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Comment by rkrzr | Hacker News Reader

I suspect that the actual cost to rebuild the bridge will be far higher than that. Initial estimates of large public works projects are virtually always too low, and actual costs can easily be 5-10 times higher.

There is a great book about this phenomenon (and how to avoid it) by Brent Flyvbjerg called "How Big Things Get Done".

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Here in Tokyo, there's a relatively new bridge that's almost exactly the same length as the Key bridge in Baltimore, and was expressly designed to allow large ships to pass underneath:

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

By my calculations (using the yen cost in the wikipedia article and the JPY/USD conversion at the time), it cost about USD $1.1B, so a bit less than double this estimate.

However, with the way things get done in the US these days, I suspect your 10x prediction is much more likely.

It probably needs to be earthquake-proof too, which maybe it doesn't in Baltimore.

I suspect the winning bridge design in Baltimore is going to include massive starlings, beyond what is normal, or some other mitigation factor for the last disaster.

So maybe earthquake-proofing is a fair comparison, cost-wise.

They’re just going to put more dolphins around the pylons. They had a few already but they were poorly placed and had an opening a container ship could slip through.

The cheapest option (and most profitable to tug operators) is to require that ships over a certain tonnage be tug escorted past the bridge.

"an opening a container ship could slip through" -- I'm going to use that to mock security people at my work

It definitely needs to be earthquake-resistant; we get earthquakes here constantly.

Another interesting fact about the Tokyo Gate Bridge (from the Wikipedia article): it's basically made of 3 sections, the two sides and one smaller piece in the middle to connect them. The two side pieces are cantilevers, so they're self-supporting. So if a big container ship managed to strike one side and knock it down, theoretically the other side would remain standing, rather than the whole thing collapsing like the Baltimore bridge.

The entire project should be outsourced to a Japanese contractor. We're going to end up with a 10year $14bn bridge to nowhere, much like HSR in California.

>The entire project should be outsourced to a Japanese contractor.

You can't do that; it doesn't work that way unless perhaps you transfer ownership of all that territory to Japan.

This is a location that's on the opposite side of the planet. So you could obviously do the design work in Japan, but the construction has to happen on-site, which means

1) using local workers, and 2) dealing with local laws/regulations.

The labor force alone is hugely different between the two countries, not just the people themselves and their culture and language, but also how they're organized: contractors, subcontractors, unions, etc. A Japanese company with no experience working outside Japan would have no idea how to deal with all that.

Local laws and regulations are also an issue, since again the Japanese company would be unfamiliar with all that. In NYC, for instance, there's some crazy regulations about how many workers have to be present for stuff, which ends up driving costs up a lot. Just having a foreign company manage the project isn't going to change that stuff.

The ridiculous costs of American projects are due to many factors present in America now, and simply hiring a foreign company to manage a project isn't going to change those. America needs to fix its issues. Unlike a car or airplane, a bridge or subway isn't something you can just build offshore and transport to your country.

What helps push down prices of bridges, is to not build them in US.

Or at least, it always strikes me how outlandishly expensive infrastructure projects are in the US (for me coming from Europe, originally).

outlandishly expensive infrastructure projects are in the US

As someone in Europe I wonder where this notion comes from. Just about every major (and several minor) infrastructure project I can remember in my lifetime, in any of the European cities I've live in, has been both late and wildly over budget

Case in point: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berlin_Brandenburg_Airport

This train tunnel below Malmö in Sweden was finished in 2010 six months earlier than planned and at a cost 10% below budget.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_Tunnel_(Malm%C3%B6)

That’s Scandinavia though.

Similarly, just look at HS2 project in the UK, couldn't even get half way through the project before scrapping it.

Because it's true. Projects in Europe, especially big ones, often go over budget and are late. There are extremes like Berlin Brandenburg, but usually the price increase is in the order of 20-40%, which isn't too bad considering the complexity, and there's still good results in exchange. (E.g. Grand Paris Express will cost 50% more than originally planned (35 vs 22 billion euros), take a few years more, but it will result in 200km of all new fully automated, mostly underground, metro lines which will be amazing)

In comparison, in the US and Canada big projects are absurd. Take the Second Avenue Subway in New York - it's projected to cost $6 billion for 2.4km of track (no, that's not a typo, 2.4 km of track, really).

The California HSR is costing multiple times what similar projects in other countries cost (estimated to cost upwards of $100 billion, up from the original estimate of $40 billion for the first phase of 840 km; the Turin - Lyon high speed railway in more challenging terrain, including the longest rail tunnel in the world, is projected to cost around 25 billion euros for 270km, 1/4 of the price for 1/3 of the distance).

In fact there are lots of people and publications trying to understand why costs in US and Canada are so absurd compared to anywhere else in the world:

https://www.vice.com/en/article/k7b5mn/a-dollar100-billion-l...

https://www.vox.com/22534714/rail-roads-infrastructure-costs...

https://www.npr.org/2023/06/26/1184420745/why-building-publi...

https://www.marketplace.org/2022/03/28/why-does-transit-infr...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zzcy7Usw8y8

Major infrastructure projects everywhere tend to be both late and wildly over budget, but the point is that in USA the initially budgeted cost (which is optimistic and doesn't get met) is outlandishly expensive even when compared to the actual wildly over budget cost of other places; what other countries say "wildly over budget" is still cheaper than a USA project that would get done on time below budget.

i wonder that too (although we all know how intellectually comfortable it is to resort to tribalist thinking). human greed, inefficiency, and error is certainly not geographically restrained.

Maybe I shouldn't paint all of Europe with the same brush. Although other comments are agreeing with my observation. And I agree that there's plenty to complain about in Europe too, but then still the total costs are often factors lower than in the US. It being outside of my professional field, I've found it quite hard to search the Internet for easily comparable numbers, but what I've been able to find over the years on cost per mile of road, or cost per meter of bridge, I've found sometimes a 10× difference between the US and the Netherlands (where I'm originally from). Maybe I'm confirming my biases, but I just don't think so.

Not only that. you have to dismantle the old one and you will pay premium trying to get the new one done as quickly as possible.

> estimates of large public works projects are always too low, and actual costs can be 5-10 times higher.

The most recent example I can think of is England's High Speed 2 going from £35b to (est) £170b: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Speed_2#Funding

A fair bit of the cost increase of HS2 was NIMBYs wanting it to be in tunnels after the route had been chosen, replacing a bridge should be easier to estimate.

Do you think that NIMBY factor won't apply when replacing this bridge? And are you really certain that "replacing a bridge" can't or won't turn into building some tunnels during the process, as some people are already suggesting? IMHO everything is possible.

Almost definitely billions and almost definitely multiple years. Planning, testing and clean-up alone could be over a year. It's far too early to even put a number on it.

Even if we assume $600m is the correct number, the expenditure is evenly distributed, and it takes 6 years to be fully up and running. Based on 3% inflation alone:

Year 1: $100m, Year 2: $103m, Year 3: $109m, Year 4: $112m, Year 5: $116m, Year 6: $119m = $666m

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