This is gratuitously false. US manufacturing output today is as high as it has ever been. Even low value add industries like steel production are at a significant percentage of their historical maximum output (they do tend to be relatively mechanized and automated and not job centers anymore).
> Right, but manufacturing's share of GDP is low as it has ever been.
That only means that we are creating more jobs than manufacturing can provide. There is no point in manufacturing more and more if current levels are enough. For an analogy, agriculture is only 2% of GDP but it is good enough to feed everyone. Increasing the percentage of GDP of agriculture is pointless.
That's different from having the "know-how", though. We have the knowledge and ability to manufacture a lot--as much as or more than any past point in time. We just "produce" a lot more stuff that isn't manufactured now as a share of our economic output.
Unions and safety. Quality of life and less risk for the workers which china et al has less of. Not a difficult question but this topic keeps coming up as some sort of indirect nudge to corrode those two components under the guise of an argument about global competitive advantage.
I don't mind things going slower and costing more for good reasons - what concerns me though is the intentional graft, feet dragging, and insertion of middle men to extract as much money as possible from an important project. Unfortunately unions are a big and willing part of the problem in the US.
amazing to watch entire generations stumble forward without understanding "retirement,healthcare,workhours,promotion" since you know, "I have never had a problem".. Everyone is protected now.. yeah, thats it
The unionization movement was built on solving the safety issues of the day for workers exposed to employers who found employees to be expendable. The topic here is about how those safety expectations once established by unions slow down construction. Labor laws now cover those concerns, so the decline in unionization is largely irrelevant. The entire workforce has become a member of the de facto union.
That's a rather limited view of the role of unions. One of their biggest accomplishments was the establishment of a standard 40 hour work week as the norm. That was mostly about work/life balance, not safety. And that certainly isn't codified in labor laws, given the remarkably loose overtime rules for most salaried employees today.
How does that pertain to the discussion? We’re not focused on talking about unions here, we’re talking about why construction projects take a long time, so what does that mean for project duration?
I lean in your direction on this. However, I am worried that this evidence doesn't say what we think it says.
Is it that there was more growth in non union fields? It is conceivable that union work is still responsible for much in the building realm. That combined with a non growing workforce could easily explain slowness. Combined with basic supply/demand thinking can then explain costs.
> Is it that there was more growth in non union fields?
Most unionized labor in the US was outsourced during the deindustrialization of the USA.
More than 6 million manufacturing jobs were lost in the US between 2001 and 2010 (representing approximately 1/3 of all manufacturing jobs).
So yes: non union fields are growing, mostly because unionized jobs were busted by companies shipping production overseas. The jobs that "replaced" the good labor of industry are mostly poverty wage service jobs which require very little training. As there's little investment per-worker Unions have effectively 0 bargaining power: Scabbing a strike is simple when you only need 2 hours of training to do their jobs.
Funnily enough the USA manufactures more goods than ever in its history, accounting for ~6 trillion USD of our GDP in 2019.
But this really doesn't feel to be talking to my question. Local building of infrastructure isn't really offshoreable, is it? Such that I get a ton of things were shipped overseas. Not entirely clear that explains why building locally is so expensive.
Your last line indicates that robotics and other large scale industrialization can be pointed at. We manufacture more with far fewer resources?
But, back to my hypothesis that i would love to see shot down. Is the only labor left in large unions in a position that they are in the critical path of building? (Note, that if true, the answer isn't necessarily to bust unions, but to expand their base significantly. I could easily believe that their funds have been starved such that they aren't growing due to so much money being funneled away from them.)
While private union participation has sharply declined, public unions are still quite powerful and present a virtual lock on substantial changes. Witness the teachers' unions. Particularly, their obstinance during the pandemic and reluctance to providing true school choice.
True school choice is an illusion as long as private schools are free to decline unwanted students that cost more to teach. The advocates of such policies tend to ignore the fact that it would leave disabled and other special needs students in a public system that no longer had enough other students to pay for their higher costs. That’s a problem that requires an adequate solution before any type of voucher is reasonable.
A fair point. But the unions have been anything but reasonable on this issue. True, some have opened up to charter schools, but many have rescinded that option as soon as it was politically feasible. True choice can only happen when a different management of schools is in place. They have been obstinately against this.
>The advocates of such policies tend to ignore the fact that it would leave disabled and other special needs students in a public system that no longer had enough other students to pay for their higher costs.
People already pay for public schooling through income and property taxes, whether they're children use it or not. I don't see how your theory prevents higher cost students from being taught. It just sounds like you're advocating for a crab bucket.
Every proposal I’ve seen for vouchers tries to tie the amount to average spending per student. My point is that’s fundamentally unfair because private schools are only interested in students that cost below the average to educate. They work hard to exclude and disqualify those with costly special needs. The result is you leave the public education system with all the high cost students but still getting the $X k they had per student when they had low cost students too. The net result of vouchers is raising the per capita cost of public education without raising the per capita funding. That’s unfair to everyone forced into using that system.
If you're issue is mainly with vouchers, then why not get rid of the need for vouchers in the first place by getting rid of limiting attendance by zip code? It's unfair for anyone, not just "high-cost" students, to be forced riders in an education system for which they have no agency. Fairness isn't determined on the basis of who in particular is negatively affected. Either the principle itself is fair or it isn't.
The only solution compatible with choice and public education is to allow all students a free-for-all to attend any public school within driving distance. Tuition isn't usually the biggest or first barrier to entry in attending better schools, it's bureaucracy.
I think the follow-on effects of delocalizing schools can be pernicious. In the extreme case you can look at districts in Vermont and Massachusetts where some towns provide vouchers to other education systems instead of having one themselves. Having non-local education systems almost completely disconnects costs from funding. It potentially creates a race to the bottom where districts lower property taxes and make their own education system worse knowing that everyone can use other systems. Of course if everyone does that we set the entire region/country backwards a great deal but prisoners dilemma systems are seldom successfully solved.
Stop holding 95% of students hostage to a tiny minority. They deserve better education. They deserve their teachers' focus instead of them having to devote inordinate amount of time to the mainstreamed special needs students.
The attendant should be tutoring the 95% of kids to keep them from falling behind. Only 35% of fourth graders read at grade level. Why do we spend inordinate resources on those that are incapable of ever reading at a fourth grade level when so many are effectively denied being educated?
Accept the 30% voucher that represents what a typical student getting into private school costs the system instead of demanding 50% as fair when that leaves the system too impoverished to deal with the students that remain.
In Ontario, the teachers ratified a three year contract in the spring of 2020 (i.e. COVID-19 was already raging), with the most notable feature being that remote learning would not be permitted, conceding to a paltry 1% raise in order to get the 'win'. Funny part is that they caved to the remote learning pressure in the end anyway.
Depends on where you live. Where I live the teachers union supported moving to remote learning overnight and remote learning continued until halfway through this school year. In fact it is still ongoing for those students who chose to do remote learning instead of in person learning. They plan on continuing offering remote learning as an option perpetually into the future. One thing they learned during the pandemic is that there are certain students who do poorly with in person learning but they excelled with remote learning. They want to keep supporting those students who learn better with remote learning than in person learning.
Perhaps in high school level. But little kids, grade-school level, need in-person. They also should not be scared witless by mandatary rules that do nothing but leave them psychologically scarred for years to come.
Children are not so weak as you seem to think. It was children at all levels that showed remarkable improvements through remote learning over in person learning.
The argument against school choice us utterly unreasonable to anybody outside of the teacher's union. Their argument against is essentially that their pet school would go out of business because nobody would choose to go there if there were alternatives.
I remember the housing boom around 2005-ish in my area. They were throwing houses together at an amazing pace. Private building contracts with a friendly regulatory environment.
My state is ranked among the highest in fraud related to public works projects like building roads. Basically the game is: Start a company, bid so low you know you won't succeed, take your cut, start a build, declare bankruptcy, rinse/repeat. Easy money, no consequences.
I'm pretty sure the government/bureaucracy is in on the take because they do nothing about it. The mayor of my city was on the board of the company that manages the toll system.
Environmentalists tried to protect commercial forests (intended to be harvested for cardboard) in an industrial zone to stop the Tesla factory from being built.
Germany is absolutely the wrong example here (I am from Germany):
- the last U5 extension in Berlin (2.2km) took over 10 years to complete https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U5_%28Berlin_U-Bahn%29?wprov=s...
- the Stuttgart 21 project was presented in 1994(!), started construction in 2010, was protected to end in 2019 and by now, the main station is expected to be finished in 2025, with more to follow. Of course it went massively over budget and was probably one of the more protested against projects in the last few years https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuttgart_21?wprov=sfla1
- the BER airport is probably one of the most "famous" projects. Planning began in 1991, construction in 2006(!). The planned opening was in October 2011, but the first plane landed in October 2020, nine years later https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berlin_Brandenburg_Airport?wpr...
- NIMBYs preventing wind turbines is a big issue too, the most recent discussion was about Bavaria preventing new plans with ridiculous requirements (sadly no English source here) https://www.br.de/nachrichten/amp/bayern/wie-viel-windkraft-...
For a really rough comparison, you can look at the building of the east span of the Oakland Bay bridge. It's also worth noting how many people died while building them. (Disclosure: I've never looked this up or done this comparison myself)
Before you wax poetic about this period, please read more on the complete disregard for the families and communities impacted by the large construction projects from that time. Replies comparing the US today to China would also benefit from the same. Public works has a lot of issues with cost and inefficiencies, but I think we should all be happy that eminent domain is not wielded with the same disregard for human life as it once was.
Interestingly, the Golden Gate Bridge pioneered worker safety measures while the Bay Bridge (built at the same time) followed the status quo of almost no consideration to safety.
The difference was, basically, how much management cared about the issue.
>Sometime in living memory, the built environment of the U.S. began to freeze in place. I’d mark the time roughly at *1970*, but it’s a process, not a single seminal event.
> It is obviously fair for authorities to take some time to plan things out and weigh the costs and benefits. But they spend, well, an inordinate amount of time weighing the costs and benefits. In a 2018 study of environmental impact statements under NEPA, *the mean statement took 4.5 years to complete*
"The National Environmental Policy Act of 1969 (NEPA), *enacted in 1970*, established a policy of environmental impact assessment for federal agency actions, federally funded activities or federally permitted/licensed activities that in the U. S. is termed "environmental review" or simply "the NEPA process."
