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Comment by fnord123 | Hacker News Reader

>I don't have much hope for the future generation of megaprojects. And, you know, we're not really doing them anymore. I wonder what changed.

We are still doing megaprojects just fine. And less people die doing them.

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The First Transcontinental Railroad, 1868 mi in length, was built between 1863 and 1869. Six years - completing a route from the Atlantic to the Pacific.

California High-Speed Rail, 520 mi in length, began construction in 2015, cost 90x as much per mile, even after accounting for inflation, and.... was indefinitely postponed in 2019. For a rail line in a single state.

Admittedly, with much higher speed, and much more humane construction. But nonetheless, even with a much higher per-mile price they still couldn't deliver it? I can see how someone someone might get the impression we aren't able to successfully deliver large projects any more.

We also live in an era where the government (federal, state, whatever) is seemingly viewed by many as less a benevolent force to be co-opted, and increasingly as a necessary evil to be thwarted and disempowered. Sure, the time period you mention is right around the heart of the civil war, with all the anti- and pro-establsihment sentiment that came along with it, but these feelings were rather new at the time. Most people were still farmers who valued "getting shit done" more highly than divorced-from-reality ideological barriers. The country was still needing to be connected and filled up.

Read the US Constitution and the Declaration of Independence if you thing this view is new.

I'm of course aware of the basis of these documents as an American. However, a lot of the core ideas behind the US' founding were that it was possible to form "a more perfect union". I.e. one where government was done 'right', I.e. democracy. There were certainly anarchists at the time too, but the form of anti-government sentiment we have now seems to be almost pathological; memetic rather than considered.

Wasn't a lot of the "payment" to the railtoads for the transcontinental railroad giving away land to the railroads to later sell to people (who'd take their trains out there to claim it)? You'd need to factor that in to the payment as well.

I should try to find some hard data, but it always feels like construction costs outpace inflation. I don't know if if it's regulation, labour costs, or what.

Transit advocates have done a lot of work figuring out why costs are so high. Turns out they don't have to be: Barcelona has significantly lower costs than anyone else doing similar scope projects. However Barcelona is in Spain where they speak Spanish so it is hard to learn from them.

I've seen many analysis of the situation pointing to all kinds of different "reasons". Many of those reasons have been rebutted by someone else. I cannot figure out who is right or what factors cause things, but the bottom line is some places transit costs a lot more than others after you factor in cost of labor and land which seem like the only things that should be different.

> However Barcelona is in Spain where they speak Spanish so it is hard to learn from them.

I believe it's about 50/50 Spanish/Catalan in Barcelona.

It is complex. I haven't been there is years, but in general Barcelona everybody speaks Spanish and is learning Catalan. It might be 50/50 now, but Spanish is likely to be the language they speak better. As you leave the city Catalan is more common.

Either way though, they don't speak the same language as the people who want to know what they are doing different.

Yes, their wisdom can only be accessed by 500 million Spanish speakers, including around 50 million in the USA.

It isn't just the USA: India has mass transit construction cost problems and could learn - if only they shared a language. Not to mention France (France is better at controlling costs than the US, but still not cheap)

In the US Spanish speakers tend to be poor and thus not in position to do anything about costs if they did look into it.

I'm sure Indians who wanted to go over to Barcelona to learn about the transit system would have difficulty finding a common language, or paying for a couple of translators.

I assume you are making a sly joke, because even if the USA didn't have plenty of Spanish speakers, Barcelona has plentyof English speakers.

I wouldn't expect the people in their transit department are hired for their English ability. Since Spanish and Catalan are important languages there I would expect that I need to learn at least one of them to learn from there. Of course if Spain wanted to teach the world how they do it English would make more sense as it is the dominate trade language today - but I can't think of any reason why Spain would care to teach others. It thus is on the rest of the world to learn Spanish to learn from them.

We might be able to learn from the Chinese or Russians. I'm not sure what their cost structures are like. Learning best practices from high cost areas won't help you control costs, which rules out all English speaking countries.

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

I forgot about this joke yesterday, but it is a better reply than my previous ones.

> However Barcelona is in Spain where they speak Spanish so it is hard to learn from them.

I'm confused by this sentence.

>However Barcelona is in Spain where they speak Spanish so it is hard to learn from them.

Federal infrastructure projects are in Spanish.

But here is a report in English anyway:

http://www.mega-project.eu/assets/exp/resources/High_Speed_R...

Yes, and the highly-valuable rights of way which were later monetized by telecom,etc: SPRint (Southern Pacific Railroad), QWest, etc.

Having access to a train was much more desirable in 1886. It meant you could ship your stuff to markets across the nation.

Today no one wants a train in the backyard.

Plus 1000s of people died constructing these railroads. That's not acceptable today.

I blame the Freemasons. /s

Seriously, though-- whether true or not, there's undoubtedly an impression of extensive graft throughout the U.S. construction industry. Perhaps there are just so many people involved in such work that the inevitable few bad actors stand out more (a dishonest one is more likely to have stories told about them than one who simply does proper work for a fair price), but there is almost a tradition about it. If you talk to almost anyone directly involved in the industry - at least where I've been - they seem to act like these 'shady' types are a noticeable and constant presence.

Land: Basically free.

Labor: Basically slavery.

Regulation (safety and environment): Basically none.

This goes back to my original point about visibility of engineering work. Clearly, one of the biggest problems that California high speed rail has to solve is buying land for the track. But nobody sees a few land purchases as "building high speed rail". Until there is a concrete pylon with some train tracks on top, people think nothing is being done. But of course, without that pre-work, nothing can be done.

Yep. And it's a hard, hard problem. Buying land or right-of-way in high-value, dense urban environments is considerably more expensive then buying it in unused wilderness. And dealing with each municipality's politics along the way is far more difficult and expensive than dealing with unincorporated, unpopulated land.

I live in Minneapolis, and remember when the 35W bridge fell. Republicans tried to prevent adding lanes for future light rail to the new bridge (particularly then-governor Coleman, who was eyeing a presidential run), and our mayor basically held the bridge hostage - he told the state and federal governments that if there weren't provisions for future light rail, that the city wouldn't be issuing the necessary construction permits for the new bridge. (A call I fully supported, btw.)

This is why it's more expensive than the 1870s.

Now factor in the cost paid by laborers and their families in the form of low wages and hgh risk of detah and dismemberment, and see how cheap FTR was.

You can always get something cheap if someone else pays

Compare feeding and clothing the world now to 200 years ago. We get much more done at a much lower consumer price tag.

And of course CHSR is far more complicated -- travelling through dense, developed urban areas at much higher speeds.

Is it really any surprise that after the easier projects are all done, the remaining projects are harder?

Why not compare a functioning project with a functioning project? e.g. the Beijing-Shenzhen line (2230km (1390 miles to compare to the FTR)) that takes 8h34m and can hit 300km/h: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beijing%E2%80%93Guangzhou_high...

Or we could compare successful project of today (A380) vs failed project (Spruce Goose).

Or, I know it's not as romantic as a real living person on the Moon who then comes back home, but we have robots on Mars. And on comets.

>I can see how someone someone might get the impression we aren't able to successfully deliver large projects any more.

We're all clever people and can convince ourselves of anything if we really try. Why not be positive? :)

Isn't that mostly OSHA? We are still doing megaprojects, but we've traded schedules for safety, which means we can do fewer of them.

I think that's the correct tradeoff, but it would be nice if we didn't lie to ourselves (and our constituents) about the precision of our estimates. I can't recall a megaproject completed this century which was less than 3 years late.

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