Can America Still Build Big? A California Rail Project Raises Doubts
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
I visited Hoover Dam a few years ago. It is impossible for me to imagine a project like that happening now. It was a massive project. The government saw the need, put out the project for bids. The project was completed ahead of time and under budget. It was a spectacular success.
During the tour, we walked through some of the offices -- clean, gleaming corrdiors.
Now there were fewer regulations way back when the project was initiated. But even ignoring slowdowns due to environmental concerns (for example), we all know what would happen now. Democrats would be for it. Republicans would try to block it (except for those whose districts would benefit directly.) If the project were approved, it would be very late and way over budget. Hell, this government can't even approve badly needed and overdue infrastructure maintenance, (even though that would provide many of the jobs they are always going on about).
My opinion, as a 62-year old American, is that this country is in an irreversible decline.
A comparison to the giant boondoggle that was Boston's Big Dig might be warranted, except that the Big Dig actually produced something that millions of people use on daily basis.
Do we have that little transparency?
- The 787 was years late and over budget
- The 520 bridge was years late and over budget
- The 99 tunnel was years late and over budget
- Microsoft doesn't seem to schedule releases (publicly) or use calendar years for version numbers any more, but from where I sit, Windows hasn't exactly been a shining example of success in the past decade, either
These are public and private, across completely disparate engineering fields. California may be dysfunctional but everybody else is, too. If someone in this country can still "build big", who is doing it?
If missing estimates of time and resources is a success, then what would be a failure? Just giving up? Can we make any project a "success" by just keeping on throwing time and money at it until it's finished?
People (like executives, or voters) made the decision to go forward with these projects based on the estimates. If engineering estimates can't even be accurate to within a factor of 2 (like these), then what's the purpose of providing them? If humans are just bad at estimating, why are these estimates always much lower than actual, and never higher? What about the benefits which could have been achieved by other uses of this money? How can anyone make an informed decision about which possible engineering project to implement, when estimates are this bad?
These days, I assume any estimate without a confidence interval is a lie.
I'd argue that a contributing factor to the moderating of big projects is that the world is now better instrumented and we have a better idea of the costs and benefits of big projects, so a lot more goes into each decision and it's harder to push things though on the basis of a grand vision.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoover_Dam#Construction_deaths
Take above paragraph with a pinch of salt please.
Seriously speaking, large government projects are less about people and more about misplaced priorities of politicians. California's rail project was absolutely nonsensical and horribly bloated. Why do we even need a high speed train between Merced and Bakersfield ? For cows ?
American private entrepreneurs are dreaming big. Those big dreams however are getting realized only in areas government has not yet killed off with ultra crazy regulations. Elon Musk alone is doing it with Giga Factory, SpaceX and Teslas. Amazon through entering healthcare. Google is doing it through Google brain and so on. There might not be huge structures built with human sacrifice but the efforts gone into them are nevertheless equally spectacular.
America is building far bigger thing that benefits even the poor person in remote village of India instead of dams and trains. You just need to look at right locations. Also America doing it without risking lives of workers.
Amazon through entering healthcare
> “The environmental process has become about litigation protection,” he said. “You’re going to get sued so you’ve got to go out and basically do process upon process, study upon study to make sure that somebody cannot find some toehold for litigation.”
Not to knock on the environmental regulations but I think this illustrates why big monolith projects tend be very difficult or to fail outright. In the U.S. the system is setup to completely de-risk large-scale construction projects. We want a large project with a huge footprint to have zero environmental impact, zero negative impact on any community, displace no workers, and benefit every potential stakeholder. No trade-offs allowed: either everybody wins or the project is not completed or even started.
So the era of big top-down monoliths may be over in the U.S. Local, low impact solutions like Seattle's Link light rail are the future.
Cali is big, and SF is quite a piece away from LA with not that-that much in between. That's a lot of km.
Consider that you can connect London, Paris, Frankfurt, the Rhine Valley and the entirety of Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg - with less track distance. Or roughly.