---
Things like unions and safety regulations had more of an effect on costs of projects. In terms of time to complete projects, what you see above is the biggest culprit.
What's weird is how common it was to have completely polluted rivers inside US cities.
And how Nixon needed to make it an Agency first because he didn't want Congress to have a Department of the Environment which would be out of control from the executive.
And how that has shaped the US environmental plans by making it a bargaining chip of the executive rather than a foundational aspect of our representative government.
Disband the EPA and create a Department of The Environment under Congress. Executive Orders do not have the gravitas required for a solid policy.
Regulations took previously externalized costs passed to labor and made them internalized costs to businesses.
A lot of that which is cheap is only cheap because a combination of exploitation that involves externalizing costs and pushing constant pressure on labor efficiency. Every now and then we get gains in reduced cost from a technological innovation where a simpler or improved process is able to shave things off vs passing them on. In these cases, gains tend not to be externalized but instead internalized unless competition can drive the gains to be externalized.
I know the author can’t possibly include every cause of slowness but it seems disingenuous to not include the preservation movement, especially given the decision to talk about downtown San Francisco.
The 70s saw a change in how historic preservation was handled, I’d argue because of the success of Jane Jacobs. It became less about saving patriotic sites and more about saving the look and feel of the idealized early 1900s city. From the 70s to the 90s we stopped protecting battlefields and started protecting whole neighborhoods.
The big catalyst here was in 1972: State Legislation
The Advisory Council of Historic Preservation provides guidelines for State Historic Preservation Legislation. State Preservation Officers were established in 1966 as well, but each state had different legislation. While every state has its own priorities, the guidelines were meant to streamline the legislation.
Now, standards that were explicitly written to help preservationists maintain places like Mount Vernon apply to important chunks of our major cities. Sure Chicago and sfo have maybe 2-3% of parcels protected, but they are highly clustered in desirable areas. And blanket block or neighborhood designations cover parcels of dubious distinction. Additionally it seems like every time there’s a major project announced in major cities these days, someone is going to come out and try and protect the “landmark.”
In Milwaukee there’s a project proposed to tear down an early 1900s hospital on the college campus. The school doesn’t have funds to maintain it. It’s a minor project by a minor architect and is not particularly unique. The preservationists are trying to block the demolition and honest to god, the reason given is that some of them were born there. They’ll probably win.
I think the authors point on heavy handed but well meaning legislation from the 70s needs to be revisited is applicable here as well. I’m for preservation but the mechanisms seem to have gone completely out of whack with the realities of our cities and current needs.
the construction of the second avenue subway was slow because of hundreds of years of infrastructural technical debt in manhattan and reduced tolerance for utility disruptions in an affluent area.
you can dig a hole (as elon musk has done) in nevada in the space of a few months.
We knew we needed to replace it in 1989 after Loma Prieta. In 2001 the Nisqually quake damaged it and made its replacement mandatory. It wasn't decided to build the tunnel until 2009, it then took until 2019 before it opened.
One thing that's pretty easy to understand is the network effect of complexity.
You don't have to check many things if you have few things in place. Each item creates an exponential increase in complexity for the next one. Another reason why things slow down is that as you add things to a system, they have a maintenance cost, the more you add the more you approach an equilibrium of costs == capacity.
This is, in part, explains why it becomes inevitably hard to add to a very large codebase -- you might have many many scrum teams simply maintaining what is, and each Nth new item has to do N-1 compatibility checks.
- Wages are high, so labor for construction is very expensive (not unique to the US)
- It's difficult to acquire property to build new stuff in existing cities compared to building in new places.
- It is also incredibly slow/expensive to build subways if you try to prioritize minimizing inconvenience to nearby residents above all else (cut-and-cover is MUCH faster/cheaper than tunneling).
- The US is also not very interested in trying to learn from what construction techniques, etc. have worked for public transit in other countries
Aside from the first point, a lot of this comes down to the fact that even in places in the US that have decent public transit, transit is treated more as a toy that is nice to have than a serious priority by the government, and it is only built when it doesn't cause any inconvenience to residents/drivers/etc.
The US has historically been willing to demolish low income areas and force people to move in order to build highways, however.
I’ll add one more: there is a strong preference in a large percentage of the population for suburban and rural style homes and light business areas. We build a ton of that and often very quickly. We are very good at building that type of landscape.
The HN crowd tends not to be the target market for this though so it gets criticized and downplayed here.
There has been a shift toward urbanism in the last 25 years though, and prices exploding in the cities show that the market is lagging in satisfying that demand.
> there is a strong preference in a large percentage of the population for suburban and rural style homes and light business areas. We build a ton of that and often very quickly.
Because that's the only thing you can build. The zoning regulations don't let anything else happen easily. You can't reason from this that this is what people actually prefer.
You can't reason that that's what most people prefer, but it likewise seems clear that if most people in some town/city did prefer something else, the zoning laws would be changed.
In a world where there is little to no friction and no incentives to prolong the changing of those laws, yes. Unfortunately, that is not the world we live in. Even something as simple as wanting to change it but seeing the immense amount of effort to try and get it noticed is enough to dissuade most people from trying.
No, that isn't clear at all. Bad and unpopular laws can remain on the books for a long time if there is a politically powerful minority who benefits from them.
Also it might just be that most people don't even know about the problem.
One needs to consider, however, why people prefer this kind of homes in the US, compared to most countries. It is probably because life is so hard and expensive on most American cities. And I say this as somebody from another country, where cities are livable and provide lots of advantages -- something that we associate in the US only to New York City and its high associated costs.
Just putting in a quiet vote for Chicago, that most underrated and magnificent of American cities. If you don't mind the risk of getting murdered once in a while, the city is affordable, beautiful, walkable, full of great food and good people, and has arguably one of the country's best public transit systems. It also has household garbage collection, unlike NYC's trash mountains. It reminds me a lot of the great metropolises outside the country.
It really makes other US cities like Portland, Seattle, San Francisco, etc. seem like quaint little backwater neighborhoods. Most of those have become little more than traffic-ridden strip malls, preserving a tiny downtown district but everywhere else is mostly just a bunch of drive-up destinations with little pedestrian activity and not much liveliness. Chicago's neighborhoods are still super vibrant and full of festivals, and even in the deep snow of winter people will bustle on the sidewalks and converge on the fun pubs and music venues and such. I've never seen anything else like that in the US.
But, yes, walk a few blocks in the wrong direction and you'll soon be dead. Despite that, millions make it their home. It's an amazing place to live.
What are the net advantages of being in a city? It used to be access to good employment was the main thing but with remote work this often isn't as much of a factor anymore. Access to better restaurants, music and sporting events are definitely advantages but limited access to nature, traffic congestion, etc. are disadvantages. I'd say it is more of a lifestyle tradeoff.
>What are the net advantages of being in a city? It used to be access to good employment was the main thing but with remote work this often isn't as much of a factor anymore.
This is only really true for the type of privileged person posting on HackerNews (me included), other groups don't have that privilege in the same way.
>Access to better restaurants, music and sporting events are definitely advantages
Add to this the potential to live without having to own a car. The transportation infrastructure of good cities beat having to drive all the time.
One other popular thing I've heard is a much larger dating pool, which is probably true.
>limited access to nature
Good cities include good green spaces. I can access at least two major hiking trails that stretch for about a week with public transportation, and also a huge archipelago.
>traffic congestion
This is an issue unique to car-oriented development, though, because of how poorly this category of development scales. Cities with high-quality public transportation and bicycle infrastructure don't suffer from the same amount of traffic congestion, and the issue is less relevant as good alternatives for getting around exist.
The poor shape of America's cities is both a cause and an effect. There are numerous other reasons. Here's the big ones in no particular order:
(1) America's very old and ongoing racism problem, hence "white flight" and cycles of re-development due to segregation.
(2) The "law of rent" and the connection between the growth of the middle class and the use of suburbanization to escape high urban property prices and eternal rent to a landlord class: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_rent -- This one is tough to solve and is still a problem. There's a new re-suburbanization trend driven in part by young people realizing it's hard to build wealth if you can only ever rent. This is also a major driver of remote work. COVID just accelerated the remote work trend.
(3) A cultural legacy of preference for the outdoors and the frontier and a desire of a large number of people to have at least some land. This is a romantic idea in American culture that is not as strong in Europe or Asia.
(4) Cities were horribly polluted during the early to mid industrial era. Even those who lived in cities often maintained country homes or vacationed in the country whenever possible if they could afford it, with a major driver being to get away from the noise and pollution.
(5) Lastly, cars were invented in the USA and the automobile industry was and still is a major economic engine and employer in the country. America is where car culture really took hold if not originated. Car culture is still quite strong even though younger generations seem less enamored by it.
Fear of racism is a bigger problem than racism itself. Most people don't care, but the fear of that minority that does causes all sorts of bureaucracy to fight it (which in turn needs to feed racism to justify its existence). Also fear of that minority is causing lots of people to not buy near the out races for fear of not being able to sell, thus driving prices down.
Racism is like crime. It takes 0.1% violent criminals in a neighborhood to make it a "bad neighborhood." It takes just a few determined racists to make the entire neighborhood racist.
The people who are not racist generally don't know racism is even a problem if it's not affecting them. Fighting it would require bureaucratic trench warfare, and most people don't have time for that shit. There is probably an inverse correlation between people who have better things to do and racism anyway, since the racists tend to be the types who... lets just say have enough time on their hands to be actively racist because... well... lets just say there's probably a reason they don't have better things to do.
Yeah. The major slow projects I can think of in recent years; Second Ave. Subway, East Side Access, Crossrail, etc. all involve deep bore tunneling through some of the most densely occupied land on Earth. Utility relocation, minimizing disruption to residents and businesses, etc. are the "hard part" here. If you could just nuke Midtown, East Side Access would have been easy. If you could demolish half of the Upper East Side, build a subway in the crater, and then cover it with new buildings, it would have been ready sooner. But, that's impractical. People are emotionally attached to their homes and neighborhoods.
That said, future projects can probably done more cheaply. IBX and QueensLink won't involve much underground work, and the right of way is already clear. The problem is that the benefit isn't clear enough to actually fund the projects and get them started. (That is an even more complicated problem. The MTA is a state body, subway lines entirely within the city are not something people on Long Island and Westchester want to pay for. Maybe there should be some sort of Independent Subway that the city itself pays for ;)
I remember when I was in Boston a discussion of how to expand one of the T-lines under Tufts Medical Center without causing vibrational problems for the equipment in the hospital right above.
