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Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

"This takes time, with the average EIS taking 4.5 years to complete. Some have taken longer than a decade. A cottage industry of consultants is devoted to completing these documents, earning themselves millions in fees."

Now there's an opportunity for a startup. Make the process paperless. Go out with drones, phone apps, and ground-penetrating radar, tie all the info to location. Hook this up to AR goggles, so the people involved can see all the data when on-site. Much of the environmental paperwork could be generated automatically.

Drone-based ground penetrating radar is now available.[1] It's a lot cheaper than finding pipes and cables during construction.

[1] https://integrated.ugcs.com/gpr

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Filling out the paperwork is not why you pay consultants $$$, their knowledge of how to write the application to appeal to whoever's reading it is. It's just like lobbying in Congress.

>Now there's an opportunity for a startup. Make the process paperless.

There's some precedent: the enterprise content management company Documentum was started as "DocPharma" -- a software system specifically design to shepherd the documentation required to get drugs approved by the FDA. After they saturated that market, they generalized it beyond the original purpose.

It seems from outside the problem is not the process itself took long. People take advantages of some procedure loop-holes to effectively delay this forever for NIMBY reasons (there are some limitations on how long it should take, but there are loop-holes such that the EIS didn't kick off entirely, bypassing the time limit requirements).

You can't tech your way out of fetid politicians.

getting government contracts isn't about competence/efficiency, it's about connections. You could make the best solution in the world but it wouldn't matter. In many cases these processes are created for the exclusive purpose of legally funneling millions of dollars to people

there's no incentive currently for the US government to be efficient. The only people I know who support large government initiatives are people who have never worked in or with the government

>>there's no incentive currently for the US government to be efficient.

This is also true in many large corporations - I have worked for a few - and the inefficiencies and waste is mind-boggling to someone that mostly works for small and mid-sized business that actually like to watch their pennies. If you are a manager, and you are given a budget, you make dam sure you spend 100% of it by the end of the year, even if you have to basically throw it away on some useless spend. There is zero incentive to save money - if you do, you will see your budget cut for the next year too, or criticized/penalized for having asked for more than you needed. Last thing you want to do is bring in your project under budget; wouldn't have believed it if I haven't seen it played out this way time and time again.

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