Hacker News Reader

Comment by fadisaleh | Hacker News Reader

"...the iPhones that distract us from our environment also distract us from how strangely old and unchanging our environment is, how you're riding a subway that's 100 years old. And I think sort of a healthier sort of progress would happen on many different fronts."

This quote stood out to me. It seems like we silently concluded that the physical world has evolved enough, developed enough, even though there's a ton of inefficiencies to fix.

I often lament that the built environment of the average American city looks stuck in the 80s, and this quote made me think of that.

View on HN

I think the market is what silently concluded that the physical world has evolved enough; software isn't more important, just more profitable. And because the United States is allergic to public spending, that's all that matters.

> And because the United States is allergic to public spending, that's all that matters.

I don't think it's the spending that the US is allergic to, it's the collecting the money to spend.

Ever been to Connecticut? I-84 is still constantly in rough condition, even as property and income taxes climb.

As a Korean who visited LA this summer, I was shocked to see how unmaintained the roads were, especially the highways. (There were cracks and debris all over the place)

I remember thinking the same back in 2005, which was the first time I'd driven in the US. Cracks and potholes all over the place. At the time I'd assumed it was because California was basically bankrupt (maybe it still is), but slightly shocking that it's still the case.

I suddenly felt like I understood why American cars have such soft suspension. The roads were notably worse than in the UK, and by a wide margin: no way I'd want to drive a car with a sportier setup there.

What's depressing is that since 2010 there's been a progressive degradation in the state of our roads. In Cambridgeshire the roads are now in a terrible state: cracks, fissures, potholes, road markings barely visible.

You can blame public spending cuts for this, and no doubt there's truth in that statement, but there are plenty of road infrastructure projects happening. For example: the (admittedly decades overdue) A14 upgrade, recently completed Ely southern bypass, various smart motorway projects (M1 and M4 spring immediately to mind, as well as recently completed work on M3).

This is all well and good, but I would far rather see some of this money diverted to the basics of a safe road network: i.e., ensuring the roads we already have are in good condition. I would particularly like to see funds being used for smart motorways, for which serious safety concerns have emerged, diverted in this way.

My home town agreed a very long - multiple decades - private contract for road maintenance... at least ten year ago? Unsurprisingly, the private company puts in the minimum to service the contract and the roads have gone to pot.

'Smart motorway' is an umbrella term for various traffic control schemes used on motorways since the 90s. The version deemed unsuitable is dynamic hard shoulder running (called 'managed motorway' at inception), first used on the M42 from 2006 on.

All new projects in England since 2013 have used All Lane Running (an alternative to widening, where the HS is permanently converted into a traffic lane). This format is not being killed off.

The A14 Huntingdon Bypass was supposed to open as a smart motorway (A14(M)) but the legislation hasn't passed soon enough, so it will open as an all-purpose road with motorway-style restrictions and smart tech.

Interestingly it might just have to do with the age of the roads. When I was living in Baltimore in the late 80s my fellow Californians complained how bad the roads were in Maryland compared to LA. Now 30 years later the roads in California are bad too. IIUC much of Korea's roads are new-ish so it's possible in 30 years they'll be in the same state. .... or not of course. Maybe Korea is just better at maintaining roads.

It is worth noting that the US has several orders of magnitude more roads than Korea does to maintain.

... but that doesn't excuse the under-spending on them, because we're also under-spending.

Most people in the U.S. have never been to a country with an actual transportation system. They can't imagine that it could be any different and will get angry if you point out to them.

Part of the issue is that wealthier people are self segregating themselves into their own separate towns, do that their property tax dollars don’t have to go to maintain the roads that everyone else drives on.

Are you sure it isn't endless spending on new roads and destruction of tax base by expanding the suburbs?

Not at all! Every year the US and it’s various state and local governments collect trillions... and then proceed to spend it on some other crap.

For the last ten years everybody has been printing money like crazy, the banks literally don't know what to do with all the cash, you're being paid for borrowing some of it.

NYC seems to be just fine at redeveloping. So the problem is regional (though very widespread).

It could really be so much better. There are a lot of other cities which are developing faster (mainly outside the US).

That's hardly the case. The entirety of NYC (including the 5 bouroughs) is falling apart, and quality/cost of new projects leaves much to be desired.

> silently concluded that the physical world has evolved enough

the main culprit is regulation. There are other markets which build modern cities at breakneck pace

the same thing is going to happen to tech now that regulation is kicking in

As someone who saw Grenfell go up from his bedroom window, I'll take the regulation thanks.

