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Comment by seanmcdirmid | Hacker News Reader

It really feels like we can't have nice things anymore. Seattle goes way over budget and time on all its transit projects, to the point that it just feels like we can't get anything done anymore. In contrast, China builds subways and rail lines for a reasonable price, even if they aren't always needed.

My wife's hometown (Chenzhou Hunan, 4.5 million, although just 1 million urban) just got an airport, so no more flights to Changsha or Guangzhou and then a 1-2 hour HSR connection into the city. I guess it seems a bit pointless, because HSR made the lack of an airport completely reasonable, but what do I know. But there are definitely enough people to justify an airport, like that airport in Guizhou...it serves 6.6 million people...so in 10 years they might think they didn't build it big enough.

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> It really feels like we can't have nice things anymore.

Economists talk about the middle-income trap, but I feel there’s another trap in developed economies. The economics of low-cost, high-skill labor that made the public and private architecture of the past (my small city of around 70,000 people has a gorgeous post office that was built in the early 1900s in a grand neoclassical style) so comparatively extravagant and beautiful just doesn’t work today.

Blame doesn’t lie with the high-skilled working class for not wanting to work for what would amount to poverty wages, but at the same time shareholders and city council meeting-goers refuse to pay the correct price to build beautiful things anymore. It’s a cycle that nobody wants to (or can) give ground on.

That’s BS. Very little of the cost of these projects is labor actually doing the work. Most of it is planning, admin, and opaque costs nowhere near labor costs to subcontractors.

If you believe that’s the case why aren’t you founding a disruptor to the construction industry with high-skilled, highly-paid labor? Should be easy to eliminate those “opaque costs” and undercut all of your competition, right? Easy money.

Hahaha, the money is going to the folks playing the games with procurement and management. My skill is actually building things. Which is completely uninteresting to all parties involved in that mess. Often actively avoided, actually, as it tends to ruffle feathers.

Similar to Beltway bandit type software work.

That isn’t going to change until there is clear motivation by taxpayers/constituents to actually get something done quickly that doesn’t suck, and they can agree on what that is. Which isn’t going to be anytime soon.

In the mean time, plenty of folks happy to sit back and cash paychecks ‘helping’ the various entities.

All your points are true, yet remember that China has over 4x the US population and a higher overall population density. Also, if your wife is from the PRC, you obviously know how the CCP will ram through any project they deem necessary, regardless of what the locals think.

Construction is expensive in the US because the cost of living is expensive, primarily due to continuous inflation over the past 60 years. To my knowledge, the majority of construction costs are worker pay and worker health insurance plans, not equipment and building materials. China's cost of living is still low, so worker pay stays relatively low, and though I know almost nothing about the Chinese healthcare system, I can't imagine their healthcare costs are comparable to the US.

I am genuinely surprised an urban population of 1 million people just got an airport in 2023.

Construction is expensive because in large part we became a society of NIMBYs, especially when compared to other countries with high labor cost. At the same time, we're also wasting money on unnecessary infrastructure.

Labor costs are manageable by itself. But the sheer ineptitude, obstructionism, excessive goldplating, and changing your mind every five minutes is going to balloon project costs, especially when they're not routine affair.

At the same time, we're adding parking lots and expanding and adding additional roads. They're not really needed and contributed to excessive pollution, urban decay, and maintenance issues.

Setting aside the rest, NIMBY's are part of why we don't have projects like the Three Gorges Dam that displaced over a million people from their homes.

Sure, a lot of it is just wankery, but a certain amount of input from the people who will be harmed by social projects is a good thing.

Doesn't prevent road expansion, rampant parking lot construction, and urban sprawl. They're only NIMBY against certain projects. Some environmental destruction are more acceptable than other.

Hmm. That's not inaccurate, though it's too pessimistic to be constructive.

Certain Americans are convinced that living in a dense urban environment is a necessary way to live, and they're quite vocal about increasing population density. As it happens, many people who live in those cities, particularly the locals, disagree. But see, that's the thing: the locals are content with the current state. In my own experience, the main energy for change in the majority of non-US cities comes from transplants.

Everyone thinks they're the protagonist in their story. A simple solution for more space is to move to a small town, fill a niche, and build community, yet many people aren't willing to make that sacrifice, particularly if your family has deep roots in a certain region.

Rest assured that if you experience Atlanta traffic, you will not be content.

My experience living in Beijing for 9 years tells me more about the CPC than anything. They replaced a freeway bridge (三元桥) overnight once, that was an experience to see. But more to the point, our productivity should be higher for the higher pay, but it isn’t. We’ve stagnated in construction for some reason.

It just opened in 2021, not 2023, not a huge diff. But one million people is considered a small city by Chinese standards.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chenzhou_Beihu_Airport

A lot of cost savings come from just producing things in volume. The Chinese may be way over-building the infrastructure, but they're building so much that their industry is quite good at it. Contrast that with the US where these infrastructure projects are relatively uncommon and the industries that support them are small and high cost. If you have to keep an industry alive on only a handful of projects each decade then those projects are necessarily going to be expensive, probably outrageously so.

Yep, that makes sense. Seattle can’t get enough firms to bid on projects, and there aren’t enough civil engineers to go around (the ones that exist are retiring), kids these days see computer science as the only way to make money since we’ve been underpaying civil engineers…etc…

Pesky land rights owned by individuals can muck things up

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