The low cost leader in subway construction is Spain and they use deep bore tunneling, and they even use larger tunnels than most everyone else (one large tunnel is more expensive than two smaller ones)
I totally agree, though I think these primarily stem from one thing, which is that America hasn't been seriously tested for a very long time. When you're not challenged, you can easily settle into what is adequate, even if you support progress and innovation on paper. America is a great place to live despite its faults, but it's also stuck in the past. Take for instance our major cities; somehow much older cities around the world ironically have more modern elements than cities like Los Angeles and New York, which for all intents and purposes aren't significantly different from where they were in the 1970s (besides greater population and in the case of LA much less smog).
If we want to build quickly and actually begin to address problems rather than just accept things as the way they are, we need to be knocked down a peg. I don't think that means getting nuked or whatever, but it would mean that our "too big to fail" status would need to actually be jeopardized in a meaningful way. Once the current generation of grey-hairs in government finally croak and pass on the torch, then there would be the chance to garbage-collect excessive regulations and better pick and choose what should be regulated heavily or not, rather than regulate with a broad brush. Laws and regulations should be designed with exceptions in mind, and not just for fat cats in the club.
> somehow much older cities around the world ironically have more modern elements than cities like Los Angeles and New York
Somehow? Shouldn’t this say “Much older cities around the world have more modern elements than cities like Los Angeles and New York because they were razed to the ground during the world wars and rebuilt in modern times.”?
Nah, Thameslink beats any US line and it’s from 1988. Lizzie line will be better too.
Oedo line too. And Fukutoshin like.
Blackfriars is over the Thames. I don’t think there’s a US station that is as creative in use of space.
Not to speak of the overground or DLR.
I think it’s just trade offs. The US gives individual power, those other places give state power. Former excels in certain places but provides veto when you achieve steady state. So things stall here.
Notice that in things which can be done with individual power, like developers making housing developments in Texas, outcomes are good.
I think power to execute is definitely a big part of it. A neighborhood can't afford a major work, or organize one, so it won't, but when a government entity can afford a major work, the neighborhood often has the power to stop that. Even though the major work is likely part of a larger orchestration of infrastructure, that one neighborhood can put a halt to it.
They tried to replace a level crossing with an overpass in my city, arguably good for everyone. Well, they did argue it, and it didn't happen. Even though there is already a train line there, apparently an overpass was too much infrastructure for them.
That wouldn't explain why Phoenix and Seattle and Austin and Las Vegas (and other recent-growth cities) lack the amenities of similarly-sized European cities.
For discussion's sake, can you enumerate the amenities you're alluding to?
If it's solely in regards to public transit, I think this is largely due to cultural differences. The US still has the remnants of an individualistic frontier mentality. I don't know, but tend to think it's not by coincidence, that the better public transit systems tend to be near the eastern seaboard.
It’s not just public transit. Walkability. Bike paths. High density - potentially mixed use types. No emphasis on lowering noise. Etc.
Basically anything you’d normally see in a Not Just Bikes video…
It’s not cultural btw. It’s corporational. It’s corporations which are driving these things - which don’t seem to have as significant of a voice in other countries.
Certainly corporations drive some of it. But I do think there's also a cultural element. I've lived all across the US and the places that lack those amenities simply don't want them from my experience. Even when they do get implemented by well-wishing civil servants, they are often openly mocked as a waste of money.
Do you think social media influencers are what drives the selection of gas stoves? That...is a very new take I've never heard.
Most people prefer gas stoves because they are better for cooking than electric. They are generally considered better for cooking because they burn hotter than electric. It's been a long time since I've worked in food service, but I can't remember a single kitchen using electric stoves to good with and for good reason. This was when gas was much more expensive than it is now and I doubt the natural gas lobby has much influence on those choices.
The thing is - induction is shown to be better now. It’s faster and more powerful and doesn’t create the waste heat. There are specialty ones for woks now too - that are curved and all.
So really it is the gas lobby that is fueling this resistance to the switch. I myself used to buy into the cooking with gas was better because of all the media, my partner, and so forth. But the truth is - cooking with gas sucks for the most part. The newer induction ranges with temperature sensors and what not are actually better. And no waste heat and no toxic fumes except for what you’re cooking.
Honestly - I’m a big convert. I just need to move into a non-rental so I can install 230v induction instead of having to use 120v stuff. (Which is still good but obviously 5000w is much better than 1800w)
And if we compare shit electric to a gas stove then yeah - gas is better. But once you start using decent induction… it’s not really a problem unless you like to move your pan around a lot and even then - you can learn a different technique to get a similar effect.
I agree and almost put in discussion about induction in my first reply. But I think the difference is one of economics for most people. I realize HN probably skews towards the higher income range, so sometimes I feel like this discussion comes across as tone deaf when the median household (not person) income in the U.S. is about $67k.
The newer induction ranges are awesome. But they are very expensive by comparison to a comparable gas range. For an average person, they are probably out of range (ha) in terms of price point. Add to it that your existing cookware may not work with it, and it's a deal breaker for a lot of average people. For someone like a landlord, they will almost always go with the cheaper option. If I was renting and had the choice between an cheap electric range or gas, I'd always prefer the gas. I hope the tech progresses enough to bring the price down to be competitive in the future.
It's a lot like the discussions around heat-pumps. I love the ideas of heat pumps in homes. But I also realize the initial sticker cost is too much for people to bear. When natural gas prices have been as low as they have been in the last decade, it's hard to blame people for selecting a natural gas furnace.
I love the more efficient options, but I do think people don't always recognize they are, to an average consumer, a luxury and a hard sell when they are just trying to make ends meet. That's partly why some of the talk comes across to some as elitist and it hurts the ability to convert people.
Gas stoves get hot faster and respond quickly when you turn the dial, that's their big advantage. But electric is hotter. Even plain resistance coil electric elements put out much more heat than gas. Try to boil a pot of water on gas vs electric and it's no contest, electric wins.
And of course, modern induction electric elements are better in every way as long as you don't mind throwing out all your cheap alluminum pots
In what sense? Both have BTU ratings to determine their capacity. Just for kicks, I looked at a few units online at a mid-range price point of about $1500. The gas ones had 18-20 kBTU burners and the electric were around 10 kBTU burners, so the gas has considerably higher output. As you say, gas is basically instantaneous once the flame is present while electric has a lag, so it's going to take longer to get to that capacity for the electric. Maybe your point is that electric transfers heat better? I couldn't find any sources on that. Add to it that the colors of the flame/heating element as a general rule of thumb for temperature, the gas is higher on the temperature spectrum.
I think the idea of walkability isn’t that you spend hours having to walk everyday to do menial tasks. It’s that you’re within very short distances of places.
> public transit . . . individualistic frontier mentality
A century ago, most American cities had some kind of tram system. And the cities were connected by railroads - actual passenger trains. People were sold the idea of automotive independence. That notion was completely manufactured for our consumption. We didn't have the bureaucracy in place to keep mass transit in place, so when people used it less, it lost money and was largely torn out. Without bureaucracy in place to give people time to think, we're stuck with the swift wisdom of the market.
When I lived in Seattle, I was half a block from an old commuter line that's buried in asphalt now. The city just installed "innovative" light rail a few blocks away. Progress! /s
That's the point I was trying to get across. The automobile created fostered an individualistic culture related to transport that is very hard for people to give up. Most cities still have bus routes, but people generally don't want to use them if they can use a car instead.
I don't disagree with most of that, but some places in the US do put some priority on public transit. Much to the annoyance of local neighborhoods, for example, Tri-met in Portland regularly proposes and then eventually builds out new light rail lines through existing neighborhoods. The bus network could be better in outlying areas but in the city proper it is pretty useful for many people, not a toy. And Portland builds new highways rarely. Aside from small extensions, there hasn't been a new interstate-size highway created in decades. It all stopped in the 70s (though the final bits didn't get finished until the mid 80s).
Edit:
IMO Portland could really justify another interstate and Columbia river crossing to the east of the city, but probably won't do it. It would primarily serve lower income people who've migrated out that direction, and they don't really have much voting power. I don't envy their commute since so much of it has to be on surface streets before they hit a major arterial. The light rail has a leg that direction but it's slow, and there's just one out there.
Highways do not serve low income areas, public transit does.
Portland is entirely justified in not building expensive and low density transit solutions (highways) to service communities. A BRT or Light Rail line will justify the cost significantly better and lead to denser, transit oriented development along the path: All of which better serves the poor.
Maybe, but I think it's more that the managers/owners are greedy and need big profit margins, especially to pay back their political connections who gave them the contract to begin with.
Corruption exists in some form at every step of a publicly funded project. People are too apathetic to care, and the process for getting a road repaved or whatever has been made almost entirely opaque to the electorate. Especially at the county and state levels, where serious cash gets gifted or grifted all the time.
>the process for getting a road repaved or whatever has been made almost entirely opaque to the electorate.
Most government contracts use an open bid process which is much less opaque than what happens in private contracts. What transparency are you specifically looking for?
What if there is an overarching malaise of dysfunction, inefficiency and apathy towards ambition to build a better nation? 1950’s USA was very different than today.
I've worked with some brilliant government orgs (NIST) but more often than not, many have the problem of top-down management and bureaucratic class that has no checks and balances, that is impossible to get rid of, and perpetuate dysfunction, overbilling, etc. No one questions them, media is busy with other things, and we always talk about funding the gov, but never asking "Can we do more with the same amount?". At least, private enterprises have skin in the game and they'd be toast if their products and services does not perform or is overbudget. Similar to government agencies, as private enterprises get larger (GE, Lockheed, IBM, P&G, Mitsubishi), they have exact same problems as governments.
The solution is to completely start over. We did that in 1950's when many new agencies were formed. They were vibrant and well functioning. Without a garbage-collector process so-to-speak, government agencies tend to become dysfunctional.
I love Eli Dourado's blog, particularly these two articles:
Re-orgs are often partially a garbage collection process, I have noticed. Lots of talk about "efficiency" and "better alignment". All fluff you expect, but in practical terms, a lot of people get let go, projects and org units disappear, and priorities are reorganized. The whole operation is expected to work as if the re-org never happened, and often it will.
They might not care about it being compulsorily acquired at a decent price. They'd be less likely to have an emotional attachment to an investment property than to their current or ancestral home.
