That does not sound like a general solution to the problem, because it would be fantastically, unreasonably expensive to put one under every road. Seems like something that would only be reasonable in a 1) particularly expensive central business district of a 2) city being built from scratch.
IIRC, some of the biggest US cities don't have separate storm and sanitary sewers, because the cost of retrofitting an existing city would be prohibitively expensive. Installing utility tunnels everywhere would be even moreso.
The cost of retrofitting an existing city aside, the sanitary sewer is a subgrade utility tunnel, by design and by cost footprint. If you're already digging a big ditch and installing infrastructure there, it doesn't cost much more to have space for other utilities. We're not talking about building a basement for the entire roadway, we're talking about dropping modest size pipes under the sidewalks (or in many places, the lack of sidewalks) and enabling access through manholes.
We are talking about a basement for the entire roadway if "[m]aintenance crews can just drive through in cars and do their jobs, without stopping traffic and digging out pipes," like the GGP was talking about. Also, that's what all the pictures in the previously linked https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utility_tunnel look like.
> ...we're talking about dropping modest size pipes under the sidewalks (or in many places, the lack of sidewalks) and enabling access through manholes.
I think you have a different idea, which sounds like conduit or something between conduit and a full tunnel.
> substantially separate systems at this time almost everywhere
2) Don't retrofit. Rather, if you dig up a street you put in the tunnel while you're doing it. Eventually all the important roads end up with tunnels.
Is there a point you're trying to make? If so, care to enlighten us without assuming we all have history degrees?
Regardless, I suspect there's a point being made about the timeless ineptitude of bureaucracy (even if I don't agree with it—some cultures are notably more competent at managing logistics of public works than other are).
Would it have been so much to ask to put a Wikipedia link and nerd-snipe some of us in the process?
Parent definitely would've nerd sniped me with a link and if these replies here on HN hadn't been there to catch my interest first I would have just googled him.
Basically by trying to be a smart ass and belittling others they harmed their own cause of making Hammurabi more widely known.
You are reading way too much into someone not documenting their comment.
> they harmed their own cause
To me it looks like you and others paid even more attention this way.
> their own cause of making Hammurabi more widely known
I don't think that was their goal?
Or just do it for kicks and to feel better about himself.
But it's lo_zamoyski that made the reference.
Yet shiroiushi is the one directly insulting my (and others that I'm referencing as not having had to have heard of him)'s education without knowing anything about said education.
Depending on very specific and exact place of upbringing and schooling, there are a myriad of differences in what is regular curriculum or not. This is a global forum too, so it's even "worse" in that sense for making very absolute statements like shiroiushi has.
Has every Bachelor of Computer Science had to take a course that included learning about how regular expressions are implemented and had to implement a regular expression parser? I sure did, mandatory course and wouldn't have been able to get the BA and then go on from that even further without it at my university. Yet I've met people from other universities that didn't. Do I insult them and their education for it? I don't!
For anyone who went through that, he’s another “the mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell”-type answer form 6th grade tests or whatever.
Among these laws were civil penalties for builders who performed shoddy workmanship:
> If a builder constructs a house for a man but does not make it conform to specifications so that a wall then buckles, that builder shall make that wall sound using his own silver.
By the way, the Romans also had building codes, and engineers who built bridges and roads were liable for the durability of those structures, thus a tradition of over-engineering.
It isn't, but it was discovered early and benefited from intense popular interest in the Bible. Popular interest in Mesopotamian history fell off sharply as it turned out that history generally differed from what the Bible said.
It's still very early, roughly the 18th century BC.
>> If a builder constructs a house for a man but does not make it conform to specifications so that a wall then buckles, that builder shall make that wall sound using his own silver.
This is obviously a statement about who bears liability for fixing the wall, but it's funnier if you imagine it as a requirement for the builder to repair the wall with silver bricks, as a penalty for the original shoddy work.
You can find the US state standards used to set baseline requirements ("learning standards") for school district curriculums online, for most (all?) states.
Let's take an infamously-bad state for education ("Thank God For Mississippi") and famously good one (Massachussetts).
Cmd/ctrl-F "hamm" on this one to find it for Mississippi:
https://www.mdek12.org/sites/default/files/Page_Docs/final_2...
(Theirs is a little weird [probably because their government's, you know, bad] and this comes from a non-profit organization, but it seems to in-fact be the official curriculum standards for their actual BOE, as well)
Here's Massachusetts:
https://www.doe.mass.edu/frameworks/hss/2018-12.pdf
Same deal, you'll find it with a search ("Hamm" also finds one occurrence of Muhammad, in this case, though, but it does get a few hits on Hammurabi)
A person may have missed it due to: 1) going to schools outside the US that maybe don't emphasize Hammurabi, or 2) moving between US school systems that don't teach Hammurabi in the same year(s), such that they leave one before it's taught and arrive at the other after it's been taught.
