17 ms·

Why U.S. Infrastructure Costs So Much

164 points by jseliger 5y ago

systemvoltage 5y ago
It’s dysfunctional on purpose. Media is busy with identity politics and trumpism, no checks and balances with efficiency of the government. Doesn’t bring in the clicks. Local media is extinct so local municipalities get a free pass.
- WhisperingShiba 5y ago
  Uh oh things are not looking good for our fair nation. Fortunately it seems like China isnt doing the best either, but in other ways. Hopefully we fall together.
  - systemvoltage 5y ago
    The internet sort of centralized journalism. Local newspapers couldn’t keep up. I remember my dad reading local printed newspaper and always keeping abreast of what issues impacted local infra, municipality effectiveness, elections and general know how about how the local gov functioned. No one cares about it anymore. Instead, a friend of mine is asking me about Cuomo’s sexual assault case - mind you, he lives in Perth, Australia. Who cares!
    - WhisperingShiba 5y ago
      So how do we go back? If our problem is human nature, perhaps we just have to survive long enough, and the human organism will self-correct. I want to overtake small cities and make an escape rout for people who feel trapped in society, like me. The problem is that you need money in order to make jobs in those cities. Basically we are just stuck waiting for culture to change again.
neonate 5y ago
https://archive.md/XQQZc https://archive.md/XQQZc
ihsw 5y ago
Infrastructure funding is a jobs creation program with an occasional side-effect of providing infrastructure to the public.
_xnmw 5y ago
Because the US has an unlimited supply of the world's reserve currency, so there is no incentive to be economical.
- distribot 5y ago
  But the local governments executing these projects have very fixed budgets. They can't just fire up the money printer.
  - fdgsdfogijq 5y ago
    Local government officials have no real incentive to get the most for their money. They "get the job done", but I really doubt they are anywhere close to efficient
    - distribot 5y ago
      I think the mayor of NYC has a strong incentive to get credit for improving their subway system.
      - NovemberWhiskey 5y ago
        Perhaps surprisingly, the NYC subway is run by the MTA, over which the mayor has no control; it's run by the state government up in Albany.
    - vkou 5y ago
      They would, if our democracy worked better. People care deeply about where municipal tax money is going. Unfortunately, most of the time, municipal governments are entirely controlled by an unholy alliance between local real estate moguls, and the town's chamber of commerce, so 'what their constituents want' is rarely a priority for them.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- sofard 5y ago
dantheman 5y ago
Corruption
- Finnucane 5y ago
  Which never happens in Europe.
sofard 5y ago
I was a management consultant ages ago and worked on large capital projects. In my experience (as the article mentions) it was a mix of: 1. Red tape & public "input" 2. Layers of contractors and subcontractors, each taking their slice 3. No real incentives for governments to be cost sensitive. Usually capital projects last well into the next administration. 4. Too many cooks in the kitchen and consultations
- phenkdo 5y ago
  IMO #2 takes the cake (rest is all icing)
  - lotsofpulp 5y ago
    In my experience with construction projects, legal costs and liabilities take the cake. Once something is in court, there is zero telling how long and how much money it takes to resolve.
    - jltsiren 5y ago
      This is interesting from a foreign perspective. I still follow urban planning in Helsinki, Finland. Major public projects always face opposition and go to court, but it's not a big deal. Because zoning plans and similar project plans are decisions made by public officials, all complaints about them go to the administrative court system. Administrative courts don't care about the substance of the argument. (That's for elected representatives.) They only determine if the officials followed all appropriate regulations and decisiomaking processes. Going to administrative court is cheap enough and fast enough that the costs and delays are usually included in the project plan. Sometime the court overturns the decision, delaying or canceling the project. Sometimes their justifications are stupid and sometimes there are unintended consequences. Regardless, the system more or less works most of the time.
      - maccolgan 5y ago
        Sounds like a despotate, residents are fucked if one of the officials make a wrong decision.
darkwizard42 5y ago
Why aren't contracts to build the projects tightly written to avoid cost ballooning? When a service is to be provided at a certain cost, it should be provided at certain cost. Some contingencies should be built in (if something gets discovered that was unexpected) but how on earth does every municipal project seem to have so much invested in budget oversight and contractors overbilling or needing overtime to make things happen. If someone is painting my house, I get a quote for the job and the date it will be completed. I don't find myself paying them more unless its for something outside of what we specified together and they quoted. Building on government contracts should be solid money but it seems like every time the taxpayer gets fleeced and the end result is barely functional/impactful.
- lotsofpulp 5y ago
  It is easy to say, and tough to do. Big projects have almost unlimited liability. The entities involved can get taken to court for pollution concerns, environmental concerns, get caught up in local politics. And once something is in the courts, the whole timeframe is completely up in the air. One of the places I lived had Walmart wanting to build a Walmart Supercenter, and convert their current Walmart into a Sams Club. The non Walmart grocery store (which was garbage in terms of quality and service) and a Sams Club competitor tied up Walmart in court over the status of some endangered garden snake. It was obvious nonsense, but it would have taken so long to untangle legally that Walmart said screw it and moved on.
- vkk8 5y ago
  This is what I'm also wondering. What is the point of making a contract in the first place if the price quoted is not binding? If the provider needs more material or manpower or whatever than expected, then it should be their fucking problem and not the clients. The possibility of unexpected stuff happening should, of course, also be taken into account in the initial price quote since the provider should be much better at estimating the probability of something happening than the client.
  - g_p 5y ago
    The problem when dealing with government or public works is that the provider simply isn't better at estimating that probability, since they aren't empowered to bulldoze ahead. The contractor can accurately price in (and insure against) technical risks like the risk of accidentally striking a cable while digging, and they can mitigate this as well (looking at the quality of cable mapping data, using detectors etc.) What the contractor can't factor in is all the (local) government politics and bureaucracy. Where things fall on the financial year calendar, whether they will have to spend the money before or after April, whether they will have to pause works because a resident legally challenges the works, whether the client has even asked for the right thing, or if it will emerge while planning the work that they have made major errors etc. When dealing with a well-specified, fixed-scope piece of work, you are right - the provider should eat that. When dealing with an uninformed non-expert customer (i.e. most public sector or government contracts), nobody in their right mind would take on that risk, except some of the big government outsourcing contractors, who would all quote insane prices based on past "actual costs" after factoring in all the nonsense from previous work.
Finnucane 5y ago
At least the GLX is a little further along now. The location in the photo at the top of the article is near my house, and the new trackbed there is complete.
rp1 5y ago
Both of my parents are in civil engineering and construction in NYC. As an outside observer, what I see is that the management of projects is not set up in a sustainable way and is just bad. The heads of important departments are political appointees. Most of the time, appointments go to political friends, not to competent managers with extensive knowledge of the field. Also, the assignments are constantly changing as elected officials change.
KingMachiavelli 5y ago
Every time any land is going to be developed where I live (Denver/Boulder/etc.), there is always a thread on Nextdoor advocating for people to stop it by raising environmental concerns and putting in a ton of comments. If 1/10 projects get canceled due to individual objections that means a lot of time and money gets wasted. Another 4/10 projects might eventually get built but only after long drawn out discussions and after many iterations to address individual concerns making the project less standardized and more expensive. The remaining projects that built aren't really infrastructure projects rather they are statement pieces. Instead of building a $200M subway station we build a $1B community gathering area that includes a subway station. The optimistic hope is that these larger projects will encourage public adoption and support for more of these types of projects but in reality their costs spiral out of control and construction takes far too long at which point the public is just tired.
- davidw 5y ago
  The article hints at this NIMBYism. Many of the other things that factor in are not unique to the US. Government waste, bureaucracy, etc... are all things in other wealthy countries too, but NIMBYism and 'public input' seems to carry more weight in the US.
- JohnWhigham 5y ago
  It's things like this that make me yearn for the government of yore that just fucking did it, no questions asked i.e. the federal government laying out the interstate highway system. They didn't care it tore apart neighborhoods, they did it because if they didn't, the evil Soviets would eventually build a better highway system and the US couldn't have that embarrassment. A shitty motivator? Sure, but it was a motivator. Now in the 3 decades since the end of the Cold War, what accomplishments has any government done that rivals what happened during the Cold War era? None.
