I see many public locations, where a short street or even a walkway is closed for months, because they need to repave literally 20-30 square meters of a walkway, while companies such as Hofer (Aldi) manage to repave their parking yard in a few days, while keeping half of it still open for customers.
It would have the bonus effect of making infrastructure construction/maintenance projects happen more often. Both by lower the barrier to get started (no need to have contractors bid your project, etc) and b/c it's wasteful to have public employees just sitting around with no work to do.
I'm not sure it results in projects being cheaper or quicker overall.
I used to be a public sector dev with an agency that stores plaintext passwords and direct deposit information. People simply didn’t know any better and because government doesn’t have merit raises, the rest of us simply didn’t do anything about it.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2009/08/31/the-rubber-roo...
And have you ever been to a government office to pull a permit? Or dealt with government procurement? Or attempted to get paperwork through the FAA?
And your experience with who you’ve worked with isn’t data by the way.
Yes. It was relatively straightforward, as long as you followed the rules.
The hard part is following all the relevant rules, almost all of which exist because people have tried to rip off the government or lawmakers decided to impose unrelated requirements on procurement. That's not the fault of the government workers whose job it is to carry out the requirements that have been imposed on them.
And what does an opinion piece about teachers have to do with procurement? Those are completely separate things.
The hard part is not going postal as you find out piece by piece that person A didn't tell you about rule X and that department T actually has a revised form W that... and on and on until you find out that you didn't actually have to do any of that because there's some other less shitty process none of these people told you about.
It's like the bureaucratic runaround is the default behavior in some of these organizations.
It's your job to do the research and do things out correctly so that person A doesn't have to waste time telling you what you should be doing.
Or do you think that government agencies have the budget to hire customer support representative and receptionists with intimate knowledge of their department's rules and regulations?
Yes, several times, and it is always completely straightforward. Fill out the appropriate forms, provide the correct documentation, pay fee. If it can be approved by the administrator, it’s issued promptly. If it needs a hearing, it’s scheduled for the next one, you show up and answer questions, they make a decision promptly and it’s either issued or not. I’ve rarely had such efficient interaction with private companies.
Let's not put the cart before the horse, shall we? Yes, all human organizations can suffer from these things (and maybe some more than others). But that's not a reason in and of itself to dismiss an entire class of human organizations as irretrievably doomed.
Look at what the UK government's digital service has done: absolutely outstanding online presence for so many important government services.
For example, you can't use SSN to identify someone. Unless of course you were doing it before the prohibition was established. Apparently it's fine if you keep using it, forever.
Ah yes, because that's what government workers are known for, speed, efficiency and quality.
Trams run fast and very rarely break.
The problem is not the people completing the work; it's not like Aldi's has their own paving machine in the back.
It's that the government doesn't have employees who know how to specify the project and nobody has an incentive to finish in a timely manner.
I think the real problem is more that there is accountability for job performance in the private sector (you get fired if you suck and waste your boss's money) and very little to none in the public sector. No one votes for politicians based on objective performance data.
It'd wild to me how it's considered American to have this sort of bid process because "free markets" and "small government" but the results are everything Americans accuse socialist countries of being.
IMO, a lot of the differences come from the different set of rules that govt work has to run by. For example, Aldi can just decide to hire a contractor that they know does good work at a reasonable price. In contrast, the govt has to use a lengthy fair and open bid process and if they want to select a bid that isn't the lowest, it's a painstaking process to justify that selection. Govt work must adhere to certain laws that tend to push up labor wages (see: Davis Bacon Act). Plus, the govt has lots of other competing goals, like supporting minority or veteran-owned business etc. A simple comparison misses all of those nuances.
The administrative controls are lagging indicators at best, and administrative controls are usually one of the least preferable control mechanisms.
It's unfortunate, but probably better than the corruption that anything else will enable in the long run. Churchill said that democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others. For government spending, lowest bidder is the worst form of contracts, except for all the others.
FWIW, the govt can do "best value" contracts instead of lowest bid. But there is an asymmetry in risk to those making the selection. If something goes wrong in the design/construction, or if corruption is found, there's a lot more explaining to do. Like the old quote, "Nobody got fired for hiring IBM," except in this case "Nobody got fired for selecting the lowest bid."
Isn't that a recipe for cost over-runs?
I mean, it sounds like if building a tunnel costs $100M and one company bids $100M (planning to deliver on budget), a second company bids $50M (planning 100% cost overruns) and a third company bids $25M (planning on 300% cost overruns) it's mandatory to select the third company?
