Why We Can’t Figure Out Why Infrastructure Is So Expensive | Hacker News Reader

Why We Can’t Figure Out Why Infrastructure Is So Expensive

nymag.com

190 pointsjseliger206 comments

A family member in the DOT told me this as but one of many tales of woe.

Several hundred miles of an interstate were going to be rehabbed. There was a proven technique to redo the joints between the concrete slabs, which were in good shape. A contractor was hired to do a small number of miles as a test, but they had a learning curve. The first few joints that they redid were not done well, but they rapidly improved and the approach looked really good.

However, the state selected a different approach which required tearing up the road and redoing it. The excuse was those first few bad joints. There was also the unstated matter that the contractor favored by the state did not know how to do this technique.

The result was billions of wasted money to redo the road with an inferior material. That material failed within a few years, and they now need to redo it again.

And this is not just a cost issue. Its estimated that failure to adhere to known safer pavement designs is resulting in 10,000 - 15,000 unnecessary deaths a year.

> There was also the unstated matter that the contractor favored by the state did not know how to do this technique.

I’m gonna bet this was the deciding factor.

The further you are removed from "other people" with regards to "other people's money", the easier it is to waste/pocket/embezzle. Fixing that problem would go a long way.

The solution to that problem in many places is currently to have lists of approved suppliers.

And once you're on the list it's basically a license to print money so the last thing you want is changes to the system.

Well that clearly doesn’t work. Montreal is a perfect example. So much corruption on that list.

Right, so my point is that we need a solution to that corruption which itself is not an avenue for corruption.

Yea, that's called gsa.

And then they get comfy and loosen their standards... and when someone new comes along with a better technique it takes forever to hire them. As anybody with industry experience should know, that does not work.

The better alternative is forcing supplier to get an insurance.

e.g. we want a road that will be X feet wide and will last Y years provided no earthquakes. Maintenance cost + Z dollars per day closed comes from insurance.

Want to use old boring tech - you insurance cost is lower. Want to try something new and shiny. Your insurance rate is higher at first, but may go down in the future.

This is not unique to government. Private Corporations are really, really good at wasting money as well.

Is there a realistic approach to this that doesn't require changing a fundamental aspect of humanity?

> And this is not just a cost issue. Its estimated that failure to adhere to known safer pavement designs is resulting in 10,000 - 15,000 unnecessary deaths a year.

That seems unlikely, if this was in a single state, considering only about 35k people die each year on the roads in the entire country.

Is it possible that the 10-15k figure includes a different way of counting? Pedestrians and bikes etc?

It would be good to see a source.

No pedestrians or bikes on the interstate. It's likely the figure is just a large exaggeration.

Or it’s multiplied over the expected life of the roadway?

Since the figure quoted is "X deaths per year", that that would be a large exaggeration, as I said, right?

Here is another way to think about that story:

DOT and their proven, reliable contractor had experience with a certain method of rehabbing the joints between concrete slabs. A new technique was tried, and the first few attempts were not done well. The new technique showed promise, but there was a concern that if the new technique failed, there would be consequences to the state for trying a new technique rather than the tried-and-true method. To reduce the risk to themselves, the DOT went with the old method.

IME, DOT and transit agencies often shy away from new methods/techniques because they are raked over the coals whenever the new approach doesn't work out (see SF Bay Bridge, or the Big Dig [0]). That makes them risk averse to trying or sticking with innovative methods.

[0] I'm not saying that cost problems with those projects are completely due to new methods/processes, but significant chunks were.

Unfortunately, there is no such thing as a riskless option.

If the last decades of experience with government and corporate bureaucracies taught us anything, it's that one of the primary functions of bureaucracies is to route risk around. Every part of an organization is risk-phobic, so the risk accumulates in places where the people either can't effectively dump it on someone else, or they don't notice what's happening.

So e.g. here, by choosing an inferior but established method over a superior but new one, the DOT was routing the risk in the form of "they might rake us over the coals" away from themselves, and dumping it onto taxpayers in the form of "we'll pay more for it now, and even more when it breaks in a couple of years".

We should still be talking about this. That story fascinated me. If the media went into more detail on infrastructure beyond stories about how it's crumbling or who in congress does or doesn't want to pay for it, that could really make a difference.

I would watch a nightly news show called "Infrastructure Tonight" if it existed.

It would be awesome if the fourth estate executed their role in society proper. But outlets like the WSJ have to push out an article per minute to remain relevant in the search ranking.

Maybe news is more important than just supplying entertainment and should the world take notice of UK's model with the BBC.

you are also subscribed to and paying Vice?

The great thing about markets is people get to vote on what’s important to them. The bad thing about government programs is they can force everyone else to pay for what’s important to a few loud voices.

There are lots of high quality subscriber news agencies struggling because their services aren’t that important to most people. Using the state to force people to subsidize that won’t make them care more.

I get that. However, the DOT has used the approach in other areas with great success. In many cases, the concrete roadways were put in before finite element analysis models were available or even remotely realistic. A lot of research has gone into how to repair these after the fact so that money is saved and you don't get the thumpity thump, etc.

States make their own choices, though. The DOT can only cajole them by dangling money. If the only competency in a state DOT is to cut a check, and there is not going to be any price to be paid for putting in a road that is unsafe or that does not last or that costs too much, then it is more likely that too much money will be spent.

Another related story is this relative went to Germany to confer with counterparts over there and compare notes. The Germans were laughing at them because they use the US research, but the US doesn't. We have great research spanning multiple decades, but political concerns are what end up determining how roads are built.

However, the DOT has used the approach in other areas with great success.

And I get that - in fact I live it. I'm a government contractor that works on transportation projects and it's frustrating when a particular agency doesn't want to use an innovative technique or design that has literally been successful on another project that's only a few miles away but project managers don't want to be testifying in front of their state legislatures about wasting tax payer money with a new fangled approach when the tried and true could have been used. Magazines like Engineering News-Record and ASME/ASCE journals bang the drum for concepts like "state of good repair" and ROI, but as long as the public will hang a politician or project manager out to try for an unsuccessful project (or worse, a new technique that kills someone), project managers will route around risk.

Again, I'm not saying this is why US projects are so expensive, but there is often a rational through process behind seemingly irrational decisions.

(yes, there are times where incompetency and/or corruption are also to blame, but IME it's much less often than portrayed in this thread).

Maybe the construction industry or infrastructure need to find their analogue to “cloud” and “AI” so that when the heads of these departments from different states get together they can crow about how their contractors are using “smart” concrete and “smart” building techniques built with the assistance of DoT AI. Something to make them feel like they’re keeping up with the other state DoT Joneses.

Interesting dynamic. It's also behind the theory why NASA missions tend to become huge and long lasting. No iteration. Failures avoided at all cost.

Sometimes new techniques turn out to be a disaster. I-495 in Massachusetts was built using a new technique for concrete roadways. Concrete is normally not used to build roads in New England because it doesn't handle frost heaves. The new technique "solved" that problem. The result was that every inch of I-495 has had to be rebuilt. Even worse, the first "rebuild" was to lay asphalt over the concrete and then subsequently everything had to be ripped out and done again.

Almost certainly they switched contractors because of corruption.

Here in Montreal, it's well known that the mob runs the construction industry and quite frankly you're not allowed to even bid on contracts without their say so, otherwise you'll get visited for a very frank chat.

So I can't speak for why infrastructure is expensive elsewhere, but atleast here in Quebec (& likely RoC) it's simply because of corruption. See the recent woes of SNC Lavalin.

Also explains the crumbling infrastructure of Montreal. The mob always needs more money to do the same work, sometimes many times more.

The thing is, even if this is true, it still doesn’t explain the cost difference between us and e.g. Japan. Construction firms and public infrastructure works in Japan have well-known ties to the yakuza, yet they still finish these at way lower costs than us (even though labor is more expensive!) Why?

Cultural differences: Japan is pretty homogenous and they seem to see themselves as part of a whole whereas in the US, for example, exploiting your fellow citizens for profit is almost a matter of duty in business.

Seems like a cliched and simplistic explanation to just waive away a large difference with 'culture'.

Sometimes things really are that simple though. Why can you (most of the time) leave your bike outside a store you stop at in Japan but not in America? Because it isn't part of Japanese culture to take what doesn't belong to you, but is normal for a number of Americans. Why can you get relatively wholesome food at a 7-11 in East Asian countries while you get junk and trash at ones in America? Because Japanese people prefer real food over getting chips and a crappy sandwich for lunch. Why are nice public facilities possible in those kinds of countries and not America? Because those people don't wreck, vandalize, and spray grafiti on them, while Americans do.

