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

Re: When did New York start building slowly?

#211

Post by MichaelZuo » Thu, Mar 23, 2023, 4:43 PM UTC

EntrePrescott wrote: post #194

MagnumOpus wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

> The Moscow metro is not just for vanity - the nomenklatura don't take the metro, the people in squalor do... That's like saying the vanity construction projects of Roman emperors weren't for vanity because they were used more by the plebs than by the nomenklatura. Which group uses it most has absolutely nothing to do with what makes a vanity project. Quite to the contrary, the criterion for a vanity project is that…

Doesn't that reinforce the parents' point that even a country with 1/10th the GDP and 10x more corruption, still manages to complete their subway projects 10x quicker at 1/10th the cost?

I don't think the explanation is that Russians are 10000x smarter than Americans, so it must be some environmental/organizational difference.

Re: When did New York start building slowly?

#212

Post by fknorangesite » Thu, Mar 23, 2023, 4:45 PM UTC

seanw444 wrote: post #192

rajamaka wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you explain what you mean by "people can just leave". Because this isn't really a realistic option for a majority of people.

It's really annoying that HN has resorted to the same hivemind behaviour as Reddit. You're asking a reasonable question, because you didn't follow, and you're greyed-out from downvotes. If someone has a bad take, downvote them. If someone doesn't understand, but wants to, either upvote or don't vote. It's really that simple.

> If someone doesn't understand, but wants to

Then they can actually read the comment they are responding to.

Re: When did New York start building slowly?

#213

Post by Symbiote » Thu, Mar 23, 2023, 4:46 PM UTC

Retric wrote: post #180

acdha wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m pretty sure he’s aware of which country Copenhagen is in but was simply pointing out as an example a much harder large, complex project in a dense urban environment built in far less time. The key thing to understand is that while other countries have some boondoggles, the United States does almost nothing else despite spending massive amounts of money. The Purple Line mentioned was ostensibly going to be cheaper…

US does plenty of large construction projects without major issue. One World Trade Center a public/private partnership started construction April 27, 2006 and opened on November 3, 2014 at the cost of 3.9 billion. Which is easily in line with similar projects around the world, even though it was much slower than such projects back in the 1920’s. It’s a more complicated building than those 1920’s designs booth from mo…

> still continuing with only 12.7 miles in operation

No, 23.7 miles are in operation. 12.7 miles is the amount that opened in the first stage in 2002.

Washington DC has a population greater than the whole of Denmark, and the DC metro was opened decades ago, so I don't think it's a useful comparison.

Re: When did New York start building slowly?

#214

Post by acdha » Thu, Mar 23, 2023, 4:53 PM UTC

zdragnar wrote: post #59

klooney wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. Unfortu…

> 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)

That last part isn’t true in my experience, but that makes it harder to solve: every procurement officer I’ve worked with has been very scrupulous about not favoring a vendor but they’re operating under rules for things like fairness and security which are hard to comply with. A huge company can hire a room full of people to document how they’re complying with everything but a startup is going to run into exactly the problem you described. The big guys all support this since it has the effect of limiting options without actually being illegal — who’s going to argue against risk reduction, right?

Re: When did New York start building slowly?

#215

Post by edgyquant » Thu, Mar 23, 2023, 4:54 PM UTC

eru wrote: post #140

machina_ex_deus wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The key is having an accountable "dictator". There are two interpretations to democracy: you can emphasize "representation", and parliamentary system, or you can emphasize "accountability" and singular leaders. The idea being, if you rolled the dictatorship dice badly, you minimize damage and reroll it. The U.S. was clearly designed with the second interpretation in mind. The revolution was a result of taxation by th…

> The revolution was a result of taxation by the British Parliament, [...] It's a bit more complicated. Colonials paid lower taxes than people back in England, too. See also https://www.econlib.org/archives/2016/12/bruce_bueno_de.html > His stories about George Washington, none of which I knew, are even more fascinating. Bueno de Mesquita claims, quite plausibly, that a huge part of George Washington’s motive for fig…

This seems like a pretty irrelevant derail of the GPs point, no? Regardless the revolution was about their rights as Englishmen being infringed upon, not the amount of taxes paid.

Re: When did New York start building slowly?

#216

Post by JPws_Prntr_Fngr » Thu, Mar 23, 2023, 4:55 PM UTC

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…

Your choice of metrics is so nonsensical it can only be bad faith. For the other readers, I'll submit some more relevant questions.

NYC subway is more expensive per meter? No shit. What's the ROI? How many passengers per day? What do you think are the economic payoffs for those investments?

What survey showed 80% of respondents preferring suburbs? A suburb versus what? What kind of respondents do you think they got? How do you reconcile this with the market reality of brutal real estate shortages in America's denser cities? (Just pull up some pricing per sqft. How do urban vs rural compare?)

