 miles? Awesome. Gravel or paved? The Army Corps of Engineers gets involved because your ditches are wetlands, I'm going to guess. You might have a window open right now to redo them, best check.
- megabl8 7y ago
  > You have no idea how costly maintaining a road (any road) is. And after your comment, I still do not. Telling us might help.
  - Steltek 7y ago
    MassDOT recently published their capital budget with a little more fanfare than usual, to soothe Red Line passengers hurting from the recent derailment perhaps. It included $3 billion in major repaving efforts but that seems to have gone without challenge. However the Green Line Extension is barely alive politically on their $2.4B capital budget. Likewise, a nearby overpass on Rt 128 was repaired for $30M. Highways eat money but when Massachusetts looks to obvious transit improvements, suddenly cost is a major concern.
WC3w6pXxgGd 7y ago
Long story short: unions.
golover721 7y ago
Honestly I think there is a lot of incompetence involved with local transportation agencies as well. Often they are extremely underfunded so it’s not always their fault. But living in a metropolitan area where the population is very much for innovative and forward thinking infrastructure, the agency responsible has time and time again made very costly mistakes and decisions. As well as try and deceive the public by doing things such as claiming they are providing BRT but really it’s just new buses with an HOV lane. So at this point the public has very little faith in them being able to provide what we so desperately want.
Proven 7y ago
Because you don't want to figure it out. Everyone knows it's more expensive because it's made by the government. And the government is there to be milked, both by labor unions and crony capitalists such as Elon Musk.
gok 7y ago
It's surprising infrastructure in the US is as cheap as it is. It is built with no meaningful cost controls. Environmental impact studies are uniquely slow and hard to navigate. Only a few well-connected firms are able to bid, and they get picked for mostly political reasons. "Buy America" restrictions make a lot of obvious projects actually impossible. Those responsible for cost overruns are never held to account.
asdff 7y ago
I've been reading a lot about transit lately, and the one theme that seems to dominate cost and time overruns is reliance on contractors due to there being supposedly not enough labor. Contractors bid to deliver an inferior product, because working to deliver a superior product will hurt their profit margins, and they are insulated from the fallout as all blame will go to the transit agency and not whichever dime a dozen contractor failed the project. By relying on the contractor model, these agencies don't need to maintain a bulky labor pool, but in the process for every public dollar given to project labor, a portion gets withheld for that profit margin. Privatization is fundamentally inefficient and has no place in public works projects. Public engineering should be the most powerful force in this country, and for a time it really was. Some of the brightest engineering minds in the world are trained in our public universities, and many end up contributing to projects that are a net negative to society, blinded by the private sector paycheck and the supposed prestige that brings. LA Metro complains that there is a labor shortage, yet they provide regional transit to Cal Tech, USC (though a private school), and UCLA, serving the labor pool they claim doesn't exist. Public infrastructure agencies need to do a much better job at recruiting from our constant output of talent and preventing these students from being wasted in the private sector, working hard and wasting their years for someone else's dollar. LA Metro also complains about a labor shortage in a region where 60k live on the street. If this was 1930, those destitute people would be hired and trained to build infrastructure. But this is 2019, and we can't even build homeless shelters lest they tarnish our sweet sweet property values.
- Ericson2314 7y ago
  I think in the cheap places they contract too, but yes as a contractor the incentives are almost always wrong and the balkanization precludes economies of scale.
dimitar 7y ago
I love how the word "corruption" doesn't appear once in the text. If this was an article about Eastern Europe for example it would be in every paragraph. So, I'm wondering if corruption overemphasized in my region and Project Management is just very hard, or there is corruption in the US and rest of the English speaking countries as well, but people are not talking about it much.

190 points by jseliger 7y ago

Kind of weird to use a picture of the East Side Access project in New York as the lede. New York is a whole different case from the rest of the country. We do know why infrastructure in New York is so absurdly expensive. Outright theft and fraud is a big culprit: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/nyregion/new-york-subway-construction-costs.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/nyregion/new-york-subway-... > The budget showed that 900 workers were being paid to dig caverns for the platforms as part of a 3.5-mile tunnel connecting the historic station to the Long Island Rail Road. But the accountant could only identify about 700 jobs that needed to be done, according to three project supervisors. Officials could not find any reason for the other 200 people to be there. > “Nobody knew what those people were doing, if they were doing anything,” said Michael Horodniceanu, who was then the head of construction at the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which runs transit in New York. The workers were laid off, Mr. Horodniceanu said, but no one figured out how long they had been employed. “All we knew is they were each being paid about $1,000 every day.” > The discovery... occurred in 2010 and was not disclosed to the public This sort of behavior is unfortunately commonplace.