Do governments actually award contracts based on race?
https://selectgcr.com/blog/minority-owned-businesses-how-to-...
And yes, it causes massive corruption.
But yes, it can open the door to corruption and inflated costs. For example, a tiny veteran owned corporation may be hired who subcontracts to a massive firm instead of the other way around. The govt would probably be better off just contacting to the large firm directly.
But private companies have to contract out to private developers. ALDIs doesn’t have a construction division.
Especially when things like equipment, cones and barriers are being rented at high daily rates for months while work is practically at a standstill.
A project in my city that resulted in adding a textured crosswalk pad, new stripes and a beg button cost $1.4M and took 3 years.
ADA does add to the costs of projects, but so does, say, safety code compliance. It's the law, and it exists for a good reason.
As for the example of a minor accessibility project costing $1.4M and taking 3 years, I would suggest that there is probably more to the story that helps explain the cost or the time.
1. New construction must meet ADA requirements. 2. Old construction can remain. 3. Repairing broken old construction requires meeting ADA requirements.
So between 2 and 3 you end up with broken old construction that cannot be repaired to "what it was" because repairs must meet ADA requirements.
Each step makes sense on its own, but combined they result in something worse (in particular) even though overall it works out better.
Or, just have a fixed window to achieve compliance or the building is condemned.
Then a popular crosswalk gets upgraded before a rural crosswalk that nobody uses anyway. An easy upgrade is done before a hard upgrade. Sometimes even new stuff might be built non-compliant if, for example, there are other substantial benefits that outweigh the fine.
Just burn the fine revenue. (Burning money is the inverse of printing money, helps reduce inflation, and means nobody has an incentive to maximize fines)
But ADA stuff is almost always handled on a local, not even state, level.
They're the ones who can print them anyway. The end result is they just print less each year.
If the new local maximum is "well, we won't fix it at all then" - the usual building code solution is property maintenance codes that mandate repairs.
Not in the long run.
ADA just forces better designs. Retrofits are costly.
> As for the example of a minor accessibility project costing $1.4M and taking 3 years, I would suggest that there is probably more to the story that helps explain the cost or the time.
Committees, political turf wars, getting funding for the project through grants (that are complicated to apply for, that's why you need a dedicated bureaucrat to do it!). Then there's union rules since construction workers from the city are government employees.
That's half a million in employee's salaries right there and not a single concrete steps has been taken yet!
I'm not going to argue that it isn't necessary or right. But it absolutely costs more. A bathroom stall, for example, literally takes up more space, and that costs. A ramp and stairs takes up more space, materials and time and that costs.
There are things which are right to do, but disingenuous arguments to support them aren't helpful.
Adding a beg button can mean upgrading or replacing the signal control module, which could mean replacing the housing if it's not large enough for the new module. (Audible-tactile buttons and controllers themselves cost $5-6k each, just for parts.)
Aside from that, the issue with ADA compliance costs isn't when a municipality or DOT pays for them. It's when they remove the crosswalk entirely because they decide compliance isn't affordable enough.
There are other requirements as well relating to multimodal travel depending online the funding source.
All the while, we had an increasingly dangerous intersection with no visible crosswalks and outdated signals for years.
The stupid isn’t ADA, it’s compliance activity. Cities and towns cannot afford the engineers to meet the standards, so the Federal and State governments fund projects. So there’s no framework of best practices beyond the state standards - each project is a special snowflake.
Oh, your road itself is at a slope greater than 3%? Oops, you can't legally do it!
It's okay to have standards. It's not okay if they're bullshit.
ADA ramp max slope should be 1:12, i.e. 8.33% which is (IMHO) reasonable.
Recommended slope for drainage on concrete and asphalt is .25-.5:12, or 1/4" to 1/2" over 1' of length.
Recommended slope for wheelchair ramps are 1-1.5:12, or 1" to 1.5" over 1' of length.
Sometimes the comments on this site are just insufferable.
And sometimes it’s ridiculous: drive through ATMs with braille for instance. Private motel swimming pools requiring wheelchair lifts. That extreme additional cost means that many motels just won’t have a swimming pool at all — so everyone is worse off. But you can’t charge disabled people a swimming pool surcharge since that discriminatory. So it raises costs for everyone. By the way, I am referring to private building codes, not taxpayer-funded projects like sidewalks.
Certainly you’ve heard of Little’s Law if you hang out in HN?
Passengers in the backseat.
