Slow

    The 2nd Ave Subway in Manhattan, with
    preparatory construction beginning in
    1942. First phase opened in 2017.

Although the outcome should be celebrated, the slowness and the added costs that brings certainly should not be.

    While every project is unique, it is not
    immediately clear why digging a subway
    on the Upper East Side is twenty times
    more expensive than in Seoul or ten
    times more expensive than in Paris.

https://marroninstitute.nyu.edu/blog/costly-lessons-from-the...

here's a even more damning look: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/articles/why-it-costs-4-billion...

edit: I've been on a tirade about this subject this week. https://www.brethorsting.com/blog/2025/07/state-capacity-and...

This goes hand in hand with the Lindy effect[0]. Some of the examples given in the article are a testament to it.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect

I disagree. The PC post never demeans projects that purposefully move slowly with intent, but rather criticizes boondoggles that move slowly due to utter incompetence. The only pejorative text in the PC post is this:

>San Francisco proposed a new bus lane on Van Ness in 2001. It opened in 2022, yielding a project duration of around 7,600 days. “The project has been delayed due to an increase of wet weather since the project started,” said Paul Rose, a San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency spokesperson. The project cost $346 million, i.e. $110,000 per meter. The Alaska Highway, mentioned above, constructed across remote tundra, cost $793 per meter in 2019 dollars.

Next?

Medium.

Posted on Medium, ofc.

I dunno. I think we should separate out the stuff that fundamentally has to take a long time, like the pitch experiment, from stuff like Notre Dame, which just took a long time because they lacked the resources to do it all at once. Like OK, it takes a long time to build a big church because you need to find all the right rocks or whatever. But the pitch, that’s the universe taking a long time to tell us something.

(I’m being flip for comedy/emphasis sake, of course Notre Dame is pretty impressive too).