Comment by mogwire | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mogwire | Hacker News Reader

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Honestly do you not think what he is saying isn't true?

Do you think they count the items he mentioned in the total costs?

Every major project in America has undocumented costs to go along with the miles of red tape. Just look at California's High Speed Rail.

Where I live they wanted to extend the expressway and it was overwhelmingly supported. So why, 6 years later hasn't it happened? The environmentalist sued to get a survey done that took 2 years to find.... no impact. The county commissioners got voted out and now the new ones want certain promises. The company that got the original no bid contract is owned by a brother of a former commissioner so that led to law suits. People sued because they don't want the new exits to be too close to their house. Others sued because they felt the exits would targets towards higher end homes and didn't equally consider everyone. Then you have the demands that we use ONLY AMERICAN LABOUR!!! and ONLY AMERICAN MATERIALS!!! A state representative said they would boycott the expansion unless a certain percentage of his constitutions were hired to do the work regardless of their qualifications. Another said they would block it due to road noise and complaints from his constitutions unless compensation was made.

It goes on and on and each one costs money they don't count in the official budget.

That's not red tape. That's politics. Europe is notorious for red tape, yet can do large transit projects for an order of magnitude less cost than America can.

America needs more red tape. Red tape is explicit rules and procedures. In Europe you can make sure your project follows all of the explicit rules and procedures and then you can proceed. Nobody can come and try and stop you because you just say "I followed the rules", and continue.

OTOH in America the rules and procedures aren't explicit. They're embodied in court precedent (like the environmentalist who sued) and in gatekeepers like the county commissioners.

> Every major project in America has undocumented costs to go along with the miles of red tape.

Along with would imply that they are not red tape.

> That's not red tape. That's politics.

That’s literally the definition of red tape! How do politicians have this kind of power to stop the projects? Because there is a county/city/state law that grants them this power. It’s literally part of the procedure! In other words, some part of the process is not defined beyond “the council member has veto power for any construction in their district” (hello NYC!).

As a result, the whole process is not deterministic and ill defined due to red tape.

> In Europe you can make sure your project follows all of the explicit rules and procedures and then you can proceed.

You can in America too, if everything you want to do falls within the current zoning you can build "by right" but the problem is that most projects need a variance here or there, even for something like the type of siding used and that is when all the political negotiation kicks in.

this stuff needs to be made illegal. If state gives approval to build stuff according to spec, then nobody should be able to block, unless there is major deviation from spec

In many countries that's basically how it works. You file for permission, hand in all the paper work, maybe have a hearing or a period where the public can bring concerns, and once the project is approved it can go ahead and is very difficult to stop. But doing it that way means the approval process now has to capture all the nuances, bloating the process. Big projects go a lot smoother, but small projects nobody would care to object to become more expensive

It's an interesting trade off, and getting the right balance is difficult

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