50 ms·

Why America can’t build

• halffaday 4y ago
  This article could have been written about any industry at all, like healthcare, aerospace, or fast food, and have made essentially the same points, on the same timeline, and with the same conclusions. Maybe something happened in the 1960s…
• mhh__ 4y ago
  "build" has turned into one of those zero-entropy words like "content". Let's build back better our ability to build because [insert massively simplified view of society] means we can't build.
• mikece 4y ago
  The title is misleading. Why something cannot be built on time or on budget in Los Angeles versus the rest of the country is apples and oranges. Given the complications inherent in LA I'm surprised the project is actually finished.
• favflam 4y ago
  Brightline is being built and it is a private railroad. The local highway authorities are attempting a shake down. Perhaps policies should tie transportation, rezoning, and real estate to incentivize private construction of transportation infrastructure.
  • stetrain 4y ago
    I think the general trend of giving “highways” their own departments, agencies, and budgets is a big part of the issue. In many cases there’s no agency with the authority to say that spending $2b on transit infrastructure would have a better traffic outcome than spending $2b on a giant road widening project. The highways department has a budget and whaddaya know they spend it on expanding highways. This if often used as a positive and accountable outcome for tax payers, ie “my gas/road tax should only be used for roads not other projects!” And especially once that is tied into privately operated toll roads, you have entities which stand to lose out if that budget is redirected to things that aren’t highways.
• Kaotique 4y ago
  If you need to do so much work to make a single carpool lane you really have to think if that is the best solution in the first place. You already have too many cars. The obvious solution is reducing the existing number of cars. Open a couple extra bus routes and turn one of the existing lanes into a bus lane.
  • sieabahlpark 4y ago
    I'll tell you why that is a non starter. I live 25 miles away and I'm not riding a bus or chain of buses for 2-3 hours for work. I will drive myself directly to work and save myself 2 hours. I don't care if it's worse for the rest, you couldn't pay me to sit on a bus for 2-3 hours just so I can sit in an office for 8 and then make the whole trip home at the end of the day. Sorry not sorry.
    • jewayne 4y ago
      You say that you won't ride a bus. But what I'm also hearing is that you really don't want to pay for a bus lane, either. That the very existence of public infrastructure that you will never use is a deep, personal affront to you. Am I hearing that clearly?
    • elteto 4y ago
      The extra bus routes are not for you, but for other drivers that do live closer and can trade their car commute by a bus ride. This, in turn, alleviates road congestion for everyone else, _including_ people like you who have no option but to drive! So, ironically, what you are complaining about (and would probably vote against if given the choice) is something that could benefit you. But hey, at least you have your freedom or something.
      • akozak 4y ago
        This is really important to understand. Someone explained to me once how small changes (low single digit reduction) to cars on the road leads to huge congestion benefits. I'm sure someone on HN will have a good citation. Public transportation helps you have your luxury experience.
• dcposch 4y ago
  One of the things I love about Palladium (and closely related, Samo Burja's newsletter) is the depth of research. Like the detail that one of the most egregious episodes from California HSR involved a Spanish company that performed excellently on rail projects in Spain. Overall, this piece makes a strong case that the problem is specifically NIMBYism and loss of government institutional capacity. I think the million dollar question is how government organizations can hire and retain better. The current situation looks dire. Obviously a charismatic leader with a broad anti-NIMBY mandate would go a ways at getting competent people to want to work in government. You saw that succeed on a small scale with orgs like US Digital Service. The elephant, after that, is merit-based pay and promotion. Someone needs to sell this to the public. RN literally random cops and plumbers make mid six figures thru overtime while the directors of $100b mega-project are low-energy lifers making less than that. That's not gonna work.
  • kevin_thibedeau 4y ago
    NIMBYs don't cause the gross mismanagement of funds on existing rail lines.
  • thr0wawayf00 4y ago
    > I think the million dollar question is how government organizations can hire and retain better. Simple: offer salaries that compete with the private sector. Of course, this involves raising tax revenues which is incredibly unpopular politically. But we get what we pay for and as long as public sector pay remains a joke compared to the private sector, we are always going to have this problem.
    • seoaeu 4y ago
      The worst part is that it wouldn’t even require any noticeable increase in tax revenue! The salaries of the dozen or so government employees managing a billion dollar contract are a rounding error in the total cost
    • jcims 4y ago
      I don't think it's just that simple to be honest. Government organizations are going to be held to the highest standard for equity, transparency and governance (and ideally security, but...). Building a product with artifacts that demonstrate and/or attest to all of these things creates incredible friction. I'm just coming out of a seven year stint at one of the largest banks in the world, and despite loving the people I work with I couldn't take it any more. I've on the other side of the summit in my career and I don't really want to have navigating bureaucracy be a major component of my professional efforts for the remainder of it.
• tester756 4y ago
  do construction workers in US have reputation of working under the influence too? those who work on those "simple" projects like renovation of homes and stuff
  • wollsmoth 4y ago
    Uh, I don't think so. It's a hard job and often involves heavy machinery. One of my cousins works construction and does enjoy drinking but always after hours afaik.
  • rpmisms 4y ago
    Contractors who work in the home, not really. Construction workers might crack a beer at work, but it's nowhere near the "builders" stereotype the UK has.
  • MAGZine 4y ago
    depends. drywalling is notoriously a stoner job in north america. other professions, like electrician, not so much since you could end up dead.
    • SoftTalker 4y ago
      Painters and roofers too. All that I know are borderline or actual alcoholics. I don't know how the roofers manage to be drunk on a roof and not fall off, but they do.
      • bluedino 4y ago
        Roofers are easily the roughest crowd. Not sure where they find those guys.
      • deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
    • jhgb 4y ago
      > drywalling is notoriously a stoner job in north america I thought dry masonry was a stoner job? (OK, I'll show myself out...)
• king-geedorah 4y ago
  What are peoples thoughts on palladium? I’ve found their articles and podcasts to be a refreshing analysis on modern socio-political issues with minimal culture war or partisan interference. Any other podcasts of similar quality and rigor anyone is listening to?
  • timmytokyo 4y ago
    Wary. See this article about its founders. https://splinternews.com/leaked-emails-show-how-white-nationalists-have-infiltra-1837681245 https://splinternews.com/leaked-emails-show-how-white-nation...
    • g8oz 4y ago
      Yikes
  • ETH_start 4y ago
    Yea, very high quality, and focused on the most important big picture issues.
• alldayeveryday 4y ago
  American cities, being large and complex systems, are not centrally planned or managed to the extent that would allow for optimization of logistical concerns. The financial motivations of large development firms, coupled with their political power (aka bribery of elected officials) has resulted in cities that are disorganized and unoptimized for the movements of goods and people. These systems are very good at creating profitable projects for those with enough capital, however. The federal highway system is about the best thing one can say about America concerning large scale construction projects - the relic of a bygone era.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• rayiner 4y ago
  > Incredibly, the state has not laid a single mile of track and it still lacks 10 percent of the land parcels it needs to do so. Half of the project still hasn’t achieved the environmental clearance needed to begin construction. The dream of a Japanese-style bullet train crisscrossing the state is now all but dead due to political opposition, litigation, and a lack of funding. Among my favorite images are hulking segments of unfinished CHSR viaduct dominating the skyline of Central Valley towns that didn't want it in the first place. A man-made monument to hubris. E.g. https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/d88bcf176aba93cb014bff7a9be1461fdfddb771/0_225_4722_2832/master/4722.jpg?width=940&quality=45&auto=format&fit=max&dpr=2&s=7321bad7a8697606722ce0dc2e3f7761 https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/d88bcf176aba93cb014bff7a9be14...
  • thehappypm 4y ago
    Why is that above grade anyway ?
    • bombcar 4y ago
      Likely to get over something else somewhere else (highway, building, roads, river) without having to climb and come back down. High speed rail doesn't want to climb at all if possible, certainly less than normal rail (and much, much less than light rail).
    • rrrrrrrrrrrryan 4y ago
      Not sure about this specific stretch, but there is at least one stretch where they elevated the track to get over a stubborn farmer's land who refused to sell. Apparently eminent domain can take a really long time if the landowner is dead-set on mucking up the process with lawyers, so they just went over his land instead of dividing it, mainly to send a message to any potential future holdouts. (i.e. He could've just accepted the generous offer, but instead got paid nothing.)
    • octoberfranklin 4y ago
      Because that photo is part of the section that has to cross over a preexisting freight railroad. Transcontinental freight railroads have insane godlike legal powers. Immune to eminent domain, property taxes, even get to ignore the IBC when they build buildings.
• softwarebeware 4y ago
  Doesn't this article display a classical fallacy when it attempts to equate vastly different construction projects (building an additional highway lane vs. building a factory, for example)?
• elzbardico 4y ago
  PANIC: 666 - ERRTOOMANYLAWYERS
• Animats 4y ago
  "This takes time, with the average EIS taking 4.5 years to complete. Some have taken longer than a decade. A cottage industry of consultants is devoted to completing these documents, earning themselves millions in fees." Now there's an opportunity for a startup. Make the process paperless. Go out with drones, phone apps, and ground-penetrating radar, tie all the info to location. Hook this up to AR goggles, so the people involved can see all the data when on-site. Much of the environmental paperwork could be generated automatically. Drone-based ground penetrating radar is now available.[1] It's a lot cheaper than finding pipes and cables during construction. [1] https://integrated.ugcs.com/gpr https://integrated.ugcs.com/gpr
  • liuliu 4y ago
    It seems from outside the problem is not the process itself took long. People take advantages of some procedure loop-holes to effectively delay this forever for NIMBY reasons (there are some limitations on how long it should take, but there are loop-holes such that the EIS didn't kick off entirely, bypassing the time limit requirements).
  • ren_engineer 4y ago
    getting government contracts isn't about competence/efficiency, it's about connections. You could make the best solution in the world but it wouldn't matter. In many cases these processes are created for the exclusive purpose of legally funneling millions of dollars to people there's no incentive currently for the US government to be efficient. The only people I know who support large government initiatives are people who have never worked in or with the government
    • ejb999 4y ago
      >>there's no incentive currently for the US government to be efficient. This is also true in many large corporations - I have worked for a few - and the inefficiencies and waste is mind-boggling to someone that mostly works for small and mid-sized business that actually like to watch their pennies. If you are a manager, and you are given a budget, you make dam sure you spend 100% of it by the end of the year, even if you have to basically throw it away on some useless spend. There is zero incentive to save money - if you do, you will see your budget cut for the next year too, or criticized/penalized for having asked for more than you needed. Last thing you want to do is bring in your project under budget; wouldn't have believed it if I haven't seen it played out this way time and time again.
• FastMonkey 4y ago
  Suing contractors for the bureaucratic nightmare you create means that every future bid will now have a buffer to cover the expense of that.
• AtlasBarfed 4y ago
  The california HSR has spent 44 billion dollars over budget and still hasn't even gotten the first leg's real estate done? I hope most of that was for the land, which is not a sunk cost/lost asset.
  • ruw1090 4y ago
    The total estimated cost has increased by 44 Billion. Only ~10 billion has been spent on the project so far.
