When did New York start building slowly?
constructionphysics.substack.com
constructionphysics.substack.com
For New York specifically there's another factor that it's strange the article omitted: Robert Moses.
Prior to the mid-1960s, it was fairly simple: if Robert Moses wanted something built, it was built. If he wanted it blocked, it was blocked. This made the process of getting approvals a known factor. Moses chaired a wide variety of authorities including NYC Planning Commission, the Parks Department, and more. He was the sole authority to negotiate with the Federal government for NYC projects.
This kind of central oversight allows certain projects to be completed much faster than it would be in other setups, but it also allows for a number of bad outcomes - corruption, ignoring the public good, environmental destruction, and more. As such, over time more process gets added. It's easy to criticize process, but many of the rules were written in blood with the best of intentions.
The question we are tasked with answering is: why?
Tokyo has also been around for ages.
Or you can just go with the simple stupid answer of corruption as if Europe isn't its own cesspool.
Huh? East Asian countries differ greatly from each other.
And the bigger countries, like China, differ vastly by region. Just like the US.
Ah yes, Norway and Greece are known for having the same climate.
The temperature range is literally 100 degrees Centigrade - record in Greece ks 48 Degrees C
Record in Norway is -51 degrees
You just basically named two continents and said they build faster than the US and you're accusing someone else of simplistic takes?
Which European country builds infrastructure faster than the US?
https://pedestrianobservations.com/ and the less feisty https://transitcosts.com/ are the canonical sources on comparative infrastructure costs.
As I recall, the TBM used in NYC was “mannned” by 5x more workers than an identical machine in Paris. We’re talking like 50 people. France isn’t known for labor efficiency, but between the various labor agreements, minority/women owned employee and subcontractor requirements, etc that many extra hands were being paid. Whether they did anything is another story.
- station sizes (causing spend on stations to increase by a factor of 2)
- nonstandard systems (elevators, escalators, etc) (causing an increase over nominal best practices of approximately 1.35)
- inefficient procurement (how contracting works) (increase by a factor of 1.85, although this is a squishy)
- soft costs (design, planning, construction management, contingencies) (factor of 1.2, again fairly squishy)
- labor costs (factor of 1.5 over a well run transit system baseline)
so it's both the case that the labor costs are outrageous and that they're insufficient to explain the outrageous project costs.
Which is what I said, the difference in labor costs "helps", not that it's the sole explanation.
The collapse of the Ponte Morandi / Polcevera Viaduct was just a few years ago and is still fresh in the minds.[1][2]
[1]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ponte_Morandi#Collapse
[2]
Police release new footage of doomed Morandi Bridge collapse in Genoa https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V479srTBlAk
Genoa motorway bridge collapse caught on camera https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Pl0rsVdXxM
Fast, cheap, good. Pick none. The American construction mantra.
So far it's worked because of the reserve currency and technological progress. But the time of the American monopolar world is coming to an end. In twenty years, the bill will come due and instead of acting to liberate themselves, Americans will fall over themselves to justify their status quo - unable to reconcile the existential shame they feel at the thought that they inherited power the likes of which the world had never seen before and transformed it to impotence.
"The billionaires", "we do it to be safer", "the X are ruining it". All the while they drift into irrelevance, raging hopelessly at shadows while their own choices drive them to destruction
It would be amazing if someone could research this, and publish a paper on exactly what reforms the United States needs to make†.
† to get to the same speed/quality/cost-efficiency as these countries
The weird outlier is the US!
By the way, much of the same can be said about manufacturing.
In the US a lack of construction has caused the industry to atrophy.
There was a long period where very little maintenance or construction was required.
Now we are seeing the structures all start to deteriorate at the same time.
Alon Levy is the most accessible source for this kind of cross-national comparision. https://transitcosts.com/ and https://pedestrianobservations.com/2023/03/03/we-gave-a-talk... is a good place to start.
How well build that infrastructure is/was built is debatable, and a massive loss of life has just occurred.
I think it depends heavily on which infrastructure you're talking about though and what parts of the project you're considering. Some countries may be faster at obtaining permits and/or finding the money, and others may be faster at actually building the thing; my impression is that Italy absolutely sucks at the former, but some projects are also slowed down by the sheer amount of archaeological finds that you stumble upon when digging under Rome or Naples.
Anyway, European countries have plenty of boondoggles. Germany’s Berlin Brandenburg Airport was a 30 year project requiring multiple legal battles etc. construction took 11 years where the initial €2.83 billion budget over ran to €6.5 billion due to massive design flaws, construction issues, poor management, multiple lawsuits etc.
Asia has similar issues, China for example does plenty of big infrastructure projects because its infrastructure is so behind, but it’s projects have massive issues. The Three Gorges Dam for example ballooned from $8.35 billion to $37 billion.
The key thing to understand is that while other countries have some boondoggles, the United States does almost nothing else despite spending massive amounts of money. The Purple Line mentioned was ostensibly going to be cheaper due to a public-private partnership but that ended in delays and greater costs as those almost always do, and the same was true of a highway expansion Maryland was trying to do with an Australian partner, and just about every other major American road, rail, bridge, bus station, etc. project is similar. Even our bike lanes take ages to build for the relatively small amount of work.
I agree with the theory that much of this is due to hollowing out the civil service as a “cost savings” measure – these projects sound like what I’ve seen at large organizations where they want a software project without hiring developers so they bring in one consulting company to do the work, and after the first round of failures, a second to oversee the first. Even if everyone is actually acting in good faith it’s just inefficient when you have multiple parties and difficulties sharing or acting on institutional knowledge.
