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Comment by melling | Hacker News Reader

The new World Trade Center took 8 years and is the most expensive building in the world:

http://www.theguardian.com/world/video/2013/may/11/one-world...

Everything done is the U.S. takes more time and costs a lot more money.

Consider, for example, that China has constructed 10,000 miles of high-speed rail in about a decade. We still have 0.0 miles. Yeah, yeah, we don't need 10k but we need more than 0.

Airports, subways, cities, and I imagine roads are being constructed at an incredible pace. This Bill Gates blog gets the point across: http://www.gatesnotes.com/About-Bill-Gates/Concrete-in-China

This is all good for China but the U.S. looks like it will quickly be passed as the largest economy. That may have some repercussions.

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"Everything done is the U.S. takes more time and costs a lot more money."

On the coasts, bureaucracy and politics are major costs in urban areas, the WTC being the #1 example of how much it can affect construct costs.

"China has constructed 10,000 miles of high-speed rail in about a decade. We still have 0.0 miles."

We have one of the best cargo rail networks in the world. That is what we chose to build. If high-speed rail was going to be profitable as cargo, it would be built (check Texas for an attempt).

On the other subject, China doesn't care what its citizens think beyond keeping them from revolting. They are dictating a policy.

Not sure about the WTC but I know for rail, bridge, etc. there can be lots of environmental regulations to deal with in the US. Finding a butterfly in a field can be enough to stop the work while they do environmental assessments to see how it may impact that butterfly species.

I know a little bit about this because my first job out of engineering college was working at a consultant company doing the drudge work for such an assessment. After 6 months of work, I felt we barely put out anything of value while burning consultant hours. The reports were cookie cutter format from previous contracts with a few facts filled in.

A friend who works for the state transportation engineering agency mentioned finding a native american arrow while expanding a highway triggering another investigation. Then there is eminent domain, noise assessments, impact reviews, etc.

So basically it is not the engineering costs but all the other demands of society that make these a slow and expensive venture.

Im not saying that this particular tower is unsafe, but in the US we have loads of regulation. Depending on your political view, this can mean either the US is helping to protect citizens or it means that it gets in the way of business/progress.

Having some regulation in place helps prevent things like: http://i.imgur.com/McgeoNa.jpg

But that doesn't mean that US isn't over regulated.

WOW! I just looked this up using Tin.eye and the imgur link to locate this fiasco and how it happened.

This event happened in 2009 in Shanghai, China. The location was Block-7 at Lotus Riverside in the Minhang District. The building did not fall due an earthquake but rather due to very poor foundation planning. The coup de grace or death blow came when an underground parking garage was being dug below the building. (Why did not not dig out the garage first?) One worker was killed and no residents had moved in yet. (They want their money back)

Building a sky scrapper in just a few weeks or even months seems pretty rushed and quite ill advised. Each floor would have to be inspected and certified as safe and I don't believe that could be done in under a year.

Here is a page on what went wrong: http://affordablehousinginstitute.org/blogs/us/2010/02/its-n...

> Each floor would have to be inspected and certified as safe and I don't believe that could be done in under a year.

"Nobody" spends that long on modern highrises - the processes are generally well understood and most of the structures are "cookie cutter" designs with solid margins. The ones going up in London now typically takes 1-3 days per floor for the structure.

If it takes 1-3 days per floor (let's presume this building was built in London and it only took one day per floor) would it not take 57-days then? or do they wait till the building is built and do it all at once?

In Los Angeles you build a floor, it has to be inspected one floor at a time. Then again, London does not have earthquakes but both Shanghai and California do.

Great point. Additional note- even with heavy US regulation, US still has its share of engineering disasters. Building code is written in response to such disasters albeit more frequently from non-catastrophic failures. For example, we might see high-strength steel requirements evolve in response to the new Bay Bridge's faulty steel rods.

The US has had its share of disasters too. We studied these in-depth in civil engineering school, including the design decisions and cost compromises made along the way. Look up Citicorp Tower's tuned mass damper in NYC (disaster pre-empted), Kansas City Hyatt Regency walkway collapse (killed 114), as well as Berkman Plaza parking garage collapse during construction in Jacksonville, FL (killed 1).

Back to OP, A general rule of thumb in engineering, there's cost, quality, and schedule: pick two. I always scratch my head at celebrating at some huge engineering feat completed in a small fraction of the typical timeframe, because it surely leaves out either value engineering/cost) or quality/safety. Schedule should be optimized, but prioritized?

It's also possible that the Broad's schedule is merely a byproduct of the modular technique. The article doesn't mention cost beyond saying its a problem, and I assume that modular, industrialized construction requires factoring costs in a method similar to airplane accounting, a function of the quantity built.

To be sure, there's room for huge innovation in the construction industry, and I'm excited to see how Broad develops their methods.

The new WTC is one of the most bomb-proof buildings in the world. It is also one of the tallest (even if you don't count the spire). Everything in the US takes more time and costs more money when we're doing it better than everyone else.

