Comment by tristanj | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tristanj | Hacker News Reader

The SF Chronicle did a great exposé on the bay bridge earlier this year. The Chronicle explains how the committee that selected the bridge was made up of specialists in fields only tangentially related to the job at hand — seismic experts, building engineers and architects. These people had not designed bridges before, and chose the design based on aesthetics, not practicality. When given a choice between two bridges: a conventional cable-stayed one at $1.5B and an experimental self-anchored suspension at $1.7B, they chose the attention-grabbing bridge over the practical one. This led to the enormous cost overruns we see today.

Note that the bridge isn't unsafe, the modern span is much, much safer than the old WW2 era span. The new bridge won't collapse in an earthquake. However, because of design failures and shoddy construction, it will last much shorter than planned.

http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Bay-Bridge-s-troubles-...

This may be true, but if those experts would have only been paid if the project came in under budget this surely would not have happened. Incentives matter more than expertise.

People can even be sent to prison for bad design, and it doesn't stop bad designs from being created :P It actually happened to the constructors of the radio tower in Raszyn, Poland, which was the tallest structure in the world for a while - the tower collapsed in 1991 due to a structural problem:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warsaw_radio_mast

Purchasing is full of unintended consequences.

"You only get paid if the project comes in under budget" might just only give you the lower-tier players who have no better project to work on -- maybe the more professional people would say 'no way' to an arrangement like that, especially given the % of these projects that wind up running over.

Then you wind up over budget with a sub-par contractor in charge of the project.. what do you do, change horses mid-bay? No way, turns out the threat doesn't even have teeth.

The problem is when people realize they're not going to get paid, they also realize there's no reason to finish.

After a constant stream of cost overruns the US military tried to do fixed price contracts for awhile. What happens is the big players don't bid, or they do it through independent subsidiaries.

Then when the project costs balloon the contractor comes to you and says "Look, you have two choices - either you can modify the contract so we can make money, or we'll declare bankruptcy and you'll have to write off every nickel you've spent so far."

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