7 ms·

The state of infrastructure, both physical and technical, in this country is quite sorry. There would be plenty of well paid union and trades jobs to be had if

by Arrath 4y ago

The state of infrastructure, both physical and technical, in this country is quite sorry. There would be plenty of well paid union and trades jobs to be had if we could pony up the funds to rehab, repair, and replace the crumbling bridges, roads, pipelines, sewers, etc across the country.

bxparks 4y ago
Similar to the software industry, politicians don't get elected for maintaining old bridges. They get elected by building new bridges.
- wwweston 4y ago
  Can you explain more about how this works? Even if we're being totally cynical and seeing politics entirely in terms of who can distribute favors within their network (which I think is at best partly true), it seems to me contracts to repair or rebuild bridges could be at least as lucrative as building a new bridge.
  - nemomarx 4y ago
    I don't think it necessarily has to be about kickbacks - it's also about acclaim and reputation? In software, you talk about a project you headed or a new feature you developed when you're looking at promotions. In a political career, a new bridge or a new project has more advantages than simply upkeeping an old one for basically the same reason - it can be associated with you specifically in a stronger way, you can talk about it as an accomplishment to more people. "I funded repairs so this bridge didn't fall" is a lot more of a non event, at least until the bridge actually falls and someone has to be blamed.
    - Arrath 4y ago
      > I don't think it necessarily has to be about kickbacks - it's also about acclaim and reputation? Exactly. The classic ground-breaking or ribbon cutting ceremonies attract a lot more acclaim than "We're going to shut down one lane of the road a a time for 3 months to re-pave it and make traffic living hell"
  - wcunning 4y ago
    It's more that politicians respond to incentives -- repairing bridges requires money being spent and taxes going up, since states can't run at a deficit for very long. Often this angers voters. Similarly, people get pissed off about what we refer to in Michigan as "Orange Barrel Season" when you cant' get from here to there because of the construction snarling traffic. As a result, it doesn't build goodwill to maintain infrastructure before it's at the verge of catastrophic failure from a political standpoint. On the other hand, building new freeway through mostly farm fields has concentrated costs (the farmers losing land, who are then paid fairly well for the loss) with obvious benefits to everyone. It's pretty "no downside". In Michigan we've also run into issues where infrastructure crumbles before the bonds that built it from scratch are paid off, which then causes significant pain in paying for repairs, since it requires all new taxes or significant other service cuts. This was one of the main arguments in the 2018 gubernatorial campaign and then in the early part of Whitmer's term.
- UI_at_80x24 4y ago
  Or in the case of some politicians; How many bridges they can burn.
drcongo 4y ago
What is the deal with construction in the US, how is this allowed to happen?
- Enginerrrd 4y ago
  Civil Engineer here. It's... complicated. A big problem IMO is the politicization of funding. So for example, when doing road maintenance, it's unique in that it is essentially ALWAYS cheaper to do the maintenance NOW rather than later. So like doing a cheap slurry seal/ chip seal on a road that was just paved 2 years ago is probably actually a really good idea. If you do maintenance like that, you can pretty much maintain that road indefinitely at remarkably low costs. As roads degrade toward failure, the costs to repair them go up exponentially. However, the public doesn't get it. They see the road that is already failed, full of pot holes and cracks and wonder why they're spending money fixing a road where nothing is wrong instead of doing the same thing to the failed road. What they don't realize is that the cost to repair the failed road is 10x, 25x maybe even 100x more expensive than that cheap slurry seal. But they can't differentiate between a seal, or an asphalt overlay or a full repair of the road and subgrade. So the optics of correct and optimal road maintenance strategy are weird, and make the road works strategy dependent on political whims. Now the problems really start to compound. Politicians in the US have been divorced from the reality of costs for a long time. Local jurisdictions essentially rely on "emergency funding" to do the really expensive (over 10-100x cost) repairs that could have been entirely avoided if they had just spent the money to do the maintenance earlier. But they had basically NO incentive to do so. If anything, to get the big money from the state or the fed, they have to let it fail so that it looks really bad and becomes a genuine priority or safety issue. They also just can't help but spend the money on feel-good sexy-looking bullshit out of the general fund instead of properly funding the boring infrastructure projects, because, like a good IT guy, no one notices at all when you're doing your job well. Couple that with polarized politics: Republicans can't help themselves but fight to cut taxes that should go to things like this because they are displeased with government waste and Democrats can't help but spend the tax revenue on other things without worrying about how to pay for them all until tomorrow. So the end result from both sides is: There's just not enough money to do things the cheap way, so now there's REALLY not enough money.
bluescrn 4y ago
The problem is that the funds wouldn't go to tradespeople doing the hard work, most of it would go into the pockets of CEOs and shareholders. (And any attempt to build anything these days, at least in the UK, will face a horde of NIMBYs and environmental activists trying to stop it, adding more to the cost and timescale if the project ever happens. Even 'green' projects like wind and solar farms face heavy opposition)
- nickff 4y ago
  Do you have any evidence for this? I ask because I’ve heard that public projects are overburdened with unnecessary unionized staff.
  - spaetzleesser 4y ago
    When I look at other industries I would expect that if the unionized staff causes overhead and more cost then shareholders and management take a multiple of that for themselves.
    - NovemberWhiskey 4y ago
      Typically what happens is that the government contract effectively requires the use of union labor, which then fixes a substantial element of the cost for all bidders due to union work rules and salaries. Insofar as price is a competitive element of the bidding, you're then talking about the other costs.
  - NovemberWhiskey 4y ago
    There's no need for hearsay on this. This is a true statement. During the construction of New York's East Side Access subway project, union rules required 18 workers to run and supervise one of the tunneling machines. The manufacturers of the machine say no more than six are required to do this, which is how many are used in hardly-slave-labor countries like Norway. Underground construction projects usually require three to four times as many staff in NYC as they do in Asia or Europe.
