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Comment by ralusek | Hacker News Reader

This is, IMO, a terrible article that doesn't even begin to discuss any of the reasons why infrastructure in the US costs so much.

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The article gives two reasons. The first starts in the paragraph that begins with

  The first underlying driver of U.S. infrastructure costs is that the U.S. has felt so rich as a country that, for decades, we spent freely on infrastructure and never asked serious questions about the return on that investment

And then lists some of the things we spend freely on that aren't really necessary. The second reason is

  The second underlying driver of U.S. infrastructure costs is how deeply embedded infrastructure spending is within our model of economic growth.

both of those essentially boil down to we spend so much because the market is set up to encourage us to spend a lot. Probably not the answer you were looking for, but at the end of the day we spend so much money because we have set up the market to enable high prices.

The underlying factor really is that the people in charge of spending infrastructure money are not really incentivized to be careful or ask tough questions about how it is being spent. Furthermore, they are often bound by piles of regulations and restrictions on their freedom for contracting the work, so they also lack agency.

Yeah, that's just the old and cynical "everyone-is-corrupt" talking-point.

It fails rather obviously because (a) the article is comparing costs across countries, and other countries haven't found some magic system to increase accountability of politicians and beaurocrats that goes beyond not re-electing them.

And, (b), there are plenty of incentives for decision-makers to keep costs down. Don't you think the governor or Mayor of New York would crow endlessly if they managed to build subway <x> or tunnel <y> for a fraction of the usual costs? Have you noticed how California's high-speed rail project and its cost overruns have been terrible for three governors in a row?

Whether anybody is practicing witchcraft or any other form of magic is beyond the point; it should be obvious to anybody who's not totally naive that some countries have more corruption than others.

>would crow endlessly

Sure, so why doesn't this happen more often? The simplest explanation is that elected politician's influence is small compared to the collective bureaucracy's power to do what it was going to do anyway.

And yes, everyone who is handed a pile of third-party cash to spend on other people does not usually have very good incentives to make the most efficient choices, and doubly so when their personal agency is further restricted by a mass of regulation.

> the people in charge of spending infrastructure money are not really incentivized to be careful

The citizens are the only ones who would have such incentives. They're paying for it & they're using it. They aren't supposed to be piggy banks to jiggle to pay for things, they should also be involved in what gets paid for and how. Expecting a bureaucracy to be efficient is like expecting a monopoly to be fair, so the citizenry needs to be more engaged.

The first reason doesn't explain why infrastructure causes more today (when the US doesn't feel as rich) than it did when the US was making large scale infrastructure investments.

The second reason seems flat out wrong especially when you compare e.g. the large scale infrastructure investments China is making to fuel its economic growth and compare that to the US where economic growth seems to be largely based on quantitative easing.

It is notable, not only China does that. Almost any single country, just within different scales. If you take Japan, Europe, they build infrastructure too, and a lot of it.

I think the headline for this article is unfortunate. The article didn't focus on answering the headline in the way most readers will expect, but those who have read more of Chuck Marohn's writing probably won't expect it to. It's really about "Why Does Infrastructure Cost So Much?" being a common concern but missing the point. He points out that bad development patterns and misguided regulations lead to roads that aren't economically productive enough to pay for their own maintenance, and that reducing the actual construction costs isn't going to change that paradigm. This probably shouldn't be the first article anyone reads on strong towns, as it jumps to conclusions that are justified in earlier writings.

I believe this article's best explanation of its solution is: My approach ... is for local governments and local communities of people to assert leadership, to take active steps to make their places stronger, healthier, and more prosperous, so that—regardless of what happens with the state and federal economies—our cities evolve to become better places to live.

It seems to me that could mean a whole lot of different things, or maybe nothing at all. It's not really specific advice. IDK. Maybe the book has the details.

Where is a better article? The cost of infrastructure is extremely complicated. People who are experts in construction financing are busy making good money rather than writing articles or donating time to journalists. (and construction/construction finance experts are usually only experts in a specific subfield)

http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/07/why-we-cant-figure-ou...

https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/02/09/considerations-on-cost...

This is a pretty good article, along with his response to comments:

https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/02/17/highlights-from-the-co...

That is a good article for explaining why costs have gone up in most countries, like they have in France and Spain.

It's less good at explaining the vast outlier (larger outlier on cost than gdp) that is US construction costs.

For me it has become habit to read comments about articles before actually reading the articles. The deliberate miss-titling of stories to sucker in readers is now commonplace and I appreciate when I'm afforded a chance to avoid it. Here we're allowed to believe the story might investigate why building infrastructure in the US costs several multiples of what other countries pay, or what the US used to pay for the same result. Instead what appears is yet another naval-gaze about the evils of roads, cars and suburbs.

There was a specific example that is indicative of why it costs so much here. He said, hypothetically, that a road project may have to purchase 5 additional feet of land for the right of way in order to meet some standard like 12 foot lanes, doing this without thinking at all. That 5 feet may not have been needed if you sized the project to 11 foot lanes, but now it must be purchased from a variety of landowners, and each one knows that they can hold out for top dollar. And it's probably low-value land to them anyway if you're building a 5-lane road through it.

This sort of thinking gets in the way of a lot of projects. I read at the time that Acela was proposed as a 180mph train, but the difficulty acquiring and building more right of way to smooth out turns, and the requirements for heavier parts to meet some safety regulations, meant that it could not approximate the speed of TGV. Instead, it goes 150 on some relatively straight sections and usually goes somewhat less. The special trainsets also cost more than European HSR trainsets.

Why do government software systems cost so much? Many of the same reasons, and as the article points out for infrastructure, the players have a desire to fund big projects and act like they're "done" instead of funding little improvements all the time.

What are those reasons?

Some of the theories I've heard are (I don't necessarily agree with all of these):

* Higher intrinsic costs (i.e., labor costs, eminent domain costs, litigation costs)

* Outright corruption (this one in particular I'd disagree with for US costs, but I have heard people discuss it).

* Price gouging, either via corporate cost-plus contracts raking in money, or via union featherbedding, or some other way in which a lot of money within the contracts are for things that don't really serve any "legitimate" purpose.

* Political consideration forcing all projects to become "megaprojects" that are prone to sunk cost fallacies or scope creep and are not amenable to effective cost-control.

* Antigovernment trends shifting design and engineering work from public agencies, causing the agencies to be unable to effectively manage the construction of projects.

Ok. But why?

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