Why We Can’t Figure Out Why Infrastructure Is So Expensive • Hacker News Board

Re: Why We Can’t Figure Out Why Infrastructure Is So Expensive

#61

Post by ameister14 » Wed, Jul 24, 2019, 7:25 PM UTC

dsfyu404ed wrote: post #22

ameister14 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think Illinois gives NY a run for their money. Remember Blagojevich trying to sell the senate seat?

Money is really good at masking systemic problems (like government run by idiots, corruption, etc) because you can just throw money at wherever the problem rears it's head. I don't know if Chicago is more corrupt or they're just less able/willing to put up an expensive front of propriety. Everyone loves to cite the number of politicians that get prosecuted or go to jail for corruption. To me that says the corruption…

>Everyone loves to cite the number of politicians that get prosecuted or go to jail for corruption. To me that says the corruption doesn't run very deep.

Meh, it could also simply be deep local corruption and shallow Federal corruption. If the FBI is coming, that doesn't mean that your State government isn't corrupt, just that it doesn't have enough power to influence federal.

Re: Why We Can’t Figure Out Why Infrastructure Is So Expensive

#62

Post by Allower » Wed, Jul 24, 2019, 7:25 PM UTC

tdb7893 wrote: post #24

ambicapter wrote: post #17

> The usual way you produce journalism or policy research on a technical question like this is that you hire someone with expertise in journalism or public policy to produce a report. That person calls up relevant experts and asks them to talk, for free, about their areas of expertise. This is one of the great perks of my job: I call up lawyers and other professionals who ordinarily charge hundreds of dollars an hour…

The experts often have already done that work already, often that's how they became an expert.

Reviewing numbers is not something you need an engineering expert for..

Re: Why We Can’t Figure Out Why Infrastructure Is So Expensive

#63

Post by ijpoijpoihpiuoh » Wed, Jul 24, 2019, 7:26 PM UTC

tomohawk wrote: post #36

A family member in the DOT told me this as but one of many tales of woe. Several hundred miles of an interstate were going to be rehabbed. There was a proven technique to redo the joints between the concrete slabs, which were in good shape. A contractor was hired to do a small number of miles as a test, but they had a learning curve. The first few joints that they redid were not done well, but they rapidly improved a…

> And this is not just a cost issue. Its estimated that failure to adhere to known safer pavement designs is resulting in 10,000 - 15,000 unnecessary deaths a year.

That seems unlikely, if this was in a single state, considering only about 35k people die each year on the roads in the entire country.

Re: Why We Can’t Figure Out Why Infrastructure Is So Expensive

#64

Post by ambicapter » Wed, Jul 24, 2019, 7:29 PM UTC

yellowstuff wrote: post #28

ambicapter wrote: post #17

> The usual way you produce journalism or policy research on a technical question like this is that you hire someone with expertise in journalism or public policy to produce a report. That person calls up relevant experts and asks them to talk, for free, about their areas of expertise. This is one of the great perks of my job: I call up lawyers and other professionals who ordinarily charge hundreds of dollars an hour…

I think the basic idea of investigatory journalism is that the journalist is not necessarily an expert in the topic they write about, but is good at finding informed sources, getting overlapping information from all of them, and determining who can be trusted on which facts.

Getting overlapping information seems like a good play, but the determination of who can be trusted on which facts (again, as a non-expert) seems like it'd be drowning in personal bias.

Re: Why We Can’t Figure Out Why Infrastructure Is So Expensive

#65

Post by ambicapter » Wed, Jul 24, 2019, 7:30 PM UTC

lemoncucumber wrote: post #56

erentz wrote: post #47

I don’t fully buy that we can’t work this out. The author gives examples of how it’s difficult to compare, but what those examples show is that yes, to compare properly you need to go very deep on some parts to find out why design decisions were made the way they were. This may be more time consuming and cost more but it’s doable. One other thing we might try is to set aside a hundred billion dollars for a half dozen…

> I don’t fully buy that we can’t work this out. The author gives examples of how it’s difficult to compare, but what those examples show is that yes, to compare properly you need to go very deep on some parts to find out why design decisions were made the way they were. This may be more time consuming and cost more but it’s doable. That's exactly what the author is advocating for, so I'm not sure what your point is.…

Sounded like the author was advocating another mega-project, which comes off a bit weird considering the article they just wrote.

