5 ms·

State capacity and eight parking spaces

voidUpdate 1y ago
There's a lot in my city that had construction going on for about a month, they barely got anywhere, and now it's been deserted for a while. It's meant to be a new block of flats, and I know that takes a while, but every time I pass it, I think about the stories of Chinese workers erecting a 57 storey building in 19 days (Though I don't know if that includes wiring, plumbing, etc, or if it's just the concrete shell)
- nitwit005 1y ago
  That just seems to be some sort of common construction scam. I've seen it more than once with private construction. There is a private dental office down the street from me that's has an expansion which somehow took years. Same story. Ton of construction for a month or two, and then nothing happened. There was a union protest about using non-union labor for a bit. It felt like they were protesting the wrong issue, as no labor was occurring.
bjackman 1y ago
An idle observation about bureaucracy: In my big tech job we have a pretty small (by public sector standards) red-tape burden but it does exist. It does slow work down and it does increase the activation energy such that some small projects that might otherwise happen simply don't. Sometimes, I choose to semi-transparrently ignore it. I see this happen at the institutional level too. So there's a spectrum of tactical non-compliance, extending roughly between: - I do not submit my conference material to PR/legal, I just go to the conference and present without approval. I admit this to my management chain, they are mildly uncomfortable about it but ultimately don't care enough to make my life difficult. To: - We have a policy stating that all open source code in our stack must be fully reviewed internally. I think this does genuinely happen for lots of libraries but for the Linux kernel we are in flagrant violation and nobody cares. I assume there are very good reasons this is not something you can just do in the public sector. I assume there's also a factor in there about how there is no serious constituency in my company that genuinely cares about the PR/legal approvals, whereas the regulations blocking parking spaces are probably ultimately due to someone who really does care about whatever they are supposed to represent. And yeah I guess I do like the rule of law, I prefer that our governments don't break it. But maybe there's something there.
codeflo 1y ago
[flagged]
- the_snooze 1y ago
  I feel that there's a strain of extreme neuroticism in certain leftist activist groups that would rather keep the problem in place (and themselves relevant in fretting about it) than take care of the problem and move on. The COVID emergency comes to mind: Biden kept the federal government in an emergency posture until mid-2023, which was a year after Democratic governors ended emergencies in their states, and two whole years after widespread availability of vaccines.
- Telemakhos 1y ago
  His book also proceeds from the unquestioned assumption that people working on things like high-speed rail and affordable housing want it to come to fruition, much as you suspect that his critics do not want them to come to fruition. The alternative possibility that maybe needs a glance is that the projects' strongest backers have no intention of bringing those projects to pass, but rather desire to funnel the funds needed for the bureaucratic steps to their cronies. This is sometimes cited in criticism of California's high-speed rail: people working on the studies and processes necessary for bureaucracy are being paid, although the actual train will not be built. Maybe the train (or the Seattle parking spaces) are not actually what some part of the powers behind the project want, because they want really their friends to get paid for the bureaucratic work on the project.
  - aqme28 1y ago
    I'm not following this take. In either case, wouldn't everyone (except these corrupt powers) prefer for less bureaucracy hampering the project? Unless I'm misunderstanding you, a breakdown of this "unquestioned assumption" makes Ezra's argument stronger, not weaker.
    - silvestrov 1y ago
      Not if your job is part of the bureaucracy, then you want to keep the bureaucracy running for as long as possible to keep your job for as long as possible. It also gives you a sense of importance: nothing can get built without my full permission and approval and recognition.
roenxi 1y ago
It is a weird subject - on the one hand, I don't think anyone would argue that the story in the article makes sense from a process perspective. But simultaneously the people who are of the opinion that the regulations burdens should be lightened seem to be in a political minority that can't be much bigger than around 30% of the population. Raising the question - what do the majority of voters actual think about this sort of regulation? Maybe they are just of the opinion that case studies like this aren't representative of reality. I'd incline to believe that if the US body politic set out to solve this one they'd end up in a position of introducing a loophole for charging projects (ie, increasing bureaucracy) and reducing the regulatory burden wouldn't be an option.
- pikminguy 1y ago
  I think most people have an opinion similar to NIMBYism. Everyone agrees there are too many regulations but no one agrees which ones are the extra. Every rule is someone's highest concern. That's why part of the argument in Abundance is that current processes give too many people too much veto power. When every issue is someone's pet issue nothing can ever get done.
- pornel 1y ago
  Regulations are like code of a program. It's the business logic of how we want the world to be. Like all code, it can be buggy, bloated and slow, or it can be well-written and efficiently achieve ambitious things. If you have crappy unmaintainable code that doesn't work, then deleting it is an obvious improvement. Like in programming, it takes a lot of skill to write code that achieves its goals in a way that is as simple as possible, but also isn't oversimplified to the point of failing to handle important cases. The pro-regulation argument isn't for naively piling up more code and more bloat, but for improving and optimizing it.
sokoloff 1y ago
> And yet here we are, three years later, staring at an empty lot. By way of comparison, Project Gemini was conceived in 1961 and Gemini 3 successfully flew in April of 1964. But I'm sure that 8 EV parking spots is a more complex endeavor somehow...
- bigDinosaur 1y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_triviality https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_triviality has been noted for a long time. Unfortunately much bigger projects are now affected in ways that perhaps they would not have been in the past.
readthenotes1 1y ago