I'm an American and I don't wreck, vandalize or spray grafiti. I've seen same in Japan, Brazil, India, Hong Kong, Singapore, Paris, etc... (and US). Your generalizations are lazy.

You are one American. Generally, in American culture, the things I described are commonplace and par for the course while in East Asian countries (or other smaller, homogenous countries) not so much. If it does happen sometimes in those places, it is generally far less acceptable while in America you must simply accept it and factor it into the cost of operation. Having lived here all my life, it is funny to see anyone deny it.

And I am not surprised vandalism and graffiti occurs in Brazil, India, and Paris by the way. I would group those places in the same realm as the U.S.

Yeah, I'm American too, and I don't understand why people like the OP are so willing to defend this country against claims that are so obviously true. Vandalism and graffiti are very common in America, though of course it really depends on the area. There's plenty of graffiti in Europe too. Japan, no.

I find it really odd how some people will say good things about other place's cultures, but then deny that culture is a factor when discussing the bad parts about a place. Culture is a real thing, it really does exist, and it isn't always good.

As an Australian who has recently visited both the states and Japan, I can attest that there is a significant difference in the quality and care for the commons in both.

Personal anecdote: I saw a drunk Japanese businessman vomit on the sidewalk outside a bar in Tokyo, who then went back into the bar and collected napkins in order to clean up said puke. After cleaning up the puke, he then walked into a neighboring lamppost and collapsed to the ground, and an onlooker then went to his aid.

Would you steal a bicycle in Japan?

I wouldn't and it has nothing to do with hand-wavy culture.

The reason I would not touch the unlocked bicycle is because I know it is registered with the police. If I got stopped on that bicycle and they looked up the frame number then I would have some explaining to do. Even if I claimed it was mine I could still be prosecuted for not registering 'the change of ownership' with the police. You could imagine the lying, language difficulties and the situation spiralling out of control to end up with time spent in the cells and a few million yen in fines. Could happen.

Note that in America a bicycle is a toy. It has only survived as a vehicle that can be used on the highway by fate, there have been plenty of efforts to fully ban the bicycle from the road and to denigrate it as a toy.

To extrapolate from the bicycle theft situation in Japan to assume that Japanese people are Not Like Us and therefore don't steal is wishful thinking. Personally I believe that Americans are exceptionally unlikely to steal your stuff. I am actually sure that if I did go on a round the world tour that I would find this matter of being honest to be a near universal human trait.

Bicycle theft thing is just one example. I was giving various examples of how culture played a role in influencing the environment. I never said Japanese people are Not Like Us and "therefore don't steal".

Your personal belief that Americans are exceptionally unlikely to steal your stuff is your belief to have. But I would still not leave my bike out for the Americans who do steal to take it and then have the other Americans who don't steal victim shame me "Oh, well why did you leave your bike out?"

It's just totally different man, culture is a hell of a drug. Maybe generally, if you're a lucky person, most people are honest, but A LOT aren't, and I'm not gonna be the one to drop my guard in America. I'll leave that to you and others.

Personally I believe that Americans are exceptionally unlikely to steal your stuff.

I guess the people who stole my former startup's hardware prototypes and thousands of dollars of equipment didn't get the memo, nor did the professionals who broke into the bike lockers at a previous residence and stole thousands of dollars of bicycles.

There is also the matter of pre-emptive multi-karma. If you expect to be mugged then you will be. If you expect people to return your lost wallet then they will return it. Hence life works out better if one sees the nicest people one could wish to meet whilst in America. There is a good and a bad side to all of us, even the worst bullies can be nice on occasion. Same with thieves, there is honour among thieves, if you are in the gang they ain't going to trouble you.

Sorry to hear you have been a victim of crime, but are you sure the culprits were American?

Why blame a local when politicians always present an omnipotent and omnipresent foreign enemy?

The thieves could have been drug smuggling rapists that weren't stopped by a wall at the border. Or they could have been from Liverpool, where a sense of pride exists for being light fingered. I doubt they were true Scotsmen though.

I don't think your personal anecdote is a good indictment of corruption of a country on a statistical level.

> Because it isn't part of Japanese culture to take what doesn't belong to you, but is normal for a number of Americans.

This may be hard to believe if your knowledge of American society is limited to certain strata, but it's absolutely true. If you spend some time on Reddit, on places like /r/AmITheAsshole, you'll find that a vast proportion of people outright justifies theft, shoplifting, cheating and many other sorts of unethical behavior.

Except in areas where citizens are allowed to "exploit their fellow citizens," i.e. markets, things are done in the US and elsewhere extremely efficiently. The problem with public infrastructure spending is that incentive structures are not cost driven, or at least not primarily as a function of cost. There are promises made to unions or contractor companies who pay the politicians or makeup major parts of their constituencies. Then there are other departments that have their say, such as environmental impact analyses. Then there is major price insensitivity, because the funding was guaranteed from taxes with absolutely no implication or responsibility to spend wisely or generate a return.

yakuza would probably be mortified if they were responsible for things going badly.

Even the Yakuza feel a sense of social obligation.

The Guardian had a so-called Concrete Week[1] earlier this year when they published articles related to the concrete industry and its impact.

One of the articles [2] touched briefly on the corruption related to the building and concrete industry.

I assure you, these mafias exist in a lot of places. Odebrecht has entangled governments of Peru and Brazil with corruption here in South America. I would be interested where else has this happened.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/cities/series/guardian-concrete-...

[2] https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2019/feb/25/concrete-the-...

Teh French cement company Lafarge did business with jihadis in Syria during the current civil war, including with the Islamic State [1]. That's corruption on a whole new level, as I'm 100% sure the decision to conduct this type of business was taken at the company's HQ in France.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jun/28/lafarge-charge...

15 years ago,I worked on a residential project. Being a young boy with not much of work experience, I found it quite amusing. One day I got assigned to register all incoming deliveries. So here comes this truck with bricks.The driver gets off the truck,I inspect the bricks and he gives me the paperwork to sign: it says 7 trucks with n pallets of bricks..I look at the driver,at the truck and ask him: so where are the other 6 trucks??? The driver looks at me,has a good laugh and says: that's not something you or I need to worry about. Just sign and move on...The H&S inspector from the council used to pay occasional visits to the site.He told the site manager that if someone dies,he should call him first and then the ambulance...The owner of the business used to come on site on weekly basis to pay us wages.He used to carry a briefcase stuffed with money and a gun...On the opposite site of the road there used to be the office of a political party..The head of the party used to come to our site for money. The site manager used to call the project owners,local millionaires, asking what to do.They used to tell him to give him the money and they will reimburse him later on... It was a circus of a highest order...

Why would you passively participate? This seems like corruption at its core - something worthy of a fight against!

I think that's addressed in the parent

>He used to carry a briefcase stuffed with money and a gun

The worst part is we still have shit roads.

And this has been studied. The reason is simple. The pave mix uses used car engine oil instead of new bitum/oil. This leads to surface crumbling at much higher rate.

Yet everything is blamed on the winter and salt.

Given that the US vehicle fatalities as a whole are only around 36,000 (source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in...), 10 - 15 thousand seems hard to believe.

I read that as a worldwide figure. But, I would still like a source.

>The first few joints that they redid were not done well, but they rapidly improved and the approach looked really good.

So in the end the contractor knew how to do it properly but decided not to fix the initial burnt batch? Is it really a surprise that they were not hired?

My SO did soil testing for the state for public works projects. Things like water retention rates, expansion, Atterberg tests, etc. It's incredibly basic stuff. Like, how much does the soil expand when it rains/snows? Over a few hundred miles of road bed, even small percentages will add up. In our state there are clays that will expand 4x their volume before water can no longer be absorbed. It turns out, the earth can be suprisingly active on a week to week basis, just from rain.

So, yeah, there is a LOT of corruption and incompetence out there. But we've figured out a lot about soils/rocks/dirt in the last 40 years or so too. It's that there is this deep perception in most people that dirt is well ... dirt. Like, it's dirt, it doesn't change or move.

So, you get issues where they pave the road-bed over just after a rain. And then the road dries out over 2 years and the entire road just breaks apart. Or you get the problem where the the pH of the soil wasn't tested, so the rebar in the concrete will corrode faster. Or they build another thing nearby and change the drainage patterns around your dam. It's not simple stuff to make a house or a 70mph highway that will last for 50 years without a lot of issues.

