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Yet again an article about how it costs $X to do something with infrastructure but no explanation for why it costs $X. Until everyone starts asking "why?" and t

• haram_masala 6y ago
  Thank you. This was my first thought too, and then for some reason I felt like a jerk for going there.
• koheripbal 6y ago
  Why is the high cost of western labor not in your list. Labor is the main cost. We need construction robots.
  • rightbyte 6y ago
    That is not a problem if you got "high cost labor" taxpayers.
  • yardie 6y ago
    Same projects in Western Europe are coming in significantly lower. Labor is cited as the main cost but it’s easy to hide corruption in labor costs.
    • Spooky23 6y ago
      This isn’t NYC. We outsourced to places like this before Mexico and China were options.
    • bnt 6y ago
      But Western Europe (EU) has the benefit of temporarily importing cheap East European (Romania, Poland etc) under skilled workers to do the heavy lifting.
      • burntoutfire 6y ago
        Aren't there like 10 million illegal immigrants in the US who serve similar function?
        • theptip 6y ago
          Presumably not for public contracts.
        • xyzzyz 6y ago
          In NYC, the labor law requires paying "prevailing wage", which NYC decided is $100k+/year. See https://comptroller.nyc.gov/services/for-the-public/nyc-wage-standards/wage-schedules/ https://comptroller.nyc.gov/services/for-the-public/nyc-wage... No wonder that all public projects are so expensive.
      • Xylakant 6y ago
        Western European Countries usually have a law in place that labor brought in for these contracts has to be paid the same wage as local labor.
  • DarthGhandi 6y ago
    We have "construction robots" already. It's called foreign labour and no one in the West would dare suggest bringing them in for one-off large infrastructure projects regardless of how many cost-benefit-analyses you can get the smartest economists on Earth to produce, nor the willingness of the laborers to do it.
  • pchristensen 6y ago
    It’s much more complicated than that. If you’re interested, Alon Levy of Pedestrian Observations compares transit construction costs across countries, for example why some countries like Spain and South Korea can build subways for 1/10 the cost per mile of USA construction projects. It basically comes down to “no one tried to make this cheaper”. Culture and history seem to be the primary drivers, more than labor costs, unions, corruption, environmental regulations, NIMBYs, etc.
    • TwoBit 6y ago
      > no one tried to make this cheaper What do you mean by this?
      • pchristensen 6y ago
        It was never an organizational goal to reduce the cost of delivering infrastructure. Picture an overweight, out of shape person. Literally anything you do can improve health - portion size, macro balance, calorie restriction, daily exercise, intensity of exercise, change of environment, removal of food temptations, variety of exercise, cardio, weights, sports, etc. You don’t have to be a dietician or personal trainer to help this person. But if they don’t want to lose weight, they’re not going to try any of these. Much of American infrastructure provision is like that hypothetical person - the goal is never to to spend less. Political and organizational goals are to increase budget, increase headcount, deliver ribbon cutting ceremonies, avoid affecting neighborhoods with powerful constituents, hit service coverage goals, create construction and operations jobs, etc. There’s no one whose job evaluation and advancement is based on reducing costs.
    • pnw_hazor 6y ago
      Many local US governments establish prevailing wage-laws that set minimum wages for construction jobs that private contractors have to abide by if they go work for the government. https://secure.lni.wa.gov/wagelookup/ApprenticeWageLookup.aspx https://secure.lni.wa.gov/wagelookup/ApprenticeWageLookup.as...
    • bnralt 6y ago
• ItsJason 6y ago
  Don't forget no incentive to be efficient or innovate better techniques / technologies on the part of both the city as a whole and individual employees. Government is the least accountable of all organizations and therefore the least effective at any given task.
  • chasd00 6y ago
    I'm not sure what DFW and TXDOT do right but they routinely bring projects in on time and on budget (if not under). Two large projects that come to mind is the HighFive and Grapevine Connector. Both were huge and the High Five made headlines for some new bridge making machine the contractor invented. Whatever they're doing it seems to be working.
    • jaccarmac 6y ago
      The projects may be on time and under budget, but from a citizen's perspective the transportation situation in DFW is excruciating. Endless construction, confusing junctions, deceptively labeled toll roads, and an NTTA site that won't let you use secure passwords (or security questions) to register. Give me fewer freeways and more public transit options any day, thanks.
  • mnd999 6y ago
    Nobody doing critical infrastructure, public or private will be allowed to go under. Look at the privatised rail companies in the UK or the banks in 2008 for examples of this. Competition and markets definitely do raise standards where that competition is fair and genuine and well regulated. Usually though, privatisation results in state awarded monopolies where little more gets done than before and costs rise because of the need to show a profit or bail out accrued losses because at the end of the day, the infrastructure has to keep running. Maybe we can create a marketplace for bidding on infrastructure work job by job and maybe, it could be profitable for everyone. I’m not so sure though.
