Comment by JPKab | Hacker News Reader

Comment by JPKab | Hacker News Reader

The article lacks precision in the fact that it's not necessarily "American" construction costs, so much as "why are construction costs in large American cities so costly". DC, NYC, LA, SF are not representative of how infrastructure projects are pursued in the rest of the country.

We know very well that there are orders of magnitude more bureaucratic obstacles, as well as dramatically higher labor costs, when comparing any building project conducted in Texas vs. California. New York City's municipal projects are widely-known to have dramatically inflated labor costs due to various factors, not limited to rampant corruption within unionized labor. I'm a supporter of labor unions, but a minority of unions give the majority a bad name by allowing themselves to be used as tools to enrich corrupt officials. European unions seem to be far, far less susceptible to these kinds of grifters.

There are certainly issues at the federal level as well with metrics for funding allocation, but let's not pretend that building large infrastructure in states with lower regulations is remotely as expensive as in places like California which have ridiculous levels of red tape and NIMBY empowerment. (Understood that construction in California has to take into account earthquake mitigation, but it isn't remotely enough to explain the cost deltas.)

>We know very well that there are orders of magnitude more bureaucratic obstacles, as well as dramatically higher labor costs, when comparing any building project conducted in Texas vs. California. New York City's municipal projects are widely-known to have dramatically inflated labor costs due to various factors, not limited to rampant corruption within unionized labor.

Please read the actual link. This simply isn't an issue the way you think it is. "It's the unions" is simply being intellectually lazy because it fits your preconceived notions.

"I am not overlooking union power, I believe it is not an important factor, not when right-to-work US states have very high construction costs too while Scandinavia has low costs."

The problem is the quantity of labor. In the US we use many more people to operate a TBM vs what they'd use in Europe. On commuter rail lines we pay conductors $100k a year to collect tickets when in Europe they'd use a ticket machine. On the NYC subway they have a driver and a conductor when in Europe they'd only have a driver at best, or even some lines are being made driverless I believe. They're trying that in NYC too but it's complicated and costly because of how old the signaling system is, because it was too costly to ever upgrade.

The agencies should focus less during union negotiations on keeping salaries and benefits down and more on reducing the quantity of required workers. If they were able to do it in Europe, they can certainly do it here.

You can try to break it down, but the fact is in NYC the quantity of labor is a union-negotiated (and demanded) problem.

The NYTimes did a detailed article on this a couple years ago, with a focus on the NY subway expansion: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/nyregion/new-york-subway-.... There's no escaping that the overstaffing was a political boon to a union.

_Why_ NY construction unions are so much worse than Scandinavian unions is a whole different question. But it's not really deniable that the public-union interaction in big cities here is incredibly extractive and antagonistic, and that drives up costs.

Who do you think requests more quantity of labor for every job?

The unions.

And the contractors pass on the cost because the bigger the final dollar amount the more opportunity there is to squeeze in profit.

And the beurcrats rubber stamp it because the bigger the amount of resources they control the more powerful they are.

And the politicans ignore it because it provides them more power to do favors and a bigger haystack in which to bury their nepotism and unethical meddling.

It's self serving waste all the way down.

The fundamental problem is that nobody anywhere in the chain or responsibility wants to spend taxpayer money with precision, efficiency and care because doing otherwise is in their best interest, as is every other party, except the taxpayer who has no choice but to bend over and take it.

It's not just a union problem. But rest assured the unions are doing all they can to perpetuate it as it benefits them.

How does that work? Unions do not run companies and hence have no say in negotiations between government offices and contractors. Unions only concern themselves with the relationship between the employees and the employer. I don't think you know what a union is.

That isn't true. Union members vote. There are a lot of laws on the books about what can and cannot be done in those negotiations - many of them written by the union.

In places like New York City the unions are easily able to stop the work of any private contractor. The private contractors know this and collaborate with the unions on ensuring that they are able to ensure that the contracts mandate union labor.

This is not how most unions in the United States operate but they do operate this way in locations where the dominant political party has not changed for a hundred years, see NYC.

It's rather condescending to indicate to someone that they don't understand what a union is. You should research a little bit more before you assume that unions aren't able to influence private companies that employ them when negotiating contracts with local governments. It's simply wrong.

I'm very familiar with these details because I had to do a detailed analysis of labor costs for the WMATA which has to negotiate with unions to operate the DC metro system.

That you have been involved in the project doesn't mean that you know where the real cost sinks are. The role of unions are discussed extensively in the linked to article's comments. The idea that unions drive the cost of construction projects through demands for more labor appear to be quite tenuous. If you have evidence to the contrary cite them. Otherwise I would chalk up GP's comment as the typical anti-union scare propaganda. It's very common on HN.

>> quantity of labor

This is something I don’t really understand about American business. In my experience it’s pretty common in America to have “superfluous” jobs - the Walmart greeter for example, valet parking attendants etc. etc.

Now on the one hand you can say these roles aren’t superfluous at all, they’re required, maybe some people find a valet convenient (does not compute for me), maybe some customers spend more in your store after a cheery hello at the entrance.