Honestly, it does take a PhD these days.

Apropos: https://www.denverpost.com/2019/07/16/us-36-denver-boulder-c...

We have had an unusually wet year and a chunk of roadway collapsed. Fortunately, it was slow enough that the road was closed well in advance of being a danger to motorists. The blame game is extra-complex since this is a toll road and a public/private partnership. The article goes into good detail.

tl;dr lawyers/actors are in charge of projects for which they have no domain expertise. just using their temporary appointment on a 'transportation committee' as a stepping stone to some other job in public office.

the actual planning and execution are either completely neglected over politicized that its almost impossible to build something efficiently. not to mention building such projects in large cities is extremely complicated and requires tons of focus and experience. doing it the way our government structures projects is almost impossible.

there are only like 40k fatal accidents a year in the US, i seriously doubt 25-30% would be prevented from safer pavement design.

There are a lot of opinions being floated here, so I feel free to float mine. I think that the use of private contractors for public works leads to corruption and large cost overruns.

It is a truism that government agencies lack competition, and thus can be less efficient and/or innovative compared to private enterprise. However, as we know, private enterprise's goal is profit, and profit only requires efficiency in the face of competition and price sensitivity of the consumer. While there can be competition and price sensitivity during contract bidding process, this can be corrupted through back door dealings, political donations, etc. Perhaps even more dire, is that government agencies may be bad at keeping contractors to the terms of their contract, being responsible for cost over-runs, etc, who actively wish to get the government to pay as much as possible. I think that infrastructure would be much cheaper if it were designed and built by government employees of the relevant agencies, because although they might not have extreme efficiency, they have no profit motive to swindle an inattentive government consumer. It is my opinion anyway. I do not have the resources to find the relevant data to see if there is a correlation in cost and private vs public employee construction. I'd like to see some empirical meat on my hunch. I did find several articles:

https://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/13/us/13contractor.html https://www.forbes.com/sites/erikkain/2011/09/18/do-private-...

> 10,000 - 15,000 unnecessary deaths a year

It's a very strong claim, and I don't believe it. Total deaths in US for road accidents is ~37,000 per year. [0]. I find it hard to believe that 30-40% of it is caused just by inferior pavement design.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in...

The author briefly touched on how it's also expensive in countries with similar law-systems like Canada and Australia. It may just be that our laws make it a lot easier for contractors to jack up government contracts.

My personal opinion is that managers and regulators in Europe and South Korea are a lot more efficient because they have a lot more freedom to apply common sense and personal judgement without fear of getting sued over a stupid technicality in a contract dispute.

Whereas in US & Canada it's common for companies to sue the government over a small/irrelevant technicality and win a big settlement.

Thus regulators and contractors interpret rules as literally as possible in order to avoid this legal confrontation and I think it's precisely this that drastically reduces the construction efficiency of public projects.

One thing that surprised me in Germany, both in Munich and Berlin was that while the central train & subway stations were quite grandiose (Hauptbahnhof's interior looks like something out of Halo), the stations in the periphery of the city were surprisingly quite "thin and light", built frugally with thin weather shielding and a minimal amount of materials.

Whereas in Toronto it's the opposite. We built a $6Billion subway extension, with 6 stations at a billion each, all overbuilt in exactly the same standard. Only half of them actually have any population within walking distance and one is a complete ghost-town. The reason why this happened was because treating all 6 equally was safe and no one complained.

It's not hard to see how you can provide the same service for 1/4 of the price.

As an European, I'm always surprised when someone says that our governments are efficient. We're always complaining about them.

The grass is always greener on the other side. It’s funny OP mentions Berlin train stations but fails to mention the Berlin Airport.

I always appreciate peoples' willingness to be self-deprecating about their situation, but just because the world is imperfect doesn't mean that that imperfection is evenly distributed. At least here in the US, it seems we have a dearth of both understanding and ability to reason about the degree of that understanding.

Boston had to pare back stations on its Green Line Extension to save over a half billion dollars: https://www.thetransportpolitic.com/2016/05/10/frequent-serv...

A hard-to-capture cost factor is keeping highly used services operational or replaced while doing work on it. A super-fancy new subway with lots of stations in Shenzhen where people weren't already taking trains and expecting to use stations for their daily commute will be much cheaper than disrupting a line service to open a new station in London or New York City. Replacement bus bridge services, network-wide service advisories, staff and enforcement training, are all costs that are not easy to quantify or justify because it doesn't directly manifest in the construction of the infrastructure.

Of course there are other factors that vary a lot across cultures:

* China's heavy-handed governmental decision-making leaves no room for inefficiencies via neighborhood antagonism towards the constructions or zoning;

* Car culture differences create different magnitudes of popular roadblocks to investment in non-automobile infrastructure, which can result in large expenditures on lobbying and campaigning;

* Significantly more arbitrary middlemen making their way into the process because of "let the market figure it out" does, in fact, create some process inefficiencies in supply chains and contract pipelines. Few countries are as aggressively market-based for things meant for public good as the US.

> A hard-to-capture cost factor is keeping highly used services operational or replaced while doing work on it.

Anyone who does any kindof "building" (whether it be software engineers making schema changes, or a general contractor adding to an existing house vs building from scratch) knows this intimately, so really it shouldn't be any kind of surprise at all

But to the article's original point, the people conducting the research to prepare these reports are non-experts. So they wouldn't even know where to look for these figures.

Exactly. It's super evident to anyone who works on maintaining SaaS that is in production with at least a hundred users at any given time using it in real-time when you are trying to push features or fixes that even going down for a minute will result in serious service reputation damage. We engineer a lot of reusable scaffolding and reporting tools to modify our services in-situ with minimal/no disruption because it is a huge priority. Operating on public infrastructure is the closest real-world parallel.

But to most people who work jobs where their choices don't directly influence customer service uptime (including a construction worker or a surveyor of construction for the same public works, as opposed to the project coordinator/planner/senior architect/engineer), this is an opaque cost.

> Significantly more arbitrary middlemen making their way into the process because of "let the market figure it out" does, in fact, create some process inefficiencies in supply chains and contract pipelines. Few countries are as aggressively market-based for things meant for public good as the US.

This times a 1000. This is a huge factor that I think is missing. The market will just price in the labor required of all the people to make something happen. In other governments/countries, the heavy-handed government tends to basically say "We are paying this much, who wants to do it?". And they really only pay that much. There's no room for cost over runs. On the flip-side, a lot of times the amount is established by some bureaucrats friend before the project is even set to take off and the criteria are design to favor that friend and their companies price and strengths.

Profit is also priced in of course. You pay a public employee $1 to do $1 worth of labor, all swell. To get that same $1 worth of labor out of the private contractor, you need to pay $1.30 so that their C level employees get paid C level and their shareholders see exponential growth. It's parasitic and public funds should not be allowed to be skimmed by this by these bad actors.

You are correct that private companies are adding cost due to the desire to make money. I think the issue with the “public employee $1 to do $1 worth of labor” is that you get a level of complacency with government employees that can be a huge black hole for project funding. It’s possible, though not always the case, to allow a private company to make a profit while still getting more for your money. If the private employee is more efficient, they may need less hours to accomplish the same task. So the hourly rate may be higher, but there could be less hours in the equation to make the overall cost the same or lower. In theory at least.

> Significantly more arbitrary middlemen making their way into the process because of "let the market figure it out" does, in fact, create some process inefficiencies in supply chains and contract pipelines. Few countries are as aggressively market-based for things meant for public good as the US.

It's kind of disingenuous to blame "let the market figure it out" for government contracting problems that are attributable almost entirely to political corruption.

Governments buy a million things from the private sector using contract bidding with reasonable requirements, and then the low bidding napkin vendor turns out to be Walmart or some direct napkin producer in the midwest, the state spends 0% of its overall budget on napkins, and nobody pays any attention to the successful process because it's 0% of the overall budget and there is nothing to complain about.

The problem is that it's all too easy for a corrupt politician to purposely add a contract requirement that only a specific contractor can satisfy, with the predictable consequences for the level of competitive bidding and the contract price. But that's not fundamentally any different than politicians pandering to government workers unions by "creating jobs" supervising people who are digging holes and filling them back in, even if they're all direct government employees.

The people receiving the money have a much larger incentive to spend their influence on that specific project than the average taxpayer, because it constitutes 100% of their income rather than 0.5% of their tax dollars, only then there are a hundred such projects and it looks like half the budget is waste (because it is).