One World Trade Center a public/private partnership started construction April 27, 2006 and opened on November 3, 2014 at the cost of 3.9 billion. Which is easily in line with similar projects around the world, even though it was much slower than such projects back in the 1920’s.
It’s a more complicated building than those 1920’s designs booth from modern standards + features like AC, but also because it was designed to survive an attack.
PS: The Copenhagen Metro has been a 28+ year project that’s gone well but it’s hardly that amazing on its own. Planning began in 1992, the first construction started in 1996, first line opened in 2002 and the project is still continuing with only 12.7 miles in operation. By comparison the DC metro system is currently 129 miles long of which about 50 miles are underground with construction starting in December 9, 1969 and the first 4.6 mile segment opening in March 27, 1976.
Part of this is tall buildings simply run into issues with workforce sizes. The same happens for developers building thousands of single family homes run into similar issues. They can build individual homes vastly faster than they can finish a large subdivision.
Elevators are also a bottleneck etc.
WTC did not have anything like that to worry about and an exceptional level of political will to keep it on schedule.
For more classic example consider say the $252 million 2.8 mile Marc Basnight Bridge which started construction July 27, 2017 scheduled to be completed on February 2019 and actually opened on February 25, 2019. While huge it was politically uninteresting compared to WTC and much cheaper, so while it ended up on time and budget nobody paid much attention.
That bridge is much closer to the typical major project in the US than the kind of things people remember because they made the news and ran wildly over budget.
No, 23.7 miles are in operation. 12.7 miles is the amount that opened in the first stage in 2002.
Washington DC has a population greater than the whole of Denmark, and the DC metro was opened decades ago, so I don't think it's a useful comparison.
“The metro consists of four lines, M1, M2, M3 and M4. M1 and M2 share a common 7.69-kilometre (4.78 mi) section from Vanløse to Christianshavn,[3] where they split along two lines: M1 follows the Ørestad Line to Vestamager, while M2 follows the Østamager Line to the airport. The metro consists of a total route length of 20.4 km (12.7 mi),[3] and 22 stations, 9 of which are on the section shared by both lines.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copenhagen_Metro
Also, the DC metro area is much larger than the area served by the metro system which is why the keep expanding it. In terms of actual daily riders the systems are surprisingly close, though DC gets swamped occasionally for things like Obama’s inauguration etc.
The paragraph you quoted mixes up the situation from before M3/M4 opened with the situation after. I also see where you have taken 13.9km for M1, but on M1's own article page it says 14.3km. Danish Wikipedia gives different figures again.
M1's total length is around 14km, M3 is 15.5km. Christianshavn to the airport is 7km by road, Østerport to Orientkaj about 3km, so the total is roughly 40km.
57 million annual riders on the Washington Metro doesn't seem so much for such a large city. There must be a good chance of getting a seat :-)
Copenhagen's metro claims 107 million annual riders, but the older and more extensive S-train also has 116 million annual riders. Supposedly the total comes to 183 million riders of either/both annually.
Note that Italy is not perfect. And like all cases of corruption it is worse in some areas than others. The construction costs project is about mass transit where Italy does fairly well, but they don't look at highways so we cannot say anything about how they do highways from the data here. (I'm sure someone reading this knows more than I do about Itally's highways and can comment)
I remember staying at the Shinagawa Prince, three years in a row, and it overlooks that big-ass office park, on the other side of the station.
One year, I look out, and there’s a huge empty lot.
The next year, there’s a steel frame, for several buildings.
The next year, the lights are on, and the buildings are obviously occupied.
Also, their standards are very high. They weather massive earthquakes, quite well.
Plenty of farmland. Maybe could use some hospitals.
A real need to rebuild post-world wars seems to have become some mind virus we have to constantly crank out mega projects.
Can we get over the ridiculous hallucination we need to “drill baby drill” and grind through all the resources to goto Mars? You and I will be dead before that’s tenable let alone implemented… can we let the future sort itself out a bit?
Why do we still buy into the story of post-war shell shocked paranoids who spent decades huffing leased gas fumes, expropriating the world from everyone else dropping democracy bombs.
Decades of television as a carefully curated propaganda pipeline has messed the last generation up.
Old infrastructure wears out, and often it fails to meet modern standards and should be replaced (ex old houses often cannot be insulated to modern standards, old bridges we now realize were not built strong enough). Many have for various reasons concluded that some of what we have built in the past was a mistake and so we should tear some things down to replace with something else. (ex replace highways with mass transit)
While we don't need to build or rebuild everything we did in the past, there is still a lot of things that if we would build our life would be better.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-txmGH11sh0
https://www.rbth.com/travel/335939-moscow-metro-big-circle-l...
And this is all under massive sanctions and a less democratic and more corrupt system.
Besides it is irrelevant for the topic - say you are right, then you are still admitting that even a corrupt country that constructs public transport only for vanity can do it at 10x the speed and 0.1x the costs as we can...
That's like saying the vanity construction projects of Roman emperors weren't for vanity because they were used more by the plebs than by the nomenklatura.
Which group uses it most has absolutely nothing to do with what makes a vanity project. Quite to the contrary, the criterion for a vanity project is that a core motivation for its construction was to embellish the image/popularity/glory of the powerful person who ordered the construction. So yes, it is quite common for vanity projects to be precisely those used more by the plebs than the nomenklatura.
I don't think the explanation is that Russians are 10000x smarter than Americans, so it must be some environmental/organizational difference.
