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Why America can’t build quickly anymore

• jspaetzel 5y ago
  Don't forget the perverse incentives of the folks working on these things. They don't get paid for projects getting completed, they bill by the hour. And if that wasn't bad enough, taking a call on the way from one job to another? Bill them both for the time.
• SubiculumCode 5y ago
  I've also heard that bands were better in the 60's and 70's than they are today...or...oh wait, is it just survivor-ship bias? We do have examples of building big things fast in history, but do we also have examples of projects taking way longer than they should?
• stjohnswarts 5y ago
  We seem to be able to throw up buildings pretty fast. At least here in Austin, but Texas as a hole works for years on anythign to do with roads. OMG it just takes so dang long. I suspect regulations and bureaucracy.
• thematrixturtle 5y ago
  > Today’s high gas prices are the perfect example. Americans are universally unhappy about the high short-run costs of energy and transportation. "High" meaning $4/gallon. Meanwhile in much of Europe, it's over 2 EUR per liter, or near $10/gallon. The US would look very different if gas was taxed at European levels.
  • glitchcrab 5y ago
    It's always made me chuckle when I see Americans complaining about their 'high' gas prices, even more so before this current price rise started. I'm in the UK and my nearest fuel station (which is pretty averagely priced in my area) is currently charging $10.50/gallon, and that's been steadily rising for some time now. I'm not sure it's plateaued yet either.
• Mountain_Skies 5y ago
  The eastside freeway in Atlanta doesn't exist because NIMBYs opposed it for years and the final stake through the heart of the project was when Jimmy Carter selected a site for his presidential library right in the middle of path the freeway was to take. Instead Atlanta got Freedom Parkway (most famous as the cover image for 'The Walking Dead'), a much lower capacity, much less useful road but also one that didn't destroy the surrounding neighborhoods like the Downtown Connector did with African-American neighborhoods such as Buttermilk Bottom. NIMBYism stops many useful projects but it also protects a lot worth saving.
• ilaksh 5y ago
  If America cannot continue to evolve, improve, and adapt, then its prosperity and leadership role will fade away. It doesn't matter how great our ideology or political systems are (or we think they are). It doesn't even really matter how many advanced weapons we have. You can't fight the whole world forever. I guess people would literally rather take the chance of America falling apart or the earth melting than let someone build a subway or new building near them.
• venkat223 5y ago
  Climate change is natural.To much thoughtless advancement of western countries try to sell that idea to imitate the East which is evolving with what is termed as"climate Change" ..All are bunkum...Live with it and enjoy life.
  • Waterluvian 5y ago
    This is a very common strategy for those who get easily overwhelmed with big things in life: declare that it’s meant to be that way so that you’re absolved of any sense of responsibility. The problem is that declaring “I am but a passenger” is self defeating: it inevitably robs you of agency to do anything meaningful in life.
• honksillet 5y ago
  I’m in my 40s. I’ve heard that we have X years multiple times and frankly I’m very skeptical.
• bluedino 5y ago
  It took us six months to have a local ISP run fiber for three blocks in a non-densely populated area. Spectrum wouldn't even touch it. Delay after delay in the permit process. And spent almost as much on permits as actually running the fiber. Then to top it off, we're near railroad tracks (fiber doesn't go anywhere near it) No wonder nobody wants to invest money in businesses in the city. And how can they attract any companies when there's no decent internet?
• formvoltron 5y ago
  We need robots to build for us. Possible?
• ClumsyPilot 5y ago
  I am convinced that this cannot be the whole story. The 'West' construction is not a mess because of bureocracy. It is a mess because of contractor disease and hollowing out of skills. First come the contractors - UK government needed to do contract tracing, and has contracted a private company to get medical proffesionals to call travelers that were diagnosed with covid. The private conoaby has no expertise in anything other that writing bids and proposals for government contra ts, they subcontracted someone else. Those subcontracted a call center that has people with no experience or understanding of medicine reading from a script and earning minimum wage while 4x their salary is pocketed. I see this all over the place, there are like 5 layers of subcontracting you must travel though before you find actual work being done. Second consider alck of long-term planning - uk has not been building nuclear power plants for decades, then started hincley point C. There was noone in the coutry with the experience requires to run a nuclear project of this scale. Then the project will be complete, with difficulty and delays and people train in the job, and the people will be lost again. The financing on that project was forced onto the company to keep construction costs off government balancesheet - they didnt want it to show up as debr for political reasons. So insted of government borrowing for 30 years at 0.3% interest the conpany has to borrow that money ar 3% interest, more than doubling the cost. I frequently see evidence of China and other asian nations being more technically skills and agile, for instance they were desinfecting their busses with UV-C before UK managed to figure out hand sanitising stations. We have done nothing to sort out ventilation in schools, we are removing masks even though they don't hurt anyone, and we are forcing peolle back into central london to prop up the commercial real estate bubble.
  • glitchcrab 5y ago
    Whilst I agree with a lot of your post (I am British), most of it was just a rant about the government's inadequate response to covid. It has pretty much nothing to do with this article.
    • makomk 5y ago
      It was an inaccurate rant about the UK's response to Covid too. The only part of calling up people with Covid to find their contacts which was contracted out was recruiting and employing them, fairly directly by the government, and of course medical professionals weren't used - those were busy giving medical care, and contact tracing was outside their area of expertise anyway. And the big reason it seemed inadequate is that the British press, quite frankly, outright lied about how well contact tracing worked in places like South Korea and about the downsides of their approach, which would not have been at all politically acceptable in the UK.
• kalu 5y ago
  Robert Moses made a career out of building fast in a time and place where public works were extremely inefficient due to corruption. He rose to power at a time when jobs were handed out as currency to collect votes. Robert Caro describes in great detail scenes where, for example, hundreds of city workers who were supposed to be working would instead camp out in parks passing around prostitutes and brown paper bags. The city was a wasteland of corruption and incompetence. Moses turned this around in a matter of years to build massive public works projects quickly and at a high level of quality. I guess my point is that things were very bad in New York before the 1920s. And one man found a way to turn that around. So we shouldn’t act as if the status quo is our destiny. That we are somehow witnessing something that is new in this country. Things can change. We can change them. It happened before.
• sytelus 5y ago
  The pattern looks a lot like changing existing code vs writing code from scratch. We have accumulated vast number of laws where making any change in the world is uphill battle. The advantage of places like China is that they we’re able to throw away existing code quickly.
• yoyopa 5y ago
  there's no safety net in america, and no recognition for doing good things, so people do not want to take risks and people do not want to work for the benefit of others... it's a much easier and better idea for most people to do nothing, or if they're going to do something, do it for themselves.