Re: Why We Can’t Figure Out Why Infrastructure Is So Expensive

#66

Post by rafiki6 » Wed, Jul 24, 2019, 7:30 PM UTC

granshaw wrote: post #50

keerthiko wrote: post #45

A hard-to-capture cost factor is keeping highly used services operational or replaced while doing work on it. A super-fancy new subway with lots of stations in Shenzhen where people weren't already taking trains and expecting to use stations for their daily commute will be much cheaper than disrupting a line service to open a new station in London or New York City. Replacement bus bridge services, network-wide servic…

> A hard-to-capture cost factor is keeping highly used services operational or replaced while doing work on it. Anyone who does any kindof "building" (whether it be software engineers making schema changes, or a general contractor adding to an existing house vs building from scratch) knows this intimately, so really it shouldn't be any kind of surprise at all

But to the article's original point, the people conducting the research to prepare these reports are non-experts. So they wouldn't even know where to look for these figures.

Re: Why We Can’t Figure Out Why Infrastructure Is So Expensive

#67

Post by svachalek » Wed, Jul 24, 2019, 7:31 PM UTC

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #44

BurningFrog wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In China the purpose of infrastructure projects is to get infrastructure. In the US the purpose of infrastructure projects is to enrich everyone associated with the project.

That simply isn’t true at all. There are plenty of unused or underused highways and bridges in China that made a few red families lots of money. It’s fascinating to me that some people think corruption in China is lower than the USA. Not even the Chinese would make such a claim.

It's absolutely corrupt, but in a way that still gets projects done. Many, many projects, on a scale we can't even conceive of here. It's hard to believe our corruption is worse, but Occam's Razor says otherwise.

Re: Why We Can’t Figure Out Why Infrastructure Is So Expensive

#68

Post by jp57 » Wed, Jul 24, 2019, 7:32 PM UTC

The best part of this thread is that the article is about why it's really hard to understand the cost differences, while the top comments all offer unsupported and anecdotal speculation explaining the cost differences in 200 words or less.

"HN: Where dilettantes opine."

Re: Why We Can’t Figure Out Why Infrastructure Is So Expensive

#69

Post by Anechoic » Wed, Jul 24, 2019, 7:32 PM UTC

tomohawk wrote: post #36

A family member in the DOT told me this as but one of many tales of woe. Several hundred miles of an interstate were going to be rehabbed. There was a proven technique to redo the joints between the concrete slabs, which were in good shape. A contractor was hired to do a small number of miles as a test, but they had a learning curve. The first few joints that they redid were not done well, but they rapidly improved a…

Here is another way to think about that story:

DOT and their proven, reliable contractor had experience with a certain method of rehabbing the joints between concrete slabs. A new technique was tried, and the first few attempts were not done well. The new technique showed promise, but there was a concern that if the new technique failed, there would be consequences to the state for trying a new technique rather than the tried-and-true method. To reduce the risk to themselves, the DOT went with the old method.

IME, DOT and transit agencies often shy away from new methods/techniques because they are raked over the coals whenever the new approach doesn't work out (see SF Bay Bridge, or the Big Dig [0]). That makes them risk averse to trying or sticking with innovative methods.

[0] I'm not saying that cost problems with those projects are completely due to new methods/processes, but significant chunks were.

Re: Why We Can’t Figure Out Why Infrastructure Is So Expensive

#70

Post by rafiki6 » Wed, Jul 24, 2019, 7:34 PM UTC

keerthiko wrote: post #45

A hard-to-capture cost factor is keeping highly used services operational or replaced while doing work on it. A super-fancy new subway with lots of stations in Shenzhen where people weren't already taking trains and expecting to use stations for their daily commute will be much cheaper than disrupting a line service to open a new station in London or New York City. Replacement bus bridge services, network-wide servic…

> Significantly more arbitrary middlemen making their way into the process because of "let the market figure it out" does, in fact, create some process inefficiencies in supply chains and contract pipelines. Few countries are as aggressively market-based for things meant for public good as the US.

This times a 1000. This is a huge factor that I think is missing. The market will just price in the labor required of all the people to make something happen. In other governments/countries, the heavy-handed government tends to basically say "We are paying this much, who wants to do it?". And they really only pay that much. There's no room for cost over runs. On the flip-side, a lot of times the amount is established by some bureaucrats friend before the project is even set to take off and the criteria are design to favor that friend and their companies price and strengths.