8 ms·

It would be interesting to compare prices of privately funded projects vs publicly funded ones, both in terms of cost, over-budget amounts and time needed to co

It would be interesting to compare prices of privately funded projects vs publicly funded ones, both in terms of cost, over-budget amounts and time needed to complete the project. I see many public locations, where a short street or even a walkway is closed for months, because they need to repave literally 20-30 square meters of a walkway, while companies such as Hofer (Aldi) manage to repave their parking yard in a few days, while keeping half of it still open for customers.

Spooky23 4y ago
There’s lots of stupid rules around sidewalks and lane striping. You need to do an ADA evaluation, remediate any findings, etc. A project in my city that resulted in adding a textured crosswalk pad, new stripes and a beg button cost $1.4M and took 3 years.
- mhalle 4y ago
  "Stupid rules" for one person are what enable another person to live an independent life. The Americans with Disabilities (ADA) act has been law since 1990 and codifies mobility and access as civil rights in the US. ADA does add to the costs of projects, but so does, say, safety code compliance. It's the law, and it exists for a good reason. As for the example of a minor accessibility project costing $1.4M and taking 3 years, I would suggest that there is probably more to the story that helps explain the cost or the time.
  - Robotbeat 4y ago
    I bet closing the sidewalk for longer is much worse for disabled people.
  - bombcar 4y ago
    The rules are fine, the stupidity is latent and revealed: 1. New construction must meet ADA requirements. 2. Old construction can remain. 3. Repairing broken old construction requires meeting ADA requirements. So between 2 and 3 you end up with broken old construction that cannot be repaired to "what it was" because repairs must meet ADA requirements. Each step makes sense on its own, but combined they result in something worse (in particular) even though overall it works out better.
    - rtkwe 4y ago
      What's the alternative that reaches eventual compliance everywhere on a shorter span than "wait for the grandfathered buildings to be bought and demolished" though?
      - dragonwriter 4y ago
        Impose a supplemental property tax, increasing over time, on buildings out of compliance with current requirements, so that upgrade or replacement becomes comparatively more desirable vs. doing neither than it currently is. Or, just have a fixed window to achieve compliance or the building is condemned.
        briandear 4y ago
        Cool. Let’s start with NYC subway stations. Public infrastructure should be ADA compliant yet NYC permitting will hammer a small business for a toilet two inches out of compliance when the city itself has massive issues that are ignored.
      - londons_explore 4y ago
        A daily fine for everything noncompliant. Make the fine approximately proportional to the number of potential users impeded. Then a popular crosswalk gets upgraded before a rural crosswalk that nobody uses anyway. An easy upgrade is done before a hard upgrade. Sometimes even new stuff might be built non-compliant if, for example, there are other substantial benefits that outweigh the fine. Just burn the fine revenue. (Burning money is the inverse of printing money, helps reduce inflation, and means nobody has an incentive to maximize fines)
        lukas099 4y ago
        I have trouble imagining anyone convincing a city to 'burn revenue', even if it's a good idea in principle. Maybe the next best thing is applying it to a negative income tax so that it goes to the lowest-income residents.
  - 908B64B197 4y ago
    > ADA does add to the costs of projects Not in the long run. ADA just forces better designs. Retrofits are costly. > As for the example of a minor accessibility project costing $1.4M and taking 3 years, I would suggest that there is probably more to the story that helps explain the cost or the time. Committees, political turf wars, getting funding for the project through grants (that are complicated to apply for, that's why you need a dedicated bureaucrat to do it!). Then there's union rules since construction workers from the city are government employees. That's half a million in employee's salaries right there and not a single concrete steps has been taken yet!
    - LanceH 4y ago
      > ADA does add to the costs of projects I'm not going to argue that it isn't necessary or right. But it absolutely costs more. A bathroom stall, for example, literally takes up more space, and that costs. A ramp and stairs takes up more space, materials and time and that costs. There are things which are right to do, but disingenuous arguments to support them aren't helpful.
  - VHRanger 4y ago
    Permitting process hell is the explanation.
  - starkparker 4y ago
    Replacing curb ramps can mean relocating the curb cut, which can mean relocating the underground sensor loops. Adding a beg button can mean upgrading or replacing the signal control module, which could mean replacing the housing if it's not large enough for the new module. (Audible-tactile buttons and controllers themselves cost $5-6k each, just for parts.) Aside from that, the issue with ADA compliance costs isn't when a municipality or DOT pays for them. It's when they remove the crosswalk entirely because they decide compliance isn't affordable enough.
  - Spooky23 4y ago
    As implemented ADA compliance requires that even trivial changes to a moderate complexity intersection require an engineering study at $300-500k, minimum. There are other requirements as well relating to multimodal travel depending online the funding source. All the while, we had an increasingly dangerous intersection with no visible crosswalks and outdated signals for years. The stupid isn’t ADA, it’s compliance activity. Cities and towns cannot afford the engineers to meet the standards, so the Federal and State governments fund projects. So there’s no framework of best practices beyond the state standards - each project is a special snowflake.
  - coryrc 4y ago
    The allowed slope for a ramp according ADA 1.5-3%. The recommended slope for drainage is 3-6%. Better hope you're really fucking precise. Oh, your road itself is at a slope greater than 3%? Oops, you can't legally do it! It's okay to have standards. It's not okay if they're bullshit.
    - jaclaz 4y ago
      You sure? ADA ramp max slope should be 1:12, i.e. 8.33% which is (IMHO) reasonable. https://www.ada-compliance.com/ada-compliance/ada-ramp https://www.ada-compliance.com/ada-compliance/ada-ramp
    - Loughla 4y ago