This is all even without taking into account the market distortions (and ponzi schemes) arising from the US's infrastructure sprawl since the 50s. What happens if/when the cities stop subsidizing the completely financially insolvent surrounding areas?

Re: When did New York start building slowly?

#217

Post by Retric » Thu, Mar 23, 2023, 5:55 PM UTC

Symbiote wrote: post #213

Retric wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

US does plenty of large construction projects without major issue. One World Trade Center a public/private partnership started construction April 27, 2006 and opened on November 3, 2014 at the cost of 3.9 billion. Which is easily in line with similar projects around the world, even though it was much slower than such projects back in the 1920’s. It’s a more complicated building than those 1920’s designs booth from mo…

> still continuing with only 12.7 miles in operation No, 23.7 miles are in operation. 12.7 miles is the amount that opened in the first stage in 2002. Washington DC has a population greater than the whole of Denmark, and the DC metro was opened decades ago, so I don't think it's a useful comparison.

How are you getting those numbers? The original line M1 is 13.9 km. The total length of all lines adds up to 20.4 km counting the shared 7.7km section used by M1, and M2 once.

“The metro consists of four lines, M1, M2, M3 and M4. M1 and M2 share a common 7.69-kilometre (4.78 mi) section from Vanløse to Christianshavn,[3] where they split along two lines: M1 follows the Ørestad Line to Vestamager, while M2 follows the Østamager Line to the airport. The metro consists of a total route length of 20.4 km (12.7 mi),[3] and 22 stations, 9 of which are on the section shared by both lines.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copenhagen_Metro

Also, the DC metro area is much larger than the area served by the metro system which is why the keep expanding it. In terms of actual daily riders the systems are surprisingly close, though DC gets swamped occasionally for things like Obama’s inauguration etc.

Re: When did New York start building slowly?

#218

Post by cyberax » Thu, Mar 23, 2023, 5:59 PM UTC

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #113

cyberax wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"pre-war"? WTF? > the extremely high demand for pre-war and denser areas. Of course there is a high demand for urban areas. It's an effect of runaway density. Companies have competitive advantage if they locate their offices in The Downtown of a large city. This in turn makes the area around it more expensive, as people try to move closer to avoid longer commutes. This is a vicious circle, leading to a sort of "densi…

Tightening of the rules to what, precisely ? "Nope, sorry, your company's locating here would push downtown density past the limit, you should find a greenfield site on the edge of town and build something new there" ???

Yup. Exactly that.

A hard limit on the amount of office space per square mile. You simply can not build any more offices. The market forces then will take care of distributing the office space accordingly.

If you absolutely NEED to have an office in The Downtown, then you will just have to pay $$$$$$$$$. Otherwise you'll have to rent an office in a nearby suburbian village center.

Kind of like we did cap-and-trade for sulfur emissions.

Re: When did New York start building slowly?

#219

Post by cyberax » Thu, Mar 23, 2023, 6:02 PM UTC

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #181

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…

Houston is actually losing people, it’s growth occurring in the suburbs: https://kinder.rice.edu/urbanedge/houston-dallas-led-metro-a...

I'm sorry, I should have specified that I meant "Greater Houston Area", not the Houston proper.

It's what people mean by saying "Houston" anyway.

Re: When did New York start building slowly?

#220

Post by Retric » Thu, Mar 23, 2023, 6:25 PM UTC

acdha wrote: post #210

Retric wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

US does plenty of large construction projects without major issue. One World Trade Center a public/private partnership started construction April 27, 2006 and opened on November 3, 2014 at the cost of 3.9 billion. Which is easily in line with similar projects around the world, even though it was much slower than such projects back in the 1920’s. It’s a more complicated building than those 1920’s designs booth from mo…

We’re talking about infrastructure projects, which tend to be harder because they have more shared points of contention – e.g. the one rayiner mentioned was repeatedly held up by questions like whether homeowners who’d illegally fenced public land into their backyards had some right to keep it, which had to be fought up to the highest court in the state. The NIMBYs also tried things like claiming that it was uniquely…

WTC had a great deal of will to build something, but also a lot of political meddling because it would be so iconic. You can read up on many of the details but by the initial plan was heavily altered by many stakeholders for to add office space, security concerns, etc.

For more classic example consider say the $252 million 2.8 mile Marc Basnight Bridge which started construction July 27, 2017 scheduled to be completed on February 2019 and actually opened on February 25, 2019. While huge it was politically uninteresting compared to WTC and much cheaper, so while it ended up on time and budget nobody paid much attention.

That bridge is much closer to the typical major project in the US than the kind of things people remember because they made the news and ran wildly over budget.