What about Oroville dam repairs? It was a pretty successful and fast engineering project. I think that America can still build quickly if she wants to. But most of the projects are not that important.
That’s kind of a strange example. Fixing things that provide existential hazards is always a priority, not to mention that the scope of the damn did not change with the repairs (the dam did not get taller, wider, etc). There was no reason for nimby-isms, environmental impact reports of building/expanding the reservoir, etc, as it was already there. It was a huge, ongoing emergency that required action to be taken and only cost the state $1.1B, from which they’re trying to recover some portion from federal funds.
MacArthur Maze repair was also under budget and before timeline because of the novel contract.
The truth is that most US infrastructure is not required. We should let many of these roads rot and many of these super projects languish in design.
Notice how CA HSR had delays because they wanted to use “first of its kind state of the art signaling system”. Why “first of its kind”? There exist like a dozen HSR builders. Just copy them. But that’s because HSR isn’t required. So we just use it as a modern WPA-style jobs tool.
This comment box is too small to provide a proof ;)
I’m sorry, it’s not fair to make a controversial statement and then leave it at that but I only had the appetite to provide the hypothesis (easy) not the backing (I’ve got to collate my notes on this).
But, if you’re down to meet in SF one evening in April we could go over it.
This article is about a road diet in terms of restriping an existing road with fewer lanes, but the same amount of asphalt (and, given the additional markings, probably a similar amount of paint). I don't see what that has to do with the infrastructure being not needed.
I think you're actually talking about Caltrain's CBOSS system, which while obviously related to the CAHSR, eventually, was designed and (not) implemented by a completely different agency at a prior time.
Also consider this; for buildings/real estate, the market value of the finished construction may appreciate faster than the negative cash-flow from construction and financing. Just adjust rate of construction accordingly.
The owners of money get to decide when they are paid and how much, if they prefer these low interest rates, then why would you care? It's not like it matters.
When interest rates are negative, you are basically in the sandbox part of a developed society. You already have everything, everything you do afterwards is as pointless as existence and the universe. Who cares? Artists don't care.
You know what interest rates also do? Higher interest rates punish longevity as future income is discounted, meanwhile lower interest rates promote longevity as future income is no longer discounted.
It's the opposite. Once there is less incentive to rush to completion, interest rates go down. If you are about to starve tomorrow, you must rush, interest rates are high because you are willing to borrow for food. If you have enough food to last a year, you won't borrow, you would prefer that it lasted 5 years instead.
> " This style of thinking is present especially in environmental laws like the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) at the federal level, or the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) at the state level. These laws both require the government to conduct an exhaustive review of government projects—sometimes even permitting decisions on private projects—that might have negative environmental impacts."
There's a reason those laws were passed, and it's because of all the massive groundwater and air and soil contamination problems created by unregulated free-for-all industrial development that have had to be cleaned up at great public expense. Those waste problems are solvable but solutions are often expensive, adding a large percentage onto the end-to-end cost of a manufacturing line for semiconductors, for example:
As far as large-scale public infrastructure projects, a lot of that is repair and rebuilding of existing installations (bridges etc.), so there's not as much environmental review there - just a need to devote resources to the task. I suppose a more autocratic country like China (which has rapidly built out high-speed rail) wouldn't bother about EPA reviews, but the air in China can be pretty bad.
As far as doing things quickly? The global supply chain problem is pretty evident right now, maybe offshoring and 'just in time' manufacturing wasn't such a great idea due to its lack of robustness under stress? Critical supply chains should be located domestically. Yes, that would either raise prices or cut profits due to increased domestic labor costs and pollution regulations.
What probably should have been done was to write a provision into the law for priority projects, allowing some activities to be waived or timeboxed.
It's a bit unreasonable to expect a process that efficiently handles $x million / 2-year projects to scale to $xxx million / 10-year projects.
If the risks of not having a port expansion / bridge or dam repair / rail transit / nuclear power are greater than the risks of not completing a comprehensive environmental review... well, there you are.
I don’t think blaming the supply chain is fair. Big transportation projects, big city’s housing problems all existed way before our current supply chain problems.
Clearly considering the environment is important. But the costs of over worrying about the environment is becoming clear too. Negative externalities like the homeless crisis in the West coast are affecting everyone.
> There's a reason those laws were passed, and it's because of all the massive groundwater and air and soil contamination problems created by unregulated free-for-all industrial development that have had to be cleaned up at great public expense.
OK, sure, but what does that have to do with building a bridge or a train station? A similar objection occurs on a smaller scale when we talk about opening up zoning laws to allow more apartments. "There's a reason those laws were passed. You're saying you want a chemical treatment plant built by your school?" No, what I said is that it should be legal to build apartments. Who said anything about a chemical plant?
Supporting quick approvals for less hazardous projects doesn't suggest support for more hazardous projects, but implying that it does is an effective opposition tactic.
We need some free-for-all zones to build new cities. I know with the current political structure it's near impossible, but "Hamsterdam" from the wire ( uhh, sans drugs and killings... ), comes to mind. A libertarian paradise. Perhaps it could start with more landgrants on just a fraction of the massive bureau of land management reserves. Free from entrenched politics of existing cities, these zones, if done well ( technocrats, here's your chance! ) could serve as inspiration for exporting the know-how to the existing cities.
You might like to read the book “A Libertarian walks into a bear”. It’s about a group of hardcore libertarians who took over Grafton New Hampshire with the goal to do a small town version of what you’ve described.
I never thought about the length in time it takes to build things in the US today when compared to previous time periods in the US.
I had to double-check this but it did really take 4 years to complete initial construction of the NYC subway system; however, what's failed to mention in the article is that a plan was approved to build the NYC system 6 years prior. In total, it took 10 years of planning and construction to actually have an initial system in place.
Even though the author failed to mentioned the planning period in that instance, it doesn't take away from his argument that things are slower today in getting large projects built or renovated due to legal and political structures that stop each of these from happening through procedural delays.
I have a great local example of this. My interstate bridge has been in need of repair for the last 30 years, but nothing has been done of it due to so many groups getting in the way. It's been a nightmare and that bridge is very much needed for the local community to stay as strong as it is. I believe the political will to do anything has vanished out of frustration.
The I-5 Columbia river replacement bridge just recently got a ton of funding from the WA state legislator, so maybe things are finally moving forward. However I guess delaying the project has been bickering on what to actually put on the bridge. E.g. they want to more then double the car lane count, then they also want light rail on there, and potentially even high speed rail. This feels like a classic case of overdesign.
I do not see how incorporating mass transit is over design for something expected to last 100+ years. Especially for a region that has been adding tens of thousands of people per year for 10+ years, at an increasing pace.
Neither do I, however WSDOT has not released any details on the project but their renderings indicate they want to widen the freeway to some 10+ lane monstrosity[1]. Meanwhile Cascadia High Speed Rail has ideas about replacing the existing BNSF/Amtrak bridge with a double deck four track + four care lane bridge in addition to the I-5 bridge[2]. This combined makes a ridiculous amount of car lanes and railway tracks, plus a redundant bridge. There must be a better—and cheaper—way to cross this river.
Believe it or not, New Hampshire does pretty well with building bridges, I saw them build a large bridge within 6 months and it seems roads are kept in a decent shape. In a nearby state where I am, I think it can outdo what you see in your state. Took 10 years to replace a very small bridge across some railroad tracks. That road was closed for 10+ years.
Over rivers ? Where I am, I suggest before you cross, open all your vehicle windows and wear a life preserver, I am serious.
I’ve wondered about state level differences too. Most of the east coast has terrible roads. That’s especially true in NYC where I live. But I did a trip down to Delaware and was on freeways like I’d never seen in the US. Just really nice. Are some states just run much better?
It varies county by county too. “Conscientious Republican” counties—like in Northern VA when I was growing up in the 1990s, or California from the 60s to the 80s—are the most well run. I live in a traditionally red county in Maryland (went Romney 2012, split evenly in 2016) and everything is super well run.
Not just roads. Northern VA’s excellent educational system was built under republicans, with a few conservative democrat governors. Building and permits are much easier. Even just efficiency of government offices. Getting a copy of my kid’s birth certificate in my county took like 10 minutes. In bored strokes, at state and local level, republicans tend to focus on serving the majority, while democrats are focused on equity and redistribution for minorities.
I grew up in a super-red county in California. Things were horribly run. The area has been under Democratic leadership for the past twenty years and it is a world change in terms of how much nicer, better, and more efficient everything is. The roads are better, the schools are better, the neighborhoods and people are better.
It turns out than when you have people believe that government should exist, and that government can do a good job, you get people who do good work. And when your government consists of people who think it shouldn't exist...you get morass.
Contrast blue counties with red counties in most states and you'll notice a huge difference in how much nicer things are in the blue counties. There's a reason so many Republicans retire to LA and NY: after they've made their money railing
"against the libs" they just want a nice place to live out their golden years.
Did your county see a change in significant improvement in socioeconomic status during that time period? Because that’s not a fair comparison. Note I said I was talking about places Northern VA in the 1990s, or Silicon Valley in the 1970s. I’ve never seen these places get better under Democrats.
Also, virtually no republicans “retire to LA and NY” lol. Maybe billionaires who can insulate themselves from the dysfunction of those cities. For middle class people, the major internal migration trend in the country is people leaving those places for Texas, the Carolinas, etc.
Yes, as soon as the Republicans were kicked out of office, the Democrats that replaced them made the area nice, and within a few years the socioeconomic status of the area improved.
Notably, this always happened after the Republicans were kicked out.
Generally, "competent" and "Republican" are diametrically opposed terms. Republicans like Mitt Romney are the exception to the rule.
In fact, every area that has been taken over by Republicans has seen a marked decrease in socioeconomic status following Republican takeover: see, for example, Ohio and Florida, which were once blue states that are now red.
The change of guard is most important from what I can tell. Both parties have their own corruption. Change often and each will stop the other's bad practices before they get too bad.
It isn't perfect, but it is the only thing that seems to have any long term success .
Alternate take: most places where people actually live are governed by Democrats, because Democrats dominate urban areas, and most people live in urban areas. Places with single-party dominance tend to be poorly governed (for instance: the Illinois Democratic party, the Kansas Republican party). When Republicans survive in Democratic areas (for instance: Massachusetts Republican governors) they tend to do well; presumably, Democrats managing in red states do well too, but we don't hear so much about them, because people tend not to live in red counties (they tend to be rural, not urban).