the_duke 7y ago
Why would that be different from everywhere else though? Infrastructure projects are always a prime danger for corruption. (large sums of money with customers that aren't under financial pressures like a company, actual or effective cost-plus contracts, chance for politicians to get "lobbied" and make lasting connections, ...) I think it's the same everywhere in the world, with varying degrees of dubiousness.
- chimeracoder 7y ago
  > Why would that be different from everywhere else though? Corruption in New York is a whole different animal than any other state. New York has, hands down, the most corrupt state government in the country.[0] As just one example, the governor of New York, Andrew Cuomo, a Democrat, openly orchestrated an illegal[1] coup to ensure that Republicans maintained control of the state senate, despite losing control in the then-recent elections. He did this because it ensured that he had unilateral power to decide which laws were even brought to a vote in the state legislature, so he could essentially pre-veto any legislation behind closed doors, instead of having to veto a potentially popular piece of legislation openly after the legislature passed it. Or, on the topic of public transit, Cuomo stole $5 million from the MTA (public transit for NYC metro area) and gave it to upstate ski resorts that he has a personal interest in[2]. [0] https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/05/how-new-york-became-most-corrupt-state-in-america-117652 https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/05/how-new-york... [1] A judge later ruled that the caucus was illegally formed and ordered them to return the money, though I don't know if they ever actually did. [2] https://gothamist.com/2017/07/10/mta_tips_down_k_val.php https://gothamist.com/2017/07/10/mta_tips_down_k_val.php
  - User23 7y ago
    Can confirm. New York crookedness is so advanced I can’t help having a grudging admiration. It’s been like that longer than any of us have been alive too.
  - ameister14 7y ago
    I think Illinois gives NY a run for their money. Remember Blagojevich trying to sell the senate seat?
    - chimeracoder 7y ago
      > I think Illinois gives NY a run for their money. Remember Blagojevich trying to sell the senate seat? Blagojevich is an amateur. He got caught. The ones who are the best at corruption are the ones who can keep it up for years - decades - successfully.
    - dsfyu404ed 7y ago
      Money is really good at masking systemic problems (like government run by idiots, corruption, etc) because you can just throw money at wherever the problem rears it's head. I don't know if Chicago is more corrupt or they're just less able/willing to put up an expensive front of propriety. Everyone loves to cite the number of politicians that get prosecuted or go to jail for corruption. To me that says the corruption doesn't run very deep.
      - ameister14 7y ago
        >Everyone loves to cite the number of politicians that get prosecuted or go to jail for corruption. To me that says the corruption doesn't run very deep. Meh, it could also simply be deep local corruption and shallow Federal corruption. If the FBI is coming, that doesn't mean that your State government isn't corrupt, just that it doesn't have enough power to influence federal.
      - asdff 7y ago
        Local government in Chicago is designed to make corruption as efficient as possible. The alderman are like mini dictators.
jdc0589 7y ago
get out
ComputerGuru 7y ago
Regardless of whether it is cost effective to do so or not, each and every one of the beneficiaries from such corruption should be investigated and prosecuted to the fullest extent possible under the law, no matter how expensive it gets, to set a precedent so others might think twice in the future.
- chimeracoder 7y ago
  > Regardless of whether it is cost effective to do so or not, each and every one of the beneficiaries from such corruption should be investigated and prosecuted to the fullest extent possible under the law, no matter how expensive it gets, to set a precedent so others might think twice in the future. I think you underestimate the extent of corruption in New York state government. New Yorkers unfortunately can't do anything about it, because a combination of state laws have ceded electoral power to a handful of local pay-to-play clubs[0] which determine which candidates are permitted to run (unopposed) in elections. [0] Each district is controlled by a local club; membership in these starts around $1000/year, and these clubs are responsible for deciding when a local candidate receives a primary challenge. If the clubs don't approve a challenge, then the primary election is cancelled.
  - twunde 7y ago
    1) I don't know whether NY is any more corrupt than other states, I'd imagine other states that are largely controlled by party machines have similar levels of corruption. If you look at historical political machines (Tammany Hall, Kansas City), it seems that there used to be more corruption. 2) While many districts are controlled by local party machines, they are not invincible. It's still possible to get on a democratic primary ballot without the support of Dem machine, you just need to get the required number of signatures by registered Dems and file the paperwork (funnily enough, in some areas the local Rep party will help with this. NY's rule allowing candidates to run on multiple parties helps with this).
    - chimeracoder 7y ago
      > If you look at historical political machines (Tammany Hall, Kansas City), it seems that there used to be more corruption. Tammany Hall still exists. My own local Democratic club, for example, literally compares itself to Tammany Hall. > It's still possible to get on a democratic primary ballot without the support of Dem machine, you just need to get the required number of signatures by registered Dems and file the paperwork The laws around which signatures are considered valid are absurdly stringent, to the point of disenfranchising actual registered Democrats, with the intention of making right-to-ballot petitions infeasible in most districts. > NY's rule allowing candidates to run on multiple parties helps with this. Fusion voting is a way for major parties to exert control over third parties, not a way for voters registered with a party to exert political pressure against the party establishment.
reallydude 7y ago
The California High Speed Rail was also corruption. It's all over everywhere, because nobody is accountable for it, except the people over-charging, while simultaneously pointing out that they are taking all the liability when things go wrong (and someone actually tries to prosecute).
- geggam 7y ago
  Given the spread of corruption and looking for the commonality one cant help but conclude govt overall is creating corruption. eg power corrupts
- jonahhorowitz 7y ago
  From my conversations with people who worked on HSR - a lot of the problem was we outsourced the decisions to expensive consulting agencies, and those agencies saw the project as a place to stash their most useless staff members. So basically we had a bunch of very expensive idiots running an outsourced project. If they had kept the whole project in house, we'd have the initial operating segment already. See also, CEQA is a terrible law that mostly blocks good things and rarely blocks bad things.
  - rsj_hn 7y ago
    I think rather than generally blaming "corruption", nowadays I prefer to blame "lack of competence", although there is a lot of overlap. That's because I see a lot of bad decisions -- stupidity over greed. It only takes a few bad decisions made by people with power to completely sink a project. Now imagine building an airport or a subway. How many of these do we build? They are basically one off projects. Following a manual to repave a road doesn't require much competence, as it's a project that's done over and over again -- but doing a one-off project with unique challenges -- that requires serious competence. And lack of competence is a much harder problem to solve than corruption. The incompetent person doesn't admit or know they are incompetent. The incompetent person can't be scared with lawsuits or investigations to become competent. No amount of sunshine will help. The only solution is to get rid of the incompetent person and put someone competent in charge. But that doesn't work at the national level -- if there is a shortage of incompetent people, or if our hiring systems aren't able to hire the competent person. So the solutions are very long term and painful: * change how governments hire and promote staff to focus more on competence and less on passive traits like seniority/diversity/etc. * reduce the need for competence by focusing on standardized projects built in a steady cadence. For subways, make every subway the same, or pick just 2 variants, and develop a team of people with experience working on these all across the country, with standardized best practices and a pool of skilled workers who have experience working on these projects. All of that requires some pretty radical reforms of how our projects are funded and what role cities have to play in building them, as well as upsetting a lot of government unions. Then there is the issue of Federalism. The Swiss have a highly efficient infrastructure system and have strong federalism, as does Germany, but you're not in a situation where each state has completely different zoning/eminent domain laws, or separate licensing so an engineer in one state may not be able to even work in another. This makes it harder for us to adopt more standardized practices across states for big infrastructure projects as well as a national pool of experts that can go state to state and build standardized projects.
bluedino 7y ago
>> “All we knew is they were each being paid about $1,000 every day.” Assuming a 5-day work week, $270,000 a year is a crazy amount, isn’t it?
- jandrese 7y ago
  Multiply by 200 people and that's $5.4 million out the door every year.
  - sokoloff 7y ago
    $54 million, not $5.4 million.
- bluGill 7y ago
  Not quite that crazy. There is a lot of overhead that comes out of that 1000/day. Medical benefits, retirement, the accountant to track their pay - they are still make 6 figures for sure, but it isn't 270k/year.