"It’s about rebuilding government’s capacity to accomplish its basic functions efficiently and effectively." That is a fairly hopeless aspiration as systems inevitably evolve to perpetuate themselves, not the services they were created to provide.
- praestigiare 1y ago
  I think that framing this as hopeless, and perpetuating the idea the government cannot operate efficiently, is a part of the problem. If a system is created to provide a service, it makes sense that said system would consider its existence instrumental to meeting that goal. This could be a positive motivator to provide the service efficiently and effectively. There are many reasons that it often does not work out that way, but one is public perception that government is supposed to be slow and inefficient.
Peteragain 1y ago
As a leftie - admittedly one who thinks - I thought the article was actually quite positive and didn't bring politics into it: "What would that look like for something as simple as EV charging stations? Standardized approval processes. Pre-approved vendor lists. Streamlined permitting for routine infrastructure. Clear timelines with accountability mechanisms." A clear and sensible suggestion. Cool.
- FinnLobsien 1y ago
  I think state capacity shouldn't be a left-right issue. Whether you want oil rigs or public parks to be built, everyone can agree that once the decision is made, it should be built swiftly and well. And the public should be able to have an expectation that when the government says they'll do something, they're capable of doing so within a reasonable budget and timeframe.
- HEmanZ 1y ago
  In my neck of the woods, you’d be called a capitalist bootlicker for this point of view by many lefties. I get called that for basically any suggestion besides complete communist revolution. I can always tell who on the left is ideologically poisoned by how vehemently they hate anything related to the idea that current government processes and regulations could improve or that government regulations can go (sometimes very) wrong. As if somehow that admission is the same as wanting anarcho-libertarianism.
  - kayodelycaon 1y ago
    As a “liberal” (American definition), you’re in a far different bubble than I am.
    - shazbotter 1y ago
      I'm an American, in my circles "liberal" is almost a curse word. It's what we tend to call people who support corporate power, profit motivation, and social progress as long as it doesn't inconvenience them personally. We broadly use "leftist" to refer to ourselves, whether that's democratic socialists, anarchists, communists, syndicalists, unionists, etc. Philosophically, these folks are fundamentally pushing for wellbeing of all, social motivation, and social progress even if it inconveniences me personally. I don't think it's helpful to refer to these differences in ideology as bubbles, though. I think there's a very real philosophical difference between liberals and leftists, and has been for generations. 60 years ago Phil Ochs sang "Love me I'm a liberal", and it wasn't a new idea back then. Liberals and leftists hold incompatible worldviews. Just like liberals and conservatives do. I think deploying the term "bubble" for such broad groups is probably more reductive than helpful.
ajd555 1y ago
Great read, and a great example of America's failure to complete infrastructure projects. I agree with the proposed solutions, and I do hope that some local governments start enacting some of them. I'm reminded of the staggering cost for a new railroad in the US, that can go up to $4M/mile near urban environments[0]. We need more articles like these and some political courage to get building again! [0] https://www.freightwaves.com/news/commentary-do-you-want-to-build-a-freight-railroad https://www.freightwaves.com/news/commentary-do-you-want-to-...
pu_pe 1y ago
The legitimate criticism I read against "Abundance" is that for the most part regulations and due process emerged to protect public interests from private capture. In the article the author says we should use "pre-approved vendor lists" or "streamlined approvals" and that sounds great in principle, but could also easily be exploited. One of the reasons American and German cities are made for cars is because of the influence of their car industry. However, this also pushed out investment in competing alternatives like public transport infrastructure.
- FinnLobsien 1y ago
  > In the article the author says we should use "pre-approved vendor lists" or "streamlined approvals" and that sounds great in principle, but could also easily be exploited. Every kind of regulation can be exploited and is currently being exploited. GDPR led to law firms squeezing money out of neighborhood bars with cease and desists. Government grants spawn companies doing the exact minimum to keep getting grants without building real businesses. I totally agree that lobbyism is a massive problem (and often the reason we get such complex regulation—they shut out the little players). But any proposed solution will have to be some type of risk.
- Analemma_ 1y ago
  Has our system done a good job at preventing private capture? Are we better at preventing private capture than countries which build things more easily?
  - ryathal 1y ago
    Our system is great at preventing private capture at the small scale and great at ensuring it on the large scale
- aqme28 1y ago
  > for the most part regulations and due process emerged to protect public interests from private capture. In truth I think it's a mix of this, and the opposite--where private interests have already captured the public good.
- 1y ago
FinnLobsien 1y ago
Good article. There are 3 observations I'd add: -I think we underestimate the impact of the cultural assumption that anything the government does will be 10x as expensive, take 10x as long and then not work properly, with nobody ever being held accountable, but lots of people having been paid along the way. Of all the ambitious, smart people I know, a single one has said he even believes it's a good thing to work for the government. And he doesn't do it because he thinks the experience would be so miserable compared to working in tech. -Most people don't seem to understand that regulations don't just add up, but compound. It's not that each individual, well-intentioned regulation is bad (though some are), it's that many regulations intersect and create edge cases. And when there's regulation/paperwork at every point, it starts to look like an insurmountable barrier. This is true with entrepreneurship in Europe. People aren't against a specific regulation, the perception is that whatever you want to do, you'll have to ask permission from someone, somewhere, fill out 5 pages of paperwork and wait 3 months before you get to talk to a notary and finally change your business' mailing address (real example from Germany) -It's hard to make a rational case for this because humans are wired to weigh danger more heavily than upside. We don't have counterfactuals (the cafe that didn't open because of zoning laws, the parks that were never built, etc.) Even when politicians admit this problem, they then proclaim they want more housing, innovation or whatever, but getting rid of a regulation has some amount of risk. So then they try to find the "free lunch": a solution that has none of the downside, but all of the upside. That free lunch doesn't exist and the resulting solution only gets even more complex.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- dfxm12 1y ago
