When did New York start building slowly? • Hacker News Board

Re: When did New York start building slowly?

#51

Post by winter_blue » Thu, Mar 23, 2023, 1:41 AM UTC

throwaway2037 wrote: post #47

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?

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.

What's their secret? How do they keep their standards up, but still build so fast, and so cheap (compared to the US)?

It would be amazing if someone could research this, and publish a paper on exactly what reforms the United States needs to make†.

† to get to the same speed/quality/cost-efficiency as these countries

Re: When did New York start building slowly?

#52

Post by tuatoru » Thu, Mar 23, 2023, 1:42 AM UTC

Awelton wrote: post #31

I work for a place that designs and manufactures parts for a lot of these NYC projects. There are several factors that slow them down, and every step of the process is horribly inefficient. We start the bid and design process years before groundbreaking because it takes so long to get reviews and approvals. Permitting, planning, and impact studies that should take a few months drag on for years. The land prices are s…

This is interesting stuff, but the article was focused on the actual construction phase, not the pre-construction planning and approvals. The duration of those is a related problem but not the one Brian was looking at.

Re: When did New York start building slowly?

#53

Post by cyberax » Thu, Mar 23, 2023, 1:47 AM UTC

dnissley wrote: post #40

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…

Are you advocating for sprawl?

Absolutely. Sprawl (with some small adjustments) is the best way to structure cities.

It's also the only workable way to provide affordable housing.

Re: When did New York start building slowly?

#54

Post by cyberax » Thu, Mar 23, 2023, 1:48 AM UTC

shadowofneptune wrote: post #41

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.

Chicago is about 2 times less dense than NYC: 12000 vs 26000 people per square mile.

If we look at Manhattan, it's a complete runaway disaster: 73000 people per square mile.

Re: When did New York start building slowly?

#55

Post by seanmcdirmid » Thu, Mar 23, 2023, 1:55 AM UTC

cyberax wrote: post #53

dnissley wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you advocating for sprawl?

Absolutely. Sprawl (with some small adjustments) is the best way to structure cities. It's also the only workable way to provide affordable housing.

Sprawl leads to cheaper housing at the cost of more expensive infrastructure costs (mainly roads, but water, sewer, schools becomes more difficult to support without density). It also leads to places that are not very nice to live at.

Re: When did New York start building slowly?

#56

Post by klipt » Thu, Mar 23, 2023, 1:58 AM UTC

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.

Probably helps that wages are lower in Spain. Americans want cheap infrastructure but also want high wages and that's probably an impossible combination.

Re: When did New York start building slowly?

#57

Post by debacle » Thu, Mar 23, 2023, 2:01 AM UTC

nukeman wrote: post #33

Daz1 wrote: post #19

Why? Unions. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/nyregion/new-york-subway-...

France has unions out the wazoo, yet you don’t see nearly the level of cost increases.

France has real unions. The US has graft disguised as organized labor, and New York has some of the worst.

Re: When did New York start building slowly?

#58

Post by steveBK123 » Thu, Mar 23, 2023, 2:05 AM UTC

bobthepanda wrote: post #24

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…

It is worth noting that the second phase costs even more per mile to build, despite the fact that pretty much all the tunnels already exist from an earlier attempt, are structurally intact, and will be reused.

Yup. $8B for .. 2-3 stations, 1.5 miles of track and 0.75 mile of new tunnel. Incredible.

Re: When did New York start building slowly?

#59

Post by zdragnar » Thu, Mar 23, 2023, 2:07 AM UTC

klooney wrote: post #45

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 magni…

I can't speak too much to the first several points, but noting

    - agency micromanagement of contractors
    - general red tape

is very fitting and a direct contribution to

    - too little competition

I worked with a startup company ~8 years ago that wanted to go after government contracts. According to the owners, everyone they demo'd the product to said it was very clearly superior to what they were currently using.

Unfortunately, the people who would use it are not the people that sign off on paying for it. Those people had checklists of irrelevant requirements, slow response times, almost certainly pressure to select "certain" vendors (i.e. those who threw money into lobbying the right folk). It got to the point where they seriously considered hiring a consulting company whose sole purpose was to help others navigate all the red tape that gets thrown in your way when you try to get government contracts.

In the end, they realized that they were better off pivoting entirely to the private sector instead of doing a half and half approach.

I seem to recall a similar tale with the lead pipe retrofitting in Flint, MI... contractors to do the job were picked not necessarily by speed and capability, but by other qualities. Regardless of how they were chosen, though, the city failed to deliver. Despite the crisis starting in April 2014, residents and activists had to sue the city in 2017 to actually get the work completed, and it still isn't done. Mostly done, but not completely... 8 years later.

Re: When did New York start building slowly?

#60

Post by jonstewart » Thu, Mar 23, 2023, 2:08 AM UTC

Hikikomori wrote: post #20

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…

Behind the bastards has an episode about Robert Moses. https://www.iheart.com/podcast/105-behind-the-bastards-29236...

Much better is Robert Caro's masterful _The Power Broker_.