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How the US can stop wasting billions of dollars on each transit project

• onphonenow 4y ago
  Watch McDonald’s put up a restaurant. I went to school and they changed zoning along this big road where I lived. When I can back from winter break it was unrecognizable and the stores were open. Now in CA - voted for high speed rail and was absolutely promised it would not go over budget. The first contractor quit in disgust SNCF and started doing projects in Africa saying they were less dysfunctional :) Most recent audit committee reports are that everything is on track. We will see One argument on ballot was 10 years of planning went into project before ballot - so starting 1998 or so - 24 years later now
  • Cyberdog 4y ago
    I voted against high speed rail because it it wouldn't be serving anywhere near my area - I get it, the majority of the population lives on the coast between the Bay Area and San Diego, but why increase the tax burden on the people who live in the other 90% of the state who will likely never ride it? - and because I knew it would go over-budget and over-schedule. Unsurprisingly, I got outvoted. And unsurprisingly, however many years and billions of dollars later, there are still no high speed trains running.
    • bagels 4y ago
      I voted against it and lived where it would be useful because I didn't think it would be on time or on budget, because no infrastructure project is in the US.
      • vasco 4y ago
        By that yardstick no infrastructure would be built.
        • bagels 4y ago
          We don't get to vote on all of them.
        • MontyCarloHall 4y ago
          Perhaps none should be built until we figure out how to get costs on par with other first world countries.
          • cultofmetatron 4y ago
            THis is disastrously unproductive thinking. perfect is the enemy of good enough and if we don't build infrastructure, there's no incentive to create the supply chains that bring costs down overtime in the first place.
            • xboxnolifes 4y ago
              Perfect may be the enemy of good, but thankfully the US' ability to construct in a reasonably fast and affordable way isn't good.
    • renewiltord 4y ago
      Personally, this is why I vote against schools. No child of mine goes to public school. Big waste of money. Wish I could do that with universities but that's mostly federal and state. Fortunately, can just vote against property tax and bonds to stop local schools.
      • s5300 4y ago
        Do you not realize how fucked up & demented you sound in saying this…? Education is the only path to a better world. The vast majority of the populace cannot afford private schooling. & to them - you say - fuck them. Makes me feel as if nepotism might be a fetish of yours.
        • wizzwizz4 4y ago
          Education is incredibly important… but I'm not confident US schools actually provide it. It's better than nothing, sure, but if you can do better than schools, why send your child to one? https://mysite.science.uottawa.ca/mnewman/LockhartsLament.pdf https://mysite.science.uottawa.ca/mnewman/LockhartsLament.pd... So long as you make sure they have friends and peers – which is, admittedly, really hard outside the school system – what's the advantage of school?
          • s5300 4y ago
            I went to a public school in one of the 10 poorest counties in the US. I lived well below the poverty line with food insecurity. Socially it was somewhat hellish & there were definitely more than enough teachers that gave zero fucks about anything, but also teachers who cared more than you could ever imagine. I came out of it with full ride scholarships for mechanical engineering, to a University ranked something within the top 20 of whatever with regards to their engineering programs in general, & of their various fields, their MechE & ElecE were regarded as the best (within the engineering college, realized my poor wording could be interpreted in another way). I also received - actually, was harassed with - endless offers from military recruiters to go down a navy nuke/Air Force officer path, w/a $30k-$40k enlistment bonus, just for being in the top percentile of the ASVAB test - offered by my public school, that I reluctantly took. Public schools, administration wise, are in general part of the problem. But cunts of parents raising shitty little cockgargling douchecunts of kids that inhabit the public schools are the larger problem. I don’t know the best solution to the problem, but burning down public schools even more is definitely not it. I think giving a baseline pay of $70k/yr, a $20k or so one time “bonus”, as well as a “if you hate being a teacher, here’s $15k-$30k severance to quit, but you can never be in any position dealing with public education systems again” to every teacher may be a decent start. Sorry for the poor articulation & vocabulary in this comment, quite tired after a long day & in a good amount of physical pain.
    • vincnetas 4y ago
      You would benefit by less traffic on roads because someone else would be using high speed trains.
      • chucksmash 4y ago
        If high speed rail does not serve their region, then I think it stands to reason that high speed rail wouldn't improve traffic in their region.
        • panick21_ 4y ago
          That is a bad assumption. Because if you have other public transport and regional rail, that connects to the high speed rail backbone. All of sudden somebody that wants to go to LA of SF would take the regional rail to the next high speed train station. Thus those persons wouldn't drive. California has done a lot since the 1990 in terms of regional rail and things like electrification of Caltrain are no brainers. But they need to do a lot more. High speed rail is successful when its integrated into lots of regional rails.