  - truculent 5y ago
    But isn’t a lot of the bad infrastructure and urban sprawl a consequence of those very decisions? Perhaps a more considered approach would have worked better in the long term. For instance, in Amsterdam, local people fought back against plans to put highways through the city which has resulted in a much more pleasant urban environment.
wnevets 5y ago
or its for similar reasons rewriting existing software can take so much time and money. It's way easier to build a subway (or software) when you don't have to worry about the existing needs of the customer or people who live in or around the area.
mikewarot 5y ago
Once the US had railroad companies that laid rail at a mile per day (mostly crap rail, but enough to count), that was when the incentives were all aligned, and a huge amount of resources were mobilized and ready to deploy. Once the US pulled of the completely absurd task of putting a man on the moon and then returning him safely to earth, in less than a decade. All the incentives were aligned, it had public support, and a huge amount of resources were mobilized and ready to deploy. We're not deploying huge resources on our infrastructure projects, we're piecemealing them. I've got a branch rail line going in at the end of my street. [1] The public input/planning process went on for years, and only now are they starting to relocate utilities, put up fences, etc. There's no one entity in charge of all the layers of the project, it's all hired contractors and inter-agency cooperation. It will be done, likely in 3 years or so. This line is a total of about 9 miles long for about $945 Million. The worst part about it for me is the insidious nature of the funding they're using. They're doing "Tax Increment Financing" which means that any increase in property tax revenues theoretically caused by the "improvement" of my house go to pay off the construction bonds. Let's say there is NO improvement, but inflation doubles taxes in the next decade. The town now gets the same dollar amount, but half of the funding it used to get, and the rest goes to the bond holders. This will strangle our schools which depend on local real estate taxes. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Lake_Corridor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Lake_Corridor PS: Just across the state line is a defunct Country Club, which is in close enough to the station to qualify for "TIF" improvements, and the husband of the local State Representative pushing for the project, just happens to be the a real estate developer interested in said property.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- OldHand2018 5y ago
  And don't you just love that the trains they'll be running will consist of end-of-life Metra coaches that they're paying to have refurbished? https://www.chicagotribune.com/suburbs/post-tribune/ct-ptb-nictd-meet-double-track-st-0126-20210125-vslmopf7j5f55pkx3uiedgoecm-story.html https://www.chicagotribune.com/suburbs/post-tribune/ct-ptb-n... These are the new Metra coaches, BTW: https://chi.streetsblog.org/2021/01/13/metra-board-chooses-new-modern-passenger-rail-cars-to-replace-1950s-gallery-cars/ https://chi.streetsblog.org/2021/01/13/metra-board-chooses-n...
ivankirigin 5y ago
NEPA
- jjtheblunt 5y ago
  ?
  - ivankirigin 5y ago
    Regulations slow the pace of building. Good article here: https://medium.com/cgo-benchmark/why-are-we-so-slow-today-c34dad4d2bff https://medium.com/cgo-benchmark/why-are-we-so-slow-today-c3... Good recent discussion here, including other incentives: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bzMTlBddJ-E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bzMTlBddJ-E
    - jjtheblunt 5y ago
      thanks!
  - tastyfreeze 5y ago
    National Environmental Protection Act In other words, every infrastructure project is required to prove that they are not harming habitats or disturbing native cultural sites or any of the myriad other types of sites that are protected.
    - jjtheblunt 5y ago
      Thank you!
- tastyfreeze 5y ago
  Having worked on software to track the mountain of paperwork for NEPA compliance of road projects I agree. But, I would expand it to just say bureaucracy or over-regulation. We can't build a damn thing without getting approval or licenses from multiple agencies after satisfying their every whim. Every regulation doesn't just make the project cost more. We are also paying for the administration and enforcement of those regulations. We pay on both sides when it is a State DOT doing the project. Residents of the State pay for staff to make sure they are satisfying all the NEPA requirements and Federal staff to make sure that the State DOT is in compliance.
throwaway0a5e 5y ago
Doesn't help that people have short memories. Remember the big dig? Textbook pork filled boondoggle in every way. Yet here we are 10yr later and there's no shortage of people with goldfish memories trying to defend it because "well the greenway is kind of cool". Government isn't idiots. They know that you'll forget. So they spend money without a care in the world and then give non answers when asked. Time works its magic and they get off scott free never being held accountable for wasting public resources.
InTheArena 5y ago
This misses a fundamental point - the goal of this is not to fund infrastructure - it's to fund people who vote for people who vote for infrastructure. There is zero incentive to run on time and on-budget, and every incentive to milk more government cash, so that people in power can get election contributions, that stay in power. If you also deny money to people who didn't vote for you, then all the better as well. See the union restrictions on EV money in this bill. Why help GM, when you can help GM and hurt Tesla, all in one! Doesn't matter if it's (R) or (D), or union versus non-union. It's profit-seeking across the board.
- DennisP 5y ago
  From the article, Istanbul gets things built a lot cheaper, partly because: > Whereas Boston might only build one new transit line every few decades, Istanbul builds dozens. Seems like building dozens of times as much would even more effectively "fund people who vote for people who vote for infrastructure." So why aren't we like Istanbul?
  - munk-a 5y ago
    The more regular an activity is the more likely you're going to have people specialized in it - you'll have much more accurate estimates around costs and time to deliver since people will have more recent experience getting it done and you'll have infrastructure around building infrastructure. When these projects are rarer it becomes infeasible for a company to dedicate itself to the labour so you end up with residential construction firms digging tunnels and laying road foundations - and needing to learn a lot as they go or bring in consultants. The more you build - especially the more you commit to build in the future - the cheaper it will be. If everything is billed as a one-off then the specialized labour doesn't settle in the local market and you end up paying large costs over and over.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - DennisP 5y ago
candyman 5y ago
Thirty years ago when you needed to install new computers in an office I remember it took us weeks to get the cable (Ethernet) installed because one contractor had to pull the cable and cut it at each workstation, another contractor had to come and put the connector on the cable and yet another had to come and plug the cable into the machine. Believe me we were tempted to sneak in one weekend and do the whole thing ourselves but were severely warned about the consequences. So what could have been done in a day by one or two guys took over a month because you couldn't even schedule the second service until the first was done. I imagine this kind of thing is everywhere when it comes to building real infrastructure.
- human 5y ago
  In real life it’s even worse. None of the suppliers actually show up, they ramp up the price and deliver a failing product. Then they all blame the previous guy.
- chrisseaton 5y ago
  > another contractor had to come and put the connector on the cable ... severely warned about the consequences This kind of job moating and threats is a union thing isn't it?
  - drak0n1c 5y ago
    Yes, my partner was a conference planner and whenever they had one in NYC in the Time offices their team wasn't allowed to adjust tables by themselves, everything had to be done by formal work order tickets and only union hands could touch anything, even equipment they owned and brought in themselves. Coincidentally, this new infrastructure bill has union requirements for any EV work.
    - dr_dshiv 5y ago
      Unions get a bad rap. They don’t have to be bad. Everyone should have an incentive for efficiency.
missedthecue 5y ago
One thing the article misses is that construction worker productivity has been on the downtrend for decades https://cdn.substack.com/image/fetch/w_600,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fpbs.substack.com%2Fmedia%2FE4Cm6fLVgAAfX4e.png https://cdn.substack.com/image/fetch/w_600,c_limit,f_auto,q_...
- Naac 5y ago
  Please follow up to the article/source of this graph.
  - missedthecue 5y ago
    https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/what-happened-to-construction-productivity https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/what-happened-to-construct...
m0llusk 5y ago
This article is toxic garbage. The best example of this is how the NYC Second Avenue subway project is cited as an example of costs out of control. This project was initially proposed around a hundred years ago and over time was repeatedly rejected as being far too expensive to ever make sense and then raised again and again for consideration. At the time the work started there was a hundred years of literature going into detail about the many complexities involving other power, water, and sewer infrastructure as well as multiple other subway lines and difficult geological constraints. Well before any work was done it was extremely well established that a Second Avenue subway could only ever be astronomically expensive. Taking a project that was refused for a hundred years because of the apparent extreme difficulties and using that as an example of how US infrastructure costs too much is blatant manipulation. The nearest popular comparison I can think of would be saying that American military efforts cost too much because D-Day was shockingly expensive. Military conflicts don't work that way and neither does infrastructure construction.
