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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 simu

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.
mullen 7y ago
Do you have any evidence of this? Building HSR is expensive and takes a long time to do. Tracks and other infrastructure for HSR has to be a much higher standard than regular train infrastructure.
- reallydude 7y ago
  > Building HSR is expensive and takes a long time to do Bids and bonds have already been levied against those estimates. Even if you make up new ones to match reality, it was fraudulent in concept. With less than half the length (515km versus the proposed >1200km CA project), the japanese built a HSR for about 2.3 billion USD (adjusted from 1959 ~400 billion yen). From the start, this has been a doomed project to get some people paid. Admittedly, the idea of starting something (anything) to connect the top and bottom half of CA is perhaps visionary, selling it as a doable project was dishonest. However it turns out, the CA HSR (or slow speed rail) will not be completed in the lifetime of anyone alive today, but Californians still get to pay for it. I'm reminded of Lyta's admission about the Vorlon mistakes in Babylon 5's Thirdspace movie. It's just compounded for the poor Californians, each time.
asdff 7y ago
iirc the high speed rail authority was established as a completely new arm of the state government with like 6 employees. If Caltrans ran the project from the start, it would run in the middle of the 5 far away from palmdale and be a decade ahead of schedule at least.

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.

mullen 7y ago

Do you have any evidence of this? Building HSR is expensive and takes a long time to do. Tracks and other infrastructure for HSR has to be a much higher standard than regular train infrastructure.

reallydude 7y ago
> Building HSR is expensive and takes a long time to do Bids and bonds have already been levied against those estimates. Even if you make up new ones to match reality, it was fraudulent in concept. With less than half the length (515km versus the proposed >1200km CA project), the japanese built a HSR for about 2.3 billion USD (adjusted from 1959 ~400 billion yen). From the start, this has been a doomed project to get some people paid. Admittedly, the idea of starting something (anything) to connect the top and bottom half of CA is perhaps visionary, selling it as a doable project was dishonest. However it turns out, the CA HSR (or slow speed rail) will not be completed in the lifetime of anyone alive today, but Californians still get to pay for it. I'm reminded of Lyta's admission about the Vorlon mistakes in Babylon 5's Thirdspace movie. It's just compounded for the poor Californians, each time.

asdff 7y ago

iirc the high speed rail authority was established as a completely new arm of the state government with like 6 employees. If Caltrans ran the project from the start, it would run in the middle of the 5 far away from palmdale and be a decade ahead of schedule at least.