• CabSauce 4y ago
  "If we could just get rid of environmental and worker protections, costs would be lower!" - Every Company Ever
  • rcpt 4y ago
    How about actually making environmental regulations matter? Blocking infill development with CEQA? You need to say how much more driving will happen as a result.
    • harmon 4y ago
      Exactly this. Every project is going to impact the environment. The end goal of a risk assessment is not to bring the environmental risk to zero, it is to bring it down to an acceptable level given the benefits of the project.
      • Goronmon 4y ago
        Exactly this. Every project is going to impact the environment. The end goal of a risk assessment is not to bring the environmental risk to zero, it is to bring it down to an acceptable level given the benefits of the project. I think getting at this type of issue is specifically what I wished the article had done more of. It's easy to say "Well, environmental regulations are causing the problem." Which I guess is good to know, but the real important part is what's the next step or how could things improve. Otherwise, it comes across as "The problem is that environmental regulations exist."
    • Symmetry 4y ago
      The Cape Wind project, which was going to be the US's first offshore wind farm, was famously killed by wealthy and powerful people worried about their views with environmental causes as a pretext. I think that bureaucratic review could be much better than the current case of "anybody wealthy enough can sue to stop the project" but that would have required spending money spinning up the department when the law was introduced and relying on lawsuits from the public looks free. EDIT: And of course recently fossil power interests were able to stop some power lines to bring hydro electricity in from Canada.
• Linda703 4y ago
  [dead]
• danhor 4y ago
  Regarding just the Public-Private-Partnerships: Alon Levy doubts it's benefical (at least for transit), partially due to high ongoing costs https://pedestrianobservations.com/2021/01/15/friends-dont-let-friends-build-ppps/ https://pedestrianobservations.com/2021/01/15/friends-dont-l...
• acabal 4y ago
  It's not just in megaprojects either. In my large, fairly dense US city, basic, easy-to-build, local infrastructure like adding a 1-mile bike lane to a straight street is impossible because a handful of NIMBYs are constantly taken seriously by local politicians. My city has many bike lanes that are popular and well-used, as well as a bike-share program that is extremely popular. It also has a large number of cyclist deaths - including children! - due to the spottiness of existing bike infrastructure and overall lack of protected bike lanes. It seems like improving that infrastructure would be both easy, cheap, and popular, given the popularity of cycling and its existing infra, and the cheapness of plopping a concrete barrier onto a street. But no - the second anyone mentions protected bike lanes, a handful of NIMBYs write in with "but muh cars" and the politicians throw up their hands and surrender. I don't understand why NIMBYs have been taken so seriously in the US in the past 50 years. It seems like at any point in history, any local project will be opposed by somebody, no matter who they are or what the project is. But previous generations seemed to be able to get over that in favor of building. For today's generation it seems like doing nothing has become better than doing something. If this were the 1900s, government would have told the NIMBYs to get bent, we're building Thing X because it's good for society and if you don't like it, tough. That's what living in city means sometimes!
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  • sylens 4y ago
    I half wonder if you live in my city because your description matches it to a tee, but I bet this is happening in cities all over the country. As for why they care about NIMBYs so much - it is because our current class of politicians aim to be career politicians. Therefore, they look to remain in power at all costs, and part of that means not pissing off the most vocal members of their community. What we need is real leadership from politicians who are willing to stake their tenure in office on pushing projects through.
    • JohnBooty 4y ago
      What we need is real leadership from politicians who are willing to stake their tenure in office on pushing projects through. Easy to say, but our current system proves that it selects for politicians of exactly the opposite ilk. How do we change the system?
• patwater10 4y ago
  The costs of growing complexity cannot be exaggerated. Note there's a new effort to help create more effective government in CA that's worth checking out: https://effectivegovernmentca.org/ https://effectivegovernmentca.org/
  • nonethewiser 4y ago
    What do we do when software gets too complex? We redesign and start over. That may or may not be an option with government. If it's not, we know the consequences. Paralysis. I remember a musing Elon Musk had on Lex Friedman's podcast. He noted that there was no cleansing function for laws. Something like that might be a step in the right direction.
    • diordiderot 4y ago
      > We redesign and start over. I feel like its better to do greenfield development and migrate.
    • fireflash38 4y ago
      Frequently people forget what happens when they do that. People love refactoring... but forget how that spaghetti got there in the first place. Spoiler alert: it's because life is messy and doesn't fit neatly into buckets & code. You throw out so much testing bug fixing & corner case fixes. For every reg that is abused by bad actors, there's a dozen that are written in blood.
• bell-cot 4y ago
  Why? Because successfully completing large infrastructure projects is - at best - a "lip service" priority for most people. But it is an actual priority for very few people.
• ruw1090 4y ago
  I stopped reading at "Incredibly, the state has not laid a single mile of track" for California High Speed rail, which is completely false. There are 119 miles under active construction and they've been putting down track since 2018.
  • PKop 4y ago
    It's hard to find evidence that his statement is false. How many miles of tracks have been laid, and where?
    • Invictus0 4y ago
      I was able to find this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_High-Speed_Rail#/media/File:California_HSR_Project_Status.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_High-Speed_Rail#/me...
      • nonethewiser 4y ago
        There is no "constructed" key here. Which suggests the furthest along is "under construction". I'm not sure what all that constitutes.
    • secabeen 4y ago
      Laying track is clearly the last part of the project; they're working on all the important stuff that goes under the track. The fact that they haven't laid track specifically is a false concern.