- Shacklz 5y ago
  Reading comprehension. They may or may not have picked an unfortunate example to make their point, but that by no means refutes their initial statement: > Mile for mile, studies show the U.S. spends more than all but five other countries in the world on public transit, and more on roads than any other country that discloses spending data.
- asdff 5y ago
  Replace the second avenue subway with any other major passenger rail line built in the US in the last ten years, look at the costs per mile of track laid, and see that this is not some unique geological issue with manhattan but a national issue with the ability to cheaply and quickly construct capital improvements.
  - m0llusk 5y ago
    That makes no sense. Most subways are built with cut and cover. The Second Avenue was only made possible with the very latest in tunneling technology. And that meant a path being dug carefully around multiple existing subways, lots of other infrastructure, and the relatively delicate foundations of old buildings. Furthermore, as I pointed out, the extreme impracticality of the Second Avenue subway was documented starting from the first proposal around a hundred years ago which was rejected as being too expensive to make sense. And that was the first of many such studies. Yes, we need to figure out infrastructure and have some problems, but a project that was known to be essentially impossible for a hundred years is being used as a way to bump the averages here. It is not possible to effectively or reasonably generalize based on the most extreme exception available.
rootusrootus 5y ago
I still remember when Oregon paid $175M to plan the new I5 bridge across the Columbia River, only for the entire plan to collapse. That is close to 40% of what the nearby Glenn Jackson I205 bridge cost in total. $114M of that went to one contractor (and their subs).
bearjaws 5y ago
I am of the opinion that continuing to build out all these long 'runs' of infrastructure to serve a even more spread out populace is a dead end. Where I live we spent tens of billions expanding highway infrastructure, and it has not improved the lives of anyone meaningfully, traffic is as bad as its ever been. We need to spend more money creating better metropolitan areas that people want to live in, rather than using tax payer money to support fewer and fewer people.
- BurningFrog 5y ago
  If you double your highways and traffic stays as bad, your highway system is delivering twice as much transportation. That is a clear improvement.
  - francisofascii 5y ago
    Not really. Doubling your commute length is not an improvement. I have noticed places with heavier traffic tend to have shorter distances to your destination. So your total time is the same regardless.
    - rictic 5y ago
      Life is more than just commute time. When commuting further distances you have more options of where to live and where to work.
    - BurningFrog 5y ago
      I think you misread me. Doubling your commute length had nothing to do with my argument.
      - francisofascii 5y ago
        I was just using commute as an example. More transportation does not always translate to a positive good. It depends on other factors.
  - 5y ago
pxeboot 5y ago
I have worked on government IT projects. A long standing joke for writing quotes was "For local/state government, add a zero. For the feds, add two zeros". This wasn't entirely accurate, but often close.
AlexTWithBeard 5y ago
My pet theory: because this is not a priority? The NY ex-governor Cuomo. He's not without dark spots, but a lot of infrastructure projects have been running during his time in the office: Moynihan hall train, LIRR double-track to Ronkonkoma and so on. Nevertheless, it was decided that moral qualities of the governor are more important than his ability to push projects to completion. So nope, Mr. Cuomo, you're not perfect. Get out. And there is a queue of smart, nice, efficient and highly moral people lined up outside to become NY governors.
- slymon99 5y ago
  "Moral qualities"? We aren't talking about Cuomo cheating on his wife, he used his position of authority to sexually harass eleven women.
  - AlexTWithBeard 5y ago
    Then fine the shit out of him, install a watch to make sure it doesn't happen again and let him keep doing things he's good at.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - notreallyserio 5y ago
      I don't like the idea of having to hire staff to monitor someone 24x7 to ensure he stays on task and doesn't drive away coworkers and employees with harassment just because "he's good at" part of his job. That doesn't make any sense.
      - AlexTWithBeard 5y ago
        Checks and balances is a staple of any functioning system.
- HanShotFirst 5y ago
  Cuomo literally harrased his own highly competent NYC Transit director into resigning, for disagreements and stealing the spotlight. The LGA airtrain is an expensive boondoggle that is thankfully looking like it will be canceled. He was into large statement projects he could slap his name on regardless of actual need because he was clearly a huge narcissist.
vdance 5y ago
Strange question, maybe? I'm an expat living in Romania and I always appreciate and marvel at the efficiency of Romania to have/enable providers to sell an unlimited 4G mobile service plan, that (for me) also works in the middle of nowhere here in RO for 5 euros per month. Thoughts? BTW, it makes buying a service plan in KS, USA that barely works in various areas feel a bit like a scam...
- ducttapecrown 5y ago
  A service plan in the US probably does cover a larger amount of total area than on in Romania, though.
  - DrJokepu 5y ago
    A Romanian service plan covers the entire European Union.
    - ducttapecrown 5y ago
      That's a lot bigger area than I thought! Great point. Out of curiosity, I looked it up and the USA is actually 2.3 times bigger than the EU in terms of land area. The land area of Europe is much larger than the land area of the USA, so if EU service plans cover more land area than just the EU they could still have more coverage...
- nine_k 5y ago
  I'd compare average household incomes. US mobile carriers just know they can charge more, and people will be able to pay.
zip1234 5y ago
If you are interested in this topic, a good follow on Twitter is Marco Chitti--he compares reasons for high costs of infrastructure in US to other countries: https://twitter.com/ChittiMarco https://twitter.com/ChittiMarco One of the things he mentions is lack of use of prefab: https://twitter.com/ChittiMarco/status/1460674103464140801 https://twitter.com/ChittiMarco/status/1460674103464140801
carabiner 5y ago
How was China able to blanket their entire country in high-speed rail in less time than it'll take to a build a single line in California? Is it just more manpower?
- danny_codes 5y ago
  No, it's entirely politics and policy. California has an extremely cumbersome legal baggage that drags against public projects. Strong public unions, poorly implemented environmental protection laws, and a legal code that enables rampant NIMBYism are, IMO, the main limiting factors for Californian growth. We could today pass legislation that circumvented all of this nonsense, and we would see HSR rapidly built across CA. I would guess that for these sorts of projects the actual building part is relatively cheap and simple: it's the endless legal battles, plan changes, and political maneuvering that balloons cost. China doesn't have this problem. If the CCP is unified on some policy, no local protectionist politicians can slow them down.
  - carabiner 5y ago
    Yeah, and I know China + civil rights etc. I wonder what specific civil rights abuses occurred in building their HSR? Was it similar to the US use of eminent domain to acquire land for building the interstate highways? Maybe we should bring that back. I'm seriously in awe of the Chinese government these days. In 30 years, they went from a raw labor and manufacturing country, to landing rovers on Mars. They built new hospitals in days during the pandemic, and will soon be deploying brand new nuclear reactors. They'll probably have a dozen by the time we approve one. In the US, we're having national debates over whether horse dewormer cures COVID. We sound like a laughingstock of irrational, argumentative kids. I can't believe it. I see China had a HSR crash that killed 40. That seems comparable in governmental fuckups to the FAA oversight with the 737 MAX (killed 346).
    - geodel 5y ago
      I think the American individual pursuit of happiness is not compatible with Chinese good for society approach. Now it feels good to think that one can combine all the good stuff from different systems and make a best system but somehow it is not possible.
alkonaut 5y ago
> Dialing back citizens’ rights to participate in public projects would seem politically unfeasible. So is having design processes decoupled from project budgets. Just restrict the participation to budget neutral things. The political decision to build something and what it can cost can’t be followed by another process where it snowballs to 5x the cost?
the-alchemist 5y ago
For those interested in a real deep dive, and I mean, deep, check out the blog https://pedestrianobservations.com/construction-costs/ https://pedestrianobservations.com/construction-costs/. And the comments are super informative! It makes a lot of complex analyses using the best cost information available, and compares projects across countries, states, geography, politics, etc. I'm impressed by the technical engineering analyses. We IT people could learn a thing or two. ;) Like, "this subway project in NYC cost $N billion USD, which cannot be compared to this subway project in France, which cost $M billion EUR, because of the diameter of the tunnel used and the composition of the dirt under the ground."
GhettoComputers 5y ago
>MBTA’s dearth of staff capacity and project management expertise was a thornier issue. Despite GLX being Boston’s costliest rail project in history, only a handful of dedicated staff members were working on managing it at any given time, the researchers found. What’s a handful? A fist sized amount is how many?
