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The more pressing question: Can we actually still do such projects in western democracies? How long would it take until the last judge has dismissed the plea to

The more pressing question: Can we actually still do such projects in western democracies? How long would it take until the last judge has dismissed the plea to save the nearly extinct Californian Pink Stink Beetle that by circumstance breeds in that area? How much more expensive would the project become over its ever longer runtime? What will happen when the seemingly inevitable corruption scandals are brought to daylight?

thrower123 7y ago
I would not want to take a wager on whether this sort of project could be done in San Francisco. China, I am certain, could do it. If it were an Army Corps of Engineers project on the Mississippi or the deep South, I'd give it 50-50 odds. We do seem to have no ability to do any sort of large scale projects. They built the Empire State Building in under a year in the 1930s, and meanwhile it's taken ten and counting to replace a bridge where I live today. The technical ability is there, there's just no will to get anything done.
- dougweltman 7y ago
  I agree with your general point, but it's worth mentioning 2 points on the Empire State Building example: 1) Depending on where you draw the line for starting the ESB, it was 16 months. 2) Look at building sites in NYC today (which can still build skyscrapers effectively), and compare them with pictures from the 30s. MUCH better health and safety, both for workers and nearby pedestrians. At least 5, and as many as 14, people died during construction. Some of the reasons things take longer today are actually good!
  - thrower123 7y ago
    Fourteen people dying to lay ten and a quarter million bricks and thousands of tons of steel is not much of a butcher's bill. I'd bet that more people would die in car accidents getting to the work site over the extended construction time today.
    - admax88q 7y ago
      Even if that were true, perhaps the answer is to reduce vehicle deaths rather than increase construction deaths. Just so you can get your bridge sooner.
  - lazyjones 7y ago
    Is the situation actually much better today? > 21% / 991 of 4693 Work Deaths In The US Were In Construction (2016) http://www.imectechnologies.com/2018/07/30/construction-safety-21-of-all-work-deaths-in-the-us-were-in-construction/* http://www.imectechnologies.com/2018/07/30/construction-safe...
    - mlyle 7y ago
      Yes. Tens of thousands of people died per year in construction and industrial deaths in the 1910s, 20s, and 30s, with a much smaller population. Yes, construction is still disproportionately risky, but... Two deaths to build 1 WTC, vs 60 deaths to build the Twin Towers (4x the square footage), vs 5-14 deaths to build the Empire State Building (80% the square footage). Most ordinary skyscrapers have zero, which wasn't the case 100 years ago.
  - BurningFrog 7y ago
    I seriously doubt any substantial part of the slowdowns are caused by improved worker safety. Yes there is a correlation between those two trends, but as we all know, that doesn't prove causation. We have enormously better technology today than in the 30s, and should be able to put of a skyscraper in 1/4 of the time. I understand that's more or less what China does.
    - imgabe 7y ago
      But sometimes China has things like this happen: https://failedarchitecture.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/22s5AXG-1500x750.png https://failedarchitecture.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/22...
      - beerandt 7y ago
        It's actually quite impressive that it managed to stay in one piece. It implies a scary-dangerous brittle failure mode for the structure, and horrible engineering, but still impressive.
      - zachguo 7y ago
        Hundreds of thousands of highrises were built there, one collapse doesn't mean much.
teshier-A 7y ago
The parallel with Mauna Kea is too tempting to not be mentioned!
- 205guy 7y ago
  But apparently not tempting enough to give details or show how it is in fact parallel.
derefr 7y ago
I think we still do these projects all the time, in cities of a certain development level, for the same reason we always did them: industry lobbying. This land was, almost always, reclaimed by heavy industry, for industrial use; and only later, once that industry no longer had need of it (and was being gentrified out of the area entirely) was the land re-zoned for other uses and “finished off” as a public works project. Residential or commercial developers have never been given authorization to reclaim coastline, AFAIK. And governments very rarely do it themselves, save for when they’re essentially serving the role of an infrastructure provider to some later industry (e.g. an airport.)
- eru 7y ago
  Singapore does it. But they are special in so many other regards, too. (Oh, and the Dutch of course.)
- beerandt 7y ago
  New Orleans lakefront and parts of New Orleans East were massive land building projects, specifically for neighborhoods. Lakefront Airport (KNEW) was also included in these projects. The land was sold to finance the levees before federal law put the Army Corps of Engineers in charge of levee building, ~1965. http://richcampanella.com/assets/pdf/Picayune_Cityscapes_2018_04_13_Lakefront%20Project.pdf http://richcampanella.com/assets/pdf/Picayune_Cityscapes_201... https://neworleanshistorical.org/items/show/603 https://neworleanshistorical.org/items/show/603 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lakeshore/Lake_Vista,_New_Orleans https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lakeshore/Lake_Vista,_New_Or... Edit: I can't find the source, but the levee board still has title and standing permission from the state to fill-in something like an additional 2 miles out into Lake Pontchartrain.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
nck4222 7y ago
>The more pressing question: Can we actually still do such projects in western democracies? I sure hope not. Two sentences by the author dismissing environmental concerns isn't sufficient. They also list Boston as an example, but Boston's land creation projects ran over cost back in the 1800's, which most people seem to think is only a modern day issue for some reason. The Back Bay was filled-in because the city had already created an environmental disaster out of it. A dam was built which caused the bay to stagnate, and fill with sewage. Maybe a judge should've ordered an environmental impact study be done before the dam was built, which would've caught this. https://historyofmassachusetts.org/how-boston-lost-its-hills/ https://historyofmassachusetts.org/how-boston-lost-its-hills... You don't need to create land in order to have a functioning public transit system, which would address several of the problems the author brings up, without introducing a plethora of new issues.
- thorwasdfasdf 7y ago
  how do you have a transit system to get people 80 miles to work? The imbalance of where work and residential areas are in the bay area is so horrendous, there's 1 residential place to live for every 4 jobs on the peninsula. The only way to balance it out is either get rid of the jobs or build lots lots more residential
- CharlesColeman 7y ago
  >> The more pressing question: Can we actually still do such projects in western democracies? > I sure hope not. Two sentences by the author dismissing environmental concerns isn't sufficient. That's typifies a problem I have with internet pseudo-"rationality." The world is messy and and composed of lots of legitimate, competing political interests. The only way you can hope to offer a simple, "rational" solution in a pithy blog post is by ignoring or handwaving away a huge amount alternate perspectives and history, which actually isn't rational at all. [1] The reason I bring this up is because the article is a blog post on LessWrong, which describes itself as "a place to 1) develop and train rationality, and 2) apply one’s rationality to real-world problems."
asdfman123 7y ago
That attitude drives me crazy. Each new high rise built in San Francisco prevents a few several blocks of nature being paved over for suburbs somewhere else. I had this debate with an environmentalist who supported urban farming. Sure, urban farming is cool and a nice hobby, but it would be far more environmentally friendly to build a high rise. New high rises drive down the costs of urban living, more people move to the city, and whole tracts of nature are saved from destruction.
- thorwasdfasdf 7y ago
  > but it would be far more environmentally friendly to build a high rise. Absolutely Right! And, it would decrease pollution and global warming because people's commutes would be much much shorter, as they wouldn't be forced to commute from 80 miles away, like it currently is in the Bay Area.
  - pyrale 7y ago
    Food and building material would still need to commute, and the amount of energy it represents probably can't be decreased enough to make dense cities a good thing for climate change.
    - bluGill 7y ago
      Food needs to be transported either way. Dense cities are better because the trucks need to make less stops on the delivery end.
      - pyrale 7y ago
        The number of stops is probably less important than the distance traveled by food. Towns or small cities can have food produces locally. In large cities, food has to travel across the city, and on top of that it has to travel across the space required for farming. This is a non-concern now of course, but in a world where we want to reduce transportation at scales serious enough to fight climate change, large cities will be a liability.

