The environmental review process is also horribly broken in the US. In practice it does relatively little to protect the environment and adds enormous cost and complexity to projects. Important needed infrastructure is held up for years, sometimes decades, in lengthy court battles that frequently don’t meaningfully alter the proposals. In the end the same project is built but at 2-3x the cost.
We should, of course, protect the environment but we’ve gotta find a way to do that which is efficient and doesn’t waste public funds (where that current waste ironically could then be diverted into meaningful projects to protect the environment!).
Environmental review isn’t just about the hippie-greenie meaning of environment, but the actual built-environment. Questions asked include: how does the proposed plan interface with existing infrastructure? How will humans interact with it? What kind of traffic volumes are proposed?
It isn’t just about protecting and engineering our way around natural features. It’s about engineering around the built-environment as well.
I went to school and they changed zoning along this big road where I lived. When I can back from winter break it was unrecognizable and the stores were open.
Now in CA - voted for high speed rail and was absolutely promised it would not go over budget. The first contractor quit in disgust SNCF and started doing projects in Africa saying they were less dysfunctional :)
Most recent audit committee reports are that everything is on track. We will see
One argument on ballot was 10 years of planning went into project before ballot - so starting 1998 or so - 24 years later now
It's a little bit different than building a McDonalds - they're building an underground rail line in my city, and just the acoustic sheds and site offices (before they could start even digging a shaft to drop in a tunnel boring machine) on one of the six or so major sites is like building a dozen McDonald restaurants in itself! Not to mention water treatment, spoil handling and treatment, ventilation systems, moving utilities etc. etc.
Thing is, because of property tax systems, these large companies build these box stores and fast food joints in the cheapest way possible so they can basically not pay property taxes and basically write it off after 10 years.
The tax system and the infrastructure fees insensitive totally the wrong way of development.
I think the US don't deserve high speed trains. This can be revisited in a few decades when the population becomes less hostile towards rails. (Cf this : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33502387)
Building a nerwork in Africa, however, is a great idea !
I voted against high speed rail because it it wouldn't be serving anywhere near my area - I get it, the majority of the population lives on the coast between the Bay Area and San Diego, but why increase the tax burden on the people who live in the other 90% of the state who will likely never ride it? - and because I knew it would go over-budget and over-schedule.
Unsurprisingly, I got outvoted. And unsurprisingly, however many years and billions of dollars later, there are still no high speed trains running.
I believe Ray Dallio's most recent book talks about this a bit. Essentially the idea that more developed countries have slow downs in productivity related to waste.
A year or two ago I read the book The Power Broker about a guy who was responsible for a lot of the construction in new york city in fairly corrupt ways. You get the idea in the book that they were just figuring out the earliest versions of ballooning costs and slowing projects down in those days.
In the same way private contractors benefit from the military industrial complex and are incentivized to keep it alive and even promote conflict, We have a sort of bullshit industrial complex too of consultants and other nonsense jobs that come in and make projects take longer.
It seems like there must be a way to go back to building stuff as fast as we could 100 years ago in the US.
In China they can still build that way today[0][1] in a way I find embarrassing and annoying.
Patrick Collison explores this idea some on this page[2]. I consider it to be one of the most important problems of the modern age.
How different would the world be if in 3 months SF build 19 giant skyscrapers full of apartments you would want to live in?
Some of these problems are exacerbated by the fact that even if you could do it now, capital isn't as cheap as it used to be. Which makes it even more frustrating that we went through that period without massive infrastructure updates and improvements.
Singapore is not a great comparison, because construction is largely done by armies of migrant workers paid starvation wages, who are sent back home at the slightest hint of complaint (example: https://www.channelnewsasia.com/singapore/nine-men-public-as...).
But Japan and Europe don't, and they still manage to deliver public transport for much less.
One major difference is Singapore and Japan’s stops are profit centers and not cost centers - they rent massive amounts of property on them, meaning they’re not as dependent on debt or fare collection.
So many issues which all come back to culture and how you both set and incentivize it in the workers. Not many humans are going to bite the hand that feeds them so if they can pretend they have a full-time job as a "dropped nail collector" or something for $100K/year, many people will.
