Why American Construction Costs Are So High • Hacker News Board

Re: Why American Construction Costs Are So High

#161

Post by conanbatt » Thu, Mar 07, 2019, 2:52 PM UTC

purplezooey wrote: post #139

conanbatt wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thats purely corruption. I always explain to my argentinian friends, used to the petty corruption of putting friends and family in public positions, that the us does corruption at a much bigger scale: at the legal one. The transbay terminal is one of the biggest rip-offs ever. It cost the revenue of sales taxes of the city for years. And it doesn't even work, while the "transient" station that must have cost almost n…

Sorry that temporary one worked like ass. Rainy and wet, cold, hard to navigate around, just a big parking lot and some tents.

worked? You mean works. At not 2 billion +

Re: Why American Construction Costs Are So High

#162

Post by pimmen » Fri, Mar 08, 2019, 9:21 AM UTC

Americans not wanting to learn from other countries is just so puzzling to me. If I ever get an answer to why it's often "the US is much bigger than Sweden, it wouldn't work here" to which I reply "then why don't your states look at the European countries? Germany and France have way more people than any US state" to which I get some defeatist drivel about that too.

Meanwhile in Brazil, China and India curiosity reigns.

Re: Why American Construction Costs Are So High

#163

Post by dagw » Fri, Mar 08, 2019, 9:28 AM UTC

vinay427 wrote: post #33

alwaysdoit wrote: post #32

> In Paris, as well as Athens, Madrid, Mexico City, Caracas, Santiago, Copenhagen, Budapest, and I imagine other cities for which I can’t find this information, metro stations are built cut-and-cover... There is extensive street disruption, for about 18 months in the case of Paris, but the merchants and residents get a subway station at the end of the works. The cost of using a more expensive method ($750M per statio…

I'm actually curious: how do those businesses, particularly smaller ones, survive 18 months of highly impeded traffic?

Honest answer. Many don't.

Re: Why American Construction Costs Are So High

#164

Post by sporkland » Sun, Mar 10, 2019, 11:58 AM UTC

BubRoss wrote: post #159

thisisweirdok wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you want to put the Panama Canal through Boston it's going to cost astronomically more than $24bn — the logistics (not to mention the requirements and processes of the time period) are entirely different.

How is that at all relevant?

The grandparent poster compared the cost of the big dig to the cost of the panama canal to in an attempt to show that the big dig was overly expensive.

This parent poster is pointing out the fallacy by hypothesizing that the Panama canal in Boston would be way more expensive than the Panama canal in Panama, thereby showing the error in the grandparent post's reasoning.