thrower123 7y ago

I would not want to take a wager on whether this sort of project could be done in San Francisco. China, I am certain, could do it. If it were an Army Corps of Engineers project on the Mississippi or the deep South, I'd give it 50-50 odds. We do seem to have no ability to do any sort of large scale projects. They built the Empire State Building in under a year in the 1930s, and meanwhile it's taken ten and counting to replace a bridge where I live today. The technical ability is there, there's just no will to get anything done.

dougweltman 7y ago
I agree with your general point, but it's worth mentioning 2 points on the Empire State Building example: 1) Depending on where you draw the line for starting the ESB, it was 16 months. 2) Look at building sites in NYC today (which can still build skyscrapers effectively), and compare them with pictures from the 30s. MUCH better health and safety, both for workers and nearby pedestrians. At least 5, and as many as 14, people died during construction. Some of the reasons things take longer today are actually good!
- thrower123 7y ago
  Fourteen people dying to lay ten and a quarter million bricks and thousands of tons of steel is not much of a butcher's bill. I'd bet that more people would die in car accidents getting to the work site over the extended construction time today.
  - admax88q 7y ago
    Even if that were true, perhaps the answer is to reduce vehicle deaths rather than increase construction deaths. Just so you can get your bridge sooner.
- lazyjones 7y ago
  Is the situation actually much better today? > 21% / 991 of 4693 Work Deaths In The US Were In Construction (2016) http://www.imectechnologies.com/2018/07/30/construction-safety-21-of-all-work-deaths-in-the-us-were-in-construction/* http://www.imectechnologies.com/2018/07/30/construction-safe...
  - mlyle 7y ago
    Yes. Tens of thousands of people died per year in construction and industrial deaths in the 1910s, 20s, and 30s, with a much smaller population. Yes, construction is still disproportionately risky, but... Two deaths to build 1 WTC, vs 60 deaths to build the Twin Towers (4x the square footage), vs 5-14 deaths to build the Empire State Building (80% the square footage). Most ordinary skyscrapers have zero, which wasn't the case 100 years ago.
- BurningFrog 7y ago
  I seriously doubt any substantial part of the slowdowns are caused by improved worker safety. Yes there is a correlation between those two trends, but as we all know, that doesn't prove causation. We have enormously better technology today than in the 30s, and should be able to put of a skyscraper in 1/4 of the time. I understand that's more or less what China does.
  - imgabe 7y ago
    But sometimes China has things like this happen: https://failedarchitecture.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/22s5AXG-1500x750.png https://failedarchitecture.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/22...
    - beerandt 7y ago
      It's actually quite impressive that it managed to stay in one piece. It implies a scary-dangerous brittle failure mode for the structure, and horrible engineering, but still impressive.
    - zachguo 7y ago
      Hundreds of thousands of highrises were built there, one collapse doesn't mean much.

teshier-A 7y ago

The parallel with Mauna Kea is too tempting to not be mentioned!