    • cnorthwood 6y ago
      Many private rail operators in the UK have been allowed to collapse, UK gov has set up "operators of last resort" which are run by the government to take over services when that happens. Pre-pandemic, the East Coast Mainline and Northern operations were run by them after the private operators walked away on the verge of collapsing
• Spooky23 6y ago
  Strongtowns always starts with their answer and works backward to find questions. Your approach is similar... ie “it must be corruption”. The answer is always the same for local governments. ~70% of expenditure is for operations, and 60% of that is for cops and fire.
  • netcan 6y ago
    This is the problem of politics in a nutshell. We tend to have strong opinions, as is out democratic duty. It's impossible (or very hard) to form opinions based on specifics. So we fall into tragically cliched thinking. "The problem" is whatever the problem always is. Maybe its Capitalism. Maybe its "kickbacks, overregulation, collusion in bidding, and simple "match the budget" bids" It's probably whatever your worldview always points to.
    • bosie 6y ago
      > We tend to have strong opinions, as is out democratic duty. How is a strong opinion a democratic duty?
      • netcan 6y ago
        I meant that tongue in cheek.
    • PaulDavisThe1st 6y ago
      Silly me. I foolishly thought that careful investigations and analyses of situations like the ones described in TFA could help us figure out what "the problem" actually is.
  • lotsofpulp 6y ago
    And that 60% does not include defined benefit pension and retiree healthcare benefits that are understated or unstated because the government can use extra rosy assumptions and/or just skip saving money and then dump those expenses on future taxpayers.
• rbg246 6y ago
  I see the same thing with private enterprise everyday.
  • bhupy 6y ago
    Key difference being that there’s actually some mechanism for private enterprises to fail and go out of business.
    • Fricken 6y ago
      Government's can and do fail.
      • bhupy 6y ago
        It's extremely rare. Ask yourself how many companies from the 20th century are now defunct vs government programs (or governments in general). You can probably count on one hand the number of governments that have "gone out of business" (so to speak), in the last 40-50 years. You'll need several people to tabulate the set of private enterprises that have gone bankrupt, defunct, or M&A'd out of existence over the same timespan, in the US alone.
        • dukeyukey 6y ago
          If you count having lost effective control of a significant part of their country as a government having failed, there are plenty. No-one would say that Syria or Libya have a single functioning government controlling the country at the moment, and you can throw swathes of central Africa in there as well. Other than a coup, civil war, or a foreign takeover, there isn't really a way for a government to definitely 'fail', but no-one would say that these events are unheard of.
          • bhupy 6y ago
            > If you count having lost effective control of a significant part of their country as a government having failed, there are plenty. Losing control of a significant part of a country isn't comparable to private enterprise failure, it's more comparable to the CEO of a company being replaced. Imagine what retail would have been like if, instead of Sears being essentially replaced, we just elected a different set of leaders to run the same organization. > No-one would say that Syria or Libya have a single functioning government controlling the country at the moment, and you can throw swathes of central Africa in there as well. Right, and in general we consider that instability to be a bad thing, and a key goal of UNESCO (and adjacent organizations) is to make African nations as stable as Western democracies. That kind of stability just isn't sought out in the private sector. > Other than a coup, civil war, or a foreign takeover, there isn't really a way for a government to definitely 'fail', but no-one would say that these events are unheard of. If you were to ask me to pick a system where change happens through violence and bloodshed (civil wars, coups) vs peaceful financial transactions (M&A, bankruptcy) — I would choose the latter any day of the week.
• hourislate 6y ago
  In Toronto, Canada a simple renovation of a subway stations entrance (painting, tile, basic refresh) can take several years. All the while they will rope off large sections or shut down escalators for months while there is ZERO work being done. There was a Subway station called Runnymede that took about 5-7 years and when completely you couldn't tell they did anything. I am sure it cost 10's of millions of dollars and could have been completely started and finished by a private contractor in a couple months. The city has never been manage properly because there are no consequences to the ineptness of the Politicians and bureaucracy that run it. You could complain (a lawyer friend did) and they basically either ignore or make up some story how difficult it is to lay 200 sq/ft of tile and clean an escalator...These things take years of hard work and planning.... Surprised the city doesn't come crashing down under it's own weight of dysfunction but they seem to prop it up by the endless tax or fee increases.
  • CydeWeys 6y ago
    Private contractors aren't a solution to the problem; that's orthogonal. Lots of work goes to private contractors here, with the same results.
    • mdifrgechd 6y ago
      Procurement is one of the root causes, specifically running the procurement out of a government bureaucracy where the actual tactical outcomes (refurbishing the train station in the example above) are way down the list from other priorities such as the appearance of fairness in procurement, and other government aims like job creation etc.
      • pnw_hazor 6y ago
        In the US, it common for local or federal RFP's (requests for proposals) to include a hard requirement that qualified vendors have done the same kind of project before. This usually excludes any new players from the game. How many companies build large bridges, airports, subways, railroads, tunnels, etc? Not many. It is part of the racket that discourages innovation.
