Comment by roody15 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by roody15 | Hacker News Reader

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I am an elected official (12 years and elected six times in Illinois) unfortunately seeing this process work over 12 years is discouraging. For example President Obama allocated 8 billion dollars for high sped passenger rail service improvements. By 2017 almost 2 billion of this money had been spent on railroad improvements / railroad crossings and line inspections. Fast forward to 2024 no high speed rails have actually been built. For example Chicago Illinois was to get a line from Iowa City to Quad Cities to Chicago (straight line). This project was fully funded at one point but Iowa and Illinois had (still have) a disagreement on bridge repairs connecting the states.

Now Governor Pritzer has authorized a new high speed rail commission to try and get this project going again.

In a nutshell .. Rail project between Iowa City and Chicago was fully funded as of 2016… all that actually happened is some rail road crossing were improved.. lines were inspected and no actual new lines constructed. Instead 1 out of the 2 billion was spend on “engineering” costs and compliance paperwork … which now has expired and need to be redone if the project is to be completed.

The amount of money spent on compliance paperwork and “engineering” is staggering. Many six figure salaries depend on slightly altering existing engineered projects to meet compliance requirements for projects that are never built. From waste treatment upgrades, water treatment, road improvement, traffic studies, on and on. The amount of money spent on services that are not finished or lead to an actual project is absolutely staggering … entire industries depend on this inefficiency and lobby effectively to keep things “obtuse”.

From someone who's seen the other side... every time the engineer has to quabble over email with the permitting departments over matters such as "you sent it to the wrong bureaucrat so I'm ignoring instead of forwarding it" or "the permit admin wrote the wrong 1 of 50 Comcast subsidiaries on the paperwork so now I have to get a skip-manager's signoff" it's billed at $400/hr.

I feel like Boston has had similar, we have contracts with companies to complete a thing by a specific time, they don't but we are stuck paying them even more to complete a project so it ends up being over budget, late, and possibly not done well as is evident by our green line extension that opened last year that was shut down to redo it because the tracks are the wrong width.

It just feels like the money is going to the wrong places like you said.

I would probably argue that we still need more funding even if we fixed how we used the money, but we need to fix how we use it first.

This is what happens when the repercussions for poor performance/failure is more money. Privatization, with some regulations, and reduction of monopolies, seems like a good idea. But, the system will never choose to harm itself.

The current engineering ecosystem is largely private, and it's poorly functioning, costing us way more money than just hiring engineers as public employees rather than paying a contracting firm to do initial and final design on each rail system segment.

Just go look at the RFPs and responses each municipality has four expansion of their current system. It is all outsource to private industry, at great cost compared to doing it inside government.

I would claim that the problem is that they're doing it for government, which is what makes the chain of accountability lead to nowhere.

The problem is the government doesn't know what to ask for.

The lack of accountability happens because the government is not allowed to build up the in-house expertise they'd need to manage projects like this, because of this bizarre American idea that government=bad private=good. So the government agencies end up having to outsource absolutely everything - and not only is that expensive, it's also doomed to failure, because understanding and accountability by its nature can't be outsourced. And that's only compounded by a lack of trust, low-bid rules and the like.

If you look at the entities that have actually managed to get stuff like this done (which is something most developed countries around the world manage), it's not private industries, it's governments - but governments that were enabled and trusted to build-up effective in-house teams for doing large projects.

But why are other countries able to build successfully, despite the same chain of accountability?

Design-Build contracts. As stupid as the downtown Seattle highway 99 tunnel was [0], apparently we got away without paying the overages.

0: two lanes of traffic each way and an 8-lane stroad for >$2B instead of fixing the 3-lanes-each-way viaduct for $1B

Wasting money on favored constituents is the point of these projects.

Wasting money on special interests would be more accurate.

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