        • Cyberdog 4y ago
          Precisely. The closest high speed rail train station to where I grew up would be… three hours away, maybe? And no, there are no regional trains I could take to get there. I don't think there are any buses either. The entire state is not the SF-LA corridor. That's my entire point.
    • CalRobert 4y ago
      Similarly, we should end services to low density areas that can't support themselves. It's very unfair on a per-person basis.
    • panick21_ 4y ago
      This doesn't really make sense. The whole point of high speed rail is to reliably and effectively connect the northern and southern existing transit regions that are currently separated. Its like saying the US should never have built rail across the US because most people don't use it. Of course if you just do high speed rail, you don't have much, what you actually need is to extend and expand your regional rail and transit network. Then high speed rail benefits both regional transit networks. Given how much money is invested in highways and how much it cost to build the absurd highway system, rail just makes way more sense. Its pretty funny to me that what is supposed to be 4 largest economy in the world can't manage a half way decent train network. When there are multiple cities with 500k to millions people are between SF and LA. There is easily enough population to have a really successful high speed rail if its correctly connected to a larger regional network.
      • adolph 4y ago
        > Its like saying the US should never have built rail across the US because most people don't use it. Initialization of rail across the US was a greenfield project with little in the way of previous context and self-funded by land grants. The comparison is specious since about the only thing HSW and historic rail have in common is their use of rails.
        • mymythisisthis 4y ago
          To call it 'self-funded' is a bit of a stretch. Most rail financing went bankrupt and had to have been bailed up by the government at some point. Even though rail was a greenfield project, native treaty rights were trampled, that should also be remembered. Technology wise, it was WWI that killed rail, unintentionally. All the trucks, post war, were dumped and sold for cheap. Companies bought them up and started hauling goods to market, without having to buy real-estate, or a factory, near a rail line.
          • adolph 4y ago
            "self-funded": sure, lets say "intended as self-funded"; "native treaty rights": yes, relatively greenfield compared to today WWI and rail: another aspect was nepotistic political control (which might not have been a bad thing but definitely has an odor). [0] I wonder if dumping the Liberty trucks a conceptual/capacity jump start more than a physical one. The 1917 rolling stock was 2,250,000 freight cars [0], and roughly 10k Liberty Trucks were produced [1]. On March 21, 1918, the Railway Administration Act became law, and Wilson's 1917 nationalization order was affirmed. Wilson appointed his son-in-law, Secretary of the Treasury William Gibbs McAdoo, as Director General of the newly formed USRA. 0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Railroad_Administration https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Railroad_Adminis... 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberty_truck https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberty_truck
  • stephen_g 4y ago
    It's a little bit different than building a McDonalds - they're building an underground rail line in my city, and just the acoustic sheds and site offices (before they could start even digging a shaft to drop in a tunnel boring machine) on one of the six or so major sites is like building a dozen McDonald restaurants in itself! Not to mention water treatment, spoil handling and treatment, ventilation systems, moving utilities etc. etc.
    • onphonenow 4y ago
      If you travel internationally you quickly realize all the excuses for why things take so long are just that. Be curious how long Tesla would take to build a huge full factory in China. In ca the permitting alone is on the order of years.
      • Game_Ender 4y ago
        They built their factory in China in less than a year [0]. Tesla pushes equally hard everywhere which you can see in Germany where they pulled out every stop they could to build quickly and still took about 2 years [1]. 0 - https://www.pmi.org/most-influential-projects-2020/50-most-influential-projects/tesla-gigafactory-shanghai https://www.pmi.org/most-influential-projects-2020/50-most-i... 1 - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gigafactory_Berlin-Brandenburg https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gigafactory_Berlin-Brandenbu...
        • panick21_ 4y ago
          The Berlin factory was larger then the initial factory in China. Its more like the second extension in China.
      • adolph 4y ago
        Seems like in the US Tesla can get something up and running within a couple years. May 2020, a selection process was underway by Tesla July 2020, Tesla selected Austin as the site July 2020, Construction began end of 2021, limited production of Model Y starts April 2022, initial deliveries of vehicles built at the factory took place at an opening party called “Cyber Rodeo” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gigafactory_Texas https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gigafactory_Texas
  • Fiahil 4y ago
    I think the US don't deserve high speed trains. This can be revisited in a few decades when the population becomes less hostile towards rails. (Cf this : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33502387 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33502387) Building a nerwork in Africa, however, is a great idea !
    • snovv_crash 4y ago
      I saw protest graffiti against high speed trains in Spain as well.
      • deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
  • newaccount2021 4y ago
  • madengr 4y ago
  • panick21_ 4y ago
    Thing is, because of property tax systems, these large companies build these box stores and fast food joints in the cheapest way possible so they can basically not pay property taxes and basically write it off after 10 years. The tax system and the infrastructure fees insensitive totally the wrong way of development. And this is why cities are mostly broke.
• refurb 4y ago
  Singapore just put in a new MRT line (well, in phases, some haven't opened yet) - 43km, 32 stations, all underground for $25B or ~$0.8B per station. San Francisco put the Chinatown line in - 3km, 4 stations, 3 underground for $2B or $0.7B per station (ignoring the above ground one). Clearly Singapore can do it quicker because there is one level of government. And they import cheap labor to actually build the lines. So other than the delays, the cost for SF doesn't seem ridiculous.
  • atdrummond 4y ago
    One major difference is Singapore and Japan’s stops are profit centers and not cost centers - they rent massive amounts of property on them, meaning they’re not as dependent on debt or fare collection.
    • deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    • larsiusprime 4y ago
      This is essentially "land value capture" policy, right? https://www.lincolninst.edu/publications/articles/2022-09-land-value-capture-pay-infrastructure-affordable-housing-public-services https://www.lincolninst.edu/publications/articles/2022-09-la...
    • tjpnz 4y ago
      Either that or they put in their own retail. It's no coincidence that Tokyu, Keio and Hankyu all operate their own supermarkets and stores throughout Japan's rail network.
    • warning26 4y ago
      Having rail operators also act as real estate companies is pure genius IMO -- it creates a profit motive for dense, transit oriented development, without any need for onerous top-down planning.
      • closeparen 4y ago
• user3939382 4y ago
  IMHO often the purpose of these projects isn’t to deliver transportation, it’s to keep people employed in the project. That means draw it out, maximize the budget, spend every penny, etc., whereas the actual infrastructure is the excuse to keep it going. Put another way, conflicts of interest tend to arise from the bureaucracy inherent in these projects. The researcher here identifies the symptoms of this but seems to see this more as an accident.
  • robomartin 4y ago
    > IMHO often the purpose of these projects isn’t to deliver transportation, it’s to keep people employed in the project. Bingo! Another element of this is to use such projects to buy the votes of the large unions. Just a couple of months ago these crews came through our street. They ripped-up the PERFECTLY GOOD sidewalks and rebuilt them. This street is 24 years old. In other words, it's new. Oh, yes, they repaved it once about a year ago. The guys ripping-up the sidewalk told me they are going to rip-up the street and repave it next year. This is criminal.
    • jimt1234 4y ago
      Can you please tell them to come re-pave my street? It's pothole heaven.
      • robomartin 4y ago
        That's the irony/tragedy of this, isn't it. The misallocation of funds is staggering. I'll give you another example. There's a stop sign not far from my home that gets knocked down with such alarming frequency that the neighborhood knows it at "Kenny" (the South Park character that always got killed). I would say it lasts two to six weeks. I would not be surprised if, in the last ten years, Kenny was replaced 100 to 200 times. I lost count. The reason this happens is that semi trucks exiting the freeway at night can't see it, make a tighter than usual turn and run it over. There really isn't anything wrong with the turn, they have plenty of room. The sign is simply in the wrong place. Guess what they do? Every time the sign is taken down they return and install a new sign in exactly the same spot. Brand new sign. I would not be surprised if the aggregate cost of replacing this sign, between hardware, labor and organizational costs is in the order of $10K to $20K. Which means we have likely spent between a million and four million dollars, if not more, replacing this sign. It's Einstein's definition of madness: Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. And we pay for the madness.
• socialismisok 4y ago
  Seattle delivered rail infrastructure on time and under budget, and now it has a ridership in the millions. People want trains. People use trains. Build more goddamn trains.
  • sfpotter 4y ago
    It did? I’m from Seattle, and the plans for a light rail were perennially stalled since I was a kid. What they’ve built so far is nice, but they’re expanding it at a glacial pace. They could build more and faster.
    • AmpsterMan 4y ago
      Point still stands though, as meager as it is. The link is the only major public works project in recent memory that largely succeeded AND under budget
    • resist_futility 4y ago
      1-2+ million a month. I wonder how fast light rail will be when they have as many stops as are planned, will it be just as slow as a bus? https://www.soundtransit.org/ride-with-us/system-performance-tracker/ridership https://www.soundtransit.org/ride-with-us/system-performance... https://www.soundtransit.org/get-to-know-us/maps https://www.soundtransit.org/get-to-know-us/maps
      • socialismisok 4y ago
        They aren't adding new stops in between existing stops. Trains board and deboard WAY faster than busses. And the link has grade separated track most of the way. So it cannot be slowed by traffic. There's no reason to think it would be slower than it is today, which is to say, often faster than a single occupancy vehicle.