  And he doesn't do it because he thinks the experience would be so miserable compared to working in tech I've worked for the US federal government, big tech and another big corp. I would say my experience with the government (and the non tech big corp) was more positive than big tech, as my team was more focused on working/growing together rather than trying to individually outshine everyone else. I feel like we were working towards practical goals that has clear benefits for our customers rather than trying to hit seemingly arbitrary kpi's. Working for the government I also feel like my work/life balance was most respected as well. YMMV though. Admittedly, N=1 here.
WBrentWilliams 1y ago
Writ-large, isn't what the article is referring to the plot of 生きる(Ikiru, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ikiru https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ikiru)? My suspicion is that the solution to lack of ability for government to enable building in the US will be the same, writ-large, as in the movie. That is, it will happen, but (I'll stop here, least I spoil the movie for you).
djoldman 1y ago
I find it quite interesting that US private industry can be incredibly effective relative to non-US private industry, but the opposite seems to be more the case when it comes to government projects.
- dweinus 1y ago
  The idea of US private efficiency is overblown. It doesn't take long working in a large US company to see massive delays, red tape, duplicate work, self-sabotage, or favoritism. Even when it is fast, that doesn't equate to efficient. It's not uncommon to see 8 figures put into throw-away work.
- kayodelycaon 1y ago
  I’ve seen massive waste in private business. Incredible amounts of it. Somehow these companies don’t collapse. Sometimes I think the only real difference is it’s easier to sell stuff to upper management than it is to a congresscritter. Easier for one person to waste a lot of money than it is for a committee to do it.
  - gruez 1y ago
    >Sometimes I think the only real difference is it’s easier to sell stuff to upper management than it is to a congresscritter. Easier for one person to waste a lot of money than it is for a committee to do it. How does this square with congressional pork like the SLS[1], or buying tanks that the army doesn't want[2]? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Launch_System#Criticism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Launch_System#Criticism [2] https://www.military.com/daily-news/2014/12/18/congress-again-buys-abrams-tanks-the-army-doesnt-want.html https://www.military.com/daily-news/2014/12/18/congress-agai...
xnx 1y ago
Not a great example since building and maintaining an EV station is not something Seattle should be doing. Cities have no experience building or maintaining charging stations.
- swiftcoder 1y ago
  Regardless of whether the City of Seattle should be in the EV charging station business, once they decide to, they damn well ought to be in the Getting Things Done™ business
- shazbotter 1y ago
  The city runs a municipal electrical utility (Seattle City Light), so building and maintaining electrical infrastructure is absolutely something they both have experience with and should be doing.
  - xnx 1y ago
    Why EV parking spaces and not a laundromat (which uses electricity)?
    - shazbotter 1y ago
      Because an EV lot is delivering power to a point (the charger) and parking is a business the city regularly operates. There's nothing novel to the city there. A laundromat does take power routing, and there would be sufficient expertise to do that part, but operating a laundromat is a business the city has never done before. It requires knowledge of machines, customer traffic, laundry care, and a bunch of other stuff the city hasn't done.
shazbotter 1y ago
The article highlights a failure, which is good, but gives a very surface level review of what failed here. Some gestures are made at environmental review but it's not clear that the root cause here was regulation. If the project needed three redesigns, why? Maybe electrical capacity for 8 high capacity outlets on that site was tricky. Maybe the transformers and their cooling was louder than that site could accommodate. Maybe this was a low priority project and other things kept stealing time from it. I can think of many reasons why a project like this stalls. And too be clear, regulation could absolutely be one of them. The article just doesn't support that as a root cause beyond conjecture.
- mindslight 1y ago
  Spot on. I read the article wondering when they were going to describe what specifically failed or got stuck. Instead it's just a vague implication that such redesigns must have been unnecessary, but never saying exactly why such redesigns were being done. What/who is the project currently waiting on? It's never specified. In light of that, maybe a better description of the problem is more the absence of responsibility/accountability (for both the proponent and the reviewers, although it's not indicated which is dropping the ball here) rather than the processes/regulations themselves.
  - shazbotter 1y ago
    [dead]
  - dpkirchner 1y ago
    I think the article was clear that this was a series of delays at all steps -- no one issue (eg redesigns) that prevented progress. I would like to have seen more details, however it's possible they just don't exist in any one place.
    - mindslight 1y ago
      That is the opposite of being clear - there is no analysis of what was responsible for each delay, leaving the reader to fill in their own imagined idea. And we can imagine many different scenarios. Maybe permits were stonewalled and denied for petty reasons. Maybe the muni electric company assigned the project as a low priority to an intern who kept missing key requirements. Maybe the better charging station vendor had too long of a lead time, and the muni electric was trying to ram it through with a different vendor that is more aggressively trying to privatize the commons. Each of these things are going to have wildly different fixes.
M95D 1y ago
In my country, obtaining a permit to build something is so very complicated and long that most people prefer to just build and then pay the fine for building without permits.
advisedwang 1y ago
