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Someone should really do a study to compare private infrastructure works vs public ones. A local Hofer (=Aldi) here can repave a whole parking lot and the acce

Someone should really do a study to compare private infrastructure works vs public ones. A local Hofer (=Aldi) here can repave a whole parking lot and the access road in basically a weekend, while the same thing (parking lot) for a local government office can take a year or more, at approximately the same size.

jefftk 2y ago
Is there anything under the parking lot?
- roenxi 2y ago
  That does make a difference, but not that much of a difference. Reading between the lines, the issue here seems to be that the city doesn't keep records of what is underground that can be referred to during the planning process - the "they unexpectedly found a maze of Con Edison gas and steam lines" quote sounds expensive. Possibly they should consider engaging some sort of dial-before-you-dig program - https://newyork-811.com/homeowners/ https://newyork-811.com/homeowners/ sounds promising on a quick search - or keeping better records. This situation sounds a bit weird to me, I'm not sure how they made the mistakes the article is suggesting they made.
  - deltarholamda 2y ago
    I've done some work with big hospitals on big campuses. Back in the day, the physical plant people were lifelong employees and they knew where all the bones were buried. They worked closely with design and engineering teams, and they had long term relationships with architects and engineers. Big construction projects also routinely did as-built drawings, and this was a cost built into the contracts. So if the physical plant people didn't have, or had lost the record drawings, they knew which architect or engineer to call. This happened all the time. I can recall pulling out a drawing from the early 80s to answer a question in the early 2000s. However, all of this was a cost center. Starting some twenty years ago or so, everybody has been rooting out these cost centers as cost-cutting measures. Institutional knowledge is an unquantifiable asset, but it's far, far, far from zero. You lose it at your peril.
    - toomuchtodo 2y ago
      Spot on. This is self inflicted debt and pain from not valuing what you enumerated. And now it will cost even more to rebuild that muscle memory.
    - Aurornis 2y ago
      > Back in the day, the physical plant people were lifelong employees and they knew where all the bones were buried. They worked closely with design and engineering teams, and they had long term relationships with architects and engineers. Some of this infrastructure in NYC is old enough that there likely isn’t anyone alive who remembers what went there. Not to mention the fact that NYC is orders of magnitude bigger than a hospital complex. Good luck finding anyone who worked on that exact section decades ago, even if they were still alive. > Institutional knowledge is an unquantifiable asset, but it's far, far, far from zero. You lose it at your peril. There is no possible way a city could store their institutional knowledge spanning more than a century within employees. Institutional knowledge is how they got into this problem, not a solution.
      - bluGill 2y ago
        The drawings should exist though - they should have been created and kept. Someone should be in prison if they were destroyed (including via accidental fire - keep backups is important for paper as much as electronic data!) Where drawings don't exist the city should demand they be created.
      - deltarholamda 2y ago
        Well, FWIW, the campus I'm familiar with has been around long enough that it has outlived many employees. And yet the institutional knowledge remains. Not sure where you get the idea that I think the answer is solely institutional knowledge as you seem to imply. It is but a part of the whole solution, which includes record keeping, standard practices, etc. The articles shows a single example of a more persistent problem plaguing NYC. Not being able to deal with 500 feet of water and sewer in 10 years and millions upon millions of dollars indicates a deep problem, and there is no acceptable excuse for it. NYC has kicked the can down the road for a long time, and now they are paying the price for that. My issue is that many places and institutions have been doing this as well, and it will bite us in the ass.
  - _visgean 2y ago
    > or keeping better records I think the issue is that those historical records are simply not available and the best you can do is record whenever you dig out something new..
    - roenxi 2y ago
      Yeah, but the dude thinks that sitting down with the utilities might help and it is a bit ... how would that help? If they don't have records either then that doesn't make things better. You have to go exploring whatever happens. And their plans should account for that.
      - bluGill 2y ago
        The costs should be on the utility to do the exploring though. They are the ones who via incompetence (likely cost cutting) don't know where their pipes are.
  - Aurornis 2y ago
    > Reading between the lines, the issue here seems to be that the city doesn't keep records of what is underground that can be referred to during the planning process They keep records of modern infrastructure. It’s the extremely old infrastructure that is missing records. It’s part archaeology project, with potential missteps creating outages for many people who depend on the infrastructure.