Definitely need to do something about Political interference, the bane of many countries. People who have the power to sign checks/cheques but have no actual skin in the game if they change things, screw things up, promise their buddy some lucrative contract etc.
The transparency has got to be one of the best ways of forcing things into the open though. Instead of a large contractor hiding a tonne of profit (or contingency) into their price, they specify it all - that should be the cost of earning public money. It helps both ways too. If the Project goes awry and needs the contractor to do more, they need to be paid more based on their rates.
It sounds like NY is especially disfunctional though. I would love to see a decent (and long!) documentary on this sort of thing :-)
Bring back small time corruption. It’s reserved for the super wealthy in the US but if foremans could grease the wheels every now and again things go a lot faster.
You used to get this for free in NYC as you had to bribe someone to avoid concrete delivery delays and rejected mixes. They made sure all the little guys with a tiny bit of power stayed out of your way.
The industry is now known as expediters and depending on the city is useless.
As a country I think we forgot how to do business. It’s clear people aren’t happy with their wages..
It doesn't have to be corruption, which tends to reward the people in the know far more than those who aren't!
There is already the concept of an expedited payment. You want the concrete on the agreed schedule, it's $3000 but if you need it express because you screwed something up, you can pay $500 and we'll get another driver in etc.
Ugh. That just makes it worse as more money disappears into the cracks and there is less accountability.
The issue is the folks paying for it don’t demand results, they usually prefer it get drug out. It means more fees to the folks involved, a longer time in the cushy job overseeing it, etc.
It’s usually the taxpayer or some large entity where the leaders are political and can get in on the graft, or are easily fooled.
Once the planning authorities get out of the way, just look at most private construction - anything where it’s not a giant megacorp or entity paying for it.
It’s done in 1/5th the time of equivalent public works,
and at a fraction of the cost too.
In most of these places, the politicians/leaders know how to control the captive base, and the captive base just shrugs and pays their taxes without demanding better.
So as long as the graft isn’t too obvious, ‘everyone wins’ - except the end user of course.
But they usually don’t actually need it (as in someone dies or an economy collapses or whatever), so they just putter along bitching about it without doing anything or looking closer. I guess that’s also part of the issue with having something that ‘mostly works’ already, no rush to replace it.
IMHO often the purpose of these projects isn’t to deliver transportation, it’s to keep people employed in the project.
That means draw it out, maximize the budget, spend every penny, etc., whereas the actual infrastructure is the excuse to keep it going.
Put another way, conflicts of interest tend to arise from the bureaucracy inherent in these projects. The researcher here identifies the symptoms of this but seems to see this more as an accident.
IMHO often the purpose of these projects isn’t to deliver transportation, it’s to keep people employed in the project.
Not even that, it's a corrupt racket. It's purpose is to make money for powerful people. Sometimes employing people helps but notice "Andrew Cuomo launched a “transformation plan” created by a consulting firm to “simplify a complex and inefficient organization,” the MTA (still) says on its website. The most noteworthy “accomplishment” was hiring six-figure executives who promptly left with golden parachutes; once Cuomo was gone the transformation team was shut down."
The researcher here identifies the symptoms of this but seems to see this more as an accident.
Yeah, that's kind of standard for reports like this. A sophisticated reader can easily discern a steam mass of corrupt interests involved with situations like this but the report writer doesn't like to burn their bridges so they don't connect the dots and X many other apologists merrily misapply Hanlon's razor to the situations as well.
> IMHO often the purpose of these projects isn’t to deliver transportation, it’s to keep people employed in the project.
Bingo!
Another element of this is to use such projects to buy the votes of the large unions.
Just a couple of months ago these crews came through our street. They ripped-up the PERFECTLY GOOD sidewalks and rebuilt them. This street is 24 years old. In other words, it's new. Oh, yes, they repaved it once about a year ago.
The guys ripping-up the sidewalk told me they are going to rip-up the street and repave it next year.
That explanation doesn’t really seem to explain why there is such a huge difference between the US and other countries with an arguably larger administrative state and higher union participation.