      • PKop 4y ago
        Then the issue was with his elevation of the claim as pertinent, not the claim itself. He is right then that no track has been laid? It seems simply a shorthand maker of progress of the project. >is clearly the last part of the project All that tells me is they're not really close to the "last part of the project" then. And this last part could be very far away, because "working on" sections could mean anything. Until track is laid (especially as you claim it being near the end) the project is vaporware is it not? And that is useful information for the general public who can be bamboozled by project tracker graphics documenting "progress" that never delivers anything. I see a few articles highlighting with pictures the construction of various concrete elevated platforms, that seem to have stopped or are abandoned. So ultimately work can be done for a long time and not amount to much at all.
• formerkrogemp 4y ago
  The US needs dramatic, progressive change, but instead we're failing and regressing in so many ways and places. I expect cascading failures to continually compound.
• kraig911 4y ago
  NIMBY-ism is just an example of people not caring for one another in our country. Everyone in the last 20 years or so seems only out for themselves. I remember when the interstate was being built through my town as a kid and people would say it's going to be great. Nowadays I feel every new report about new construction projects only reflect the negative impacts like cost, environment etc. It's just as if everywhere I look all I see is negative outlook from society. And take from that how people's first response is how they can protect themselves.
  • ch4s3 4y ago
    You can easily look out for you own interests and not go out of your way to shit in the pool. Most of the NIMBY-ism is see in NYC is old busy-bodies interfering in things that probably won't effect them at all.
  • Symmetry 4y ago
    I don't think I'd put it that way. For the average NIMBY their friends and social circle are often suffering or benefiting from the same projects as them and from the inside it feels more like protecting their community than protecting themselves. But of course a community is just as much defined by who is outside it as who is inside.
    • nikanj 4y ago
      However, in the typical case suffering means "The view from my window changes". And somehow that's a valid reason to stop a housing project for hundreds of people.
• throwaway5752 4y ago
  Megaprojects are mostly wasteful and don't deliver on their promise. They appeal to dreamers and idealists, and the GCs make out like bandits while residents are harmed and the promised benefits don't arrive. We don't build because private industry would rather issue buybacks to the oligarchic class in Arkansas and Kansas than invest in infrastructure used by the rest of too stupid to be born generationally wealthy with family offices.
  • sschueller 4y ago
    I have to disagree with you on the mega projects being wasteful. Here in Switzerland we dug a 57km train tunnel [1] which has enabled a large number or cargo to be put on rail and travel at much higher speed. Another large project at Zürich main station involved digging an additional underground station with a tunnel up through the mountain underneath a river. [2]. It has enabled a much tigher train schedule especially for intercity trains which can now travel through the main station instead of having to back out. Well worth the 2 Billion it cost. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/NRLA https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/NRLA [2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weinberg_Tunnel https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weinberg_Tunnel
    • throwaway5752 4y ago
      Some aren't wasteful. I could have written my post more clearly, because I was talking about all proposed megaprojects, not just those that have been built. I think this could have used a bigger disclosure, too. The author, Brian Balkus, works for a major construction company, MasTec (which has had its issues with labor law violations). There is a clear editorial bias.
  • FastMonkey 4y ago
    Without megaprojects, we'd all probably still be living a subsistance agrarian lifestyle. It's hard to tag specific dollars to a specific public project, they often work as multipliers across the economy.
• JumpCrisscross 4y ago
  Has anyone in the Congress proposed NEPA reform?
• paulpauper 4y ago
  I think a major reason is simply is that it's not a high priority by voters.
• sieabahlpark 4y ago
• loudmax 4y ago
  The article lays out a lot of the problems with American projects, but doesn't do much to explain why European projects are able to manage a better track record. Are their unions weaker, or are their goals better aligned with the projects? Also the article suggests eliminating National Environmental Policy Act(NEPA) provisions as a way of cutting red tape. I don't doubt that there's a lot of NEPA that ought to be revised, but we need to remember why these provisions were created in the first place. If we eliminate environmental impact studies rather than come up with a more efficient way to conduct them, we should expect that megaprojects will have unforseen environmental impacts. In some cases, local species will be driven to extinction, and in other cases the long term health of nearby people may be compromised. These risks may be worth the payoff, but we should be upfront about these risks and who could be affected.
  • bpodgursky 4y ago
    US unions are uniquely dysfunctional.
  • mjmahone17 4y ago
    I wonder with NEPA if we could do “existing negative impact” studies, i.e. if this is not built, how will the environment be affected? And if the answer is “on net the status quo is worse environmentally” then permitting can proceed without further in depth reviews required for each sub-component. Like high speed electric trains should be extremely easy to pass: they remove car and plane traffic, so even if they hurt some local environments in the process of being built, the net result is better than the status quo so those micro problems are considered outweighed by the macro, unless someone can prove otherwise. Expanding on this, private groups should be allowed to fund neutral third parties who act similarly to land surveyors: they can provide impact studies for projects the government has not planned. If the status quo is worse for the environment and more expensive to maintain, these “impact study libraries” could provide off-the-shelf projects that wouldn’t need extra regulatory approval. Advocacy groups, like say Extinction Rebellion, could reasonably fund “status quo” analyses for carbon-intensive infrastructure vs reasonable alternatives (mass transit, HSR, road diets, etc).
    • 4y ago
• austinl 4y ago
  A friend has worked in construction project management for almost 40 years, mostly in Texas. A few years ago, he moved to San Francisco to work on the Van Ness project, which was approved in 2003, began construction in 2017 (!), went $40 million over budget, and finally completed this year. The project essentially added a median and some bus lanes to a two mile stretch of road through San Francisco and took 19 years. During his time in SF, no construction took place—so he told me he would essentially go into the office and do nothing while waiting for various city hearings to happen. After 8 months, he quit in frustration and moved back to Texas.