    • socialismisok 4y ago
      Yep, we talked about it for a long time, but it did in fact complete on time and under budget. It's expanding slowly because there's a lot of pushback to adding more, which is a bummer. We need like 8x the amount of rail here, at least.
• kkfx 4y ago
  My unpopular opinion is simple: public transit works well for standard humans witch means meat-based self-reproducible robots, any dictatorship want, because they do not almost have "individual" needs, they are just tools to be moved around in batch, public transport for them is like containers for shipping industry. Humans, Citizens instead tend to have effectively overlapping needs, but they essentially never overlap 100% so or public transports waste money in big under-used infra of make them moving nearly empty 24/7/365 to satisfy Citizens needs and desires. In dense cities cars are a nightmare so public transport is the only remaining solution behind nuking the city itself. But that's not a cheap AND effective solution in essentially all cases, as a result or we admit that the real "future society" target is the one pictured by the WEF years ago https://youtu.be/Hx3DhoLFO4s https://youtu.be/Hx3DhoLFO4s with the meat-based robots stuffed in modern chicken coops named "smart cities" where the dumb is the human (well depicted by the facial mimic of the main actor of the aforementioned video) and the Humans/Citizens (or oppressors, cleptocrats, depending on your POV) remain outside or no country in the world can stop wasting billion on crappy public transit project if not deciding to de-urbanize creating a new distributed society where we do have aggregation centers (like schools, unis, etc) and some districts for some kind of manufacturing activities we can't do otherwise, create a hybrid far more remote and ALSO far more social IRL society or...
  • sanxiyn 4y ago
    Note that public transports moving nearly empty doesn't waste much money: it's a common misconception. Rail is mostly capex with little opex, and fare is set above opex anyway. Tracks are already built and trains are already bought. You need to pay back capex with fare, so every little ridership helps, and people's transportation choice is very sensitive to how often trains run (therefore how long they need to wait), so often the optimal choice is to run trains as much and as often as possible, even if they are nearly empty. Absolute ridership number is much more important than how full trains are.
    • rippercushions 4y ago
      Incidentally, running frequent services is something the US is really bad at. I doubt there's another country where a line with one (1) train in the morning and one (1) in the evening on weekdays, and none at all on weekends, would dare to call itself a commuter service. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sounder_commuter_rail https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sounder_commuter_rail On the upside, "additional trips on the S Line are scheduled to be implemented by 2046." Whoo!
• bigbacaloa 4y ago
  Seems the conclusions can be summarized as: institutionalized corruption at the local level drives costs way up.
• supernova87a 4y ago
  In addition to the factors mentioned in the article, I boil it down in my mind to 2 factors, one legitimate, one dumb. 1) Here in the US and other now built-up countries, it's extremely expensive to displace existing interests and structures (both physical and legal, etc). People have built their lives, bought property, created interests, that have to be compensated to be moved out of the way. Even if a relatively neutral 3rd party could balance one interest against another, we simply have so many legal protections for people's interests that you now have to pay them heavily to make anything possible. Good for some reasons, bad for others, but that's a large part of makes it expensive. Just look at the ridiculous attempts to work around this at LaGuardia Airport. Never going to happen. Unless the government/state was forethinking enough to have reserved rights to some property to develop it, you now have to pay for the value it has accrued. 2) The other large part is that we almost now go looking for liability to protect ourselves against, whether real or perceived. This leads to endless environmental reviews, opportunities to object, lots of consultants required, conservative (read, high) costs, over engineering and over spec-ing. It has become an industry for everyone to get their cut, at the expense of the general welfare, but urged on by some small consituency, and they're all happy to stay employed to do so. It's good for some things that property rights are being respected and the environment / issues are known before building something. But it has swung too far to that side I think. And as sad as I am to say it, sometimes you wish that Elon Musk would do for local infrastructure what he did for government understanding of reasonable rocket costs. But this one is a lot harder to fix than offering for sale an alternative.
  • panick21_ 4y ago
    1) This is a problem everywhere. And yet most don't have problem as extreme as the US. The are often solutions for those sorts of things. 2) This is certainty a problem but also not totally unique. Musk wont help public transit, he hates it.