I don't see how it would. The reasons why a country with 1/10th the GDP and 10x more corruption still manages to complete their subway projects 10x quicker at 1/10th the cost is totally orthogonal to whether it's a vanity project or not, or with which group will use it most.
> it must be some environmental/organizational difference.
indeed, it very much is. And for that matter: a construction project ordered by an autocratic dictator in a corrupt second-world country has inherently a much higher probability of being finished in time and within budget than a nominally comparable project in a democratic first world country. It may later turn out to be of totally shitty quality or cause lots of other problems (e.g. safety, environmental, etc) because quality and other standards were sacrificed to the priority of meeting the will of the dictator/party, but when a totalitarian ruler gives an order, people feel they better comply quickly.
A totalitarian state that doesn't give a shit about your rights, the environment etc, can more easily just evacuate or disown everyone who lived in the planned line or area, whereas in a first-world democratic country the construction will be hindered by lawsuits (both for their legitimate right and for nimbyism, particular interests etc). Same for the environment: In Germany, these days, there's almost no large-scale construction project that isn't severely slowed down by activists because (true or false) the project is suspected to harm the habitat of some rare protected species. It drags through the courts, Experts have to evaluate the situation, solutions may have to be found (sometimes very costly), etc.
In a totalitarian country, all of that doesn't exist. The environment is just totally meaningless compared to the will of the dictator or party. Finally, it's not just the rights, legal, environmental and social standards that are much more complicated (and in consequence, costly and slowing things down) in developed democratic countries, but pretty much all standards, including for everything related to the building project. So yeah, a totalitarian state is total shite, but its leadership has waaay fewer obstacles to getting their construction project done in time and within budget.
Because it removes the explanation of the motivation that it will primarily benefit their personal usage. Since the decision-makers for the project obviously have to share the subway with millions of ordinary commuters.
Even if it was a vanity project, the vanity only accrues to the top leadership, not to the thousands of middle-managers. So it's extra significant that even with a 10x more corrupt structure, where the vast majority of said structure don't benefit from the vanity, it's still completed quicker.
Does it? I'd say that they have far more benefit of the project than the common commuter… it's just a different use. Their use is not merely commuting (they live in a palace and have a limousine and chauffeur and personal jet) but a tool for asserting and furthering their power and image… So yes, they very much have a personal interest in it. Also, vanity projects in corrupt and autocratic countries are often a way for the dictators and their nephews and goons to fill their pockets from state money. That too is way more benefit than the common commuter.
> the vanity only accrues to the top leadership, not to the thousands of middle-managers
The fact that such a vanity project isn't born from the vanity of middle managers doesn't change the fact that they too have a big personal interest in such projects. Playing your part well in a vanity project is what gets you promoted in autocratic and other totalitarian regimes.
> So it's extra significant that even with a 10x more corrupt structure, where the vast majority of said structure don't benefit from the vanity, it's still completed quicker.
The higher speed of authoritarian regimes when it comes to the decision making processes is nothing surprising but inherent to its nature: no checks and balances, no lawsuits or high standards to slow things down, just a simple top-down order structure. It's not good for the rights and freedoms of people, but it is inherently faster than a democratic system which requires to reach a wide consensus and to comply with a whole lot of complicated requirements.
https://www.iheart.com/podcast/105-behind-the-bastards-29236...
He’s sort of the Don Knuth of US political biography.
Who's Chernow in this scenario? Maybe Ron Rivest?
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/28/nyregion/power-broker-tv....
Over time legitimate bugs and requirements at the time fall by the wayside but the code remains. I don't know how we fix that problem when it comes to legal code though.
However, there isn't much incentive for it. A law getting struck down has no negative effect on Congress or state legislatures. That's a problem IMO
They did things in-house. There’s an anecdote in the book about how they had a building on Randall’s Island with 100 draftsmen on call at any time. The minute the federal government announced more money was released they’d whip up designs for highways or bridges before anyone else and have the proposal in.
There’s a lot of stories like that. Moses and his organization actually built shit, they designed and project managed their own stuff.
We don’t do that any more. It’s not just that we hire construction companies, we hire companies to manage the construction companies and then another company to manage the managers. None of those people have an incentive structure that rewards building fast and on budget.
This problem is endemic to every government function at this point. I am convinced we could solve half the problem with public works by just like building a government department to actually deliver the government services themselves instead of what we do now. Which, of course, is how governments mostly used to function before neoliberalism and general corporate dominance took over.
https://pedestrianobservations.com/2023/03/12/the-issue-of-c...
this is a giant issue in the angloshere
And noone own the outcome for quality of the result.
When an issue arises, before anything is foxed there are 15 years of lawsuits between these companies to figure out who's fault it is
In Britain, we had 100's of highroses built non-cpmpliant with fire safety, apparently the builder, the owner, the fire inspector and the local government are not responsible for compliance.
The leaseholder of the individual apar5ment has tonpay for fixing it.
Some people bought partial ownership, i.e. 25% of the apartment, the rest is owned by investors. Well, theybare responsible for 100% of the maintenance (this is a government scheme)
So some people have bought an asset for £40k and now much pay 100k to fix it. And they cant say no
Having family members who worked inside government and having (briefly) done so myself, I completely agree with the grandparent. Government departments are basically just sprawling hierarchies of middle-management. Very few people who actually do things or take responsibility for anything. Those who want to are likely to get fed up and leave very quickly.
It's all about contracting things out to the usual suspects of consulting firms, who inevitably are only interested in dragging things out for as long as possible and leeching as much money as they can.