  • javajosh 4y ago
    If you wanted a pithy explanation this comment points to it. It's the speed of the justice system (of which city council is ultimately a part). People want to complain about the participants, but the system itself is so goddamn slow, and more and more decisions are plugged into it, that it's slowness is really the central cause. A working system should be able to handle baseless allegations and NIMBY whining; you can't expect people to show self-restraint. (The justice system's slowness is also at the heart of another critical problem, the failure of the criminal justice system. Again, people want to complain about the agents, but it's the system itself, particularly it's glacial slowness, that creates perverse incentives and terrible outcomes.) The justice system is, at its heart, a collaborative information system, and as such is ripe for disruption by software. And I think it's more important to fix even than the healthcare system! At least in part because a large fraction of the complexity of every other system is caused by problems in that most foundational system, justice.
    • meowtimemania 4y ago
      What would this justice software system do that the currently used software doesn’t do?
      • 0des 4y ago
        Eliminate people
      • 4y ago
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• Kharvok 4y ago
  Why are bike lanes held up as the optimal solution in small municipalities with an aging population?
• davesque 4y ago
  People generally call out NIMBY-ism as though it's just some sort of irrational bias that people have, but I don't think that always explains it. Sure, in a lot of cases, people are overprotective of their neighborhoods or communities. But where did that attitude come from? I'd argue it came from decades of corporate greed and government dysfunction that bred a general distrust of large institutions. It's not like people have no reason to feel like big business doesn't have their best interests in mind. Another commenter gave the construction of highways as an example, saying that people used to look at large infrastructure projects like that with a positive attitude. Well, I'd say look where that got them. The way highways were built in this country completely wrecked communities (especially poor ones located in less desirable parts of town) and eventually led to the uniquely American aesthetic of the urban and suburban wasteland. If large organizations in this country want to undertake large projects, they have to first work to regain the trust of the average person by acting like they actually give a damn and really want to the world to be a better place for their efforts.
  • carapace 4y ago
    In SF people could read up on the history of the Embarcadero Freeway. It took a half a century and the Loma Prieta earthquake to work through all that. https://medium.com/@UpOutSF/old-san-francisco-a-look-at-before-and-after-the-embarcadero-free-came-down-85739ff61dc1 https://medium.com/@UpOutSF/old-san-francisco-a-look-at-befo... https://www.sfchronicle.com/projects/2022/visuals/san-franciso-tore-down-embarcadero-freeway/ https://www.sfchronicle.com/projects/2022/visuals/san-franci...
  • MrMan 4y ago
    we need planning, not just building
    • pitaj 4y ago
      Planning (specifically urban planning around cars over the last century) is a giant failure. Hopefully you can understand why people like myself would be skeptical.
    • seoaeu 4y ago
• TedShiller 4y ago
  Where's Pete?
• carabiner 4y ago
  Meanwhile, China is building high speed rail, roads, and bridges around the world, mainly in Eastern Europe and Africa. Biden has announced a competing initiative: https://www.npr.org/2022/06/24/1106979380/g7-summit-2022-germany-global-infrastructure https://www.npr.org/2022/06/24/1106979380/g7-summit-2022-ger... but we all know this is empty talk. The US cannot build in its own land; outside of the US, it is hopeless.
  • president 4y ago
    Environmental laws/regulations, Cheaper building costs, Chinese speed of building. Pick only 2.
    • deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
  • caracustard 4y ago
    You also forgot to mention the terms on which China does that and at whose cost. Also, it's one thing to "just" build something, but a whole other to maintain and service.
• Pxtl 4y ago
  The NIMBYism crisis in Canada has also reached a fever pitch: https://www.tvo.org/article/by-the-numbers-the-cmhc-says-abandon-all-housing-hope-ye-who-live-in-ontario https://www.tvo.org/article/by-the-numbers-the-cmhc-says-aba... That's the Ontario provincial public broadcaster. Canada currently builds a measly 286,000 homes per year, but the housing crisis is so severe that the government thinks we need to build 5.7 million homes over the next 9 years to alleviate the crisis. Which is basically impossible. And the municipalities are still crying about Character Of The Neighborhood and the importance of democratic local control.
  • pif 4y ago
    > the government thinks we need to build 5.7 million homes Last time I checked, Canada had plenty of space to build a few million houses. What is the problem?
    • Pxtl 4y ago
      1) Green belts. These exist for good reason -- while Canada is enormous, some of its cities are located within narrow zones of super-arable land that has food security implications if it's developed. Also, greenbelts prevent climate-change-destroying sprawl. 2) Red tape. Canada has a similar problem as Cali, where municipalities have basically declared all buildings larger than a 2 storey detached house to be illegal. The only way anything gets built is through zoning and planning variance committees and provincial quasilegal arbitrators, which take years and add ferocious amounts of carrying costs and legal fees. Provinces are only just getting started tackling this. 3) Industrial capacity. There isn't the available skilled manpower and equipment needed to double and triple our per-year output.
• justinzollars 4y ago
  You get sold on Global Warming, Healthcare for All, and Social Justice and end up with a Byzantine System 57 bureaucratic layers deep, mountains of paperwork, legal problems, and grift whose total government size is 44% of the GDP - with big plans to grow. Good luck building anything.
• mattnibs 4y ago
  We really need this generation's Robert Moses or Lyndon Johnson. Someone with the ambition and political saavy for cutting through layers of bureaucracy, though maybe today's setup would be too much for even them.
