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Comment by simonsarris | Hacker News Reader

It's just a bridge for animals? Or a tunnel for humans, depending on how you look at it.

Looking through the FAQ, it's very funny that it began planning in 2016 and completed environmental reviews in 2018, and that the NEPA review got a Finding of No Significant Impact (FONSI). So its cleared the bar.

...But the whole point of a wildlife crossing is to impact the environment! That's its job! So its kind of amusing it might have needed a "finding of no impact", first.

OK reading around more: I don't get it. Why this website? Why did it take so long to build a bridge? Have they been funding guys playing with LEGOs or is that just a hobby? This news piece they link to says it took the lego guy a year:

https://spectrumnews1.com/ca/la-west/environment/2024/03/13/...

that might explain why it takes almost a decade to build a bridge? I'm more confused than when I started. What percent of projects like these is grift?

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Everything takes forever in the US now, and California especially. We built an entire interstate highway system in the 50s in the same amount of time it takes us now to build 10 miles of carpool lane in LA.

To be fair, people tend to have more expectations of a partially open freeway.

Unlike the 50s, society now takes at least a bit of care about environmental impact or the rights of minorities and financially disadvantaged people.

We don't just go and bulldoze through entire city quarters primarily inhabited by poor Black people any more [1].

[1] https://www.history.com/news/interstate-highway-system-infra...

In LA only half that planned system was built due to protests over how it was planned to be built (eminent domain through populated neighborhoods). So even back then, it is false to say these things were easy, they ran out of political will within a few years of construction.

The interstate highway system was started in the 50s. It wasn't declared complete until 1992.

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

How expensive are environmental reviews? Is it a purely on paper/surveying exercise, that doesn't require any construction to happen first?

If that's the case, then I can understand environmental reviews taking a long time. Its similar to pre-production in movies/games, where the writing/high level design can take a huge amount of time, and is not accelerated by adding more people, but is also very cheap to do, so companies partition small teams out to constantly be in pre-production.

If that's not the case, then it probably is debilitating to construction work.

Environmental reviews are cheap. Time to wait for the bureaucrats though…

How much cost inflation has occurred since this project was initially budgeted? A lot.

> Why this website?

Could educate the public about the need to keep spending more solid money on this kind of things.

> Construction will close a portion of the Los Angeles County’s 101 Freeway overnight on weekdays for several weeks starting Monday.

We should cheer that less people will have a car crash against a deer or a puma in the area from now on.

This claim in particular is impressive

"Data collected from crossing structures with wildlife fencing throughout North America indicate up to an 86-97% DECREASE in wildlife-vehicle collisions upon affected roadways.”

It took 6 years to build the first transcontinental railroad - by hand.

It was not not built 'by hand'. For example here is a photo of a steam powered excavator being used. https://original-ufdc.uflib.ufl.edu/CA90000065/00001 The entire site is fascinating collection of photos from the construction https://original-ufdc.uflib.ufl.edu/railroads

https://www.trains.com/trn/railroads/history/transcontinenta...

says:

_The Transcontinental Railroad was built by hand_. For the most part all they had were hand tools. There were very few power equipment. The Union Pacific had some steam shovels, but the actual rail, the track laying was done as a hand operation and what you see as a crew when they started building the railroad, they started with a small crew, maybe just a dozen men laying the track. They would take a cart like this out to the end of track. It would be loaded with a row of rails.

On top of that would be ties. They would take it out to the end of track pulled by a horse or a mule. The crew would unload the ties one at a time with two men per tie there to lay those ties down as far as they went and then they would start to take the rails off the car. The one thing that Jack Casement figured out and he applied this first at the Union Pacific, was how to involve more people. In some cases on the Union Pacific, they were laying ties 40 miles ahead of the railroad because in the Union Pacific, the ties were actually to the west of them, so they were bringing them back to the railroad.

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