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The US has forgotten how to do infrastructure

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Re: The US has forgotten how to do infrastructure

#301

Post by LordKano »

Mz wrote: post #287
puranjay wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I woke up to a flat tire about two months ago. Don't know why, but that was the breaking point for me. Since then, I haven't driven a single day. I walk, take the metro or get an Uber. I haven't been happier. Driving was easily the worst part of my day.

I have two sons. At the time that we chose to go carless, we were living in an apartment complex with endless speed bumps. Driving over the speed bumps into and out of the complex daily was about 3 minutes of torture that we were completely thrilled to give up. Humorously, we have had occasion to put me on a bus for some reason while they walked to the destination in question. I would get ahead of them, then the bus…

Unless you are driving quite a long distance and/or on the open highway, car travel is not as much faster than foot travel as some people seem to believe.

I'm going to have to disagree on this one.

I can drive to my local Wal-Mart in about 5 minutes. It would take me 30 minutes to walk there. I can drive there. Do my shopping, wait in line, pay, cart my stuff back out to my vehicle and drive home in less than the amount of time it would take to walk there.

Re: The US has forgotten how to do infrastructure

#302

Post by jonknee »

goodcanadian wrote: post #187
davidw wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> mostly privatized Where's that?

Switzerland might be a good example ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Healthcare_in_Switzerland ): Healthcare in Switzerland is universal and is regulated by the Swiss Federal Law on Health Insurance. There are no free state-provided health services, but private health insurance is compulsory for all persons residing in Switzerland (within three months of taking up residence or being born in the country).

It's privatized, but not private like you would think of in the US. For example, insurers aren't allowed to profit off of the basic insurance everyone is required to get, they can only profit off of expanded coverage. They also have Medicare-style price controls which is obvious, but not private in the sense we use in the US.

Re: The US has forgotten how to do infrastructure

#303

Post by lkbm »

imgabe wrote: post #80

I 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…

The case-study of the Hyatt Regency collapse might a major root cause of the bureaucracy you're describing. The change that caused the issue was approved by the engineers in that case, but I think made us a lot more instituionally cautious: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyatt_Regency_walkway_collapse * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VnvGwFegbC8

Re: The US has forgotten how to do infrastructure

#304

Post by microcolonel »

vinay427 wrote: post #206
lghh wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

This is an extremely simplistic view of the situation. In reality, many of the largest cities are almost entirely unusable without a car while many small cities (in the extreme case, most college towns) have excellent walkability and public transit because of their dense layout. I have personally experienced these. This is not a problem of urbanization to large cities, but of overall urban design.

Yeah, there are some even more extreme cases of office parks where it's illegal to walk on the roadside, illegal to walk near the road, illegal to walk on the road, illegal to walk on the surrounding property. Basically places where it's illegal not to be on at least a bicycle, and more likely in a car.

Re: The US has forgotten how to do infrastructure

#305

Post by chc »

CodeCube wrote: post #253
chc wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can we try to get through one thread on HN without frothing at the mouth about how much we hate cars? Message received, you happen to be in a situation where you don't need a car — I am genuinely happy for you, as well as envious. But it is not necessary or helpful for someone to bang on about it in every single thread that has anything to do with building stuff. It doesn't help anything, and it just annoys people wh…

If people don't bang on about it, nothing will ever change ... seriously, everyone will simply move on and build the next urban sprawl center, and the next shitty road, out to the next desolate subdivision because that's what's easy. No one wants to be agitated. Well, too bad, we _should_ be agitated. Those without the good fortune _should_ raise hell to the city planners, and attend city council meetings, and vote i…

If you have some good ideas about how to solve the problem of transportation in America, absolutely go talk to the relevant authorities. Heck, you might even start a startup around it, because this is a problem that many cities have poured money into with little success.

What is not useful is going into vaguely related threads on Hacker News and posting extended analogies between cars and abusive boyfriends.

Seriously, look at this entire sprawling "I like cars"/"I don't like cars" subthread that has derailed discussion of the actual article and tell me: Has it brought America one iota closer to a solution?

Re: The US has forgotten how to do infrastructure

#306

Post by LordKano »

anovikov wrote: post #267
TulliusCicero wrote: post #204

Earlier 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…

I had never considered this and something else about it makes perfect sense to me.

It also explains the "white flight" of the time. What we now call the "inner city" was allowed to remain black and brown with the expectation that the country would be alright if they were incinerated while the more -valuable- people had been relocated to the suburbs.

The Soviets would be able to get their retaliatory body count while eliminating people that the US didn't really value in the first place.

Re: The US has forgotten how to do infrastructure

#307

Post by ShannonAlther »

gwern wrote: post #122
jboggan wrote: post #82

Earlier 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.

This is only true for certain scales relating IQ to construction costs. The average IQ in Africa is, what, ~15 points lower than America? Suppose the first 2 points increase construction costs by a factor of 1.5, and each subsequent 2-point reduction by a smaller factor, until you reach some limit (IQ average too low to be realistic, NGO aid, something like that).

Re: The US has forgotten how to do infrastructure

#308

Post by tonyedgecombe »

bogomipz wrote: post #78

I don't know if "forgotten" as used in the title is the correct word so much as just "out of practice." Look at this list of infrastructure projects in China in the last decade or so: http://www.businessinsider.com/giant-chinese-infrastructure-... It's hard not to be impressed by that list. And China is undertaking these scale projects abroad as well from Latin America to Africa. It's should be no surprise that you g…

It's almost like a democracy slows development, if you compare China to India it looks like that.

Re: The US has forgotten how to do infrastructure

#309

Post by grahamannett »

Apreche wrote: post #2

It costs extra because CORRUPTION. They're skimming off the top at every level, and that's why they can't let anyone investigate.

Yeah, was looking for a comment like this. While not an outright parallel, some of the similarities strike me as eerily similar to a recent article in the new yorker that discusses the russia-crimea bridge: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/05/29/putins-shadow-c...

Re: The US has forgotten how to do infrastructure

#310

Post by cylinder »

wahern wrote: post #295
imgabe wrote: post #80

I 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…

No not really, once you study the legal system of other advanced countries you will realize the US system is completely insane. The verdicts are wild, and we use juries for complex civil litigation. A bunch of regular Joes are supposed to understand torts and then even calculate damages! The result is trial lawyers succeed by playing on emotion, class, race, playing a character, etc., and a bunch of bored confused Joes and Janes sees an injured person and thinks "Okay, this sucks, give them $50 million."
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