- ajsnigrutin 2y ago
  It was a repaving job, just the top 20centimeters removed, and new asphalt added and some cement blocks/barriers, edge pieces etc. I was just comparing a project length (while price should also be compared) between a private business needing something done and government needing something done.
D13Fd 2y ago
These were private companies doing the work. The article argues that the problem was that the private company who is doing the construction is on a cost-plus contract and is different from the private company who designed the project, so the construction company has no ownership of the problems and no incentive to get it done. As far as private infrastructure, I don't see how that would make much of a difference here, other than that a private company would probably have a harder time with permits to dig up the street on and off for 8 years.
elevation 2y ago
Ten years ago, my city decided to repave a stretch of a local street. The contract stipulated that work must begin in April and must be concluded the same year, and the city awarded it to the lowest qualified bidder, a local contractor. The contractor crews showed up in April, closed the road with detour signs, tore up and removed the previous pavement, and left. All summer and fall a third of the city choked through a residential detour around a road project nobody was working on. With their deadline so far away, the the contractor was free to chase lucrative summer work elsewhere and returned only in late November to meet their contractual obligation to the city. They hurriedly poured the concrete and left it to cure in freezing winter temps, undermining a good cure and ensuring it'll need to be redone decades sooner than would be otherwise necessary. For all the sub optimal contract writing, construction work, and traffic inconvenience, there was no news story, no outrage, and no politicians lost their jobs. People are too busy to punish incompetence if things start to work _eventually_, so the incompetent can keep calm and carry on.
- quesera 2y ago
  This is a failure at the city contracting level. Incompetence or corruption or both.
  - WarOnPrivacy 2y ago
    > This is a failure at the city contracting level. Incompetence or corruption or both. Solely? Editing out the contractor's actions seems to leave an incomplete picture. edit: I suggest there is a fault with society, when society gives a pass to a business operating unethically - simply because it leveraged (or purchased, fed/state) loopholes that allow it to do so.
    - quesera 2y ago
      Contractor fulfilled obligation. City contracting office failed to specify the requirements correctly. In particular the curing schedule/temperature. If this was a homeowner getting a driveway paved, it would be one thing. But a city needs to employ people who know how to write contracts. If they do not, and bad contracts are legally fulfilled, then yes I'd argue that it's entirely the city's fault. And the contractor's unethical exploitation, of course. But that's contracts. To your edit: I agree, and it sucks! But this is not a novel problem, and people in this business know how to get their desired results. I would argue that this kind of error does not happen accidentally.
samcat116 2y ago
Do you mean the time it takes to actually do the paving is a weekend? Or the process of going from "I want this repaved" to getting it completely done is too long?
- ajsnigrutin 2y ago
  I'm saying that the time the cones come up and the parking is closed to the time it's reopened it takes a weekend... and it takes a year for the approximately same sized parking lot on a government propery.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
hylaride 2y ago
There have been studies. In the public transit realm, there was a comparison of the Vancouver Canada Line that was built for the Olympics (an elevated train/subway to the airport) and the Eglinton Crosstown in Toronto (mixed underground surface light rail). The TL;DR is that the Vancouver line was mostly on time, on budget, and is working well, while the Eglinton line is massively over-budget, still not ready (should have opened in 2020) with an "indeterminate opening date". The big difference between the two? Vancouver's doled out ONE contract to design, build, and operate the line. It was up to the one company to decide how and where to contract out or subdivide, only being held to certain conditions with reasonable flexibility for unexpected issues. Toronto had a (notoriously bureaucratic provincial government organization called Metrolinx) subdivide a bunch of contracts and essentially act as a project manager (of which a lot was also contracted out) with government-level accountability. The results were all over the place. Tracks were installed with slightly bad gauges, signalling software was bought and didn't have interoperability with other components, substandard construction was used, some contractors were probably hired for political reasons, etc. There's plenty of studies from all over the world that compare cost differences for infrastructure between countries. The French are actually really good at it - they tend to spend a fraction the cost of infrastructure compared to England. https://www.bcg.com/united-kingdom/centre-for-growth/insights/reshaping-british-infrastructure-global-lessons-to-improve-project-delivery https://www.bcg.com/united-kingdom/centre-for-growth/insight...