It's mostly party machines that are the problem, not the particular parties.
It's not just state level, the same thing happens at the municipal level. There's a trip I take a few times a year, and I always notice the transition from one town to another by the sudden deterioration of the road.
It's less "how well states are run" and more that some states just get way more money. Delaware gets approximately 50x as much money as California or New York does from the federal government on a per-mile basis.
Delaware is in large part a drive through state as people go from NYC/Philadelphia/New England to DC. So the roads there tend to be used more by out of staters. Look at the person I'm responding to. That makes it easier for other senators to want to contribute cash. Plus, Delaware doesn't have nearly as many roads, so the total number is still fairly reasonable.
There may be some fixed costs per state. I don't know.
There is a risk that if Delaware got too little money, they could forgo it, lower their drinking age to 18, and have state liquor store sell to everyone under 21 in the surrounding states.
Winter and salt are both hard on roads with lots of freeze thaw cycles putting cracks in the road. So Delaware is an apples and oranges comparison. Delaware is going to have a lot less winter wear on their roads.
Note that the 4.5 years cited for the NEPA process is just the average time to reach an initial decision. It doesn’t include the years of litigation challenging that decision that inevitably follows for any significant project.
My kid’s school tried to convert a declining golf course in a residential area into athletic fields. We’re not talking about a Texas high school football stadium—its some ball fields and tennis courts for an artsy school where sports doesn’t exactly attract big crowds. They were tied up in litigation for the better part of a decade. They spent half as much on the litigation as in purchasing the property.
Coincidentally I've been supporting trying to keep around a local golf course over letting a local private school expand athletic fields on it in my area. In my eyes the golf course is better for the community. People from all ages from the local area come there to play cheap golf or tennis and get reasonably priced lessons. Meanwhile if this plan were to go through, suddenly that area is private and reserved for rich people who can afford tuition at this private school, and all those opportunities for local people to get some activity outdoors vanish for good. Plus that school in question already has athletic facilities, these would just look more collegiate looking I guess...
I've just been trying to reach out to my local representatives and express support for preservation of the course. There are already a number of grassroots campaigns that have been keeping me current on developments. I can only hope it all works out though and this space remains for the public; the bad guys seem to win more often than not and the sitting councilman whose district this course falls into certainly has an amicable relationship with the school.
That was 6 years of planning mostly what to do, presumably.
Another problem with the US legal environment is that all this "planning" effort we do now goes into the whether, not the what. That means despite 1000s of pages, final designs are often lousy and ad-hoc, rather than a plank in a longer term integrated vision.
Public transit makes the problem especially clear, as the benefits for integration vs random flashy projects to hype up the Andrew Cuomo du jour is extremely stark.
When I think about American infrastructure projects in the 70s I think about all the minority neighborhoods they ploughed through and all the roads they closed during the entire construction livetime.
I don’t know how accurate that historical perception is, but if it is that is not how things are done today (thankfully). E.g. I’ve been observing the planning of ST3 in Seattle, and they indeed compromise on design all the time in order to displace as few people and businesses as possible, and they often end up with a much more expensive and much longer building times in order to allow traffic to flow (mostly) unhindered during construction. Without those constraints I bet building would be far quicker. (that being said neither of those are excuses for why it has taken over 2 years to fix the West Seattle bridge).
Interestingly those two constraints clash in the new International District/Chinatown station. One of the alternatives would displace and disrupt more minority owned businesses on the 5th Ave. while the other would disrupt traffic flow for 5-6 years on the 4th Ave. Curiously this is one of really few portions of the ST3 plan where they don’t have a preferred alternative.
In Los Angeles the two closest lessons I took were the 210 Freeway in Pasadena (which literally cut through poorer, Blacker neighborhoods) and the 710 Freeway which was supposed to connect to it.
The last part of the 710 Freeway was meant to go through a richer, whiter neighborhood. Some houses were purchased, but the connector was held up in lawsuits from at least the 1970s, and remains unfinished to this day.
For the ID station, I think the idea to bring Union Station back to life and use existing infrastructure to connect the multiple rail options at the same level is by far the best solution. It will pay dividends long-term.
One thing they do now is get a half of a plan in place without any idea of how to fund the rest, so that ends up drawing things out.
"Hard to argue that promises were not kept, but something has to be done with an already started project. In that light, one thinks of former Assembly Speaker Willie Brown’s principle, “In the world of civic projects, the first budget is really just a down payment. If people knew the real cost from the start, nothing would ever be approved. The idea is to get going. Start digging a hole and make it so big, there’s no alternative to coming up with the money to fill it in.”
"
Probably due to bureaucratic overhead. Everything needs to pass through ten layers of approval and every bureaucrat plays power politics the whole time.
I was once involved in a small city project, and the town liaison treated the project like we were in charge of the nation's nuclear arsenal. It's mind blowing how something so trivially small can become such a big deal when there are too many cooks in the kitchen.
Not when anyone can sue because a certain detail is missing. The fundamental interface to environment work needs to change not just the length of the reports.
the biggest reason is simply financialization, which infiltrates every nook and cranny of our socioeconomic perceptions.
it creates the perception that everyone else is getting ahead of you by hook or by crook (which is true in the minority but not the majority), rather than building stuff for the pride of having done it. that distorts all of our incentive structures for the worse, which is just one of the many adverse effects of financialization (which i define as economic activity focused solely on money itself, which includes most of real estate these days).
Are you sure? It sounds like you're applying a pet/fad theory to somewhere where it's not super-applicable.
Some of the biggest advocates for inefficiency in construction (at least here in Australia) have been Union members getting cushy jobs for their mates.
you're conflating financing with financialization, which are two very different points in a multidimensional spectrum. financing is certainly helpful to allow capital projects to shift forward (or backward) in time to deliver (and perhaps capture) greater value. and under the constraints of scarcity, it helps allocate resources more efficiently, price risk more accurately, and provides necessarily liquidity in markets.
we're way beyond the constraints of scarcity and the ideals of efficient resource allocation because we've decoupled finance and the money supply from the natural constraints under which our economic theories "work" (i use that term loosely, since economics has done a poor job of accounting for actual human behavior vs. the idealized). we're at a point where economic activity is about the money itself, rather than what it represents in the real world, things like bridges, restaurants, and dry cleaning. that's financialization, when it becomes decoupled from real value.
all that takes away from wanting to build real things, because the perception is that it's just easier to "get rich quick" via financialization schemes. if you can get the money without the hard work of delivering real value, why not? is the thinking. that's corrosive to social fabrics, not to mention economies themselves. that's why we're where we're at, rather than a simplistic demonization of 'financing' in isolation.
How do you determine the value of a "delivery" without a financial metric? Taking a laissez-faire approach doesn't change the need for financialization. At most, it changes some of the evaluated variables.
The contractors only need to worry about the contract price, which we arrive at through a market bidding procedure before the project.
What happens in reality is that contractors offer unrealistic prices to get the contract; and when the project fails they demand more time and money in order to complete. Government officials usually agree in order to save face and avoid public fiascos.
So you're back to square one. If you can't trust contractors to set a reasonable and realistic prices, then a solution should be a metric or set of metrics by which one can assess what is reasonable and realistic.
I think the author is fundamentally correct on the main point: the interface for environmental review needs to change. The current interface is that you generate a report and anyone can sue to require that report to have additional details provided a court agrees those details are unaddressed environmental impacts. This leads to 4.5 years for just the environmental assessment and 575 page environmental impact reports. It allows for excessive detail and thoroughness at the expense of time and cost. I’m not sure what the better interface is but it’s quite clear we as a society need to figure it out and halt the current trend of building less and less for more and more cost. Other issues people raise are parts of the problem but it’s clear that 4.5 years on one aspect of planning for a single project is not reasonable.
I wrote software for an environmental consulting firm. It is the dark side of construction and permitting in the US. Basically, people that worked in government permitting would leave their job after 10 years in the public service then work for us in the private sector. Let's say you wanted to build a mall. You would need us to come in analyze the land check for vernal pools, cultural artifacts, rare species of salamanders... the list is 20 pages long. We would then run software (me!) to find places which you could pay to protect (the pay off)- in order to get a permit for plowing over that area. Our firm would spend months analyzing a rock to ensure it wasn't an arrow head or watch if bats would bread in your area. "Why can’t America build quickly anymore?" I would say permitting is a large portion of the answer. If you wanted to build without knowing this system or you fought it - your application would sit in some bureaucratic office for years.
permitting is indeed at the center of it; I suggest that if it wasn't bats and salamanders, it would simply be something else to stall about.. even with extreme stories, and their opposite where a real estate developer finds and kills the last flower or butterfly on the land (which is true also), I support saving bats and salamanders. You know how easy it is to mix and pour a portion of an acre of concrete? or run a chain saw? literally forty years of growth can be killed in a half a day.. easy..
Here's an inconvenient truth: Building itself is energy-intensive and depends heavily on emitting CO2 from the cement kiln to the trucks to the excavating equipment etc. Doing it quickly, more so. The answer is always to do less. Less travel, less building infrastructure for travel, less economic activity, and ideally fewer people alive. Nobody wants to hear that. Everything on the table in what passes for public debate represents one or more of the Kubler-Ross grief stages: bargaining, denial and anger.
the end result of "systems thinking" is that "balance" is found by smoothing out extremes.. it takes a combination of capacity, training, inputs and will to use a human mind to think in terms of systems, not just yourself, but many people are capable of that
One must remember the capex opex distinction. Building e.g. in electricity generation with fossil fuels can be net negative, and even necessary, to bootstrap more electrified activity.
I am not saying some sectors aren't just bad need to shrink, but other sectors are good need to grow. That is what Jason Hickel thinks too, incidentally!
An across-the-board slowdown of economic activity is a very stupid --- both in terms of political impossibility and also needless sacrifice --- way to fix our climate issues.
What if we need to build mass transportation solutions in order to get Americans off of single occupancy vehicles? What if we need to build more housing in our cities so that housing becomes affordable and the homelessness problem is reduced? What if we need to build solar and wind farms so that we can turn off coal and natural gas generators?
I don't know how you can propose doing literally nothing at all as the solution to the problem that has us on course for disaster.
