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

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

#191

Post by BurningFrog »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #184
BurningFrog wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

China has no shortage of people. These cities will fill up. Maybe it's my Bay Area PTSD, but if too much housing is the worst problem in your society, I envy you and want to subscribe to your newsletter!

I’ve been to a few that haven’t filled up in 10 years, eg kangbashi is going nowhere unless coal makes a big comeback (unlikely). I’ll match your Bay Area PTSD with my Beijing PTSD. The crazy thing is that even in Beijing there are lots of empty apartments (bought by speculators for flipping only who don’t want to renovate them so they can be rented out).

I always want to defer my theoretical speculative punditry to people's real experience, so I'll agree you're probably right.

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

#192

Post by Camillo »

siphon22 wrote: post #134
BubRoss wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems like a cliched and simplistic explanation to just waive away a large difference with 'culture'.

Sometimes things really are that simple though. Why can you (most of the time) leave your bike outside a store you stop at in Japan but not in America? Because it isn't part of Japanese culture to take what doesn't belong to you, but is normal for a number of Americans. Why can you get relatively wholesome food at a 7-11 in East Asian countries while you get junk and trash at ones in America? Because Japanese people…

> Because it isn't part of Japanese culture to take what doesn't belong to you, but is normal for a number of Americans.

This may be hard to believe if your knowledge of American society is limited to certain strata, but it's absolutely true. If you spend some time on Reddit, on places like /r/AmITheAsshole, you'll find that a vast proportion of people outright justifies theft, shoplifting, cheating and many other sorts of unethical behavior.

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

#193

Post by Gravityloss »

Anechoic wrote: post #150
tomohawk wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I get that. However, the DOT has used the approach in other areas with great success. In many cases, the concrete roadways were put in before finite element analysis models were available or even remotely realistic. A lot of research has gone into how to repair these after the fact so that money is saved and you don't get the thumpity thump, etc. States make their own choices, though. The DOT can only cajole them by…

However, the DOT has used the approach in other areas with great success. And I get that - in fact I live it. I'm a government contractor that works on transportation projects and it's frustrating when a particular agency doesn't want to use an innovative technique or design that has literally been successful on another project that's only a few miles away but project managers don't want to be testifying in front of…

Interesting dynamic. It's also behind the theory why NASA missions tend to become huge and long lasting. No iteration. Failures avoided at all cost.

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

#194

Post by afarrell »

moltar wrote: post #130
afarrell wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The solution to that problem in many places is currently to have lists of approved suppliers.

Well that clearly doesn’t work. Montreal is a perfect example. So much corruption on that list.

Right, so my point is that we need a solution to that corruption which itself is not an avenue for corruption.

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

#195

Post by bobthepanda »

nisten wrote: post #74

The author briefly touched on how it's also expensive in countries with similar law-systems like Canada and Australia. It may just be that our laws make it a lot easier for contractors to jack up government contracts. My personal opinion is that managers and regulators in Europe and South Korea are a lot more efficient because they have a lot more freedom to apply common sense and personal judgement without fear of g…

Boston had to pare back stations on its Green Line Extension to save over a half billion dollars: https://www.thetransportpolitic.com/2016/05/10/frequent-serv...

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

#196

Post by AnthonyMouse »

closeparen wrote: post #155
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. It's kind of disingenuous to blame "let the market figure it out" for government contracting problems that are attributa…

Suppose your team needs new workstations. Or an RDBMS, a server operating system, a compiler, a profiler, or any number of things. “Write down the requirements, we will put out an RFP and give you the cheapest supplier that satisfies the requirements” is an absurd approach. The people on your team have familiarity and proficiency with certain tools, experience with many more, and professionally informed opinions of m…

> These things vary wildly in terms of quality and fitness for purpose in ways that are wickedly hard to pin down in a document listing objective criteria.

It's more work. It's not impossible. And when the difference is literally millions of dollars, it's worth doing the work.

> The best tools may be open source, or from small time shareware shops that will not submit proposals.

If they're open source then you don't need to solicit bids because you're not appropriating money, and if the bidding process excludes small legitimate vendors then you can start by addressing that.

> There may be some discount IDE out there with the same feature set as IntelliJ but unbearably frequent crashes.

"Doesn't crash more than once per N hours of normal usage" is a fairly objective criteria that can be specified under terms like "if it does that then payment is withheld until you fix it."

> There are some ridiculous programming languages out there, but “not ridiculous according to my team” is a clearly subjective and corrupt requirement.

