61–70 of 248 posts
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.
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Short version: "New York skyscrapers are built at around 50-70% the speed of Chicago skyscrapers. This seems partially due to New York constructing many more skinny skyscrapers with very small floor plates than Chicago does, which take proportionately longer to build." Ones like this:[1] [1] https://www.cnn.com/style/article/steinway-tower-intl-scli/i...
Why is NYC building skinnier skyscrapers? Is it air rights? Or is it easier to get approval to build such things on the few remaining smaller parcels and shorter buildings (which have to be knocked down first).
I don't understand why someone would like to live in New York.
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…
There’s another very important factor about Moses that people overlook. They did things in-house. There’s an anecdote in the book about how they had a building on Randall’s Island with 100 draftsmen on call at any time. The minute the federal government announced more money was released they’d whip up designs for highways or bridges before anyone else and have the proposal in. There’s a lot of stories like that. Mose…
this is a giant issue in the angloshere
And noone own the outcome for quality of the result.
When an issue arises, before anything is foxed there are 15 years of lawsuits between these companies to figure out who's fault it is
In Britain, we had 100's of highroses built non-cpmpliant with fire safety, apparently the builder, the owner, the fire inspector and the local government are not responsible for compliance.
The leaseholder of the individual apar5ment has tonpay for fixing it.
Some people bought partial ownership, i.e. 25% of the apartment, the rest is owned by investors. Well, theybare responsible for 100% of the maintenance (this is a government scheme)
So some people have bought an asset for £40k and now much pay 100k to fix it. And they cant say no
I don't understand why someone would like to live in New York.
Because it’s the best city in the United States
Probably when Frank Sinatra was alive but certainly not now.
What can you get in New York that you cannot get somewhere else?
Seems like a weird set of metrics whose relevance isn’t clear. Of course approved construction projects are going to take longer - demolishing a 19th century 6 story building is trivial compared to a mid century high rise. Construction is a cutthroat business, so I’m sure that if velocity was the gating factor, the companies would find a way.
I’ve been involved in construction projects as a stakeholder, and NYC isn’t slower to navigate if you have a team that knows how to navigate NYC. I can think of a couple of projects in random suburbia, CA that took longer to permit than the total duration of a NYC project.
Government contracting is totally different, as New York law is knowingly designed to maximize employment. Most government projects do not allow a single general contractor and require separate bids for different components of the building, for example. You also cannot design and build a project in most cases.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don’t think this is obvious or even necessarily true. Europe has many things going against it as well, language barriers, split markets, generally being quite a bit poorer than the US. Moreover it doesn’t explain the performance of East Asian countries at all.
It would greatly explain the performance of East Asian countries. They share the same environmental challenges whereas in the US the challenges are vastly different depending on which coast you are near. Of course China had less red tape (no pun intended) in some regards for development than the other East Asian countries so it executes even faster than its peers. I think its more of a slam dunk than comparing Europe…