Don't blame me for that "mass suicide" comment, that was someone else's unimaginative and disingenuous reduction of many possibilities (various ways population might shrink) into one -- the most ridiculous and easy-to-shoot-down one as a matter of fact, which is why I throw the "disingenuous" in there.
Nothing will be done to stop climate change. I'll bet you a million 2022 dollars, payable in 2050 in whatever units or quantity are used then. Nobody who actually makes or affects policy is reading what we type here, and they don't pay undue attention to how we vote either. So like I said, I'm not proposing a solution; climate change is happening; there's no rest of the sentence. (There's no "...unless we hurry up bla bla hey guys c'mon etc. etc.") Nobody was in charge of changing it and nobody is in charge of stopping it (because nobody is in charge, at all).
The only thing you can say with any certainty (and it's surprising how obvious it is to some and how unacceptable to others) is that since technology and human activity are what caused the problem in the first place, and since every single permutation of more of the same, including and especially those designed to make our activities more efficient (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox) will just make it worse, then the only plausible solution is LESS of that. Nobody wants to hear about less. Less is negative growth, less is a recession, and nobody wants to hear it, as I already said and as you and your fellow commenters and downvoters have amply confirmed. It's funny how smug you all are while being naive enough to believe that somehow the thing that caused it all will be the solution to it all. Bla bla same actions expecting different result bla bla insanity bla bla?
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[ 4.3 ms ] story [ 372 ms ] threadRight, but manufacturing's share of GDP is low as it has ever been.
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NV.IND.MANF.ZS?location...
That only means that we are creating more jobs than manufacturing can provide. There is no point in manufacturing more and more if current levels are enough. For an analogy, agriculture is only 2% of GDP but it is good enough to feed everyone. Increasing the percentage of GDP of agriculture is pointless.
[1] https://www.bls.gov/news.release/union2.nr0.htm
Is it that there was more growth in non union fields? It is conceivable that union work is still responsible for much in the building realm. That combined with a non growing workforce could easily explain slowness. Combined with basic supply/demand thinking can then explain costs.
Most unionized labor in the US was outsourced during the deindustrialization of the USA.
More than 6 million manufacturing jobs were lost in the US between 2001 and 2010 (representing approximately 1/3 of all manufacturing jobs).
So yes: non union fields are growing, mostly because unionized jobs were busted by companies shipping production overseas. The jobs that "replaced" the good labor of industry are mostly poverty wage service jobs which require very little training. As there's little investment per-worker Unions have effectively 0 bargaining power: Scabbing a strike is simple when you only need 2 hours of training to do their jobs.
Funnily enough the USA manufactures more goods than ever in its history, accounting for ~6 trillion USD of our GDP in 2019.
Your last line indicates that robotics and other large scale industrialization can be pointed at. We manufacture more with far fewer resources?
But, back to my hypothesis that i would love to see shot down. Is the only labor left in large unions in a position that they are in the critical path of building? (Note, that if true, the answer isn't necessarily to bust unions, but to expand their base significantly. I could easily believe that their funds have been starved such that they aren't growing due to so much money being funneled away from them.)
People already pay for public schooling through income and property taxes, whether they're children use it or not. I don't see how your theory prevents higher cost students from being taught. It just sounds like you're advocating for a crab bucket.
The only solution compatible with choice and public education is to allow all students a free-for-all to attend any public school within driving distance. Tuition isn't usually the biggest or first barrier to entry in attending better schools, it's bureaucracy.
Interesting way of saying "I want poor children to go to school with poor children and rich children to go to school with rich children".
My state is ranked among the highest in fraud related to public works projects like building roads. Basically the game is: Start a company, bid so low you know you won't succeed, take your cut, start a build, declare bankruptcy, rinse/repeat. Easy money, no consequences.
I'm pretty sure the government/bureaucracy is in on the take because they do nothing about it. The mayor of my city was on the board of the company that manages the toll system.
- the last U5 extension in Berlin (2.2km) took over 10 years to complete https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U5_%28Berlin_U-Bahn%29?wprov=s... - the Stuttgart 21 project was presented in 1994(!), started construction in 2010, was protected to end in 2019 and by now, the main station is expected to be finished in 2025, with more to follow. Of course it went massively over budget and was probably one of the more protested against projects in the last few years https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuttgart_21?wprov=sfla1 - the BER airport is probably one of the most "famous" projects. Planning began in 1991, construction in 2006(!). The planned opening was in October 2011, but the first plane landed in October 2020, nine years later https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berlin_Brandenburg_Airport?wpr... - NIMBYs preventing wind turbines is a big issue too, the most recent discussion was about Bavaria preventing new plans with ridiculous requirements (sadly no English source here) https://www.br.de/nachrichten/amp/bayern/wie-viel-windkraft-...
This argument is ridiculous.
Do you have a comparison of safety data from projects over the years?
> some sort of indirect nudge to corrode those two components under the guise of an argument about global competitive advantage.
I don't see anyone making an argument against safety?
https://www.historylink.org/File/8214
The difference was, basically, how much management cared about the issue.
> It is obviously fair for authorities to take some time to plan things out and weigh the costs and benefits. But they spend, well, an inordinate amount of time weighing the costs and benefits. In a 2018 study of environmental impact statements under NEPA, *the mean statement took 4.5 years to complete*
"The National Environmental Policy Act of 1969 (NEPA), *enacted in 1970*, established a policy of environmental impact assessment for federal agency actions, federally funded activities or federally permitted/licensed activities that in the U. S. is termed "environmental review" or simply "the NEPA process."
---
Things like unions and safety regulations had more of an effect on costs of projects. In terms of time to complete projects, what you see above is the biggest culprit.
And how Nixon needed to make it an Agency first because he didn't want Congress to have a Department of the Environment which would be out of control from the executive.
And how that has shaped the US environmental plans by making it a bargaining chip of the executive rather than a foundational aspect of our representative government.
Disband the EPA and create a Department of The Environment under Congress. Executive Orders do not have the gravitas required for a solid policy.
A lot of that which is cheap is only cheap because a combination of exploitation that involves externalizing costs and pushing constant pressure on labor efficiency. Every now and then we get gains in reduced cost from a technological innovation where a simpler or improved process is able to shave things off vs passing them on. In these cases, gains tend not to be externalized but instead internalized unless competition can drive the gains to be externalized.
The 70s saw a change in how historic preservation was handled, I’d argue because of the success of Jane Jacobs. It became less about saving patriotic sites and more about saving the look and feel of the idealized early 1900s city. From the 70s to the 90s we stopped protecting battlefields and started protecting whole neighborhoods.
The big catalyst here was in 1972: State Legislation The Advisory Council of Historic Preservation provides guidelines for State Historic Preservation Legislation. State Preservation Officers were established in 1966 as well, but each state had different legislation. While every state has its own priorities, the guidelines were meant to streamline the legislation.
Now, standards that were explicitly written to help preservationists maintain places like Mount Vernon apply to important chunks of our major cities. Sure Chicago and sfo have maybe 2-3% of parcels protected, but they are highly clustered in desirable areas. And blanket block or neighborhood designations cover parcels of dubious distinction. Additionally it seems like every time there’s a major project announced in major cities these days, someone is going to come out and try and protect the “landmark.”
In Milwaukee there’s a project proposed to tear down an early 1900s hospital on the college campus. The school doesn’t have funds to maintain it. It’s a minor project by a minor architect and is not particularly unique. The preservationists are trying to block the demolition and honest to god, the reason given is that some of them were born there. They’ll probably win.
I think the authors point on heavy handed but well meaning legislation from the 70s needs to be revisited is applicable here as well. I’m for preservation but the mechanisms seem to have gone completely out of whack with the realities of our cities and current needs.
you can dig a hole (as elon musk has done) in nevada in the space of a few months.
You don't have to check many things if you have few things in place. Each item creates an exponential increase in complexity for the next one. Another reason why things slow down is that as you add things to a system, they have a maintenance cost, the more you add the more you approach an equilibrium of costs == capacity.
This is, in part, explains why it becomes inevitably hard to add to a very large codebase -- you might have many many scrum teams simply maintaining what is, and each Nth new item has to do N-1 compatibility checks.
- Wages are high, so labor for construction is very expensive (not unique to the US)
- It's difficult to acquire property to build new stuff in existing cities compared to building in new places.
- It is also incredibly slow/expensive to build subways if you try to prioritize minimizing inconvenience to nearby residents above all else (cut-and-cover is MUCH faster/cheaper than tunneling).
- The US is also not very interested in trying to learn from what construction techniques, etc. have worked for public transit in other countries
Aside from the first point, a lot of this comes down to the fact that even in places in the US that have decent public transit, transit is treated more as a toy that is nice to have than a serious priority by the government, and it is only built when it doesn't cause any inconvenience to residents/drivers/etc.
The US has historically been willing to demolish low income areas and force people to move in order to build highways, however.
The HN crowd tends not to be the target market for this though so it gets criticized and downplayed here.
There has been a shift toward urbanism in the last 25 years though, and prices exploding in the cities show that the market is lagging in satisfying that demand.
Because that's the only thing you can build. The zoning regulations don't let anything else happen easily. You can't reason from this that this is what people actually prefer.
Also it might just be that most people don't even know about the problem.
I was born and raised in a city, never before have so many young white people wanted to move here.
It really makes other US cities like Portland, Seattle, San Francisco, etc. seem like quaint little backwater neighborhoods. Most of those have become little more than traffic-ridden strip malls, preserving a tiny downtown district but everywhere else is mostly just a bunch of drive-up destinations with little pedestrian activity and not much liveliness. Chicago's neighborhoods are still super vibrant and full of festivals, and even in the deep snow of winter people will bustle on the sidewalks and converge on the fun pubs and music venues and such. I've never seen anything else like that in the US.
But, yes, walk a few blocks in the wrong direction and you'll soon be dead. Despite that, millions make it their home. It's an amazing place to live.
This is only really true for the type of privileged person posting on HackerNews (me included), other groups don't have that privilege in the same way.
>Access to better restaurants, music and sporting events are definitely advantages
Add to this the potential to live without having to own a car. The transportation infrastructure of good cities beat having to drive all the time.
One other popular thing I've heard is a much larger dating pool, which is probably true.
>limited access to nature
Good cities include good green spaces. I can access at least two major hiking trails that stretch for about a week with public transportation, and also a huge archipelago.