It's not like 6th grade had an intensive 3 month unit on Hammurabi.
Regardless the answer, the lack of context makes the figure meaningless.
Are we really going to tell people that they can't live without sewer / clean water / electricity / whatever because the window closed 2 months ago and their problem didn't start until today?
Maintenance is largely required to be scheduled, so utilities cannot wait until things break, they'll be required to perform maintenance/replace at pre-established frequencies. So we might not know when in 2030 the road gets torn up, but we do know it will be, since maintenance is required that year on infra X,Y,Z. Scheduling of the precise dates is then done according to the window.
This is everyday life in India. A big budget is sanctioned to build a road. Road gets built, then a month or two later, some body forgets they didn't do the sanitary/sewage pipes well enough and manholes are now overflowing, they tear down the whole road and then just leave it as is.
The process restarts again in two years or so. Here is the rub- The guy who builds it at the first place knows all this so builds it as cheaply as they can get away with.
Its just how corruption works, and money flow from tax payers to politically well connected contractors(often the politicians themselves, as the contractors are just shell companies owned by contractors). Even if the company is black listed a new one can always be floated next time.
>>I suspect local governments are just inept at logistics.
No they are just corrupt. Its easy money. No audits, no accountability and no questions of any kind.
Another side of the problem is how often we need close a road to dig it up. If we just enforce the quality, we will just wasting more time and money for more works and less time actually using them .
Proper solution would be a utility duct or tunnel.
Or maybe corruption ? All utility builders have to fix the road -> more work -> more profit.
This is not a place where Hanlon's razor applies. Gov construction is rotten all the way through as matter of course and policy. High volume material industries are the easiest to commit fraud. Especially when the bureaucrat that signs the checks is never going to bother themselves by checking the real world shipments match to the bills. And that is just the easy part to check, checking for fudging numbers requires real work. Its been going on so long that the corruption is now part of the system. Its trivial to look at various costs and see the "$10,000" hammer all over the place. Or how instead of price going down at scale it goes up.
I probably will not convince you of this in a comment though, so do some research if you are interested.
I mean your statement goes against all of my experience and the experience of every person I've met IRL, but I think you're confusing redundancy, rent-seeking, and (yes) incompetence with criminal intent.
Do you have any friends that work for a city? I'd just ask them about government work in general. The point of the domain is orthogonal to the business world, so you need someone to translate and explain what you're looking at.
Trivial example: You walk into a city garage and see mechanics working on their own vehicles. Are these government employees committing fraud?
The answer will *depend on local weather*. There's a direct connection between e.g. annual snowfall and paying people to sit on their asses, and you'll need to appreciate that connection to understand what's going on around you.
That's before considering what regular construction crews do. Most of the sidewalks are closed most of the time. They're routinely torn out and never fixed. There are nails and other debris in the roads all the time. When we first moved to our current address, my wife had all four of her tires go flat within the first year. I didn't own a car until two years ago, but both front tires have gotten nails in them already. That's also on top of the city's contracted out private dump truck crushing my rear windshield and smashing the hatch and leaving a business card with a claim number on one of my front wiper blades. That was nice to walk out to.
Then there was the crew across the street stealing all of my power tools when I accidentally left my garage open one day.
I'm not a NIMBY, but experiencing this makes me weary of the Hacker News zeitgeist railing against communities that don't want their neighborhoods turned into constant construction. There are entirely non-evil reasons homeowners might want that because building where people already live is incredibly disruptive.
To me, the trick about allowing more construction in established neighborhoods: Make the noise rules incredibly strict. Tokyo has non-stop construction everywhere. And the noise rules are very strict. It works. In Japan, I assume, for cultural reasons, most construction corps follow the rules. In other places ("The West"), you probably need expensive fines along with manual/automatic on-site inspections.
Really, all it takes for one carpenter to bend a nail, pull it out, and toss it over his shoulder.
Is Public Works a state agency? I would have expected them to be subordinate to the city.
While interstates are nice, cities are where people live, so the quality of urban roads matters and is maybe the reason for the perception of US roads?
At my parents place, they resurfaced to road a few years ago. Only for Deutsche Telekom to swoop in a year later and dig in their FTTC gear. Street was patched after, but reasonably well. At least we got faster internet back then