• daniel-cussen 4y ago
  America can build if it wants to. It's just got to want to. It is good to want things if they are good for you! There is merit in wanting what is right! And little kids can't do anything but want what they want to want. Just want. Concomitantly with my Idealistic Christianity, let me share the Atheistic perspective running in parallel: I developed an algorithm that can solve any problem in a math textbook, but it can't want anything. And I'm not going to automate that, that must always be left to someone in flesh and bone. Seek, and ye shall find.
• Xeoncross 4y ago
  litigation for every little thing + courts that move slow + large legal costs = America
• hwestiii 4y ago
  Oh noes, too much democracy…
• ggm 4y ago
  As a NIMBY, for some things, and a YIMBY for others, I sense my power in this situation is significantly smaller than other costs and consequences. Nothing I think seems to be vested with much power. Do people think NIMBY have more power than YIMBY? I think it equalises. It might be NIMBY power is indicative of risks, and unassessed costs and consequences?
• jsiaajdsdaa 4y ago
  We are a nation where those who can are blocked by those who can't. Better things could be accomplished in international waters, at this rate.
• yalogin 4y ago
  I think on the whole America is in decline quite a bit. We don’t see it yet in terms of GDP or economic output, but the politics have changed considerably over the years and that is going to have a lasting impact. Mitch McConnell is singly responsible for this. One party doesn’t vote for the other party’s initiatives, not even one vote. If anyone votes they are targeted and primaried. We don’t realize it but this is what happens on a much worse scale in poor countries as the only objective in those countries for poliiticians is to siphon money for themselves. Getting things done is never on the cards. We are on that same path.
  • dilap 4y ago
    i dont think that explains SF or CA dysfunction, though...
  • archhn 4y ago
    There are whole regions of America that are almost post apocalyptic. People dying of drugs everywhere, rampant hopelessness, mass murder and gang violence, millions of people in prison, etc. Then there are other parts of America that look like paradise. America is a big place. It's like 50 countries lumped into one. In some places it's the best of times, in others it's the worst of times. We tend not to hear too much about the bad places. They are like a shit stain on America's underwear. We keep it hidden as best we can because no one respects a poopy pants. I remember watching a documentary about a ghetto in some U.S. city. There was a lady who had just moved into a new appartment. She was thrilled that her new appartment was double the size of her old one, but there was some downsides... in particular, stray bullets from gang shootouts kept coming through her window. She showed the interviewer the bullet holes on the wall. Then she was like, "Yeah, but other than that it's a nice place." It was a shocking reminder that people tend to just adapt to their environment and try to make the best of things. A lot of people have adapted to poor conditions in America, but they try to make the best of it and most people remain silent as they quietly try to eke their way through this world.
• unity1001 4y ago
  NIMBY is the least of the problems. The real problem is the private sector that exists to siphon money off the government spending. They amplify the cost of each initiative many times, making it utterly ineffective to invest in any infrastructure. There is a reason why China's infrastructure industry is largely state-owned or dominated. It prevents such profiteering.
  • phendrenad2 4y ago
    This seems correct. A lot of the infrastructure people point to as examples of a time when America could build (such as the interstate highway system, or the old Penn Station in NYC) were built mostly by government, not private contractors.
• Blackstrat 4y ago
  There are other reasons. I live in a major city that has difficulty completing infrastructure projects. In grad school, one of the projects we did was to evaluate the city’s contracts, which were publicly available. What our team found was that the city routinely contracted subsequent projects with higher bonuses for earlier completion than the penalty on prior contracts for being late. Since many of the projects were going to the same handful of companies, it became a lucrative pyramid scheme with local taxpayer dollars. This was in the late 80s and things are better, but no one ever went to jail or was voted out of office. But I did get my MBA as did the other team members. In the end, it all felt like a game.
• snowwrestler 4y ago
  America can build; but America does not want to build, or at least a large portion of America doesn’t. And they try their darnedest to slow everyone else down. And there may be a good reason for that. Consider this nugget from the article: > The entire $160 million-per-mile road lane project, and the five years of gridlock it created, were justified by the promise of shaving one minute per mile off commute time for its users. The final indictment of the project was a Metro study that found that Sepulveda had actually made commute times longer. Many of the things people want to build are pointless! Lanes are added but commute times don’t drop. Roads are added and they are soon choked with traffic. New homes are built but prices go up anyway. Or worse, they are actively harmful. The “big project” urban highway builds of the late 20th Century ruined waterfronts and neighborhoods and in some cases were weapons wielded at minority communities. It took a horrible earthquake to reclaim San Francisco’s waterfront from the highway. It took a famously difficult “Big Dig” to reclaim downtown Boston. Or look beyond roads at the huge ecological damage done by the big project dams of the 20th Century. Look at abandoned mines and coal power plants all over the country. So: it’s hard to build because so many people are against building. And so many people are against building because there is so much evidence that most building projects are pointless or harmful. The end result is a much higher bar for projects to clear to get started, and a higher bar for them to clear while underway. These may be good things in the long run.
  • colinsane 4y ago
    > Many of the things people want to build are pointless! Lanes are added but commute times don’t drop. this feels like an incomplete metric to me. if you value getting from point A to point B in 30 minutes, surely other people do too. so you add another lane. now instead of 10000 people making that trip every day, 15000 do. even if the transit time doesn’t decrease (or goes up by a couple percent), that new lane still adds net value? sure, if adding a lane doesn’t decrease transit time nor increase trips, it’s hard to make the case that it’s an improvement. but you gotta look at both of these things before you make that claim.