• wang_li 6y ago
  There’s plenty of reasons beyond corruption. Repaving a mile of third avenue in Seattle costs a lot more than a mile of downtown Wendell, Idaho which will cost a lot more than chip sealing a mile of dirt road just two miles away from the center of Wendell. Salaries are more expensive in big cities. The job is more complex as the amount of infrastructure beneath the road surface, which requires ongoing access, so lots of man holes. Repaving in a dense urban center requires removing the old pavement, in a rural setting it’ll just be piled on top until it’s been layered four or five times.
  • specialist 6y ago
    There's an explainer (in the aether) comparing the cost of 1 mile of subway in misc locations. Cost of land is a surprisingly high factor. I'm generally against eminent domain. Because it's abused so easily and so often. But I would also like the option to build our way out of our messes. Failing to make the real estate more affordable, maybe we'll innovate our way out. Some combination of telework, The Boring Company, and cheap personal transportation options.
• KingOfCoders 6y ago
  I thought the main point of the article was that cities spend $X in infrastructure to get $Y in short term profit with $Z in long term costs. Sum($Z) >> Sum($Y) with $X paid for my subsidies.
• RivieraKid 6y ago
  The general principle is that we haven't figured out yet how to deal with monopolist markets (in other words, situations where there is no market). Competitive markets lead to high efficiency but there are many situations, often public projects, where there's no competition.
• Mountain_Skies 6y ago
  It's interesting that so many of the responses mention the high costs of infrastructure upkeep is due to the density and complexity of the built environment in which is exists. The article however is pushing for denser development so there is less infrastructure to maintain. Interesting balance between the two opposing development patterns, both of which appear to lead to high maintenance costs.
• renewiltord 6y ago
  The classic example of this is the 580/880 intersection replacement in Oakland/Alameda. It's a crucial intersection for the East Bay so when a tank truck caused a fire that collapsed it, the tender issued provided a massive bonus for each day ahead of projected schedule you achieved. The winner completed it far faster than similar projects, and under projected budget, taking it all in from the bonus. Every day he was slow, he lost money. So the incentives were great, and the winning contractor did a great job. So we have the construction technology and we have the policy technology. But similar projects frequently take forever. Why is that? We know how to make them fast, cheap, and good, clearly. We know how to set up the incentives on a per-task basis so we will do that as well. So I suspect it is because they actually aren't crucial. So you sell the buyer (the populace) on the price tag based on the supposed importance, but you actually do the work on the real importance. The gap between the two allows for profit for politically connected contractors like Tutor Perini and also for make-work for powerful groups like construction unions. What we don't know is how to set up the incentives such that good per-task incentives will be put in place. In fact, I'd say that the true importance of any slow project is likely very low. In California, the following projects should not have started: * CA HSR * SF Central Line During their lifetimes they will not yield positive economic utility.
  • spicybright 6y ago
    Wouldn't an incentive to get it done quick encourage cutting corners? It's critical infrastructure, sure, but all the more reason it should be fixed properly AND quickly.
    • deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    • renewiltord 6y ago
      Yes, you are right. You couple it with other constraints and an audit to ensure it's done well. I did not state the entire thing for brevity.
• fuzzfactor 6y ago
  They're spending other people's money. But how they get the money and from who is a factor too. This always happens when real property is taxed rather than commerce, and the amount of land available for development is limited or fixed. To start with all land is taxed according to its initial assessment, after that revenues can not increase without raising rates and/or further developing parcels to increase their taxable value. Both of which are unsustainable in the face of any inflation at all. Each of which have their staunch supporters at odds with the other. If only rate increases are considered, rate increases will have to outpace inflation or the taxing authority will go bankrupt. The taxing authority can not be allowed to fail especially since the original purpose of this type tax is for the taxpayer to go bankrupt before the nobility does. Eventually the _landowner_ will be assessed more tax than the land itself brings in, and will require _owners_ having outsized wealth from other sources, often only multigenerational prosperity will be sufficient. At the other extreme where revenue growth comes only from further property development, pressure is greatest on undeveloped properties having the biggest upside potential. New infrastructure is built at the expense of the old, spread more widely, and naturally not yet having future inflated maintenance costs incurred. Little hand-waving is needed when a tax payer & collector are all prospering over the deal in the short term and there is some plausibility to behave as if future prosperity for all taxpayers will increase at the rate enjoyed by those involved with the development. Surely making costly things easier by then. Inflation makes it impossible to know for sure anyway. Mix and match these growing costs across citizenry which is not becoming more prosperous, and eventually there is no discretionary wealth except among the few who overcame the inflationary toll. Taxing commerce instead of property allows revenue to grow at the rate of real prosperity unlimited. With the risk that revenue will drop when prosperity drops, or the authority will go bankrupt at the same time as the general citizenry in such a case. Not a realistic risk since the authority will have enough credit to delay its own bankruptcy until after the majority of the citizens are ruined. I guess the point of view about what kind of tax could ideally fund infrastructure indefinitely depends on whether you are a lowly taxable subject or a high-born guv'nor.