There was a recent report comparing metro construction in Italy with the USA that came to the same conclusion. They concluded that in-house expertise is by far the biggest factor in delivering large-scale projects on time and on budget.
I think there's also an analogy with the way software gets slower as hardware gets faster. That is, pointless bureaucracy and wasteful work grows as technology allows a smaller number of people to get the "real work" done. As long as the final result is acceptable (company doesn't go bankrupt / software slowness is tolerable), nothing is done about the waste.
Edit: that includes overly complicated arrangements of sub-sub-sub-contractors with 5 layers of management, all passing messages around before the one guy with a hammer can actually do anything. Kind of like the modern web stack.
I'm not aware of anywhere else in the World where this is the case.
Have you even looked?
How about Singapore? Or even Switzerland or Germany?
This is how things were done for a long time, but anywhere the government delivers value is quickly "privatized" the next time a conservative government is elected.
Privatisation also often allows a short term financial boost at long term net expense.
Cities used to/should have public works departments. Not hire a contractor who hires a paver who rents the machinery to fix a pothole. The city should just own it all and hire someone as it will forever need to fix potholes.
If you get a good dictator, things get done with little friction, because the power rests on a single person's shoulders. But if you get a bad one, you're stuck with it.
Democracy might be slower and less inefficient, but it's reliably slower and less efficient.
The U.S. was clearly designed with the second interpretation in mind. The revolution was a result of taxation by the British Parliament, and their anger at the British crown was that the king did not stop the parliament. The president / executive branch is a single person, and it represented their view of preferring an accountable monarch over distributed accountability dispersing Parliament.
They also designed the house seats with very lower upper bounds on the number of people represented by a single person, and the design of voting districts reflects a view of accountability over representation.
However, the prevailing meta game of politics is using the representation interpretation. And the design of the U.S constitution is quite bad when that is the understanding. It's just not designed for it. And the pubic has been trained, in almost pavlovian way, to interpret the "accountability" interpretation as "populism" with negative connotation.
It's a bit more complicated. Colonials paid lower taxes than people back in England, too.
See also https://www.econlib.org/archives/2016/12/bruce_bueno_de.html
> His stories about George Washington, none of which I knew, are even more fascinating. Bueno de Mesquita claims, quite plausibly, that a huge part of George Washington’s motive for fighting the Revolutionary War was to protect his substantial, and critically placed, landholdings in the Ohio Valley. I’m not saying that I agree with him, but his story made me realize that a large part of my belief in GW is romantic: because I learned about him so early in life, that romantic view is harder to shake and I’ve been less willing to put GW under the public choice microscope than with any current or recent president.
> An excerpt about GW’s wealth:
>> His last position, just before becoming President, was President of the Patowmack Canal Company–the Potomac Canal, as we know it, from the Potomac River. What that canal did was bring, make it possible to bring produce from the Shenandoah Valley–which George owned–up to the port in Alexandria, which had been built by Lawrence, by the Ohio Valley Company, in which George had a direct interest, and shipped goods out. So it was a very profitable undertaking–or so he thought it would be, in the long run, for him. And that’s what motivated him. Most people think of Washington as–besides a great hero, which he certainly was–as kind of a gentleman farmer. Economists have estimated the worth in real dollars adjusted for inflation, not appreciated, of George Washington’s estate, in contemporary terms; and it’s about $20 billion dollars. He is by far the wealthiest President. He is the 59th wealthiest person in American history. Three of the American founding fathers are in the list of the top 100 wealthiest Americans in all of history: Hancock, who was wealthier than Washington–made his money smuggling; and Ben Franklin, who was not quite as wealthy, who made his money because he had a monopoly on the printing press. These are the folks who led the Revolution. These were not the downtrodden. These were not the oppressed. These were people who stood to lose huge amounts of wealth because of the King’s policies. And so they fought a Revolution. Which was, by the way, not very popular. Sixty percent of the colonists either were neutral or opposed to the Revolution.
I don't think we should necessarily take traitors at their word.
(Especially when they talk a big talk about freedom and mankind, but keep slaves.)
For example, the President could appoint the cabinet and judges, but the Senate has to approve them. The president could negotiate treaties, but the Senate has to approve them. The president could veto a bill, but Congress can override it. And so on, and so on. That's not a dictator.
The president has been moving closer and closer to a dictator, though, because Congress has become more and more useless. They have become so tied up in political trench warfare that they can't actually govern. They often can't even pass a budget, which is their most basic job. So the president rules more and more by executive order, which is very much not the way the system was supposed to work.
If someone has a bad take, downvote them. If someone doesn't understand, but wants to, either upvote or don't vote. It's really that simple.
Ironically, this is the most reddit sentence I’ve ever read.
To add more substance and avoid be-redditting this thread even further: I think the crucial difference in a good forum culture is that “bad takes” aren’t reflexively buried - they’re dismantled, disproven, and alternatives are submitted. That way anyone else with similar “bad takes” is guided to a better POV. This is actually productive.
Downvotes are for irrelevant material, which isn’t productive.
Then they can actually read the comment they are responding to.
Most "dictators" in Eve actually end up being pretty good at their job, because it is a cutthroat market, and the most precious currency is players willing to fly for you and they can easily leave to join another group should you piss them off and not take care of them.
As usual, there's a Wikipedia article listing some others: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benevolent_dictatorship
(Relevant disclosure: I'm not French.)
That’s why the US founders loathed democracy. A Republic was the answer they came up with.