The article pretends that the EV charging project failed because of bureaucratic hurdles, but then says 'But they had to switch charging station vendors due to supply chain issues, and the new equipment had “a very long lead time.”' That has nothing to do with bureaucracy, and none of the abundance stuff comes anywhere near addressing it.
throw0101d 1y ago
From Noah Smith, "America needs a bigger, better bureaucracy": > In other words, environmental regulation doesn’t threaten America’s economy via a sea of red tape enforced by an army of punctilious bureaucrats. It threatens America’s economy via a plague of lawsuits and pointless paperwork that we implemented as an alternative to hiring an army of punctilious bureaucrats. If we scrapped this legalistic permitting regime and replaced it with an army of bureaucrats, we would still be able to protect the environment just fine, but we would be able to do it without causing insane multi-year delays and driving costs to the moon. > The nine most terrifying words in the English language are not “I’m from the Government and I’m here to help”. Nine far more terrifying words are: “Please spend four years completing your Environmental Impact Statement.” […] > But even more important is what economists call an “agency problem”. Nonprofits would rather get the government to give them as much money as possible; they would love to rip the government off. And if all the expertise involved in building housing or providing social services resides in the nonprofits instead of the government itself, the government doesn’t have the ability to judge whether it’s getting ripped off. Here’s how I put it in my earlier post: >> When the government controls the purse strings but only the contractors know how much things should really cost, you get the worst of both worlds — a government that doesn’t know how to save taxpayer money, paying contractors who don’t want to save taxpayer money. * https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/america-needs-a-bigger-better-bureaucracy https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/america-needs-a-bigger-better-...
potato3732842 1y ago
We need to stop calling these insane perverse situations the outcome of "well-intentioned regulations". Every single one of theses regulations passed over the warnings of people at the time who predicted they would cause or contribute to exactly the outcomes we see now. The regulations and their peddlers are about as well intentioned as the carbon fiber submarine dude. The peddlers of these regulations wanted the regulations and ignored everyone who told them something they didn't want to hear. That's not well intentioned. That's behavior on a spectrum from ignorant to malicious.
- e40 1y ago
  Agreed, but it’s not just government. I just spent 2 days in a Kafka-like hell where a credit card I had for 22 years was closed by Citi. At every stage the many people I spoke with wanted to help but couldn’t, because the software had made the decision and it was final. No human was in the loop. And it wasn’t until many hours of phone calls that we even learned the reason for the closure. This army of humans employed by Citi are just slaves to a computer system.
appreciatorBus 1y ago
It’s funny that this is being portrayed as example of abundance being stymied. This is more about abundance of cars, or abundance of car subsidy in the form of free land and infra. Deregulation of cars and car infra while maintaining the stranglehold on non vehicle land uses. In a Seattle where land use had actually been reformed, no landowner, public or private, would choose a glorified parking lot as a good use of land. They would build something more important to the public - as evidenced by prices - such as housing or office or some other structure.
- mindslight 1y ago
  Living in a less dense place where the municipal electric has set up EV chargers in public parking lots and it all seems sensible, this hadn't occurred to me. But it's another astute point, and ties right into how this article doesn't analyze the actual hangups. Maybe the city has delayed this project of creating a new 8-space parking lot in favor of building multi-story or underground parking garages (which can also have EV charging spots).
lesuorac 1y ago
> California’s failed high-speed rail Everybody throwing shade a California HSR but uh Texas wanted one starting in 2009 [1], "finished" planning in 2015 [1] and a decade later only has a fancy website to show for it [3]. While California voted in 2008 [4] and broke ground in 2015 and has an impressive ;) 22 miles done in the past decade. And in response to the very slow time, California is blocking CEQA [5] from affecting government projects which will speed up construction [6]. The author does have some points, however they are missing that work is being done on this. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_Central_Railway https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_Central_Railway [2]: https://texascentral.wpenginepowered.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/Last-Mile-Analysis.pdf https://texascentral.wpenginepowered.com/wp-content/uploads/... [3]: https://www.texascentral.com/project/ https://www.texascentral.com/project/ [4]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_High-Speed_Rail https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_High-Speed_Rail [5]: https://www.gov.ca.gov/2025/06/30/governor-newsom-signs-into-law-groundbreaking-reforms-to-build-more-housing-affordability/ https://www.gov.ca.gov/2025/06/30/governor-newsom-signs-into... [6]: https://gsppi.berkeley.edu/programs/highspeedrail/docs/Schweitzer&Chakrabarti_Presentation_Nov30.pdf https://gsppi.berkeley.edu/programs/highspeedrail/docs/Schwe...
FarMcKon 1y ago
Folks; Yeah this is a run of the mill dead low-priority project. It happens in private industry, capitalism, communism, the roman empire, etc. Only because government is out in the open, it is easy to see. I don't have proof, but this stinks of 'Failed project used as a place-holder for schedule slop'. I see is so so so many places. Somebody, or a lot of somebodies knows this [Refactor AIP / Electric Charge Lot] is not a good idea. Instead of saying 'It's dead' it gets used as a buffer in the project plan. Oh it's there, and if things are every slow enough, it will happen. But even a mouse sneeze will move it out a year, to make budget [time, or $$$ ] for something useful. Once a year the [ boss / newspaper] will ask "Oh what about, [refactor / Parking Lot]' and somewhere points to the start and end date on the chart. But it's not a priority, and is a placeholder job that gets bumped and shifted for priority work. It is all over the place, since time began. WWII had it. The Revolutionary War had it. Ford has it. Roman Empire had it. Lockheed Martin has it. Hell, your own house projects have it. This is just 'A dead project is a placeholder since the org is bad at planning.' It is everywhere.