throwawayboise 4y ago
Wasn't a lot of this supposed to happen in the 2008 financial crisis relief funding? I remember a lot of talk about "shovel-ready jobs." Turns out they didn't really exist (there were plenty of infrastructure problems, just very few shovel-ready plans to deal with them). Also, when you throw huge balls of government money at these problems once every 10 or 20 years, it's a lot less efficient that just funding needed maintenance every year. Those huge federal spending bills tend to get frittered away on all kinds of middlemen and pork projects, and when the dust clears the original problems have not gotten any better.
spaetzleesser 4y ago
The country has totally forgotten the concept of the greater good and to invest in basic infrastructure that benefits everybody. It’s all about profit for some groups. You see the same in healthcare. Nobody can seriously argue that the current setup is beneficial for the country as a whole but the people and institutions that benefit from the dysfunction will fight any changes tooth and nail.
- omegaworks 4y ago
  The country attempted to move forward on infrastructure, but the bill died in an anti-democratic institution dominated by right-wing austerity hawks (the US Senate).
  - ducttapecrown 4y ago
    Those people are not austerity hawks. They are austerity hawks if and only if the President is a Democrat. Otherwise they run budget deficits.
  - tylersmith 4y ago
    Bridges can be fixed without federal laws. It's ridiculous to blame all poor infrastructure on a single law failing to pass.
    - omegaworks 4y ago
      It's not really ridiculous when the federal government controls the power to issue currency. Any infrastructure improvement that occurs at the local level needs to be paid for by either tax or debt. Taxes take money out of a local economy and debt is typically more expensive for local municipalities. The federal government can borrow at extremely low interest and literally create currency if needed. If the infrastructure expands the productivity of the economy as a whole that currency creation does not contribute to inflation. At a macro level bridges enable more efficient commerce, so issuing currency to pay for them can be the most optimal way forward for the society. If the bridge saves 1,000 farmers $150,000 in fuel/transportation cost over the course of its life, that bridge created $150,000,000 of new value in the economy.
ars 4y ago
> There would be plenty of well paid union and trades jobs There are already. There's more work than people right now. All that work you describe is so expensive we can only do a small portion of it. What's really needed is more trade school so we can get more people in those positions (and yes, this increase in supply will lower wages). It actually seems there's more work than money in every single field. We need to figure out how to make a world that doesn't take so much work to keep running. Demographics being what they are, we aren't going to be able to have complete funding for everything in the future. It's either that, or have a world with well funded profitable amazing things, next to crumbling basic things.
- Arrath 4y ago
  > There are already. There's more work than people right now. All that work you describe is so expensive we can only do a small portion of it. I'm well aware. I'm a lead engineer on a critical infrastructure project in the hundreds of millions range, that probably costs double what it actually should thanks to any number of issues with the process. > What's really needed is more trade school so we can get more people in those positions (and yes, this increase in supply will lower wages). Agreed 100%. There is a crisis in the loss of institutional knowledge, bringing new blood in, training and mentoring them up. Workers and engineers are direly needed at all levels. > It actually seems there's more work than money in every single field. We need to figure out how to make a world that doesn't take so much work to keep running. Demographics being what they are, we aren't going to be able to have complete funding for everything in the future. > It's either that, or have a world with well funded profitable amazing things, next to crumbling basic things. Either less work to keep running, or less money to do the work required.
waqf 4y ago
Last year a man died after falling through disused stairs up to a highway bridge in Boston. To be fair they were fenced off and were obviously unusable, but still … https://www.nbcboston.com/news/local/newly-released-video-shows-moment-bu-professor-fell-through-staircase-to-his-death/2640584/ https://www.nbcboston.com/news/local/newly-released-video-sh...
nostromo 4y ago
It’s not a funding problem. The US funds infrastructure handsomely. In fact we probably even over-fund it. Unfortunately we get very little back for all that funding. If you compare costs for rail and airports and bridges in the US to Europe or Asia, we pay for one bridge what other similar countries pay for three, four, or five bridges.
- Mountain_Skies 4y ago
  Atlanta paid $23 million for a pedestrian bridge over a four lane street that they claimed cost so much because it needed to be completed in time for the Super Bowl. It was closed during the Super Bowl for security reasons.
- Arrath 4y ago
  You're not at all wrong that we don't see the benefit we should for each dollar spent, and I wish we could see some systemic fixes to address these issues beyond the age old "throw more money at the problem" I will add a fresh anecdote however. I was recently involved in bidding a project for a municipality, it was a FEMA mandated sewer improvement project. There was one respondent to the RFP (ours), that was substantially higher than the Engineer's Estimate. Aspects of the bid are still under review by state offices and FEMA, thus the bid was rejected, and the project will circle back for another round. Was the bid high? Was the Engineer's Estimate low? Both? Why did no other contractors bid on the job? There only being one respondent can certainly have pushed the price higher. I know for a fact that my portion of the work was estimated responsibly, but it was nonetheless expensive due to a tight schedule required by the city, and restrictions placed upon the work by proximity to residences and historic structures of concern. Can the schedule be opened up to allow for less pressure? Can the specifications or restrictions be relaxed? What will entice other parties to bid? Can the review process by outside agencies be sped up to allow for the project to proceed? In my experience, such reviews always eat away at the project lead-up time, without respective time added to the schedule to allow the work to be performed. It's a lose-lose. And I kinda lost what I was even going for here. Anyway, you can see any number of stumbling blocks that can be addressed, for one small sewer project. Expand this to public works across the country and imagine it.
- 4y ago
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