Agreed. You can take software as an example; it's far less regulated than most infrastructure sectors, but how many outages per year does Facebook have? How many times per year are our PII gutted out of an under-secured dataset?

Now, that level of sloppiness, but applied to bridges and skyscrapers? No thanks.

How do you regulate public housing?

I don't even understand the question in this context.

But on not turning buildings into death traps, I'd start by asking the ICWCI.

"And because the United States is allergic to public spending, that's all that matters."

The United States wouldn't be so allergic to public spending if we weren't so complacent about foreign spending, namely the military and foreign aid/manipulation.

> you're riding a subway that's 100 years old ... a healthier sort of progress would happen on many different fronts

Is he saying there is something wrong with electric subways? It seems an excellent solution to transport in a dense urban area. And metros have kept up with technology fairly well. What is the better solution to the subway for the problem it solves in the places it solves them?

Yes, we've had subways for over 100 years. And trains in general. Freight trains are very efficient ways of moving things. How old is the hammer or the shovel? Pretty old. And both work well.

He mentions also that some extension of a NYC subway cost $3.8 billion a mile. Yeah that's expensive. No doubt they ran into horrific problems drilling the tunnel. B-1 bomber program spent $40 billion and delivered 20 aircraft at a program cost of $2 billion each (much more than the claimed cost, but this is the actual cost). Likewise the B-2 ran $1 billion each. Was this mile of subway worth more than two B-1 bombers? I'd say yes but others may say no.

the i486 was an excellent processor, too

sx or dx?

dx and remember to press the turbo button

I think he's referring to the horrifically unmaintained and archaic state of the world's older subways, like NYC and the London Underground. Besides the expense, NYC is absurdly behind on modern train timing systems, which causes very loose scheduling and frequent delays. There's also the general squalor and lack of maintenance of the platforms. London's tunnels are so full of iron dust and other particulates that a half hour in them literally turns your mucus black, and the lack of a cooling system has caused the ambient temperature to rise ~30 degrees since their construction with no sign of stopping. They also screech loudly enough to cause permanent hearing damage.

These systems could be modern and effective, but instead they're disintegrating in place. That's the problem.

> inefficiencies

Think that while this person is looking at the iPhone on the subway, it's also probably unaware that there is (in this very moment, in the world) people starving to dead or dying from deceases that already have a cure, or that there is people beheading others with machetes in tribal-like wars.

The paradigm of progress is relative.

> there is people beheading others with machetes in tribal-like wars

I prefer the society that does not end up with machetes, but there are maniacs out there that would argue that even expressing such a preference is 'problematic'

In California (can’t speak for other states), much of that “stuck in <x time period>” is largely driven by NIMBYs and at what point the place became more or less affluent.

SV seems to have figured out that some land can be redeveloped into apartments relatively recently, but otherwise it looks like 60s was a pretty active development era and most of that stuff is still here. By contrast, in LA much of 50s - 60s sprawl has been replaced by 70-80, or even 90s sprawl.

California is basically screwed as long as prop 13 applies to businesses and apartment buildings - what incentive do you have as the owner to raise your tax base, especially with rent control where you can’t charge more.

I don't know why you're getting downvoted, because it's absolutely true that much of CA is stuck in the mid 20th century in terms of real estate development. The zoning laws and NIMBY-ism are very important to call out for restricting progress. Somebody above tried to blame the market. It isn't the market when you own a piece of property but you are restricted to building a single-family home that meets 200 different regulations and restrictions so tight that you only end up with cookie cutter homes in a neighborhood of cul-de-sacs. It's not just CA that suffers from this but it's certainly the most extreme case. Zoning laws are among the key reasons why city design has stagnated. There's little wiggle room for innovation. And if you look at attempts to build high speed rail, for example, and the debacle that is with the amount of money spent and the never-ending construction and you compare that to the achievements of the early 20th century and it looks like a sad situation.

Bear in mind that 1) only a few areas of California are increasing in population, and 2) the SF bay area has had two huge empty-house plenty-of-downtown-parking foreclosure-signs-everywhere recessions in the last 20 years. Next one is probably coming up soon.

> "...the iPhones that distract us from our environment also distract us from how strangely old and unchanging our environment is, how you're riding a subway that's 100 years old."

We need a smartphone-age/post-TV update to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panem_et_circenses and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amusing_Ourselves_to_Death

As long as prices keep going up there s no motive. And if people want to see modern tower architecture they catch a flight to asia

Reply on news.ycombinator.com