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As an example on that, when the UK resumed domestic manufacturing of nuclear powered submarines, the first boat had a huge number of technical issues. Because in the time between when they had launched the last generation submarine, and the beginning of design/finalization/construction of the new one, 80%+ of the work force who knew how to build one had retired.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astute-class_submarine

In a number of highly specialized military subsystems and platforms, it is easier to understand the decisions that the US DOD makes when looking at it in the context of a minimum viable production rate to retain a core skilled workforce of engineers and factory workers.

I agree, although designing institutions for building doesn’t necessarily mean they can maintain what they built.

For example, in DC the subway system (Metro) is run by the Washington Metro Area Transit Authority (WMATA). In recent years they’ve had a pretty poor safety and service record, which much hand wringing over how to fix the system. There are some financial challenges, some corruption, a good helping of standard union pathologies... but a lot of it is just that the system stopped growing a couple decades ago.

To hear the elders tell it, WMATA really figured out how to build in the mid twentieth century. As long as they were building stations and laying rail regularly, the system worked pretty well!

But then they finished and stayed finished for 20-30 years. Maintenance was under-funded. Power structures calcified, public accountability weakened, constituents took the system for granted.

When they tried to start building again, it was HARD. New stations have structural problems. Contractors fail to deliver. Corruption hits the papers.

And the safety and service levels stay low. They shut down for maintenance sprints that never seem to pay off... and then the pandemic shows up. So now ridership is way down, and the finances look worse, but at least they have more time to repair things..

I dunno where Metro goes next, TBH. I just wish it was efficient, reliable, safe and ubiquitous. Building institutions like that is hard.

> So now ridership is way down, and the finances look worse, but at least they have more time to repair things..

A boon! Finally the Red Line can get fixed.

> I dunno where Metro goes next, TBH. I just wish it was efficient, reliable, safe and ubiquitous. Building institutions like that is hard.

It is safe, efficient, and ubiquitous. Outside of the public transit systems that I used in Australia (esp. Melbourne and Adelaide), there are few systems that compare to the DC Metro. I'm from Fairfax and used to ride it into the city all the time, and when I was stationed at Bethesda I would ride it across the city to see my folks on the other side of the river. It ain't Tokyo, but it's pretty good.

I guess what happens over time is that the expertise has to get consolidated -- here it goes into private companies like Parsons, etc. And then they shop themselves around the country looking for projects to staff.

And then what you see is as you mentioned above, the cities (customers) having lost their ability to supervise properly and pay for such projects.

China is a poor example, especially for bullet trains as they literally just did bad copying from Japan. They have a lot more accidents than ex. Japan.

Japan would be a prime example and it's a shame you didn't use it.

I feel like that makes China a better example than it otherwise would be, because it shows that the Japanese model can work elsewhere too. Although this is also the country that built a hospital in Wuhan in a weekend. Perhaps European comparisons would be more apt.

I agree with your greater point, but it must be said that what they built wasn't a hospital--it was a warehouse that they put sick people into.

that collapsed a month later...

Do you have a source for this? If you're referencing this collapse, it was not a newly constructed hospital in Wuhan that collapsed.

https://www.cnn.com/2020/03/07/china/china-coronavirus-hotel...

Did it? All I can find is news about a hotel collapsing.

Presumably most of what happens in China infrastructure-wise would be flat out illegal in the US. My big issue is nuclear power and I go green with envy watching as China sets up a generation of engineers who know how to turn atoms into useful forces.

This solar/wind gambit had better work out for the West or I will be a very grumpy old man.

Jonathan Blow had a talk about this that was related to software complexity and losing institutional knowledge over time.

Because technology is essentially knowledge, it has a tendency to deteriorate over time as we build abstractions and people with foundational knowledge move on and people with abstracted knowledge move in.

As a contrived example, China made templates for these bridges, which are an abstraction of the underlying knowledge. In say 50 years time, all the engineers capable of designing the templates have died and no one was needed to make new templates for another 20 years, so no one learned howto design them. So you have lost your ability to design bridge templates and likely no longer understand what makes the current templates work.