by Arrath 4y ago

bxparks 4y ago

Similar to the software industry, politicians don't get elected for maintaining old bridges. They get elected by building new bridges.

wwweston 4y ago
Can you explain more about how this works? Even if we're being totally cynical and seeing politics entirely in terms of who can distribute favors within their network (which I think is at best partly true), it seems to me contracts to repair or rebuild bridges could be at least as lucrative as building a new bridge.
- nemomarx 4y ago
  I don't think it necessarily has to be about kickbacks - it's also about acclaim and reputation? In software, you talk about a project you headed or a new feature you developed when you're looking at promotions. In a political career, a new bridge or a new project has more advantages than simply upkeeping an old one for basically the same reason - it can be associated with you specifically in a stronger way, you can talk about it as an accomplishment to more people. "I funded repairs so this bridge didn't fall" is a lot more of a non event, at least until the bridge actually falls and someone has to be blamed.
  - Arrath 4y ago
    > I don't think it necessarily has to be about kickbacks - it's also about acclaim and reputation? Exactly. The classic ground-breaking or ribbon cutting ceremonies attract a lot more acclaim than "We're going to shut down one lane of the road a a time for 3 months to re-pave it and make traffic living hell"
- wcunning 4y ago
  It's more that politicians respond to incentives -- repairing bridges requires money being spent and taxes going up, since states can't run at a deficit for very long. Often this angers voters. Similarly, people get pissed off about what we refer to in Michigan as "Orange Barrel Season" when you cant' get from here to there because of the construction snarling traffic. As a result, it doesn't build goodwill to maintain infrastructure before it's at the verge of catastrophic failure from a political standpoint. On the other hand, building new freeway through mostly farm fields has concentrated costs (the farmers losing land, who are then paid fairly well for the loss) with obvious benefits to everyone. It's pretty "no downside". In Michigan we've also run into issues where infrastructure crumbles before the bonds that built it from scratch are paid off, which then causes significant pain in paying for repairs, since it requires all new taxes or significant other service cuts. This was one of the main arguments in the 2018 gubernatorial campaign and then in the early part of Whitmer's term.
UI_at_80x24 4y ago
Or in the case of some politicians; How many bridges they can burn.

drcongo 4y ago

What is the deal with construction in the US, how is this allowed to happen?