      Don't make things up. Recommended slope for drainage on concrete and asphalt is .25-.5:12, or 1/4" to 1/2" over 1' of length. Recommended slope for wheelchair ramps are 1-1.5:12, or 1" to 1.5" over 1' of length.
  - asdff 4y ago
    IMO ADA is probably a net harm at this point. When I look at the sidewalks here in socal, where 50 years ago they planted these rooty trees that make the region look like a tony hawk game today versus something you'd be able to get a wheelchair across, I'm starting to suspect its all ironically ADA's fault. They put the costs to meet their criteria so high that cities find it a better bet to just absorb lawsuits and not do anything than to actually make their cities manageable for disabled people. We need a more practical ada, that isn't nearly so costly to implement, so cities don't find it financially sensible to just sit on their hands forever.
- MaxMatti 4y ago
  Yes but you can do all that before tearing open the street or sidewalk
- ahoy 4y ago
  My dad's been physically disabled my entire life. Those "stupid" ADA rules make it possible for him to navigate public spaces
- ikiris 4y ago
  How dare those projects be forced to checks notes accommodate disabled people. Sometimes the comments on this site are just insufferable.
  - briandear 4y ago
    However there should be a balance. Look at parking lots — the ratio of disabled spaces to standard spaces is not the same ratio as disabled people to non-disabled people. And sometimes it’s ridiculous: drive through ATMs with braille for instance. Private motel swimming pools requiring wheelchair lifts. That extreme additional cost means that many motels just won’t have a swimming pool at all — so everyone is worse off. But you can’t charge disabled people a swimming pool surcharge since that discriminatory. So it raises costs for everyone. By the way, I am referring to private building codes, not taxpayer-funded projects like sidewalks.
    - hinkley 4y ago
      Do you suppose that perhaps disabled people take longer to shop? Certainly you’ve heard of Little’s Law if you hang out in HN?
    - lukas099 4y ago
      It probably costs less to have drive through ATMs with braille, because they can reuse the braille signage from the non-drive through ATMs.
    - asdff 4y ago
      Other things that can add cost fast are having too many elevators. I've been in 4 story buildings with 4 separate elevator shafts before that didn't have nearly the population or staff to ever get more than two moving at once. That just means higher rent to make a return on those 4 shafts mandated by some ordinance, which probably hurts you especially if you can't work and are living cheaply on disability. A lot of ordinances have been written with no understanding of how it would look in practice or the costs to implement them in the market and what that will mean for people who have to rent these units.
    - 4y ago
- PaulDavisThe1st 4y ago
  A few years ago, my daughter (a young person) ended up in a wheelchair and/or on crutches for several weeks while recovering from surgery. It is moments like that when you realize that the scope of beneficiaries of the ADA is: all of us Put differently, if you live long enough, you can pretty much guarantee that you will benefit from the facilities the ADA requires at least once (and possibly for a more extended period than my daughter did). It all looks like extra cost for little benefit until you can see it through the eyes of someone who actually needs this stuff, at which point it becomes at least a valuable and at best a life-enabling set of features. And the chances are good that you will be one of the people, assuming you live a long and healthy life.
  - hinkley 4y ago
    Just move a cart around and have a little bit of imagination.
bluedino 4y ago
I've seen this with roads. 1/2 mile closed or under construction for the whole summer. And then 4 miles of another road seems like they do it in 2 weeks.
- asdff 4y ago
  Thats sometimes because the teams are not in sync because there's often more work than labor or budget. sewer work has to happen but the sewer team is busy with 10 other streets that will be completed first, so the paver team has to wait. It's not like work isn't being done, its more like work is being done elsewhere and you aren't there to see it.
jaclaz 4y ago
That (re-paving 20-30 meters of a walkway) is a tiny project, it has nothing to do with the complexities of large projects (which are the theme of the article). On these tiny projects, usually the difference between what a public administration and a private can do is only the bureaucracy involved which is a lot for the public and very little for a private firm.
- ajsnigrutin 4y ago
  I was giving an obvious example... we can still compare building a skyscraper in a busy city vs building a hospital. Sears tower was built in three years, while our neurologic clinic [1] with three floors took more than a decade. Say what you will, but sears tower is a complex project. [1] https://goo.gl/maps/KLwDmGnk9PrcVLyr5 https://goo.gl/maps/KLwDmGnk9PrcVLyr5
  - secabeen 4y ago
    You don't have to look far to find recent similar build times. Salesforce tower was built in 5 years.
  - jaclaz 4y ago
    It is very difficult to compare different (complex) projects (independently from whether they are public or private) because - Captain Obvious speaking now - they are different (not only the actual thing that is built, also the quality of the project and its engineering, the chosen contractor and a lot of other factors come into play, your new examples add two completely different countries and two completely different periods of construction). Construction times are even trickier, as they may also be influenced by other factors (authorizations/approvals or changing norms as an example). A (typical) appropriate construction time for a (large/complex) project is around 4-5-6 years, 3 years means they were fast (in Chicago , in the '70's) 10 years means they were slow (in Slovenia, in more recent years), but otherwise there is no way to make senceful comparisons.
  - asdff 4y ago
    Others have mentioned this already but there are plenty of regulations that are relevant just for hospitals because of what they are. For example, the bulk of the historic LA county hospital is vacant, because the building is no longer up to the seismic standards required by the state for a hospital. When you have a big earthquake, you probably want the hospital to be the very last building to fall in the city. The building, however, is used for things like offices or storage because these uses don't have the same standards as a hospital.
hnuser847 4y ago