  • mymythisisthis 4y ago
    The U.S.A. also went through rapid de-industrialization for the last 30 years. Look at what is called the 'rust belt' in the North-East. Does the U.S.A., need all the bridges and roads it once built. Detroit is contracting. Some towns might even be better off economically if they removed all their old bridges and replaced access to a town with a small ferry. If a town has transformed into a retirement community, becoming more bucolic and scenic would attract retirees and tourists. It would be less of a burden with up keep, more of a tourist draw.
• hardware2win 4y ago
  2b per km? Thats insane
• 6stringmerc 4y ago
  “You can’t fight the railroad” Texas would be great for high speed rail and we all know it. Texans hate the idea of the government using its power over them, especially when it comes to a train line in their yard. A lot of the hostility in the US is probably historically based. I worked in rail engineering a few years ago and the rail companies are…powerful. As in “Mrs or Mr Mayor/Governor go fuck yourself” level powerful. The legacy of rail is full of powerful assholes. It’s an awful industry for anybody with a decent education and understanding of the planet. Honestly if you are a big ox of a person and a flat earth advocate, a track gang is a good spot for you. Rail is not liked in the US because the railroads have acted like assholes for more than 100 years here. Just ask the Chinese.
• grecy 4y ago
  The thing is that money is not being "wasted" at all. It's profit for someone. Just like healthcare & education, building big infrastructure projects lines the pockets of everyone even tangentially involved, so there is no incentive to change anything. People are literally making millions of dollars.
  • devoutsalsa 4y ago
    If you’re not getting a good return on your paid taxes, I’d call that wasteful spending.
    • grecy 4y ago
      For YOU, sure. For the people getting rich, it’s working perfectly and nothing is going to change.
    • AdrianB1 4y ago
      We call it corruption here in Eastern Europe. Call a spade a spade.
  • photochemsyn 4y ago
    Transparency is the solution to that. For some reason, you also left out one of the largest government contracting sectors in the USA, i.e. military and intelligence procurement and contracting - where the waste is more extreme, as it can be hidden behind classification on 'national security grounds'.
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  • nicoburns 4y ago
    I’m other words, the process is corrupt, allocating money to private interests rather than to actually constructing the project.
  • adamsmith143 4y ago
    Of course it's wasted. If you paid for a service and received no service in return you typically call that fraud. Why would it be different in this case, because someone received "profit" for doing nothing it's all ok?
• m0llusk 4y ago
  The idea that we can do better and save money by ignoring context is utterly and shamefully stupid. This piece highlights the Second Avenue subway. That line was first proposed roughly a hundred years ago. It was decided then that the level of complication from utilities and other subway lines made it unreasonably expensive to build. Over the years the Second Avenue line was repeatedly proposed and the conclusion was always the same. The level of complication made it completely impractical. The costs of construction would be astronomical. So then it was decided that new tunnel boring technology would make the project pencil out. So the project moved forward. Sure enough, the complications caused costs to explode. If only someone had consulted the extensive literature on the subject that had accumulated over the last hundred years. Now researchers look at what went wrong and have decided that more careful control of contractors would fix things. That is false. The Second Avenue subway has always been impractical. Basic research shows that has been demonstrated at length many times. Making generalizations about transit construction based on a project that was ruled out repeatedly over a period of a hundred years makes no sense. The Second Avenue subway did not break records with its expense because we don't know how to build. The Second Avenue subway cost a phenomenal amount because it is an impractical project with a huge amount of complications. No amount of clever design or management could possibly make the Second Avenue subway cost a reasonable amount. And this has been solidly understood for a hundred years.
  • MontyCarloHall 4y ago
    None of this is true. >That line was first proposed roughly a hundred years ago. It was decided then that the level of complication from utilities and other subway lines made it unreasonably expensive to build. The utility density under Second Avenue is not any higher than any other avenue. There are very few other neighboring subway lines to contend with (especially when the line was first proposed). In fact, the only other subway tunnels that the actually completed portion of the Second Avenue Subway contends with already had built-in provisions to connect to a future SAS tunnel (63rd Street tunnel, finished in the late 80s). >Over the years the Second Avenue line was repeatedly proposed and the conclusion was always the same. The level of complication made it completely impractical. The costs of construction would be astronomical. Other cities with equally complex underground infrastructure (e.g. Paris) manage to complete cut-and-cover subway construction at a fraction of the cost. >So then it was decided that new tunnel boring technology would make the project pencil out. So the project moved forward. Sure enough, the complications caused costs to explode. Again, other cities manage to construct deep bore tunnels at a fraction of the cost. For example, Korea is building a deep bore (50m underground) high speed rail line under Seoul (GTX A) with several underground stations at a fraction of the cost of the SAS. This line will carry heavy rail trains at 180 km/h, so it is a considerably more complex undertaking than a regular subway tunnel. (It’s not just the SAS, by the way; insane construction costs are rampant in the NYC Metropolitan Transit Authority. For example, it cost $30M and took 3 years to build a single staircase: https://www.amny.com/transit/30-million-subway-stairs-times-square-subway/ https://www.amny.com/transit/30-million-subway-stairs-times-...)