The problem is probably made worse by the separation between revenue and spending. We have one institution in charge of generating money (tax collector) and then a hundred separate ones in charge of spending it, but the spenders aren't accountable for the money and there is a lot of buffer because the government as a whole can just spend more than it collects and issue debt to make up the rest of it. Which means there is nobody really in charge of making sure the taxpayer is getting good value for money in any given project.

What we could do is to elect the heads of the various government departments (e.g. transportation, education, law enforcement) and have them pull revenue from the same source (e.g. sales or income tax), but the tax rate is set directly based on how much money they actually spend. In other words, they set their own individual budgets, but they also have to individually directly answer to taxpayers. But the general legislature still has to approve the overall budget to keep any of them from getting out of hand.

Then if the head of transportation doubles the transportation budget to spend it on corruption and waste, leading directly to a 2% increase in the sales tax (and doesn't get vetoed by the general legislature), he's out on his butt in two years, and is more likely to actually end up in jail because now more people are paying attention.

Suppose your team needs new workstations. Or an RDBMS, a server operating system, a compiler, a profiler, or any number of things.

“Write down the requirements, we will put out an RFP and give you the cheapest supplier that satisfies the requirements” is an absurd approach. The people on your team have familiarity and proficiency with certain tools, experience with many more, and professionally informed opinions of most. These things vary wildly in terms of quality and fitness for purpose in ways that are wickedly hard to pin down in a document listing objective criteria. The best tools may be open source, or from small time shareware shops that will not submit proposals. There may be some discount IDE out there with the same feature set as IntelliJ but unbearably frequent crashes. Well, there is no credible independent report proving its deficiency, so it’s what you’re going to get. There are some ridiculous programming languages out there, but “not ridiculous according to my team” is a clearly subjective and corrupt requirement.

Do you think following this process faithfully will make your team more or less efficient than rigging it to land on the tools you know to be right for the job?

> These things vary wildly in terms of quality and fitness for purpose in ways that are wickedly hard to pin down in a document listing objective criteria.

It's more work. It's not impossible. And when the difference is literally millions of dollars, it's worth doing the work.

> The best tools may be open source, or from small time shareware shops that will not submit proposals.

If they're open source then you don't need to solicit bids because you're not appropriating money, and if the bidding process excludes small legitimate vendors then you can start by addressing that.

> There may be some discount IDE out there with the same feature set as IntelliJ but unbearably frequent crashes.

"Doesn't crash more than once per N hours of normal usage" is a fairly objective criteria that can be specified under terms like "if it does that then payment is withheld until you fix it."

> There are some ridiculous programming languages out there, but “not ridiculous according to my team” is a clearly subjective and corrupt requirement.

Then identify the thing that objectively makes it unsuitable and add that to the requirements. It can't be subjectively ridiculous yet have no objective defects unless your subjective determination is without merit.

The difference between this and rigging the bid is that if e.g. the IDE that is only unsuitable because it crashes all the time could have that defect corrected for a million dollars, and it's a ten million dollar contract, it becomes worth it for the other vendor to fix their code so they can bid on the contract, whereas if you rig everything then that's impossible and the sole vendor gets to charge the taxpayer monopoly prices.

"let the market figure it out" is high variance, low bias => good in the long run (probably the only stable choice) "let bureaucrats figure it out" is low variance, high bias => more reliable in the short run but escalates in the long run

It turns out most people who influence this decision (politicians etc.) have short-term interests and no long-term responsibility so countries with a weaker constitution (like here in Europe) tend to rather go with the latter one...

"why is American infrastructure so bad?" has been a topic I am curious about. The above article does not answer the question.

I'd prefer not to care about American infrastructure costs. Unfortunately, I occasionally have to leave my house, and the consequences of bad infrastructure stare me in the face: people living in their cars, traffic jams.

The best attempt to actually answer the question I've seen has been "Pedestrian Observations" blog. Their take on the same GAO report is:

[New Report on Construction Costs Misses the Mark](https://pedestrianobservations.com/2019/07/22/new-report-on-...)

"The GAO report is out now, and unfortunately it is a total miss, for essentially the same reason the RPA’s report was a miss: it did not go outside the American (and to some extent rest-of-Anglosphere) comfort zone"

Check out strongtowns.org.

Here's my simplistic answer to this in three words: incompetence, corruption, self-interest. Having worked on a multiple construction projects and witnessed all 3 abovementioned aspects in various shapes and forms,I'd like to give a real life example. In the second largest city in Lithuania,a retailer got an approval to build a massive shopping center in the very center of the city.An agreement between the city council and the retailer was made and part of the project was to build a small bridge connecting the road outside the shopping center and a small island in the river alongside the road. The contract was won by a company that specialises in road and bridge building..So far so good. The works started. I used to go past the site on daily basis and often observed many people simply standing on the upcoming bridge and not doing much... Eventually a guy I used to know got a job with the company to work on that bridge project.Money was good..He quit after only a month.When I enquired what happened,he said that he is a man of work and can't stand idle. Even thought he tried his best,he couldn't stand the fact that he simply couldn't not work.On his first day,he went to the site manager and asked what he should be doing.He got told to collect a massive spanner and tighten 12 bolts on the metal construction.He returned to the manager in 45min or so and asked what's his next task.The site manager looked at him with anger and disappointment and said: look, it's your first day and you already making mistakes.I have given you a task for the whole day,not just for 45min..So now I now have to come up with something else for you to do.. Don't you ever do this to me again.You need to preserve your work,not rush with it.. Now scale it up to a massive underground project and you'll get the idea where the money is going to..

A couple of facts that should at least provide a baseline for costs (like the best case scenario): Shenzhen metro: 198 stations, about 180 miles of track (soon to be more like 250 miles), majority of it built in past 10-12 years. All I can find so far on cost is the phase iii cost which says it will cost about 20 billion. Phase I was quite small. So maybe they have spent about 30 billion to get almost 200 miles of rail and lots of stations? I’ve used the Shenzhen metro and it’s pretty nice. Also used the Shanghai metro as well.

Often in the US, stations are cited as a big cost.

Would be interesting to get a pie chart for costs between US and China like land acquisition costs, labor, raw materials, management, etc.

A bit disappointing that the report essentially ended in a “it depends” type of non-informative report.

> Would be interesting to get a pie chart for costs between US and China like land acquisition costs, labor, raw materials, management, etc.

Safety, incidents/deaths, etc...

(Although I believe that the costs for large infra projects are ballooning for a lot of reasons, comparison to China continues to ignore the human cost and history there)

China doesn't have to worry about liability and cover-your-ass costs, which are huge.

Also presumably land acquisition/NIMBYism is easier to deal with.

Labour costs are much lower . . .

> cover-your-ass costs

Everything in a Communist Party in power in any country in the world, at any time, has been about cover-your-ass stuff. At least policies, if not costs.

Those are cover-your-ass with respect to your superiors. In America, the cover-your-ass costs are with respect to the citizens who will use the infrastructure.

In China the purpose of infrastructure projects is to get infrastructure.

In the US the purpose of infrastructure projects is to enrich everyone associated with the project.

No China infrastructure project is laden with just different kind of political strings. In US the system has to impress up on voters, unions, donors etc. In China the hogs at the trough are just different.

You say that but they get things done while we build nice mansions for contractors instead.

That simply isn’t true at all. There are plenty of unused or underused highways and bridges in China that made a few red families lots of money.

It’s fascinating to me that some people think corruption in China is lower than the USA. Not even the Chinese would make such a claim.

It's absolutely corrupt, but in a way that still gets projects done. Many, many projects, on a scale we can't even conceive of here. It's hard to believe our corruption is worse, but Occam's Razor says otherwise.

I did not at all claim there is no corruption. But look at your own quote:

> There are plenty of [...] highways and bridges in China

I think we agree that the infrastructure does get built!

Much of it with the main purpose of enriching people.

China, especially a few decades ago, was so poor that eminent domain was a complete non-issue. Combined with a fairly authoritarian government system, building a train line faced basically no resistance.

In the US, it's almost the opposite. The places where public transit is most needed are the most highly valuable, densely populated areas, where eminent domain is a nightmare. In the US, all of our highly populated areas are already urban. In the past, that was certainly not the case in China, and to an extent, still so today.

One of China's more ambitious solutions to this was newly founded, planned metropolises where no major city had previously stood.

Aka the infamous ghost cities?

Which would you rather have? A city that stands empty, ready for people to move in, or a city so full and restricted that people camp on the streets?

China has both, actually, so you don’t really have to choose. Those cities won’t fill if they are faraway from jobs, migrants go where they can make money even if they have to sleep under a ring road bridge.