Respectfully, we already know this part. It's at the top of every single thread like this.
The more important questions are:
* Are all of these rules still necessary?
* Are any of these rules more obstructive than beneficial?
* Could any of these rules be refactored for a better benefit to obstruction ratio?
The problem will not be solved as long as every time it's discussed, it becomes a "should we have any rules or no rules at all" discussion. We know the vast majority were put in place because something prompted them. What's less discussed is how to fix it, or at least stop making it worse.
Isn't the point of the U.S. checks and balance system that it's basically impossible to 'fix' 'bad rules' that are viewed as beneficial by at least a quarter of the population?
Regardless of how 'bad' it's considered by the majority?
An example from the Netherlands: you have Amsterdam which is 500 years old. It's an infrastructure nightmare. And there is Rotterdam which was conveniently carpet bombed by the Germans in WW2.
Guess which city got a subway first?
It is to the credit of our modernity that the project was completed at all. The real lesson here is not one of generalized slowing, but of a lack of rational analysis, particularly when a wealth of information is available.
Maybe we've now built everything that's easy to build, and all that's left is the hard stuff.
Based on around 100 interviews and many diagrams and reports, we managed to decompose the New York construction cost premium over low-cost countries, which is about a full order of magnitude, into the following items:
The stations are overbuilt by a factor of 3, which contributes an overall factor of 2 cost premium
The systems are not standardized, which contributes a factor of about 2.3 cost premium for the systems and 1.35 overall
Labor costs (including supervisors and other white-collar workers) are 50% of hard costs in New York where they should be about 25%, contributing a factor of 3 premium on labor costs and 1.5 overall
Procurement problems including the privatization of risk, change order risk, agency micromanagement of contractors, general red tape, and profit stemming from too little competition double overall costs
Soft costs are depending on what one counts either 21% on top of hard costs where they should be 7%, or 46% where they should be 20% - agency micromanagement of contractors
- general red tape
- too little competition
Unfortunately, the people who would use it are not the people that sign off on paying for it. Those people had checklists of irrelevant requirements, slow response times, almost certainly pressure to select "certain" vendors (i.e. those who threw money into lobbying the right folk). It got to the point where they seriously considered hiring a consulting company whose sole purpose was to help others navigate all the red tape that gets thrown in your way when you try to get government contracts.
In the end, they realized that they were better off pivoting entirely to the private sector instead of doing a half and half approach.
I seem to recall a similar tale with the lead pipe retrofitting in Flint, MI... contractors to do the job were picked not necessarily by speed and capability, but by other qualities. Regardless of how they were chosen, though, the city failed to deliver. Despite the crisis starting in April 2014, residents and activists had to sue the city in 2017 to actually get the work completed, and it still isn't done. Mostly done, but not completely... 8 years later.
This reads like a lack of democratic influence and even direct corruption.
That is, these "stakeholders" are not concerned that the voters would be unhappy with their performance, and would fire them (directly or through an action of a newly elected official). They seem to be conveniently shielded from feedback of the population which they nominally are hired to serve.
Political control (ie democratic control) is not value neutral.
Though the actual important bit is actually a quote from https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-the-new-su...
And owners have never lied about the superiority of their product, or what other people think.
Except that is pretty much all they do.
Reminds me of a demo I did for some Congresscritters once. The staffer said "It'll take $50k per record to bring this database online" so they refused to look at the live, running demo I had of the database online. I heard, later, that someone else got "$50k per record" as a contract.
That last part isn’t true in my experience, but that makes it harder to solve: every procurement officer I’ve worked with has been very scrupulous about not favoring a vendor but they’re operating under rules for things like fairness and security which are hard to comply with. A huge company can hire a room full of people to document how they’re complying with everything but a startup is going to run into exactly the problem you described. The big guys all support this since it has the effect of limiting options without actually being illegal — who’s going to argue against risk reduction, right?
Ones like this:[1]
[1] https://www.cnn.com/style/article/steinway-tower-intl-scli/i...
https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2019/feb/05/super-tall-su...
In 2009, NY started working on a high-speed rail study, which finally completed last month after 14 years. Now, the completed version of the study recommends a 25-year project that will increase train speed from 80MPH to...wait for it...90MPH.
Insanity.
If there is a mission, a shared common goal and a belief that the benefits of the mission will be as fairly shared as the effort then you get the "magic". Corruption is looked down upon, stupidities are challenged.
But if there is no mission, no expectation that the benefits will accrue to "society", then "getting paid" is the most obvious and sensible response - one is resigned to the stupidities of the project and just accepts them.
Basically, a society with a safety net people trust will find it easier to have a mission that everyone believes.
When you're a startup, you build features fast, you're not afraid of breaking things. Big features are scoped out within days, development starts, and everything is done within a couple of weeks or months. It is so different when you start working for big tech companies, in FAANG for instance some of the small features will take developers months to build given all of the process required to do (RFCs, collaborations with other teams for different services etc)
Many of our greatest works were built on pools of blood that would not be tolerated today.
"Homebuilders don’t seem to think the burdens of OSHA and other safety regulations are all that high. Complying with OSHA is the second lowest category of perceived jobsite regulatory costs."
https://constructionphysics.substack.com/p/how-much-safer-ha...
You can’t build fast on a city that’s been around for a while. There’s too much shit already there. And not just infra, but also simply people, and culture and everything else that comes with human beings occupying a space.
You could probably build the entirety of Manhattan out in the middle of Wyoming somewhere in 10 or 20 years from scratch with a reasonably sized set of resources because there’s nothing around and so little to deal with. It’s just the nature of a place with a lot of people.