makotech222 7y ago

Nationalize construction industry. Give workers salaries and remove profit incentive. No more waste, no more bidding contracts, no more graft.

40acres 7y ago

I'm no expert, but I would wager that costs are so high due to a mix of: state capture, a complex regulatory scheme, and relatively minor process inefficiency throughout the value chain that when taken as a whole slow down large projects. The Congressional Act cited in the article explicitly states a timeline of 9 months for the GAO report to be delivered and yet it was 7 months late. Many state budgets have not reached pre-2008 levels and regulatory agencies are ripe to be exploited by labor groups, lobbying, private property owners, etc.

xt00 7y ago

A couple of facts that should at least provide a baseline for costs (like the best case scenario): Shenzhen metro: 198 stations, about 180 miles of track (soon to be more like 250 miles), majority of it built in past 10-12 years. All I can find so far on cost is the phase iii cost which says it will cost about 20 billion. Phase I was quite small. So maybe they have spent about 30 billion to get almost 200 miles of rail and lots of stations? I’ve used the Shenzhen metro and it’s pretty nice. Also used the Shanghai metro as well. Often in the US, stations are cited as a big cost. Would be interesting to get a pie chart for costs between US and China like land acquisition costs, labor, raw materials, management, etc. A bit disappointing that the report essentially ended in a “it depends” type of non-informative report.

elithrar 7y ago
> Would be interesting to get a pie chart for costs between US and China like land acquisition costs, labor, raw materials, management, etc. Safety, incidents/deaths, etc... (Although I believe that the costs for large infra projects are ballooning for a lot of reasons, comparison to China continues to ignore the human cost and history there)
lotsofpulp 7y ago
China doesn't have to worry about liability and cover-your-ass costs, which are huge.
- topkai22 7y ago
  Also presumably land acquisition/NIMBYism is easier to deal with.
  - goodcanadian 7y ago
    Labour costs are much lower . . .
- oblio 7y ago
  > cover-your-ass costs Everything in a Communist Party in power in any country in the world, at any time, has been about cover-your-ass stuff. At least policies, if not costs.