There's a lot in my city that had construction going on for about a month, they barely got anywhere, and now it's been deserted for a while. It's meant to be a new block of flats, and I know that takes a while, but every time I pass it, I think about the stories of Chinese workers erecting a 57 storey building in 19 days (Though I don't know if that includes wiring, plumbing, etc, or if it's just the concrete shell)

nitwit005 1y ago
That just seems to be some sort of common construction scam. I've seen it more than once with private construction. There is a private dental office down the street from me that's has an expansion which somehow took years. Same story. Ton of construction for a month or two, and then nothing happened. There was a union protest about using non-union labor for a bit. It felt like they were protesting the wrong issue, as no labor was occurring.

bjackman 1y ago

An idle observation about bureaucracy: In my big tech job we have a pretty small (by public sector standards) red-tape burden but it does exist. It does slow work down and it does increase the activation energy such that some small projects that might otherwise happen simply don't. Sometimes, I choose to semi-transparrently ignore it. I see this happen at the institutional level too. So there's a spectrum of tactical non-compliance, extending roughly between: - I do not submit my conference material to PR/legal, I just go to the conference and present without approval. I admit this to my management chain, they are mildly uncomfortable about it but ultimately don't care enough to make my life difficult. To: - We have a policy stating that all open source code in our stack must be fully reviewed internally. I think this does genuinely happen for lots of libraries but for the Linux kernel we are in flagrant violation and nobody cares. I assume there are very good reasons this is not something you can just do in the public sector. I assume there's also a factor in there about how there is no serious constituency in my company that genuinely cares about the PR/legal approvals, whereas the regulations blocking parking spaces are probably ultimately due to someone who really does care about whatever they are supposed to represent. And yeah I guess I do like the rule of law, I prefer that our governments don't break it. But maybe there's something there.

codeflo 1y ago

[flagged]

the_snooze 1y ago
I feel that there's a strain of extreme neuroticism in certain leftist activist groups that would rather keep the problem in place (and themselves relevant in fretting about it) than take care of the problem and move on. The COVID emergency comes to mind: Biden kept the federal government in an emergency posture until mid-2023, which was a year after Democratic governors ended emergencies in their states, and two whole years after widespread availability of vaccines.
Telemakhos 1y ago
His book also proceeds from the unquestioned assumption that people working on things like high-speed rail and affordable housing want it to come to fruition, much as you suspect that his critics do not want them to come to fruition. The alternative possibility that maybe needs a glance is that the projects' strongest backers have no intention of bringing those projects to pass, but rather desire to funnel the funds needed for the bureaucratic steps to their cronies. This is sometimes cited in criticism of California's high-speed rail: people working on the studies and processes necessary for bureaucracy are being paid, although the actual train will not be built. Maybe the train (or the Seattle parking spaces) are not actually what some part of the powers behind the project want, because they want really their friends to get paid for the bureaucratic work on the project.
- aqme28 1y ago
  I'm not following this take. In either case, wouldn't everyone (except these corrupt powers) prefer for less bureaucracy hampering the project? Unless I'm misunderstanding you, a breakdown of this "unquestioned assumption" makes Ezra's argument stronger, not weaker.
  - silvestrov 1y ago
    Not if your job is part of the bureaucracy, then you want to keep the bureaucracy running for as long as possible to keep your job for as long as possible. It also gives you a sense of importance: nothing can get built without my full permission and approval and recognition.

roenxi 1y ago

It is a weird subject - on the one hand, I don't think anyone would argue that the story in the article makes sense from a process perspective. But simultaneously the people who are of the opinion that the regulations burdens should be lightened seem to be in a political minority that can't be much bigger than around 30% of the population. Raising the question - what do the majority of voters actual think about this sort of regulation? Maybe they are just of the opinion that case studies like this aren't representative of reality. I'd incline to believe that if the US body politic set out to solve this one they'd end up in a position of introducing a loophole for charging projects (ie, increasing bureaucracy) and reducing the regulatory burden wouldn't be an option.

pikminguy 1y ago
I think most people have an opinion similar to NIMBYism. Everyone agrees there are too many regulations but no one agrees which ones are the extra. Every rule is someone's highest concern. That's why part of the argument in Abundance is that current processes give too many people too much veto power. When every issue is someone's pet issue nothing can ever get done.
pornel 1y ago
Regulations are like code of a program. It's the business logic of how we want the world to be. Like all code, it can be buggy, bloated and slow, or it can be well-written and efficiently achieve ambitious things. If you have crappy unmaintainable code that doesn't work, then deleting it is an obvious improvement. Like in programming, it takes a lot of skill to write code that achieves its goals in a way that is as simple as possible, but also isn't oversimplified to the point of failing to handle important cases. The pro-regulation argument isn't for naively piling up more code and more bloat, but for improving and optimizing it.

sokoloff 1y ago

> And yet here we are, three years later, staring at an empty lot. By way of comparison, Project Gemini was conceived in 1961 and Gemini 3 successfully flew in April of 1964. But I'm sure that 8 EV parking spots is a more complex endeavor somehow...

bigDinosaur 1y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_triviality https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_triviality has been noted for a long time. Unfortunately much bigger projects are now affected in ways that perhaps they would not have been in the past.

readthenotes1 1y ago

"It’s about rebuilding government’s capacity to accomplish its basic functions efficiently and effectively." That is a fairly hopeless aspiration as systems inevitably evolve to perpetuate themselves, not the services they were created to provide.

praestigiare 1y ago
I think that framing this as hopeless, and perpetuating the idea the government cannot operate efficiently, is a part of the problem. If a system is created to provide a service, it makes sense that said system would consider its existence instrumental to meeting that goal. This could be a positive motivator to provide the service efficiently and effectively. There are many reasons that it often does not work out that way, but one is public perception that government is supposed to be slow and inefficient.