The bigger the project is, the more backers it needs. Many of these have to be bought. The people initiating the project don't have money to buy them, but the project budget does, or can. Adding that to the budget would make it a bigger project, needing more backing.
So, projects are under-budgeted, and overruns pay off backers. Nobody involved wants that money flow ever to end, so it goes over schedule.
Some projects avoid this fate. Solar and wind farms have transparent costs (N units x $M per unit), and start producing revenue almost immediately. Nukes suffer it most, because nobody knows how much any of it ought to cost, it takes forever, and it produces nothing until it is finished several changes of administration later.
Ok, then the problem with such projects in the US is obviously the lack of plannability. New York has now (finally, after decades of planning) built 3 stations of the Second Avenue Subway. Wether it will ever be expanded is currently unsure. Compare that to Munich, where between 1965 and 2010 there was always a subway under construction. Even without the inherent interests of the companies and workers involved, it should be obvious that when you build more, the cost per mile will be much lower.
Maybe the incentives could be changed by not employing those people as long as it takes but by a fixed amount of time and instead making the project scope flexible. Once the main project is finished they can work towards some optional goals and get a bonus or something.
In addition to the factors mentioned in the article, I boil it down in my mind to 2 factors, one legitimate, one dumb.
1) Here in the US and other now built-up countries, it's extremely expensive to displace existing interests and structures (both physical and legal, etc). People have built their lives, bought property, created interests, that have to be compensated to be moved out of the way. Even if a relatively neutral 3rd party could balance one interest against another, we simply have so many legal protections for people's interests that you now have to pay them heavily to make anything possible. Good for some reasons, bad for others, but that's a large part of makes it expensive. Just look at the ridiculous attempts to work around this at LaGuardia Airport. Never going to happen. Unless the government/state was forethinking enough to have reserved rights to some property to develop it, you now have to pay for the value it has accrued.
2) The other large part is that we almost now go looking for liability to protect ourselves against, whether real or perceived. This leads to endless environmental reviews, opportunities to object, lots of consultants required, conservative (read, high) costs, over engineering and over spec-ing. It has become an industry for everyone to get their cut, at the expense of the general welfare, but urged on by some small consituency, and they're all happy to stay employed to do so.
It's good for some things that property rights are being respected and the environment / issues are known before building something. But it has swung too far to that side I think.
And as sad as I am to say it, sometimes you wish that Elon Musk would do for local infrastructure what he did for government understanding of reasonable rocket costs. But this one is a lot harder to fix than offering for sale an alternative.
One of the most convincing analyses I read, and I may dig up the link someday, is that the US sucks compared to Europe because every project is treated as a one-off unique effort, and there are so few of them, while Europe just builds transit the way the US builds houses: ongoing, repeated, standardized.
It's easy to compare this with an aspect of software development, something most HN readers are no doubt familiar with: If something is hard, do it more frequently, until you get good at it.
Nobody masters a skill by planning and thinking really hard about how to do the skill, then suddenly doing the skill perfectly. No, you start out with a goal and a general idea of the method, begin with the basics, try, fail, learn, try again. For days, weeks, months, years, until you master the skill.
Deceptive title. No answer, just magical thinking about people ignoring their incentives.
Here’s an idea, not a great one, but something: torts and bonds. Regulators specify public-interest outcomes and associated monetary values, which are the bonding requirements. Then public interest lawyers sue for a maximum of the existing bond on the grounds of any violation of the public interest outcomes. The plaintiff would be required to pay the the non-refundable public cost of the court case. It is important these court cases would not be based on intent or following standards, or technical merit; they are strictly about outcomes defined and valued by the bond.
This would push technical standards and project evaluation into the insurance industry, and the finance industry would select their tolerable level of innovation and risk in each bonding pool. It is important here that the bonds be actual dollars held in trust, and not just letters of credit, and additionally, that no government agency provides finance or insurance in any form.
It would have the obvious side-effect of requiring a lot of up-front capital to do anything, and tying up a lot of capital, which would have a huge range of risk, and therefore interest rates, as a project amortizes out its tort risk over time. The bonds would only be recoverable by torts, successful decommission of the project, or more realistically, subsidizing renewal of the project.
