So I worked for the family construction firm for a few years. The amount of ass covering, paperwork and complexity to what should be a simple thing was amazing. The amount of litigation involved when anything was not as expected was amazing vs. just trying to sort it between the those involved. My father build a $M business on just doing change orders & claims. There is your problem.
The US has forgotten how to do infrastructure
291–300 of 564 posts
Re: The US has forgotten how to do infrastructure
#292Earlier quoted context omitted.
The abusive relationship love-affair is the best explanation I've ever heard of cars in the USA. Just like a an abusive relationship, the car love affair still produces some good things. It's not all dark and dreary. "I hate that he comes home drunk and hits me, but he's so loving and apologetic the next morning." "I hate that I get so stressed from my daily commute, but being able to drive to the countryside on the…
> "I hate that I get so stressed from my daily commute, but being able to drive to the countryside on the weekend is so nice." I have truly never understood this line of thinking. These two are not tied together. I grew up in a car-centric city, but moved away in my teens. I've never personally owned a car and haven't had one in the household since I was 17. I hear this supposed "upside" of cars from my friends who a…
In Canada, renting a car when you're under 25 years old is pretty annoying. It's usually an extra $25 a day and that's what turned me off to renting. Some rental companies won't even let you get a car if you're under 25. It's actually a function of age, so I'm currently 24 and in theory, it should be cheaper now.. so let's do some blanket math to entertain your idea.
- I drive my car only on weekends, so Friday - Sunday
- It tends to break down every 3 months, at around $1000 a repair each time(BMWs have expensive repairs.) That's $4000 a year
- Insurance is about $1750 for a year
- Looking at rates at www.enterprise.com for my city, it's about $100 CAD for a rental car for 3 days (pick up at 7:00AM Friday and drop off at 4:00PM on Sunday.)
- $100 CAD * 4 is about $400 a month for a rental
- $4000 (repairs) + $1750 (insurance) + $120 (stickers) is about $489 for owning
It looks like using rental cars on weekends is not a great investment still and that makes me sad. I only save $89 a month and have to deal with picking up and dropping off the car and also not using it through the week. $1068 in yearly savings is not worth it!
Note: Gas is not included because I have to pay for gas for both cars, I guess it might be a little cheaper for the rental cars since they tend to be gas efficient, but I still don't think it's huge savings.
Re: The US has forgotten how to do infrastructure
#293That suggests that U.S. costs are high due to general inefficiency [...] Americans have simply ponied up more and more cash over the years while ignoring the fact that they were getting less and less for their money. There's a general effect in political systems, that if a law takes $20 from 1,000,000 people and gives $100,000 to 200 people, the people who lose money won't have enough incentive to put up a big fight;…
The only meaningful campaign finance reform would require a constitutional amendment, because SCOTUS has said a corporation is a person and persons have free speech and money is free speech therefore corporations can spend any amount of money on behalf of a candidate. So you'd have to rip that up with an amendment. There are two paths to an amendment, via 2/3rds agreement by both houses of Congress, or 2/3rd of the states calling for a consitutional convention (which has never happened). There is no chance such an amendment gets proposed by this or a foreseeable future Congress. Both of the major parties prefer the existing system.
Which leads to the other possible amendment, up ending the monopoly the political parties have on the primary voting system. One way that sounds nice, but is specious, is destroying the political parties - simply disallow their existence. Probably better is to change the voting system:
a. Range or preferential voting in a single election rather than the current tribal primary system which is not controlled by law but by each political party. Primaries encourage members of the tribe to vote in a reactionary way, the extremes of each party tend to win.Range or preferential voting is better than runoffs, it's basically an instant runoff system.
b. Get rid of the Electoral College. The idea it will keep us from getting incompetent presidents is pretty much proven wrong, plus it's been broken again by the two political parties who have gotten states to enact laws that require electors explicitly to not vote their conscience, under penalty. So it doesn't at all do what it was designed to do; and it comes from our racist slave history, the southern slave states wouldn't ratify the constitution without this provision. So get rid of it. The only thing worse than tyranny of the majority is tyranny of the minority.
Anyway, it's not going to fix itself. People will have to want to fix it.
Re: The US has forgotten how to do infrastructure
#294Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hypothesis: nicotine is a nootropic [0] good for say, 6 IQ points on average (Danish study I saw referenced, not linking unless I can find the original paper). The Hoover Dam and many other great infrastructure projects were created in the earlier 20th century when smoking was pervasive. Perhaps we were somewhat smarter in aggregate back then and that's why we can't engineer infrastructure at the same level anymore.…
There aren't 6 point differences between France, China, Japan, and the USA. It's more like 2 points. And if 2, or 6 points could double construction costs, then in the poorest countries like Africa everything would have to cost something like 100x more, which is definitely not the case.
Somehow you put the double construction costs in the middle of "IQ difference" and "we can't do it". Why?
