Can America Still Build Big? A California Rail Project Raises Doubts(nytimes.com)
nytimes.com
Can America Still Build Big? A California Rail Project Raises Doubts
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/25/us/california-high-speed-rail.html
46 comments
At the cost of 154+ deaths. That's one thing that has changed since the big projects of last century: construction workers are no longer considered to be part of the cost/benefit equation.
I'd argue that a contributing factor to the moderating of big projects is that the world is now better instrumented and we have a better idea of the costs and benefits of big projects, so a lot more goes into each decision and it's harder to push things though on the basis of a grand vision.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoover_Dam#Construction_deaths
I'd argue that a contributing factor to the moderating of big projects is that the world is now better instrumented and we have a better idea of the costs and benefits of big projects, so a lot more goes into each decision and it's harder to push things though on the basis of a grand vision.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoover_Dam#Construction_deaths
Cost of life in USA has gone up significantly since then and hence people are willing to put up with unreasonable and super expensive safety mechanisms which bloat the entire project. USA could however use immigrants in such projects with lower safety standards, something that most middle easterns countries and our very close allies like Saudi Arabia has been doing.
Take above paragraph with a pinch of salt please.
Seriously speaking, large government projects are less about people and more about misplaced priorities of politicians. California's rail project was absolutely nonsensical and horribly bloated. Why do we even need a high speed train between Merced and Bakersfield ? For cows ?
American private entrepreneurs are dreaming big. Those big dreams however are getting realized only in areas government has not yet killed off with ultra crazy regulations. Elon Musk alone is doing it with Giga Factory, SpaceX and Teslas. Amazon through entering healthcare. Google is doing it through Google brain and so on. There might not be huge structures built with human sacrifice but the efforts gone into them are nevertheless equally spectacular.
America is building far bigger thing that benefits even the poor person in remote village of India instead of dams and trains. You just need to look at right locations. Also America doing it without risking lives of workers.
Take above paragraph with a pinch of salt please.
Seriously speaking, large government projects are less about people and more about misplaced priorities of politicians. California's rail project was absolutely nonsensical and horribly bloated. Why do we even need a high speed train between Merced and Bakersfield ? For cows ?
American private entrepreneurs are dreaming big. Those big dreams however are getting realized only in areas government has not yet killed off with ultra crazy regulations. Elon Musk alone is doing it with Giga Factory, SpaceX and Teslas. Amazon through entering healthcare. Google is doing it through Google brain and so on. There might not be huge structures built with human sacrifice but the efforts gone into them are nevertheless equally spectacular.
America is building far bigger thing that benefits even the poor person in remote village of India instead of dams and trains. You just need to look at right locations. Also America doing it without risking lives of workers.
Amazon through entering healthcare
Not right now, but they will in a big way.
Unless they get into US health insurance, they are not going to have that much of a difference in US health Care.
Its lack of safety considerations would terrify folks today. Look at film of highscalers with little more than a rope. Diversion tunnel crews that were at constant risk of cave-in and suffocation. Blacks segregated and given the most dangerous jobs. All the cheap labor you could use.
Not disagreeing with you, but cautioning; I wouldn't read any grand lessons into the failure of CA HSR, except as they pertain to California's dysfunctional politics. Comparison to Hoover Dam (federally funded) isn't apples-to-apples.
A comparison to the giant boondoggle that was Boston's Big Dig might be warranted, except that the Big Dig actually produced something that millions of people use on daily basis.
A comparison to the giant boondoggle that was Boston's Big Dig might be warranted, except that the Big Dig actually produced something that millions of people use on daily basis.
I don't claim to know much about California bureaucracy, but in my own state, just in the past decade:
- The 787 was years late and over budget
- The 520 bridge was years late and over budget
- The 99 tunnel was years late and over budget
- Microsoft doesn't seem to schedule releases (publicly) or use calendar years for version numbers any more, but from where I sit, Windows hasn't exactly been a shining example of success in the past decade, either
These are public and private, across completely disparate engineering fields. California may be dysfunctional but everybody else is, too. If someone in this country can still "build big", who is doing it?
- The 787 was years late and over budget
- The 520 bridge was years late and over budget
- The 99 tunnel was years late and over budget
- Microsoft doesn't seem to schedule releases (publicly) or use calendar years for version numbers any more, but from where I sit, Windows hasn't exactly been a shining example of success in the past decade, either
These are public and private, across completely disparate engineering fields. California may be dysfunctional but everybody else is, too. If someone in this country can still "build big", who is doing it?
