91–100 of 248 posts
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Much better is Robert Caro's masterful _The Power Broker_.
Oh definitely checking this out. Thanks for the recommendation!
He’s sort of the Don Knuth of US political biography.
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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.
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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 wha…
> The cities that allow for lots of sprawl (eg Houston) are not very nice places to live in many people’s viewpoints. "Many peoples' viewpoints" is a cop-out. You can apply it to ANY phrase: "In many people's viewpoints we should drop a nuke on Manhattan and rebuild it from scratch". If you look at objective data, Houston beats NYC handily in pretty much any important metric. Houston commute is 26 minutes vs 33 minut…
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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…
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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…
> It’s not just that we hire construction companies, we hire companies to manage the construction companies and then another company to manage the managers. None of those people have an incentive structure that rewards building fast and on budget. 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 b…
Having family members who worked inside government and having (briefly) done so myself, I completely agree with the grandparent. Government departments are basically just sprawling hierarchies of middle-management. Very few people who actually do things or take responsibility for anything. Those who want to are likely to get fed up and leave very quickly.
It's all about contracting things out to the usual suspects of consulting firms, who inevitably are only interested in dragging things out for as long as possible and leeching as much money as they can.
There was a recent report comparing metro construction in Italy with the USA that came to the same conclusion. They concluded that in-house expertise is by far the biggest factor in delivering large-scale projects on time and on budget.
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> 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.
How well build that infrastructure is/was built is debatable, and a massive loss of life has just occurred.
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> 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.
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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).
Both. In order to encourage existing building owners to keep their existing height, they were able to sell their air rights, which then made it possible to build tall skinny buildings. https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2019/feb/05/super-tall-su...
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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 did this actually, and the pluses were: - Dollar cost was 1/4 to 1/3 what a builder estimated. (Labor savings) - I saw continuous progress with no surprise delays. - It was easier and cheaper to do custom solutions or adjustments as unforseen issues came up. - Was fun and I learned a lot. Minuses: - Material costs were higher than if contractors bought due to retail purchasing. - It took over a year, versus 5-6 mon…
Depending on how they actually worked in practice, it may have taken them a year too.