    • noahmasur 4y ago
      The problem is that "inducing demand" for people who would otherwise take public transit doesn't actually increase efficiency. Putting more cars on the road is not necessarily a net benefit. See this video from CityNerd for more details: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=za56H2BGamQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=za56H2BGamQ
• dcow 4y ago
  The kicker is right at the end: > Like Germany, the U.S. regularly shows that its current stall is ultimately a political choice. In February 2017, heavy rain damaged the nation’s tallest dam, Oroville Dam, creating the risk of catastrophic and deadly flooding in the Sacramento valley. Over 180,000 people living downstream along the Feather River in Northern California were evacuated from their homes. As in the current German case, the risks posed by inaction necessitated a bypassing of the usual rules. > > Within 10 days of the damage incident, Kiewit was awarded a contract. A little over two weeks later Kiewit’s team and equipment were fully mobilized at the site. After only 165 days Kiewit had brought the dam’s main spillway into working condition. It then completed a second phase where it built a 1.2 million square foot spillway—an area so large that 25 NFL regulation-sized fields could fit inside it. The combined project was completed in only 18 months. Same company, two different bureaucratic contexts. The US legal and bureaucratic system is a legacy codebase. It’s done well and continues to work but is vastly inefficient. Now, how to reboot America with a new codebase? That’s the real question…
  • tyleo 4y ago
    Dan Carlin has a podcast episode in "Hardcore History" where he describes the US as a "schizophrenic giant" (though I think he is quoting someone). Essentially he describes the US as being ineffective at making decisions, but when they do, they move quickly and with great force. The Covid vaccine is a great recent example. A truly astonishing amount of scientific work was done in an incredible time-frame when the need for the vaccine became clear.
    • ausbah 4y ago
      any sort of military deployment as well I think
• xiaodai 4y ago
  a better question? does America need to build? The answer is a resounding no. Japan and China are building bridges to nowhere. Their ethno-nationalism is holding them back. If they take in immigration like the rest of the rich world, they'd have a better luck to tackle their aging population issue. But they wouldn't for ethno-nationalistic reasons. America already has fantastic infrastructure in the form of roads. they don't need all these bullet trains etc. It's propaganda. Spain has one of the largest bullet train network but their economy is still sluggish. If the bullet trains were such a good idea then a Elon Musk-type would've invested in one. U see, that's how the railway system got built in America. Think Rocker-feller. The fact that America doesn't have it just means it doesn't make economic nor political sense. Also, if an enemy nation like Mexico invades, do u want them to have fast trains to move soldiers around? Do you want Mexico to take back the city of angels? All in all. It's asking the wrong question. The assumption is that building good, not building bad. Which is the fundamentally wrong. China will not overtake the US just by building. The US is fine just the way it is.
• steve76 4y ago
• throwaway5752 4y ago
  • rcpt 4y ago
    Seems fine to me. It's a good article to.
• fallingfrog 4y ago
  I think we’re all dancing around the real issue which is that this is what happens when you have a low trust society in which everyone is trying to get theirs and there is no social cohesion or sense of common purpose. You get nimbys. The only thing that has held the country together up till now is “free” real estate and prosperity due mostly to luck and abundant natural resources. Take that away, and suddenly everyone is attacking each other. It’s no wonder we don’t get anything done.
• sparrc 4y ago
  I don't find this thesis to be true at all, at least from the perspective of someone living in the Seattle area, where we recently: - Hugely expanded the light-rail system and should have a major east-side extension opening within 2 years. - Tore down an above-ground waterfront highway and replaced it with a tunnel underneath downtown Seattle. - Currently reconstructing the waterfront to connect to the historic pike place market. - At least one major new ferry terminal in the region in the last few years. - Major expansion of the bike-lane network to where it's now easy to bike pretty much anywhere downtown, largely on protected bike lanes. As far as I can see the only issue really is funding that pushes the timelines out on further expansions. The federal government seems to give peanuts for major transportation projects so the state/city/county pretty much has to fund it all themselves.
• apexalpha 4y ago
  >Incredibly, the state has not laid a single mile of track and it still lacks 10 percent of the land parcels it needs to do so. Half of the project still hasn’t achieved the environmental clearance needed to begin construction. The dream of a Japanese-style bullet train crisscrossing the state is now all but dead due to political opposition, litigation, and a lack of funding. Surely this is the worst way to do a project. Not even having the land yet? I mean even a kid would now know the incredible amount of leverage the remaining land owners have over you. They can ask basically any price for it now.
• aporetics 4y ago
  Most of the comments here seem to be decidedly pro-building-big-stuff. As though that were obviously in the interest of the greater good, and everyone should just get with the program. But the primary exhibit in the author’s opinion is a project that, by his own account, probably should never have been undertaken. So let’s ask a question. What if the hurdles and pushback, (which the author identifies as environmental reviews, pushback from local communities, and unions) are performing a necessary function (but doing so inefficiently). What if they are saying something that shouldn’t be ignored? What if we shouldn’t be building huge freeways (odd that all the examples are roads and bridges—-what about energy projects)? What if that investment went into methodically reshaping our cities to be walkable, livable, sustainable, fed from locally grown food, integrated with wild space… Just consider the amount of concrete it takes to build one of these megastructures. Concrete alone accounts for 8% of global CO2 emissions [0]. What would happen if you accounted for that cost in addition to the billions of dollars spent on a one-minute-per-mile faster commute. (If only there were some power to the irony of wasting CO2 emissions for the sake of enabling more cars on the road. See Braess’ Paradox [1] and Jevons Paradox) Maybe environmental concerns are right. Maybe labor concerns are right. Maybe we need to integrate the values they represent into planning, rather than making them file lawsuits. Maybe we should think more carefully about what we should build. [0] https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02612-5 https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02612-5 [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Braess%27s_paradox https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Braess%27s_paradox
• bandrami 4y ago
  In the last bit he leaves out Bell Labs, which was de facto the national research laboratory for decades, funded by a system that was a tax in everything but name, and which was encouraged to try new things even with the assumption that most of them would fail.
