141–150 of 272 posts
Probably 500 fewer people die a year of workplace accidents and similar because of all these rules, but hundreds of thousands die of air pollution and economic distress due to the low return on the dollar.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you double your highways and traffic stays as bad, your highway system is delivering twice as much transportation. That is a clear improvement.
Not really. Doubling your commute length is not an improvement. I have noticed places with heavier traffic tend to have shorter distances to your destination. So your total time is the same regardless.
This misses a fundamental point - the goal of this is not to fund infrastructure - it's to fund people who vote for people who vote for infrastructure. There is zero incentive to run on time and on-budget, and every incentive to milk more government cash, so that people in power can get election contributions, that stay in power. If you also deny money to people who didn't vote for you, then all the better as well. S…
I am of the opinion that continuing to build out all these long 'runs' of infrastructure to serve a even more spread out populace is a dead end. Where I live we spent tens of billions expanding highway infrastructure, and it has not improved the lives of anyone meaningfully, traffic is as bad as its ever been. We need to spend more money creating better metropolitan areas that people want to live in, rather than usin…
If you double your highways and traffic stays as bad, your highway system is delivering twice as much transportation. That is a clear improvement.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can't see the difference between the current Democratic Party and GOP? I heard that argument for years, but now it's like saying there's no difference between day and night.
Apparently you don't see (don't want to see) the point of the discussion. The context here is not about their ideology or superficial talking points. It's about the mechanism of the power structure. No matter which party gets in control, it will always want to increase national debt, always go for more money and more concentration of power. This is the same mechanism applies to everybody, anybody who doesn't want to…
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There is only one political party, you can see it in effect of their governance. Locally they might do things differently, the “land/city” way regardless of their party.
You can't see the difference between the current Democratic Party and GOP? I heard that argument for years, but now it's like saying there's no difference between day and night.
NYC recently opened the first stage of the Second Avenue Subway. This is a project that was initially started ~90 years ago and has been started and stopped multiple times in the intervening years. I believe the final version used none of the original tunnels however. It cost ~$6B for 1.5 miles of track [1]. The budget was padded at probably every level (eg [2]). There are a bunch of other contributing factors.
Now compare Crossrail [3]. This is a hugely ambitious project to build some 117km of track and 21km of tunnels under London in an east-west direction connecting Kent, Essex, Heathrow, central London and the Thames Valley. This was in the planning stage in the early 2000s (possibly earlier) and construction commenced in 2009 or so. It is near completion, only 2-3 years behind the original schedule (that I recall from 2003 at least) with cost overruns of around 20% (IIRC) coming out to ~17B pounds.
The UK and US are similarly developed industrialized nations. NYC and London are large cities with all the problems that entails. Actually, London is far worse because it's been for literally thousands of years, including some ~500 years of Roman occupation.
The scale of Crossrail (adjusted for cost) compared to the Second Avenue Subway is unreal. It's basically an order of magnitude.
The reasons for this are complex. There's no single determining factor. There is failure all the way from the Federal through the state and local governments as well as with the companies that build these things, the oversight of those projects, how the bids are awarded and the people who are actually doing the work. This should at least convince you that there is a problem and it's absolutely massive.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Avenue_Subway
[2]: https://jalopnik.com/heres-the-most-damning-report-yet-on-wh...
I was a management consultant ages ago and worked on large capital projects. In my experience (as the article mentions) it was a mix of: 1. Red tape & public "input" 2. Layers of contractors and subcontractors, each taking their slice 3. No real incentives for governments to be cost sensitive. Usually capital projects last well into the next administration. 4. Too many cooks in the kitchen and consultations
Yeah my first reaction to this was "Oh it's going to be the public". Because the US has strong rights and legal system basically anyone can come along and considerably screw up a project just by claiming some endangered bat is living in the path of it, or some economic harm will be done, or some community will be damaged, it's far easier to just to just stick planning notice on display in the bottom of a locked filin…
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> Why aren't contracts to build the projects tightly written to avoid cost ballooning? Because no legitimate construction firm will take on a project where they are saddled with 100% liability for overruns. Not without very generously padding their estimated costs, that is. Which will make them lose the initial bid. A fly-by-night operator may want to take that project, and when things go sour, they'll leave you with…
One alternative would be to have a public works department which does the work itself. It would hire people, plan, write specs, buy or lease equipment, buy materials, do the work. That, however, would be socialism, so it can't be done, even though it's done on a smaller scale in every US city for issues starting at road repair and going on up.
We don't build enough because building is expensive, and building is expensive because we don't build enough.
When we don't build enough, a crown corporation dedicated to building is not going to have enough consistent work to justify its existence.