China has no shortage of people. These cities will fill up.

Maybe it's my Bay Area PTSD, but if too much housing is the worst problem in your society, I envy you and want to subscribe to your newsletter!

I’ve been to a few that haven’t filled up in 10 years, eg kangbashi is going nowhere unless coal makes a big comeback (unlikely).

I’ll match your Bay Area PTSD with my Beijing PTSD. The crazy thing is that even in Beijing there are lots of empty apartments (bought by speculators for flipping only who don’t want to renovate them so they can be rented out).

I always want to defer my theoretical speculative punditry to people's real experience, so I'll agree you're probably right.

Many of them, yes. Keep in mind, too, though that there are places like Shenzen. It's grown an order of magnitude in 40 years and was designated as a specific enterprise zone. It was a market town. Now it's an electronics manufacturing powerhouse.

For every Shenzhen there are ten Kangbashies and a couple of Tianjin financial districts.

> * China, especially a few decades ago, was so poor that eminent domain was a complete non-issue*

This is a really weird framing of a system without any private property where people who got in the way of the government where slaughtered by the millions.

Yeah, it's improved immensely since 1989, but still. Let's not forget history. The killers are still alive.

Don't kid yourself, there are people getting rich on those china projects.

They're also getting some really nice infrastructure in the process. I can't say the same for America these days.

Nothing wrong with getting rich from providing important infrastructure to society.

Ideas like this which are politically charged but plausible explanations also square with the GAO's failure to make a satisfactory report. Perhaps certain interests tugged on people which tugged on others and ended up watering down the GAO's report. If it weren't true, at the very least the report could dispell/falsify the notion that widespread corruption were to blame. But instead, we get neither.

Lots of people get rich in China and the railways, roads, and buildings get built. In the US people just take the money and don't build anything in a lot of corrupt states. In some states there is less obvious corruption and things get built more quickly. New York City and State are simply unusually corrupt by US standards and corrupt by global first world standards.

And yet Robert Moses managed to ram home some of the most ambitious public works projects the world has ever seen in New York, precisely because he was somewhat corrupt and could disregard process and opinion.

I think self enrichment on public projects is a thing anywhere public projects happen. The difference is that in the US it is often the only goal due to the politics involved with creating budgets which often result in bartering silly little projects to make this or that representative vote along. The problem with this is that these small uncoordinated efforts serve no bigger strategy. It's literally nothing more than a photo opportunity for some politician to look good just in time for his next election.

China seems really good at coming up with long term strategies and then executing them over the course of a few decades. The US used to have that ability but seems to have lost that. The highways and railways of the US were built in a very different era where such things were needed and people got tasked with getting things done on an epic scale. A bit like China is today maybe.

China deployed massive amounts of infrastructure over the past few decades. That was intentional and probably made a lot of people very wealthy as a side effect of getting that job done. Maybe not all of that is as effective and there definitely is somewhat of a debt bubble around this.

The fix in the US and Europe is to make public spending on these things sexy again and to stop relying on contractors that are in it for funneling as much public funds to their own pockets as they possibly can. Big government haters have been good at scaling down government, which used to get things done inefficiently but at least got them done and is now simply not getting things done at all. The market did not step in to do it better and when it did get involved, it optimized for profit and enrichment instead of results. Probably by most objective standards this is less efficient from a tax dollar point of view as it is a lot more expensive and the results are decidedly underwhelming.

Here in Berlin, the new airport is a good example of inept politicians making some contractors and themselves very rich while not getting the job done for nearly a decade past its original opening date in 2012, before it became clear that there was not going to be an opening two weeks before the planned date. Especially, when you consider that it is supposed to replace two existing airports that were built with a minimum of fuss and cost in the cold war era when airports simply got built when politicians decided they wanted one. E.g. Tegel, one of the current airports got constructed in 90 days in 1948 to support the Berlin airlift and still serves much of the traffic in Berlin (way more than it was ever intended to be able to handle). Planning for the new airport started in 1996 and it's still unclear if they are actually opening as planned in 2021.

With all the bright minds on hacker news i honestly think we could make this report ourselves.. I wonder if there are good sources for this info?

The trend for more people moving to cities would seem that everything is moving in the direction of making infrastructure projects at least in cities more reasonable for every passing year. So seems like a worthwhile effort.

We are notoriously unable to estimate the time required to complete software projects. Most of us have zero practical knowledge of civil engineering.

Expertise in one field does not automatically confer expertise in another.

> The usual way you produce journalism or policy research on a technical question like this is that you hire someone with expertise in journalism or public policy to produce a report. That person calls up relevant experts and asks them to talk, for free, about their areas of expertise. This is one of the great perks of my job: I call up lawyers and other professionals who ordinarily charge hundreds of dollars an hour for their services, and they talk to me for free, whether because they find it interesting, because they have a message they want to get out in the world, or simply because they like seeing their names quoted in print.

This is probably uncouth for Hacker News, but let me just say: Aaaahahahahahahahahha. Is there really an expectation of accuracy if your method is calling up an expert and asking him to pontificate for a little bit? Whatever happened to accounting? Shouldn't the way you go about this is run the numbers, find the differences in isolated segments AND THEN ask the expert why such a difference exists?

I think it a large discredit to this journalist and the organization he/she works for if they think this is how they're going to spread important, useful information to the masses.

The experts often have already done that work already, often that's how they became an expert.

Which then means why redo the work when you can call the expert and get things pre-digested for you.

I think the basic idea of investigatory journalism is that the journalist is not necessarily an expert in the topic they write about, but is good at finding informed sources, getting overlapping information from all of them, and determining who can be trusted on which facts.

Getting overlapping information seems like a good play, but the determination of who can be trusted on which facts (again, as a non-expert) seems like it'd be drowning in personal bias.

What is your alternative proposal, if you were to (say) do research on the likely future of US-China trade policy, to make it concrete?

I would ask an expert :) But therein lies the rub, I wouldn't ask an expert who was known for profiting off of US-China trade policy news. My spider sense fires here because the GAO is asking the contractors, who benefit from the infrastructure project corruption, why is contracting so expensive and complex? And lo and behold, the contractors tell him, its too complex a question to answer. Fancy that.

They can hardly become a subject matter expert, the same way a jury can't. But they can compare the information different sources provided, research the reliability of a source, etc. It's ridiculous to think the only acceptable way of finding information is to do it yourself, especially if you don't happen to personally be a small army of accountants.

As other respondents have said, a good journalist does not rely on a single expert. Good reporting cross-checks multiple sources, often seeking out conflicting ones, and trying to form a coherent story out of that.

Unfortunately, that often leads to false dichotomy. It's not sufficient to seek out a contradictory source... especially if that contradictory source is not credible. But it's very exciting journalism to say, "We spoke to X and Y, who bitterly disagree with each other. We'll gloss over the fact that X has a PhD and the support of the entire community, while Y is funded by motivated donors and has been repeatedly debunked. We'll go to Y every single time because they only fund the one."

So yeah, journalism is in trouble. Not for reliance on experts, but for failing to rely on themselves when a story seems fishy... and for relying on the public to care about whether they have or not.

Why is it that you assume that a PhD or community support makes someone right? And surely he gets his paycheck from someone just as Y does, right?

It doesn't, in itself. But when a PhD with very widespread support disagrees with somebody so lacking in the relevant discipline that they keep making the same elementary mistakes over and over in support of a preconceived notion, it's a really strong sign that they're not really talking on an equal footing.

It's not always easy to rule out outsider with novel ideas, but there are lists of warning signs of crankery and motivated reasoning that a journalist should be able to identify. There will always be a gray area, but that's no excuse for lazy journalists to repeatedly seek out anybody willing to disagree just for the purpose of presenting an equal-and-opposite story.

> Good reporting cross-checks multiple sources, often seeking out conflicting ones, and trying to form a coherent story out of that.

To me such reporting is not good enough.

Have you read Asimov's Foundation? There's a character named Lord Dorwin who's interested in finding he truth about a certain subject, and whose method is to analyze and reconcile the opinions of "old masters" who have "covered the ground" before. Asimov explains quite scathingly why that doesn't work.

Grandparent comment is right: a reporter needs to be hands-on with the topic. If you write about overspending, and you only asked experts but never added two numbers in Excel yourself, what makes you qualified to weigh the opinions of experts?