Reminds of the Navy Pier Flyover in Chicago, a half-mile long bicycle/pedestrian bridge that took seven years and $64 million to construct[1]. Not saying that this project was simple by any means, but why did it take seven years to finish? For comparison, the Sears Tower, arguably Chicago's most iconic building and at one time the world's tallest building, only took four years to complete. [1] https://blockclubchicago.org/2021/05/10/navy-pier-flyover-a-project-that-spanned-3-chicago-mayoral-administrations-is-finally-done/ https://blockclubchicago.org/2021/05/10/navy-pier-flyover-a-...
- c22 4y ago
  I imagine some aspects of building horizontally might not scale as well as vertical construction. For instance, it looks like the Navy Pier Flyover touches the ground in many different places along its half-mile length, each of those places will have different junk buried there already, unique challenges and access restrictions, and new ownership/usage agreements. With the skyscraper you dig one messy hole then stack and connect layer after layer of engineered rectangles.
  - willyt 4y ago
    In the mid 19th C Brunel built a ~100 mile long railway line in 5 years, the route was dug out by hand with picks shovels and wheelbarrows. It's a marvel of engineering with a route alignment that would allow trains to travel at well over 100mph. However, over a hundred people were killed just digging one of the tunnels on the route. When the Sears Tower was built there were probably still guys walking along the bare girders with no safety harnesses. So that's probably part of it.
- asdff 4y ago
  The flyover is free. The sears tower collects rent. If you pay for fast construction with the tower, that means less time not collecting rent which might work out better. If you pay extra to expedite the bike bridge, whats the point? Its a cost center for the city either way. Getting it done faster just wastes the public's money giving them the same thing they would have gotten anyhow.
jonas21 4y ago
The cost of a grocery store parking lot being closed can be easily quantified in terms of lost sales, while the cost of closing a short street or walkway is not as well-defined, and the cost is not borne by those in charge of the construction anyhow. So in the former, there's a clear and measurable incentive to get things done quickly, and in the latter, there's not.
- Robotbeat 4y ago
  Absolutely, and added on to this is that cost is fairly proportional to labor hours (plus cost of rental equipment), so if it takes a lot longer to get done, it’s probably also costing a lot more money.
  - dkarl 4y ago
    I don't know much about public works, but when you're hiring trades and subs for small residential projects, you pay extra to know they're going to show up and work on your project until it's done. If you want to minimize costs, you have to accept that it may be slow. They say they'll start on Tuesday, and they actually show up Friday. They do two days of a four day job, and then they disappear for a week. It's not because they're lazy. It's because they have different projects that are more or less lucrative to work on, and they generally prioritize the more lucrative ones.
- johannes1234321 4y ago
  Also: below pavements there are usually quite a lot supply lines as that's the only available space. All work there has to be done careful not to damage anything. On a larger parking lot however there is just a single power line for the lights and little sewage for collecting rain water, while most other area is free.
  - deleted 4y ago
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- londons_explore 4y ago
  In many cases, taking longer to do work costs more. Especially when things like equipment, cones and barriers are being rented at high daily rates for months while work is practically at a standstill.
mschuster91 4y ago
> It would be interesting to compare prices of privately funded projects vs publicly funded ones, both in terms of cost, over-budget amounts and time needed to complete the project. Take for example the Munich "Luise Kiesselbach Tunnel": it finished early and under budget, and to my knowledge in its seven years of operation there was no apparent case of cutting corners or botched work. And now one may ask, how is that possible in the country that produced infamous disasters such as the BER airport, the Elbphilharmonie or the #2 S-Bahn tunnel under Munich? The answer is, the funding makes no difference - the oversight of the funders over the construction process does. When you have to hire external consultants for each project, where the people keep on rotating, instead of having expert knowledge in-house that answers to you, you'll always end up with worse quality - and the external consultants may not have the political standing to override pushes for changes, which tend to be a massive issue in government-funded projects.
- Robotbeat 4y ago
  The problem is that regulated “oversight” is no guarantee of cost reductions, either, and may be a significant portion of the cost increases. Incentive alignment is one of the main problems. When big projects become “job builders,” you’ve now completely misaligned your incentives.
  - mschuster91 4y ago
    Proper oversight and project leadership (as in, it goes beyond "call McKinsey and have them send over a couple of seniors") can save costs at many parts of the process: - catch politicians' bullshit before planning (plans that, say, lead directly through a nature reserve) or during construction (e.g. a new politician comes in and wishes some random shit to change just to be able to brag "I did something") and intervene - check bids on tenders if they are actually plausible or if they are so far under a realistic budget that there will be massive problems later on (e.g. the company threatening insolvency to demand re-negotiated higher rates) - check impediments if they are actually legitimate or if they are overblown and resolve them - keep vendors accountable to milestones You can forget about the first two points, which are the most critical, for external consultants.
bobthepanda 4y ago
Where I live we see the same even though sidewalks are the responsibility of the property owner.
paulusthe 4y ago
Private meet budgets way more often, because there's a finite amount of money. Lenders sign term sheets detailing exactly how much money they'll lend and on what terms, so the developer has precisely that amount of money to spend. It's a big deal to need more funds, because it requires a ton of legal work, probably new banks, new agreements, new terms, etc - all of which might conflict with the existing funding structure. So yeah private ones usually do meet budget. Source - am architect
ahoy 4y ago