Why haven't they been fixed? Why does the city continue to be cruel to disabled people year in and out, content to absorb the lawsuits from the few with means to bring them up? It's probably a simple case of those lawsuits being a lot cheaper than actually fixing the sidewalk to the standards the sidewalk is supposed to be fixed. This is an example of a regulation that was meant to help people (building nice sidewalks with various characteristics), but in the end the regulation was written with no understanding of the cost of these changes, or how they might stack up against the cost of doing nothing at all, so its an example of a bad regulation that should be changed so it can actually help people.
Put differently, if you live long enough, you can pretty much guarantee that you will benefit from the facilities the ADA requires at least once (and possibly for a more extended period than my daughter did).
It all looks like extra cost for little benefit until you can see it through the eyes of someone who actually needs this stuff, at which point it becomes at least a valuable and at best a life-enabling set of features.
And the chances are good that you will be one of the people, assuming you live a long and healthy life.
Not saying that this project was simple by any means, but why did it take seven years to finish? For comparison, the Sears Tower, arguably Chicago's most iconic building and at one time the world's tallest building, only took four years to complete.
[1] https://blockclubchicago.org/2021/05/10/navy-pier-flyover-a-...
For instance, it looks like the Navy Pier Flyover touches the ground in many different places along its half-mile length, each of those places will have different junk buried there already, unique challenges and access restrictions, and new ownership/usage agreements.
With the skyscraper you dig one messy hole then stack and connect layer after layer of engineered rectangles.
Take for example the Munich "Luise Kiesselbach Tunnel": it finished early and under budget, and to my knowledge in its seven years of operation there was no apparent case of cutting corners or botched work. And now one may ask, how is that possible in the country that produced infamous disasters such as the BER airport, the Elbphilharmonie or the #2 S-Bahn tunnel under Munich?
The answer is, the funding makes no difference - the oversight of the funders over the construction process does. When you have to hire external consultants for each project, where the people keep on rotating, instead of having expert knowledge in-house that answers to you, you'll always end up with worse quality - and the external consultants may not have the political standing to override pushes for changes, which tend to be a massive issue in government-funded projects.
Incentive alignment is one of the main problems. When big projects become “job builders,” you’ve now completely misaligned your incentives.
- catch politicians' bullshit before planning (plans that, say, lead directly through a nature reserve) or during construction (e.g. a new politician comes in and wishes some random shit to change just to be able to brag "I did something") and intervene
- check bids on tenders if they are actually plausible or if they are so far under a realistic budget that there will be massive problems later on (e.g. the company threatening insolvency to demand re-negotiated higher rates)
- check impediments if they are actually legitimate or if they are overblown and resolve them
- keep vendors accountable to milestones
You can forget about the first two points, which are the most critical, for external consultants.
So yeah private ones usually do meet budget.
Source - am architect
I’m all for taking care of the environment, but it feels like there’s a lot more “let’s get community and environmental input” than we had in the past (for better and for worse).
> There is no perfect project that makes everyone happy. So, you end up making compromises and adding features to allay all the new stakeholders. This may seem like a bunch of added red tape, but it really is a good thing in a lot of ways. There was a time when major infrastructure projects didn’t consider all the stakeholders or the environmental impacts, and, sure, the projects probably got done more quickly, efficiently, and at a lower cost (on the surface). But the reality is that those costs just got externalized to populations of people who had little say in the process and to the environment. I’m not saying we’re perfect now, but we’re definitely more thoughtful about the impacts projects have, and we pay the cost for those impacts more directly than we used to. But, often, those costs weren’t anticipated during the planning phase. They show up later in design when more people get involved, and that drives the total project cost upward.
On these tiny projects, usually the difference between what a public administration and a private can do is only the bureaucracy involved which is a lot for the public and very little for a private firm.
Sears tower was built in three years, while our neurologic clinic [1] with three floors took more than a decade.
Say what you will, but sears tower is a complex project.
Construction times are even trickier, as they may also be influenced by other factors (authorizations/approvals or changing norms as an example).
A (typical) appropriate construction time for a (large/complex) project is around 4-5-6 years, 3 years means they were fast (in Chicago , in the '70's) 10 years means they were slow (in Slovenia, in more recent years), but otherwise there is no way to make senceful comparisons.
A (larger) town nearby they contract, and everything gets pretty bad before they sign a huge contract, and the company works for a year and fixes everything in one long go.
I work for government myself and have often been frustrated by the inefficiency forced upon us by well-intentioned but misguided legislation. Also, you learn pretty quickly that some contractors play the game better than others and will win one government contract after another, not because they will do the job better, but because they understand the rules around bidding better.