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Comment by robomartin | Hacker News Reader

There's a difference between theory on a piece of paper the the reality of building something. In the real world unions will be all over a project like this. Up every crevice. So will environmental groups and other special interest groups. None of this is good for any major civil engineering project.

I asked a question in my post. Can you name any new major civil engineering project in the US in the last fifty years? Refurbishing an existing project does not count. I am talking about something major, say, a new conventional railroad.

The reality is that these kinds of projects are just-about impossible to realize given our political and, yes, labor framework. So, yes, unions are very relevant because it matters not if the physics of the project is brilliant and utterly peer reviewed. The various externalities I mentioned almost guarantee that it cannot built.

I'd love to be wrong.

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Can you name any new major civil engineering project in the US in the last fifty years?

New San Francisco Bay Bridge. (No, it's not a refurbish -- it's a completely separate bridge with a separate design to replace the existing Eastern span.)

This one:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastern_span_replacement_of_the...

It only supports my point. It's 2.2 miles long. Construction started in 2002. It was supposed to open in 2007. It will not open until the end of this year. Total cost is currently at six billion.

The Hyperloop is 400 miles long, will be built in seven years and will cost six billion.

See my point now?

I think it supports your point that the cost is probably off by a lot.

I don't think it supports your point that US unions are destroying the country. That's complete hyperbole.

Cost overruns can be attributed to many factors, the largest being that they're usually underestimated on purpose to sell the idea in the first place.

Yes, and when the new Eastern span of the Bay Bridge was proposed, it too was cheap and fast: less than $1B. The dramatic difference in the actual cost has a lot to do with the mayors of nearby cities pushing for a much fancier and complex design, and to a sudden spike in demand for global steel and concrete.

Trying to compare the actual cost of actual projects with the first projected cost of an ideal, untested project is a bit silly, don't you think?

> Trying to compare the actual cost of actual projects with the first projected cost of an ideal, untested project is a bit silly, don't you think?

Not really. I would never estimate a six billion dollar cost for anything involving placing massive pylons on the center of the Golden State highway for four hundred miles.

It's the difference between reality and wishful thinking.

Look, I already said that I'd rather spend the sixty billion allocated for the bullshit high speed train on the Hyperloop. In other words, I am not saying we cannot build it. I am saying it will cost far more, take longer and be far more difficult (not technologically but unions, special interest groups and plain politics) than stated in the pdf.

Since Hyperloop is 'Open Source', I wonder if the Chinese government will give it a go.

Can you name any new major civil engineering project in the US in the last fifty years?

Boston's Big Dig (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_big_dig)?

I'm assuming you're being facetious. A picture of the big dig belongs in the dictionary under the word boondoggle, and proves robomartin's point better than almost any other example could.

Boondoggle would imply it wasn't worth it.

Yes, the Big Dig cost a lot of money. More than expected. It was still worth it.

I can't think of a more apt example to support robomartin's original point. Regrettably.

Which was disastrously over budget

The Boston Big Dig. At 190% cost overrun, it was almost a bargain.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Dig

Expensive != impossible.

California is ready to spend $70. billion. dollars.... On a much slower technology rail platform.

> Can you name any new major civil engineering project in the US in the last fifty years?

Most of the interstate highway system, any number of lakes, many major bridges, the completed portion of the superconducting supercollider underground chambers, the brilliant Alaska pipeline pylon system, Florida's long elevated marine highways, the Norfolk (?) tunnel, the NYC aqueduct, most major airport runways.

What man has done he may aspire to do again.

These things move in cycles. Political patronage projects currently are in vogue, but their star is falling. You cannot credibly claim that unions will make any LA-SF project cost $100B, because Mr. Bond Market is about to have a mountain comes to Mohammed moment. At some point the market for rational projects will reopen for a few decades, like it does from time to time.

Elon Musk is just the man to make it happen. He already killed the Space Shuttle program and its standing army of $1B/yr payroll patronage jobs. Extending that to other projects is a matter of will and personality.

> [Elon Musk] already killed the Space Shuttle program and its standing army of $1B/yr payroll patronage jobs.

What did Musk have to do with Space Shuttle program cancellation? I thought it collapsed under its own weight - disasters, costs, slowness etc. Please provide links if any.

SpaceX was running an entire rocket development program for the price of one Shuttle launch. When they kept hitting their performance/schedule targets, the Shuttle lost all credibility within NASA. It's hard to predict a past that did not happen, but the Shuttle would probably have been kept going for longer if there has been no alternative waiting in the wings.

The Florida highway through the Keys dates to the 1930s and the NYC Catskill aqueduct to roughly 1916 - those are certainly great projects but aren't the last fifty.

Largely agree with the rest of your comment though :)

Parent was specifically referring to the no. 3 aqueduct for NYC, which was started in the 1960s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City_Water_Tunnel_No....

Also, the highway through the Keys has seen very large infrastructure improvements over the last few decades, so while not a new project it is a significant civil engineering effort.

Daniel_Newby is likely referring to the third aqueduct tunnel, under construction for ~40 years now. It's not small: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City_Water_Tunnel_No._...

Unions exist for a reason. Consider another large scale transportation project: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Panama_Canal

Thank god unions protect us from malaria. /s

The death toll during the (later) American phase of construction was dramatically lower, not because of unions. Here is the article you are looking for: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_measures_during_the_cons...

The "union solution" would have been to not dig the damn thing at all.

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