• DogOfTheGaps 5y ago
  A particularly absurd case of environmental review delaying a much needed project is congestion pricing in NYC. They are actually going to review the environmental impacts of a system that will decrease the number of cars on the road. What are they even reviewing? https://gothamist.com/news/mta-expects-congestion-pricing-to-start-at-the-end-of-2023 https://gothamist.com/news/mta-expects-congestion-pricing-to...
  • Gibbon1 5y ago
    One of the big issues with the California High Speed Rail is lawsuits dragging out the environmental review process. Ditto utility solar installations.
• pontifier 5y ago
  I'm in Arkansas, and I've been fighting the city for 2 years to get my power turned on and be able to use a building that I bought. It's freaking ridiculous.
  • Gibbon1 5y ago
    You point brings up something, in the US there are thousands of planning departments. And each one is it's own little fiefdom. Some are fine. Some enjoy screwing over people. Some are incompetent. Some are corrupt. If you bought a run down 6 plex and wanted to fix it up. SF the permitting would be a right pain. Berkeley would actively try to stop you. Oakland someone would want a bag of cash. Santa Cruz would allow it as long as you used a GC with proper connections.
• avidphantasm 5y ago
  The problem of public input vetoing low-carbon energy projects (including transmission) is really a symptom or side effect of the fact that we don’t have coherent global to national to regional to local energy policy. There is no responsibility for regions or localities to reduce carbon emissions, so these communities are not forced to make tradeoffs when commenting on local impacts of projects. What we need instead is to have carbon emissions reduction goals at all levels. Then a suite of efficiency and generation/transmission projects can be identified in each region that can contribute to those goals. Then, when those projects are being designed and approved (via an integrated process), the approval process can involve explicit tradeoffs. If the community, for example, has an exceptional wind energy resource, but doesn’t want to develop it for environmental or aesthetic reasons, then their regional climate action plan can be updated to use other mixes of efficiency and generation/transmission that would meet or exceed their goals. The community may then find that they would rather have the wind turbines than the alternatives. The “problem” with this approach is that it requires a level of urgency and coordination that we have only been able to muster in the past using wartime central planning. Not sure how to get around this, and this is a major problem given ideological biases against central planning in the US. The other problem is that in practice it will likely not be possible for both global and local climate goals to be satisfied while also minimizing local displeasure with the tradeoffs required. However, no system is perfect, and perhaps this system could at least provide a framework for identifying who is getting the short end of the stick and therefore to whom some sort of reparations can be made for “taking one for the team”.
• kkfx 5y ago
  IMVHO the ancient Italian proverb "presto & bene, raro avviene" (quick & well done, rarely happen) it's still valid: - acting quickly, with emergency powers/needs etc is a recipe to a disaster, things MUST be done as much as possible with accurate reasoning, that means more cost at initial phases but far less for the rest of the life; - when acting quickly is needed, things must be as much pre-digested as possible. USA and IMVHO the entire western world can't build quickly anymore because it have build too quickly in the past and now we are in a messy state. Quick growth of the recent past have led to too dense cities, to little room to evolve anything and now both available resources, lessons learned and analyze-paralyze make anything complicated. The so called Great Reset is actually needed, while definitively not as neoliberals have drawn it so far. Unfortunately such "reset", even if well driven at the slowest peace possible, will be (already is) far harmful anyway. IMVHO those who build quickly now because they can and they need (like China) know that well, but are locked-in in a state of things that leave very limited choices. For instance China can't nourish it's Citizens with internal resources, so it need to import many things, starting from food, and that's true for too many countries, and that's not only food. Not only oil. Not only other natural resources (metals, woods etc): people are constantly kept in semi-ignorant states to being able to drive them like a flock, that's true for all dictatorships and for formal (but not substantial) democracies, that's both the neoliberal idea of governing, the Chinese, Russians, Indian, ... idea of governing. Doing so *might* work under certain conditions but when you need to change it's a mess, most do not understand why they need to change. They fear (with good reasons) the change, they do accept being pastured under stable even if bad conditions but they react against any changes. To push a *quick* change the classic way is crisis/wars/disasters and the outcome is generally another big set of issues... To build quickly AND being able to correct issues that *always* happen we need something able to evolve, for instance we need to abolish cities, they are too dense and complex to evolve. And that's an issue because, yes, with actual tech (transportation, communications etc) we can abandon cities while remaining modern but we are probably too numerous for the usable land we have and for the amount of resources needed for the transaction. Such change it's also not just in housing and transportation means but also in social structures and organization. It can be done in terms of experiments, but on scale... Probably on scale a big war is needed. Unfortunately doing so with today tech and state of things means a big disaster, probably big enough to destroy humanity... That's is: a big mess.
• Razengan 5y ago
  Do they need to? They already have control over their populace (excessive policing etc.), so of course now they’ll spend more on controlling other populations (the insane military budget).
• dark-star 5y ago
  Not just America. I guess most (all?) countries have that problem. In Germany, Hitler built the whole Autobahn system in a couple of years. Now it takes 8 years to upgrade a 5km stretch of the Autobahn from 2 to 3 lanes. Yes, Nazi Germany was using lots of slave labor, but these days we have so many machines that it would require much less workforce to achieve the same result. Yet, you often see construction machinery standing idle next to the Autobahn for weeks, if not months, with no work being done
• bannedbybros 5y ago
• RyanGoosling 5y ago
  China doesn’t seem to have a problem.
• nickdothutton 5y ago
  There is an entire economy within the economy, based upon slowing things down. This has become so ingrained, and people are so accustomed to it, that most can’t even see it.
• hericium 5y ago
  US generates little production know-how since Wall Street moved production to China.
  • maxerickson 5y ago
    This is gratuitously false. US manufacturing output today is as high as it has ever been. Even low value add industries like steel production are at a significant percentage of their historical maximum output (they do tend to be relatively mechanized and automated and not job centers anymore).
    • gruez 5y ago
      >This is gratuitously false. US manufacturing output today is as high as it has ever been Right, but manufacturing's share of GDP is low as it has ever been. https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NV.IND.MANF.ZS?locations=US https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NV.IND.MANF.ZS?location...
      • wodenokoto 5y ago
        In this context that doesn’t matter.
      • nine_zeros 5y ago
        > Right, but manufacturing's share of GDP is low as it has ever been. That only means that we are creating more jobs than manufacturing can provide. There is no point in manufacturing more and more if current levels are enough. For an analogy, agriculture is only 2% of GDP but it is good enough to feed everyone. Increasing the percentage of GDP of agriculture is pointless.