Better? Or just more over engineered?

It put $3.9B into the US economy over 8 years. No other skyscraper has done that ;)

It's over-engineered unless a big truck bomb goes off next to it, or an airliner hits it, or it's subject to a significant earthquake--in which case it will then hopefully be just-right engineered.

The original WTC towers were already over-engineered. They could not be brought down by a plane hitting them, just like previously a plane hit the Empire State Building and it also did not collapse. That's why they needed the planes plus [redacted] in order to bring the towers down.

Don't be silly, the plane that hit the empire state building is a rinkydink fraction of the size of the planes that hit the WTCs.

You've got the right mindset, but your conspiracy is backwards. The plane that hit the Empire State Building DID cause it to collapse, but the leaders of the media, academia, and construction industries formed a conspiracy to quickly rebuild it and pretend it never happened.

Edit: In case it's not obvious, they did this because they knew skyscrapers would be essential to the future growth of New York, and they did not want the public to be scared of them.

Damn, I'm usually a humorless person when it comes to comments trying to be funny at HN but this, this was good.

The joke is on us for accepting a story that could be verified by computer simulation, but for which a computer simulation was never written.

Also the report written on it only needed to prove that the fuel leaked from the tank. From that point on it was assumed on the report that the destruction we saw was caused simply from the fuel.

That is a hypothesis that is amenable to computer simulation. My sense of humor finds it funny no one has simulated what happened on a computer (well, those who tried have reached different conclusions, which is actually hilarious).

As far as I know nobody else is interested in building their own WTC. And when it comes to tall buildings, well, let's say they're as ok as everyone's else.

We can certainly dismiss regulations and have a Chinese-like system, its just you're going to have to deal with stuff like this more often:

http://i.imgur.com/McgeoNa.jpg

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

Let's not applaud the low regulation and quick and dirty school of construction too hard here.

This kind of stuff reminds me of "car guy" whining about crumple zones, ABS, air bags, etc making modern cars heavier and less efficient than 1960's deathtraps. Yeah, most civilized people prefer a democratic process in regards to the safety of their family in their dwellings. Autocratic and dictatorial tricks are cute, but come at the cost of safety, health, etc. Not to mention the limited ability to petition the autocratic government over these things.

tldr; How is the air in Beijing today?

I live in the DC area and frequently visit Beijing.

The DC Metro is currently building the Silver Line, an extension out to Dulles airport and a bit beyond. The first segment of the extension, with five stations, was completed last year after five years of construction. The remainder is planned to be complete in 2019 or 2020... assuming there aren't any more delays.

In a similar amount of time, the Beijing subway went from a sad little system with three lines to the second largest system in the world today, with 18 lines and 7 more under construction currently.

Now, Beijing is a substantially larger city, but it's still vastly disproportionate. The contrast between the two metro systems is just shocking.

I don't know what the hell we're doing in the US, but whatever it is, we're doing it wrong. Safety and quality differences aren't adequate to explain it by a long shot.

I don't know what the hell we're doing in the US

We've substantially and enormously empowered veto players at all levels: http://www.amazon.com/Rent-Too-Damn-High-Matters-ebook/dp/B0... , in part due to the influence of Jane Jacobs and her fight against Robert Moses: http://jakeseliger.com/2013/07/03/jane-jacobs-is-everywhere-... .

That being said, there seems to be something about wealthy, industrialized countries that makes local resistance to infrastructure development powerful. Europe and Canada are suffering from the same basic problems.

I visited China for the first time last year. I went to Guangzhou with a friend of mine. My friend from there left to study in the US in 2010, and he could barely recognize his own city with all the new districts and buildings.

I ultimately came to the conclusion that the growth in China is real, unlike how it's routinely described in the news in the US. Though I did meet an Irish business owner (who lived there for nearly two decades) who expressed doubt that these buildings would ever be filled to sufficient capacity. Ultimately we don't have access to all of the data which would shed light on China's current affairs.

Regardless, I live in the Boston area now. The MBTA is a complete embarrassment compared to what is in Guangzhou. Even so, the MBTA is purchasing the next supply of Red Line trains (which are several decades old now, and routinely breaking down) from China. It's been planned for several years, yet it's still going to take until 2017 to get these trains rolling in Boston!

Even if the doomsayers are correct and the Chinese economy crashes in the next year or so, it should be noted that (a) this would be a global economic recession and that the US would not be immune to this (since many of the buildings in China are funded by Wall Street speculators), (b) they have the capital to actually help their recovery (as opposed to the bulimic fiscal policy we had in 2008 and still have in the US today, funding billion-dollar military campaigns and social programs created with the 1930's and 1960's in mind, while routinely gutting our own tax revenue), and (c) they'll have already built a modern infrastructure to empower their recovery (instead of the US's aging infrastructure that nobody want to pay to fix).

