The US has forgotten how to do infrastructure • Hacker News Board

Re: The US has forgotten how to do infrastructure

#61

Post by shuntress » Wed, May 31, 2017, 4:57 PM UTC

post_break wrote: post #44

stupidcar wrote: post #16

Vague talk of inefficiency in construction isn't really very informative. Has anyone ever done a study where they take two very similar projects — building a medium sized office building, for example — in the US and China, and following them both from beginning to end, auditing exactly how much money and time is spent on each stage? It seems like this would provide a useful basis for comparison.

Wouldn't they vary wildly due to OSHA and other requirements like permits and bribes?

Probably.

That is something that would be good to understand with precision, hence the study.

Re: The US has forgotten how to do infrastructure

#62

Post by arethuza » Wed, May 31, 2017, 4:57 PM UTC

rm_-rf_slash wrote: post #50

chadgeidel wrote: post #40

My brother and father (concrete construction) would probably lay the blame on onerous regulation. They regularly complain about nit-picky engineers with their insistence on (in their words) unreasonable slavish devotion to engineering specifications. I'm not on the jobsite so I don't actually know. I wonder is our construction regulations are much more stringent than other western nations?

Count your blessings. Construction can be much harder in other countries for reasons beyond engineering and safety. Italy, for example, is a real estate developers nightmare. Every rock or patch of dirt has a decent chance of sitting atop an Ancient Greek or Roman ruin, and the process to ensure that construction won't damage any heretofore unknown ruins is agonizingly slow. It boils down to political power and cultu…

But that problem applies to a lot of places in Europe - a lot of projects in the UK need to have teams of archaeologists in place and stuff seems to get built here at a reasonable rate (OK mostly - around Edinburgh we've had one dubious tram project and a successful major bridge and railways being re-opened).

The Crossrail project in London had over 100 archaeologists working on it:

http://www.crossrail.co.uk/sustainability/archaeology/

Edit: The Forth Crossing bridge uncovered sites roughly 10,000 years old!

Re: The US has forgotten how to do infrastructure

#63

Post by fivestar » Wed, May 31, 2017, 4:58 PM UTC

alistairSH wrote: post #39

tmh79 wrote: post #26

It seems to me like the biggest things that have changed are the safety regulations on the construction process itself and the finished product. The golden gate bridge was built in a few years, but with a few worker deaths. Building a new bridge like the golden gate today would likely be illegal, and take ~25 years.

That doesn't explain the difference in time/cost between current-day USA and current-day France or Japan. All three have modern safety and environmental regulations, yet two can complete jobs faster and for less money.

Maybe you don't understand the real incentives at work? In the US, it is jobs, jobs, jobs. Long, drawn out projects keep hardhats working for years. It's not about outcomes, which is a big part of the problem.

Re: The US has forgotten how to do infrastructure

#64

Post by davidw » Wed, May 31, 2017, 4:58 PM UTC

beat wrote: post #18

This reflects in health care as well. American health care costs about twice as much as it does in every other first-world nation. Those systems run the gamut from fully socialist to mostly privatized, but they all share a common feature - they provide universal coverage at half the cost of the American system. That says there's something uniquely broken in our model. Infrastructure? Same thing. There's something dis…

> mostly privatized

Where's that?

Re: The US has forgotten how to do infrastructure

#65

Post by WithHighProb » Wed, May 31, 2017, 4:59 PM UTC

stupidcar wrote: post #16

Vague talk of inefficiency in construction isn't really very informative. Has anyone ever done a study where they take two very similar projects — building a medium sized office building, for example — in the US and China, and following them both from beginning to end, auditing exactly how much money and time is spent on each stage? It seems like this would provide a useful basis for comparison.

Given the real estate bubble in China now, I guess it'll be 100 times faster

Re: The US has forgotten how to do infrastructure

#66

Post by fivestar » Wed, May 31, 2017, 5:00 PM UTC

jicks wrote: post #43

rrggrr wrote: post #30

Durability. Its one thing to quickly and cheaply add infrastructure, and I've traveled the world to places where this is accomplished at a dizzying pace. Its another thing altogether to engineer and build projects that can endure over time and in the face of natural and unnatural disaster. Yes, the US is overdue for infrastructure investment. Yes, its costly and unproductive Federal and State entitlement obligations…

It doesn't fit. Railway systems in Japan and France (taken as example in the article) are high quality and last long as well. Yet construction railway is way less expensive there.

In Japan, are property rights a big deal? How about corruption? Here in the US, you would get every NIMBY and enviro-whacko all fired up. Then you have the insiders who know where the right of way will likely be and they will buy up the land so they can flip it to .gov at a premium.

Re: The US has forgotten how to do infrastructure

#67

Post by fivestar » Wed, May 31, 2017, 5:02 PM UTC

masterleep wrote: post #7

Bureaucrats, allied with progressives and public sector unions, work vigorously to make government as expensive and inefficient as possible. In the United States, they are succeeding very well.

I wish HN members wouldn't downvote just because 'progressive' gets bashed. Too close to home for you? It's a valid point, but so is the other side--conservatives are just as bad. Two wings of the same bird, really.

Re: The US has forgotten how to do infrastructure

#68

Post by WithHighProb » Wed, May 31, 2017, 5:02 PM UTC

WithHighProb wrote: post #65

stupidcar wrote: post #16

Vague talk of inefficiency in construction isn't really very informative. Has anyone ever done a study where they take two very similar projects — building a medium sized office building, for example — in the US and China, and following them both from beginning to end, auditing exactly how much money and time is spent on each stage? It seems like this would provide a useful basis for comparison.

Given the real estate bubble in China now, I guess it'll be 100 times faster

btw at 0.1-0.01 cost, because land is state-owned it's possible you could get the bid for the land at a very low price.

Re: The US has forgotten how to do infrastructure

#69

Post by sharemywin » Wed, May 31, 2017, 5:02 PM UTC

aaronarduino wrote: post #49

sharemywin wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But, from what the article was pointing out we're comparing place like france and japan which have as many if not more regulations.

It's not how many regulations there are, it's more about how much time and effort it takes to conform to the regulations.

So, your argument is we enforce are regulations better?

Re: The US has forgotten how to do infrastructure

#70

Post by ghaff » Wed, May 31, 2017, 5:03 PM UTC

noonespecial wrote: post #51

I thought about this when I visited the Hoover Dam. The audacity of the thing and sheer impossibility of doing anything remotely like it in today's America makes it seem like a relic from an ancient civilization. It felt like visiting the pyramids in Egypt.

Dams specifically are... complicated. There are a lot of reasons why dams are more likely to be torn down these days than built. Some are necessary for flood control but dams often have very significant negative environmental effects.

It's also hard to imagine building the interstate highway system today but, in general, a greater concern about the environmental impact of infrastructure projects isn't really a bad thing.