notadoc 7y ago

Really? Are we sure we can't figure this out? Who believes that? Private contractors seem to be very expensive. No-bid contracts are obviously not competitive. And when the tax payer is picking up the bill, is there really any incentive for a contractor to keep costs low? Who advocates for the taxpayer? And how much corruption, kick-backs, lobbying, political favoring, porking, and other questionable activity goes on behind the scenes that increase costs? This isn't rocket science, it's mostly about accounting and accountability.

bps4484 7y ago
But wouldn't all those same problems you outline be the case in other countries? I think the question isn't "Why are infra costs so high?" which I think your list answers, but instead "Why are infra costs so high in the united states?"
- noobermin 7y ago
  Bribery is legalized in the US in the form of campaign contributions. In fact, the Supreme Court determined it was speech, something whose freedom is enshrined in the constitution.

ambicapter 7y ago

> The usual way you produce journalism or policy research on a technical question like this is that you hire someone with expertise in journalism or public policy to produce a report. That person calls up relevant experts and asks them to talk, for free, about their areas of expertise. This is one of the great perks of my job: I call up lawyers and other professionals who ordinarily charge hundreds of dollars an hour for their services, and they talk to me for free, whether because they find it interesting, because they have a message they want to get out in the world, or simply because they like seeing their names quoted in print. This is probably uncouth for Hacker News, but let me just say: Aaaahahahahahahahahha. Is there really an expectation of accuracy if your method is calling up an expert and asking him to pontificate for a little bit? Whatever happened to accounting? Shouldn't the way you go about this is run the numbers, find the differences in isolated segments AND THEN ask the expert why such a difference exists? I think it a large discredit to this journalist and the organization he/she works for if they think this is how they're going to spread important, useful information to the masses.

tdb7893 7y ago
The experts often have already done that work already, often that's how they became an expert.
- Spellman 7y ago
  Which then means why redo the work when you can call the expert and get things pre-digested for you.
- Allower 7y ago
  Reviewing numbers is not something you need an engineering expert for..
yellowstuff 7y ago
I think the basic idea of investigatory journalism is that the journalist is not necessarily an expert in the topic they write about, but is good at finding informed sources, getting overlapping information from all of them, and determining who can be trusted on which facts.

atotic 7y ago

"why is American infrastructure so bad?" has been a topic I am curious about. The above article does not answer the question. I'd prefer not to care about American infrastructure costs. Unfortunately, I occasionally have to leave my house, and the consequences of bad infrastructure stare me in the face: people living in their cars, traffic jams. The best attempt to actually answer the question I've seen has been "Pedestrian Observations" blog. Their take on the same GAO report is: [New Report on Construction Costs Misses the Mark](https://pedestrianobservations.com/2019/07/22/new-report-on-construction-costs-misses-the-mark/ https://pedestrianobservations.com/2019/07/22/new-report-on-...) "The GAO report is out now, and unfortunately it is a total miss, for essentially the same reason the RPA’s report was a miss: it did not go outside the American (and to some extent rest-of-Anglosphere) comfort zone"

rthomas6 7y ago
Check out strongtowns.org.

tomohawk 7y ago

A family member in the DOT told me this as but one of many tales of woe. Several hundred miles of an interstate were going to be rehabbed. There was a proven technique to redo the joints between the concrete slabs, which were in good shape. A contractor was hired to do a small number of miles as a test, but they had a learning curve. The first few joints that they redid were not done well, but they rapidly improved and the approach looked really good. However, the state selected a different approach which required tearing up the road and redoing it. The excuse was those first few bad joints. There was also the unstated matter that the contractor favored by the state did not know how to do this technique. The result was billions of wasted money to redo the road with an inferior material. That material failed within a few years, and they now need to redo it again. And this is not just a cost issue. Its estimated that failure to adhere to known safer pavement designs is resulting in 10,000 - 15,000 unnecessary deaths a year.

koolba 7y ago
> There was also the unstated matter that the contractor favored by the state did not know how to do this technique. I’m gonna bet this was the deciding factor.
daenz 7y ago
The further you are removed from "other people" with regards to "other people's money", the easier it is to waste/pocket/embezzle. Fixing that problem would go a long way.
- afarrell 7y ago
  The solution to that problem in many places is currently to have lists of approved suppliers.
  - dsfyu404ed 7y ago
    And once you're on the list it's basically a license to print money so the last thing you want is changes to the system.
  - 7y ago

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

keerthiko 7y ago

A hard-to-capture cost factor is keeping highly used services operational or replaced while doing work on it. A super-fancy new subway with lots of stations in Shenzhen where people weren't already taking trains and expecting to use stations for their daily commute will be much cheaper than disrupting a line service to open a new station in London or New York City. Replacement bus bridge services, network-wide service advisories, staff and enforcement training, are all costs that are not easy to quantify or justify because it doesn't directly manifest in the construction of the infrastructure. Of course there are other factors that vary a lot across cultures: * China's heavy-handed governmental decision-making leaves no room for inefficiencies via neighborhood antagonism towards the constructions or zoning; * Car culture differences create different magnitudes of popular roadblocks to investment in non-automobile infrastructure, which can result in large expenditures on lobbying and campaigning; * Significantly more arbitrary middlemen making their way into the process because of "let the market figure it out" does, in fact, create some process inefficiencies in supply chains and contract pipelines. Few countries are as aggressively market-based for things meant for public good as the US.