      • sidlls 5y ago
        That's different from having the "know-how", though. We have the knowledge and ability to manufacture a lot--as much as or more than any past point in time. We just "produce" a lot more stuff that isn't manufactured now as a share of our economic output.
• hwers 5y ago
  Unions and safety. Quality of life and less risk for the workers which china et al has less of. Not a difficult question but this topic keeps coming up as some sort of indirect nudge to corrode those two components under the guise of an argument about global competitive advantage.
  • gedy 5y ago
    I don't mind things going slower and costing more for good reasons - what concerns me though is the intentional graft, feet dragging, and insertion of middle men to extract as much money as possible from an important project. Unfortunately unions are a big and willing part of the problem in the US.
  • vegetablepotpie 5y ago
    The fact that Union participation in the work force has declined from 20% in 1983 to 10% in 2020 [1] tells me that something else is at play. [1] https://www.bls.gov/news.release/union2.nr0.htm https://www.bls.gov/news.release/union2.nr0.htm
    • randomdata 5y ago
      A lot of what unions once offered has been rolled into labour legislation. The entire workforce is now a member of the de facto union, so to speak.
      • mistrial9 5y ago
        amazing to watch entire generations stumble forward without understanding "retirement,healthcare,workhours,promotion" since you know, "I have never had a problem".. Everyone is protected now.. yeah, thats it
        • randomdata 5y ago
          The unionization movement was built on solving the safety issues of the day for workers exposed to employers who found employees to be expendable. The topic here is about how those safety expectations once established by unions slow down construction. Labor laws now cover those concerns, so the decline in unionization is largely irrelevant. The entire workforce has become a member of the de facto union.
• fasteddie31003 5y ago
  I was surprised when I learned the Golden Gate Bridge was built in 4 years started in 1933. I wonder how long it would take today.
  • thriftwy 5y ago
    Crimean bridge was also built in 4 years or something like that.
  • Wistar 5y ago
    The newest Tacoma Narrows Bridge took about five years to construct, beginning in 2002 and finishing in 2007. It is about one mile long. https://www.historylink.org/File/8214 https://www.historylink.org/File/8214
  • randomdata 5y ago
    There is a new bridge being constructed here over a ~200 foot span across the river and it is nearing four years of work and not yet done.
  • thwarted 5y ago
    For a really rough comparison, you can look at the building of the east span of the Oakland Bay bridge. It's also worth noting how many people died while building them. (Disclosure: I've never looked this up or done this comparison myself)
  • tinkertamper 5y ago
    Before you wax poetic about this period, please read more on the complete disregard for the families and communities impacted by the large construction projects from that time. Replies comparing the US today to China would also benefit from the same. Public works has a lot of issues with cost and inefficiencies, but I think we should all be happy that eminent domain is not wielded with the same disregard for human life as it once was.
    • dangus 5y ago
      Interestingly, the Golden Gate Bridge pioneered worker safety measures while the Bay Bridge (built at the same time) followed the status quo of almost no consideration to safety. The difference was, basically, how much management cared about the issue.
• KoftaBob 5y ago
  >Sometime in living memory, the built environment of the U.S. began to freeze in place. I’d mark the time roughly at *1970*, but it’s a process, not a single seminal event. > It is obviously fair for authorities to take some time to plan things out and weigh the costs and benefits. But they spend, well, an inordinate amount of time weighing the costs and benefits. In a 2018 study of environmental impact statements under NEPA, *the mean statement took 4.5 years to complete* "The National Environmental Policy Act of 1969 (NEPA), *enacted in 1970*, established a policy of environmental impact assessment for federal agency actions, federally funded activities or federally permitted/licensed activities that in the U. S. is termed "environmental review" or simply "the NEPA process." --- Things like unions and safety regulations had more of an effect on costs of projects. In terms of time to complete projects, what you see above is the biggest culprit.
  • backtoyoujim 5y ago
    What's weird is how common it was to have completely polluted rivers inside US cities. And how Nixon needed to make it an Agency first because he didn't want Congress to have a Department of the Environment which would be out of control from the executive. And how that has shaped the US environmental plans by making it a bargaining chip of the executive rather than a foundational aspect of our representative government. Disband the EPA and create a Department of The Environment under Congress. Executive Orders do not have the gravitas required for a solid policy.
  • Frost1x 5y ago
    Regulations took previously externalized costs passed to labor and made them internalized costs to businesses. A lot of that which is cheap is only cheap because a combination of exploitation that involves externalizing costs and pushing constant pressure on labor efficiency. Every now and then we get gains in reduced cost from a technological innovation where a simpler or improved process is able to shave things off vs passing them on. In these cases, gains tend not to be externalized but instead internalized unless competition can drive the gains to be externalized.
  • rangersanger 5y ago
    I know the author can’t possibly include every cause of slowness but it seems disingenuous to not include the preservation movement, especially given the decision to talk about downtown San Francisco. The 70s saw a change in how historic preservation was handled, I’d argue because of the success of Jane Jacobs. It became less about saving patriotic sites and more about saving the look and feel of the idealized early 1900s city. From the 70s to the 90s we stopped protecting battlefields and started protecting whole neighborhoods. The big catalyst here was in 1972: State Legislation The Advisory Council of Historic Preservation provides guidelines for State Historic Preservation Legislation. State Preservation Officers were established in 1966 as well, but each state had different legislation. While every state has its own priorities, the guidelines were meant to streamline the legislation. Now, standards that were explicitly written to help preservationists maintain places like Mount Vernon apply to important chunks of our major cities. Sure Chicago and sfo have maybe 2-3% of parcels protected, but they are highly clustered in desirable areas. And blanket block or neighborhood designations cover parcels of dubious distinction. Additionally it seems like every time there’s a major project announced in major cities these days, someone is going to come out and try and protect the “landmark.” In Milwaukee there’s a project proposed to tear down an early 1900s hospital on the college campus. The school doesn’t have funds to maintain it. It’s a minor project by a minor architect and is not particularly unique. The preservationists are trying to block the demolition and honest to god, the reason given is that some of them were born there. They’ll probably win. I think the authors point on heavy handed but well meaning legislation from the 70s needs to be revisited is applicable here as well. I’m for preservation but the mechanisms seem to have gone completely out of whack with the realities of our cities and current needs.
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• a-dub 5y ago
  the construction of the second avenue subway was slow because of hundreds of years of infrastructural technical debt in manhattan and reduced tolerance for utility disruptions in an affluent area. you can dig a hole (as elon musk has done) in nevada in the space of a few months.