Shadonototra 5y ago
because we are animals stuck on a little dying planet and we believe money is what gonna save us we'll transcend humankind the day we stop trying to profit from each other or worry about "how much it'll cost" capitalism and its market don't want your street to look nice if it's not gonna make them generate profit, even if it makes you happy the market doesn't want it!
- rowathay 5y ago
  Clearly you’ve rejected Capitalism because you don’t properly capitalize anything.
  - Shadonototra 5y ago
    oh i do, don't worry about that, i don't even need to work anymore because of that i get to realize how wrong it is
spoonjim 5y ago
It all comes down to the ease of suing people in the US. Because of that, everyone gets insurance, the insurance companies mandate all kinds of inspections, all vendors need to be certified and bonded, and go through a 4000 hour licensing process, etc. Probably 500 fewer people die a year of workplace accidents and similar because of all these rules, but hundreds of thousands die of air pollution and economic distress due to the low return on the dollar.
bell-cot 5y ago
Big picture answer - because the U.S has very little constituency for economical, timely, and competent construction of actual working infrastructure. Vs. political posturing, profiteering, NIMBYism, etc. - all of those have large, savvy, and highly motivated constituencies.
cletus 5y ago
Here's my favourite example of this. NYC recently opened the first stage of the Second Avenue Subway. This is a project that was initially started ~90 years ago and has been started and stopped multiple times in the intervening years. I believe the final version used none of the original tunnels however. It cost ~$6B for 1.5 miles of track [1]. The budget was padded at probably every level (eg [2]). There are a bunch of other contributing factors. Now compare Crossrail [3]. This is a hugely ambitious project to build some 117km of track and 21km of tunnels under London in an east-west direction connecting Kent, Essex, Heathrow, central London and the Thames Valley. This was in the planning stage in the early 2000s (possibly earlier) and construction commenced in 2009 or so. It is near completion, only 2-3 years behind the original schedule (that I recall from 2003 at least) with cost overruns of around 20% (IIRC) coming out to ~17B pounds. The UK and US are similarly developed industrialized nations. NYC and London are large cities with all the problems that entails. Actually, London is far worse because it's been for literally thousands of years, including some ~500 years of Roman occupation. The scale of Crossrail (adjusted for cost) compared to the Second Avenue Subway is unreal. It's basically an order of magnitude. The reasons for this are complex. There's no single determining factor. There is failure all the way from the Federal through the state and local governments as well as with the companies that build these things, the oversight of those projects, how the bids are awarded and the people who are actually doing the work. This should at least convince you that there is a problem and it's absolutely massive. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Avenue_Subway https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Avenue_Subway [2]: https://jalopnik.com/heres-the-most-damning-report-yet-on-why-the-new-york-c-1821651731 https://jalopnik.com/heres-the-most-damning-report-yet-on-wh... [3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crossrail https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crossrail
- my123 5y ago
  Also see the Grand Paris Express railway lines, 200km of new track mostly undergound... and still way below US costs.
- nouveaux 5y ago
  Someone else's comment further down on this subject: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29491371 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29491371
Nasrudith 5y ago
One "obvious" solution for the issue of building projects while still respecting citizen rights would be to have them all given public approval votes. If approved that mandate could shield it from disruptions that could turn it entirely into a waste or make lawyers the biggest expense. I believe that the grounds for lawsuits against passed ballot initiatives are limited mostly to constitutionality. Even if it just resulted in civil engineers drawing up every possibility to try to solve the issue that would at least support the proper expertise.
analog31 5y ago
Just as with health care, when everybody is accusing someone else of gouging us, chances are, everybody is gouging us. I'm curious, do other countries handle as much of public construction with as many layers of private contractors as we do?
hardwaregeek 5y ago
I always reference the Power Broker when it comes to urban planning, but in particular I'd like to reference the language Caro uses to describe how Moses built his creations: driving, ramming, pushing. Getting something built in New York is a process of force, of sheer will, of political domineering. It's a nice sentiment to view building as a collective effort where we all come together in a democratic process and build something that we all love. But that's just not true. It's a process by which some will lose and many will win. It's a process that, for better or worse, will have long term effects that are only understood years after the fact. It's also a process that is not suited to an electoral system with candidates who leave office after a few years. You need someone who will sustain the effort for decades, who will not buck or bend, even to public will, and who can offer the institutional knowledge that the article mentions. This does provoke a rather tricky question: Is too much democracy bad for public works? Because someone like Moses was ultimately a dictator. And granted, Moses caused horrific damage to many neighborhoods, carved racism into the city's structure, and irreparably shifted the city in favor of cars. But he also got stuff done and it's debatable that a more democratic system would have accomplished even half of what he did.
addicted 5y ago
Some reasons that almost certainly contribute to the ballooning costs of US infrastructure, although I cannot really tell what the impact is: 1) Not Invented Here syndrome. This pervades the US, not just in infrastructure, but it stands out in infrastructure simply because of how backwards US infrastructure is relative to most of the rest of the world (and not just rich countries). US infrastructure planning seems to exist in a vacuum, and pretends the rest of the world doesn't exist. Heck, it gets even worse and one district will pretend that a project conducted in a neighboring district didn't exist. Therefore American infrastructure planning never learns best practices from the rest of the world, repeat mistakes everyone else has made, refuses to use standard parts and products leading to much more expensive customized parts and products, refuses to use standardized plans, requiring expertise to build out customized plans, etc. 2) American infrastructure supporters are so starved of any infrastructure investment that they've made the spending of money an end in itself. So unlike infrastructure supporters in the rest of the world, who in addition to lobbying for more funding also try to ensure better plans so they get the most bang for the buck, American infrastructure supporters spend most of their time in just raising money. This has been shifting, thankfully, but it's still a process that's moving too slowly. 3) Not building infrastructure. The US simply hasn't built infrastructure in a while, so it lacks the expertise, logistics, and manufacturing capabilities to do this cheaply. Combined with #1 where the US refuses to seek help from outside, this is a recipe for bloated costs. 4) Patchwork of Regulations. But not the way you think. The US has far fewer regulations than many countries that build infrastructure at a fraction of the cost of the US. But the US has random regulations spread across every level. A tiny neighborhood will set standards based on no expertise whatsoever. Navigating this patchwork of regulations and approvals, etc., is a nightmare. Americans like to defend it as "democracy", but it's really a parody of democracy.
dkobia 5y ago
Don’t agree with Elon Musk on many things but this one hit home: "…it does not make sense to take the job of capital allocation away from people with a demonstrated great skill in capital allocation and give it to an entity that has demonstrated very poor skill in capital allocation"
hunglee2 5y ago
there a vicious circle here - the more it costs, the less you do, the less experience you have of doing it, the more it is going to cost when you do do it. It is the equivalent of getting first time software engineers to build an enterprise wide system via Waterfall - of course it will screw up, take years, likely won't work as specified, which will then increase risk aversion for a future effort.
errcorrectcode 5y ago
All I want to know is: Why are there so many fucking potholes in ATX and Palo Alto CA?
sleepysysadmin 5y ago
>If history is a guide, President Joe Biden’s $1.3 trillion investment may not fund nearly as much transportation as it would in much of the rest of the world. The article and comments seem to align in that it's portrayed as 'inefficient' but missing that the bill doesn't have much infrastructure in it. It does have $10 billion for a civilian climate corp: https://www.npr.org/2021/05/11/993976948/reaching-back-to-the-new-deal-biden-proposes-a-civilian-climate-corps https://www.npr.org/2021/05/11/993976948/reaching-back-to-th... $20 Billion to Advance Racial Equity and Environmental Justice, for which i don't know what that means but that's not infrastructure. $175 Billion in Subsidies for Electric Vehicles but only if they are built by unionized workers. Tesla/Musk pretty upset. $213 Billion to Build/Retrofit 2 Million buildings. Not exactly infrastructure and guess who is earmarked for that... $25 Billion for Government Childcare Programs again not infrastructure. These might be good ideas but it's not infrastructure. Infrastructure costs so much because it's not being bought. The money is going to lots of other things.