Peteragain 1y ago

As a leftie - admittedly one who thinks - I thought the article was actually quite positive and didn't bring politics into it: "What would that look like for something as simple as EV charging stations? Standardized approval processes. Pre-approved vendor lists. Streamlined permitting for routine infrastructure. Clear timelines with accountability mechanisms." A clear and sensible suggestion. Cool.

FinnLobsien 1y ago
I think state capacity shouldn't be a left-right issue. Whether you want oil rigs or public parks to be built, everyone can agree that once the decision is made, it should be built swiftly and well. And the public should be able to have an expectation that when the government says they'll do something, they're capable of doing so within a reasonable budget and timeframe.
HEmanZ 1y ago
In my neck of the woods, you’d be called a capitalist bootlicker for this point of view by many lefties. I get called that for basically any suggestion besides complete communist revolution. I can always tell who on the left is ideologically poisoned by how vehemently they hate anything related to the idea that current government processes and regulations could improve or that government regulations can go (sometimes very) wrong. As if somehow that admission is the same as wanting anarcho-libertarianism.
- kayodelycaon 1y ago
  As a “liberal” (American definition), you’re in a far different bubble than I am.
  - shazbotter 1y ago
    I'm an American, in my circles "liberal" is almost a curse word. It's what we tend to call people who support corporate power, profit motivation, and social progress as long as it doesn't inconvenience them personally. We broadly use "leftist" to refer to ourselves, whether that's democratic socialists, anarchists, communists, syndicalists, unionists, etc. Philosophically, these folks are fundamentally pushing for wellbeing of all, social motivation, and social progress even if it inconveniences me personally. I don't think it's helpful to refer to these differences in ideology as bubbles, though. I think there's a very real philosophical difference between liberals and leftists, and has been for generations. 60 years ago Phil Ochs sang "Love me I'm a liberal", and it wasn't a new idea back then. Liberals and leftists hold incompatible worldviews. Just like liberals and conservatives do. I think deploying the term "bubble" for such broad groups is probably more reductive than helpful.

ajd555 1y ago

Great read, and a great example of America's failure to complete infrastructure projects. I agree with the proposed solutions, and I do hope that some local governments start enacting some of them. I'm reminded of the staggering cost for a new railroad in the US, that can go up to $4M/mile near urban environments[0]. We need more articles like these and some political courage to get building again! [0] https://www.freightwaves.com/news/commentary-do-you-want-to-build-a-freight-railroad https://www.freightwaves.com/news/commentary-do-you-want-to-...

pu_pe 1y ago

The legitimate criticism I read against "Abundance" is that for the most part regulations and due process emerged to protect public interests from private capture. In the article the author says we should use "pre-approved vendor lists" or "streamlined approvals" and that sounds great in principle, but could also easily be exploited. One of the reasons American and German cities are made for cars is because of the influence of their car industry. However, this also pushed out investment in competing alternatives like public transport infrastructure.

FinnLobsien 1y ago
> In the article the author says we should use "pre-approved vendor lists" or "streamlined approvals" and that sounds great in principle, but could also easily be exploited. Every kind of regulation can be exploited and is currently being exploited. GDPR led to law firms squeezing money out of neighborhood bars with cease and desists. Government grants spawn companies doing the exact minimum to keep getting grants without building real businesses. I totally agree that lobbyism is a massive problem (and often the reason we get such complex regulation—they shut out the little players). But any proposed solution will have to be some type of risk.
Analemma_ 1y ago
Has our system done a good job at preventing private capture? Are we better at preventing private capture than countries which build things more easily?
- ryathal 1y ago
  Our system is great at preventing private capture at the small scale and great at ensuring it on the large scale
aqme28 1y ago
> for the most part regulations and due process emerged to protect public interests from private capture. In truth I think it's a mix of this, and the opposite--where private interests have already captured the public good.
1y ago

FinnLobsien 1y ago

Good article. There are 3 observations I'd add: -I think we underestimate the impact of the cultural assumption that anything the government does will be 10x as expensive, take 10x as long and then not work properly, with nobody ever being held accountable, but lots of people having been paid along the way. Of all the ambitious, smart people I know, a single one has said he even believes it's a good thing to work for the government. And he doesn't do it because he thinks the experience would be so miserable compared to working in tech. -Most people don't seem to understand that regulations don't just add up, but compound. It's not that each individual, well-intentioned regulation is bad (though some are), it's that many regulations intersect and create edge cases. And when there's regulation/paperwork at every point, it starts to look like an insurmountable barrier. This is true with entrepreneurship in Europe. People aren't against a specific regulation, the perception is that whatever you want to do, you'll have to ask permission from someone, somewhere, fill out 5 pages of paperwork and wait 3 months before you get to talk to a notary and finally change your business' mailing address (real example from Germany) -It's hard to make a rational case for this because humans are wired to weigh danger more heavily than upside. We don't have counterfactuals (the cafe that didn't open because of zoning laws, the parks that were never built, etc.) Even when politicians admit this problem, they then proclaim they want more housing, innovation or whatever, but getting rid of a regulation has some amount of risk. So then they try to find the "free lunch": a solution that has none of the downside, but all of the upside. That free lunch doesn't exist and the resulting solution only gets even more complex.