Enginerrrd 4y ago
Civil Engineer here. It's... complicated. A big problem IMO is the politicization of funding. So for example, when doing road maintenance, it's unique in that it is essentially ALWAYS cheaper to do the maintenance NOW rather than later. So like doing a cheap slurry seal/ chip seal on a road that was just paved 2 years ago is probably actually a really good idea. If you do maintenance like that, you can pretty much maintain that road indefinitely at remarkably low costs. As roads degrade toward failure, the costs to repair them go up exponentially. However, the public doesn't get it. They see the road that is already failed, full of pot holes and cracks and wonder why they're spending money fixing a road where nothing is wrong instead of doing the same thing to the failed road. What they don't realize is that the cost to repair the failed road is 10x, 25x maybe even 100x more expensive than that cheap slurry seal. But they can't differentiate between a seal, or an asphalt overlay or a full repair of the road and subgrade. So the optics of correct and optimal road maintenance strategy are weird, and make the road works strategy dependent on political whims. Now the problems really start to compound. Politicians in the US have been divorced from the reality of costs for a long time. Local jurisdictions essentially rely on "emergency funding" to do the really expensive (over 10-100x cost) repairs that could have been entirely avoided if they had just spent the money to do the maintenance earlier. But they had basically NO incentive to do so. If anything, to get the big money from the state or the fed, they have to let it fail so that it looks really bad and becomes a genuine priority or safety issue. They also just can't help but spend the money on feel-good sexy-looking bullshit out of the general fund instead of properly funding the boring infrastructure projects, because, like a good IT guy, no one notices at all when you're doing your job well. Couple that with polarized politics: Republicans can't help themselves but fight to cut taxes that should go to things like this because they are displeased with government waste and Democrats can't help but spend the tax revenue on other things without worrying about how to pay for them all until tomorrow. So the end result from both sides is: There's just not enough money to do things the cheap way, so now there's REALLY not enough money.

bluescrn 4y ago

The problem is that the funds wouldn't go to tradespeople doing the hard work, most of it would go into the pockets of CEOs and shareholders. (And any attempt to build anything these days, at least in the UK, will face a horde of NIMBYs and environmental activists trying to stop it, adding more to the cost and timescale if the project ever happens. Even 'green' projects like wind and solar farms face heavy opposition)

nickff 4y ago
Do you have any evidence for this? I ask because I’ve heard that public projects are overburdened with unnecessary unionized staff.
- spaetzleesser 4y ago
  When I look at other industries I would expect that if the unionized staff causes overhead and more cost then shareholders and management take a multiple of that for themselves.
  - NovemberWhiskey 4y ago
    Typically what happens is that the government contract effectively requires the use of union labor, which then fixes a substantial element of the cost for all bidders due to union work rules and salaries. Insofar as price is a competitive element of the bidding, you're then talking about the other costs.
- NovemberWhiskey 4y ago
  There's no need for hearsay on this. This is a true statement. During the construction of New York's East Side Access subway project, union rules required 18 workers to run and supervise one of the tunneling machines. The manufacturers of the machine say no more than six are required to do this, which is how many are used in hardly-slave-labor countries like Norway. Underground construction projects usually require three to four times as many staff in NYC as they do in Asia or Europe.

throwawayboise 4y ago

Wasn't a lot of this supposed to happen in the 2008 financial crisis relief funding? I remember a lot of talk about "shovel-ready jobs." Turns out they didn't really exist (there were plenty of infrastructure problems, just very few shovel-ready plans to deal with them). Also, when you throw huge balls of government money at these problems once every 10 or 20 years, it's a lot less efficient that just funding needed maintenance every year. Those huge federal spending bills tend to get frittered away on all kinds of middlemen and pork projects, and when the dust clears the original problems have not gotten any better.

spaetzleesser 4y ago

The country has totally forgotten the concept of the greater good and to invest in basic infrastructure that benefits everybody. It’s all about profit for some groups. You see the same in healthcare. Nobody can seriously argue that the current setup is beneficial for the country as a whole but the people and institutions that benefit from the dysfunction will fight any changes tooth and nail.