granshaw 7y ago
> A hard-to-capture cost factor is keeping highly used services operational or replaced while doing work on it. Anyone who does any kindof "building" (whether it be software engineers making schema changes, or a general contractor adding to an existing house vs building from scratch) knows this intimately, so really it shouldn't be any kind of surprise at all
- rafiki6 7y ago
  But to the article's original point, the people conducting the research to prepare these reports are non-experts. So they wouldn't even know where to look for these figures.
- keerthiko 7y ago
  Exactly. It's super evident to anyone who works on maintaining SaaS that is in production with at least a hundred users at any given time using it in real-time when you are trying to push features or fixes that even going down for a minute will result in serious service reputation damage. We engineer a lot of reusable scaffolding and reporting tools to modify our services in-situ with minimal/no disruption because it is a huge priority. Operating on public infrastructure is the closest real-world parallel. But to most people who work jobs where their choices don't directly influence customer service uptime (including a construction worker or a surveyor of construction for the same public works, as opposed to the project coordinator/planner/senior architect/engineer), this is an opaque cost.

erentz 7y ago

I don’t fully buy that we can’t work this out. The author gives examples of how it’s difficult to compare, but what those examples show is that yes, to compare properly you need to go very deep on some parts to find out why design decisions were made the way they were. This may be more time consuming and cost more but it’s doable. One other thing we might try is to set aside a hundred billion dollars for a half dozen key “trial” or “learning” projects, and see if we can get some of the agencies from say Japan and France and Spain to execute those projects so we can learn how they do it differently. And they can show up all the things (regulations, interference, etc) that they encounter here that would be different to back home. In the scheme of things it’s cheap, we still get infrastructure out of it, and it’s one sure way to learn.

roel_v 7y ago
He's not saying it can't be done, he's saying it can't be done on the cheap.
lemoncucumber 7y ago
> I don’t fully buy that we can’t work this out. The author gives examples of how it’s difficult to compare, but what those examples show is that yes, to compare properly you need to go very deep on some parts to find out why design decisions were made the way they were. This may be more time consuming and cost more but it’s doable. That's exactly what the author is advocating for, so I'm not sure what your point is. Heck, the last line of the article is "It would be worth paying to get the answers even if that would be very expensive."
- ambicapter 7y ago
  Sounded like the author was advocating another mega-project, which comes off a bit weird considering the article they just wrote.
  - mcphage 7y ago
    > Sounded like the author was advocating another mega-project No, they were suggesting that in order to find out why these projects are so expensive, it would be best to hire people experienced with mega-projects and pay them for their time to get answers to these questions.

noobermin 7y ago

May be this is just too much cynicism but isn't it possible the GAO just failed to do what it was supposed to do and is offering that paragraph as a poor way to explain away their failure? The trend of it being more expensive in the US is a real, statistically determinable fact. That hints there are structural reasons for it. They should at least give a stab at it rather than throwing up their hands and claiming there's nothing they can do.

pas 7y ago
yes, the report is shit. https://pedestrianobservations.com/2019/07/22/new-report-on-construction-costs-misses-the-mark/ https://pedestrianobservations.com/2019/07/22/new-report-on-... + see the design-build vs design then build comment(s) too.

legitster 7y ago

Let alone cost, one thing that boggles my mind is how slow infrastructure building is in the US. In our area, a multi-billion dollar freeway or subway line will often be constructed with 5 days of a single 8-hour shift. I get that certain work needs to be done at night, but surely the work sites shouldn't sit empty for 16 hours a day! Just think about the cost of equipment being rented, the overhead that is on salary, the amount of work to startup and shutdown the site for the day, and the opportunity cost lost by not having it done 2-3x as fast. It's seems like it would be a no-brainer to have 3x the workers and get the job done in 1/3 the time.

rafiki6 7y ago
Same principle applies here as with any software development effort. There are some natural bottlenecks that can't be avoided/parallelized (for e.g. waiting for a layer of asphalt to dry). Further, more people doing a thing doesn't mean it will get done faster. You have to contend with overhead of planning, context-switching and handover overhead between workers leaving/starting shifts etc. etc.
- athenot 7y ago
  True but those constraints can result in more creative engineering. Look at this timelapse of a bridge getting replaced in 43 hours. They had the new bridge built next to the orignal and "just" moved it into place—I'm using quotes because of course that is an impressive operation. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vz_j_BEkVCQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vz_j_BEkVCQ
  - thehappypm 7y ago
    This does happen in the US where it's cost effective. The Tappan Zee Bridge was replaced by a new bridge built completely from scratch in parallel, then the old bridge decommissioned.
  - Steltek 7y ago
    You may want to check out how the Comm Ave bridge over the Pike was replaced in Boston. It was pretty quicke although not as fast 43 hours. However, we also couldn't afford to close the lower road (I-90) as above for an extended staging effort. I believe rail lines were only impacted on two weekend pushes. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zNiACLQtHyg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zNiACLQtHyg

arthur5005 7y ago

I’m surprised by the cynicism here. Working in software we know that high complexity projects are _really_ hard to estimate. Hofstadter's Law says it always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's Law. Too many unknown unknowns. If the projects were broken down into smaller chunks, the incremental costs would be better understood as the project progressed.