Let alone cost, one thing that boggles my mind is how slow infrastructure building is in the US. In our area, a multi-billion dollar freeway or subway line will often be constructed with 5 days of a single 8-hour shift. I get that certain work needs to be done at night, but surely the work sites shouldn't sit empty for 16 hours a day!

Just think about the cost of equipment being rented, the overhead that is on salary, the amount of work to startup and shutdown the site for the day, and the opportunity cost lost by not having it done 2-3x as fast.

It's seems like it would be a no-brainer to have 3x the workers and get the job done in 1/3 the time.

Same principle applies here as with any software development effort. There are some natural bottlenecks that can't be avoided/parallelized (for e.g. waiting for a layer of asphalt to dry). Further, more people doing a thing doesn't mean it will get done faster. You have to contend with overhead of planning, context-switching and handover overhead between workers leaving/starting shifts etc. etc.

True but those constraints can result in more creative engineering.

Look at this timelapse of a bridge getting replaced in 43 hours. They had the new bridge built next to the orignal and "just" moved it into place—I'm using quotes because of course that is an impressive operation.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vz_j_BEkVCQ

This does happen in the US where it's cost effective. The Tappan Zee Bridge was replaced by a new bridge built completely from scratch in parallel, then the old bridge decommissioned.

You may want to check out how the Comm Ave bridge over the Pike was replaced in Boston. It was pretty quicke although not as fast 43 hours. However, we also couldn't afford to close the lower road (I-90) as above for an extended staging effort. I believe rail lines were only impacted on two weekend pushes.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zNiACLQtHyg

I'm guessing construction companies also have a desire to maintain a fairly stable set of employees. Doing a project 3x faster isn't exactly a win when there isn't 3x the amount of work to be done to sustain the operation over the long term.

People don't particularly enjoy boom / bust cycles, so finding competent employees would probably be difficult if everything was "go as fast as possible, then no work until the next contract hits". Construction is already seasonal. Making the work even more intermittent probably wouldn't work too well.

Given that most labourers are paid hourly, I suspect that the speed (or lack thereof) with which infrastructure projects are built _is_ the reason why they're so expensive

I'm no expert, but I would wager that costs are so high due to a mix of: state capture, a complex regulatory scheme, and relatively minor process inefficiency throughout the value chain that when taken as a whole slow down large projects.

The Congressional Act cited in the article explicitly states a timeline of 9 months for the GAO report to be delivered and yet it was 7 months late.

Many state budgets have not reached pre-2008 levels and regulatory agencies are ripe to be exploited by labor groups, lobbying, private property owners, etc.

The best part of this thread is that the article is about why it's really hard to understand the cost differences, while the top comments all offer unsupported and anecdotal speculation explaining the cost differences in 200 words or less.

"HN: Where dilettantes opine."

Mmmm, it's a good part, but I think the best part is all the people who have it figured out because in all of recorded history, nobody thought of checking into things like the costs of corruption.

It's nice that the city planners include it as a line item, why don't we look there?

I've been reading a lot about transit lately, and the one theme that seems to dominate cost and time overruns is reliance on contractors due to there being supposedly not enough labor.

Contractors bid to deliver an inferior product, because working to deliver a superior product will hurt their profit margins, and they are insulated from the fallout as all blame will go to the transit agency and not whichever dime a dozen contractor failed the project. By relying on the contractor model, these agencies don't need to maintain a bulky labor pool, but in the process for every public dollar given to project labor, a portion gets withheld for that profit margin. Privatization is fundamentally inefficient and has no place in public works projects.

Public engineering should be the most powerful force in this country, and for a time it really was. Some of the brightest engineering minds in the world are trained in our public universities, and many end up contributing to projects that are a net negative to society, blinded by the private sector paycheck and the supposed prestige that brings. LA Metro complains that there is a labor shortage, yet they provide regional transit to Cal Tech, USC (though a private school), and UCLA, serving the labor pool they claim doesn't exist. Public infrastructure agencies need to do a much better job at recruiting from our constant output of talent and preventing these students from being wasted in the private sector, working hard and wasting their years for someone else's dollar.

LA Metro also complains about a labor shortage in a region where 60k live on the street. If this was 1930, those destitute people would be hired and trained to build infrastructure. But this is 2019, and we can't even build homeless shelters lest they tarnish our sweet sweet property values.

I think in the cheap places they contract too, but yes as a contractor the incentives are almost always wrong and the balkanization precludes economies of scale.

I don’t fully buy that we can’t work this out. The author gives examples of how it’s difficult to compare, but what those examples show is that yes, to compare properly you need to go very deep on some parts to find out why design decisions were made the way they were. This may be more time consuming and cost more but it’s doable.

One other thing we might try is to set aside a hundred billion dollars for a half dozen key “trial” or “learning” projects, and see if we can get some of the agencies from say Japan and France and Spain to execute those projects so we can learn how they do it differently. And they can show up all the things (regulations, interference, etc) that they encounter here that would be different to back home.

In the scheme of things it’s cheap, we still get infrastructure out of it, and it’s one sure way to learn.

He's not saying it can't be done, he's saying it can't be done on the cheap.

> I don’t fully buy that we can’t work this out. The author gives examples of how it’s difficult to compare, but what those examples show is that yes, to compare properly you need to go very deep on some parts to find out why design decisions were made the way they were. This may be more time consuming and cost more but it’s doable.

That's exactly what the author is advocating for, so I'm not sure what your point is. Heck, the last line of the article is "It would be worth paying to get the answers even if that would be very expensive."

Sounded like the author was advocating another mega-project, which comes off a bit weird considering the article they just wrote.

> Sounded like the author was advocating another mega-project

No, they were suggesting that in order to find out why these projects are so expensive, it would be best to hire people experienced with mega-projects and pay them for their time to get answers to these questions.

https://pedestrianobservations.com/2019/07/22/new-report-on-...

Kind of weird to use a picture of the East Side Access project in New York as the lede. New York is a whole different case from the rest of the country. We do know why infrastructure in New York is so absurdly expensive. Outright theft and fraud is a big culprit: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/nyregion/new-york-subway-...

> The budget showed that 900 workers were being paid to dig caverns for the platforms as part of a 3.5-mile tunnel connecting the historic station to the Long Island Rail Road. But the accountant could only identify about 700 jobs that needed to be done, according to three project supervisors. Officials could not find any reason for the other 200 people to be there.

> “Nobody knew what those people were doing, if they were doing anything,” said Michael Horodniceanu, who was then the head of construction at the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which runs transit in New York. The workers were laid off, Mr. Horodniceanu said, but no one figured out how long they had been employed. “All we knew is they were each being paid about $1,000 every day.”

> The discovery... occurred in 2010 and was not disclosed to the public

This sort of behavior is unfortunately commonplace.

Why would that be different from everywhere else though?

Infrastructure projects are always a prime danger for corruption. (large sums of money with customers that aren't under financial pressures like a company, actual or effective cost-plus contracts, chance for politicians to get "lobbied" and make lasting connections, ...)

I think it's the same everywhere in the world, with varying degrees of dubiousness.

> Why would that be different from everywhere else though?

Corruption in New York is a whole different animal than any other state. New York has, hands down, the most corrupt state government in the country.[0]

As just one example, the governor of New York, Andrew Cuomo, a Democrat, openly orchestrated an illegal[1] coup to ensure that Republicans maintained control of the state senate, despite losing control in the then-recent elections. He did this because it ensured that he had unilateral power to decide which laws were even brought to a vote in the state legislature, so he could essentially pre-veto any legislation behind closed doors, instead of having to veto a potentially popular piece of legislation openly after the legislature passed it.

Or, on the topic of public transit, Cuomo stole $5 million from the MTA (public transit for NYC metro area) and gave it to upstate ski resorts that he has a personal interest in[2].

[0] https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/05/how-new-york...

[1] A judge later ruled that the caucus was illegally formed and ordered them to return the money, though I don't know if they ever actually did.

[2] https://gothamist.com/2017/07/10/mta_tips_down_k_val.php

Can confirm. New York crookedness is so advanced I can’t help having a grudging admiration. It’s been like that longer than any of us have been alive too.

I think Illinois gives NY a run for their money. Remember Blagojevich trying to sell the senate seat?

> I think Illinois gives NY a run for their money. Remember Blagojevich trying to sell the senate seat?

Blagojevich is an amateur. He got caught. The ones who are the best at corruption are the ones who can keep it up for years - decades - successfully.

Money is really good at masking systemic problems (like government run by idiots, corruption, etc) because you can just throw money at wherever the problem rears it's head.