I imagine a lot of the cost & time for public projects is precisely because they have to be contracted out to private developers. If the government had construction workers & equipment on it's own payroll (like we do for police, postal workers, sanitation, etc), these projects probably get done a lot quicker. It would have the bonus effect of making infrastructure construction/maintenance projects happen more often. Both by lower the barrier to get started (no need to have contractors bid your project, etc) and b/c it's wasteful to have public employees just sitting around with no work to do.
- nonethewiser 4y ago
  > I imagine a lot of the cost & time for public projects is precisely because they have to be contracted out to private developers. But private companies have to contract out to private developers. ALDIs doesn’t have a construction division.
- londons_explore 4y ago
  Many governmental organisations do have their own employees for this sort of thing. I'm not sure it results in projects being cheaper or quicker overall.
  - throwawaysleep 4y ago
    Probably cheaper, but with abysmal quality. I used to be a public sector dev with an agency that stores plaintext passwords and direct deposit information. People simply didn’t know any better and because government doesn’t have merit raises, the rest of us simply didn’t do anything about it.
    - Arainach 4y ago
      That may be true in software (where the pay gap in the private sector is particularly blatant) but it's not true in most industries. The stereotype of lazy government workers is essentially conservative propaganda - I've known and worked with plenty, and with a few obvious exceptions (political appointees, software, etc.) across the board they're passionate and great at what they do. Civil engineers, road builders, park rangers, EPA researchers, administrative assistants, even IT.
tnel77 4y ago
I feel like some of the issue/reason is because the government has to cover every single possible scenario. “Time to make a road. We better do a three year environmental study to make sure this doesn’t hurt the native turtles.” I’m all for taking care of the environment, but it feels like there’s a lot more “let’s get community and environmental input” than we had in the past (for better and for worse).
- dwohnitmok 4y ago
  The article/video addresses this. You have to be careful that images of past efficiency aren't just examples of externalizing costs. > There is no perfect project that makes everyone happy. So, you end up making compromises and adding features to allay all the new stakeholders. This may seem like a bunch of added red tape, but it really is a good thing in a lot of ways. There was a time when major infrastructure projects didn’t consider all the stakeholders or the environmental impacts, and, sure, the projects probably got done more quickly, efficiently, and at a lower cost (on the surface). But the reality is that those costs just got externalized to populations of people who had little say in the process and to the environment. I’m not saying we’re perfect now, but we’re definitely more thoughtful about the impacts projects have, and we pay the cost for those impacts more directly than we used to. But, often, those costs weren’t anticipated during the planning phase. They show up later in design when more people get involved, and that drives the total project cost upward.
- asdff 4y ago
  This is a huge time sink for transit projects. For example, the sepulveda rail project in LA has like 6 alternatives right now going from heavy rail, monorail, above and below grade, a few different routings. Each requires careful study as if you were going to commit 100% to it, millions of dollars probably in expensive engineering labor, even though realistically only 1 alternative (the heavy rail offering the fastest end to end time) is rumored to be considered. Still, the agency got proposed by this monorail maker, so to act in good faith they have to claim they did their due diligence and came up with these plans showing that yes, in fact, the monorail is inferior to the heavy rail alignment. If you have any community groups opposing any aspect of the project, prepare to spend 2 years refining further useless alternatives to satisfy each and every nitpick. Both community groups (and these are not representative of the community, but more the loudest and angriest with the most time to spare of the community) and companies exploit this good faith planning to extend timelines, increase costs, and often dilute the end product to the detriment of the public that this "community engagement" process is supposed to protect.
Joeri 4y ago
A possible explanation for that situation is that some utility below the pavement needs urgent work, so the pavement is broken open by a utility contractor to do that work, and then they don’t repave it properly … because they’re not allowed to. If that utility contractor did the final repaving they would be taking that work from other contractors which would violate laws that force government to open up contracts fairly. So, a bidding process is started to select the contractor that will repave, and that process takes months. I work for government myself and have often been frustrated by the inefficiency forced upon us by well-intentioned but misguided legislation. Also, you learn pretty quickly that some contractors play the game better than others and will win one government contract after another, not because they will do the job better, but because they understand the rules around bidding better.
willyt 4y ago
Madrid Terminal 4 cost about half what Heathrow Terminal 5 did. Same architect. Both billion € projects. Both complicated sites next working airports. Similar sizes and infrastructure. Madrid T4 was a public project and Heathrow T5 was a private project. So I think it's more to do with the contracting culture of a country than wether it's a private or a public project. With the UK megaprojects there's about 5-10 project manager guys who rotate between them. It's quite a small group of people who all know each other. A lot of the people working on HS2 now would have been junior project mangers on Heathrow T5 or Crossrail in the past; they bring the culture with them between projects. I think UK construction culture is quite slow and bureaucratic compared to say France or Spain, but not as bad as the US which is on another level.
asdff 4y ago
The scale that government manages, even your small suburban town or whatever, is much larger than an aldi store. Chances are there's more work than money or labor which is why things take as long as they do more than anything. It's not like a private company would manage this better, when the mindset of the american capitalist is to ditch their lifeboats to appear to sail faster.
blitzar 4y ago
My front steps have needed repaving for 20 years. I still haven't gotten round to it yet.