Seems like a weird set of metrics whose relevance isn’t clear. Of course approved construction projects are going to take longer - demolishing a 19th century 6 story building is trivial compared to a mid century high rise. Construction is a cutthroat business, so I’m sure that if velocity was the gating factor, the companies would find a way.
I’ve been involved in construction projects as a stakeholder, and NYC isn’t slower to navigate if you have a team that knows how to navigate NYC. I can think of a couple of projects in random suburbia, CA that took longer to permit than the total duration of a NYC project.
Government contracting is totally different, as New York law is knowingly designed to maximize employment. Most government projects do not allow a single general contractor and require separate bids for different components of the building, for example. You also cannot design and build a project in most cases.
Not sure anyone would ever be able to prove causation, but it would definitely be interesting to look at. For all I know maybe it’s not a factor at all?
Alternative is lower margins, but they aren’t that big in typical development projects anyway (in normal times)
- Dollar cost was 1/4 to 1/3 what a builder estimated. (Labor savings)
- I saw continuous progress with no surprise delays.
- It was easier and cheaper to do custom solutions or adjustments as unforseen issues came up.
- Was fun and I learned a lot.
Minuses:
- Material costs were higher than if contractors bought due to retail purchasing.
- It took over a year, versus 5-6 month estimate from builders.
- Was a lot of personal time and learning.
Depending on how they actually worked in practice, it may have taken them a year too.
There's also the very subjective tradeoff between opportunity cost of taking time off from my career vs the benefits of doing more manual labor and learning a lot building a house.
They have excellent general contractor skills, but no experience in whole house construction. It has already been an interesting ride (as of now, they have dealt with soil conditions and dug grade beam trenches for the garage foundation), and there's still 98% of it left to play out over time.
With interest rates low, easier to just hold construction note for another year.
As the US becomes more and more divided on every level: ideologically, religiously, ethnically, culturally, etc this is only going to continue.
Now projects like that are likely harder as the companies that can do it are 1) busy, 2) expensive, 3) not in your area.
NYC is an example of a runaway complexity. So now 1 mile of Manhattan subway costs about the same as 1000 miles of 6-lane freeway.
The correct way to fix it is: don't. Stop encouraging density, instead make sure that other cities can thrive by providing incentives for companies to build in sparse areas.
It's also the only workable way to provide affordable housing.
Nope. Sprawl's infrastructure cost is about the same as urban cost over time. This is because maintenance of city infrastructure is way more expensive.
"Expensive roads" are also a myth. As I said, one mile of NYC subway can cost as much as 1000 miles of 6-lane freeway.
Or another point, Seattle is building subway expansion at the cost of $60B. It's projected to increase rideship by about ~100k daily passengers. For that $60B we could have instead built a city, gave 100k people houses for free, and still have enough money left to allow them to live on investment income from that.
Sure, we'll need to do some small adjustments: switch from giant SUVs to medium-sized and small-sized EVs. Improve pedestrian and bicycle accessibility within suburban villages, etc. But these are all relatively minor changes that can be done gradually.
> It also leads to places that are not very nice to live at.
Most people surveyed (80+%) would prefer to live in suburbs if they could. Yep, very unpleasant places.
Roads are a bad value for what you get. Not only is the throughput not great, they are expensive to maintain. Switching to EVs only really solves pollution and energy usage problems, it doesn’t make traffic somehow more streamlined.
"Many peoples' viewpoints" is a cop-out. You can apply it to ANY phrase: "In many people's viewpoints we should drop a nuke on Manhattan and rebuild it from scratch".
If you look at objective data, Houston beats NYC handily in pretty much any important metric.
Houston commute is 26 minutes vs 33 minutes for NYC. Per-capita income after taxes is similar, and housing costs in Houston are not even in the same league ($3000 average rent vs $1300). Houston also has less income inequality (Gini coefficient of 0.51 vs 0.55 for NYC).
> People aren’t clamoring to live in Houston
This is rich, because Houston is one of the fastest-growing cities in the US: https://www.click2houston.com/news/2016/03/24/census-data-sh... - it's THE fastest growing city in some measures.
Apparently, nobody goes there - it's too crowded.
> Roads are a bad value for what you get. Not only is the throughput not great, they are expensive to maintain.
You're making factually false statement after factually false statement.
I really find it curious how people swallow the urbanist propaganda without ever bothering to check if it makes sense.
> the extremely high demand for pre-war and denser areas.
Of course there is a high demand for urban areas. It's an effect of runaway density. Companies have competitive advantage if they locate their offices in The Downtown of a large city. This in turn makes the area around it more expensive, as people try to move closer to avoid longer commutes.
This is a vicious circle, leading to a sort of "density pollution".
And it should be solved in exactly the same way we dealt with other forms of pollution: via regulation and gradual tightening of rules.
"Nope, sorry, your company's locating here would push downtown density past the limit, you should find a greenfield site on the edge of town and build something new there"
???
A hard limit on the amount of office space per square mile. You simply can not build any more offices. The market forces then will take care of distributing the office space accordingly.
If you absolutely NEED to have an office in The Downtown, then you will just have to pay $$$$$$$$$. Otherwise you'll have to rent an office in a nearby suburbian village center.
Kind of like we did cap-and-trade for sulfur emissions.
It appears that the same induced demand that makes traffic eventually occupy all lanes, no matter how many you build, works to make dense cities unaffordable and impossible to maintain.
