Yeah, America can still build stuff | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, America can still build stuff

jabberwocking.com

28 pointsleotravis1025 comments

The solar farm construction plot is ignoring that the us doesn't make the solar panels. That sort of manufacturing is strongly effected by pollution regulations, that appear to be largely absent or ignored in the country where they are made. Tariffs for the express purpose of deglobalization may be argued about, but tariffs to include ignored externalities seem like they should be largely uncontroversial.

It does not ignore that - it plots exactly what it plots, total solar watts installed per person.

If your claim is that we don't "build" the solar panels, and therefore that's not a meaningful metric to include in a article about building things, I guess that's fine. But for civic / personal construction projects, it's perfectly fine to say "we scouted, permitted, and built a ton of things including solar farms", regardless of where the raw materials were sourced.

US solar PV module manufacturing is approaching self sufficiency for domestic demand (~40GW/year). Cell manufacturing does need to catch up, but that is not impossible to accomplish. This is a direct result of the Inflation Reduction Act.

https://cleantechnica.com/2025/01/03/us-solar-manufacturing-...

https://www.renewableenergyworld.com/solar/the-us-can-almost...

https://seia.org/blog/american-solar-manufacturing-is-back-a...

https://seia.org/research-resources/us-solar-market-insight/

I guess the OP really meant cell manufacturing, otherwise we are just playing mounting imported bricks - because whether directly in farms or first in panels no big difference for the mentioned independence.

Building supply chains takes time. Time to bootstrap is not the same as "we can't."

https://www.energy.gov/eere/solar/solar-manufacturing-map

I predict the same thing will eventually happen for cars, if the US continues to fail to compete with China. Eventually China (either directly or through some friendshore country) will have a local dealer network in the US and Chinese-designed EVs will completely disrupt the ICE market here.

All of the charts describing how much is being built in this piece date back to, at most, the 1980s, while the most criticized regulatory laws date back to the seventies and late sixties (NEPA was enacted in 1969, CEQA in 1970). It seems like if you're going to argue that those laws haven't negatively impacted construction capacity, you should probably compare construction before and after they were enacted into law, yeah?

I see 11 charts that predate 1980. Here's a housing chart that goes back to 1900 https://www.statista.com/statistics/1041889/construction-yea...

Hard to say, but it looks like linear growth to me.

Here's "housing starts" which looks to me to be mostly flat from 1960 to 2020, with some cycles up and down.

I wish we could build more subway trains. Now it seems like adding a mile or two takes ten years and billions of dollars, and building whole systems like BART from scratch seems nearly inconceivable.

Took what 20 years to build the 2nd ave line in nyc no?

Planned in the 1920s, initial demolition to make room in the 1940s and 50s, initial construction started in 1972, and it opened in 2017, so… depending on your perspective, it took up to ~90 years, but arguably no less than 45 years.

And that’s only one of the four planned phases.

100 years in the making! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Avenue_Subway

100 years.

But the entire issue was held back politically.

The construction itself took less than a decade.

However, even that showed the issues with America building so sporadically. The construction was really expensive. And a lot of those expenses could have been reduced if the US was doing this consistently enough so we could learn from them and optimize future construction.

The next phase, for example, has changed the station design based on the experience with the first phase, which alone has been estimated to save about $500mm in costs. There’s some great work being done by NYU or Columbia (I can’t remember which one) analyzing the expenses and suggesting other trivial changes (such as the working hours and the shift timings) that will save many more hundreds of millions if not billions (1 example I believe was something like modifying shift timings so excavation is completed right before the trash pickup arrives, because right now many millions were being spent to excavate additional space simply to hold the materials excavated until the trash pickup shift started).

https://transitcosts.com/about/

Why do transit-infrastructure projects in New York cost 20 times more on a per kilometer basis than in Seoul? We investigate this question across hundreds of transit projects from around the world. We have created a database that spans more than 50 countries and totals more than 11,000 km of urban rail built since the late 1990s. We will also examine this question in greater detail by carrying out six in-depth case studies that take a closer look at unique considerations and variables that aren’t easily quantified, like project management, governance, and site conditions.

The goal of this work is to figure out how to deliver more high-capacity transit projects for a fraction of the cost in countries like the United States. Additionally, we hope that our site will be a useful resource for elected officials, planners, researchers, journalists, advocates, and others interested in contextualizing transit-infrastructure costs and fighting for better projects.

If you have ideas and evidence about why transit costs vary so greatly from one country to the next or you just want to connect with us, please get in touch at info[at]transitcosts.com or click on the “Contact Us” tab. We are trying our best to get things right, but we don’t know everything and we will invariably make mistakes. Correct us and expand our understanding of transit-infrastructure planning, construction, and financing. We are always looking for new projects, data, corrections, resources, and feedback.

We are a group of researchers under the umbrella of the NYU Marron Institute of Urban Management, but our team is spread across the globe. Our research is supported by Arnold Ventures, Andrew and Carolyn Chatham, and others.

Yeah, and every country (at least every Western country) has the same issue.

Perfect storm of building codes, political apathy, government bureaucracy, and corruption.

Not every western country (although every Anglophone country). There's a whole spectrum of costs - e.g. Spain has the lowest costs and fastest delivery of transit projects in the developed world, by a large margin (maybe an order of magnitude?). Alon Levy at https://pedestrianobservations.com covers this in great detail if you're interested.

"Delivery" perhaps, but an odd sentiment given Spain's notorious ongoing rail issues and airport misallocations.

https://www.euronews.com/travel/2024/11/30/crowds-breakdowns...

https://www.worldfinance.com/strategy/government-policy/spai...

I don't have any first-hand experience, but there's a lot of data:

  - https://worksinprogress.co/issue/how-madrid-built-its-metro-cheaply/

  - https://pedestrianobservations.com/2024/12/07/low-spanish-costs-are-not-about-decentralization/

Western Europe seems to be doing fine. The EU opened 10x as many metro systems in 2024 compared to 2023 [1]. Notable systems include the Grand Paris Express, Thessaloniki Metro, and Milan M4.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/transit/comments/1hf6p47/in_2024_th...

At least in public infrastructure projects, land acquisition is very expensive in California. And the second big factor is lack of competition when it comes to contractors.

California imposes strict requirements on projects -- codes, approvals environmental impact, DEI, etc etc

Only contractors with massive resources/willpower can satisfy them.

Los Angeles actually builds skyscrapers the fastest: https://www.construction-physics.com/p/which-city-builds-sky...

Nice charts. These are great too:

https://jabberwocking.com/top-20-charts-of-2024/

I have been absolutely impressed with what's possible even in very-expensive NYC when the gates are opened to build housing—I live one neighborhood over from the Gowanus area of Brooklyn, which was rezoned in 2021 and has been absolutely transformed since. The pace and scale of the construction of 10-30 story apartment buildings has been kind of wild. Each time I pass through I find myself wondering where some big new building came from. It's encouraging, as much as it makes every other situation where a project of few dozen homes is trapped in years of negotiation and community meeting shouting matches all the more infuriating.

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