jefftk 2y ago

Is there anything under the parking lot?

roenxi 2y ago
That does make a difference, but not that much of a difference. Reading between the lines, the issue here seems to be that the city doesn't keep records of what is underground that can be referred to during the planning process - the "they unexpectedly found a maze of Con Edison gas and steam lines" quote sounds expensive. Possibly they should consider engaging some sort of dial-before-you-dig program - https://newyork-811.com/homeowners/ https://newyork-811.com/homeowners/ sounds promising on a quick search - or keeping better records. This situation sounds a bit weird to me, I'm not sure how they made the mistakes the article is suggesting they made.
- deltarholamda 2y ago
  I've done some work with big hospitals on big campuses. Back in the day, the physical plant people were lifelong employees and they knew where all the bones were buried. They worked closely with design and engineering teams, and they had long term relationships with architects and engineers. Big construction projects also routinely did as-built drawings, and this was a cost built into the contracts. So if the physical plant people didn't have, or had lost the record drawings, they knew which architect or engineer to call. This happened all the time. I can recall pulling out a drawing from the early 80s to answer a question in the early 2000s. However, all of this was a cost center. Starting some twenty years ago or so, everybody has been rooting out these cost centers as cost-cutting measures. Institutional knowledge is an unquantifiable asset, but it's far, far, far from zero. You lose it at your peril.
  - toomuchtodo 2y ago
    Spot on. This is self inflicted debt and pain from not valuing what you enumerated. And now it will cost even more to rebuild that muscle memory.
  - Aurornis 2y ago
    > Back in the day, the physical plant people were lifelong employees and they knew where all the bones were buried. They worked closely with design and engineering teams, and they had long term relationships with architects and engineers. Some of this infrastructure in NYC is old enough that there likely isn’t anyone alive who remembers what went there. Not to mention the fact that NYC is orders of magnitude bigger than a hospital complex. Good luck finding anyone who worked on that exact section decades ago, even if they were still alive. > Institutional knowledge is an unquantifiable asset, but it's far, far, far from zero. You lose it at your peril. There is no possible way a city could store their institutional knowledge spanning more than a century within employees. Institutional knowledge is how they got into this problem, not a solution.
    - bluGill 2y ago
      The drawings should exist though - they should have been created and kept. Someone should be in prison if they were destroyed (including via accidental fire - keep backups is important for paper as much as electronic data!) Where drawings don't exist the city should demand they be created.
    - deltarholamda 2y ago
      Well, FWIW, the campus I'm familiar with has been around long enough that it has outlived many employees. And yet the institutional knowledge remains. Not sure where you get the idea that I think the answer is solely institutional knowledge as you seem to imply. It is but a part of the whole solution, which includes record keeping, standard practices, etc. The articles shows a single example of a more persistent problem plaguing NYC. Not being able to deal with 500 feet of water and sewer in 10 years and millions upon millions of dollars indicates a deep problem, and there is no acceptable excuse for it. NYC has kicked the can down the road for a long time, and now they are paying the price for that. My issue is that many places and institutions have been doing this as well, and it will bite us in the ass.
- _visgean 2y ago
  > or keeping better records I think the issue is that those historical records are simply not available and the best you can do is record whenever you dig out something new..
  - roenxi 2y ago
    Yeah, but the dude thinks that sitting down with the utilities might help and it is a bit ... how would that help? If they don't have records either then that doesn't make things better. You have to go exploring whatever happens. And their plans should account for that.
    - bluGill 2y ago
      The costs should be on the utility to do the exploring though. They are the ones who via incompetence (likely cost cutting) don't know where their pipes are.
- Aurornis 2y ago
  > Reading between the lines, the issue here seems to be that the city doesn't keep records of what is underground that can be referred to during the planning process They keep records of modern infrastructure. It’s the extremely old infrastructure that is missing records. It’s part archaeology project, with potential missteps creating outages for many people who depend on the infrastructure.
ajsnigrutin 2y ago
It was a repaving job, just the top 20centimeters removed, and new asphalt added and some cement blocks/barriers, edge pieces etc. I was just comparing a project length (while price should also be compared) between a private business needing something done and government needing something done.

