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Comment by king_magic | Hacker News Reader

It blows my mind that an environmental impact study for a single light rail system can take 8 years, when multiple coronavirus vaccines were created, safely reviewed, then safely administered to hundreds of millions of people in record time.

Edit: yes, I get the different level of scale/need between them. My point is: big things can be done safely & responsibly without criminally wasting massive amounts of time.

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An EIS can be useful cudgels to impede construction. In Seattle, one portion of a very controversial multi-use trail had an EIS that took "more than three years at a cost of $2 million. That’s less than 7 feet of trail studied per day at a cost of $271 per foot. And that doesn’t include any construction." [1] And that's from 2015, and the trail still isn't completed (lawsuits are still ongoing).

1: https://www.seattlebikeblog.com/2015/06/19/18-missing-link-v...

That's because environmental impact studies aren't really about studying environmental impact.

What do you mean? That it is used as a political tool?

Yes. As a survivor of one of these battles, when the neighbors don't want you to do something, they will throw every wrench they can find into the works. "Good faith" is nonexistent. I'm very, very sympathetic to environmental concerns, but the way I've seen this sort of thing used in real life is absolute nonsense.

Do you have some examples, just to get an idea of the problem?

My high school was a bunch of trailers on a large tract of unused but school-owned land that would eventually become a full-blown high-school. It sat next to a Tractor museum and a small marsh-type thing the opposite side of its access road. The footprint of the planned construction was only maybe twice the size of the trailers, and didn't stretch across the access road, and the land it occupies now was mostly disused fields of dirt and shrubs.

We were promised that our senior year would be in the new facility. However the school got hit with environmental studies around a specific species of endangered frog that was known to inhabit the area, and construction did not complete until 5 years later

What's crazy, viewed from outside the US, is that this kind of roadblocks seems to only apply to public works but not to private developments, or less so at least.

In Europe, public works have less barriers of that type, as it's assumed they are for the general good, whereas private projects are required to demonstrate it.

My high school was a public charter school, so it was both public and private at the same time. But I think that the environmental studies would have come up even if it were a regular public school

I'm afraid I can't get any more specific than that. There's still a lot of bad blood, and it might not be over yet.

Plenty of examples in this recent article:

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/03/signature-...

https://www.mercurynews.com/2015/09/25/sunnyvale-drive-throu...

It is unknowable. People who truly want the best for the environment obviously exist, but the outcomes of our environmental policies have secondary and tertiary effects that would also benefit people who wanted to make population growth and population change difficult for other reasons.

Apologies for the gross long URL, and as always correlation is not causation, but correlations are still worth thinking about: https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=redlining%2Cen...

In a lot of ways, yes. Kicking projects back for more environmental review has recently become a method to delay/soft cancel projects that are now out of vogue. FERC recently kicked a proposed LNG terminal in Oregon back for more environmental review[1], the Biden admin revoking the permit for Keystone XL, and so on. (I would note I am in support of both of those moves)

Combined with a rising 'consulting class' if you will where it is only to their benefit to drag out these studies and billable hours.

[1]https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-lng-jordancove/u-s-fe...

It's used as a political tool to block construction for NIMBY reasons, and as a way to line the pockets of those involved in the study.

No, there is a lot unnecessary red tape involved with them. They aren't used as a political pawn.

As someone who works on EIS/EIRs it blows my mind as well. But I do think that it's important to balance the interests of the community with the project, and I'm not sure that limiting litigation (as the paper suggest) would help with that.

Comparing constantly ongoing processes with an emergency response doesn't really stick.

It's an exception that got elevated to the highest priority. There must have been some efficiency gains as well but the prioritization part doesn't scale by definition.

That all said, 8 years is ridiculous. I have to wonder what work actually happened in those 8 years.

There is a slight difference in effort expended for the latter, and in effort expended and priority granted to make it fast. (And less legal system involved, which to a degree by principle is not fast)

Just look at usual vaccine development schedules, or the timeframes the mRNA developers had planned to work on before covid as a comparison. Same thing: less resources available, less willingness to spend resources in support, no special priority given, more detractors (often understandably and legitimately) getting in the way of speed -> slower process

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