That probably wouldn't happen with construction but just an example.

I believe you are correct. As decades go by in which the construction of a particular "thing" is no longer done, the skills, knowledge, experience, and even the institutions that are a part of it wither away. Unfortunately our lost abilities is not limited to big infrastructure projects. Even the manufacture of something as small as a simple screw is difficult in America. Here's an excerpt of what I mean.

> In 2012, Apple attempted to move production, or at least assembly, of the Mac Pro back to Texas. It found it couldn’t domestically source a tiny screw needed for the Mac, indicative of the challenges of trying to produce things in the United States. According to the New York Times account of the fiasco, in China Apple could turn to any number of factories that could produce custom screws.9 Texas had almost none. Further, as said by none other than CEO Tim Cook himself: “In the U.S., you could have a meeting of tooling engineers and I’m not sure we could fill the room. In China, you could fill multiple football fields.” Eventually, Apple had to import the screws from China, and this was merely one production bottleneck among many. In June 2019, Apple announced that the next version of the Mac Pro will be produced in China.10

> If even the mighty Apple can’t source simple things such as screws in the United States, or find enough tooling engineers, we shouldn’t expect one company to solve what is now a systemic problem. It is not rational to expect individual CEOs to expose their companies to the higher costs and bottlenecks that come with reshoring. We should not expect the market to fix this suboptimal Nash equilibrium problem, either, nor can a one-time injection of taxpayer’s money, however large. These coordination, demand, and financial problems are just too staggering for even our most powerful corporations to solve by themselves.

source: https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2020/05/reshoring-supply-...

It is concerning to me our increasing inability to produce material things.

That’s definitely an issue, but I don’t think it applies here.

It looks like the bridge that failed is a road bridge to carry cars over the tracks. The US driving infrastructure has a lot of issues, but you can’t say we’re “out of practice” building roads and bridges for cars and trucks.

It has nothing to do with experience and everything to do with accountability. We all know what happens to Chinese bureaucrats who make the government look farcical. Californian (and many other states) bureaucrats have no such fear to keep them in line and the lack of accountability rolls down hill all the way to the lowest guy on the construction site.

I don't think China is really ready for primetime when it comes to speed and quality of infrastructure.

https://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/25/world/asia/collapse-of-ne...

We dropped a bridge in Florida too so maybe the slow approach doesn't work either. Killed more here too.

Seattle had to close one of its largest and busiest bridges this year without notice due to potentially immenent collapse. The bridge was finished in 1984 and was supposed to last 100 years.

Apparently we haven't been good at building bridges for a long time.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Seattle_Bridge

If you are talking about the FIU pedestrian bridge, that was not a situation of slow building.

That project was to be a showpiece in FIU accelerated bridge construction (https://www.chronicle.com/article/engineer-connects-his-rese...).

I have not kept up with all the analysis(https://www.eng-tips.com/viewthread.cfm?qid=459940) but IIRC the combination of the accelerated construction, the new concrete truss design as well as organizational changes that left key position unfilled were the major design factors.

There were also clear warning signs of the impending collapse that were ignored.

EDIT: I mistakenly named the wrong university FSU -> FIU

> In China (put aside all the political issues at the moment), they were building elevated track to the tune of something like a mile a day at the peak. (On the order of that magnitude -- elevated! Not even just plain track on bare earth)

> What does that produce? A rail-building skilled workforce (10,000+ engineers) that has lots of practice, expertise, and templates to stamp out that stuff like it's their business. Here, we do this now, what, once per decade?

Economies of scale, and "economies of knowledge" are a very sensible argument when it comes to operating a fleet of expensive capital equipment, or capital intensive building projects.

Take a look on Emirates Airlines. They are the only company in the world who made money on their Airbus A380. Why? They operates 100+ of them.

Same with HSR in China, not tricks involved. Though it's still a heavily subsidised, loss making business, but their "core" service in between major cities makes quite a lot of money.

Emirates also has excellent service and the coach seats are first class in comparison to United or AA. The prices are even pretty good against the alternatives.