There is a big difference between late and not finished at all. Those are all examples of successful big projects.
Exactly. Humans suck at estimating cost and time for large, complex projects. Measuring the success of a project purely based on whether the estimates were accurate before they started completely ignores any benefit folks have when the project is completed.
That just leads to more questions!
If missing estimates of time and resources is a success, then what would be a failure? Just giving up? Can we make any project a "success" by just keeping on throwing time and money at it until it's finished?
People (like executives, or voters) made the decision to go forward with these projects based on the estimates. If engineering estimates can't even be accurate to within a factor of 2 (like these), then what's the purpose of providing them? If humans are just bad at estimating, why are these estimates always much lower than actual, and never higher? What about the benefits which could have been achieved by other uses of this money? How can anyone make an informed decision about which possible engineering project to implement, when estimates are this bad?
These days, I assume any estimate without a confidence interval is a lie.
If missing estimates of time and resources is a success, then what would be a failure? Just giving up? Can we make any project a "success" by just keeping on throwing time and money at it until it's finished?
People (like executives, or voters) made the decision to go forward with these projects based on the estimates. If engineering estimates can't even be accurate to within a factor of 2 (like these), then what's the purpose of providing them? If humans are just bad at estimating, why are these estimates always much lower than actual, and never higher? What about the benefits which could have been achieved by other uses of this money? How can anyone make an informed decision about which possible engineering project to implement, when estimates are this bad?
These days, I assume any estimate without a confidence interval is a lie.
I think a graph/table showing percent under/over budget vs year would be very telling, but a quick search doesn't provide anything that has been compiled. But more troubling, I'm having trouble finding any data with budget related numbers that don't require a phone call to an accounting department.
Do we have that little transparency?
Do we have that little transparency?
Even for those of us in San Francisco -- can you imagine someone proposing building Sutro Tower today? What do you mean you can see it from everywhere?! Our glorious view! That it became kind of an iconic landmark, well, that's neither here nor there. Nobody's allowed to build anything taller than anything already there. It's as if SF has decided that it's happy with things as they are and no need to grow/build/develop anything new.
The Salesforce tower is very recent, and you can see it from everywhere. It even lights up like an Asian-style building. Not saying you’re wrong, these projects seem to be much harder now on political and financial and other measures, but not completely impossible. Then again we can’t seem to open a glorified bus terminal successfully....
Indeed, I'm looking at Salesforce out the window right now :) point taken, though I feel like SoMa is basically the only part of town development is happening. No similar high-rises are being put up west of the Van Ness corridor, for instance.
I love how only now they realize that it lacks the expected Caltrain capacity.
Sutro is well above everything else in SF. It doesn't obscure anything but, uh, fog maybe.
I enjoyed the Dam tour when I took it years ago. Especially when the tour guide said the Hoover Dam was the last federal project completely on time and under budget.
I had the same thoughts visiting the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco. I cannot imagine it being built now.
A rail system in the U.S. has to compete with a very robust airport system and a very robust interstate system. You can argue what you will about whether Americans should drive as much as they do, but the old saying about bringing a horse to water applies here. If SF <-> LA flights are $100-$200 round trip at 1.5 hours (+ 1-2 hours at the airport). It's a 8 hour bus ride for like $30-50. A train that was gonna take 5+ hours has to compete for the middle market.
It's a model that doesn't work well without a corresponding tax on short-hop flights.
Why would you do that? Just because? Taxing a faster form of public transportation just to shepherd people onto trains? Makes zero sense.
To pay for the externalities of air travel (ie carbon emissions).
> Mr. Richard said California’s strict environmental regulations have become a pretext for anyone who wanted to stop the project.
> “The environmental process has become about litigation protection,” he said. “You’re going to get sued so you’ve got to go out and basically do process upon process, study upon study to make sure that somebody cannot find some toehold for litigation.”
Not to knock on the environmental regulations but I think this illustrates why big monolith projects tend be very difficult or to fail outright. In the U.S. the system is setup to completely de-risk large-scale construction projects. We want a large project with a huge footprint to have zero environmental impact, zero negative impact on any community, displace no workers, and benefit every potential stakeholder. No trade-offs allowed: either everybody wins or the project is not completed or even started.
So the era of big top-down monoliths may be over in the U.S. Local, low impact solutions like Seattle's Link light rail are the future.
> “The environmental process has become about litigation protection,” he said. “You’re going to get sued so you’ve got to go out and basically do process upon process, study upon study to make sure that somebody cannot find some toehold for litigation.”