>traffic congestion
This is an issue unique to car-oriented development, though, because of how poorly this category of development scales. Cities with high-quality public transportation and bicycle infrastructure don't suffer from the same amount of traffic congestion, and the issue is less relevant as good alternatives for getting around exist.
(1) America's very old and ongoing racism problem, hence "white flight" and cycles of re-development due to segregation.
(2) The "law of rent" and the connection between the growth of the middle class and the use of suburbanization to escape high urban property prices and eternal rent to a landlord class: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_rent -- This one is tough to solve and is still a problem. There's a new re-suburbanization trend driven in part by young people realizing it's hard to build wealth if you can only ever rent. This is also a major driver of remote work. COVID just accelerated the remote work trend.
(3) A cultural legacy of preference for the outdoors and the frontier and a desire of a large number of people to have at least some land. This is a romantic idea in American culture that is not as strong in Europe or Asia.
(4) Cities were horribly polluted during the early to mid industrial era. Even those who lived in cities often maintained country homes or vacationed in the country whenever possible if they could afford it, with a major driver being to get away from the noise and pollution.
(5) Lastly, cars were invented in the USA and the automobile industry was and still is a major economic engine and employer in the country. America is where car culture really took hold if not originated. Car culture is still quite strong even though younger generations seem less enamored by it.
The people who are not racist generally don't know racism is even a problem if it's not affecting them. Fighting it would require bureaucratic trench warfare, and most people don't have time for that shit. There is probably an inverse correlation between people who have better things to do and racism anyway, since the racists tend to be the types who... lets just say have enough time on their hands to be actively racist because... well... lets just say there's probably a reason they don't have better things to do.
That said, future projects can probably done more cheaply. IBX and QueensLink won't involve much underground work, and the right of way is already clear. The problem is that the benefit isn't clear enough to actually fund the projects and get them started. (That is an even more complicated problem. The MTA is a state body, subway lines entirely within the city are not something people on Long Island and Westchester want to pay for. Maybe there should be some sort of Independent Subway that the city itself pays for ;)
Tunneling through an existing city, often near water, is just hideously complex and expensive.
That's a non-trivial engineering challenge.
If we want to build quickly and actually begin to address problems rather than just accept things as the way they are, we need to be knocked down a peg. I don't think that means getting nuked or whatever, but it would mean that our "too big to fail" status would need to actually be jeopardized in a meaningful way. Once the current generation of grey-hairs in government finally croak and pass on the torch, then there would be the chance to garbage-collect excessive regulations and better pick and choose what should be regulated heavily or not, rather than regulate with a broad brush. Laws and regulations should be designed with exceptions in mind, and not just for fat cats in the club.
Somehow? Shouldn’t this say “Much older cities around the world have more modern elements than cities like Los Angeles and New York because they were razed to the ground during the world wars and rebuilt in modern times.”?
Oedo line too. And Fukutoshin like.
Blackfriars is over the Thames. I don’t think there’s a US station that is as creative in use of space.
Not to speak of the overground or DLR.
I think it’s just trade offs. The US gives individual power, those other places give state power. Former excels in certain places but provides veto when you achieve steady state. So things stall here.
Notice that in things which can be done with individual power, like developers making housing developments in Texas, outcomes are good.
They tried to replace a level crossing with an overpass in my city, arguably good for everyone. Well, they did argue it, and it didn't happen. Even though there is already a train line there, apparently an overpass was too much infrastructure for them.
If it's solely in regards to public transit, I think this is largely due to cultural differences. The US still has the remnants of an individualistic frontier mentality. I don't know, but tend to think it's not by coincidence, that the better public transit systems tend to be near the eastern seaboard.
Basically anything you’d normally see in a Not Just Bikes video…
It’s not cultural btw. It’s corporational. It’s corporations which are driving these things - which don’t seem to have as significant of a voice in other countries.
https://youtu.be/hX2aZUav-54
A lot of “cultural” things are corporations at work. This is a very small example…
Most people prefer gas stoves because they are better for cooking than electric. They are generally considered better for cooking because they burn hotter than electric. It's been a long time since I've worked in food service, but I can't remember a single kitchen using electric stoves to good with and for good reason. This was when gas was much more expensive than it is now and I doubt the natural gas lobby has much influence on those choices.
So really it is the gas lobby that is fueling this resistance to the switch. I myself used to buy into the cooking with gas was better because of all the media, my partner, and so forth. But the truth is - cooking with gas sucks for the most part. The newer induction ranges with temperature sensors and what not are actually better. And no waste heat and no toxic fumes except for what you’re cooking.
Honestly - I’m a big convert. I just need to move into a non-rental so I can install 230v induction instead of having to use 120v stuff. (Which is still good but obviously 5000w is much better than 1800w)
And if we compare shit electric to a gas stove then yeah - gas is better. But once you start using decent induction… it’s not really a problem unless you like to move your pan around a lot and even then - you can learn a different technique to get a similar effect.
The newer induction ranges are awesome. But they are very expensive by comparison to a comparable gas range. For an average person, they are probably out of range (ha) in terms of price point. Add to it that your existing cookware may not work with it, and it's a deal breaker for a lot of average people. For someone like a landlord, they will almost always go with the cheaper option. If I was renting and had the choice between an cheap electric range or gas, I'd always prefer the gas. I hope the tech progresses enough to bring the price down to be competitive in the future.
It's a lot like the discussions around heat-pumps. I love the ideas of heat pumps in homes. But I also realize the initial sticker cost is too much for people to bear. When natural gas prices have been as low as they have been in the last decade, it's hard to blame people for selecting a natural gas furnace.
I love the more efficient options, but I do think people don't always recognize they are, to an average consumer, a luxury and a hard sell when they are just trying to make ends meet. That's partly why some of the talk comes across to some as elitist and it hurts the ability to convert people.
And of course, modern induction electric elements are better in every way as long as you don't mind throwing out all your cheap alluminum pots
In what sense? Both have BTU ratings to determine their capacity. Just for kicks, I looked at a few units online at a mid-range price point of about $1500. The gas ones had 18-20 kBTU burners and the electric were around 10 kBTU burners, so the gas has considerably higher output. As you say, gas is basically instantaneous once the flame is present while electric has a lag, so it's going to take longer to get to that capacity for the electric. Maybe your point is that electric transfers heat better? I couldn't find any sources on that. Add to it that the colors of the flame/heating element as a general rule of thumb for temperature, the gas is higher on the temperature spectrum.
In this case one I'm glad to support.
A century ago, most American cities had some kind of tram system. And the cities were connected by railroads - actual passenger trains. People were sold the idea of automotive independence. That notion was completely manufactured for our consumption. We didn't have the bureaucracy in place to keep mass transit in place, so when people used it less, it lost money and was largely torn out. Without bureaucracy in place to give people time to think, we're stuck with the swift wisdom of the market.
When I lived in Seattle, I was half a block from an old commuter line that's buried in asphalt now. The city just installed "innovative" light rail a few blocks away. Progress! /s
https://www.vox.com/2015/5/7/8562007/streetcar-history-demis...
Edit: IMO Portland could really justify another interstate and Columbia river crossing to the east of the city, but probably won't do it. It would primarily serve lower income people who've migrated out that direction, and they don't really have much voting power. I don't envy their commute since so much of it has to be on surface streets before they hit a major arterial. The light rail has a leg that direction but it's slow, and there's just one out there.
Portland is entirely justified in not building expensive and low density transit solutions (highways) to service communities. A BRT or Light Rail line will justify the cost significantly better and lead to denser, transit oriented development along the path: All of which better serves the poor.
Maybe, but I think it's more that the managers/owners are greedy and need big profit margins, especially to pay back their political connections who gave them the contract to begin with.
Corruption exists in some form at every step of a publicly funded project. People are too apathetic to care, and the process for getting a road repaved or whatever has been made almost entirely opaque to the electorate. Especially at the county and state levels, where serious cash gets gifted or grifted all the time.
Most government contracts use an open bid process which is much less opaque than what happens in private contracts. What transparency are you specifically looking for?
I've worked with some brilliant government orgs (NIST) but more often than not, many have the problem of top-down management and bureaucratic class that has no checks and balances, that is impossible to get rid of, and perpetuate dysfunction, overbilling, etc. No one questions them, media is busy with other things, and we always talk about funding the gov, but never asking "Can we do more with the same amount?". At least, private enterprises have skin in the game and they'd be toast if their products and services does not perform or is overbudget. Similar to government agencies, as private enterprises get larger (GE, Lockheed, IBM, P&G, Mitsubishi), they have exact same problems as governments.
The solution is to completely start over. We did that in 1950's when many new agencies were formed. They were vibrant and well functioning. Without a garbage-collector process so-to-speak, government agencies tend to become dysfunctional.
I love Eli Dourado's blog, particularly these two articles:
How to move needle on progress: https://elidourado.com/blog/move-the-needle-on-progress/
Notes on technology in the 2020s: https://elidourado.com/blog/notes-on-technology-2020s/
That would also apply to other areas like health care. Exceptionalism is not a good thing to improve yourself.
That's probably also the case in China, for everything. Which might be why they can build so qyickly and cheaply.
The truth is that most US infrastructure is not required. We should let many of these roads rot and many of these super projects languish in design.
Notice how CA HSR had delays because they wanted to use “first of its kind state of the art signaling system”. Why “first of its kind”? There exist like a dozen HSR builders. Just copy them. But that’s because HSR isn’t required. So we just use it as a modern WPA-style jobs tool.
Would you say more? This is a bold claim.
I’m sorry, it’s not fair to make a controversial statement and then leave it at that but I only had the appetite to provide the hypothesis (easy) not the backing (I’ve got to collate my notes on this).
But, if you’re down to meet in SF one evening in April we could go over it.
[1] - https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2019/1/23/iowa-dot-helps...
https://caltrain-hsr.blogspot.com/2018/02/the-end-of-cboss.h...
Mary Poppendieck discusses this from the perspective of project management: https://www.infoq.com/presentations/tyranny-of-plan/
I think nowadays the projects are simply more profitable if they are long and slow.
When the cost of money is free / negative - there's less incentive to rush to completion.
Also consider this; for buildings/real estate, the market value of the finished construction may appreciate faster than the negative cash-flow from construction and financing. Just adjust rate of construction accordingly.
When interest rates are negative, you are basically in the sandbox part of a developed society. You already have everything, everything you do afterwards is as pointless as existence and the universe. Who cares? Artists don't care.
