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Comment by bko | Hacker News Reader

The thing that stuck out to me was this:

> The 2,890-metre-long structure, which took more than three years to complete, reduces travel time between the two sides of the canyon from two hours to two minutes.

Pretty impressive. I feel like things in the US take a lot longer and cost a lot more. The prime example is the second avenue subway extension which has been planned since 1920. But I just searched for a few significant bridges like the Gordie Howe bridge which took about 7 years and 6.4bn Canadian (connects US and Canada). And this bridge which seems a lot more of an engineering feat took 3 years and 8 months and cost between $280 to $292 million

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

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

https://www.barstoolsports.com/blog/3553875/the-new-tallest-...

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Chinese civil engineers, and engineering orgs, are good because they get a lot of practice.

In the West, and especially in the US, individuals and orgs don't get practice, so when they finally do get a new contract they have to stumble around for 5-10 years figuring out all the institutional knowledge that was lost.

By the time they figure it out, the project is over budget, so it gets canceled, and then it's 20 years until the next half-hearted attempt. Lather rinse repeat.

At root, a lot of this stems from a "managerial" mindset in which people and skills can simply be "reallocated" on a dime. They can't. You can't uproot trees all the time. You plant one and then it grows over multiple human lifetimes.

To say nothing of the NIMBYism. To acquire the land for use, you have to fight some armies of lawyers retained by a population with a lot of disposable income. (Yes, the US for all her problems has the biggest pool of disposable income in the world)

There's no NIMBYism in China, so that's a huge barrier that they don't have to worry about.

I know it would be attacked politically, but I wish in the US we would be more open to hiring foreign firms for these kinds of projects. Could we have high-speed rail if we just asked some French or Japanese company to build it for us? And we should structure contracts with them in a way that keeps the plans from being changed for political reasons. "Sorry state senator, we can't alter the route to pass through that town without re-opening negotiations which might cost billions."

> Could we have high-speed rail if we just asked some French or Japanese company to build it for us?

No. Please see SNCF (French rail company)'s involvement in California's high speed rail project.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/09/us/california-high-speed-...

October 9, 2022

"How California's Bullet Train Went Off the Rails"

The (foreign) company's recommendations [...] were cast aside, said Dan McNamara, a career project manager for SNCF

So I guess we have to not only hire the foreign companies, but also listen to them.

I think the lesson here might be to solve your problems on a more local scale, as the fit of the solution is as important as checking the boxes.

What works in Japan works in Japan because it was a solution built for the problems, politics, and people of Japan. Sometimes there are lessons we can take from projects in other countries, other times it turns out like Cali HSR where the proposed 'foreign' solution might be logical but not politically tenable.

The problem isn't physically building the rail, the problem is the legal framework in which governments operate in. Multiple rounds of environmental impact statements, eminent domain lawsuits, preferred contractor RFP's, zoning, permitting, endless red tape...

>> The 2,890-metre-long structure, which took more than three years to complete, reduces travel time between the two sides of the canyon from two hours to two minutes.

The construction timeline and travel improvement are comparable to the New River Gorge bridge, which was completed in the US in ~50yr ago back when systems were structured to and the people who ran them actually were capable of producing results.

Freakonomics just had an episode about how China is run by engineers, who get things done, while the US is run by lawyers, who prevent things from getting done.

This is the central thesis of Ezra Klein's "Abundance" book. Basically, things like this (or high speed rail, or public housing) don't get built in the USA because the government has hamstrung itself with so many rules and regulations that it becomes prohibitively expensive and/or tied up in lawsuits.

Places like China, for better or worse, are not burdened with the problem of making sure every constituency is accommodated.

As a bridge Carpenter, you are correct. I have never seen a construction project of that size for that price completed in that amount of time in the USA. Not even close. I've done projects that are worth over 20 billion today. I've done projects as small as a sidewalk repair. There's no way you can turn out that scope of work for that price at that scale in America it's not even close. They have to be lying about the budget there's no way.

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