The macroeconomic effect would be deflationary as the bonds would basically be a burn pit for dollars, but this would open up opportunities for more efficient public funding through central bank bond purchases and the elimination of tax burden. It would also massively reduce the public burden of regulation and administration, especially as the tort fees would pay for it. I think it would also promote localization of investment, as the bonding capital would be a high-yield investable asset most appropriately held or rejected by the people knowledgeable and/or responsible for the quality of the result, which is the community itself.
Okay, this is Hacker News, so, please go ahead and tear it apart.
I am always surprised when I learn that administrative/business advancement seems to be based on how much money was spent. I get it; it's much much easier to quantify spending than value per dollar. But in academia, I notice that there is a tremendous incentive to build new buildings and start new schools/departments, rather than improve existing infrastructure. Part of it is the donors, but I think there is an incentive to be able to say "I did this ...", where this involves a large budget. I suspect it is the same for public works projects -- career advancement depends more on spending money that producing value.
Part of the problem is that people in the US are hostile to the government actually doing anything using government employees instead of external contractors or consultants.
The thing is that money is not being "wasted" at all. It's profit for someone.
Just like healthcare & education, building big infrastructure projects lines the pockets of everyone even tangentially involved, so there is no incentive to change anything. People are literally making millions of dollars.
The entire point of these projects is to waste money. Or, rather, waste money from the perspective of those whom are paying. Those receiving certainly aren't wasting it.
The idea that we can do better and save money by ignoring context is utterly and shamefully stupid. This piece highlights the Second Avenue subway. That line was first proposed roughly a hundred years ago. It was decided then that the level of complication from utilities and other subway lines made it unreasonably expensive to build. Over the years the Second Avenue line was repeatedly proposed and the conclusion was always the same. The level of complication made it completely impractical. The costs of construction would be astronomical.
So then it was decided that new tunnel boring technology would make the project pencil out. So the project moved forward. Sure enough, the complications caused costs to explode. If only someone had consulted the extensive literature on the subject that had accumulated over the last hundred years.
Now researchers look at what went wrong and have decided that more careful control of contractors would fix things. That is false. The Second Avenue subway has always been impractical. Basic research shows that has been demonstrated at length many times. Making generalizations about transit construction based on a project that was ruled out repeatedly over a period of a hundred years makes no sense. The Second Avenue subway did not break records with its expense because we don't know how to build. The Second Avenue subway cost a phenomenal amount because it is an impractical project with a huge amount of complications. No amount of clever design or management could possibly make the Second Avenue subway cost a reasonable amount. And this has been solidly understood for a hundred years.
Seattle delivered rail infrastructure on time and under budget, and now it has a ridership in the millions. People want trains. People use trains. Build more goddamn trains.
I'll be taking the Shinkansen to Tokyo this week. Watching the bullet trains depart from Tokyo Station every seven and a half minutes on just the Tokaido line alone, carrying around a thousand people each... it's hard not to be a little envious. The productivity gains must be immense, and JR is practically printing money with the ticket revenue alone.
It did? I’m from Seattle, and the plans for a light rail were perennially stalled since I was a kid. What they’ve built so far is nice, but they’re expanding it at a glacial pace. They could build more and faster.
The light rail doesn't cover most of the population of Seattle, instead a slow train meanders far out into the suburbs. Pretend we all agreed to start taking public transit. We couldn't, even the population today couldn't use the system getting planned out to 2055, let alone account for growth.
[+] [-] JCM9|3 years ago|reply
We should, of course, protect the environment but we’ve gotta find a way to do that which is efficient and doesn’t waste public funds (where that current waste ironically could then be diverted into meaningful projects to protect the environment!).
[+] [-] helloooooooo|3 years ago|reply
It isn’t just about protecting and engineering our way around natural features. It’s about engineering around the built-environment as well.
[+] [-] onphonenow|3 years ago|reply
I went to school and they changed zoning along this big road where I lived. When I can back from winter break it was unrecognizable and the stores were open.
