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When did New York start building slowly?

constructionphysics.substack.com

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Re: When did New York start building slowly?

#41

Post by shadowofneptune »

cyberax wrote: post #37

Sigh. This is the fate of ALL systems. Once something gets complicated, it gets progressively more complicated to change anything. NYC is an example of a runaway complexity. So now 1 mile of Manhattan subway costs about the same as 1000 miles of 6-lane freeway. The correct way to fix it is: don't. Stop encouraging density, instead make sure that other cities can thrive by providing incentives for companies to build i…

...except the article found that Chicago did not have nearly as much of a problem.

Re: When did New York start building slowly?

#42

Post by klooney »

esperent wrote: post #22
chitowneats wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a simplistic take. European and East Asian democracies build infrastructure far faster and cheaper than the U.S. Often with even more stringent safety regulations and higher standards of quality. The question we are tasked with answering is: why?

> European and East Asian You just basically named two continents and said they build faster than the US and you're accusing someone else of simplistic takes? Which European country builds infrastructure faster than the US?

Spain is the outlier for fast/cheap/good, but I hear that even Italy has gotten its act together, and the recent Rome subway was done quickly and cheaply. The Nordic countries also have a good reputation. England is pretty bad/comparable to the US in speed and cost.

https://pedestrianobservations.com/ and the less feisty https://transitcosts.com/ are the canonical sources on comparative infrastructure costs.

Re: When did New York start building slowly?

#44

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

chitowneats wrote: post #8
Arainach wrote: post #6

Speed is affected by process, and process evolves in reaction to abuse. In the beginning, it's quick to do everything, but as people take advantage - routing contracts to friends, taking safety shortcuts - rules get put into place and those rules affect the time to complete. For New York specifically there's another factor that it's strange the article omitted: Robert Moses. Prior to the mid-1960s, it was fairly simp…

This is a simplistic take. European and East Asian democracies build infrastructure far faster and cheaper than the U.S. Often with even more stringent safety regulations and higher standards of quality. The question we are tasked with answering is: why?

Japan (Tokyo, at least), is crazy fast.

I remember staying at the Shinagawa Prince, three years in a row, and it overlooks that big-ass office park, on the other side of the station.

One year, I look out, and there’s a huge empty lot.

The next year, there’s a steel frame, for several buildings.

The next year, the lights are on, and the buildings are obviously occupied.

Also, their standards are very high. They weather massive earthquakes, quite well.

Re: When did New York start building slowly?

#45

Post by klooney »

m0llusk wrote: post #13

Everyone who wants to find fault with modern constructions trots out the Second Avenue Subway as an example. This subway is an obvious route for convenience and as such was first proposed more than a hundred years ago. At that time analysis of the geology and hydrology along the route as well as the very large amount of infrastructure including other subways already in place resulted in the conclusion that a subway a…

Alon Levy and the transit costs project are a great source of actual hard analysis on this- https://pedestrianobservations.com/2023/02/25/the-issue-of-c... has a great concise breakdown, pasted here because no one will click through:

Based on around 100 interviews and many diagrams and reports, we managed to decompose the New York construction cost premium over low-cost countries, which is about a full order of magnitude, into the following items:

    The stations are overbuilt by a factor of 3, which contributes an overall factor of 2 cost premium
    The systems are not standardized, which contributes a factor of about 2.3 cost premium for the systems and 1.35 overall
    Labor costs (including supervisors and other white-collar workers) are 50% of hard costs in New York where they should be about 25%, contributing a factor of 3 premium on labor costs and 1.5 overall
    Procurement problems including the privatization of risk, change order risk, agency micromanagement of contractors, general red tape, and profit stemming from too little competition double overall costs
    Soft costs are depending on what one counts either 21% on top of hard costs where they should be 7%, or 46% where they should be 20%

Re: When did New York start building slowly?

#46

Post by robertwt7 »

This goes the same with tech company right?

When you're a startup, you build features fast, you're not afraid of breaking things. Big features are scoped out within days, development starts, and everything is done within a couple of weeks or months. It is so different when you start working for big tech companies, in FAANG for instance some of the small features will take developers months to build given all of the process required to do (RFCs, collaborations with other teams for different services etc)

Re: When did New York start building slowly?

#47

Post by throwaway2037 »

esperent wrote: post #22
chitowneats wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a simplistic take. European and East Asian democracies build infrastructure far faster and cheaper than the U.S. Often with even more stringent safety regulations and higher standards of quality. The question we are tasked with answering is: why?

> European and East Asian You just basically named two continents and said they build faster than the US and you're accusing someone else of simplistic takes? Which European country builds infrastructure faster than the US?

I'll bite. He is probably talking about Hongkong, Taiwan, Japan, South Korea, China. They all build infra much faster than the US. If we move south, then Malaysia and Singapore also build very fast. For Europe, France builds much faster than the US, but it is more centralised.

Re: When did New York start building slowly?

#48

Post by iamthepieman »

cplusplusfellow wrote: post #27
adam_arthur wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s pretty obvious from first principles that added cost to the builder necessitates higher housing costs to justify building something. Alternative is lower margins, but they aren’t that big in typical development projects anyway (in normal times)

I encourage everyone to go attempt to build a house for themselves. It takes away the armchair quarterbacking once you add up the Home Depot receipts.

I have the trade skills to do this. Worked as a cabinet builder in my early career and started a short lived construction business with my brother in my 20s. But if I take my total compensation for the year it would take me to build, the cost of the subcontracting I wouldn't do myself (plumbing and electrical) and the materials cost it would probably be about the same as getting it built by someone else.

There's also the very subjective tradeoff between opportunity cost of taking time off from my career vs the benefits of doing more manual labor and learning a lot building a house.

Re: When did New York start building slowly?

#49

Post by throwaway2037 »

klooney wrote: post #42
esperent wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> European and East Asian You just basically named two continents and said they build faster than the US and you're accusing someone else of simplistic takes? Which European country builds infrastructure faster than the US?

Spain is the outlier for fast/cheap/good, but I hear that even Italy has gotten its act together, and the recent Rome subway was done quickly and cheaply. The Nordic countries also have a good reputation. England is pretty bad/comparable to the US in speed and cost. https://pedestrianobservations.com/ and the less feisty https://transitcosts.com/ are the canonical sources on comparative infrastructure costs.

Spain's high speed rail is criminally underrated. It is an amazing achievement.

Re: When did New York start building slowly?

#50

Post by bobthepanda »

birdyrooster wrote: post #12
chitowneats wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a simplistic take. European and East Asian democracies build infrastructure far faster and cheaper than the U.S. Often with even more stringent safety regulations and higher standards of quality. The question we are tasked with answering is: why?

Obviously (or I guess not so obvious since I am writing this) that is because of a different density of workers, architects, general contractors, engineers for vastly different biomes in the United States than in Europe. Europe has way more people (more than twice as dense) in a similar geographic area (far less diverse features) so the data and practices honed by one are more efficient and have greater economy of sc…

I don’t know that biome relevance is particularly relevant given that major US cities are not usually where major weather extremes happen. We are not talking about skyscrapers in Death Valley or Nome.
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