  • redisman 5y ago
    The Alaskan Viaduct replacement in Seattle also wasn’t absurdly slow or anything. It’s easy to cherry pick a few bad apples
    • lamontcg 5y ago
      We knew we needed to replace it in 1989 after Loma Prieta. In 2001 the Nisqually quake damaged it and made its replacement mandatory. It wasn't decided to build the tunnel until 2009, it then took until 2019 before it opened.
• maerF0x0 5y ago
  One thing that's pretty easy to understand is the network effect of complexity. You don't have to check many things if you have few things in place. Each item creates an exponential increase in complexity for the next one. Another reason why things slow down is that as you add things to a system, they have a maintenance cost, the more you add the more you approach an equilibrium of costs == capacity. This is, in part, explains why it becomes inevitably hard to add to a very large codebase -- you might have many many scrum teams simply maintaining what is, and each Nth new item has to do N-1 compatibility checks.
• resoluteteeth 5y ago
  There are a bunch of different factors: - Wages are high, so labor for construction is very expensive (not unique to the US) - It's difficult to acquire property to build new stuff in existing cities compared to building in new places. - It is also incredibly slow/expensive to build subways if you try to prioritize minimizing inconvenience to nearby residents above all else (cut-and-cover is MUCH faster/cheaper than tunneling). - The US is also not very interested in trying to learn from what construction techniques, etc. have worked for public transit in other countries Aside from the first point, a lot of this comes down to the fact that even in places in the US that have decent public transit, transit is treated more as a toy that is nice to have than a serious priority by the government, and it is only built when it doesn't cause any inconvenience to residents/drivers/etc. The US has historically been willing to demolish low income areas and force people to move in order to build highways, however.
  • spaetzleesser 5y ago
    "- The US is also not very interested in trying to learn from what construction techniques, etc. have worked for public transit in other countries" That would also apply to other areas like health care. Exceptionalism is not a good thing to improve yourself.
  • oneoff786 5y ago
    Is this last point still true? I would imagine most poor area land is still owned by rich people?
    • prawn 5y ago
      They might not care about it being compulsorily acquired at a decent price. They'd be less likely to have an emotional attachment to an investment property than to their current or ancestral home.
  • api 5y ago
    I’ll add one more: there is a strong preference in a large percentage of the population for suburban and rural style homes and light business areas. We build a ton of that and often very quickly. We are very good at building that type of landscape. The HN crowd tends not to be the target market for this though so it gets criticized and downplayed here. There has been a shift toward urbanism in the last 25 years though, and prices exploding in the cities show that the market is lagging in satisfying that demand.
• matusp 5y ago
  What about Oroville dam repairs? It was a pretty successful and fast engineering project. I think that America can still build quickly if she wants to. But most of the projects are not that important.
  • jansen555 5y ago
  • samtho 5y ago
    That’s kind of a strange example. Fixing things that provide existential hazards is always a priority, not to mention that the scope of the damn did not change with the repairs (the dam did not get taller, wider, etc). There was no reason for nimby-isms, environmental impact reports of building/expanding the reservoir, etc, as it was already there. It was a huge, ongoing emergency that required action to be taken and only cost the state $1.1B, from which they’re trying to recover some portion from federal funds.
    • frosted-flakes 5y ago
      > There [is] no reason for nimby-isms, environmental impact reports of building/expanding That's probably also the case in China, for everything. Which might be why they can build so qyickly and cheaply.
  • renewiltord 5y ago
    MacArthur Maze repair was also under budget and before timeline because of the novel contract. The truth is that most US infrastructure is not required. We should let many of these roads rot and many of these super projects languish in design. Notice how CA HSR had delays because they wanted to use “first of its kind state of the art signaling system”. Why “first of its kind”? There exist like a dozen HSR builders. Just copy them. But that’s because HSR isn’t required. So we just use it as a modern WPA-style jobs tool.
    • gkop 5y ago
      > The truth is that most US infrastructure is not required. Would you say more? This is a bold claim.
• yobbo 5y ago
  The Empire State Building was built, from start to opening, in what seems like 14 months. Mary Poppendieck discusses this from the perspective of project management: https://www.infoq.com/presentations/tyranny-of-plan/ https://www.infoq.com/presentations/tyranny-of-plan/ I think nowadays the projects are simply more profitable if they are long and slow.
  • onlyrealcuzzo 5y ago
    NIRP/ZIRP could be a huge factor for that. When the cost of money is free / negative - there's less incentive to rush to completion.
    • yobbo 5y ago
      I think so too. Also consider this; for buildings/real estate, the market value of the finished construction may appreciate faster than the negative cash-flow from construction and financing. Just adjust rate of construction accordingly.
    • imtringued 5y ago
      The owners of money get to decide when they are paid and how much, if they prefer these low interest rates, then why would you care? It's not like it matters. When interest rates are negative, you are basically in the sandbox part of a developed society. You already have everything, everything you do afterwards is as pointless as existence and the universe. Who cares? Artists don't care. You know what interest rates also do? Higher interest rates punish longevity as future income is discounted, meanwhile lower interest rates promote longevity as future income is no longer discounted. It's the opposite. Once there is less incentive to rush to completion, interest rates go down. If you are about to starve tomorrow, you must rush, interest rates are high because you are willing to borrow for food. If you have enough food to last a year, you won't borrow, you would prefer that it lasted 5 years instead.
• photochemsyn 5y ago
  > " This style of thinking is present especially in environmental laws like the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) at the federal level, or the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) at the state level. These laws both require the government to conduct an exhaustive review of government projects—sometimes even permitting decisions on private projects—that might have negative environmental impacts." There's a reason those laws were passed, and it's because of all the massive groundwater and air and soil contamination problems created by unregulated free-for-all industrial development that have had to be cleaned up at great public expense. Those waste problems are solvable but solutions are often expensive, adding a large percentage onto the end-to-end cost of a manufacturing line for semiconductors, for example: https://www.epa.gov/superfund-redevelopment/superfund-sites-reuse-california https://www.epa.gov/superfund-redevelopment/superfund-sites-... As far as large-scale public infrastructure projects, a lot of that is repair and rebuilding of existing installations (bridges etc.), so there's not as much environmental review there - just a need to devote resources to the task. I suppose a more autocratic country like China (which has rapidly built out high-speed rail) wouldn't bother about EPA reviews, but the air in China can be pretty bad. As far as doing things quickly? The global supply chain problem is pretty evident right now, maybe offshoring and 'just in time' manufacturing wasn't such a great idea due to its lack of robustness under stress? Critical supply chains should be located domestically. Yes, that would either raise prices or cut profits due to increased domestic labor costs and pollution regulations.