bluGill 7y ago
Construction generally is not doing a brand new greenfield project. Experienced web developers can put together another website for pretty close to budget. As soon as you deviate from the framework and tools that the experienced web developer knows well though estimates go out the window. Big construction projects have a lot of well understood parts. Sometimes you get unexpected rocks or something, but for the most some countries have done much better than others at controlling costs in projects of similar complexity which suggests that the difference isn't because it is hard to estimate.
pas 7y ago
https://pedestrianobservations.com/2019/07/22/new-report-on-construction-costs-misses-the-mark/ https://pedestrianobservations.com/2019/07/22/new-report-on-... ctrl-f design-build. basically, if you order a feasibility study, a design and then separately an implementation, you can keep costs under control. if you do it all together, you gonna have overrun time.

jp57 7y ago

The best part of this thread is that the article is about why it's really hard to understand the cost differences, while the top comments all offer unsupported and anecdotal speculation explaining the cost differences in 200 words or less. "HN: Where dilettantes opine."

FussyZeus 7y ago
Mmmm, it's a good part, but I think the best part is all the people who have it figured out because in all of recorded history, nobody thought of checking into things like the costs of corruption. It's nice that the city planners include it as a line item, why don't we look there?
golemiprague 7y ago
Because it is a bit stupid from the writer to complain about it, you don't need to know the absolute cost of things, just the relative cost a specific procedure can be done. He brings an example for the amount of people operating a boring machine, it is just obvious that less people means less salaries, you don't need to calculate the absolute cost, just find if there is a way to reduce the amount of workers. Same goes for regulations, it seems like in other countries there is less litigation and more common sense applied, you can just compare it to being strict and going to court for every stupid thing and see what's better. The HN crowd is actually right here, when you got a too complex system that you can't calculate you need to go with your gut feeling and everybody actually know what the problems are, someone should be courageous enough to just make the necessary changes without a stupid research to back it up, in an ironic way doing this research is actually the core of the problem itself.

fblp 7y ago

I wonder if someone has found a strong correlation between infrastructure costs and legal or land costs?

6nf 7y ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RY-mlcgFCc4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RY-mlcgFCc4 Legal costs is definitely an issue sometimes

nisten 7y ago

The author briefly touched on how it's also expensive in countries with similar law-systems like Canada and Australia. It may just be that our laws make it a lot easier for contractors to jack up government contracts. My personal opinion is that managers and regulators in Europe and South Korea are a lot more efficient because they have a lot more freedom to apply common sense and personal judgement without fear of getting sued over a stupid technicality in a contract dispute. Whereas in US & Canada it's common for companies to sue the government over a small/irrelevant technicality and win a big settlement. Thus regulators and contractors interpret rules as literally as possible in order to avoid this legal confrontation and I think it's precisely this that drastically reduces the construction efficiency of public projects. One thing that surprised me in Germany, both in Munich and Berlin was that while the central train & subway stations were quite grandiose (Hauptbahnhof's interior looks like something out of Halo), the stations in the periphery of the city were surprisingly quite "thin and light", built frugally with thin weather shielding and a minimal amount of materials. Whereas in Toronto it's the opposite. We built a $6Billion subway extension, with 6 stations at a billion each, all overbuilt in exactly the same standard. Only half of them actually have any population within walking distance and one is a complete ghost-town. The reason why this happened was because treating all 6 equally was safe and no one complained. It's not hard to see how you can provide the same service for 1/4 of the price.

mratsim 7y ago
As an European, I'm always surprised when someone says that our governments are efficient. We're always complaining about them.
- WC3w6pXxgGd 7y ago
  People who've never lived in Europe think everything's better in Europe.
- wil421 7y ago
  The grass is always greener on the other side. It’s funny OP mentions Berlin train stations but fails to mention the Berlin Airport.

rayiner 7y ago

There is a saying: it’s good to work on your weaknesses, but don’t dwell on them because otherwise you’ll spend all your time doing things you’re bad at. If we’re bad at centrally planned public infrastructure, we should just do less of it, and focus more on the things we’re good at doing.

lutorm 7y ago
Except that just because you're bad at taking care of your health, it does not follow you should spend less time on it. You'll still die early. What you're saying only makes sense if you're talking about things that are optional, not if they're required.
- rayiner 7y ago
  Centralized public infrastructure is not required. Decentralized infrastructure works.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

g00s3_caLL_x2 7y ago

I'd wager there is plenty of 'dark money' that never gets reported i.e mob, and politicians being bribed.