Then identify the thing that objectively makes it unsuitable and add that to the requirements. It can't be subjectively ridiculous yet have no objective defects unless your subjective determination is without merit.

The difference between this and rigging the bid is that if e.g. the IDE that is only unsuitable because it crashes all the time could have that defect corrected for a million dollars, and it's a ten million dollar contract, it becomes worth it for the other vendor to fix their code so they can bid on the contract, whereas if you rig everything then that's impossible and the sole vendor gets to charge the taxpayer monopoly prices.

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

#197

Post by jillesvangurp »

BurningFrog wrote: post #23
xt00 wrote: post #12

A couple of facts that should at least provide a baseline for costs (like the best case scenario): Shenzhen metro: 198 stations, about 180 miles of track (soon to be more like 250 miles), majority of it built in past 10-12 years. All I can find so far on cost is the phase iii cost which says it will cost about 20 billion. Phase I was quite small. So maybe they have spent about 30 billion to get almost 200 miles of ra…

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.

I think self enrichment on public projects is a thing anywhere public projects happen. The difference is that in the US it is often the only goal due to the politics involved with creating budgets which often result in bartering silly little projects to make this or that representative vote along. The problem with this is that these small uncoordinated efforts serve no bigger strategy. It's literally nothing more than a photo opportunity for some politician to look good just in time for his next election.

China seems really good at coming up with long term strategies and then executing them over the course of a few decades. The US used to have that ability but seems to have lost that. The highways and railways of the US were built in a very different era where such things were needed and people got tasked with getting things done on an epic scale. A bit like China is today maybe.

China deployed massive amounts of infrastructure over the past few decades. That was intentional and probably made a lot of people very wealthy as a side effect of getting that job done. Maybe not all of that is as effective and there definitely is somewhat of a debt bubble around this.

The fix in the US and Europe is to make public spending on these things sexy again and to stop relying on contractors that are in it for funneling as much public funds to their own pockets as they possibly can. Big government haters have been good at scaling down government, which used to get things done inefficiently but at least got them done and is now simply not getting things done at all. The market did not step in to do it better and when it did get involved, it optimized for profit and enrichment instead of results. Probably by most objective standards this is less efficient from a tax dollar point of view as it is a lot more expensive and the results are decidedly underwhelming.

Here in Berlin, the new airport is a good example of inept politicians making some contractors and themselves very rich while not getting the job done for nearly a decade past its original opening date in 2012, before it became clear that there was not going to be an opening two weeks before the planned date. Especially, when you consider that it is supposed to replace two existing airports that were built with a minimum of fuss and cost in the cold war era when airports simply got built when politicians decided they wanted one. E.g. Tegel, one of the current airports got constructed in 90 days in 1948 to support the Berlin airlift and still serves much of the traffic in Berlin (way more than it was ever intended to be able to handle). Planning for the new airport started in 1996 and it's still unclear if they are actually opening as planned in 2021.

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

#198

Post by cousin_it »

jfengel wrote: post #84
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…

As other respondents have said, a good journalist does not rely on a single expert. Good reporting cross-checks multiple sources, often seeking out conflicting ones, and trying to form a coherent story out of that. Unfortunately, that often leads to false dichotomy. It's not sufficient to seek out a contradictory source... especially if that contradictory source is not credible. But it's very exciting journalism to s…

> Good reporting cross-checks multiple sources, often seeking out conflicting ones, and trying to form a coherent story out of that.

To me such reporting is not good enough.

Have you read Asimov's Foundation? There's a character named Lord Dorwin who's interested in finding he truth about a certain subject, and whose method is to analyze and reconcile the opinions of "old masters" who have "covered the ground" before. Asimov explains quite scathingly why that doesn't work.

Grandparent comment is right: a reporter needs to be hands-on with the topic. If you write about overspending, and you only asked experts but never added two numbers in Excel yourself, what makes you qualified to weigh the opinions of experts?

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

#199

Post by pas »

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…

https://pedestrianobservations.com/2019/07/22/new-report-on-...

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

#200

Post by pas »

spenczar5 wrote: post #147
nova22033 wrote: post #113

This article linked from another Josh Barro piece tells you exactly why it's so expensive https://www.city-journal.org/html/fifteen-stories-under-1410... In Britain and France, only the “miners”—or tunnelers—work in unions similar to America’s. Contractors hire other workers largely as they wish. The jobs pay well but not American-construction-union well. In New York, everyone works by the same union rules, which inc…

If it that were simple, the GAO report mentioned in the article would surely have found it. It's not just labor cost.

https://pedestrianobservations.com/2019/07/22/new-report-on-...
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