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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

#391

Post by CydeWeys »

ShannonAlther wrote: post #318
Mz wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. The average speed limit on municipal roads in Ontario is 50 km/h, which means that anywhere within 5km will take 6 minutes and, within 10km, 12 minutes. Running 5km takes me 18 minutes, and running 10km takes me closer to 40 minutes. Humans walk at about 5km/h, w…

You're not wrong, and even though I dislike cars, I can't help but feel like you're arguing against someone living in an alternate reality. Unless you live in a dense urban core there's no possible way that walking saves more time than driving. The main reasons I don't have a car is that it's very freeing not to have to worry about owning one (from a theft/maintenance/risk perspective), and also because I'm now living in Manhattan, where owning a car is a huge additional hassle above just parking it in the suburbs where I used to live. I'd either have to pony up for an expensive garage or go fight to find free public parking multiple times every week, all just so I can drive in traffic that's horrendous during the entire day. No thank you.

Re: The US has forgotten how to do infrastructure

#392

Post by mark-r »

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…

There is a bridge near my house that was delayed some months because some old Indian artifacts were found there. http://www.startribune.com/ancient-campsite-discovered-along...

Re: The US has forgotten how to do infrastructure

#393

Post by kinkrtyavimoodh »

pavel_lishin wrote: post #261
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…

> What prevents you from renting a car when you want to drive out to the countryside? Nothing, but it is a barrier. When you own a car, you just get in, make sure you've got gas, and go. When you don't, you need to go out and find a rental place, get there, find a car you want/like, etc. It's a small barrier, and mostly psychological, but it's there and it affects decisions.

There are a bunch of other small inconveniences too.

I own a car but I've considered renting cars for trips multiple times (you don't have to care as much about a rental car, you don't mind if other people are driving it, it's normal to split rental car expenses but weird to split, say, the depreciation on your car) etc. But it's often a hassle.

Most rental car centers in the city do not open before say 9 am (the best I have seen is 8 am) and close by 5-6 pm. After you do all the paper work and blah blah it's typically 9-10 am before you can leave for your trip. This is just not practical for a lot of weekend trips. The other option is to rent it on Friday (which means you pay for a day more), but since they close by 5 pm you need to rent it on Friday morning at 9 am which means you have to now plan it along with your work day.

The other option is to rent from the airport where the centers are generally open 24/7 but charge more and the airport is far so now you have to take that into account.

The other problem is when you rent for a long trip and have to pay per day when you know you'll actually be driving only on a few of those days.

Re: The US has forgotten how to do infrastructure

#394

Post by adrianratnapala »

CydeWeys wrote: post #382
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…

This is an argument for vertical integration in the construction industry, which I suppose might even include state-run construction companies. If the architects, engineers, and construction workers are all working for the same entity , then there's no troublesome legal issues to deal with at the boundaries between entities, and everyone can simply do the right thing as efficiently as possible. In summary, end contra…

You have identified a incentive towards vertical integration. But then we might ask ourselves what is stopping it. Is there some counter-incentive that causes the hierarchy of contractors? Is there some regulation that forces it?

You might claim that there are no state-run construction companies because of free-market ideology or some such bogeyman. But that doesn't explain why the private contractors don't integrate vertically.

My own guess is that even a vertically integrated entity would be risk averse and have to create expensive, slow, internal sign-off procedures.

Re: The US has forgotten how to do infrastructure

#395

Post by cjlars »

jernfrost wrote: post #162
cjlars wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The US would count as a small state by most OECD averages, so assuming by quality of life you mean, 'high GDP and standards of living', Texas would be a fairly good counter-example of a successful small state. I don't think there are many people in the libertarian mainstream who would suggest shrinking government revenue to below ~15-20% of GDP (US average is currently ~27%, Gary Johnson only recommended a 3% reducti…

Doesn't fit with studies I've read. E.g nordic countries had similar tax levels to the US but started increasing taxes substantially in the 1960s without experiencing any lower economic growth. In Europe as a whole nordic countries tend to have the highest taxes but best performing among most economic metrics, growth, uemployment, competiveness, innovation etc. I suspect these studies are massively skewed by low tax…

By all means, do your own research -- I've personally had a hard time finding a strong body of evidence supporting the idea that high taxes (over ~25% of GDP) are supportive of economic growth (please share if you have something!).

If you're worried about sampling bias with respect to Asian countries specifically, here's a time series analysis supporting the same conclusions [0]. Another angle that you may find interesting is that low tax US states tend to outgrow high tax US states [1].