AcerbicZero 7y ago

I think the answer is in the first few lines actually. >Here are the instructions Congress gave last March: Not later than 9 months after the enactment of this act, the GAO shall report to the House and Senate >Sixteen months later, the GAO has produced its report and it doesn’t actually perform the cost comparisons as instructed. Bureaucracy at its finest. Over promise, under deliver, and make sure its late too, just in case anyone thought there might be a competent system in play.

mcphage 7y ago
> I think the answer is in the first few lines actually. Not really, given that the main focus of the rest of the article was about how what was asked of them is difficult to determine, and not even well defined.
- pas 7y ago
  That's just a long excuse, an appeal for incompetence, to hide the intent of face saving: https://pedestrianobservations.com/2019/07/22/new-report-on-construction-costs-misses-the-mark/ https://pedestrianobservations.com/2019/07/22/new-report-on-...

avanderveen 7y ago

My gut instinct is that the mob might be a (potentially significant) factor here. I could be wrong, but this is their bread an butter after all: bribe politician to get large-scale infrastructure project and then artificially inflate costs (false purchase orders, buying materials from companies they operate in amounts that are far in excess or what's required and not actually shipping them, etc.) so that they can siphon away tax dollars.

jedberg 7y ago

Before we make a report on how our costs differ from other G20 countries, how about a report on how our costs differ from ourselves 100 years ago. In 1900 it took four years to lay nine miles of subway in NYC. The second ave tunnel was just a couple miles and under construction for 12 years. That's just an example. It also took longer to build the new Eastern span of the Bay Bridge than it took to build the whole bridge. I think we should start by figuring out why these things happen.

jakewins 7y ago
As I understand it, most of the NYC subway was built by basically just closing of major chunks of streets and excavating them, sticking the subway in and then covering it back up. Compared to boring underground tunnels, you can imagine how much less involved it is to simply dig a hole from above. I'm not sure why they don't do that anymore, though I can imagine it's some combination of where the new routes are (maybe they aren't following the street grid?) and higher impact of year-long closures of streets. The NYP has a good article comparing the methods of construction then and now: https://www.nypl.org/blog/2015/05/04/subway-construction-then-now https://www.nypl.org/blog/2015/05/04/subway-construction-the...
- sagarm 7y ago
  I think what you are describing it's called cut and cover. Presumably, the idea of inconveniencing motorists for that long "just" for transit is no longer acceptable.
thehappypm 7y ago
In 1900 the population of New York City was a fraction of its population today and probably more importantly, cars were not widespread as the Model T had not even hit the market yet. It's bizarre to try to compare different eras.
cestith 7y ago
How many people died building the Brooklyn Bridge? Nobody knows for sure, but it was around 20 to 30. Could you imagine putting that many human lives into a bridge in 1967 or 2019? I don't know death stats at all for the subway. I do know that it was three different systems operating at least partially independently of one another until about 1940 when they came together under city control.

cosmodisk 7y ago

Here's my simplistic answer to this in three words: incompetence, corruption, self-interest. Having worked on a multiple construction projects and witnessed all 3 abovementioned aspects in various shapes and forms,I'd like to give a real life example. In the second largest city in Lithuania,a retailer got an approval to build a massive shopping center in the very center of the city.An agreement between the city council and the retailer was made and part of the project was to build a small bridge connecting the road outside the shopping center and a small island in the river alongside the road. The contract was won by a company that specialises in road and bridge building..So far so good. The works started. I used to go past the site on daily basis and often observed many people simply standing on the upcoming bridge and not doing much... Eventually a guy I used to know got a job with the company to work on that bridge project.Money was good..He quit after only a month.When I enquired what happened,he said that he is a man of work and can't stand idle. Even thought he tried his best,he couldn't stand the fact that he simply couldn't not work.On his first day,he went to the site manager and asked what he should be doing.He got told to collect a massive spanner and tighten 12 bolts on the metal construction.He returned to the manager in 45min or so and asked what's his next task.The site manager looked at him with anger and disappointment and said: look, it's your first day and you already making mistakes.I have given you a task for the whole day,not just for 45min..So now I now have to come up with something else for you to do.. Don't you ever do this to me again.You need to preserve your work,not rush with it.. Now scale it up to a massive underground project and you'll get the idea where the money is going to..

nova22033 7y ago

This article linked from another Josh Barro piece tells you exactly why it's so expensive https://www.city-journal.org/html/fifteen-stories-under-14105.html https://www.city-journal.org/html/fifteen-stories-under-1410... In Britain and France, only the “miners”—or tunnelers—work in unions similar to America’s. Contractors hire other workers largely as they wish. The jobs pay well but not American-construction-union well. In New York, everyone works by the same union rules, which include hourly wages and staffing requirements that can mean 25 workers per tunnel-boring machine, compared with a dozen or so in a nonunion state and as few as five in countries such as Norway.

spenczar5 7y ago
If it that were simple, the GAO report mentioned in the article would surely have found it. It's not just labor cost.
- pas 7y ago
  https://pedestrianobservations.com/2019/07/22/new-report-on-construction-costs-misses-the-mark/ https://pedestrianobservations.com/2019/07/22/new-report-on-...