164 points by jseliger 5y ago

It’s dysfunctional on purpose. Media is busy with identity politics and trumpism, no checks and balances with efficiency of the government. Doesn’t bring in the clicks. Local media is extinct so local municipalities get a free pass.

WhisperingShiba 5y ago
Uh oh things are not looking good for our fair nation. Fortunately it seems like China isnt doing the best either, but in other ways. Hopefully we fall together.
- systemvoltage 5y ago
  The internet sort of centralized journalism. Local newspapers couldn’t keep up. I remember my dad reading local printed newspaper and always keeping abreast of what issues impacted local infra, municipality effectiveness, elections and general know how about how the local gov functioned. No one cares about it anymore. Instead, a friend of mine is asking me about Cuomo’s sexual assault case - mind you, he lives in Perth, Australia. Who cares!
  - WhisperingShiba 5y ago
    So how do we go back? If our problem is human nature, perhaps we just have to survive long enough, and the human organism will self-correct. I want to overtake small cities and make an escape rout for people who feel trapped in society, like me. The problem is that you need money in order to make jobs in those cities. Basically we are just stuck waiting for culture to change again.

neonate 5y ago

https://archive.md/XQQZc https://archive.md/XQQZc

ihsw 5y ago

Infrastructure funding is a jobs creation program with an occasional side-effect of providing infrastructure to the public.

_xnmw 5y ago

Because the US has an unlimited supply of the world's reserve currency, so there is no incentive to be economical.

distribot 5y ago
But the local governments executing these projects have very fixed budgets. They can't just fire up the money printer.
- fdgsdfogijq 5y ago
  Local government officials have no real incentive to get the most for their money. They "get the job done", but I really doubt they are anywhere close to efficient
  - distribot 5y ago
    I think the mayor of NYC has a strong incentive to get credit for improving their subway system.
    - NovemberWhiskey 5y ago
      Perhaps surprisingly, the NYC subway is run by the MTA, over which the mayor has no control; it's run by the state government up in Albany.
  - vkou 5y ago
    They would, if our democracy worked better. People care deeply about where municipal tax money is going. Unfortunately, most of the time, municipal governments are entirely controlled by an unholy alliance between local real estate moguls, and the town's chamber of commerce, so 'what their constituents want' is rarely a priority for them.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
sofard 5y ago

dantheman 5y ago

Corruption

Finnucane 5y ago
Which never happens in Europe.

sofard 5y ago

I was a management consultant ages ago and worked on large capital projects. In my experience (as the article mentions) it was a mix of: 1. Red tape & public "input" 2. Layers of contractors and subcontractors, each taking their slice 3. No real incentives for governments to be cost sensitive. Usually capital projects last well into the next administration. 4. Too many cooks in the kitchen and consultations

phenkdo 5y ago
IMO #2 takes the cake (rest is all icing)
- lotsofpulp 5y ago
  In my experience with construction projects, legal costs and liabilities take the cake. Once something is in court, there is zero telling how long and how much money it takes to resolve.
  - jltsiren 5y ago
    This is interesting from a foreign perspective. I still follow urban planning in Helsinki, Finland. Major public projects always face opposition and go to court, but it's not a big deal. Because zoning plans and similar project plans are decisions made by public officials, all complaints about them go to the administrative court system. Administrative courts don't care about the substance of the argument. (That's for elected representatives.) They only determine if the officials followed all appropriate regulations and decisiomaking processes. Going to administrative court is cheap enough and fast enough that the costs and delays are usually included in the project plan. Sometime the court overturns the decision, delaying or canceling the project. Sometimes their justifications are stupid and sometimes there are unintended consequences. Regardless, the system more or less works most of the time.
    - maccolgan 5y ago
      Sounds like a despotate, residents are fucked if one of the officials make a wrong decision.

darkwizard42 5y ago

Why aren't contracts to build the projects tightly written to avoid cost ballooning? When a service is to be provided at a certain cost, it should be provided at certain cost. Some contingencies should be built in (if something gets discovered that was unexpected) but how on earth does every municipal project seem to have so much invested in budget oversight and contractors overbilling or needing overtime to make things happen. If someone is painting my house, I get a quote for the job and the date it will be completed. I don't find myself paying them more unless its for something outside of what we specified together and they quoted. Building on government contracts should be solid money but it seems like every time the taxpayer gets fleeced and the end result is barely functional/impactful.

lotsofpulp 5y ago
It is easy to say, and tough to do. Big projects have almost unlimited liability. The entities involved can get taken to court for pollution concerns, environmental concerns, get caught up in local politics. And once something is in the courts, the whole timeframe is completely up in the air. One of the places I lived had Walmart wanting to build a Walmart Supercenter, and convert their current Walmart into a Sams Club. The non Walmart grocery store (which was garbage in terms of quality and service) and a Sams Club competitor tied up Walmart in court over the status of some endangered garden snake. It was obvious nonsense, but it would have taken so long to untangle legally that Walmart said screw it and moved on.
vkk8 5y ago
This is what I'm also wondering. What is the point of making a contract in the first place if the price quoted is not binding? If the provider needs more material or manpower or whatever than expected, then it should be their fucking problem and not the clients. The possibility of unexpected stuff happening should, of course, also be taken into account in the initial price quote since the provider should be much better at estimating the probability of something happening than the client.
- g_p 5y ago
  The problem when dealing with government or public works is that the provider simply isn't better at estimating that probability, since they aren't empowered to bulldoze ahead. The contractor can accurately price in (and insure against) technical risks like the risk of accidentally striking a cable while digging, and they can mitigate this as well (looking at the quality of cable mapping data, using detectors etc.) What the contractor can't factor in is all the (local) government politics and bureaucracy. Where things fall on the financial year calendar, whether they will have to spend the money before or after April, whether they will have to pause works because a resident legally challenges the works, whether the client has even asked for the right thing, or if it will emerge while planning the work that they have made major errors etc. When dealing with a well-specified, fixed-scope piece of work, you are right - the provider should eat that. When dealing with an uninformed non-expert customer (i.e. most public sector or government contracts), nobody in their right mind would take on that risk, except some of the big government outsourcing contractors, who would all quote insane prices based on past "actual costs" after factoring in all the nonsense from previous work.

Finnucane 5y ago

At least the GLX is a little further along now. The location in the photo at the top of the article is near my house, and the new trackbed there is complete.

rp1 5y ago

Both of my parents are in civil engineering and construction in NYC. As an outside observer, what I see is that the management of projects is not set up in a sustainable way and is just bad. The heads of important departments are political appointees. Most of the time, appointments go to political friends, not to competent managers with extensive knowledge of the field. Also, the assignments are constantly changing as elected officials change.

KingMachiavelli 5y ago

Every time any land is going to be developed where I live (Denver/Boulder/etc.), there is always a thread on Nextdoor advocating for people to stop it by raising environmental concerns and putting in a ton of comments. If 1/10 projects get canceled due to individual objections that means a lot of time and money gets wasted. Another 4/10 projects might eventually get built but only after long drawn out discussions and after many iterations to address individual concerns making the project less standardized and more expensive. The remaining projects that built aren't really infrastructure projects rather they are statement pieces. Instead of building a $200M subway station we build a $1B community gathering area that includes a subway station. The optimistic hope is that these larger projects will encourage public adoption and support for more of these types of projects but in reality their costs spiral out of control and construction takes far too long at which point the public is just tired.

davidw 5y ago
The article hints at this NIMBYism. Many of the other things that factor in are not unique to the US. Government waste, bureaucracy, etc... are all things in other wealthy countries too, but NIMBYism and 'public input' seems to carry more weight in the US.
JohnWhigham 5y ago
It's things like this that make me yearn for the government of yore that just fucking did it, no questions asked i.e. the federal government laying out the interstate highway system. They didn't care it tore apart neighborhoods, they did it because if they didn't, the evil Soviets would eventually build a better highway system and the US couldn't have that embarrassment. A shitty motivator? Sure, but it was a motivator. Now in the 3 decades since the end of the Cold War, what accomplishments has any government done that rivals what happened during the Cold War era? None.
- truculent 5y ago
  But isn’t a lot of the bad infrastructure and urban sprawl a consequence of those very decisions? Perhaps a more considered approach would have worked better in the long term. For instance, in Amsterdam, local people fought back against plans to put highways through the city which has resulted in a much more pleasant urban environment.