• christkv 4y ago
  Read about the building of the new subway line in nyc the amount of corruption and people being payed to do basically nothing is amazing.
• JCM9 4y ago
  The environmental review process is also horribly broken in the US. In practice it does relatively little to protect the environment and adds enormous cost and complexity to projects. Important needed infrastructure is held up for years, sometimes decades, in lengthy court battles that frequently don’t meaningfully alter the proposals. In the end the same project is built but at 2-3x the cost. We should, of course, protect the environment but we’ve gotta find a way to do that which is efficient and doesn’t waste public funds (where that current waste ironically could then be diverted into meaningful projects to protect the environment!).
  • helloooooooo 4y ago
    Environmental review isn’t just about the hippie-greenie meaning of environment, but the actual built-environment. Questions asked include: how does the proposed plan interface with existing infrastructure? How will humans interact with it? What kind of traffic volumes are proposed? It isn’t just about protecting and engineering our way around natural features. It’s about engineering around the built-environment as well.
    • xphilter 4y ago
      And it’s still a waste of time and money.
    • panick21_ 4y ago
      And yet despite that transit projects in the US almost universally fail at most of these aspects. Or play into the existing status quo that is supposed to be changed. And really these questions were already asked and explored in the design phase. By the time this has to be done all these things have already been threw many iterations. Sometimes its better to just do a project, because you can always change a lot of things and iterate on a lot of aspects of a transit project.
    • ch4s3 4y ago
      The EIS process in New York amounts to little more than legally mandated graft and a blocking function for preventing new housing from being built. A residential project on the edge of Downtown Brooklyn nearly died because it cast a shadow on a tiny community garden used by fewer than 20 people. The compromise was to shorted then building which eliminated 20 or so units of affordable housing.
• dctoedt 4y ago
  • CalRobert 4y ago
    You forgot to put two spaces after each full stop (or period, if you prefer).
    • dctoedt 4y ago
      > You forgot to put two spaces after each full stop (or period, if you prefer). No, I didn't forget — browsers strip out the extra space, and I wasn't going to take the time to type in the HTML code ( ) to get an extra space (and HN seems to escape such codes in any case). Yes, I'm a two-spaces person, because: A. These days, readers are busy; they tend to scan text instead of leisurely contemplating and savoring each word. B. The extra space after the period (or the full stop, if you prefer) helps the scanning reader to discern more quickly where one sentence ends and the next begins. The Two-Space Rule is merely one corollary of The Cardinal Rule of Writing, which is: Serve The Reader. (Another such corollary is: Short, Single-Subject Paragraphs.)
  • songshu 4y ago
    I know this isn’t quite the same as what’s happening in the article, but: what do you use when referring to a singular person of unknown gender?
    • dctoedt 4y ago
      > what do you use when referring to a singular person of unknown gender? A. Use "he or she," etc.; or B. Rewrite the sentence.
      • smallerfish 4y ago
        Have you considered that you are overly sensitive to this, and that you might have been conditioned to be by the manufactured controversy currently being stoked by the right? There are exactly two uses of the word "they" as a pronoun, both in regard to Alon Levy, who presumably prefers this pronoun. It's a big world out there - learn to live with it.
• photochemsyn 4y ago
  Let's say the USA builds out rail infrastructure at the same scale as found in Europe, Japan, and China. What's that going to do to domestic fossil fuel sales? How about domestic vehicle sales? Airplane traffic and airplane fuel sales? It's very notable that the countries with the most sophisticated train networks - Japan, China, Europe - are also importers of fossil fuels. Since the USA is an exporter of fossil fuels, a collapse in domestic demand due to an efficient nationwide train system is not something the ruling oligarchs are interested in financing, it's as simple as that.
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  • Ericson2314 4y ago
    Real estate and car interests are much more to blame than fossil fuel interests.