• noirchen 4y ago
  I would say it's not an issue about democracy or bureaucracy, it's because the responsibility is diluted. Someone is not happy with this? Great, it is now not because we do not do it, it is because we take every complaint seriously. The dilution of responsibility may appear in different ways. Leave the issue to some dedicated committee, they will work very hard to make sure the project won't start in a millennium, and cost possibly even more than actually building the project. In case people are concerned about the endless delay, all the process is transparent and no one is to blame. This is not limited to building project. We all remember that when covid started, it took the CDC a long time to acknowledge that masks are effective, and even longer to acknowledge that the disease is airborne (in Oct. 2020). Why? They based their guidelines on "science and evidence". In events like, any delay in the decision leads to many deaths that could have been saved. Ironically, in current America, only the fanatics are making prompt decisions. Look how fast the red states are passing abortion laws after the RvW overturned.
• kkfx 4y ago
  In the past we have made cities because of economy of scale effects, and because we are social animals. In the very past we have made them because we do not have had effective quick enough transportation systems, for defense, water proximity etc. Nowadays at the actual evolution state, at the actual needs the economy of scale effects do not happen in cities anymore but in Rivieras, witch differ from USA suburbs because they are not residential-only areas but a mix of residential and work areas, a bit dense but not too much to have no room for evolution, not too low do have no benefit of density scale. That's is. In the very past when cities were little and made of rocks and wood changing them was moderately easy and normally happen after a not infrequent catastrophe, now with concrete thing have changed much, we can't "source raw materials where we are, recycling the past mess" and that's another important issue: we know concrete do not last forever and we made big stuff with it with no real plan on what to do when will be time to decommission them. We allow keeping up crappy things because of someone interests against all others and again no plan how to sort the issue out. That's why not USA in particular but essentially all other the world we can't build. USA have showed and tested why differentiation fails: suburbs fails because they are residential-only, you need a car just to get a bottle of milk. Cities fails because of density. EU give even worse example of dense-cities issues. BUT all other the world we see that Rivieras keep going. Surely they are not universal, we can't made a mining industry with that model. We need some "districts" but some with a single purpose, a single owner, aside that we can a day erasing them and restart over. Such model is implicit in the Green New Deal, even if people, even UN New Urban Agenda deny it, we can evolve single-family homes with a bit of land around, we can't for tall buildings and dense areas. IMVHO the Green New Deal also tell without telling their "solution": pushing poor in modern cities who happen to be like prisons, of small size to be manageable, and live few wealthy aside. I doubt such model can scale, I doubt such "separation" can work in nature though...
• lukeschwartz 4y ago
  Construction should never stop; build, modify, tear, repeat.
• 13113 4y ago
• notlukesky 4y ago
  My favorite NIMBY story is of the Golden Gate bridge: https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/place/article/Golden-Gate-Bridge-construction-and-indignation-3554707.php https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/place/article/Golden-Gate-Bri...
  • nmeofthestate 4y ago
    My favourite NIMBY story is the Edinburgh inner ring road: https://www.scotsman.com/whats-on/arts-and-entertainment/edinburghs-unbuilt-inner-ring-road-839999 https://www.scotsman.com/whats-on/arts-and-entertainment/edi...
• denton-scratch 4y ago
  I assumed "build" meant "erect buildings". Appparently the story is that USA can't lay roads. Is that the result of a timely regulatory reaction to the USA's car culture?
  • ETH_start 4y ago
    >>Appparently the story is that USA can't lay roads Also high speed rail lines.
• einpoklum 4y ago
  I called BS when the author claimed that dock workers make $100,000/year. The article seems to imply that the main part of the problem is organized labor and the need to follow environmental regulation. I don't buy that.
• atoav 4y ago
  If I learned one thing in countless city planing videos on youtube it is that car centrist ideology combined with car centrism enshrined in regulation combined create the urban sprawl that is so common in North America. The main problem with it is the extreme inefficiency: Because of the big surfaces needed for parking and driving a large fraction of the land is not only failing at generating a revenue for the city, it is in fact a liability, because when that street needs to be renewed the money will not be there to do it. In Europe when a new distric is built outside a city the first thing put up is the public transport. This leads sometimws to the absurd situation that you can take a subway to what looks like a barren wasteland with a station in it, but 10 years later it will be a living place full of flats, shops, bars and so on. Living close (<10 min walk) to a public transport hub is a major factor when I look for a place. I grew up on the country side and had a car (I was even driving as a job), but haven't had a car in the past 12 years. The places I need to go to are typically faster to reach by bicycle or public transport, the few times I need to transport something car sharing works perfectly fine.
• yeaso9 4y ago
  Because there are too few builders. I am trying to get an old house updated and keep hearing no one goes into those jobs anymore. The crews are aging and backed up on work. This rag makes a huge philosophical social statement without looking at the reality; there are more office workers than builders. You can’t build anything when everyone is preferring computer jobs and high salaries to go along. America does not need to build more industrial nonsense. Or even homes. It needs to use empty space that it built better. This whining about how grand greenfield projects cannot get off the ground is propaganda. Pay trades people what a programmer makes and America will build again. But that won’t happen as Thiel, Musk and company would not have their way with human agency if it could afford it’s own.
• albertopv 4y ago
  In USA you are lucky, at least you don't find unexploded WWII air bombs or mines or even underground nazi weapons storage rooms...yes, we still find them in Italy and it costs a lot to deal with, both time and money.