  • ethbr0 5y ago
    What probably should have been done was to write a provision into the law for priority projects, allowing some activities to be waived or timeboxed. It's a bit unreasonable to expect a process that efficiently handles $x million / 2-year projects to scale to $xxx million / 10-year projects. If the risks of not having a port expansion / bridge or dam repair / rail transit / nuclear power are greater than the risks of not completing a comprehensive environmental review... well, there you are.
  • robinjhuang 5y ago
    I don’t think blaming the supply chain is fair. Big transportation projects, big city’s housing problems all existed way before our current supply chain problems. Clearly considering the environment is important. But the costs of over worrying about the environment is becoming clear too. Negative externalities like the homeless crisis in the West coast are affecting everyone.
• cellis 5y ago
  We need some free-for-all zones to build new cities. I know with the current political structure it's near impossible, but "Hamsterdam" from the wire ( uhh, sans drugs and killings... ), comes to mind. A libertarian paradise. Perhaps it could start with more landgrants on just a fraction of the massive bureau of land management reserves. Free from entrenched politics of existing cities, these zones, if done well ( technocrats, here's your chance! ) could serve as inspiration for exporting the know-how to the existing cities.
  • swearwolf 5y ago
    You might like to read the book “A Libertarian walks into a bear”. It’s about a group of hardcore libertarians who took over Grafton New Hampshire with the goal to do a small town version of what you’ve described.
    • a9h74j 5y ago
      A libertarian, an Osho-disciple, and a Randian all walk into a small town ...
• yosefjaved1 5y ago
  I never thought about the length in time it takes to build things in the US today when compared to previous time periods in the US. I had to double-check this but it did really take 4 years to complete initial construction of the NYC subway system; however, what's failed to mention in the article is that a plan was approved to build the NYC system 6 years prior. In total, it took 10 years of planning and construction to actually have an initial system in place. Even though the author failed to mentioned the planning period in that instance, it doesn't take away from his argument that things are slower today in getting large projects built or renovated due to legal and political structures that stop each of these from happening through procedural delays. I have a great local example of this. My interstate bridge has been in need of repair for the last 30 years, but nothing has been done of it due to so many groups getting in the way. It's been a nightmare and that bridge is very much needed for the local community to stay as strong as it is. I believe the political will to do anything has vanished out of frustration.
  • stjohnswarts 5y ago
    Building and planning are two very different things, you can't lump them together.
  • selimthegrim 5y ago
    I presume this is Portland OR to Vancouver WA?
    • CSSer 5y ago
      It could just as easily be Cincinnati, OH. That’s how bad our infrastructure has gotten.
    • runarberg 5y ago
      The I-5 Columbia river replacement bridge just recently got a ton of funding from the WA state legislator, so maybe things are finally moving forward. However I guess delaying the project has been bickering on what to actually put on the bridge. E.g. they want to more then double the car lane count, then they also want light rail on there, and potentially even high speed rail. This feels like a classic case of overdesign.
• archhn 5y ago
  Probably due to bureaucratic overhead. Everything needs to pass through ten layers of approval and every bureaucrat plays power politics the whole time. I was once involved in a small city project, and the town liaison treated the project like we were in charge of the nation's nuclear arsenal. It's mind blowing how something so trivially small can become such a big deal when there are too many cooks in the kitchen.
• soxxer 5y ago
  We can't compare ourselves to China when we have a labor participation rate of 160 million and they have 50 million construction workers.
• skybrian 5y ago
  I'm wondering if environmental reports could be made faster and for less money? Maybe someone should do a deep dive into that?
  • TimPC 5y ago
    Not when anyone can sue because a certain detail is missing. The fundamental interface to environment work needs to change not just the length of the reports.
• clairity 5y ago
  the biggest reason is simply financialization, which infiltrates every nook and cranny of our socioeconomic perceptions. it creates the perception that everyone else is getting ahead of you by hook or by crook (which is true in the minority but not the majority), rather than building stuff for the pride of having done it. that distorts all of our incentive structures for the worse, which is just one of the many adverse effects of financialization (which i define as economic activity focused solely on money itself, which includes most of real estate these days).
  • onlyrealcuzzo 5y ago
    In modern history - nearly ever major infrastructure effort has been financed with debt. This is especially true for the US. IFF we used to be able to build things in the US, and we can't anymore - why does financing have anything to do with it?
    • clairity 5y ago
      you're conflating financing with financialization, which are two very different points in a multidimensional spectrum. financing is certainly helpful to allow capital projects to shift forward (or backward) in time to deliver (and perhaps capture) greater value. and under the constraints of scarcity, it helps allocate resources more efficiently, price risk more accurately, and provides necessarily liquidity in markets. we're way beyond the constraints of scarcity and the ideals of efficient resource allocation because we've decoupled finance and the money supply from the natural constraints under which our economic theories "work" (i use that term loosely, since economics has done a poor job of accounting for actual human behavior vs. the idealized). we're at a point where economic activity is about the money itself, rather than what it represents in the real world, things like bridges, restaurants, and dry cleaning. that's financialization, when it becomes decoupled from real value. all that takes away from wanting to build real things, because the perception is that it's just easier to "get rich quick" via financialization schemes. if you can get the money without the hard work of delivering real value, why not? is the thinking. that's corrosive to social fabrics, not to mention economies themselves. that's why we're where we're at, rather than a simplistic demonization of 'financing' in isolation.
• huffmsa 5y ago
  We can't disturb the habitat of the western red land grouse in the name of progress. How dare you.
• lvl102 5y ago
• TimPC 5y ago
  I think the author is fundamentally correct on the main point: the interface for environmental review needs to change. The current interface is that you generate a report and anyone can sue to require that report to have additional details provided a court agrees those details are unaddressed environmental impacts. This leads to 4.5 years for just the environmental assessment and 575 page environmental impact reports. It allows for excessive detail and thoroughness at the expense of time and cost. I’m not sure what the better interface is but it’s quite clear we as a society need to figure it out and halt the current trend of building less and less for more and more cost. Other issues people raise are parts of the problem but it’s clear that 4.5 years on one aspect of planning for a single project is not reasonable.
• black_13 5y ago
• raldi 5y ago
  The motto of America's utility-monster-coddling public policy is, "The needs of the few outweigh the needs of the many."