Spooky23 4y ago

There’s lots of stupid rules around sidewalks and lane striping. You need to do an ADA evaluation, remediate any findings, etc. A project in my city that resulted in adding a textured crosswalk pad, new stripes and a beg button cost $1.4M and took 3 years.

mhalle 4y ago
"Stupid rules" for one person are what enable another person to live an independent life. The Americans with Disabilities (ADA) act has been law since 1990 and codifies mobility and access as civil rights in the US. ADA does add to the costs of projects, but so does, say, safety code compliance. It's the law, and it exists for a good reason. As for the example of a minor accessibility project costing $1.4M and taking 3 years, I would suggest that there is probably more to the story that helps explain the cost or the time.
- Robotbeat 4y ago
  I bet closing the sidewalk for longer is much worse for disabled people.
- bombcar 4y ago
  The rules are fine, the stupidity is latent and revealed: 1. New construction must meet ADA requirements. 2. Old construction can remain. 3. Repairing broken old construction requires meeting ADA requirements. So between 2 and 3 you end up with broken old construction that cannot be repaired to "what it was" because repairs must meet ADA requirements. Each step makes sense on its own, but combined they result in something worse (in particular) even though overall it works out better.
  - rtkwe 4y ago
    What's the alternative that reaches eventual compliance everywhere on a shorter span than "wait for the grandfathered buildings to be bought and demolished" though?
    - dragonwriter 4y ago
      Impose a supplemental property tax, increasing over time, on buildings out of compliance with current requirements, so that upgrade or replacement becomes comparatively more desirable vs. doing neither than it currently is. Or, just have a fixed window to achieve compliance or the building is condemned.
      - briandear 4y ago
        Cool. Let’s start with NYC subway stations. Public infrastructure should be ADA compliant yet NYC permitting will hammer a small business for a toilet two inches out of compliance when the city itself has massive issues that are ignored.
    - londons_explore 4y ago
      A daily fine for everything noncompliant. Make the fine approximately proportional to the number of potential users impeded. Then a popular crosswalk gets upgraded before a rural crosswalk that nobody uses anyway. An easy upgrade is done before a hard upgrade. Sometimes even new stuff might be built non-compliant if, for example, there are other substantial benefits that outweigh the fine. Just burn the fine revenue. (Burning money is the inverse of printing money, helps reduce inflation, and means nobody has an incentive to maximize fines)
      - lukas099 4y ago
        I have trouble imagining anyone convincing a city to 'burn revenue', even if it's a good idea in principle. Maybe the next best thing is applying it to a negative income tax so that it goes to the lowest-income residents.
- 908B64B197 4y ago
  > ADA does add to the costs of projects Not in the long run. ADA just forces better designs. Retrofits are costly. > As for the example of a minor accessibility project costing $1.4M and taking 3 years, I would suggest that there is probably more to the story that helps explain the cost or the time. Committees, political turf wars, getting funding for the project through grants (that are complicated to apply for, that's why you need a dedicated bureaucrat to do it!). Then there's union rules since construction workers from the city are government employees. That's half a million in employee's salaries right there and not a single concrete steps has been taken yet!
  - LanceH 4y ago
    > ADA does add to the costs of projects I'm not going to argue that it isn't necessary or right. But it absolutely costs more. A bathroom stall, for example, literally takes up more space, and that costs. A ramp and stairs takes up more space, materials and time and that costs. There are things which are right to do, but disingenuous arguments to support them aren't helpful.
- VHRanger 4y ago
  Permitting process hell is the explanation.
- starkparker 4y ago
  Replacing curb ramps can mean relocating the curb cut, which can mean relocating the underground sensor loops. Adding a beg button can mean upgrading or replacing the signal control module, which could mean replacing the housing if it's not large enough for the new module. (Audible-tactile buttons and controllers themselves cost $5-6k each, just for parts.) Aside from that, the issue with ADA compliance costs isn't when a municipality or DOT pays for them. It's when they remove the crosswalk entirely because they decide compliance isn't affordable enough.
- Spooky23 4y ago
  As implemented ADA compliance requires that even trivial changes to a moderate complexity intersection require an engineering study at $300-500k, minimum. There are other requirements as well relating to multimodal travel depending online the funding source. All the while, we had an increasingly dangerous intersection with no visible crosswalks and outdated signals for years. The stupid isn’t ADA, it’s compliance activity. Cities and towns cannot afford the engineers to meet the standards, so the Federal and State governments fund projects. So there’s no framework of best practices beyond the state standards - each project is a special snowflake.
- coryrc 4y ago
  The allowed slope for a ramp according ADA 1.5-3%. The recommended slope for drainage is 3-6%. Better hope you're really fucking precise. Oh, your road itself is at a slope greater than 3%? Oops, you can't legally do it! It's okay to have standards. It's not okay if they're bullshit.
  - jaclaz 4y ago
    You sure? ADA ramp max slope should be 1:12, i.e. 8.33% which is (IMHO) reasonable. https://www.ada-compliance.com/ada-compliance/ada-ramp https://www.ada-compliance.com/ada-compliance/ada-ramp
  - Loughla 4y ago
    Don't make things up. Recommended slope for drainage on concrete and asphalt is .25-.5:12, or 1/4" to 1/2" over 1' of length. Recommended slope for wheelchair ramps are 1-1.5:12, or 1" to 1.5" over 1' of length.
- asdff 4y ago
  IMO ADA is probably a net harm at this point. When I look at the sidewalks here in socal, where 50 years ago they planted these rooty trees that make the region look like a tony hawk game today versus something you'd be able to get a wheelchair across, I'm starting to suspect its all ironically ADA's fault. They put the costs to meet their criteria so high that cities find it a better bet to just absorb lawsuits and not do anything than to actually make their cities manageable for disabled people. We need a more practical ada, that isn't nearly so costly to implement, so cities don't find it financially sensible to just sit on their hands forever.
MaxMatti 4y ago
Yes but you can do all that before tearing open the street or sidewalk
ahoy 4y ago
My dad's been physically disabled my entire life. Those "stupid" ADA rules make it possible for him to navigate public spaces
ikiris 4y ago
How dare those projects be forced to checks notes accommodate disabled people. Sometimes the comments on this site are just insufferable.
- briandear 4y ago
  However there should be a balance. Look at parking lots — the ratio of disabled spaces to standard spaces is not the same ratio as disabled people to non-disabled people. And sometimes it’s ridiculous: drive through ATMs with braille for instance. Private motel swimming pools requiring wheelchair lifts. That extreme additional cost means that many motels just won’t have a swimming pool at all — so everyone is worse off. But you can’t charge disabled people a swimming pool surcharge since that discriminatory. So it raises costs for everyone. By the way, I am referring to private building codes, not taxpayer-funded projects like sidewalks.
  - hinkley 4y ago
    Do you suppose that perhaps disabled people take longer to shop? Certainly you’ve heard of Little’s Law if you hang out in HN?
  - lukas099 4y ago
    It probably costs less to have drive through ATMs with braille, because they can reuse the braille signage from the non-drive through ATMs.
  - asdff 4y ago
    Other things that can add cost fast are having too many elevators. I've been in 4 story buildings with 4 separate elevator shafts before that didn't have nearly the population or staff to ever get more than two moving at once. That just means higher rent to make a return on those 4 shafts mandated by some ordinance, which probably hurts you especially if you can't work and are living cheaply on disability. A lot of ordinances have been written with no understanding of how it would look in practice or the costs to implement them in the market and what that will mean for people who have to rent these units.
  - 4y ago
PaulDavisThe1st 4y ago
A few years ago, my daughter (a young person) ended up in a wheelchair and/or on crutches for several weeks while recovering from surgery. It is moments like that when you realize that the scope of beneficiaries of the ADA is: all of us Put differently, if you live long enough, you can pretty much guarantee that you will benefit from the facilities the ADA requires at least once (and possibly for a more extended period than my daughter did). It all looks like extra cost for little benefit until you can see it through the eyes of someone who actually needs this stuff, at which point it becomes at least a valuable and at best a life-enabling set of features. And the chances are good that you will be one of the people, assuming you live a long and healthy life.
- hinkley 4y ago
  Just move a cart around and have a little bit of imagination.

