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Comment by dustractor | Hacker News Reader

To each their own, I guess. I guess if your whole life has been in cities where construction often involves de-constructing already-built structures, you might hear the sound of a jackhammer and think "ahh the sounds of life..."

Having grown up in the countryside, where most construction involves killing all the trees on a site by scraping off the top layer of soil, the sounds of construction only makes me think of death.

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I work in construction and I notice this attitude is becoming more common, even among my coworkers. The reality is the western world is falling behind in essential infrastructure in every capacity. And I think our attitudes towards construction have a lot to do with that. Its hard to build roads, highways, sewers these days without some pushback. We need to start changing our views and start seeing constriction as an essential human need and return to the old view of infrastructure as something we take pride in

We don't need more urban sprawls. Heck, new road construction is probably the easiest thing we can get build. The problem is the immense cost imposed on society to implement an automobile based architecture.

Instead, we should build up what we already have and encourage density.

This is not a call for less infrastructure spending, but a reconfiguration of our urban design patterns.

Do you believe that automobile based architecture never worked, or that it worked before but no longer works? How could it ever work if we refuse to invest in the infrastructure to make it work?

It is not so much a "yes-no" as a "how much and what exactly" question. And the starting points may differ from country to country.

After the Second World War, Japan concentrated heavily on passenger trains, Germany on the autobahn and a little on passenger trains, and the USA (almost?) exclusively on automobiles. Some of the differences can be explained by geography, but it was certainly not all determined by it. There always seems to be some room for choice. Usually, at any given time, the public perceives only part of the actual advantages and disadvantages, as well as the inherent trade-offs. Moreover, people's preferences are also constantly changing. That's why it's always necessary to adjust and dare to do something new.

However, in such matters, countries also seem to be extremely conservative and hardly able to leave a path once it has been taken, because institutional and economic structures and entire schools of thought would have to be completely realigned. In particular, the losers of a rethink will do everything they can to delay change as long as possible, while the exact winners are not yet known.

It works, but it’s very space intensive, so it only works where space is abundant, like in rural areas. Notably, the city is not a place cars really work.

I think that it worked and it still does so far as the transport of people and goods is concerned, but such an architecture was never necessary.

Speak for yourself. Living densely is not for everyone. I for one hate it. I like my 10 acres and my car based infrastructure. Otherwise we end up like Europe, I was there for a month earlier this year and their roads are unplanned, narrow, chaotic dogshit, there is no parking and you’re forced to take public transport everywhere.

> Otherwise we end up like Europe, I was there for a month earlier this year and their roads are unplanned, narrow, chaotic dogshit

I wish this was true. But it's like this only in the historic centers which (obviously) have not been designed with cars in mind. Outside of those historic centers large European cities are more often than not full of nightmarish highways and parking lots.

That’s not true. There are places with nice highways and ample parking but a lot of places outside of cities are still impossibly narrow roads and haphazardly planned junctions etc. most tows are like this too and the terrible street parking situation is everywhere.

To build up and in, we really need more of a "let's build it!" mentality where a few NIMBYs can't block everything.

I wonder if our general views of construction are related to the public's distrust of politicians?

Personally, when I'm inconvenienced by a crew spending six months on a job that looks like it could be done in two weeks, I think "what politician's cousin is padding their pockets with this absurdly long and inefficient contract?"

I agree that our infrastructure needs massive improvement - which requires construction.

I don't think we need more roads and highways, though. In some places, repaired and improved - for sure.

Like switching from fossil fuels to green energy, we need to change the way we build things. Fossil fuels were the quick easy way to get energy, but at a climate and pollution cost that degrade life. Buildings that only last 20-50-100 years are cheaper but a constant drain and disruption. Until we learn to build things that last we'll be in a constant war with entropy, and we'll always be losing. It is like quickly written code; you assume someone else will come along later and improve it, but it ends up getting hacked for a decade, wasting time and lives. I'd suggest you can tell how advanced a civilization is by how long its structures (both civil and material) last.

> The reality is the western world is falling behind in essential infrastructure in every capacity.

Could you expand on this? What do you mean?

> Its hard to build roads, highways, sewers these days without some pushback. We need to start changing our views and start seeing constriction as an essential human need and return to the old view of infrastructure as something we take pride in

For me, it's not "construction" by itself, but I suspect it's pushback against urban sprawl and poor urban design. I watched an excellent video about Houston: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uxykI30fS54 It takes awhile to get to the point, so you might want to skip to 3:42.

I'm also in construction. Important stuff is going to start falling down because of government mismanagement. It has the money for infrastructure but the leaches take it all. This kills the soul of the good worker. Corruption saps all motivation.

The western world is not falling behind, it is, as ever since the last century+, at the forefront of progress.

And this is just a natural evolution of realizing that building more and more and having "pride" in buildings is not really a good thing (similar to the economic doctrine of forever-growth). Working in an office building, no matter how well ventilated and sound proofed, is incomparable with working in a room with a few to a quiet garden - to give just one example.

The countries that you see that are "surpassing" the west simply haven't reached this stage of insight yet and are still locked in mundane materialistic thinking. Let them have their buildings and bustling streets and noisy neighborhoods and 10 lane highways. They will realize the health benefits of returning to more quiet way of living at some point (unfortunately, I see a number of people here in this thread have neither reached this point.)

Ironically, it's the city where construction is the hardest to get permission for.

You only exist in this world because trees were cut, soil was scraped, and concrete was poured.

And yet you only exist because trees and soils are there to form a complex ecological web that sustains you.

This type of narrow thinking that we somehow "own" nature is nuts. We don't own anything and cutting down trees and scraping soil we actually eroding the foundation that sustains us. You can very well exist, and people did for thousands of years, without cutting trees and scraping soil.

I'm shocked to see people with such a distorted view of the world are here on HN, otherwise a place of informed people.

Hopefully in a few decades people like this will be denounced as they climate heretics that they are and punished for it.

I don't understand why we see animal infrastructure like beehives or nests as part of nature but human infrastructure as some abomination. A concrete jungle is part of nature exactly like anything else on this planet.

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