• ransom1538 5y ago
  I wrote software for an environmental consulting firm. It is the dark side of construction and permitting in the US. Basically, people that worked in government permitting would leave their job after 10 years in the public service then work for us in the private sector. Let's say you wanted to build a mall. You would need us to come in analyze the land check for vernal pools, cultural artifacts, rare species of salamanders... the list is 20 pages long. We would then run software (me!) to find places which you could pay to protect (the pay off)- in order to get a permit for plowing over that area. Our firm would spend months analyzing a rock to ensure it wasn't an arrow head or watch if bats would bread in your area. "Why can’t America build quickly anymore?" I would say permitting is a large portion of the answer. If you wanted to build without knowing this system or you fought it - your application would sit in some bureaucratic office for years. Somewhat off topic: https://twitter.com/billmaher/status/1376644161172987905?lan https://twitter.com/billmaher/status/1376644161172987905?lan... bill maher wanting to build a shed in CA. Hilarious.
  • jmeister 5y ago
    This is insane. Thanks for sharing your anecdote.
  • mistrial9 5y ago
    permitting is indeed at the center of it; I suggest that if it wasn't bats and salamanders, it would simply be something else to stall about.. even with extreme stories, and their opposite where a real estate developer finds and kills the last flower or butterfly on the land (which is true also), I support saving bats and salamanders. You know how easy it is to mix and pour a portion of an acre of concrete? or run a chain saw? literally forty years of growth can be killed in a half a day.. easy..
• rdiddly 5y ago
  Here's an inconvenient truth: Building itself is energy-intensive and depends heavily on emitting CO2 from the cement kiln to the trucks to the excavating equipment etc. Doing it quickly, more so. The answer is always to do less. Less travel, less building infrastructure for travel, less economic activity, and ideally fewer people alive. Nobody wants to hear that. Everything on the table in what passes for public debate represents one or more of the Kubler-Ross grief stages: bargaining, denial and anger.
  • rayiner 5y ago
    The end result of that logic is we should all just commit mass suicide.
    • Centigonal 5y ago
      We live on a spectrum between excess and efficiency. We could move to a point further in the efficiency direction that isn't morally untenable.
    • mistrial9 5y ago
      the end result of "systems thinking" is that "balance" is found by smoothing out extremes.. it takes a combination of capacity, training, inputs and will to use a human mind to think in terms of systems, not just yourself, but many people are capable of that
  • Ericson2314 5y ago
    Why do people keep on reasoning this way! One must remember the capex opex distinction. Building e.g. in electricity generation with fossil fuels can be net negative, and even necessary, to bootstrap more electrified activity. I am not saying some sectors aren't just bad need to shrink, but other sectors are good need to grow. That is what Jason Hickel thinks too, incidentally! An across-the-board slowdown of economic activity is a very stupid --- both in terms of political impossibility and also needless sacrifice --- way to fix our climate issues.
  • lamontcg 5y ago
    What if we need to build mass transportation solutions in order to get Americans off of single occupancy vehicles? What if we need to build more housing in our cities so that housing becomes affordable and the homelessness problem is reduced? What if we need to build solar and wind farms so that we can turn off coal and natural gas generators? I don't know how you can propose doing literally nothing at all as the solution to the problem that has us on course for disaster.
• bell-cot 5y ago
  > The bigger problem is that urgency just isn’t there Pretty much says it all. Unless it's something like replacing a critical bridge that collapsed ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I-35W_Mississippi_River_bridge#Replacement_bridge https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I-35W_Mississippi_River_bridge... ), there just ain't much of a constituency for quick, affordable, and competent construction of anything.
• bezospen15 5y ago
  Can't build quickly because of all the middleman bloat. It's happening in IT...look at how big your product teams are. Software was so much better and faster before agile and product teams. Takes 50 coders a year to make a basic website.
• iancmceachern 5y ago
  One factor is workplace safety. We (rightfully) don't allow the kind of unsafe conditions that allowed us to build things so quickly in the past. We were very fast loose with human lives in the past. Look at Dubai, they're building quickly, but at great cost to the workers doing the building.
  • DogOfTheGaps 5y ago
    France, Spain, the UK, and other places are much more effective at building than the US. And they of course take safety version seriously.
• robinjhuang 5y ago
  Having lived in Shanghai during 2005-2012 and seeing the construction boom there, I noticed some differences immediately after arriving in the US. It's common to hear about transportation projects taking decades to expand a few stations here. Mean while, since the time I left the Shanghai subway station has opened 21 new lines composed of 516 stations. Certainly, the air/water was worse in China but workers also had to work much harder (later nights, weekends, etc). But perhaps most importantly, the government would waste no time in getting land that it needed, and it certainly wouldn't ask for your consideration if it needs to do construction on a Saturday morning. While I appreciate that there is an inherent trade off between environmental consideration and speed, I think the author makes it clear that it's reached comic proportions in the US. The article is short, but I think the main premise is overwhelmingly accurate: The system exists to protect the status quo. There's also the reliance of transportation agencies on consultants: https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2016/10/21/mbta-o21.html https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2016/10/21/mbta-o21.html
  • joe_the_user 5y ago
    The thing is, Europe, where the environment is a significant consideration, also builds subways (and other things) at significantly faster speeds and lower cost than the US. If you look in any detail, it's not a matter of some magic the Chinese or whoever have, it's matter of the corrupt nexus of interests that have come to soak up any transit spending in the US, in particular.
    • thiscatis 5y ago
      No they don't. Typical bureaucratic examples: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oosterweel_Link https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oosterweel_Link https://edition.cnn.com/travel/article/berlin-brandenburg-airport-one-year-on/index.html https://edition.cnn.com/travel/article/berlin-brandenburg-ai...
      • joe_the_user 5y ago
        Those are just anecdotes. You can google up ten articles verifying US transit construction costs are higher per mile - and the US is much more spread out too. Random article. https://www.constructiondive.com/news/us-rail-projects-take-longer-cost-more-than-those-in-other-countries/605599/ https://www.constructiondive.com/news/us-rail-projects-take-...
• prithvi24 5y ago
  Underrated show: https://www.reddit https://www.reddit. com/r/DownUnderTV/comments/dpytin/utopia_au_s01s04/ Australian comedy show about government infrastructure- scary how similar some of the episodes are to the Massachusetts windmill example
• robinjhuang 5y ago
  "A dozen lawsuits have targeted environmental aspects of the projects, including another suit by the town of Atherton that argued, among other things, that the rail authority had conducted an inadequate analysis of where the train should be elevated along the San Francisco peninsula. A court ruled that the analysis had been properly done." This is straight comedy. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/25/us/california-high-speed-rail.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/25/us/california-high-speed-...