bluedino 4y ago

I've seen this with roads. 1/2 mile closed or under construction for the whole summer. And then 4 miles of another road seems like they do it in 2 weeks.

asdff 4y ago
Thats sometimes because the teams are not in sync because there's often more work than labor or budget. sewer work has to happen but the sewer team is busy with 10 other streets that will be completed first, so the paver team has to wait. It's not like work isn't being done, its more like work is being done elsewhere and you aren't there to see it.

jaclaz 4y ago

That (re-paving 20-30 meters of a walkway) is a tiny project, it has nothing to do with the complexities of large projects (which are the theme of the article). On these tiny projects, usually the difference between what a public administration and a private can do is only the bureaucracy involved which is a lot for the public and very little for a private firm.

ajsnigrutin 4y ago
I was giving an obvious example... we can still compare building a skyscraper in a busy city vs building a hospital. Sears tower was built in three years, while our neurologic clinic [1] with three floors took more than a decade. Say what you will, but sears tower is a complex project. [1] https://goo.gl/maps/KLwDmGnk9PrcVLyr5 https://goo.gl/maps/KLwDmGnk9PrcVLyr5
- secabeen 4y ago
  You don't have to look far to find recent similar build times. Salesforce tower was built in 5 years.
- jaclaz 4y ago
  It is very difficult to compare different (complex) projects (independently from whether they are public or private) because - Captain Obvious speaking now - they are different (not only the actual thing that is built, also the quality of the project and its engineering, the chosen contractor and a lot of other factors come into play, your new examples add two completely different countries and two completely different periods of construction). Construction times are even trickier, as they may also be influenced by other factors (authorizations/approvals or changing norms as an example). A (typical) appropriate construction time for a (large/complex) project is around 4-5-6 years, 3 years means they were fast (in Chicago , in the '70's) 10 years means they were slow (in Slovenia, in more recent years), but otherwise there is no way to make senceful comparisons.
- asdff 4y ago
  Others have mentioned this already but there are plenty of regulations that are relevant just for hospitals because of what they are. For example, the bulk of the historic LA county hospital is vacant, because the building is no longer up to the seismic standards required by the state for a hospital. When you have a big earthquake, you probably want the hospital to be the very last building to fall in the city. The building, however, is used for things like offices or storage because these uses don't have the same standards as a hospital.