wnevets 5y ago

or its for similar reasons rewriting existing software can take so much time and money. It's way easier to build a subway (or software) when you don't have to worry about the existing needs of the customer or people who live in or around the area.

mikewarot 5y ago

Once the US had railroad companies that laid rail at a mile per day (mostly crap rail, but enough to count), that was when the incentives were all aligned, and a huge amount of resources were mobilized and ready to deploy. Once the US pulled of the completely absurd task of putting a man on the moon and then returning him safely to earth, in less than a decade. All the incentives were aligned, it had public support, and a huge amount of resources were mobilized and ready to deploy. We're not deploying huge resources on our infrastructure projects, we're piecemealing them. I've got a branch rail line going in at the end of my street. [1] The public input/planning process went on for years, and only now are they starting to relocate utilities, put up fences, etc. There's no one entity in charge of all the layers of the project, it's all hired contractors and inter-agency cooperation. It will be done, likely in 3 years or so. This line is a total of about 9 miles long for about $945 Million. The worst part about it for me is the insidious nature of the funding they're using. They're doing "Tax Increment Financing" which means that any increase in property tax revenues theoretically caused by the "improvement" of my house go to pay off the construction bonds. Let's say there is NO improvement, but inflation doubles taxes in the next decade. The town now gets the same dollar amount, but half of the funding it used to get, and the rest goes to the bond holders. This will strangle our schools which depend on local real estate taxes. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Lake_Corridor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Lake_Corridor PS: Just across the state line is a defunct Country Club, which is in close enough to the station to qualify for "TIF" improvements, and the husband of the local State Representative pushing for the project, just happens to be the a real estate developer interested in said property.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
OldHand2018 5y ago
And don't you just love that the trains they'll be running will consist of end-of-life Metra coaches that they're paying to have refurbished? https://www.chicagotribune.com/suburbs/post-tribune/ct-ptb-nictd-meet-double-track-st-0126-20210125-vslmopf7j5f55pkx3uiedgoecm-story.html https://www.chicagotribune.com/suburbs/post-tribune/ct-ptb-n... These are the new Metra coaches, BTW: https://chi.streetsblog.org/2021/01/13/metra-board-chooses-new-modern-passenger-rail-cars-to-replace-1950s-gallery-cars/ https://chi.streetsblog.org/2021/01/13/metra-board-chooses-n...

ivankirigin 5y ago

NEPA

jjtheblunt 5y ago
?
- ivankirigin 5y ago
  Regulations slow the pace of building. Good article here: https://medium.com/cgo-benchmark/why-are-we-so-slow-today-c34dad4d2bff https://medium.com/cgo-benchmark/why-are-we-so-slow-today-c3... Good recent discussion here, including other incentives: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bzMTlBddJ-E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bzMTlBddJ-E
  - jjtheblunt 5y ago
    thanks!
- tastyfreeze 5y ago
  National Environmental Protection Act In other words, every infrastructure project is required to prove that they are not harming habitats or disturbing native cultural sites or any of the myriad other types of sites that are protected.
  - jjtheblunt 5y ago
    Thank you!
tastyfreeze 5y ago
Having worked on software to track the mountain of paperwork for NEPA compliance of road projects I agree. But, I would expand it to just say bureaucracy or over-regulation. We can't build a damn thing without getting approval or licenses from multiple agencies after satisfying their every whim. Every regulation doesn't just make the project cost more. We are also paying for the administration and enforcement of those regulations. We pay on both sides when it is a State DOT doing the project. Residents of the State pay for staff to make sure they are satisfying all the NEPA requirements and Federal staff to make sure that the State DOT is in compliance.

throwaway0a5e 5y ago

Doesn't help that people have short memories. Remember the big dig? Textbook pork filled boondoggle in every way. Yet here we are 10yr later and there's no shortage of people with goldfish memories trying to defend it because "well the greenway is kind of cool". Government isn't idiots. They know that you'll forget. So they spend money without a care in the world and then give non answers when asked. Time works its magic and they get off scott free never being held accountable for wasting public resources.

InTheArena 5y ago

This misses a fundamental point - the goal of this is not to fund infrastructure - it's to fund people who vote for people who vote for infrastructure. There is zero incentive to run on time and on-budget, and every incentive to milk more government cash, so that people in power can get election contributions, that stay in power. If you also deny money to people who didn't vote for you, then all the better as well. See the union restrictions on EV money in this bill. Why help GM, when you can help GM and hurt Tesla, all in one! Doesn't matter if it's (R) or (D), or union versus non-union. It's profit-seeking across the board.

DennisP 5y ago
From the article, Istanbul gets things built a lot cheaper, partly because: > Whereas Boston might only build one new transit line every few decades, Istanbul builds dozens. Seems like building dozens of times as much would even more effectively "fund people who vote for people who vote for infrastructure." So why aren't we like Istanbul?
- munk-a 5y ago
  The more regular an activity is the more likely you're going to have people specialized in it - you'll have much more accurate estimates around costs and time to deliver since people will have more recent experience getting it done and you'll have infrastructure around building infrastructure. When these projects are rarer it becomes infeasible for a company to dedicate itself to the labour so you end up with residential construction firms digging tunnels and laying road foundations - and needing to learn a lot as they go or bring in consultants. The more you build - especially the more you commit to build in the future - the cheaper it will be. If everything is billed as a one-off then the specialized labour doesn't settle in the local market and you end up paying large costs over and over.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - DennisP 5y ago

candyman 5y ago

Thirty years ago when you needed to install new computers in an office I remember it took us weeks to get the cable (Ethernet) installed because one contractor had to pull the cable and cut it at each workstation, another contractor had to come and put the connector on the cable and yet another had to come and plug the cable into the machine. Believe me we were tempted to sneak in one weekend and do the whole thing ourselves but were severely warned about the consequences. So what could have been done in a day by one or two guys took over a month because you couldn't even schedule the second service until the first was done. I imagine this kind of thing is everywhere when it comes to building real infrastructure.

human 5y ago
In real life it’s even worse. None of the suppliers actually show up, they ramp up the price and deliver a failing product. Then they all blame the previous guy.
chrisseaton 5y ago
> another contractor had to come and put the connector on the cable ... severely warned about the consequences This kind of job moating and threats is a union thing isn't it?
- drak0n1c 5y ago
  Yes, my partner was a conference planner and whenever they had one in NYC in the Time offices their team wasn't allowed to adjust tables by themselves, everything had to be done by formal work order tickets and only union hands could touch anything, even equipment they owned and brought in themselves. Coincidentally, this new infrastructure bill has union requirements for any EV work.
  - dr_dshiv 5y ago
    Unions get a bad rap. They don’t have to be bad. Everyone should have an incentive for efficiency.

missedthecue 5y ago

One thing the article misses is that construction worker productivity has been on the downtrend for decades https://cdn.substack.com/image/fetch/w_600,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fpbs.substack.com%2Fmedia%2FE4Cm6fLVgAAfX4e.png https://cdn.substack.com/image/fetch/w_600,c_limit,f_auto,q_...

Naac 5y ago
Please follow up to the article/source of this graph.
- missedthecue 5y ago
  https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/what-happened-to-construction-productivity https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/what-happened-to-construct...

m0llusk 5y ago

This article is toxic garbage. The best example of this is how the NYC Second Avenue subway project is cited as an example of costs out of control. This project was initially proposed around a hundred years ago and over time was repeatedly rejected as being far too expensive to ever make sense and then raised again and again for consideration. At the time the work started there was a hundred years of literature going into detail about the many complexities involving other power, water, and sewer infrastructure as well as multiple other subway lines and difficult geological constraints. Well before any work was done it was extremely well established that a Second Avenue subway could only ever be astronomically expensive. Taking a project that was refused for a hundred years because of the apparent extreme difficulties and using that as an example of how US infrastructure costs too much is blatant manipulation. The nearest popular comparison I can think of would be saying that American military efforts cost too much because D-Day was shockingly expensive. Military conflicts don't work that way and neither does infrastructure construction.