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dfxm12 1y ago
And he doesn't do it because he thinks the experience would be so miserable compared to working in tech I've worked for the US federal government, big tech and another big corp. I would say my experience with the government (and the non tech big corp) was more positive than big tech, as my team was more focused on working/growing together rather than trying to individually outshine everyone else. I feel like we were working towards practical goals that has clear benefits for our customers rather than trying to hit seemingly arbitrary kpi's. Working for the government I also feel like my work/life balance was most respected as well. YMMV though. Admittedly, N=1 here.

WBrentWilliams 1y ago

Writ-large, isn't what the article is referring to the plot of 生きる(Ikiru, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ikiru https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ikiru)? My suspicion is that the solution to lack of ability for government to enable building in the US will be the same, writ-large, as in the movie. That is, it will happen, but (I'll stop here, least I spoil the movie for you).

djoldman 1y ago

I find it quite interesting that US private industry can be incredibly effective relative to non-US private industry, but the opposite seems to be more the case when it comes to government projects.

dweinus 1y ago
The idea of US private efficiency is overblown. It doesn't take long working in a large US company to see massive delays, red tape, duplicate work, self-sabotage, or favoritism. Even when it is fast, that doesn't equate to efficient. It's not uncommon to see 8 figures put into throw-away work.
kayodelycaon 1y ago
I’ve seen massive waste in private business. Incredible amounts of it. Somehow these companies don’t collapse. Sometimes I think the only real difference is it’s easier to sell stuff to upper management than it is to a congresscritter. Easier for one person to waste a lot of money than it is for a committee to do it.
- gruez 1y ago
  >Sometimes I think the only real difference is it’s easier to sell stuff to upper management than it is to a congresscritter. Easier for one person to waste a lot of money than it is for a committee to do it. How does this square with congressional pork like the SLS[1], or buying tanks that the army doesn't want[2]? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Launch_System#Criticism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Launch_System#Criticism [2] https://www.military.com/daily-news/2014/12/18/congress-again-buys-abrams-tanks-the-army-doesnt-want.html https://www.military.com/daily-news/2014/12/18/congress-agai...

xnx 1y ago

Not a great example since building and maintaining an EV station is not something Seattle should be doing. Cities have no experience building or maintaining charging stations.

swiftcoder 1y ago
Regardless of whether the City of Seattle should be in the EV charging station business, once they decide to, they damn well ought to be in the Getting Things Done™ business
shazbotter 1y ago
The city runs a municipal electrical utility (Seattle City Light), so building and maintaining electrical infrastructure is absolutely something they both have experience with and should be doing.
- xnx 1y ago
  Why EV parking spaces and not a laundromat (which uses electricity)?
  - shazbotter 1y ago
    Because an EV lot is delivering power to a point (the charger) and parking is a business the city regularly operates. There's nothing novel to the city there. A laundromat does take power routing, and there would be sufficient expertise to do that part, but operating a laundromat is a business the city has never done before. It requires knowledge of machines, customer traffic, laundry care, and a bunch of other stuff the city hasn't done.

shazbotter 1y ago

The article highlights a failure, which is good, but gives a very surface level review of what failed here. Some gestures are made at environmental review but it's not clear that the root cause here was regulation. If the project needed three redesigns, why? Maybe electrical capacity for 8 high capacity outlets on that site was tricky. Maybe the transformers and their cooling was louder than that site could accommodate. Maybe this was a low priority project and other things kept stealing time from it. I can think of many reasons why a project like this stalls. And too be clear, regulation could absolutely be one of them. The article just doesn't support that as a root cause beyond conjecture.

mindslight 1y ago
Spot on. I read the article wondering when they were going to describe what specifically failed or got stuck. Instead it's just a vague implication that such redesigns must have been unnecessary, but never saying exactly why such redesigns were being done. What/who is the project currently waiting on? It's never specified. In light of that, maybe a better description of the problem is more the absence of responsibility/accountability (for both the proponent and the reviewers, although it's not indicated which is dropping the ball here) rather than the processes/regulations themselves.
- shazbotter 1y ago
  [dead]
- dpkirchner 1y ago
  I think the article was clear that this was a series of delays at all steps -- no one issue (eg redesigns) that prevented progress. I would like to have seen more details, however it's possible they just don't exist in any one place.
  - mindslight 1y ago
    That is the opposite of being clear - there is no analysis of what was responsible for each delay, leaving the reader to fill in their own imagined idea. And we can imagine many different scenarios. Maybe permits were stonewalled and denied for petty reasons. Maybe the muni electric company assigned the project as a low priority to an intern who kept missing key requirements. Maybe the better charging station vendor had too long of a lead time, and the muni electric was trying to ram it through with a different vendor that is more aggressively trying to privatize the commons. Each of these things are going to have wildly different fixes.