On the other hand, society works just fine without these roles and at lower overall cost.

Is it a workaround for capitalism’s failings? Like “hey of course there’s a job for everyone who wants one” kind of thing and we’ll just quietly eat the cost because the flaking out on society payments (taxes to cover rule of law etc.) is cheaper overall than having a couple of extra minimum wages on the balance sheet?

It's actually likely due to low minimum wages. Countries with high minimum wages do not have superfluous jobs. They still end up with similar employment rates overall as the increased spending power of the bottom 50% stimulates the economy overall but there are definitely fewer bullshit jobs.

I agree with your statement here, but it should be noted that it's important to have smart minimum wages adjusted for regional cost of living. In the US, the minimum wage hikes can often result in local reductions in employment in the short-term.

In the long-term, minimum wage hikes tend to not at all reduce employment, even when implemented in clumsy fashion like the US tends to do.

It's a shame that conversations on these things are so politicized, because it immediately prevents nuanced discussions because ideologues pounce and label you an opponent if you try to discuss realistic details.

interesting. as an american, I have just about the opposite impression of mainstream american businesses. most retail stores seem have the bare minimum number of employees to ring up customers and stock the shelves. and grocery stores are trying to eliminate the cashiers. the exceptions tend to be higher end stores or, for some reason, clothing stores. I can barely walk five feet into a gap without someone trying to help me shop. I only see valets at nice restaurants or garages that are too tight to allow customers to park their own cars.

the walmart greeter is an odd exception. why do they pay someone to stand at the door and say hello but have almost no one out on the floor to help me find things I want to buy?

Walmart greeters are to deter theft. An old lady may not actually stop anyone from stealing, but neither does your average door lock. Both keep honest people honest.

In addition to the theft issues already mentioned, people in the right place help customer service and so are worth it because people feel better. As such the wal-mart greeter is cheap compared to the cost of a whole store. The cashier makes about twice as much per hour, and doesn't generally give the good feeling to customers.

Your response was well-reasoned and thought out, and I certainly wasn't TRYING to imply it was mostly unions.

But having done work in the past to do detailed analysis for the WMATA (they run the DC metro system) on various understaffing issues, the unions do contribute to issues with operations and maintenance. I will not and cannot comment on their issues with construction of the Silver Line.

But as far as maintenance, the unions (they do the same for BART by the way) constrain hiring the proper number of maintenance techs, so that the employed techs get large quantities of overtime pay. A single person working 12 hours a day ends up costing the same as two people working 8 hour days, but is definitely not going to be able to keep up with repairs, resulting in the constant broken escalators and elevators and out of commission tracks that have plagued WMATA increasingly since the late 2000's.

Reducing the quantity of workers when negotiating with an entrenched union is very, very difficult to do. They tend to want to keep the same quantity, or very slowly increase the quantity. This is very well documented behavior that is covered extensively in the book "The Machine That Changed the World", which was the first book documenting Toyota's journey with LEAN manufacturing, and then talking about the challenges GM faced with their unions when trying to implement these same practices.

All that being said, you were correct to poke holes in my statement and you added to the conversation significantly, so thank you for that.

> But having done work in the past to do detailed analysis for the WMATA (they run the DC metro system) on various understaffing issues, the unions do contribute to issues with operations and maintenance. I will not and cannot comment on their issues with construction of the Silver Line.

As soon as you said "WMATA" I was going to ask about the Silver line. From the outside it certainly looked like it had problems, though I suppose tunnel boring wasn't one of them.

> On commuter rail lines we pay conductors $100k a year to collect tickets when in Europe they'd use a ticket machine. On the NYC subway they have a driver and a conductor when in Europe they'd only have a driver at best

Hold on, commuter and metro rail in the US have dedicated conductors? As in one per train, rather than someone spot-checking tickets on one in a hundred trains?

Make it 2-3 conductors per train for commuter trains in Boston. Also, MBTA employees retire with super high pensions (70-80% of salary)

Worse, in some cases there is a fare gate so it is hard to even get on the train without a ticket.

The rest of the country keeps its transit infrastructure costs down by refusing to have transit.

New York and California have plenty of roads.

And roads aren't even cheap, but they are nice and decentralized and do not require smart planners.

That's a nice resiliency and I give roads credit where they are due for it. But cars are terrible and we simple cannot continue to do the easy status quo thing.

Grids can be resilient, but these days we protect neighborhoods from traffic by forcing use of arterials/collectors that become single points of failure. Often this is even retrofitted onto grids via turn restrictions.

> DC, NYC, LA, SF are not representative of how infrastructure projects are pursued in the rest of the country.

If the suburbs are different, this is a decent point. But the major American cities and their suburbs are a majority of the country on every metric that matters. BOS-WASH + SoCal alone is more than 20%.

The state of Texas is ~9% of the US pop, and Dallas, TX (top metro area by pop in the state, 4th in the country) has a substantial public transit infra to study (DART).

Totally reasonable to say we should look at Greater Houston and Dallas-Ft. Worth as well as BOS-WASH, SoCaL, and Chicagoland.

They are comparing large American cities to large cities in other countries, so it's apples-to-apples.

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