• f0e4c2f7 4y ago
  I believe Ray Dallio's most recent book talks about this a bit. Essentially the idea that more developed countries have slow downs in productivity related to waste. A year or two ago I read the book The Power Broker about a guy who was responsible for a lot of the construction in new york city in fairly corrupt ways. You get the idea in the book that they were just figuring out the earliest versions of ballooning costs and slowing projects down in those days. In the same way private contractors benefit from the military industrial complex and are incentivized to keep it alive and even promote conflict, We have a sort of bullshit industrial complex too of consultants and other nonsense jobs that come in and make projects take longer. It seems like there must be a way to go back to building stuff as fast as we could 100 years ago in the US. In China they can still build that way today[0][1] in a way I find embarrassing and annoying. Patrick Collison explores this idea some on this page[2]. I consider it to be one of the most important problems of the modern age. How different would the world be if in 3 months SF build 19 giant skyscrapers full of apartments you would want to live in? Some of these problems are exacerbated by the fact that even if you could do it now, capital isn't as cheap as it used to be. Which makes it even more frustrating that we went through that period without massive infrastructure updates and improvements. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OWp6vSHFG4M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OWp6vSHFG4M [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N6f_sayw0mM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N6f_sayw0mM [2] https://patrickcollison.com/fast https://patrickcollison.com/fast
  • kspacewalk2 4y ago
    >We have a sort of bullshit industrial complex too of consultants and other nonsense jobs that come in and make projects take longer. Forego those "bullshit industrial complex" studies, and there'll be some environmental, safety or cost fuck-up. Outside observers will then get to comment derisively on lack of foresight or planning, so it's really a win-win for us. >It seems like there must be a way to go back to building stuff as fast as we could 100 years ago in the US. There is. Forego a lot of the building/safety code, cut corners, and optimize speed over all else. >In China they can still build that way today[0][1] in a way I find embarrassing and annoying. Imagine how embarrassing and annoying it must be for Chinese people to see the relatively sub-par quality of the end result. >How different would the world be if in 3 months SF build 19 giant skyscrapers full of apartments you would want to live in? I can almost guarantee it would not happen. They can build it, but it's not likely to be an apartment I would want to live in, at least long term. Don't get me wrong, there's certainly a middle-ground somewhere between the extremes you're talking about. However, when it comes to, say, transit, I'd much rather aim for a first-world country that builds "less slowly" and cheaper without compromising safety or quality, like Spain or the Netherlands, over a place like China, which may set the record for speed but won't be setting any records for quality or longevity of its infrastructure. (And I'd even say that's okay for China, they need it deployed quickly because they, until recently, were growing fast from a very low baseline.)
• aaron695 4y ago
  It'd be good to see an adult comment on the Vegas Loop. Vegas Loop $50 million. 2 years from contract signed to opening. 1.7 miles, one lane. Currently has shared driven cars - https://www.tiktok.com/@alexsibila/video/7156602211508768046 https://www.tiktok.com/@alexsibila/video/7156602211508768046 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Boring_Company https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Boring_Company How cutting edge is the prufrock? https://www.boringcompany.com/prufrock https://www.boringcompany.com/prufrock Musk knows what to do, cut out bureaucrats. Pay more money to dig deeper rather than mess with permissions. Vice is run by children, and children of the most boring kind. Reading articles on Vice for this stuff is pointless.
  • willio58 4y ago
    Imagine if instead of using teslas where a person is driving you (lol), they could just do what cities have been doing for centuries and put in a super fast and high capacity metro. I've never understood this idea of "let's go underground, get into a car, buckle up, and let a guy drive me to a place not that far from me and not that fast"
• mozman 4y ago
  Bring back small time corruption. It’s reserved for the super wealthy in the US but if foremans could grease the wheels every now and again things go a lot faster. You used to get this for free in NYC as you had to bribe someone to avoid concrete delivery delays and rejected mixes. They made sure all the little guys with a tiny bit of power stayed out of your way. The industry is now known as expediters and depending on the city is useless. As a country I think we forgot how to do business. It’s clear people aren’t happy with their wages..
  • usui 4y ago
    Doesn't tolerance for small-time corruption necessarily manifest into tolerance for big-time corruption?
    • mozman 4y ago
      We already have ubiquitous big time corruption. Just look at corporate America.
  • lbriner 4y ago
    It doesn't have to be corruption, which tends to reward the people in the know far more than those who aren't! There is already the concept of an expedited payment. You want the concrete on the agreed schedule, it's $3000 but if you need it express because you screwed something up, you can pay $500 and we'll get another driver in etc.
    • mozman 4y ago
      Being in the know is a major advantage in life. If you are pragmatic and know how to talk to people life is so much easier.