M95D 1y ago

In my country, obtaining a permit to build something is so very complicated and long that most people prefer to just build and then pay the fine for building without permits.

advisedwang 1y ago

The article pretends that the EV charging project failed because of bureaucratic hurdles, but then says 'But they had to switch charging station vendors due to supply chain issues, and the new equipment had “a very long lead time.”' That has nothing to do with bureaucracy, and none of the abundance stuff comes anywhere near addressing it.

throw0101d 1y ago

From Noah Smith, "America needs a bigger, better bureaucracy": > In other words, environmental regulation doesn’t threaten America’s economy via a sea of red tape enforced by an army of punctilious bureaucrats. It threatens America’s economy via a plague of lawsuits and pointless paperwork that we implemented as an alternative to hiring an army of punctilious bureaucrats. If we scrapped this legalistic permitting regime and replaced it with an army of bureaucrats, we would still be able to protect the environment just fine, but we would be able to do it without causing insane multi-year delays and driving costs to the moon. > The nine most terrifying words in the English language are not “I’m from the Government and I’m here to help”. Nine far more terrifying words are: “Please spend four years completing your Environmental Impact Statement.” […] > But even more important is what economists call an “agency problem”. Nonprofits would rather get the government to give them as much money as possible; they would love to rip the government off. And if all the expertise involved in building housing or providing social services resides in the nonprofits instead of the government itself, the government doesn’t have the ability to judge whether it’s getting ripped off. Here’s how I put it in my earlier post: >> When the government controls the purse strings but only the contractors know how much things should really cost, you get the worst of both worlds — a government that doesn’t know how to save taxpayer money, paying contractors who don’t want to save taxpayer money. * https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/america-needs-a-bigger-better-bureaucracy https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/america-needs-a-bigger-better-...

potato3732842 1y ago

We need to stop calling these insane perverse situations the outcome of "well-intentioned regulations". Every single one of theses regulations passed over the warnings of people at the time who predicted they would cause or contribute to exactly the outcomes we see now. The regulations and their peddlers are about as well intentioned as the carbon fiber submarine dude. The peddlers of these regulations wanted the regulations and ignored everyone who told them something they didn't want to hear. That's not well intentioned. That's behavior on a spectrum from ignorant to malicious.

e40 1y ago
Agreed, but it’s not just government. I just spent 2 days in a Kafka-like hell where a credit card I had for 22 years was closed by Citi. At every stage the many people I spoke with wanted to help but couldn’t, because the software had made the decision and it was final. No human was in the loop. And it wasn’t until many hours of phone calls that we even learned the reason for the closure. This army of humans employed by Citi are just slaves to a computer system.

appreciatorBus 1y ago

It’s funny that this is being portrayed as example of abundance being stymied. This is more about abundance of cars, or abundance of car subsidy in the form of free land and infra. Deregulation of cars and car infra while maintaining the stranglehold on non vehicle land uses. In a Seattle where land use had actually been reformed, no landowner, public or private, would choose a glorified parking lot as a good use of land. They would build something more important to the public - as evidenced by prices - such as housing or office or some other structure.

mindslight 1y ago
Living in a less dense place where the municipal electric has set up EV chargers in public parking lots and it all seems sensible, this hadn't occurred to me. But it's another astute point, and ties right into how this article doesn't analyze the actual hangups. Maybe the city has delayed this project of creating a new 8-space parking lot in favor of building multi-story or underground parking garages (which can also have EV charging spots).

lesuorac 1y ago

> California’s failed high-speed rail Everybody throwing shade a California HSR but uh Texas wanted one starting in 2009 [1], "finished" planning in 2015 [1] and a decade later only has a fancy website to show for it [3]. While California voted in 2008 [4] and broke ground in 2015 and has an impressive ;) 22 miles done in the past decade. And in response to the very slow time, California is blocking CEQA [5] from affecting government projects which will speed up construction [6]. The author does have some points, however they are missing that work is being done on this. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_Central_Railway https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_Central_Railway [2]: https://texascentral.wpenginepowered.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/Last-Mile-Analysis.pdf https://texascentral.wpenginepowered.com/wp-content/uploads/... [3]: https://www.texascentral.com/project/ https://www.texascentral.com/project/ [4]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_High-Speed_Rail https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_High-Speed_Rail [5]: https://www.gov.ca.gov/2025/06/30/governor-newsom-signs-into-law-groundbreaking-reforms-to-build-more-housing-affordability/ https://www.gov.ca.gov/2025/06/30/governor-newsom-signs-into... [6]: https://gsppi.berkeley.edu/programs/highspeedrail/docs/Schweitzer&Chakrabarti_Presentation_Nov30.pdf https://gsppi.berkeley.edu/programs/highspeedrail/docs/Schwe...

FarMcKon 1y ago

Folks; Yeah this is a run of the mill dead low-priority project. It happens in private industry, capitalism, communism, the roman empire, etc. Only because government is out in the open, it is easy to see. I don't have proof, but this stinks of 'Failed project used as a place-holder for schedule slop'. I see is so so so many places. Somebody, or a lot of somebodies knows this [Refactor AIP / Electric Charge Lot] is not a good idea. Instead of saying 'It's dead' it gets used as a buffer in the project plan. Oh it's there, and if things are every slow enough, it will happen. But even a mouse sneeze will move it out a year, to make budget [time, or $$$ ] for something useful. Once a year the [ boss / newspaper] will ask "Oh what about, [refactor / Parking Lot]' and somewhere points to the start and end date on the chart. But it's not a priority, and is a placeholder job that gets bumped and shifted for priority work. It is all over the place, since time began. WWII had it. The Revolutionary War had it. Ford has it. Roman Empire had it. Lockheed Martin has it. Hell, your own house projects have it. This is just 'A dead project is a placeholder since the org is bad at planning.' It is everywhere.