• socialdemocrat 5y ago
  A problem with analysis like this is that these problems are in no way limited to the US or the public sector. All Western countries have these problems to different degrees and it also exists within private enterprise which do not face the same problems outlined here. Boeing e.g. had been terrible at making pretty much anything from planes to space rockets. Everything is delayed. I suspect there are deeper more fundamental problems. E.g. how companies are managed and organized. Companies used to be far more engineering oriented. Today they are very sales and MBA oriented. There is also way more outsourcing and fragmentation of business. Business used to be far more integrated.
  • stadium 5y ago
    Value extraction may be part of the problem. Competition would take care of a lot of inefficient private sector businesses. Duo/Mono-polistic profit margins leave a lot of room for waste. Resource constraints breed innovation. Boeing for example competes with Airbus on commercial planes, that's about it. And SpaceX is eating into their profit margins on rockets. They need to innovate to keep up with SpaceX rockets, while the 737-max fiasco is a great illustration of waste and inefficiency on commercial airplanes. If they had to be more competitive to survive, they may not have cut so many corners.
• xyst 5y ago
  It all begins with the urban sprawl experiment in the 1950s. As people left the city for the white picket fence in the suburbs, cities around the country began to subsidize the wealthy SFH owners. Sewers, water, electricity, roads, and gas infrastructure; and fire, EMS, police services are not cheap. The tax collected from a SFH suburb does not cover the expenses to build and maintain the infrastructure. So to help meet the increasing costs, municipalities need to raise property taxes for everyone. This increases the cost of living for everyone. So combined with inflation and the increased COL, the wages of your construction people on the ground (you know the people that actually build fucking thing you need) need to keep up with this trend so companies need to pay more. This doesn't come free so this is then passed on to the American tax paying populace. It's a never ending cycle. Low housing supply, homelessness and substance abuse are all symptoms of an underlying cause. Solution: it's a multifaceted approach - involving changes at the local, state, and federal levels. First, American cities need to get rid of SFH zoning entirely and re-zone for high density mixed use residential and commercial and get rid of any car-centric building policies (eg, car parking minimums). We need to get people out of their private vehicle. Second, need to introduce a luxury or inefficiency tax on existing SFH owners to minimize lost tax revenue and discourage people from buying a SFH (people that are poor can apply for waivers). Then earmark the luxury tax towards incentivizing developers and paying for infrastructure and enhancing public transit. Third, need to introduce extensive toll road fees for people commuting from the exurbs into the city. Why should cities continue to subsidize infrastructure for people that do not pay taxes within that county? Interstate travel will not be tolled. Then at a state level, DoTs need to re-examine where IH traffic can be redirected. In America, the highways often cut through the cores of each city. This not only reduced the amount of land that is available to cities to build on but contributed to the displacement of poor and marginalized people; and decreasing air quality. We need to follow in the footsteps of Dutch cities like Amsterdam and move towards a more scalable way of transportation and city planning. Additionally, at the state level re-examine where it's possible to reduce dependency on O&G sources of power. At the federal level, need to support states and cities through funding and providing research. Need to move the grid off of fossil fuel sources ASAP. Continue to provide green incentives and encourage people to make their homes more efficient (better HVAC units, solar power panel installations, ...). It will definitely not solve the problem in 5 years or 10 years. But maybe our grandchildren might have a chance.
• jmyeet 5y ago
  For public transit in particular, the US has billionaires and politicans who actively campaign against such projects [1]. The effect of this cannot be overstated. People buy into the propaganda that their taxes will go up and/or it will bring crime to their idyllic locales (where otherwise property prices keep the riffraff out). Landowners in the US have very successfullly voted in measures that limit further construction (including higher density housing and public transit systems) and increase the value of their holdings. I've mentioned housing here because it directly impacts a lot of potential construction, particularly public transport. You cannot build anything other than single-family homes in much of the US. This lowers population density and makes public transport less viable. It also diverts tax revenue to build infrastructure for the required cars: highways, parking lots, etc. There are a lot of local problems here too eg NYC's scaffolding laws [2], corruption in NYC construction projects [3] and CEQA in California [4]. [1]: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/19/climate/koch-brothers-public-transit.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/19/climate/koch-brothers-pub... [2]: https://www.insurancejournal.com/news/east/2020/10/08/585902.htm https://www.insurancejournal.com/news/east/2020/10/08/585902... [3]: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/nyregion/new-york-subway-construction-costs.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/nyregion/new-york-subway-... [4]: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/03/signature-environmental-law-hurts-housing/618264/ https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/03/signature-...
  • WalterBright 5y ago
    > People buy into the propaganda that their taxes will go up That's not propaganda. State and local taxes in Wa state have gone nowhere but up for the last 40 years I've lived here. Sound Transit has gotten themselves huge tax increases.
    • matchbok 5y ago
      There is no more room for roads - transit is the only alternative.
    • amrocha 5y ago
      It is propaganda, the only reason you don't pay higher taxes is that car infrastructure is heavily subsidized compared to transit.
• mulmen 5y ago
  I made a similar comment yesterday and was rightfully downvoted so I’ll try again here. The US military is a jobs program. Politically it is suicidal to support “socialism” but that’s exactly what military spending is. So, what if we expanded that idea? What if we had a domestic infrastructure version of the US Military? Or at least a peaceful national service program? The benefits seems clear to me. Opportunity, well lubricated gears of commerce, and a stronger sense of ownership among the electorate.
  • quesera 5y ago
    This is the WPA. It worked pretty well. You have my vote. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Works_Progress_Administration https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Works_Progress_Administration
    • mulmen 5y ago
      Agreed. Unfortunately “New Deal” language is also politically toxic. Not sure how to leverage the appetite for military spending to build infrastructure. Declare war on potholes?
• asfarley 5y ago
  Diana Moon Glampers, applied to infrastructure.
• drewrbaker 5y ago
  I’m trying to build a house on empty land in Los Angeles. It’s about 15mins from downtown in Mt Washington. We bought the land in April of 2019 and started on the design and permitting process immediately. Despite it being in populated Los Angeles, we need a septic system, to widen the road and add curbs, move a power pole, relocate 3 trees, and extend a water line. We won’t have gas as we want to go all solar. All of this the city is making us pay for. Our permit for a small septic system took 14 months to approve. The power department has told us it will likely take 12 months for them to approve the pole movement (the city is making us move it as part of the road widening). The water main needs to be extended 12 feet, and it’s mandated that the utility company must do that work and it will cost us $75k. The tree permit took us 12 months to get and requires us to get a bond too. We still haven’t got approval for the road widening, it’s been almost 18 months. Keep in mind this is just the road in front of our house in a residential area of Los Angeles. There are lots of homes on our street already. I’m originally from Australia. The American bureaucracy is insane. The agencies don’t talk to each other. Often times we have been acting as the go between for different departments that worked in the same building! Los Angeles has a huge housing shortage. If my experience is anything to go by, it’s because the bureaucracy is so dense it takes years to just get the permits in place. It would be cheaper and better if I could just pay a bribe and get it done quickly. Americans seem to know what the problem is, but just accept that nothing can be done about it. Like you all know the DMV sucks and the USPS sucks, but everyone has just accepted that’s it’s just the way it is and decided to live with it. Why?! Hold your officials accountable to actually run government effectively.