205guy 7y ago
But apparently not tempting enough to give details or show how it is in fact parallel.

derefr 7y ago

I think we still do these projects all the time, in cities of a certain development level, for the same reason we always did them: industry lobbying. This land was, almost always, reclaimed by heavy industry, for industrial use; and only later, once that industry no longer had need of it (and was being gentrified out of the area entirely) was the land re-zoned for other uses and “finished off” as a public works project. Residential or commercial developers have never been given authorization to reclaim coastline, AFAIK. And governments very rarely do it themselves, save for when they’re essentially serving the role of an infrastructure provider to some later industry (e.g. an airport.)

eru 7y ago
Singapore does it. But they are special in so many other regards, too. (Oh, and the Dutch of course.)
beerandt 7y ago
New Orleans lakefront and parts of New Orleans East were massive land building projects, specifically for neighborhoods. Lakefront Airport (KNEW) was also included in these projects. The land was sold to finance the levees before federal law put the Army Corps of Engineers in charge of levee building, ~1965. http://richcampanella.com/assets/pdf/Picayune_Cityscapes_2018_04_13_Lakefront%20Project.pdf http://richcampanella.com/assets/pdf/Picayune_Cityscapes_201... https://neworleanshistorical.org/items/show/603 https://neworleanshistorical.org/items/show/603 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lakeshore/Lake_Vista,_New_Orleans https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lakeshore/Lake_Vista,_New_Or... Edit: I can't find the source, but the levee board still has title and standing permission from the state to fill-in something like an additional 2 miles out into Lake Pontchartrain.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

nck4222 7y ago

>The more pressing question: Can we actually still do such projects in western democracies? I sure hope not. Two sentences by the author dismissing environmental concerns isn't sufficient. They also list Boston as an example, but Boston's land creation projects ran over cost back in the 1800's, which most people seem to think is only a modern day issue for some reason. The Back Bay was filled-in because the city had already created an environmental disaster out of it. A dam was built which caused the bay to stagnate, and fill with sewage. Maybe a judge should've ordered an environmental impact study be done before the dam was built, which would've caught this. https://historyofmassachusetts.org/how-boston-lost-its-hills/ https://historyofmassachusetts.org/how-boston-lost-its-hills... You don't need to create land in order to have a functioning public transit system, which would address several of the problems the author brings up, without introducing a plethora of new issues.

thorwasdfasdf 7y ago
how do you have a transit system to get people 80 miles to work? The imbalance of where work and residential areas are in the bay area is so horrendous, there's 1 residential place to live for every 4 jobs on the peninsula. The only way to balance it out is either get rid of the jobs or build lots lots more residential
CharlesColeman 7y ago
>> The more pressing question: Can we actually still do such projects in western democracies? > I sure hope not. Two sentences by the author dismissing environmental concerns isn't sufficient. That's typifies a problem I have with internet pseudo-"rationality." The world is messy and and composed of lots of legitimate, competing political interests. The only way you can hope to offer a simple, "rational" solution in a pithy blog post is by ignoring or handwaving away a huge amount alternate perspectives and history, which actually isn't rational at all. [1] The reason I bring this up is because the article is a blog post on LessWrong, which describes itself as "a place to 1) develop and train rationality, and 2) apply one’s rationality to real-world problems."

asdfman123 7y ago

That attitude drives me crazy. Each new high rise built in San Francisco prevents a few several blocks of nature being paved over for suburbs somewhere else. I had this debate with an environmentalist who supported urban farming. Sure, urban farming is cool and a nice hobby, but it would be far more environmentally friendly to build a high rise. New high rises drive down the costs of urban living, more people move to the city, and whole tracts of nature are saved from destruction.

thorwasdfasdf 7y ago
> but it would be far more environmentally friendly to build a high rise. Absolutely Right! And, it would decrease pollution and global warming because people's commutes would be much much shorter, as they wouldn't be forced to commute from 80 miles away, like it currently is in the Bay Area.
- pyrale 7y ago
  Food and building material would still need to commute, and the amount of energy it represents probably can't be decreased enough to make dense cities a good thing for climate change.
  - bluGill 7y ago
    Food needs to be transported either way. Dense cities are better because the trucks need to make less stops on the delivery end.
    - pyrale 7y ago
      The number of stops is probably less important than the distance traveled by food. Towns or small cities can have food produces locally. In large cities, food has to travel across the city, and on top of that it has to travel across the space required for farming. This is a non-concern now of course, but in a world where we want to reduce transportation at scales serious enough to fight climate change, large cities will be a liability.