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Comment by GorbachevyChase | Hacker News Reader

I think Chuck Marone and his group make good points but their admonition by ASCE is also deserved. He really went too far with disparaging the profession because of differences in purely value judgments. Furthermore, the type of infrastructure you get is a political decision. Civil engineers don’t tell your mayor or your highway commission what to build, their only job is to figure out how it can be built. The “what” is never a designers decision.

Now I think this is a problem with reflecting on. Why is it that given the choice, many people with financial means move away from America’s cities? I did. I promise you the reasons have nothing to do with zoning.

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> Civil engineers don’t tell your mayor or your highway commission what to build, their only job is to figure out how it can be built.

I would disagree. The engineers absolutely steer the space of available solutions. Caltrans is a prime example, I have personally met Caltrans engineers who might as well have stepped out of a time machine from 1970. This absolutely influences the priorities of both the state and the cities that depends on the framework it sets up.

And yes city politics is separately a major problem.

> I have personally met Caltrans engineers who might as well have stepped out of a time machine from 1970.

This is the problem with outsourcing everything in the name of "efficiency".

If you don't actually do things in house, you don't know how to do them.

Everybody wants the US to manufacturer and build more until they have to cut a check.

Not liking Chuck Marone is irrelevant. The question is whether or not the thesis is correct, and it seems correct.

Everyone hates Nassim Taleb and he can be an asshole, but his math is impeccable. When your concern is with someone's personality because you don't like their math, then you've lost the plot.

Personality is not relevant when determining if someone is correct or not, but it does empirically matter in terms of how likely someone is to get something done based on that. If you think being right is the only thing that should matter, you've achieved your goal already once you reach that step, so congrats! If you agree that it's not the success criteria, it makes sense to start paying attention to those other factors, or else you'll end up only being right and not successful.

I'd argue that if these issues are important to you, and you want to convince people, you'll be more effective if you find a more compelling argument than "you aren't allowed to care about what you just told me you care about".

Why is it that given the choice, many people with financial means move away from America’s cities?

This is actually generally the opposite of true. SFV is heavily Republican. Given the choice, self-made individuals prefer to live in or near blue cities despite the high taxes, because the lifestyle is objectively better than it is in the areas around red cities.

Indeed, a not-so-hidden secret of Fox News is that almost all of their anchors and personalities actually live in LA or NYC. (This is why Fox News personalities are so familiar with and obsessed with LA's problems. They're locals.) The Murdochs, for all their money prefer Los Angeles and NYC as their U.S. bases over no-tax states like Florida and Texas.

>I promise you the reasons have nothing to do with zoning.

I am willing to guess they probably did, even if it doesn't seem directly related.

The engineers are a big part of the problem and drive regulations that featherbed themselves.

I got into a fight with my city over nonexistent crosswalks (the adhesive line strips wore off) near my home in an area where drivers have a hard time realizing where pedestrians cross due to a unique road setup.

You can’t just paint lines. The project ended up costing about $1.2M and required a traffic study, some stupid ADA assessment and accommodation that frankly any layperson could have figured out, and a complete streets assessment.

Basically, they sent out a few engineering technicians who make $20/hr, billed out 80 hours at $120 to count cars and people, and printed some boilerplate analysis (@$250/hr). The end result was they painted new crosswalks and added textured curb surfaces for ADA compliance, which allowed for the use of recovery act funds.

I love a good rant, but you just have no idea what you’re talking about. First, real engineers (the kind with, education and experience requirements and personal liability for their work) have labor markups that are maybe 2 to 3 times raw rate. I don’t know if 6X margins are normal for people who collect a check to “maintain” a finished product. Second, any civil engineer will tell you that complete streets compliance for federal funding is a waste of everyone’s time. Engineers didn’t come up with that, congressmen elected by people like you came up with that. Third, the only reason they did all of that study is because the people you voted for wanted to use money that was tax farmed from me instead of your city funds. They could have just sent out a road crew. You could also cut the check yourself. Finally marked crosswalks alter pedestrian behavior, but not driver behavior. Marking crosswalks where there is high traffic and no controls like a signal with a dedicated pedestrian phase are actually more dangerous than no markings at all. I don’t expect you to know that, but that’s why you should hire people like me and not try to do this yourself.

A late addition to your comment: the reason for all the "wasteful" red tape was that the right demanded all the documentation to prove that the underlying activity itself was not wasteful...thus imposing extra costs on everything that resulted in is several magnitudes more waste.

In fairness, I should have said "engineering companies" vs. engineers. Like any scenario, the engineers themselves have to work in the scope they are allowed to. Those firms absolutely lobbied our state legislature for all sorts of things that generate make-work revenue for them. Most of the proof of work is farmed off to low dollar employees.

In this particular scenario, it's an usual configuration that can't be changed for a bunch of reasons. There are functional, adequate controls that were added about 15 years ago and were not altered by the project I'm thinking about. The crosswalks and lane markings are essential because drivers tend to stop at the wrong place.

While we may have been getting rope-a-doped, our neighborhood association was willing to contribute a pretty significant amount of money to have the city do the work. Our position was that it was becoming a dangerous intersection with significant pedestrian traffic. We were told it was illegal for the city dpw to do so without the study work.

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