rsync 7y ago

I am fascinated to see that 3 hours, 109 upvotes and 107 comments into this story, the word "regulation" occurs only once in the comment thread. I own, jointly with others, a 3 mile long road. If there could be only two things that I impressed upon someone, in relation to this road, they would be the following: 1) You have no idea how costly maintaining a road (any road) is. I didn't. I had no idea. Whatever libertarian fantasies you may harbor about private people coming together to create and maintain anything like first world infrastructure, I am sorry to dash them: we have a group of 20 or so rich, well-educated, smart and hard-working people and it's right at the edge of our capabilities to keep this 3 mile long road in semi-acceptable condition. 2) The difference between doing a safe, reasonable, environmentally responsible and long term fix and doing that very same fix but 100% by the book is a cost difference of 3x to 4x. There are minor drainage fixes we've looked into that required, no shit, the army corps of engineers to be consulted along with several other county and state regulatory and environmental agencies. After paying a third party firm to create an environmental impact report. Do you understand that I am talking about fixing a ditch ? The army corps of engineers. I did not, above, refer to "excessive regulation" because I am not ready nor willing to define that and I don't want to take a political stand on it - I am merely pointing out that the first thought you should be having on this issue is: regulations.

h2odragon 7y ago
3 miles? Awesome. Gravel or paved? The Army Corps of Engineers gets involved because your ditches are wetlands, I'm going to guess. You might have a window open right now to redo them, best check.
megabl8 7y ago
> You have no idea how costly maintaining a road (any road) is. And after your comment, I still do not. Telling us might help.
- Steltek 7y ago
  MassDOT recently published their capital budget with a little more fanfare than usual, to soothe Red Line passengers hurting from the recent derailment perhaps. It included $3 billion in major repaving efforts but that seems to have gone without challenge. However the Green Line Extension is barely alive politically on their $2.4B capital budget. Likewise, a nearby overpass on Rt 128 was repaired for $30M. Highways eat money but when Massachusetts looks to obvious transit improvements, suddenly cost is a major concern.

WC3w6pXxgGd 7y ago

Long story short: unions.

golover721 7y ago

Honestly I think there is a lot of incompetence involved with local transportation agencies as well. Often they are extremely underfunded so it’s not always their fault. But living in a metropolitan area where the population is very much for innovative and forward thinking infrastructure, the agency responsible has time and time again made very costly mistakes and decisions. As well as try and deceive the public by doing things such as claiming they are providing BRT but really it’s just new buses with an HOV lane. So at this point the public has very little faith in them being able to provide what we so desperately want.

Proven 7y ago

Because you don't want to figure it out. Everyone knows it's more expensive because it's made by the government. And the government is there to be milked, both by labor unions and crony capitalists such as Elon Musk.

gok 7y ago

It's surprising infrastructure in the US is as cheap as it is. It is built with no meaningful cost controls. Environmental impact studies are uniquely slow and hard to navigate. Only a few well-connected firms are able to bid, and they get picked for mostly political reasons. "Buy America" restrictions make a lot of obvious projects actually impossible. Those responsible for cost overruns are never held to account.

asdff 7y ago

I've been reading a lot about transit lately, and the one theme that seems to dominate cost and time overruns is reliance on contractors due to there being supposedly not enough labor. Contractors bid to deliver an inferior product, because working to deliver a superior product will hurt their profit margins, and they are insulated from the fallout as all blame will go to the transit agency and not whichever dime a dozen contractor failed the project. By relying on the contractor model, these agencies don't need to maintain a bulky labor pool, but in the process for every public dollar given to project labor, a portion gets withheld for that profit margin. Privatization is fundamentally inefficient and has no place in public works projects. Public engineering should be the most powerful force in this country, and for a time it really was. Some of the brightest engineering minds in the world are trained in our public universities, and many end up contributing to projects that are a net negative to society, blinded by the private sector paycheck and the supposed prestige that brings. LA Metro complains that there is a labor shortage, yet they provide regional transit to Cal Tech, USC (though a private school), and UCLA, serving the labor pool they claim doesn't exist. Public infrastructure agencies need to do a much better job at recruiting from our constant output of talent and preventing these students from being wasted in the private sector, working hard and wasting their years for someone else's dollar. LA Metro also complains about a labor shortage in a region where 60k live on the street. If this was 1930, those destitute people would be hired and trained to build infrastructure. But this is 2019, and we can't even build homeless shelters lest they tarnish our sweet sweet property values.

Ericson2314 7y ago
I think in the cheap places they contract too, but yes as a contractor the incentives are almost always wrong and the balkanization precludes economies of scale.

dimitar 7y ago

I love how the word "corruption" doesn't appear once in the text. If this was an article about Eastern Europe for example it would be in every paragraph. So, I'm wondering if corruption overemphasized in my region and Project Management is just very hard, or there is corruption in the US and rest of the English speaking countries as well, but people are not talking about it much.