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When did New York start building slowly?

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Re: When did New York start building slowly?

#71

Post by ClumsyPilot »

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…

> They share the same environmental challenges whereas in the US the challenges are vastly different depending on which coast you are near

Ah yes, Norway and Greece are known for having the same climate.

The temperature range is literally 100 degrees Centigrade - record in Greece ks 48 Degrees C

Record in Norway is -51 degrees

Re: When did New York start building slowly?

#72

Post by Spooky23 »

ClumsyPilot wrote: post #64
klipt wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

you cant blame slowness on wages

Sure, but wages + census makes a difference. The NY Times did a comparison of the construction of the 2nd avenue subway project after the governor took the 5th or 6th victory lap.

As I recall, the TBM used in NYC was “mannned” by 5x more workers than an identical machine in Paris. We’re talking like 50 people. France isn’t known for labor efficiency, but between the various labor agreements, minority/women owned employee and subcontractor requirements, etc that many extra hands were being paid. Whether they did anything is another story.

Re: When did New York start building slowly?

#73

Post by cyberax »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #55
cyberax wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Sprawl leads to cheaper housing at the cost of more expensive infrastructure costs

Nope. Sprawl's infrastructure cost is about the same as urban cost over time. This is because maintenance of city infrastructure is way more expensive.

"Expensive roads" are also a myth. As I said, one mile of NYC subway can cost as much as 1000 miles of 6-lane freeway.

Or another point, Seattle is building subway expansion at the cost of $60B. It's projected to increase rideship by about ~100k daily passengers. For that $60B we could have instead built a city, gave 100k people houses for free, and still have enough money left to allow them to live on investment income from that.

Sure, we'll need to do some small adjustments: switch from giant SUVs to medium-sized and small-sized EVs. Improve pedestrian and bicycle accessibility within suburban villages, etc. But these are all relatively minor changes that can be done gradually.

> It also leads to places that are not very nice to live at.

Most people surveyed (80+%) would prefer to live in suburbs if they could. Yep, very unpleasant places.

Re: When did New York start building slowly?

#74

Post by BurningFrog »

winter_blue wrote: post #51
throwaway2037 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

There is no secret. They're pretty normal developed countries.

The weird outlier is the US!

Re: When did New York start building slowly?

#75

Post by seanmcdirmid »

cyberax wrote: post #73
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Sprawl leads to cheaper housing at the cost of more expensive infrastructure costs Nope. Sprawl's infrastructure cost is about the same as urban cost over time. This is because maintenance of city infrastructure is way more expensive. "Expensive roads" are also a myth. As I said, one mile of NYC subway can cost as much as 1000 miles of 6-lane freeway. Or another point, Seattle is building subway expansion at the co…

The cities that allow for lots of sprawl (eg Houston) are not very nice places to live in many people’s viewpoints. They definitely never make the list of nicest cities. People aren’t clamoring to live in Houston, they are trying to live in Seattle. Turning Seattle in Houston would probably just make less people want to live there (well, that’s one way to solve Seattle’s housing crisis).

Roads are a bad value for what you get. Not only is the throughput not great, they are expensive to maintain. Switching to EVs only really solves pollution and energy usage problems, it doesn’t make traffic somehow more streamlined.

Re: When did New York start building slowly?

#76

Post by ars »

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.

European style unions are not the same thing as American style ones, despite both being called unions.

I wish they had different names because they are quite different.

Re: When did New York start building slowly?

#77

Post by pchristensen »

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?

Basically all of them, and at 1/2 to 1/10 of the cost. Spain, Italy, the Nordic countries, and Turkey are all much more efficient at building infrastructure than the US.

Alon Levy is the most accessible source for this kind of cross-national comparision. https://transitcosts.com/ and https://pedestrianobservations.com/2023/03/03/we-gave-a-talk... is a good place to start.

Re: When did New York start building slowly?

#79

Post by pchristensen »

winter_blue wrote: post #51
throwaway2037 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Check out https://transitcosts.com/ - it's a huge study of projects in many countries, broken out by budget line item.

Re: When did New York start building slowly?

#80

Post by nukeman »

ars wrote: post #76
nukeman wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

European style unions are not the same thing as American style ones, despite both being called unions. I wish they had different names because they are quite different.

And what would you say makes them different?
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