There's a middle ground to be achieved here, really, and it's better than both the extreme views I've been hearing over and over again.
> Houston commute is 26 minutes vs 33 minutes for NYC.
I'd take a 33 minute train commute over a 26 minute car commute any day. I'd take a 1 hour train commute over a 26 minute car commute even. When you commute by car you have to be paying attention the entire time. On a train, I can read a book, use my phone, etc. The experience of commuting by car absolutely sucks, and is considerably more expensive.
> Per-capita income after taxes is similar, and housing costs in Houston are not even in the same league ($3000 average rent vs $1300).
You need to also include the cost of transportation, which brings this figure a lot closer ($3100/m vs $2200; see: https://www.nerdwallet.com/article/loans/auto-loans/total-co...). Also, using average here is misleading. You can live in the outer boroughs and pay a lot less than that, and some areas in manhattan drive the average up a lot.
You also have to take into consideration the fact that sprawl forces you into that car pretty often. You need to use the car to go grocery shopping, whereas you can walk to a grocery store in a dense city. I live in Tokyo and used the train once so far this week. I'll be using it again today. On a normal basis, I have everything I need within a 5-10 minute walk.
>> Roads are a bad value for what you get. Not only is the throughput not great, they are expensive to maintain.
> You're making factually false statement after factually false statement.
On a total usage basis, public transportation is considerably cheaper than roads, because as a whole, public transportation tends to be very highly used, when it's ubiquitous enough to be used as a primary method. You can increase throughput by increasing train frequency, which improves commute times. When roads are heavily used, the throughput decreases, commute times increase, and expanding roads doesn't help that situation.
And so?
> When you commute by car you have to be paying attention the entire time.
Self-driving software will fix this within a decade. It's technically already legal to read books and watch TV in a car, if you own one particular high-end car model.
> You need to also include the cost of transportation, which brings this figure a lot closer
Cost of transportation is a whole another issue. Because then you need to include the local taxes that are used to build and maintain transportation infrastructure.
> You also have to take into consideration the fact that sprawl forces you into that car pretty often. You need to use the car to go grocery shopping, whereas you can walk to a grocery store in a dense city.
Yes, and? Car also allows me to just do 2 trips a week to the store to get groceries for 4 people for several days. I had to do a grocery run every day when I lived in a dense city. That's easily another 30-40 minutes wasted every day.
> On a total usage basis, public transportation is considerably cheaper than roads, because as a whole, public transportation tends to be very highly used
That's not true. The average bus load in the US is 16 people. This makes it close to the car cost, only just a bit more efficient. It also does not consider the cost of wasted personal time.
> When roads are heavily used, the throughput decreases, commute times increase, and expanding roads doesn't help that situation.
It does, actually. More roads/lanes almost always increase throughput. They don't necessarily increase the average _speed_.
But guess what, the transit speed is _slower_ than cars pretty much everywhere.
Have you personally lived in Houston or another car-oriented city in the US? Or are you just reading the horror stories about "car hells"? Try it yourself to see the drawbacks and advantages.
I personally had lived in Europe and used transit and biking a lot. Including the bike hell of Amsterdam. I got my driving license at the age of 30 and my first car at 32.
And it'll be powered by fusion energy!
> It's technically already legal to read books and watch TV in a car, if you own one particular high-end car model.
This isn't true. No car has reached level 5, which means that you're required to be able to take over. I'd really hope you're not doing this. If this is legal anywhere, those politicians are truly idiots.
> Cost of transportation is a whole another issue. Because then you need to include the local taxes that are used to build and maintain transportation infrastructure.
This one actually hurts a bit, because a very large percentage of road infrastructure is funded by federal taxes, which I'd really love to reduce, whereas a majority of public transportation is funded by local or state taxes. Another thing to note is that public transportation is partially funded by usage, whereas road infrastructure is not.
You need to include cost of transportation, because the cost of a car is extremely high, and this disproportionally affects the poor.
> I had to do a grocery run every day when I lived in a dense city. That's easily another 30-40 minutes wasted every day.
> Yes, and? Car also allows me to just do 2 trips a week to the store to get groceries for 4 people for several days.
The grocery store is just one example. You also need to fill your gas tank 1-2 times a week, wash the car, take it in for maintenance, etc. Every restaurant trip is a car ride, when you want to go to a bar, a car ride (or hopefully a taxi/lyft/uber). Thanks to density, I can walk to all of these things in ~10 minutes.
> The average bus load in the US is 16 people.
Again, using an average here isn't reasonable, especially when you're averaging across the US. You need to look at cities that have good public transportation that ubiquitous enough for use. NYC, and SF, for instance have considerably higher bus loads. When you look at train loads it's not even close to comparable.
See a comparison of the BART and the bay bridge, where the BART is 2x more efficient during rush hour: https://twitter.com/SFBART/status/1121516583409446912
The BART isn't even a great system to consider. The NYC subway's ridership is far higher.
> More roads/lanes almost always increase throughput.
No, they increase bandwidth. Throughput is how much is moved over a period of time. There's a lot of studies about this. See this article for just one example: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/06/us/widen-highways-traffic...
> But guess what, the transit speed is _slower_ than cars pretty much everywhere.
Not in cities with subway systems, or in cities where transit is prioritized over cars.
> Have you personally lived in Houston or another car-oriented city in the US?
I grew up in New Orleans (until around 30). I've lived in SF, NYC, and Tokyo. I've traveled lots of places. I have enough experience between both to know which is obviously superior in terms of general life quality.