Now in CA - voted for high speed rail and was absolutely promised it would not go over budget. The first contractor quit in disgust SNCF and started doing projects in Africa saying they were less dysfunctional :)
Most recent audit committee reports are that everything is on track. We will see
One argument on ballot was 10 years of planning went into project before ballot - so starting 1998 or so - 24 years later now
[+] [-] stephen_g|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] panick21_|3 years ago|reply
The tax system and the infrastructure fees insensitive totally the wrong way of development.
And this is why cities are mostly broke.
[+] [-] newaccount2021|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] madengr|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] Fiahil|3 years ago|reply
Building a nerwork in Africa, however, is a great idea !
[+] [-] Cyberdog|3 years ago|reply
Unsurprisingly, I got outvoted. And unsurprisingly, however many years and billions of dollars later, there are still no high speed trains running.
[+] [-] f0e4c2f7|3 years ago|reply
A year or two ago I read the book The Power Broker about a guy who was responsible for a lot of the construction in new york city in fairly corrupt ways. You get the idea in the book that they were just figuring out the earliest versions of ballooning costs and slowing projects down in those days.
In the same way private contractors benefit from the military industrial complex and are incentivized to keep it alive and even promote conflict, We have a sort of bullshit industrial complex too of consultants and other nonsense jobs that come in and make projects take longer.
It seems like there must be a way to go back to building stuff as fast as we could 100 years ago in the US.
In China they can still build that way today[0][1] in a way I find embarrassing and annoying.
Patrick Collison explores this idea some on this page[2]. I consider it to be one of the most important problems of the modern age.
How different would the world be if in 3 months SF build 19 giant skyscrapers full of apartments you would want to live in?
Some of these problems are exacerbated by the fact that even if you could do it now, capital isn't as cheap as it used to be. Which makes it even more frustrating that we went through that period without massive infrastructure updates and improvements.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OWp6vSHFG4M
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N6f_sayw0mM
[2] https://patrickcollison.com/fast
[+] [-] refurb|3 years ago|reply
San Francisco put the Chinatown line in - 3km, 4 stations, 3 underground for $2B or $0.7B per station (ignoring the above ground one).
Clearly Singapore can do it quicker because there is one level of government. And they import cheap labor to actually build the lines.
So other than the delays, the cost for SF doesn't seem ridiculous.
[+] [-] rippercushions|3 years ago|reply
But Japan and Europe don't, and they still manage to deliver public transport for much less.
[+] [-] Drunk_Engineer|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] atdrummond|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ur-whale|3 years ago|reply
Singapore can do it quicker because there's far less corruption there.
Also no unions (which is kind of the same thing as the other point above).
[+] [-] lbriner|3 years ago|reply
Definitely need to do something about Political interference, the bane of many countries. People who have the power to sign checks/cheques but have no actual skin in the game if they change things, screw things up, promise their buddy some lucrative contract etc.
The transparency has got to be one of the best ways of forcing things into the open though. Instead of a large contractor hiding a tonne of profit (or contingency) into their price, they specify it all - that should be the cost of earning public money. It helps both ways too. If the Project goes awry and needs the contractor to do more, they need to be paid more based on their rates.
It sounds like NY is especially disfunctional though. I would love to see a decent (and long!) documentary on this sort of thing :-)
[+] [-] mozman|3 years ago|reply
You used to get this for free in NYC as you had to bribe someone to avoid concrete delivery delays and rejected mixes. They made sure all the little guys with a tiny bit of power stayed out of your way.
The industry is now known as expediters and depending on the city is useless.
As a country I think we forgot how to do business. It’s clear people aren’t happy with their wages..
[+] [-] lbriner|3 years ago|reply
There is already the concept of an expedited payment. You want the concrete on the agreed schedule, it's $3000 but if you need it express because you screwed something up, you can pay $500 and we'll get another driver in etc.
[+] [-] lazide|3 years ago|reply
The issue is the folks paying for it don’t demand results, they usually prefer it get drug out. It means more fees to the folks involved, a longer time in the cushy job overseeing it, etc.
It’s usually the taxpayer or some large entity where the leaders are political and can get in on the graft, or are easily fooled.