Shacklz 5y ago
Reading comprehension. They may or may not have picked an unfortunate example to make their point, but that by no means refutes their initial statement: > Mile for mile, studies show the U.S. spends more than all but five other countries in the world on public transit, and more on roads than any other country that discloses spending data.
asdff 5y ago
Replace the second avenue subway with any other major passenger rail line built in the US in the last ten years, look at the costs per mile of track laid, and see that this is not some unique geological issue with manhattan but a national issue with the ability to cheaply and quickly construct capital improvements.
- m0llusk 5y ago
  That makes no sense. Most subways are built with cut and cover. The Second Avenue was only made possible with the very latest in tunneling technology. And that meant a path being dug carefully around multiple existing subways, lots of other infrastructure, and the relatively delicate foundations of old buildings. Furthermore, as I pointed out, the extreme impracticality of the Second Avenue subway was documented starting from the first proposal around a hundred years ago which was rejected as being too expensive to make sense. And that was the first of many such studies. Yes, we need to figure out infrastructure and have some problems, but a project that was known to be essentially impossible for a hundred years is being used as a way to bump the averages here. It is not possible to effectively or reasonably generalize based on the most extreme exception available.

rootusrootus 5y ago

I still remember when Oregon paid $175M to plan the new I5 bridge across the Columbia River, only for the entire plan to collapse. That is close to 40% of what the nearby Glenn Jackson I205 bridge cost in total. $114M of that went to one contractor (and their subs).

bearjaws 5y ago

I am of the opinion that continuing to build out all these long 'runs' of infrastructure to serve a even more spread out populace is a dead end. Where I live we spent tens of billions expanding highway infrastructure, and it has not improved the lives of anyone meaningfully, traffic is as bad as its ever been. We need to spend more money creating better metropolitan areas that people want to live in, rather than using tax payer money to support fewer and fewer people.

BurningFrog 5y ago
If you double your highways and traffic stays as bad, your highway system is delivering twice as much transportation. That is a clear improvement.
- francisofascii 5y ago
  Not really. Doubling your commute length is not an improvement. I have noticed places with heavier traffic tend to have shorter distances to your destination. So your total time is the same regardless.
  - rictic 5y ago
    Life is more than just commute time. When commuting further distances you have more options of where to live and where to work.
  - BurningFrog 5y ago
    I think you misread me. Doubling your commute length had nothing to do with my argument.
    - francisofascii 5y ago
      I was just using commute as an example. More transportation does not always translate to a positive good. It depends on other factors.
- 5y ago

pxeboot 5y ago

I have worked on government IT projects. A long standing joke for writing quotes was "For local/state government, add a zero. For the feds, add two zeros". This wasn't entirely accurate, but often close.

AlexTWithBeard 5y ago

My pet theory: because this is not a priority? The NY ex-governor Cuomo. He's not without dark spots, but a lot of infrastructure projects have been running during his time in the office: Moynihan hall train, LIRR double-track to Ronkonkoma and so on. Nevertheless, it was decided that moral qualities of the governor are more important than his ability to push projects to completion. So nope, Mr. Cuomo, you're not perfect. Get out. And there is a queue of smart, nice, efficient and highly moral people lined up outside to become NY governors.

slymon99 5y ago
"Moral qualities"? We aren't talking about Cuomo cheating on his wife, he used his position of authority to sexually harass eleven women.
- AlexTWithBeard 5y ago
  Then fine the shit out of him, install a watch to make sure it doesn't happen again and let him keep doing things he's good at.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - notreallyserio 5y ago
    I don't like the idea of having to hire staff to monitor someone 24x7 to ensure he stays on task and doesn't drive away coworkers and employees with harassment just because "he's good at" part of his job. That doesn't make any sense.
    - AlexTWithBeard 5y ago
      Checks and balances is a staple of any functioning system.
HanShotFirst 5y ago
Cuomo literally harrased his own highly competent NYC Transit director into resigning, for disagreements and stealing the spotlight. The LGA airtrain is an expensive boondoggle that is thankfully looking like it will be canceled. He was into large statement projects he could slap his name on regardless of actual need because he was clearly a huge narcissist.

vdance 5y ago

Strange question, maybe? I'm an expat living in Romania and I always appreciate and marvel at the efficiency of Romania to have/enable providers to sell an unlimited 4G mobile service plan, that (for me) also works in the middle of nowhere here in RO for 5 euros per month. Thoughts? BTW, it makes buying a service plan in KS, USA that barely works in various areas feel a bit like a scam...

ducttapecrown 5y ago
A service plan in the US probably does cover a larger amount of total area than on in Romania, though.
- DrJokepu 5y ago
  A Romanian service plan covers the entire European Union.
  - ducttapecrown 5y ago
    That's a lot bigger area than I thought! Great point. Out of curiosity, I looked it up and the USA is actually 2.3 times bigger than the EU in terms of land area. The land area of Europe is much larger than the land area of the USA, so if EU service plans cover more land area than just the EU they could still have more coverage...
nine_k 5y ago
I'd compare average household incomes. US mobile carriers just know they can charge more, and people will be able to pay.

zip1234 5y ago

If you are interested in this topic, a good follow on Twitter is Marco Chitti--he compares reasons for high costs of infrastructure in US to other countries: https://twitter.com/ChittiMarco https://twitter.com/ChittiMarco One of the things he mentions is lack of use of prefab: https://twitter.com/ChittiMarco/status/1460674103464140801 https://twitter.com/ChittiMarco/status/1460674103464140801

carabiner 5y ago

How was China able to blanket their entire country in high-speed rail in less time than it'll take to a build a single line in California? Is it just more manpower?

danny_codes 5y ago
No, it's entirely politics and policy. California has an extremely cumbersome legal baggage that drags against public projects. Strong public unions, poorly implemented environmental protection laws, and a legal code that enables rampant NIMBYism are, IMO, the main limiting factors for Californian growth. We could today pass legislation that circumvented all of this nonsense, and we would see HSR rapidly built across CA. I would guess that for these sorts of projects the actual building part is relatively cheap and simple: it's the endless legal battles, plan changes, and political maneuvering that balloons cost. China doesn't have this problem. If the CCP is unified on some policy, no local protectionist politicians can slow them down.
- carabiner 5y ago
  Yeah, and I know China + civil rights etc. I wonder what specific civil rights abuses occurred in building their HSR? Was it similar to the US use of eminent domain to acquire land for building the interstate highways? Maybe we should bring that back. I'm seriously in awe of the Chinese government these days. In 30 years, they went from a raw labor and manufacturing country, to landing rovers on Mars. They built new hospitals in days during the pandemic, and will soon be deploying brand new nuclear reactors. They'll probably have a dozen by the time we approve one. In the US, we're having national debates over whether horse dewormer cures COVID. We sound like a laughingstock of irrational, argumentative kids. I can't believe it. I see China had a HSR crash that killed 40. That seems comparable in governmental fuckups to the FAA oversight with the 737 MAX (killed 346).
  - geodel 5y ago
    I think the American individual pursuit of happiness is not compatible with Chinese good for society approach. Now it feels good to think that one can combine all the good stuff from different systems and make a best system but somehow it is not possible.

alkonaut 5y ago

> Dialing back citizens’ rights to participate in public projects would seem politically unfeasible. So is having design processes decoupled from project budgets. Just restrict the participation to budget neutral things. The political decision to build something and what it can cost can’t be followed by another process where it snowballs to 5x the cost?

the-alchemist 5y ago

For those interested in a real deep dive, and I mean, deep, check out the blog https://pedestrianobservations.com/construction-costs/ https://pedestrianobservations.com/construction-costs/. And the comments are super informative! It makes a lot of complex analyses using the best cost information available, and compares projects across countries, states, geography, politics, etc. I'm impressed by the technical engineering analyses. We IT people could learn a thing or two. ;) Like, "this subway project in NYC cost $N billion USD, which cannot be compared to this subway project in France, which cost $M billion EUR, because of the diameter of the tunnel used and the composition of the dirt under the ground."