You know what interest rates also do? Higher interest rates punish longevity as future income is discounted, meanwhile lower interest rates promote longevity as future income is no longer discounted.
It's the opposite. Once there is less incentive to rush to completion, interest rates go down. If you are about to starve tomorrow, you must rush, interest rates are high because you are willing to borrow for food. If you have enough food to last a year, you won't borrow, you would prefer that it lasted 5 years instead.
There's a reason those laws were passed, and it's because of all the massive groundwater and air and soil contamination problems created by unregulated free-for-all industrial development that have had to be cleaned up at great public expense. Those waste problems are solvable but solutions are often expensive, adding a large percentage onto the end-to-end cost of a manufacturing line for semiconductors, for example:
https://www.epa.gov/superfund-redevelopment/superfund-sites-...
As far as large-scale public infrastructure projects, a lot of that is repair and rebuilding of existing installations (bridges etc.), so there's not as much environmental review there - just a need to devote resources to the task. I suppose a more autocratic country like China (which has rapidly built out high-speed rail) wouldn't bother about EPA reviews, but the air in China can be pretty bad.
As far as doing things quickly? The global supply chain problem is pretty evident right now, maybe offshoring and 'just in time' manufacturing wasn't such a great idea due to its lack of robustness under stress? Critical supply chains should be located domestically. Yes, that would either raise prices or cut profits due to increased domestic labor costs and pollution regulations.
It's a bit unreasonable to expect a process that efficiently handles $x million / 2-year projects to scale to $xxx million / 10-year projects.
If the risks of not having a port expansion / bridge or dam repair / rail transit / nuclear power are greater than the risks of not completing a comprehensive environmental review... well, there you are.
Clearly considering the environment is important. But the costs of over worrying about the environment is becoming clear too. Negative externalities like the homeless crisis in the West coast are affecting everyone.
OK, sure, but what does that have to do with building a bridge or a train station? A similar objection occurs on a smaller scale when we talk about opening up zoning laws to allow more apartments. "There's a reason those laws were passed. You're saying you want a chemical treatment plant built by your school?" No, what I said is that it should be legal to build apartments. Who said anything about a chemical plant?
Supporting quick approvals for less hazardous projects doesn't suggest support for more hazardous projects, but implying that it does is an effective opposition tactic.
I had to double-check this but it did really take 4 years to complete initial construction of the NYC subway system; however, what's failed to mention in the article is that a plan was approved to build the NYC system 6 years prior. In total, it took 10 years of planning and construction to actually have an initial system in place.
Even though the author failed to mentioned the planning period in that instance, it doesn't take away from his argument that things are slower today in getting large projects built or renovated due to legal and political structures that stop each of these from happening through procedural delays.
I have a great local example of this. My interstate bridge has been in need of repair for the last 30 years, but nothing has been done of it due to so many groups getting in the way. It's been a nightmare and that bridge is very much needed for the local community to stay as strong as it is. I believe the political will to do anything has vanished out of frustration.
1: https://www.theurbanist.org/2022/02/18/dont-widen-highways-i...
2: https://cascadiahighspeedrail.com/portland-to-seattle/
Over rivers ? Where I am, I suggest before you cross, open all your vehicle windows and wear a life preserver, I am serious.
It turns out than when you have people believe that government should exist, and that government can do a good job, you get people who do good work. And when your government consists of people who think it shouldn't exist...you get morass.
Contrast blue counties with red counties in most states and you'll notice a huge difference in how much nicer things are in the blue counties. There's a reason so many Republicans retire to LA and NY: after they've made their money railing "against the libs" they just want a nice place to live out their golden years.
Also, virtually no republicans “retire to LA and NY” lol. Maybe billionaires who can insulate themselves from the dysfunction of those cities. For middle class people, the major internal migration trend in the country is people leaving those places for Texas, the Carolinas, etc.
Notably, this always happened after the Republicans were kicked out.
Generally, "competent" and "Republican" are diametrically opposed terms. Republicans like Mitt Romney are the exception to the rule.
In fact, every area that has been taken over by Republicans has seen a marked decrease in socioeconomic status following Republican takeover: see, for example, Ohio and Florida, which were once blue states that are now red.
It isn't perfect, but it is the only thing that seems to have any long term success .
It's mostly party machines that are the problem, not the particular parties.
he is from there and has been a leader in Gov for decades.
There may be some fixed costs per state. I don't know.
There is a risk that if Delaware got too little money, they could forgo it, lower their drinking age to 18, and have state liquor store sell to everyone under 21 in the surrounding states.
[0] https://reason.org/policy-brief/how-much-gas-tax-money-state...
My kid’s school tried to convert a declining golf course in a residential area into athletic fields. We’re not talking about a Texas high school football stadium—its some ball fields and tennis courts for an artsy school where sports doesn’t exactly attract big crowds. They were tied up in litigation for the better part of a decade. They spent half as much on the litigation as in purchasing the property.
Another problem with the US legal environment is that all this "planning" effort we do now goes into the whether, not the what. That means despite 1000s of pages, final designs are often lousy and ad-hoc, rather than a plank in a longer term integrated vision.
Public transit makes the problem especially clear, as the benefits for integration vs random flashy projects to hype up the Andrew Cuomo du jour is extremely stark.
I don’t know how accurate that historical perception is, but if it is that is not how things are done today (thankfully). E.g. I’ve been observing the planning of ST3 in Seattle, and they indeed compromise on design all the time in order to displace as few people and businesses as possible, and they often end up with a much more expensive and much longer building times in order to allow traffic to flow (mostly) unhindered during construction. Without those constraints I bet building would be far quicker. (that being said neither of those are excuses for why it has taken over 2 years to fix the West Seattle bridge).
Interestingly those two constraints clash in the new International District/Chinatown station. One of the alternatives would displace and disrupt more minority owned businesses on the 5th Ave. while the other would disrupt traffic flow for 5-6 years on the 4th Ave. Curiously this is one of really few portions of the ST3 plan where they don’t have a preferred alternative.
https://www.npr.org/2021/04/07/984784455/a-brief-history-of-...
In Los Angeles the two closest lessons I took were the 210 Freeway in Pasadena (which literally cut through poorer, Blacker neighborhoods) and the 710 Freeway which was supposed to connect to it.
The last part of the 710 Freeway was meant to go through a richer, whiter neighborhood. Some houses were purchased, but the connector was held up in lawsuits from at least the 1970s, and remains unfinished to this day.
https://www.theurbanist.org/2018/04/16/better-transit-hub-pe...
"Hard to argue that promises were not kept, but something has to be done with an already started project. In that light, one thinks of former Assembly Speaker Willie Brown’s principle, “In the world of civic projects, the first budget is really just a down payment. If people knew the real cost from the start, nothing would ever be approved. The idea is to get going. Start digging a hole and make it so big, there’s no alternative to coming up with the money to fill it in.” "
https://www.visaliatimesdelta.com/story/opinion/2019/02/13/w...
I was once involved in a small city project, and the town liaison treated the project like we were in charge of the nation's nuclear arsenal. It's mind blowing how something so trivially small can become such a big deal when there are too many cooks in the kitchen.
it creates the perception that everyone else is getting ahead of you by hook or by crook (which is true in the minority but not the majority), rather than building stuff for the pride of having done it. that distorts all of our incentive structures for the worse, which is just one of the many adverse effects of financialization (which i define as economic activity focused solely on money itself, which includes most of real estate these days).
Some of the biggest advocates for inefficiency in construction (at least here in Australia) have been Union members getting cushy jobs for their mates.
This is especially true for the US.
IFF we used to be able to build things in the US, and we can't anymore - why does financing have anything to do with it?
we're way beyond the constraints of scarcity and the ideals of efficient resource allocation because we've decoupled finance and the money supply from the natural constraints under which our economic theories "work" (i use that term loosely, since economics has done a poor job of accounting for actual human behavior vs. the idealized). we're at a point where economic activity is about the money itself, rather than what it represents in the real world, things like bridges, restaurants, and dry cleaning. that's financialization, when it becomes decoupled from real value.
all that takes away from wanting to build real things, because the perception is that it's just easier to "get rich quick" via financialization schemes. if you can get the money without the hard work of delivering real value, why not? is the thinking. that's corrosive to social fabrics, not to mention economies themselves. that's why we're where we're at, rather than a simplistic demonization of 'financing' in isolation.
This would mean letting projects and companies utterly fail when they fail to deliver, but this is considered impossible in the current climate.
What happens in reality is that contractors offer unrealistic prices to get the contract; and when the project fails they demand more time and money in order to complete. Government officials usually agree in order to save face and avoid public fiascos.
How dare you.
Somewhat off topic: https://twitter.com/billmaher/status/1376644161172987905?lan... bill maher wanting to build a shed in CA. Hilarious.
One must remember the capex opex distinction. Building e.g. in electricity generation with fossil fuels can be net negative, and even necessary, to bootstrap more electrified activity.
I am not saying some sectors aren't just bad need to shrink, but other sectors are good need to grow. That is what Jason Hickel thinks too, incidentally!
An across-the-board slowdown of economic activity is a very stupid --- both in terms of political impossibility and also needless sacrifice --- way to fix our climate issues.
I don't know how you can propose doing literally nothing at all as the solution to the problem that has us on course for disaster.
You'll understand if the rest of the human race isn't quite as edgy and nihilistic as you are.
Nothing will be done to stop climate change. I'll bet you a million 2022 dollars, payable in 2050 in whatever units or quantity are used then. Nobody who actually makes or affects policy is reading what we type here, and they don't pay undue attention to how we vote either. So like I said, I'm not proposing a solution; climate change is happening; there's no rest of the sentence. (There's no "...unless we hurry up bla bla hey guys c'mon etc. etc.") Nobody was in charge of changing it and nobody is in charge of stopping it (because nobody is in charge, at all).
The only thing you can say with any certainty (and it's surprising how obvious it is to some and how unacceptable to others) is that since technology and human activity are what caused the problem in the first place, and since every single permutation of more of the same, including and especially those designed to make our activities more efficient (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox) will just make it worse, then the only plausible solution is LESS of that. Nobody wants to hear about less. Less is negative growth, less is a recession, and nobody wants to hear it, as I already said and as you and your fellow commenters and downvoters have amply confirmed. It's funny how smug you all are while being naive enough to believe that somehow the thing that caused it all will be the solution to it all. Bla bla same actions expecting different result bla bla insanity bla bla?