Once the planning authorities get out of the way, just look at most private construction - anything where it’s not a giant megacorp or entity paying for it.
It’s done in 1/5th the time of equivalent public works, and at a fraction of the cost too.
In most of these places, the politicians/leaders know how to control the captive base, and the captive base just shrugs and pays their taxes without demanding better.
So as long as the graft isn’t too obvious, ‘everyone wins’ - except the end user of course.
But they usually don’t actually need it (as in someone dies or an economy collapses or whatever), so they just putter along bitching about it without doing anything or looking closer. I guess that’s also part of the issue with having something that ‘mostly works’ already, no rush to replace it.
[+] [-] usui|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] user3939382|3 years ago|reply
That means draw it out, maximize the budget, spend every penny, etc., whereas the actual infrastructure is the excuse to keep it going.
Put another way, conflicts of interest tend to arise from the bureaucracy inherent in these projects. The researcher here identifies the symptoms of this but seems to see this more as an accident.
[+] [-] joe_the_user|3 years ago|reply
Not even that, it's a corrupt racket. It's purpose is to make money for powerful people. Sometimes employing people helps but notice "Andrew Cuomo launched a “transformation plan” created by a consulting firm to “simplify a complex and inefficient organization,” the MTA (still) says on its website. The most noteworthy “accomplishment” was hiring six-figure executives who promptly left with golden parachutes; once Cuomo was gone the transformation team was shut down."
The researcher here identifies the symptoms of this but seems to see this more as an accident.
Yeah, that's kind of standard for reports like this. A sophisticated reader can easily discern a steam mass of corrupt interests involved with situations like this but the report writer doesn't like to burn their bridges so they don't connect the dots and X many other apologists merrily misapply Hanlon's razor to the situations as well.
[+] [-] robomartin|3 years ago|reply
Bingo!
Another element of this is to use such projects to buy the votes of the large unions.
Just a couple of months ago these crews came through our street. They ripped-up the PERFECTLY GOOD sidewalks and rebuilt them. This street is 24 years old. In other words, it's new. Oh, yes, they repaved it once about a year ago.
The guys ripping-up the sidewalk told me they are going to rip-up the street and repave it next year.
This is criminal.
[+] [-] airza|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pencilguin|3 years ago|reply
The bigger the project is, the more backers it needs. Many of these have to be bought. The people initiating the project don't have money to buy them, but the project budget does, or can. Adding that to the budget would make it a bigger project, needing more backing.
So, projects are under-budgeted, and overruns pay off backers. Nobody involved wants that money flow ever to end, so it goes over schedule.
Some projects avoid this fate. Solar and wind farms have transparent costs (N units x $M per unit), and start producing revenue almost immediately. Nukes suffer it most, because nobody knows how much any of it ought to cost, it takes forever, and it produces nothing until it is finished several changes of administration later.
[+] [-] rob74|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 8f2ab37a-ed6c|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] the8472|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sfpotter|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] supernova87a|3 years ago|reply
1) Here in the US and other now built-up countries, it's extremely expensive to displace existing interests and structures (both physical and legal, etc). People have built their lives, bought property, created interests, that have to be compensated to be moved out of the way. Even if a relatively neutral 3rd party could balance one interest against another, we simply have so many legal protections for people's interests that you now have to pay them heavily to make anything possible. Good for some reasons, bad for others, but that's a large part of makes it expensive. Just look at the ridiculous attempts to work around this at LaGuardia Airport. Never going to happen. Unless the government/state was forethinking enough to have reserved rights to some property to develop it, you now have to pay for the value it has accrued.
2) The other large part is that we almost now go looking for liability to protect ourselves against, whether real or perceived. This leads to endless environmental reviews, opportunities to object, lots of consultants required, conservative (read, high) costs, over engineering and over spec-ing. It has become an industry for everyone to get their cut, at the expense of the general welfare, but urged on by some small consituency, and they're all happy to stay employed to do so.
It's good for some things that property rights are being respected and the environment / issues are known before building something. But it has swung too far to that side I think.