Re: The US has forgotten how to do infrastructure
#295I don't know the answers, but as someone who works in the industry (on the design side). I think a big unmentioned factor is probably liability and the prospect of litigation. If you look at old blueprints for projects in the past, they are a LOT less detailed. They had to be, because it was physically more difficult to produce them since they had to be drawn by hand. A lot was left to the contractor to figure out in…
Those liability problems exist in every advanced Western country. It's true that litigation is more costly in common law countries, in some cases twice as high, and that this cost can be internalized in the ways you suggest. But those costs only account for single-digit percentages overall.
What you describe could also be understood as an inefficient way of organization that is peculiar to the United States, and a by-product of American business and economic logic. Firms (i.e. vertical integration) exist to reduce the comparative inefficiencies of having separate, independent entities. Most other countries still have huge conglomerates (e.g. Japan, Korea), or contractors enjoy closer and longer-term business relationships.
With rare exception (Berkshire Hathaway, Elon Musk, etc) Americans have systematically shifted toward looser organization of smaller, independent business entities. One of the downsides is the exploding cost of orchestrating these entities for big projects, and the loss of knowledge about how to manage such projects.
Re: The US has forgotten how to do infrastructure
#296Earlier quoted context omitted.
Anecdotally, having moved to Western Europe, I get the sense that this is the major factor as well. If I walk down the street and there is a group of workers excavating a road, there's a lot more of a relaxed attitude about fencing, walking underneath construction equipment, etc. After all - use your common sense - don't fall into the hole. If you do, isn't it kind of your own fault? Nobody's going to sue anybody. Ad…
> And America's love affair with the automobile is a well-known abusive relationship that America will never have the courage to leave. It's pretty much impossible to leave this relationship unless you live in one of the larger US cities. If you live in a suburb, rural area, or city that's not in the top 10-15 in terms of size there's literally no other option that exists or that could easily exist.
You don't think people in Europe live in suburban or rural areas?
The difference is networks of buses and trains that the countries and cities invested in over decades.
America went in another direction, and looks no closer to changing it's mind.
Re: The US has forgotten how to do infrastructure
#297> U.S. costs are high due to general inefficiency -- inefficient project management, an inefficient government contracting process, and inefficient regulation. It suggests that construction, like health care or asset management or education, is an area where Americans have simply ponied up more and more cash over the years while ignoring the fact that they were getting less and less for their money. To fix the problems choking U.S. construction, reformers are going to have to go through the system and rip out the inefficiencies root and branch.
That's a tall order. It'd be nice to see the article suggest a way to accomplish that.
Re: The US has forgotten how to do infrastructure
#298Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's a self-inflicted problem though. Nobody put a gun to America's head and forced us to make our cities sprawl out. We collectively decided to do it that way because we thought it was better. And for a few things it IS better. But there are a whole lotta costs, too, with the top 3 being being actual financial cost, grinding on the faces of the poor, and making us fat.
It was done for a very rational reason: making country more immune to a nuclear attack, especially the retaliation to its own nuclear attack (i.e. a nuclear attack that is coming in convenient time of day and week because you chose the time). It works perfectly to that purpose: it is whole lot better to keep all relevant population in separate houses with basements, with little combustible material around, than in mu…
Have a source for any of that?
Sounds like a completely made-up justification after the fact.
Surely someone would have raised the point that the soviet union could just launch it's missiles in the middle of the work day.
Also, Moscow is tremendously sprawled out.
Re: The US has forgotten how to do infrastructure
#299Why all the guesswork about why it costs so much? That sort of thing should be readily explained by accounting: follow the money. Public infrastructure should be financially transparent.
It is largely projects over $10,000 go out for public bidding, generally with sealed bids. For most State or Federal level stuff you can see who the bidders were, and what bid won the contract.
Municipal or County level projects probably have so much variability that it's hard to make any definitive statement.
Re: The US has forgotten how to do infrastructure
#300Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's probably not even a decision so much as a probable consequence of having a much smaller population and opening of new frontiers to settle over the course of the country's history, ending up today with about half the population spread across about the same total area, and not uniformly. What has been our decision is to respect individual and local preferences (NIMBYism) and to ignore certain infrastructure improv…
Sprawl IS a new phenomenon, though. We didn't see the kind of suburban sprawl that we see today until after WW2, when cars became THE way to get around. It became more and more dominant and entrenched as the interstate highway system developed. Remember, we're talking about relative density within a metro area, not how close each metro area is to the others. If you look at cities that were more or less fully develope…
True, but even in Boston they can't get public transportation and infrastructure right. Boston is almost certainly one of the most vibrant economic hubs in America and one of the most compact cities, but the subway absolutely sucks, is completely outdated, and can't adequately service proximal cities like Somerville. The city is also desperately in need of further tunneling and infrastructure expansion to service the Cambridge / Somerville area as well as the Sea Port but I can't see that ever happening. It's taken us over five years to fix a single small bridge with two lanes in each direction...