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When did New York start building slowly?

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Re: When did New York start building slowly?

#121

Post by yellow_lead »

kneebonian wrote: post #23
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…

Honestly this kind of reminds me how a large application grows. You get a polished application out and discover a bug, but you can't rewrite the whole app so you put a patch in. Then another bug is found, so another patch gets pushed out. Over time legitimate bugs and requirements at the time fall by the wayside but the code remains. I don't know how we fix that problem when it comes to legal code though.

I think there's been some writing on this - where others have suggested we need to regularly "refactor" the legal code. I mostly agree, and you could think of courts/case law in this way.

However, there isn't much incentive for it. A law getting struck down has no negative effect on Congress or state legislatures. That's a problem IMO

Re: When did New York start building slowly?

#122

Post by bonzini »

pchristensen wrote: post #77
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?

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.

Wow it takes effort to be slower than Italy. :) There are some infamous cases here of highways taking decades to complete (and also some positive experiences such as an awesome high speed rail network).

I think it depends heavily on which infrastructure you're talking about though and what parts of the project you're considering. Some countries may be faster at obtaining permits and/or finding the money, and others may be faster at actually building the thing; my impression is that Italy absolutely sucks at the former, but some projects are also slowed down by the sheer amount of archaeological finds that you stumble upon when digging under Rome or Naples.

Re: When did New York start building slowly?

#123

Post by hoseja »

cpursley wrote: post #119
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?

Hell, just look at the new metro ring line that was opened in Moscow. It’s 45 miles long and the stations are absolutely gorgeous and unique: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-txmGH11sh0 https://www.rbth.com/travel/335939-moscow-metro-big-circle-l... And this is all under massive sanctions and a less democratic and more corrupt system.

That's just a totalitarian vanity project. People live in squalor and die by the thousands on the warfront meanwhile.

Re: When did New York start building slowly?

#124

Post by Tade0 »

bigDinosaur wrote: post #93
cyberax wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

You accuse others of 'swallowing urbanist propaganda' but that's both highly uncharitable and also grossly ignorant given the extremely high demand for pre-war and denser areas.

I've been observing the discussion on sprawl vs high density in the US from the safety of my commie block and my conclusion is that sprawl is silly, but cities the density of New York are dystopian.

It appears that the same induced demand that makes traffic eventually occupy all lanes, no matter how many you build, works to make dense cities unaffordable and impossible to maintain.

There's a middle ground to be achieved here, really, and it's better than both the extreme views I've been hearing over and over again.

Re: When did New York start building slowly?

#125

Post by zo1 »

nmfisher wrote: post #96
ClumsyPilot wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Exactly the same thing happened in Australia. We lived in an apartment with flammable cladding in Melbourne that would have cost $50-100k to replace. Luckily we were just renting, so it wasn't our responsibility (we moved out shortly thereafter anyway). Having family members who worked inside government and having (briefly) done so myself, I completely agree with the grandparent. Government departments are basically…

My pet theory, not fully fleshed out yet, is that it's a consequence of "job creation" being a fundamental task of government. Or at least one we assign to it by virtue of constantly holding it accountable for "the unemployment rate" and other such statistics.

Re: When did New York start building slowly?

#126

Post by cpursley »

hoseja wrote: post #123
cpursley wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hell, just look at the new metro ring line that was opened in Moscow. It’s 45 miles long and the stations are absolutely gorgeous and unique: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-txmGH11sh0 https://www.rbth.com/travel/335939-moscow-metro-big-circle-l... And this is all under massive sanctions and a less democratic and more corrupt system.

That's just a totalitarian vanity project. People live in squalor and die by the thousands on the warfront meanwhile.

Vanity? Have you visited Russia within the past 10 years? If you didn't know, Moscow traffic is horrendous. And many Muscovites do in fact, depend on the metro to get to work, school, etc.

Re: When did New York start building slowly?

#127

Post by midoridensha »

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.

This always comes up when unions in America are blamed for these problems. Unions are strong in both France and Germany and they don't have most of these problems.

The answer is corruption. America is horribly corrupt, much like Latin American nations, and unlike western European nations. So unions in Europe actually work the way they're supposed to, whereas in America they're just another corrupt institution, probably much more corrupt in fact than most others, and cause more problems than they solve.

How do you get America to have unions like those in Europe? I have no idea, but I think it's like asking how you can turn Afghanistan into a country similar to Norway.

Re: When did New York start building slowly?

#128

Post by nicbou »

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 reminds me of what Dan Carlin called "rolling the monarchy dice" in his Hardcore History podcast.

If you get a good dictator, things get done with little friction, because the power rests on a single person's shoulders. But if you get a bad one, you're stuck with it.

Democracy might be slower and less inefficient, but it's reliably slower and less efficient.

Re: When did New York start building slowly?

#129

Post by MagnumOpus »

hoseja wrote: post #123
cpursley wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hell, just look at the new metro ring line that was opened in Moscow. It’s 45 miles long and the stations are absolutely gorgeous and unique: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-txmGH11sh0 https://www.rbth.com/travel/335939-moscow-metro-big-circle-l... And this is all under massive sanctions and a less democratic and more corrupt system.

That's just a totalitarian vanity project. People live in squalor and die by the thousands on the warfront meanwhile.

The Moscow metro is not just for vanity - the nomenklatura don't take the metro, the people in squalor do...

Besides it is irrelevant for the topic - say you are right, then you are still admitting that even a corrupt country that constructs public transport only for vanity can do it at 10x the speed and 0.1x the costs as we can...

Re: When did New York start building slowly?

#130

Post by concordDance »

BurningFrog wrote: post #74
winter_blue wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

And the UK.
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