D13Fd 2y ago

These were private companies doing the work. The article argues that the problem was that the private company who is doing the construction is on a cost-plus contract and is different from the private company who designed the project, so the construction company has no ownership of the problems and no incentive to get it done. As far as private infrastructure, I don't see how that would make much of a difference here, other than that a private company would probably have a harder time with permits to dig up the street on and off for 8 years.

elevation 2y ago

Ten years ago, my city decided to repave a stretch of a local street. The contract stipulated that work must begin in April and must be concluded the same year, and the city awarded it to the lowest qualified bidder, a local contractor. The contractor crews showed up in April, closed the road with detour signs, tore up and removed the previous pavement, and left. All summer and fall a third of the city choked through a residential detour around a road project nobody was working on. With their deadline so far away, the the contractor was free to chase lucrative summer work elsewhere and returned only in late November to meet their contractual obligation to the city. They hurriedly poured the concrete and left it to cure in freezing winter temps, undermining a good cure and ensuring it'll need to be redone decades sooner than would be otherwise necessary. For all the sub optimal contract writing, construction work, and traffic inconvenience, there was no news story, no outrage, and no politicians lost their jobs. People are too busy to punish incompetence if things start to work _eventually_, so the incompetent can keep calm and carry on.

quesera 2y ago
This is a failure at the city contracting level. Incompetence or corruption or both.
- WarOnPrivacy 2y ago
  > This is a failure at the city contracting level. Incompetence or corruption or both. Solely? Editing out the contractor's actions seems to leave an incomplete picture. edit: I suggest there is a fault with society, when society gives a pass to a business operating unethically - simply because it leveraged (or purchased, fed/state) loopholes that allow it to do so.
  - quesera 2y ago
    Contractor fulfilled obligation. City contracting office failed to specify the requirements correctly. In particular the curing schedule/temperature. If this was a homeowner getting a driveway paved, it would be one thing. But a city needs to employ people who know how to write contracts. If they do not, and bad contracts are legally fulfilled, then yes I'd argue that it's entirely the city's fault. And the contractor's unethical exploitation, of course. But that's contracts. To your edit: I agree, and it sucks! But this is not a novel problem, and people in this business know how to get their desired results. I would argue that this kind of error does not happen accidentally.

samcat116 2y ago

Do you mean the time it takes to actually do the paving is a weekend? Or the process of going from "I want this repaved" to getting it completely done is too long?

ajsnigrutin 2y ago
I'm saying that the time the cones come up and the parking is closed to the time it's reopened it takes a weekend... and it takes a year for the approximately same sized parking lot on a government propery.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

hylaride 2y ago

There have been studies. In the public transit realm, there was a comparison of the Vancouver Canada Line that was built for the Olympics (an elevated train/subway to the airport) and the Eglinton Crosstown in Toronto (mixed underground surface light rail). The TL;DR is that the Vancouver line was mostly on time, on budget, and is working well, while the Eglinton line is massively over-budget, still not ready (should have opened in 2020) with an "indeterminate opening date". The big difference between the two? Vancouver's doled out ONE contract to design, build, and operate the line. It was up to the one company to decide how and where to contract out or subdivide, only being held to certain conditions with reasonable flexibility for unexpected issues. Toronto had a (notoriously bureaucratic provincial government organization called Metrolinx) subdivide a bunch of contracts and essentially act as a project manager (of which a lot was also contracted out) with government-level accountability. The results were all over the place. Tracks were installed with slightly bad gauges, signalling software was bought and didn't have interoperability with other components, substandard construction was used, some contractors were probably hired for political reasons, etc. There's plenty of studies from all over the world that compare cost differences for infrastructure between countries. The French are actually really good at it - they tend to spend a fraction the cost of infrastructure compared to England. https://www.bcg.com/united-kingdom/centre-for-growth/insights/reshaping-british-infrastructure-global-lessons-to-improve-project-delivery https://www.bcg.com/united-kingdom/centre-for-growth/insight...