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That Sydney Metro tunnel is coming in at nearly double the initial budgeted cost. It's over $1B per km of tunnel. Australian infrastructure projects are hardly

That Sydney Metro tunnel is coming in at nearly double the initial budgeted cost. It's over $1B per km of tunnel. Australian infrastructure projects are hardly something to be proud of.

siquick 7y ago
Have you seen any breakdown of why it costs that much? It seems like an unfathomable amount.
- threeseed 7y ago
  Because the tunnel is going underneath the Sydney harbour: https://www.smh.com.au/national/nsw/under-wraps-sydney-s-first-rail-tunnel-dug-beneath-harbour-20191121-p53cs3.html https://www.smh.com.au/national/nsw/under-wraps-sydney-s-fir...
- sansnomme 7y ago
  All sorts of reasons, but corruption (along-side organized crime) is a big issue in the construction industry. Imagine Oracle-style of service and business approach coupled with an npm-deep level of dependencies/middlemen whose palms need greasing and to have their cut of the project. Then on the other side you are boxed in by physics, thousands of regulations, zoning laws, complaints, city council, government bureaucracy.
  - mc3 7y ago
    "npm-deep" I love that phrase. anyone who suffers a dig around the node_modules folder knows the pain! Ugh! I also used Oracle in the early 2000's, I need hypnotherapy to get over that.
jacques_chester 7y ago
The MTA's Second Avenue line in New York comes out to more than AU$2Bn per km, on my reckoning (US$2.6Bn/mile). It's the current world champion for expensive holes. The fact is that megaprojects basically never come in anywhere near their schedule or budget. That's because of a selection bias. When you crunch the numbers honestly, megaprojects come out as a terrible on a cost-benefit or ROI analysis. The ones that get built are built by people who choose to ignore the honest figures in favour of the shiny, optimistic ones. Et voila, another farce. There are lots of other factors, but that's the core one that precedes the others.
- incompatible 7y ago
  But it's just a subway tunnel, which have been built in cities since the 19th century. Is it really so much harder to do such "megaprojects" in the 21st century, with the vastly better equipment now available?
  - toasterlovin 7y ago
    We’ve been building houses for millennia and construction is still notorious for not going according to plan. One-off projects are just hard to get to go as planned.
    - bluGill 7y ago
      Lesson: don't do one-off projects. Find a project that meets you needs, and copy it. Make minor tweaks to their design to fit your needs, but copy as much as possible. Houses typically go according to plan because so many of the processes and parts are standard. Even large mansions can go according to plan if you have good management (note that cheap management is rewarded for change orders and thus will ensure things don't go according to plan while better management will see that if they don't make a minor change now things won't go according to plan latter.
      - grp000 7y ago
        Guess we should have stopped at the wheel.
        bluGill 7y ago
        We have improved it a lot, but the wheel has been round for a very long time. We laugh at people who reinvent the wheel as opposed to doing incremental improvements on it. We do have ships, rockets, and a few other things that don't need wheels (tough they tend to have wheels of some form inside), but the wheel itself is still just incremental improvements on that first one way back...

That Sydney Metro tunnel is coming in at nearly double the initial budgeted cost. It's over $1B per km of tunnel. Australian infrastructure projects are hardly something to be proud of.

siquick 7y ago

Have you seen any breakdown of why it costs that much? It seems like an unfathomable amount.

threeseed 7y ago
Because the tunnel is going underneath the Sydney harbour: https://www.smh.com.au/national/nsw/under-wraps-sydney-s-first-rail-tunnel-dug-beneath-harbour-20191121-p53cs3.html https://www.smh.com.au/national/nsw/under-wraps-sydney-s-fir...
sansnomme 7y ago
All sorts of reasons, but corruption (along-side organized crime) is a big issue in the construction industry. Imagine Oracle-style of service and business approach coupled with an npm-deep level of dependencies/middlemen whose palms need greasing and to have their cut of the project. Then on the other side you are boxed in by physics, thousands of regulations, zoning laws, complaints, city council, government bureaucracy.
- mc3 7y ago
  "npm-deep" I love that phrase. anyone who suffers a dig around the node_modules folder knows the pain! Ugh! I also used Oracle in the early 2000's, I need hypnotherapy to get over that.

jacques_chester 7y ago

The MTA's Second Avenue line in New York comes out to more than AU$2Bn per km, on my reckoning (US$2.6Bn/mile). It's the current world champion for expensive holes. The fact is that megaprojects basically never come in anywhere near their schedule or budget. That's because of a selection bias. When you crunch the numbers honestly, megaprojects come out as a terrible on a cost-benefit or ROI analysis. The ones that get built are built by people who choose to ignore the honest figures in favour of the shiny, optimistic ones. Et voila, another farce. There are lots of other factors, but that's the core one that precedes the others.

incompatible 7y ago
But it's just a subway tunnel, which have been built in cities since the 19th century. Is it really so much harder to do such "megaprojects" in the 21st century, with the vastly better equipment now available?
- toasterlovin 7y ago
  We’ve been building houses for millennia and construction is still notorious for not going according to plan. One-off projects are just hard to get to go as planned.
  - bluGill 7y ago
    Lesson: don't do one-off projects. Find a project that meets you needs, and copy it. Make minor tweaks to their design to fit your needs, but copy as much as possible. Houses typically go according to plan because so many of the processes and parts are standard. Even large mansions can go according to plan if you have good management (note that cheap management is rewarded for change orders and thus will ensure things don't go according to plan while better management will see that if they don't make a minor change now things won't go according to plan latter.
    - grp000 7y ago
      Guess we should have stopped at the wheel.
      - bluGill 7y ago
        We have improved it a lot, but the wheel has been round for a very long time. We laugh at people who reinvent the wheel as opposed to doing incremental improvements on it. We do have ships, rockets, and a few other things that don't need wheels (tough they tend to have wheels of some form inside), but the wheel itself is still just incremental improvements on that first one way back...