  • SubiculumCode 5y ago
    Sounds like a City problem, not an "American" problem.
    • abecedarius 5y ago
      It's an American problem to the extent most of the economic opportunity is in that kind of city. (The recent growth of remote working does help.)
  • umvi 5y ago
• jldugger 5y ago
  Plenty of examples of massive speedups in repairs: 1: https://www.enr.com/articles/51917-caltrans-shaves-months-off-sr-99-repair-time-with-precast-prefab-girders https://www.enr.com/articles/51917-caltrans-shaves-months-of... 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-TKjwblp1XI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-TKjwblp1XI It's not that we can't "build quickly," but that we can't build anything _new_ quickly.
• lordnacho 5y ago
  An absolutely enormous number of people in our western societies are employed in making reports. They don't do technical things, like engineers. They don't decide things, like management or politicians. They make a living by "contributing" to reports that actually do need to be written, essentially by ballooning the size and time taken to make the report. There are legitimate reasons why doers (engineers) and deciders (mgt, govt) need reports, but like advertising there's too much of it and we don't know what to cut once it's there. The reason there's these 575 page reports as mentioned in the article is that it's never enough just to say "the bird sanctuary will be harmed by this windfarm, let's think about that". You need a sweeping survey of how many birds there are, how many people visit the sanctuary, how much they spend at the shop, and so on. If you try to head this off by saying you want to just summarize it, you are the bad guy who wants to trample the rights of the kids who enjoy counting the birds. As mentioned, for large projects this naturally ends up in court as well, and that of course takes a long time. We also live in the age of PR, so it's not really in anyone's political interest to make a bunch of enemies. Even if those enemies have a relatively small claim to veto a project, it will inevitably loom large in the public debate about it. If TV news manages to find that a kid who likes the birds, they will put him on TV and you will have to find an appropriate face for the interview.
  • pishpash 5y ago
    They write reports to facilitate communication between people who are disconnected by the large number of people in a large organization who write reports. Get rid of people who write reports (managers first) and magically you will not need reports. Of course if you hire badly you'll need this, which means the cost of a bad hire compounds.
  • zbrozek 5y ago
    The packet for a recent city council meeting in my town of ~8000 people was >500 pages long. It's ridiculous.
• zionic 5y ago
  Because we are a civilization in steep decline, and this is just another symptom.
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• bkraz 5y ago
  -People spend more time thinking about what they might lose instead of what they might gain by doing something. Partially, this is because wealth and prosperity are generally higher. -People were more likely to ignore things they didn't like, and so building consensus was faster when dissenting people simply weren't talking. It's more common now to encounter people who feel it's their civic duty to search for things they feel are undesirable.
• qiskit 5y ago
  It's because we have no national purpose because we are no longer a nation. Instead we are an empire controlled by a conglomeration of vested interests ( foreign and domestic ). We used to be able to build massive projects like cross country railroads in the 1800s. Of course it came with genocide of native americans, theft of their land and the wiping out of bison/animals across the continential US, but at least we had a direction. We are now captainless ship and instead of trying to take control of the ship and give it direction, the elites (foreign and domestic ) are simplying offloading as much cargo as they can before the ship sinks. How else do you explain legalized gambling, drugs, culture wars, fixation on lgbt, etc? Yahoo sports has the "Sportsbook" tab in between NCAAB and NCAAF. Gotta get the young college students addicted to gambling while they are young. That tells you everything you need about the US.
• steve76 5y ago
  [dead]
• svilen_dobrev 5y ago
  there are two USAnian movies, of the very few that make sense to me.. Still.Mine-2012 - https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2073086/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2073086/ Magnolia-1999 - https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0175880/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0175880/ IMO some answer is somewhere in them..
• fvdessen 5y ago
  The downside of a system that allows to build quickly is that it allows to quickly build really stupid things as well. For example in the 70’s Brussels decided that the city should really look like Dallas and quickly destroyed complete neighbourhoods to build inner city highways and skyscrapers … I guess high speed disasters like that are part of the reason why nowadays some people are afraid of going too fast with important things
• paulwilsondev 5y ago
  This is an easy question. The answer is people started watching television.
  • zackmorris 5y ago
    You know, your answer is the funniest one but also the closest to the truth. This is a great article, but comes to a roundabout conclusion that endorses deregulation so that more community-affecting projects can get built. Which of course is the wrong solution since it merely doubles down on what we're already doing, so will only exacerbate our race towards environmental collapse. I feel that the answer is in stuff like solarpunk. Specifically, helping someone else by solving our own problems. Every house off the grid reduces the demand for electricity, lowering its price so that others can afford it too. Backyard hydroponic/robotic gardens lower the price of food, and so on. After we pick ourselves up by our bootstraps, we have the resources to help others do the same.
• Eddy_Viscosity2 5y ago
  The problem is that any publicly funded initiative is immediately treated as a cash cow that has to be milked to death. Industry, lobbies, special interest groups, insider deals, etc. etc. Everyone has to get a piece of sweet sweet cake. The longer this takes the more money is needed and the more cake there is. This is true regardless of whether its for infrastructure, schools, or defense acquisitions. Its functional systemic corruption, even if no laws are broken (because those who make the laws are part of the system).
• unnamed76ri 5y ago
  A very interesting read that is somewhat bogged down by the author’s apparent acceptance of the most alarmist of climate alarmist views.
• mcdermott 5y ago
  Perhaps it's that disease of a profession named "project management". In the past we had engineers and architects running large projects. They knew the industry, the people, and how everything works. Now we have professional projects managers that don't really understand the details of what is actually required, or how things work, so they crank the process overhead up to almost fetish levels. Even in the IT world, a one year project just 10 years ago is now a 3 year project.
  • Ekaros 5y ago
    And on IT side people might not even stick with the 3 year project... But move over part-way and then developers might actively avoid 3 year old project... So no wonder any lessons are not learned and mistakes are repeated...