One other way to look at is expert opinion. You'll note that under the CBO dynamic scoring methods, they assume higher economic growth under low taxes -- this is controversial politically, but the majority of economic forecasters appear to use an inverse relationship between taxes and growth -- presumably this should be worth something. Also note that, although there is not a hard, climate-style consensus, there are substantially more professional economists who believe that taxes slow growth than not as it relates to the current US system [2].

A lot of people like to point to some anecdotal evidence of good results in Sweden, but then ignore poor results in Denmark -- I think broad based statistical evidence is needed for these sorts of things since many other factors, such as debt, immigration policy, trade policy, and so forth can easily confound your results. The key is to look at the same problem from a wide variety of angles and see if a conclusion starts to emerge given that some studies will point in one direction and some will point in others. If 90% of the research is saying one thing, 8% is saying there's no effect, and 2% is pointing the other direction, what should you believe?

[0] http://www.nber.org/papers/w13264 [1] http://www.laffercenter.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/2012-... [2] http://www.igmchicago.org/surveys/laffer-curvehttp://www.igm...

Re: The US has forgotten how to do infrastructure

#396

Post by ShannonAlther »

CydeWeys wrote: post #391
ShannonAlther wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. The average speed limit on municipal roads in Ontario is 50 km/h, which means that anywhere within 5km will take 6 minutes and, within 10km, 12 minutes. Running 5km takes me 18 minutes, and running 10km takes me closer to 40 minutes. Humans walk at about 5km/h, w…

You're not wrong, and even though I dislike cars, I can't help but feel like you're arguing against someone living in an alternate reality. Unless you live in a dense urban core there's no possible way that walking saves more time than driving. The main reasons I don't have a car is that it's very freeing not to have to worry about owning one (from a theft/maintenance/risk perspective), and also because I'm now livin…

If I had the choice to go live in Manhattan and not have a car vs. live somewhere else and be obligated to own a car I would choose Manhattan in a heartbeat. Unfortunately, I can't do that (and even if I could, most people cannot).

Re: The US has forgotten how to do infrastructure

#397

Post by ThomPete »

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…

This is very interesting.

So basically in digital terms it went the opposite way from HTML where everything is more relative to each other to print where everything is exact.

I wonder if there is some underlying principles hiding in this. Have to think about it some more but thank you so much for your insightful comment.

Re: The US has forgotten how to do infrastructure

#398

Post by serhei »

Thriptic wrote: post #300
TulliusCicero wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

When I read about proposed public transit projects in Boston that were never built, most of them had actually been _court mandated_ by the Big Dig mitigation lawsuits, but they still didn't get completed. Very mysterious.

To be fair about the 'single small bridge', it seems like smaller projects suffer proportionately larger delays due to being considered low priority, ridiculously lax work scheduling, etc. Although the financial scales are completely different, it takes my city (Toronto) approximately the same time to build a subway extension as to renovate the bike trail that runs near my house.

Re: The US has forgotten how to do infrastructure

#399

Post by chrischen »

phkahler wrote: post #370
saint_fiasco wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If a large number of people all have to go in the same direction at a similar time, isn't that what public transit is for? Cars are more useful when people need to go to random places at indeterminate times.

>> If a large number of people all have to go in the same direction at a similar time, isn't that what public transit is for? Public transit only works when people live in high density areas. It makes no sense to have a transit stop where very few people live in walking distance of it. People with cars don't really want to drive to the bus stop and then catch a ride downtown, though some do. But most companies are sp…

Build public transit, then build high density residences, then profit. This simple formula is applied extremely well in Japan.

Re: The US has forgotten how to do infrastructure

#400

Post by CydeWeys »

adrianratnapala wrote: post #394
CydeWeys wrote: post #382

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is an argument for vertical integration in the construction industry, which I suppose might even include state-run construction companies. If the architects, engineers, and construction workers are all working for the same entity , then there's no troublesome legal issues to deal with at the boundaries between entities, and everyone can simply do the right thing as efficiently as possible. In summary, end contra…

You have identified a incentive towards vertical integration. But then we might ask ourselves what is stopping it. Is there some counter-incentive that causes the hierarchy of contractors? Is there some regulation that forces it? You might claim that there are no state-run construction companies because of free-market ideology or some such bogeyman. But that doesn't explain why the private contractors don't integrate…

My guess is regulatory capture, corruption, and knock-on effects from corporations being granted the rights of people, including money equaling free speech (see Citizens United). There's more money to be made if there are lots of different contractors and subcontractors that can all take a cut, and so the politicians are paid off through campaign contributions to allow the inefficient system to continue. Everyone involved makes lots of money, more than if they were vertically integrated and did construction efficiently, except for us taxpayers who are footing the bill, of course. It's basic rent-seeking by the construction industry.
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