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Comment by austinl | Hacker News Reader

A friend has worked in construction project management for almost 40 years, mostly in Texas. A few years ago, he moved to San Francisco to work on the Van Ness project, which was approved in 2003, began construction in 2017 (!), went $40 million over budget, and finally completed this year. The project essentially added a median and some bus lanes to a two mile stretch of road through San Francisco and took 19 years.

During his time in SF, no construction took place—so he told me he would essentially go into the office and do nothing while waiting for various city hearings to happen. After 8 months, he quit in frustration and moved back to Texas.

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If you wanted a pithy explanation this comment points to it. It's the speed of the justice system (of which city council is ultimately a part). People want to complain about the participants, but the system itself is so goddamn slow, and more and more decisions are plugged into it, that it's slowness is really the central cause. A working system should be able to handle baseless allegations and NIMBY whining; you can't expect people to show self-restraint.

(The justice system's slowness is also at the heart of another critical problem, the failure of the criminal justice system. Again, people want to complain about the agents, but it's the system itself, particularly it's glacial slowness, that creates perverse incentives and terrible outcomes.)

The justice system is, at its heart, a collaborative information system, and as such is ripe for disruption by software. And I think it's more important to fix even than the healthcare system! At least in part because a large fraction of the complexity of every other system is caused by problems in that most foundational system, justice.

What would this justice software system do that the currently used software doesn’t do?

Eliminate people

Automate and speed up courtroom proceedings. Could also greatly speed up the inclusion of new information - instead of recessing, good software could give access to new info in real time (e.g. connect it in advance to all possible data-sources).

SFMTA likes to point out that in the course of the project it was necessary for them to excavate and replace all the underground utilities along the route. Basically 100 years of the municipal equivalent of "tech debt" showed up on the SFMTA balance sheet.

It's true that the tech debt of utilities was addressed as part of the VN BRT project, however it's also true that the tech debt didn't need to be included in the scope of BRT and it was an intentional (and I would say foolish) decision to do so.

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