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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

#321

Post by wyldfire »

cylinder wrote: post #310
wahern wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Jo…

I don't know the solution but I would be super hesitant to take jury trials away (even for civil suits like described here).

Re: The US has forgotten how to do infrastructure

#322

Post by mrjaeger »

Is there any way to do a bottoms up analysis of infrastructure projects like this and see where the differences come from? I imagine the costs on projects like these are pretty finely broken down, although I'm not sure how one would go about actually getting the numbers to analyze.

Re: The US has forgotten how to do infrastructure

#323

Post by __jal »

chc wrote: post #305
CodeCube wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. Seriousl…

> has derailed discussion of the actual article

Unlike complaining about what people choose to talk about, which has a long track record of success.

Re: The US has forgotten how to do infrastructure

#324

Post by scott_karana »

jdc wrote: post #48
maxxxxx wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the one off nature of projects is the problem. There is no coherent long term plan.

According to Peter Thiel (in CS183), this lack of long term plan is a symptom of people believing that the future is indeterminate[1]. 1. http://blakemasters.com/post/23435743973/peter-thiels-cs183-... (Section I. The End of Big Projects)

Admittedly, that belief was driven by the repercussions of failed bets on the future. Just look at pension contributions and retirement returns from the 60s to the 80s.

Re: The US has forgotten how to do infrastructure

#325

Post by equalunique »

deanCommie wrote: post #298
anovikov wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Federal Highways in the US are designed to increase national security. The best example is certain bridges are in certain places so that their destruction would cut off the easy path for mobilized enemy armor. They're designed to be easily blown up on purpose.

Re: The US has forgotten how to do infrastructure

#326

Post by droidist2 »

graphitezepp wrote: post #229
andrewla wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is an interesting theory, but any attempt at explaining why the US in particular is bad at large-scale infrastructure also has to explain why other countries are so much better at it. The litigousness argument seems to be interesting from that perspective, but I'd be hard-pressed to believe that France or Germany are less detail-oriented in their planning, given that the same tools that allow better blueprinting…

American exceptionalism might have a place in the discussion, as the USA is exceptionally big. Furthermore it is notable that the only countries that are likely to have similar quality infrastructure with lower population density are the Nordic ones.

I think even in Sweden, Norway, and Finland the population is concentrated in the warmer south part of the country.

Re: The US has forgotten how to do infrastructure

#327

Post by gsnedders »

tonyedgecombe wrote: post #311
arethuza wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/sustain…

Crossrail appears to have been a quite successful project from the outside, I'm not sure if that's because of good PR or if it really has been.

Some of it is PR: some parts have gone badly (redevelopment of Whitechapel station comes to mind), but by and large it has gone to plan (albeit using almost all of its risk time, AFAIK!). They've by and large kept their cards quite close to their chests about things going wrong, though.

The worst parts, by and large, have been around the existing railway infrastructure: dealing with long-disused parts of railway infrastructure (partly buried and exact design and current state unknown) and with currently used infrastructure without long-closures (as well as Whitechapel, the electrification of the GWML out to Reading comes to my mind, with all its problems, which is really a separate project but Crossrail cannot run beyond Heathrow Junction without it complete).

Re: The US has forgotten how to do infrastructure

#328

Post by Severian »

rcconf wrote: post #292
wutbrodo wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "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 - Sun…

$4000 in repairs a year? What kind of clunker are you driving?

Re: The US has forgotten how to do infrastructure

#329

Post by mnm1 »

Is inefficiency inefficiency when it's done on purpose? That's what the article misses. The salaries of workers might not be higher than in other countries, but I bet what we pay contractors vs. what they produce is beyond astronomical. It certainly is when government contracts out software. With modern computing, I don't see why we don't keep track of costs down to the penny. A new hammer is bought to continue construction? The receipt is scanned and everything is tracked. You don't scan it, you don't get reimbursed. All actual costs are known and the profit margin can be calculated from there. It might not help that much until more data is collected and future projects can be estimated better using that data, but it sure as hell beats the current model of guessing the lowest estimate to get the contract, getting the contract, and then spending 10-1000x the estimate.

Re: The US has forgotten how to do infrastructure

#330

Post by johansch »

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…

https://infogr.am/number-of-lawyers-per-capita
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