Cities with sprawl are less fun. Commuting sucks (especially during commuter hours, where you get stuck in traffic). Parking sucks. Maintaining a car sucks. Paying the expense of cars sucks. Not being able to walk anywhere because cars are the priority sucks.
Walkable cities are more fun. There's a reason that people go to vacation to these places, and not places like houston.
If I got a US visa tomorrow I’d be on the first flight to the Houston or Dallas suburbs. Judging by the growth rates of Texas cities - compared to the growth rates of old European ones - lots of people agree.
Pretty =/= functional. There are costs to density that aren’t immediately apparent, and advantages to having space that people who are used to it may not appreciate.
https://kinder.rice.edu/urbanedge/houston-dallas-led-metro-a...
It's what people mean by saying "Houston" anyway.
NYC subway is more expensive per meter? No shit. What's the ROI? How many passengers per day? What do you think are the economic payoffs for those investments?
What survey showed 80% of respondents preferring suburbs? A suburb versus what? What kind of respondents do you think they got? How do you reconcile this with the market reality of brutal real estate shortages in America's denser cities? (Just pull up some pricing per sqft. How do urban vs rural compare?)
This is all even without taking into account the market distortions (and ponzi schemes) arising from the US's infrastructure sprawl since the 50s. What happens if/when the cities stop subsidizing the completely financially insolvent surrounding areas?
I don't think infrastructure in NYC is cost-effective. For that matter, infrastructure in Seattle (where I live now) is not cost effective.
Its ROI is in fact negative, as it forces further unsustainable agglomeration of wealth in a small area, while starving smaller cities.
> What survey showed 80% of respondents preferring suburbs?
It's a metric that is pretty constant with only small variations: https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2021/12/16/america...
> A suburb versus what?
Dense urban areas.
> What happens if/when the cities stop subsidizing the completely financially insolvent surrounding areas?
Sigh. Cities do not subsidize suburbs. Most of the US wealth is generated by people living in suburbs.
- that his own linked survey shows 46% preferring suburbs, not 80%
- that "it forces further unsustainable agglomeration of wealth in a small area" would suggest a very high ROI, actually (and "forces" is an interesting word choice vs "attracts")
- this Lafayette case study shows exactly how denser areas pay for themselves in tax revenue, and how the surrounding ones don't [0]
[0] https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2017/1/9/the-real-reason...
If we look at Manhattan, it's a complete runaway disaster: 73000 people per square mile.
Probably when Frank Sinatra was alive but certainly not now.
What can you get in New York that you cannot get somewhere else?
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2022-06-07/is-new...
Art/museums... top notch collections
Restaurants... you can find any type of food here
Sports.. I used to go to the US Open tennis every year... then there is football, baseball, MLS soccer.. all of these are within 1 hour
Sit down at a restaurant table on a sidewalk and just people watch
Broadway shows
Concerts
Beaches are close by
Hunter mountain for skiing is not too far
3 airports that have flight going everywhere
Those are just a few........
I wouldn't brag about NYC's beaches and skiing.
I’m not hating on the city, just pointing out that New Yorkers often believe that only NYC has stuff and every other city is a barren wasteland.
Concerts are an excellent way to lose your hearing.
Restaurants are enjoyable but they will drain you economically.
Spectator sports are a great way to get fat while watching someone else doing sports.
Different people make different choices and that's perfectly fine.
>Construction companies, which have given millions of dollars in campaign donations in recent years, have increased their projected costs by up to 50 percent when bidding for work from the M.T.A., contractors say. ... Consulting firms, which have hired away scores of M.T.A. employees, have persuaded the authority to spend an unusual amount on design and management, statistics indicate.
or this:
>"Worker wages and labor conditions are determined through negotiations between the unions and the companies, none of whom have any incentive to control costs."
All they say is that the reason starts with the number of people employed. If you continued reading past that point, they talk about other non-union incentives that drive up costs, like:
>Critics pointed out that construction companies actually have an incentive to maximize costs — they earn a percentage of the project’s costs as profit, so the higher the cost, the bigger their profit.
They also talk about the "soft costs" of NYC construction, like:
>The project plan called for the hiring of 500 consultants from a dozen different companies
And of course bureaucracy:
>Officials have added to the soft costs by struggling to coordinate between vendors, taking a long time to approve plans, insisting on extravagant station designs and changing their minds midway through projects.
So while we can probably agree that unions are part of the problem, it's disingenuous to act like they are the whole problem.
Oh, sure, they throw money in the pot for candidates, but in Europe, unions take actual political positions on important matters. They do not often get their way, but they act as an important counterweight in politics to the interests of the rich and powerful.
I wish they had different names because they are quite different.
In the US you are forced into a single union for an employer.
In Europe the union is for the employees, they have lots of employees from a wide variety of places, and they offer them services.
In the US the union is for the employer - they stand in between the employee and the employer and purport to decide what's best for the employee.
The answer is corruption. America is horribly corrupt, much like Latin American nations, and unlike western European nations. So unions in Europe actually work the way they're supposed to, whereas in America they're just another corrupt institution, probably much more corrupt in fact than most others, and cause more problems than they solve.
How do you get America to have unions like those in Europe? I have no idea, but I think it's like asking how you can turn Afghanistan into a country similar to Norway.
Easy. Allow the employee to pick the union - you can have more than one union per employer. Or no union at all if that's what the employee wants.
That's the only change needed.
If like, add a second change: It's not longer necessary to make an employer be a "union shop" any employer can have employees represented by unions, if that's what the employee wants.