hnuser847 4y ago

Reminds of the Navy Pier Flyover in Chicago, a half-mile long bicycle/pedestrian bridge that took seven years and $64 million to construct[1]. Not saying that this project was simple by any means, but why did it take seven years to finish? For comparison, the Sears Tower, arguably Chicago's most iconic building and at one time the world's tallest building, only took four years to complete. [1] https://blockclubchicago.org/2021/05/10/navy-pier-flyover-a-project-that-spanned-3-chicago-mayoral-administrations-is-finally-done/ https://blockclubchicago.org/2021/05/10/navy-pier-flyover-a-...

c22 4y ago
I imagine some aspects of building horizontally might not scale as well as vertical construction. For instance, it looks like the Navy Pier Flyover touches the ground in many different places along its half-mile length, each of those places will have different junk buried there already, unique challenges and access restrictions, and new ownership/usage agreements. With the skyscraper you dig one messy hole then stack and connect layer after layer of engineered rectangles.
- willyt 4y ago
  In the mid 19th C Brunel built a ~100 mile long railway line in 5 years, the route was dug out by hand with picks shovels and wheelbarrows. It's a marvel of engineering with a route alignment that would allow trains to travel at well over 100mph. However, over a hundred people were killed just digging one of the tunnels on the route. When the Sears Tower was built there were probably still guys walking along the bare girders with no safety harnesses. So that's probably part of it.
asdff 4y ago
The flyover is free. The sears tower collects rent. If you pay for fast construction with the tower, that means less time not collecting rent which might work out better. If you pay extra to expedite the bike bridge, whats the point? Its a cost center for the city either way. Getting it done faster just wastes the public's money giving them the same thing they would have gotten anyhow.

jonas21 4y ago

The cost of a grocery store parking lot being closed can be easily quantified in terms of lost sales, while the cost of closing a short street or walkway is not as well-defined, and the cost is not borne by those in charge of the construction anyhow. So in the former, there's a clear and measurable incentive to get things done quickly, and in the latter, there's not.

Robotbeat 4y ago
Absolutely, and added on to this is that cost is fairly proportional to labor hours (plus cost of rental equipment), so if it takes a lot longer to get done, it’s probably also costing a lot more money.
- dkarl 4y ago
  I don't know much about public works, but when you're hiring trades and subs for small residential projects, you pay extra to know they're going to show up and work on your project until it's done. If you want to minimize costs, you have to accept that it may be slow. They say they'll start on Tuesday, and they actually show up Friday. They do two days of a four day job, and then they disappear for a week. It's not because they're lazy. It's because they have different projects that are more or less lucrative to work on, and they generally prioritize the more lucrative ones.
johannes1234321 4y ago
Also: below pavements there are usually quite a lot supply lines as that's the only available space. All work there has to be done careful not to damage anything. On a larger parking lot however there is just a single power line for the lights and little sewage for collecting rain water, while most other area is free.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
londons_explore 4y ago
In many cases, taking longer to do work costs more. Especially when things like equipment, cones and barriers are being rented at high daily rates for months while work is practically at a standstill.

mschuster91 4y ago

> It would be interesting to compare prices of privately funded projects vs publicly funded ones, both in terms of cost, over-budget amounts and time needed to complete the project. Take for example the Munich "Luise Kiesselbach Tunnel": it finished early and under budget, and to my knowledge in its seven years of operation there was no apparent case of cutting corners or botched work. And now one may ask, how is that possible in the country that produced infamous disasters such as the BER airport, the Elbphilharmonie or the #2 S-Bahn tunnel under Munich? The answer is, the funding makes no difference - the oversight of the funders over the construction process does. When you have to hire external consultants for each project, where the people keep on rotating, instead of having expert knowledge in-house that answers to you, you'll always end up with worse quality - and the external consultants may not have the political standing to override pushes for changes, which tend to be a massive issue in government-funded projects.

Robotbeat 4y ago
The problem is that regulated “oversight” is no guarantee of cost reductions, either, and may be a significant portion of the cost increases. Incentive alignment is one of the main problems. When big projects become “job builders,” you’ve now completely misaligned your incentives.
- mschuster91 4y ago
  Proper oversight and project leadership (as in, it goes beyond "call McKinsey and have them send over a couple of seniors") can save costs at many parts of the process: - catch politicians' bullshit before planning (plans that, say, lead directly through a nature reserve) or during construction (e.g. a new politician comes in and wishes some random shit to change just to be able to brag "I did something") and intervene - check bids on tenders if they are actually plausible or if they are so far under a realistic budget that there will be massive problems later on (e.g. the company threatening insolvency to demand re-negotiated higher rates) - check impediments if they are actually legitimate or if they are overblown and resolve them - keep vendors accountable to milestones You can forget about the first two points, which are the most critical, for external consultants.

bobthepanda 4y ago

Where I live we see the same even though sidewalks are the responsibility of the property owner.