And as sad as I am to say it, sometimes you wish that Elon Musk would do for local infrastructure what he did for government understanding of reasonable rocket costs. But this one is a lot harder to fix than offering for sale an alternative.
[+] [-] cratermoon|3 years ago|reply
It's easy to compare this with an aspect of software development, something most HN readers are no doubt familiar with: If something is hard, do it more frequently, until you get good at it.
Nobody masters a skill by planning and thinking really hard about how to do the skill, then suddenly doing the skill perfectly. No, you start out with a goal and a general idea of the method, begin with the basics, try, fail, learn, try again. For days, weeks, months, years, until you master the skill.
[+] [-] jl2718|3 years ago|reply
Here’s an idea, not a great one, but something: torts and bonds. Regulators specify public-interest outcomes and associated monetary values, which are the bonding requirements. Then public interest lawyers sue for a maximum of the existing bond on the grounds of any violation of the public interest outcomes. The plaintiff would be required to pay the the non-refundable public cost of the court case. It is important these court cases would not be based on intent or following standards, or technical merit; they are strictly about outcomes defined and valued by the bond.
This would push technical standards and project evaluation into the insurance industry, and the finance industry would select their tolerable level of innovation and risk in each bonding pool. It is important here that the bonds be actual dollars held in trust, and not just letters of credit, and additionally, that no government agency provides finance or insurance in any form.
It would have the obvious side-effect of requiring a lot of up-front capital to do anything, and tying up a lot of capital, which would have a huge range of risk, and therefore interest rates, as a project amortizes out its tort risk over time. The bonds would only be recoverable by torts, successful decommission of the project, or more realistically, subsidizing renewal of the project.
The macroeconomic effect would be deflationary as the bonds would basically be a burn pit for dollars, but this would open up opportunities for more efficient public funding through central bank bond purchases and the elimination of tax burden. It would also massively reduce the public burden of regulation and administration, especially as the tort fees would pay for it. I think it would also promote localization of investment, as the bonding capital would be a high-yield investable asset most appropriately held or rejected by the people knowledgeable and/or responsible for the quality of the result, which is the community itself.
Okay, this is Hacker News, so, please go ahead and tear it apart.
[+] [-] fastaguy88|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rrwo|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] grecy|3 years ago|reply
Just like healthcare & education, building big infrastructure projects lines the pockets of everyone even tangentially involved, so there is no incentive to change anything. People are literally making millions of dollars.
[+] [-] bigbacaloa|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ravenstine|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] christkv|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hardware2win|3 years ago|reply
Thats insane
[+] [-] m0llusk|3 years ago|reply
So then it was decided that new tunnel boring technology would make the project pencil out. So the project moved forward. Sure enough, the complications caused costs to explode. If only someone had consulted the extensive literature on the subject that had accumulated over the last hundred years.
Now researchers look at what went wrong and have decided that more careful control of contractors would fix things. That is false. The Second Avenue subway has always been impractical. Basic research shows that has been demonstrated at length many times. Making generalizations about transit construction based on a project that was ruled out repeatedly over a period of a hundred years makes no sense. The Second Avenue subway did not break records with its expense because we don't know how to build. The Second Avenue subway cost a phenomenal amount because it is an impractical project with a huge amount of complications. No amount of clever design or management could possibly make the Second Avenue subway cost a reasonable amount. And this has been solidly understood for a hundred years.
[+] [-] socialismisok|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jbay808|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sfpotter|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] panick21_|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bigbacaloa|3 years ago|reply
Seattle has monthly ridership in the millions.
That's actually still pretty terrible for a city of its size.
[+] [-] coryrc|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] aaron695|3 years ago|reply
Vegas Loop $50 million. 2 years from contract signed to opening. 1.7 miles, one lane. Currently has shared driven cars - https://www.tiktok.com/@alexsibila/video/7156602211508768046
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Boring_Company
How cutting edge is the prufrock? https://www.boringcompany.com/prufrock
Musk knows what to do, cut out bureaucrats. Pay more money to dig deeper rather than mess with permissions.
Vice is run by children, and children of the most boring kind. Reading articles on Vice for this stuff is pointless.