Comment by paulmd | Hacker News Reader

Comment by paulmd | Hacker News Reader

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It's a complex situation. I have a relative who works for MDOT and apparently for road marking painting there are only 3 contractors in the state who do it. One of them wanted to buy one of the others and only stopped when they realized that being down to 2 contractors would hit the mark for "extreme consolidation" and would allow MDOT to go out-of-state for counter-bids.

To some extent the more rules and oversight you put in, the more you chase out any "honest participants". I've seen it personally in federal contracting, the only participants who can get through the bidding process are the exact companies (like the big 5) who you don't want doing your project. The oversight and complexity of the bidding process chases out anyone who is not willing to spend half their time on meetings and contract overhead if that's what the customer is willing to pay for. It's the dead-sea effect but for contracting, if you chase out the good participants and then tighten the noose, you will just end up with worse and worse participant quality on average every time you repeat the process.

There's no easy answer.

I had a conversation with one of the city engineers in Ann Arbor once about why a street near my house was gravel for like 6 months, and he said that one of the big asphalt contractors had bought out the one that bid on that single block of repaving and then wouldn't do the project on anything like the original timing because they needed the equipment elsewhere. At this point, there's only one or two road asphalt contractors that do anything in greater metro Detroit, so it's hard to get stuff done on time and in budget. It also didn't help that we had a strike from the union that does the work for that contractor and shut down major projects for an extended period in 2018 or 2019.

Beyond that, we have a history of not making good on things like road warranties -- the state called in the warranty on I-275 back in the 90's and that caused the construction company to literally go bankrupt, so now there's a general reluctance to call in major warranty work. For instance, they haven't replaced the chunk of I-94 near the Indiana border that feels like you're in a paint mixer because the steamroller that did those few miles had a bad bearing, but everyone over there knows about it. It's getting replaced nearly a decade later in the next 6~18 months because that section just needs repaving in general now.

This is correct - Through marriage I've met some insanely powerful people who fix our highways/build bridges on the East Coast. These mother fuckers are loaded and they're seriously assholes seeing as I would've never met them by chance and people with money stick together. This is the true answer. There are only a small number of companies who have the logistics/money to actually bid and complete projects like these. It also takes years to do one project, so when there is only a small number of companies who can ever legally / viability afford these jobs this is what we get. Every sector seems to have a big 5. Tech, Finance, Construction, etc;

Also, the larger the contract the bigger you need to be to attempt to bid on it. I could bid on building the proverbial bikeshed (as a programmer it wouldn't make economic sense, but I could do the work), but no way could I bid a bridge. However if you break the bridge down there are a number of operations I could bid on and get done. However that breakdown requires more oversight and work on the governments par, so for a bridge that is probably too much breakdown. Somewhere there is a point where projects are too big, and thus only the big 5 dare bid on them, we need to break projects down smaller than that, but not too small.

> There's no easy answer.

Seems like a fairly easy one, MDOT opens a few job reqs for road marking painting, buys some trucks, and paints lines on our roads. Private contractors makes a lot of sense in some situations, but this doesn't seem like one. MDOT knows how many roads need to be marked, how often, etc, why pay a private company to do so?

Don't just look at the "big 5". I know people there. A lot of the things people get frustrated about are things MDOT requires them to do.

Not long ago I was listening to someone at one of those "big 5" companies complain about how new state rules were radically increasing the time it takes to pave a road while increasing costs, too. All with no quality difference in the end. As a tax payer, they were frustrated by it.

What specifically? I can run it by that relative and see what he thinks.

He's also expressed the inverse to me, that a lot of times they are trying to get the contractors to do things a specific way and the contractors just wanna rush through as fast as they can and get to the next contract. Sometimes, like in most engineering, there are reasons things need to be done a specific way, but building a road isn't really a collaborative thing, they just need to build it the way it was ordered.

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