I don't know if Chicago is more corrupt or they're just less able/willing to put up an expensive front of propriety. Everyone loves to cite the number of politicians that get prosecuted or go to jail for corruption. To me that says the corruption doesn't run very deep.

>Everyone loves to cite the number of politicians that get prosecuted or go to jail for corruption. To me that says the corruption doesn't run very deep.

Meh, it could also simply be deep local corruption and shallow Federal corruption. If the FBI is coming, that doesn't mean that your State government isn't corrupt, just that it doesn't have enough power to influence federal.

Local government in Chicago is designed to make corruption as efficient as possible. The alderman are like mini dictators.

Re "ski resorts", sure, the money shouldn't have come from the MTA, and it's another example of Albany bleeding the city. But Whiteface is (1) state owned, and (2) absolutely critical to the economy in the north country. Cuomo's a shit, but when you say ski resorts like that it's going to mislead people who don't know the region. We're not talking about Snowbird here.

> But Whiteface is (1) state owned, and (2) absolutely critical to the economy in the north country. Cuomo's a shit, but when you say ski resorts like that it's going to mislead people who don't know the region. We're not talking about Snowbird here.

It is not at all misleading to say that Cuomo made a unilateral decision to siphon funds that had already been earmarked for public transit towards a non-transit project that he had personal interests in.

I don't see "personal interests" in the linked article, unless you just mean keeping ORDA afloat, which is 100% in the state's interest.

Calling it out the way you did is disingenuous because you're hiding the context that ORDA is also a state agency. It's robbing Peter to pay Paul, it's dumb and inefficient, but it's not exactly the crime of the century.

Regardless of whether it is cost effective to do so or not, each and every one of the beneficiaries from such corruption should be investigated and prosecuted to the fullest extent possible under the law, no matter how expensive it gets, to set a precedent so others might think twice in the future.

> Regardless of whether it is cost effective to do so or not, each and every one of the beneficiaries from such corruption should be investigated and prosecuted to the fullest extent possible under the law, no matter how expensive it gets, to set a precedent so others might think twice in the future.

I think you underestimate the extent of corruption in New York state government.

New Yorkers unfortunately can't do anything about it, because a combination of state laws have ceded electoral power to a handful of local pay-to-play clubs[0] which determine which candidates are permitted to run (unopposed) in elections.

[0] Each district is controlled by a local club; membership in these starts around $1000/year, and these clubs are responsible for deciding when a local candidate receives a primary challenge. If the clubs don't approve a challenge, then the primary election is cancelled.

1) I don't know whether NY is any more corrupt than other states, I'd imagine other states that are largely controlled by party machines have similar levels of corruption. If you look at historical political machines (Tammany Hall, Kansas City), it seems that there used to be more corruption.

2) While many districts are controlled by local party machines, they are not invincible. It's still possible to get on a democratic primary ballot without the support of Dem machine, you just need to get the required number of signatures by registered Dems and file the paperwork (funnily enough, in some areas the local Rep party will help with this. NY's rule allowing candidates to run on multiple parties helps with this).

> If you look at historical political machines (Tammany Hall, Kansas City), it seems that there used to be more corruption.

Tammany Hall still exists. My own local Democratic club, for example, literally compares itself to Tammany Hall.

> It's still possible to get on a democratic primary ballot without the support of Dem machine, you just need to get the required number of signatures by registered Dems and file the paperwork

The laws around which signatures are considered valid are absurdly stringent, to the point of disenfranchising actual registered Democrats, with the intention of making right-to-ballot petitions infeasible in most districts.

> NY's rule allowing candidates to run on multiple parties helps with this.

Fusion voting is a way for major parties to exert control over third parties, not a way for voters registered with a party to exert political pressure against the party establishment.

The California High Speed Rail was also corruption. It's all over everywhere, because nobody is accountable for it, except the people over-charging, while simultaneously pointing out that they are taking all the liability when things go wrong (and someone actually tries to prosecute).

Given the spread of corruption and looking for the commonality one cant help but conclude govt overall is creating corruption.

eg power corrupts

From my conversations with people who worked on HSR - a lot of the problem was we outsourced the decisions to expensive consulting agencies, and those agencies saw the project as a place to stash their most useless staff members.

So basically we had a bunch of very expensive idiots running an outsourced project.

If they had kept the whole project in house, we'd have the initial operating segment already.

See also, CEQA is a terrible law that mostly blocks good things and rarely blocks bad things.

I think rather than generally blaming "corruption", nowadays I prefer to blame "lack of competence", although there is a lot of overlap.

That's because I see a lot of bad decisions -- stupidity over greed. It only takes a few bad decisions made by people with power to completely sink a project. Now imagine building an airport or a subway. How many of these do we build? They are basically one off projects. Following a manual to repave a road doesn't require much competence, as it's a project that's done over and over again -- but doing a one-off project with unique challenges -- that requires serious competence.

And lack of competence is a much harder problem to solve than corruption. The incompetent person doesn't admit or know they are incompetent. The incompetent person can't be scared with lawsuits or investigations to become competent. No amount of sunshine will help. The only solution is to get rid of the incompetent person and put someone competent in charge. But that doesn't work at the national level -- if there is a shortage of incompetent people, or if our hiring systems aren't able to hire the competent person. So the solutions are very long term and painful:

* change how governments hire and promote staff to focus more on competence and less on passive traits like seniority/diversity/etc.

* reduce the need for competence by focusing on standardized projects built in a steady cadence. For subways, make every subway the same, or pick just 2 variants, and develop a team of people with experience working on these all across the country, with standardized best practices and a pool of skilled workers who have experience working on these projects.

All of that requires some pretty radical reforms of how our projects are funded and what role cities have to play in building them, as well as upsetting a lot of government unions.

Then there is the issue of Federalism. The Swiss have a highly efficient infrastructure system and have strong federalism, as does Germany, but you're not in a situation where each state has completely different zoning/eminent domain laws, or separate licensing so an engineer in one state may not be able to even work in another. This makes it harder for us to adopt more standardized practices across states for big infrastructure projects as well as a national pool of experts that can go state to state and build standardized projects.

Do you have any evidence of this? Building HSR is expensive and takes a long time to do. Tracks and other infrastructure for HSR has to be a much higher standard than regular train infrastructure.

> Building HSR is expensive and takes a long time to do

Bids and bonds have already been levied against those estimates. Even if you make up new ones to match reality, it was fraudulent in concept. With less than half the length (515km versus the proposed >1200km CA project), the japanese built a HSR for about 2.3 billion USD (adjusted from 1959 ~400 billion yen). From the start, this has been a doomed project to get some people paid. Admittedly, the idea of starting something (anything) to connect the top and bottom half of CA is perhaps visionary, selling it as a doable project was dishonest.

However it turns out, the CA HSR (or slow speed rail) will not be completed in the lifetime of anyone alive today, but Californians still get to pay for it. I'm reminded of Lyta's admission about the Vorlon mistakes in Babylon 5's Thirdspace movie. It's just compounded for the poor Californians, each time.

iirc the high speed rail authority was established as a completely new arm of the state government with like 6 employees. If Caltrans ran the project from the start, it would run in the middle of the 5 far away from palmdale and be a decade ahead of schedule at least.

>> “All we knew is they were each being paid about $1,000 every day.”

Assuming a 5-day work week, $270,000 a year is a crazy amount, isn’t it?

Multiply by 200 people and that's $5.4 million out the door every year.

$54 million, not $5.4 million.

Not quite that crazy. There is a lot of overhead that comes out of that 1000/day. Medical benefits, retirement, the accountant to track their pay - they are still make 6 figures for sure, but it isn't 270k/year.

I am fascinated to see that 3 hours, 109 upvotes and 107 comments into this story, the word "regulation" occurs only once in the comment thread.

I own, jointly with others, a 3 mile long road.

If there could be only two things that I impressed upon someone, in relation to this road, they would be the following:

1) You have no idea how costly maintaining a road (any road) is. I didn't. I had no idea. Whatever libertarian fantasies you may harbor about private people coming together to create and maintain anything like first world infrastructure, I am sorry to dash them: we have a group of 20 or so rich, well-educated, smart and hard-working people and it's right at the edge of our capabilities to keep this 3 mile long road in semi-acceptable condition.

2) The difference between doing a safe, reasonable, environmentally responsible and long term fix and doing that very same fix but 100% by the book is a cost difference of 3x to 4x. There are minor drainage fixes we've looked into that required, no shit, the army corps of engineers to be consulted along with several other county and state regulatory and environmental agencies. After paying a third party firm to create an environmental impact report. Do you understand that I am talking about fixing a ditch ? The army corps of engineers.