omegaworks 4y ago
The country attempted to move forward on infrastructure, but the bill died in an anti-democratic institution dominated by right-wing austerity hawks (the US Senate).
- ducttapecrown 4y ago
  Those people are not austerity hawks. They are austerity hawks if and only if the President is a Democrat. Otherwise they run budget deficits.
- tylersmith 4y ago
  Bridges can be fixed without federal laws. It's ridiculous to blame all poor infrastructure on a single law failing to pass.
  - omegaworks 4y ago
    It's not really ridiculous when the federal government controls the power to issue currency. Any infrastructure improvement that occurs at the local level needs to be paid for by either tax or debt. Taxes take money out of a local economy and debt is typically more expensive for local municipalities. The federal government can borrow at extremely low interest and literally create currency if needed. If the infrastructure expands the productivity of the economy as a whole that currency creation does not contribute to inflation. At a macro level bridges enable more efficient commerce, so issuing currency to pay for them can be the most optimal way forward for the society. If the bridge saves 1,000 farmers $150,000 in fuel/transportation cost over the course of its life, that bridge created $150,000,000 of new value in the economy.

ars 4y ago

> There would be plenty of well paid union and trades jobs There are already. There's more work than people right now. All that work you describe is so expensive we can only do a small portion of it. What's really needed is more trade school so we can get more people in those positions (and yes, this increase in supply will lower wages). It actually seems there's more work than money in every single field. We need to figure out how to make a world that doesn't take so much work to keep running. Demographics being what they are, we aren't going to be able to have complete funding for everything in the future. It's either that, or have a world with well funded profitable amazing things, next to crumbling basic things.

Arrath 4y ago
> There are already. There's more work than people right now. All that work you describe is so expensive we can only do a small portion of it. I'm well aware. I'm a lead engineer on a critical infrastructure project in the hundreds of millions range, that probably costs double what it actually should thanks to any number of issues with the process. > What's really needed is more trade school so we can get more people in those positions (and yes, this increase in supply will lower wages). Agreed 100%. There is a crisis in the loss of institutional knowledge, bringing new blood in, training and mentoring them up. Workers and engineers are direly needed at all levels. > It actually seems there's more work than money in every single field. We need to figure out how to make a world that doesn't take so much work to keep running. Demographics being what they are, we aren't going to be able to have complete funding for everything in the future. > It's either that, or have a world with well funded profitable amazing things, next to crumbling basic things. Either less work to keep running, or less money to do the work required.

waqf 4y ago

Last year a man died after falling through disused stairs up to a highway bridge in Boston. To be fair they were fenced off and were obviously unusable, but still … https://www.nbcboston.com/news/local/newly-released-video-shows-moment-bu-professor-fell-through-staircase-to-his-death/2640584/ https://www.nbcboston.com/news/local/newly-released-video-sh...

nostromo 4y ago

It’s not a funding problem. The US funds infrastructure handsomely. In fact we probably even over-fund it. Unfortunately we get very little back for all that funding. If you compare costs for rail and airports and bridges in the US to Europe or Asia, we pay for one bridge what other similar countries pay for three, four, or five bridges.

Mountain_Skies 4y ago
Atlanta paid $23 million for a pedestrian bridge over a four lane street that they claimed cost so much because it needed to be completed in time for the Super Bowl. It was closed during the Super Bowl for security reasons.
Arrath 4y ago
You're not at all wrong that we don't see the benefit we should for each dollar spent, and I wish we could see some systemic fixes to address these issues beyond the age old "throw more money at the problem" I will add a fresh anecdote however. I was recently involved in bidding a project for a municipality, it was a FEMA mandated sewer improvement project. There was one respondent to the RFP (ours), that was substantially higher than the Engineer's Estimate. Aspects of the bid are still under review by state offices and FEMA, thus the bid was rejected, and the project will circle back for another round. Was the bid high? Was the Engineer's Estimate low? Both? Why did no other contractors bid on the job? There only being one respondent can certainly have pushed the price higher. I know for a fact that my portion of the work was estimated responsibly, but it was nonetheless expensive due to a tight schedule required by the city, and restrictions placed upon the work by proximity to residences and historic structures of concern. Can the schedule be opened up to allow for less pressure? Can the specifications or restrictions be relaxed? What will entice other parties to bid? Can the review process by outside agencies be sped up to allow for the project to proceed? In my experience, such reviews always eat away at the project lead-up time, without respective time added to the schedule to allow the work to be performed. It's a lose-lose. And I kinda lost what I was even going for here. Anyway, you can see any number of stumbling blocks that can be addressed, for one small sewer project. Expand this to public works across the country and imagine it.
4y ago

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]