  • lazide 4y ago
    Ugh. That just makes it worse as more money disappears into the cracks and there is less accountability. The issue is the folks paying for it don’t demand results, they usually prefer it get drug out. It means more fees to the folks involved, a longer time in the cushy job overseeing it, etc. It’s usually the taxpayer or some large entity where the leaders are political and can get in on the graft, or are easily fooled. Once the planning authorities get out of the way, just look at most private construction - anything where it’s not a giant megacorp or entity paying for it. It’s done in 1/5th the time of equivalent public works, and at a fraction of the cost too. In most of these places, the politicians/leaders know how to control the captive base, and the captive base just shrugs and pays their taxes without demanding better. So as long as the graft isn’t too obvious, ‘everyone wins’ - except the end user of course. But they usually don’t actually need it (as in someone dies or an economy collapses or whatever), so they just putter along bitching about it without doing anything or looking closer. I guess that’s also part of the issue with having something that ‘mostly works’ already, no rush to replace it.
• lbriner 4y ago
  So many issues which all come back to culture and how you both set and incentivize it in the workers. Not many humans are going to bite the hand that feeds them so if they can pretend they have a full-time job as a "dropped nail collector" or something for $100K/year, many people will. Definitely need to do something about Political interference, the bane of many countries. People who have the power to sign checks/cheques but have no actual skin in the game if they change things, screw things up, promise their buddy some lucrative contract etc. The transparency has got to be one of the best ways of forcing things into the open though. Instead of a large contractor hiding a tonne of profit (or contingency) into their price, they specify it all - that should be the cost of earning public money. It helps both ways too. If the Project goes awry and needs the contractor to do more, they need to be paid more based on their rates. It sounds like NY is especially disfunctional though. I would love to see a decent (and long!) documentary on this sort of thing :-)
• cratermoon 4y ago
  One of the most convincing analyses I read, and I may dig up the link someday, is that the US sucks compared to Europe because every project is treated as a one-off unique effort, and there are so few of them, while Europe just builds transit the way the US builds houses: ongoing, repeated, standardized. It's easy to compare this with an aspect of software development, something most HN readers are no doubt familiar with: If something is hard, do it more frequently, until you get good at it. Nobody masters a skill by planning and thinking really hard about how to do the skill, then suddenly doing the skill perfectly. No, you start out with a goal and a general idea of the method, begin with the basics, try, fail, learn, try again. For days, weeks, months, years, until you master the skill.
• ravenstine 4y ago
  The entire point of these projects is to waste money. Or, rather, waste money from the perspective of those whom are paying. Those receiving certainly aren't wasting it.
• fastaguy88 4y ago
  I am always surprised when I learn that administrative/business advancement seems to be based on how much money was spent. I get it; it's much much easier to quantify spending than value per dollar. But in academia, I notice that there is a tremendous incentive to build new buildings and start new schools/departments, rather than improve existing infrastructure. Part of it is the donors, but I think there is an incentive to be able to say "I did this ...", where this involves a large budget. I suspect it is the same for public works projects -- career advancement depends more on spending money that producing value.
• rrwo 4y ago
  Part of the problem is that people in the US are hostile to the government actually doing anything using government employees instead of external contractors or consultants.
• jl2718 4y ago
  Deceptive title. No answer, just magical thinking about people ignoring their incentives. Here’s an idea, not a great one, but something: torts and bonds. Regulators specify public-interest outcomes and associated monetary values, which are the bonding requirements. Then public interest lawyers sue for a maximum of the existing bond on the grounds of any violation of the public interest outcomes. The plaintiff would be required to pay the the non-refundable public cost of the court case. It is important these court cases would not be based on intent or following standards, or technical merit; they are strictly about outcomes defined and valued by the bond. This would push technical standards and project evaluation into the insurance industry, and the finance industry would select their tolerable level of innovation and risk in each bonding pool. It is important here that the bonds be actual dollars held in trust, and not just letters of credit, and additionally, that no government agency provides finance or insurance in any form. It would have the obvious side-effect of requiring a lot of up-front capital to do anything, and tying up a lot of capital, which would have a huge range of risk, and therefore interest rates, as a project amortizes out its tort risk over time. The bonds would only be recoverable by torts, successful decommission of the project, or more realistically, subsidizing renewal of the project. The macroeconomic effect would be deflationary as the bonds would basically be a burn pit for dollars, but this would open up opportunities for more efficient public funding through central bank bond purchases and the elimination of tax burden. It would also massively reduce the public burden of regulation and administration, especially as the tort fees would pay for it. I think it would also promote localization of investment, as the bonding capital would be a high-yield investable asset most appropriately held or rejected by the people knowledgeable and/or responsible for the quality of the result, which is the community itself. Okay, this is Hacker News, so, please go ahead and tear it apart.