I did not, above, refer to "excessive regulation" because I am not ready nor willing to define that and I don't want to take a political stand on it - I am merely pointing out that the first thought you should be having on this issue is: regulations.

3 miles? Awesome. Gravel or paved?

The Army Corps of Engineers gets involved because your ditches are wetlands, I'm going to guess. You might have a window open right now to redo them, best check.

> You have no idea how costly maintaining a road (any road) is.

And after your comment, I still do not. Telling us might help.

MassDOT recently published their capital budget with a little more fanfare than usual, to soothe Red Line passengers hurting from the recent derailment perhaps. It included $3 billion in major repaving efforts but that seems to have gone without challenge. However the Green Line Extension is barely alive politically on their $2.4B capital budget.

Likewise, a nearby overpass on Rt 128 was repaired for $30M.

Highways eat money but when Massachusetts looks to obvious transit improvements, suddenly cost is a major concern.

Double plus to the wetland issue. I'm a pretty lefty environmentalist guy, but after building a house and having a wife on city council for a small town, I've realized that the Clean Water Act was essentially a huge government taking of land. Virtually every ditch is now considered a Wetland if you apply the rules literally, which puts it under the Army Corps of Engineers Wetlands guidance. States are federally required to develop regulations around this. Our town has to file for wetlands permits to MOW the ditches.

Imagine any project from the past that would go through anything wet: national highway system, national parks trails, Appalachian trail. None could be built today.

Really? Are we sure we can't figure this out? Who believes that?

Private contractors seem to be very expensive. No-bid contracts are obviously not competitive. And when the tax payer is picking up the bill, is there really any incentive for a contractor to keep costs low? Who advocates for the taxpayer?

And how much corruption, kick-backs, lobbying, political favoring, porking, and other questionable activity goes on behind the scenes that increase costs?

This isn't rocket science, it's mostly about accounting and accountability.

But wouldn't all those same problems you outline be the case in other countries?

I think the question isn't "Why are infra costs so high?" which I think your list answers, but instead "Why are infra costs so high in the united states?"

Bribery is legalized in the US in the form of campaign contributions. In fact, the Supreme Court determined it was speech, something whose freedom is enshrined in the constitution.

This article linked from another Josh Barro piece tells you exactly why it's so expensive

https://www.city-journal.org/html/fifteen-stories-under-1410...

In Britain and France, only the “miners”—or tunnelers—work in unions similar to America’s. Contractors hire other workers largely as they wish. The jobs pay well but not American-construction-union well. In New York, everyone works by the same union rules, which include hourly wages and staffing requirements that can mean 25 workers per tunnel-boring machine, compared with a dozen or so in a nonunion state and as few as five in countries such as Norway.

If it that were simple, the GAO report mentioned in the article would surely have found it. It's not just labor cost.

https://pedestrianobservations.com/2019/07/22/new-report-on-...

Honestly I think there is a lot of incompetence involved with local transportation agencies as well. Often they are extremely underfunded so it’s not always their fault. But living in a metropolitan area where the population is very much for innovative and forward thinking infrastructure, the agency responsible has time and time again made very costly mistakes and decisions.

As well as try and deceive the public by doing things such as claiming they are providing BRT but really it’s just new buses with an HOV lane. So at this point the public has very little faith in them being able to provide what we so desperately want.

May be this is just too much cynicism but isn't it possible the GAO just failed to do what it was supposed to do and is offering that paragraph as a poor way to explain away their failure?

The trend of it being more expensive in the US is a real, statistically determinable fact. That hints there are structural reasons for it. They should at least give a stab at it rather than throwing up their hands and claiming there's nothing they can do.

yes, the report is shit.

https://pedestrianobservations.com/2019/07/22/new-report-on-... + see the design-build vs design then build comment(s) too.

It's surprising infrastructure in the US is as cheap as it is. It is built with no meaningful cost controls. Environmental impact studies are uniquely slow and hard to navigate. Only a few well-connected firms are able to bid, and they get picked for mostly political reasons. "Buy America" restrictions make a lot of obvious projects actually impossible. Those responsible for cost overruns are never held to account.

There is a saying: it’s good to work on your weaknesses, but don’t dwell on them because otherwise you’ll spend all your time doing things you’re bad at.

If we’re bad at centrally planned public infrastructure, we should just do less of it, and focus more on the things we’re good at doing.

Except that just because you're bad at taking care of your health, it does not follow you should spend less time on it. You'll still die early.

What you're saying only makes sense if you're talking about things that are optional, not if they're required.

Centralized public infrastructure is not required. Decentralized infrastructure works.

My gut instinct is that the mob might be a (potentially significant) factor here. I could be wrong, but this is their bread an butter after all: bribe politician to get large-scale infrastructure project and then artificially inflate costs (false purchase orders, buying materials from companies they operate in amounts that are far in excess or what's required and not actually shipping them, etc.) so that they can siphon away tax dollars.

I think the answer is in the first few lines actually.

>Here are the instructions Congress gave last March: Not later than 9 months after the enactment of this act, the GAO shall report to the House and Senate

>Sixteen months later, the GAO has produced its report and it doesn’t actually perform the cost comparisons as instructed.

Bureaucracy at its finest. Over promise, under deliver, and make sure its late too, just in case anyone thought there might be a competent system in play.

> I think the answer is in the first few lines actually.

Not really, given that the main focus of the rest of the article was about how what was asked of them is difficult to determine, and not even well defined.

That's just a long excuse, an appeal for incompetence, to hide the intent of face saving: https://pedestrianobservations.com/2019/07/22/new-report-on-...

I love how the word "corruption" doesn't appear once in the text. If this was an article about Eastern Europe for example it would be in every paragraph.

So, I'm wondering if corruption overemphasized in my region and Project Management is just very hard, or there is corruption in the US and rest of the English speaking countries as well, but people are not talking about it much.

I wonder if someone has found a strong correlation between infrastructure costs and legal or land costs?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RY-mlcgFCc4 Legal costs is definitely an issue sometimes

I’m surprised by the cynicism here. Working in software we know that high complexity projects are _really_ hard to estimate.

Hofstadter's Law says it always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's Law.

Too many unknown unknowns. If the projects were broken down into smaller chunks, the incremental costs would be better understood as the project progressed.

Construction generally is not doing a brand new greenfield project. Experienced web developers can put together another website for pretty close to budget. As soon as you deviate from the framework and tools that the experienced web developer knows well though estimates go out the window.

Big construction projects have a lot of well understood parts. Sometimes you get unexpected rocks or something, but for the most some countries have done much better than others at controlling costs in projects of similar complexity which suggests that the difference isn't because it is hard to estimate.

https://pedestrianobservations.com/2019/07/22/new-report-on-... ctrl-f design-build.

basically, if you order a feasibility study, a design and then separately an implementation, you can keep costs under control. if you do it all together, you gonna have overrun time.

Before we make a report on how our costs differ from other G20 countries, how about a report on how our costs differ from ourselves 100 years ago.

In 1900 it took four years to lay nine miles of subway in NYC. The second ave tunnel was just a couple miles and under construction for 12 years.

That's just an example. It also took longer to build the new Eastern span of the Bay Bridge than it took to build the whole bridge.

I think we should start by figuring out why these things happen.

As I understand it, most of the NYC subway was built by basically just closing of major chunks of streets and excavating them, sticking the subway in and then covering it back up.

Compared to boring underground tunnels, you can imagine how much less involved it is to simply dig a hole from above.

I'm not sure why they don't do that anymore, though I can imagine it's some combination of where the new routes are (maybe they aren't following the street grid?) and higher impact of year-long closures of streets.

The NYP has a good article comparing the methods of construction then and now: https://www.nypl.org/blog/2015/05/04/subway-construction-the...

I think what you are describing it's called cut and cover.

Presumably, the idea of inconveniencing motorists for that long "just" for transit is no longer acceptable.

In 1900 the population of New York City was a fraction of its population today and probably more importantly, cars were not widespread as the Model T had not even hit the market yet. It's bizarre to try to compare different eras.

How many people died building the Brooklyn Bridge? Nobody knows for sure, but it was around 20 to 30. Could you imagine putting that many human lives into a bridge in 1967 or 2019?

I don't know death stats at all for the subway. I do know that it was three different systems operating at least partially independently of one another until about 1940 when they came together under city control.

I'd wager there is plenty of 'dark money' that never gets reported i.e mob, and politicians being bribed.

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