paulusthe 4y ago

Private meet budgets way more often, because there's a finite amount of money. Lenders sign term sheets detailing exactly how much money they'll lend and on what terms, so the developer has precisely that amount of money to spend. It's a big deal to need more funds, because it requires a ton of legal work, probably new banks, new agreements, new terms, etc - all of which might conflict with the existing funding structure. So yeah private ones usually do meet budget. Source - am architect

ahoy 4y ago

I imagine a lot of the cost & time for public projects is precisely because they have to be contracted out to private developers. If the government had construction workers & equipment on it's own payroll (like we do for police, postal workers, sanitation, etc), these projects probably get done a lot quicker. It would have the bonus effect of making infrastructure construction/maintenance projects happen more often. Both by lower the barrier to get started (no need to have contractors bid your project, etc) and b/c it's wasteful to have public employees just sitting around with no work to do.

nonethewiser 4y ago
> I imagine a lot of the cost & time for public projects is precisely because they have to be contracted out to private developers. But private companies have to contract out to private developers. ALDIs doesn’t have a construction division.
londons_explore 4y ago
Many governmental organisations do have their own employees for this sort of thing. I'm not sure it results in projects being cheaper or quicker overall.
- throwawaysleep 4y ago
  Probably cheaper, but with abysmal quality. I used to be a public sector dev with an agency that stores plaintext passwords and direct deposit information. People simply didn’t know any better and because government doesn’t have merit raises, the rest of us simply didn’t do anything about it.
  - Arainach 4y ago
    That may be true in software (where the pay gap in the private sector is particularly blatant) but it's not true in most industries. The stereotype of lazy government workers is essentially conservative propaganda - I've known and worked with plenty, and with a few obvious exceptions (political appointees, software, etc.) across the board they're passionate and great at what they do. Civil engineers, road builders, park rangers, EPA researchers, administrative assistants, even IT.

tnel77 4y ago

I feel like some of the issue/reason is because the government has to cover every single possible scenario. “Time to make a road. We better do a three year environmental study to make sure this doesn’t hurt the native turtles.” I’m all for taking care of the environment, but it feels like there’s a lot more “let’s get community and environmental input” than we had in the past (for better and for worse).

dwohnitmok 4y ago
The article/video addresses this. You have to be careful that images of past efficiency aren't just examples of externalizing costs. > There is no perfect project that makes everyone happy. So, you end up making compromises and adding features to allay all the new stakeholders. This may seem like a bunch of added red tape, but it really is a good thing in a lot of ways. There was a time when major infrastructure projects didn’t consider all the stakeholders or the environmental impacts, and, sure, the projects probably got done more quickly, efficiently, and at a lower cost (on the surface). But the reality is that those costs just got externalized to populations of people who had little say in the process and to the environment. I’m not saying we’re perfect now, but we’re definitely more thoughtful about the impacts projects have, and we pay the cost for those impacts more directly than we used to. But, often, those costs weren’t anticipated during the planning phase. They show up later in design when more people get involved, and that drives the total project cost upward.
asdff 4y ago
This is a huge time sink for transit projects. For example, the sepulveda rail project in LA has like 6 alternatives right now going from heavy rail, monorail, above and below grade, a few different routings. Each requires careful study as if you were going to commit 100% to it, millions of dollars probably in expensive engineering labor, even though realistically only 1 alternative (the heavy rail offering the fastest end to end time) is rumored to be considered. Still, the agency got proposed by this monorail maker, so to act in good faith they have to claim they did their due diligence and came up with these plans showing that yes, in fact, the monorail is inferior to the heavy rail alignment. If you have any community groups opposing any aspect of the project, prepare to spend 2 years refining further useless alternatives to satisfy each and every nitpick. Both community groups (and these are not representative of the community, but more the loudest and angriest with the most time to spare of the community) and companies exploit this good faith planning to extend timelines, increase costs, and often dilute the end product to the detriment of the public that this "community engagement" process is supposed to protect.

Joeri 4y ago

A possible explanation for that situation is that some utility below the pavement needs urgent work, so the pavement is broken open by a utility contractor to do that work, and then they don’t repave it properly … because they’re not allowed to. If that utility contractor did the final repaving they would be taking that work from other contractors which would violate laws that force government to open up contracts fairly. So, a bidding process is started to select the contractor that will repave, and that process takes months. I work for government myself and have often been frustrated by the inefficiency forced upon us by well-intentioned but misguided legislation. Also, you learn pretty quickly that some contractors play the game better than others and will win one government contract after another, not because they will do the job better, but because they understand the rules around bidding better.

willyt 4y ago

Madrid Terminal 4 cost about half what Heathrow Terminal 5 did. Same architect. Both billion € projects. Both complicated sites next working airports. Similar sizes and infrastructure. Madrid T4 was a public project and Heathrow T5 was a private project. So I think it's more to do with the contracting culture of a country than wether it's a private or a public project. With the UK megaprojects there's about 5-10 project manager guys who rotate between them. It's quite a small group of people who all know each other. A lot of the people working on HS2 now would have been junior project mangers on Heathrow T5 or Crossrail in the past; they bring the culture with them between projects. I think UK construction culture is quite slow and bureaucratic compared to say France or Spain, but not as bad as the US which is on another level.

asdff 4y ago

The scale that government manages, even your small suburban town or whatever, is much larger than an aldi store. Chances are there's more work than money or labor which is why things take as long as they do more than anything. It's not like a private company would manage this better, when the mindset of the american capitalist is to ditch their lifeboats to appear to sail faster.

blitzar 4y ago

My front steps have needed repaving for 20 years. I still haven't gotten round to it yet.