>social programs created with the 1930's and 1960's in mind

Its these social programs that help cushion the fall during a recession. Countries without them often are the receiving end of a peasant revolution or coup when the economy goes sour. I'd say this is very much a feature, not a bug. Meanwhile, China's affluence doesn't percolate to the rural area and a serious economic downturn would hurt the most vulnerable, which in autocratic states are poor children and the elderly.

>In one study of 1,800 infants in rural Shaanxi province in China’s north-west, 49% were anaemic and 40% were significantly hampered in developing either cognitive or motor skills.

>About one in three Chinese elderly report having poor health, and nearly one in four have consumption levels below the poverty line

I don't mind my tax dollars feeding poor children in rural USA, supporting seniors, etc. These programs made sense in 1930, 1960, today, and in the future.

Sorry, I didn't mean to imply that I am against social programs. On the contrary, I'm a supporter of universal health care in the US. This is the sort of thing I was alluding to when I said "created with the 1930's and 1960's in mind." Anyway, these systems, like our other infrastructure, have not been properly maintained (I quickly wrote an article about one example on my blog a while back (which I haven't updated in forever), should be the first article: http://boldboldness.com/) and should be modernized in some manner.

I'm not under the illusion that the Chinese health care system is better than in the US, and I'm aware that my observations were limited to the city. I was actually able to visit a local hospital in Guangzhou while I was there (interestingly, it was the hospital where the first SARS patient was treated), and I was surprised at how old and chaotic it was compared to the extravagance built in the remainder of the city. Very dark, loud, full of people, and run like a bad DMV in the US. Hopefully when China slows down they'll attempt to focus more on the health of their citizens.

What slows down development in the U.S. is accommodating competing interests in a democratic society. My parents, who live in the area, were among the people who strongly opposed the overland route and wanted a tunnel through Tysons, which would have cost another billion dollars and jeopardized federal funding. That tunnel fight took up a lot of time. There are environmentalists who care a lot more about the impact on the environment than the economic or convenience benefits of the new line. There are folks who remember when Fairfax County was a pretty sleepy place and strongly objected to any line at all. In the U.S. we try to reconcile competing interests as much as possible. In China, pro-development officials steamroll over everyone else.

Not to mention, the GDP per capita in the Tysons area is about 8x that of Beijing. We spend a lot more on safety because we have a lot to lose.

I'm a pro-development kind of guy, but the Chinese model of unelected technocrats dictating what gets built isn't the right answer. We should be looking to Western Europe, where development like public transit gets done because there is widespread public support to push things through the democratic process.

> I'm a pro-development kind of guy, but the Chinese model of unelected technocrats dictating what gets built isn't the right answer. We should be looking to Western Europe, where development like public transit gets done because there is widespread public support to push things through the democratic process.

Except in our history the major projects that got built were built in exactly this way. Robert Moses[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Moses] is perhaps the most famous example of this, but we've had many others. The technocrats get either a public official, or a private multi-billionaire and make their vision happen, and damn the consequences.

I'm not familiar with the history of urban development in Europe, but I would not be surprised to see similar figures behind the first few systems before the benefits were obvious to everyone else.

Democracy is really good at forcing the system to take, or pretend to take, competing needs into account, but end of the day in basically every system "he who has the gold makes the rules".

And yet we can go outside and safely breathe. Some things are priceless.

I don't see how the two are related. Certainly pollution controls will increase costs a bit, but not have an effect nearly this size.

We have clean air (any many other nice things!) because of regulation. China can do things faster, but pays a very high cost in public health and safety. The US could also build things a lot faster/cheaper if we didn't worry about the consequences.

Regulation isn't a monolithic entity. The regulations that keep our air clean and our structures safe aren't the ones slowing everything down, as far as I can see.

But the general concept of controlling externalized risks through regulation is. That's the lesson here, rather than dissecting individual regulations and causes. And the same process that regulates externalities and allows people affected by the decision a voice in the process (in contrast to a more autocratic decision to do something; people and costs kinda be damned) slows things down, sometimes because of over-regulation or dishonest actors.

I'm not making any value judgements here, but I think it's important to understand and recognize how when dealing with systems this complex, bad coming with good is inevitable. Both approaches have benefits, both have costs.

I highly doubt the construction of this building went through rigorous environmental impact studies. Or that the contractors were required to dispose of things properly. Or that the building materials were deemed safe (I hear China is great at making drywall!).

That's not actually true. We still have bad days in some cities. The air quality in the U.S. is better but we still have room for improvement.

http://www.gothamgazette.com/index.php/government/5111-while...

10K miles of high speed rail in the U.S. would be great. We desperately need a realistic alternative to air travel.

Unfortunately, Americans simply don't see it as a priority, and we have huge legal and environmental obstacles to building almost anything these days. The new WTC only got built because there was a national consensus that it should be built. There's no national consensus that a high speed rail line should be built, so it probably won't happen in our lifetimes, other than a minimal, barely-fast-enough 20th Century design here and there such as between D.C. and NYC.

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