America was the one civilization that could have proven wrong the inevitability of the (rise-apogee-decadence) cycle ... looks like it wont. That's very sad.
Switzerland is not exactly a standard part of Europe: it's not in the EU, it's much more capitalist than the rest of Europe and certainly not a country that's following the current downward socialist path to Venezuela-style hell many other European countries are on.
If anything Switzerland is closer in spirit to the US than most other European countries.
Europe can do it, end of story.
There are certainly more capitalist places in Europe than Switzerland. Ireland, the Netherlands or Luxembourg come to mind.
>and certainly not a country that's following the current downward socialist path to Venezuela-style hell many other European countries are on.
I haven't noticed any oil socialist republics in Europe lately. Though a lot of countries indeed are on a downward path, but more akin to America's. Ie. the great dumbfuck uprising.
>If anything Switzerland is closer in spirit to the US than most other European countries.
Switzerland is closer to the countries it borders than any other place, and by a long shot.
And in any case there are still big engineering projects all over the continent. The Lyon-Turin railway project includes a 57km tunnel being dug, but it's now threatened by the current Italian government (we're coming back to the dumbfuck uprising).
They have the greatest rail infrastructure in the world.
Even projects that require considerable more nuance and social integration, such as the revitalizing of Dutch public spaces to accommodate bicycles. [1]
I think the bit you are missing is that European nations have more centralized authority, they're somewhat naturally more communitarian, and not quite as big on individual rights, and they're also not quite so big. For better or worse, it enables them to make longer term plans on some things.
Here is a list of major European undertakings, granted the Norwegian one's are a little unfair given their vast oil wealth. [2]
[1] https://bicycledutch.wordpress.com/2011/10/20/how-the-dutch-...
[2] https://nordic.businessinsider.com/11-giant-infrastructure-p...
the greatest rail infrastructure in the world
USA: 293,564 km
EU: 230,548 km
China: 124,000 km
Edit to add: With the EU, however, having an area of about 4.5 m km^2, while USA and China have about 10 m km^2 each.
Look at NASA's marvelous manned space program. It has less manned launch capability than the agency had when the Mercury program was active. But they still spend money, doing extremely important things like sending "astronauts" to camp out on Mauna Loa and pretend they're on Mars.
As it should. NASA has made a deliberate effort to move focus away from manned launch capability instead preferring to outsource. SLS is still in the pipeline though. Hopefully this is a great time of progress.
These projects are setup as a way to extract money from taxpayers, through a relatively well developed process now: 1) Write an initiative/tax statement which promises the world. 2) Once it passes, laugh and start doing engineering planning based on the most naive/known to be wrong set of assumptions. 3) Once you hit the first roadblock, escalate it and require change orders ($$). This often doesn't require doing any actual on the ground construction work. In fact, many of these boondogles (Caltrain electrification?) never hit actual construction after 5-10 yrs of this. 4) Redo the entire set of plans at great expense, but without actual forward thinking. Hit the next roadblock, rinse and repeat prior steps.
This allows them to funnel billions into friendly firms that produce plans that never get used, doing studies that no one will read.
Since no one with any clout actually cares if this thing gets built (not like they will use it, and most of the wealthy donors/voters they care about likely won't either), no rush as long as they have something to point to showing they are doing 'something'
Eventually, when the money runs low, make up a sob story blaming someone else for it, and go back to step 1.
When someone actually cares, we still build things quickly - the Oroville dam fixes, replacing the I80 overpass when the tanker truck burned it down, etc.
The problem is less that we can't build big things - it's that most of the time, we don't actually NEED to (in a real, existential way) - at least in the opinion of those with actual power.
New York is adding a pretty massive LIRR line, so it seems like things are going ok
Yes the project will take 10 years more than it was scheduled and cost 200% extra but so what? A week after the railway is in use everyone will have forgotten about all those issues. A good railway system lasts a hundred years.