GhettoComputers 5y ago

>MBTA’s dearth of staff capacity and project management expertise was a thornier issue. Despite GLX being Boston’s costliest rail project in history, only a handful of dedicated staff members were working on managing it at any given time, the researchers found. What’s a handful? A fist sized amount is how many?

Shadonototra 5y ago

because we are animals stuck on a little dying planet and we believe money is what gonna save us we'll transcend humankind the day we stop trying to profit from each other or worry about "how much it'll cost" capitalism and its market don't want your street to look nice if it's not gonna make them generate profit, even if it makes you happy the market doesn't want it!

rowathay 5y ago
Clearly you’ve rejected Capitalism because you don’t properly capitalize anything.
- Shadonototra 5y ago
  oh i do, don't worry about that, i don't even need to work anymore because of that i get to realize how wrong it is

spoonjim 5y ago

It all comes down to the ease of suing people in the US. Because of that, everyone gets insurance, the insurance companies mandate all kinds of inspections, all vendors need to be certified and bonded, and go through a 4000 hour licensing process, etc. Probably 500 fewer people die a year of workplace accidents and similar because of all these rules, but hundreds of thousands die of air pollution and economic distress due to the low return on the dollar.

bell-cot 5y ago

Big picture answer - because the U.S has very little constituency for economical, timely, and competent construction of actual working infrastructure. Vs. political posturing, profiteering, NIMBYism, etc. - all of those have large, savvy, and highly motivated constituencies.

cletus 5y ago

Here's my favourite example of this. NYC recently opened the first stage of the Second Avenue Subway. This is a project that was initially started ~90 years ago and has been started and stopped multiple times in the intervening years. I believe the final version used none of the original tunnels however. It cost ~$6B for 1.5 miles of track [1]. The budget was padded at probably every level (eg [2]). There are a bunch of other contributing factors. Now compare Crossrail [3]. This is a hugely ambitious project to build some 117km of track and 21km of tunnels under London in an east-west direction connecting Kent, Essex, Heathrow, central London and the Thames Valley. This was in the planning stage in the early 2000s (possibly earlier) and construction commenced in 2009 or so. It is near completion, only 2-3 years behind the original schedule (that I recall from 2003 at least) with cost overruns of around 20% (IIRC) coming out to ~17B pounds. The UK and US are similarly developed industrialized nations. NYC and London are large cities with all the problems that entails. Actually, London is far worse because it's been for literally thousands of years, including some ~500 years of Roman occupation. The scale of Crossrail (adjusted for cost) compared to the Second Avenue Subway is unreal. It's basically an order of magnitude. The reasons for this are complex. There's no single determining factor. There is failure all the way from the Federal through the state and local governments as well as with the companies that build these things, the oversight of those projects, how the bids are awarded and the people who are actually doing the work. This should at least convince you that there is a problem and it's absolutely massive. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Avenue_Subway https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Avenue_Subway [2]: https://jalopnik.com/heres-the-most-damning-report-yet-on-why-the-new-york-c-1821651731 https://jalopnik.com/heres-the-most-damning-report-yet-on-wh... [3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crossrail https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crossrail

my123 5y ago
Also see the Grand Paris Express railway lines, 200km of new track mostly undergound... and still way below US costs.
nouveaux 5y ago
Someone else's comment further down on this subject: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29491371 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29491371

Nasrudith 5y ago

One "obvious" solution for the issue of building projects while still respecting citizen rights would be to have them all given public approval votes. If approved that mandate could shield it from disruptions that could turn it entirely into a waste or make lawyers the biggest expense. I believe that the grounds for lawsuits against passed ballot initiatives are limited mostly to constitutionality. Even if it just resulted in civil engineers drawing up every possibility to try to solve the issue that would at least support the proper expertise.

analog31 5y ago

Just as with health care, when everybody is accusing someone else of gouging us, chances are, everybody is gouging us. I'm curious, do other countries handle as much of public construction with as many layers of private contractors as we do?

hardwaregeek 5y ago

I always reference the Power Broker when it comes to urban planning, but in particular I'd like to reference the language Caro uses to describe how Moses built his creations: driving, ramming, pushing. Getting something built in New York is a process of force, of sheer will, of political domineering. It's a nice sentiment to view building as a collective effort where we all come together in a democratic process and build something that we all love. But that's just not true. It's a process by which some will lose and many will win. It's a process that, for better or worse, will have long term effects that are only understood years after the fact. It's also a process that is not suited to an electoral system with candidates who leave office after a few years. You need someone who will sustain the effort for decades, who will not buck or bend, even to public will, and who can offer the institutional knowledge that the article mentions. This does provoke a rather tricky question: Is too much democracy bad for public works? Because someone like Moses was ultimately a dictator. And granted, Moses caused horrific damage to many neighborhoods, carved racism into the city's structure, and irreparably shifted the city in favor of cars. But he also got stuff done and it's debatable that a more democratic system would have accomplished even half of what he did.

addicted 5y ago

Some reasons that almost certainly contribute to the ballooning costs of US infrastructure, although I cannot really tell what the impact is: 1) Not Invented Here syndrome. This pervades the US, not just in infrastructure, but it stands out in infrastructure simply because of how backwards US infrastructure is relative to most of the rest of the world (and not just rich countries). US infrastructure planning seems to exist in a vacuum, and pretends the rest of the world doesn't exist. Heck, it gets even worse and one district will pretend that a project conducted in a neighboring district didn't exist. Therefore American infrastructure planning never learns best practices from the rest of the world, repeat mistakes everyone else has made, refuses to use standard parts and products leading to much more expensive customized parts and products, refuses to use standardized plans, requiring expertise to build out customized plans, etc. 2) American infrastructure supporters are so starved of any infrastructure investment that they've made the spending of money an end in itself. So unlike infrastructure supporters in the rest of the world, who in addition to lobbying for more funding also try to ensure better plans so they get the most bang for the buck, American infrastructure supporters spend most of their time in just raising money. This has been shifting, thankfully, but it's still a process that's moving too slowly. 3) Not building infrastructure. The US simply hasn't built infrastructure in a while, so it lacks the expertise, logistics, and manufacturing capabilities to do this cheaply. Combined with #1 where the US refuses to seek help from outside, this is a recipe for bloated costs. 4) Patchwork of Regulations. But not the way you think. The US has far fewer regulations than many countries that build infrastructure at a fraction of the cost of the US. But the US has random regulations spread across every level. A tiny neighborhood will set standards based on no expertise whatsoever. Navigating this patchwork of regulations and approvals, etc., is a nightmare. Americans like to defend it as "democracy", but it's really a parody of democracy.

dkobia 5y ago

Don’t agree with Elon Musk on many things but this one hit home: "…it does not make sense to take the job of capital allocation away from people with a demonstrated great skill in capital allocation and give it to an entity that has demonstrated very poor skill in capital allocation"

hunglee2 5y ago

there a vicious circle here - the more it costs, the less you do, the less experience you have of doing it, the more it is going to cost when you do do it. It is the equivalent of getting first time software engineers to build an enterprise wide system via Waterfall - of course it will screw up, take years, likely won't work as specified, which will then increase risk aversion for a future effort.

errcorrectcode 5y ago

All I want to know is: Why are there so many fucking potholes in ATX and Palo Alto CA?

sleepysysadmin 5y ago

>If history is a guide, President Joe Biden’s $1.3 trillion investment may not fund nearly as much transportation as it would in much of the rest of the world. The article and comments seem to align in that it's portrayed as 'inefficient' but missing that the bill doesn't have much infrastructure in it. It does have $10 billion for a civilian climate corp: https://www.npr.org/2021/05/11/993976948/reaching-back-to-the-new-deal-biden-proposes-a-civilian-climate-corps https://www.npr.org/2021/05/11/993976948/reaching-back-to-th... $20 Billion to Advance Racial Equity and Environmental Justice, for which i don't know what that means but that's not infrastructure. $175 Billion in Subsidies for Electric Vehicles but only if they are built by unionized workers. Tesla/Musk pretty upset. $213 Billion to Build/Retrofit 2 Million buildings. Not exactly infrastructure and guess who is earmarked for that... $25 Billion for Government Childcare Programs again not infrastructure. These might be good ideas but it's not infrastructure. Infrastructure costs so much because it's not being bought. The money is going to lots of other things.