Not to knock on the environmental regulations but I think this illustrates why big monolith projects tend be very difficult or to fail outright. In the U.S. the system is setup to completely de-risk large-scale construction projects. We want a large project with a huge footprint to have zero environmental impact, zero negative impact on any community, displace no workers, and benefit every potential stakeholder. No trade-offs allowed: either everybody wins or the project is not completed or even started.
So the era of big top-down monoliths may be over in the U.S. Local, low impact solutions like Seattle's Link light rail are the future.
It's possible that there are very specific aspects of this project that make it not a very good example.
Cali is big, and SF is quite a piece away from LA with not that-that much in between. That's a lot of km.
Consider that you can connect London, Paris, Frankfurt, the Rhine Valley and the entirety of Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg - with less track distance. Or roughly.
Cali is big, and SF is quite a piece away from LA with not that-that much in between. That's a lot of km.
Consider that you can connect London, Paris, Frankfurt, the Rhine Valley and the entirety of Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg - with less track distance. Or roughly.
Absolutely we can, the problem is that the California Rail project was a boondoggle from the start.
I disagree. Not only can we no longer build large things, we are barely able to maintain the things we have. I lived in Cambridge MA during the repair of the Anderson Memorial Bridge, described here: http://larrysummers.com/2016/05/31/a-lesson-on-infrastructur... . Fixing a very modest bridge across a placid river took years, and cost far more than the inflation-adjusted original cost of the bridge (took longer than the original construction too!).
Look at NASA's marvelous manned space program. It has less manned launch capability than the agency had when the Mercury program was active. But they still spend money, doing extremely important things like sending "astronauts" to camp out on Mauna Loa and pretend they're on Mars.
Look at NASA's marvelous manned space program. It has less manned launch capability than the agency had when the Mercury program was active. But they still spend money, doing extremely important things like sending "astronauts" to camp out on Mauna Loa and pretend they're on Mars.
> It has less manned launch capability than the agency had when the Mercury program was active.
As it should. NASA has made a deliberate effort to move focus away from manned launch capability instead preferring to outsource. SLS is still in the pipeline though. Hopefully this is a great time of progress.
As it should. NASA has made a deliberate effort to move focus away from manned launch capability instead preferring to outsource. SLS is still in the pipeline though. Hopefully this is a great time of progress.
OK, fine. But why is NASA still pretending to build the Orion Spacecraft?
We can't, because we're slowly turning into Europe: old, arthritic, short-sighted, and with complete tunnel vision.
America was the one civilization that could have proven wrong the inevitability of the (rise-apogee-decadence) cycle ... looks like it wont. That's very sad.
America was the one civilization that could have proven wrong the inevitability of the (rise-apogee-decadence) cycle ... looks like it wont. That's very sad.
Europe can do mega projects: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gotthard_Base_Tunnel
That's in Switzerland.
Switzerland is not exactly a standard part of Europe: it's not in the EU, it's much more capitalist than the rest of Europe and certainly not a country that's following the current downward socialist path to Venezuela-style hell many other European countries are on.
If anything Switzerland is closer in spirit to the US than most other European countries.
Switzerland is not exactly a standard part of Europe: it's not in the EU, it's much more capitalist than the rest of Europe and certainly not a country that's following the current downward socialist path to Venezuela-style hell many other European countries are on.
If anything Switzerland is closer in spirit to the US than most other European countries.
Nice goalpost moving there. So... not Europe, but then all of Europe except Switzerland. Next up someone's going to bring in the high-speed rail in Spain, the Rotterdam port modernization, and so on.
Europe can do it, end of story.
Europe can do it, end of story.
> it's not in the EU, it's much more capitalist than the rest of Europe
There are certainly more capitalist places in Europe than Switzerland. Ireland, the Netherlands or Luxembourg come to mind.
>and certainly not a country that's following the current downward socialist path to Venezuela-style hell many other European countries are on.
I haven't noticed any oil socialist republics in Europe lately. Though a lot of countries indeed are on a downward path, but more akin to America's. Ie. the great dumbfuck uprising.
>If anything Switzerland is closer in spirit to the US than most other European countries.
Switzerland is closer to the countries it borders than any other place, and by a long shot.
And in any case there are still big engineering projects all over the continent. The Lyon-Turin railway project includes a 57km tunnel being dug, but it's now threatened by the current Italian government (we're coming back to the dumbfuck uprising).
There are certainly more capitalist places in Europe than Switzerland. Ireland, the Netherlands or Luxembourg come to mind.
>and certainly not a country that's following the current downward socialist path to Venezuela-style hell many other European countries are on.
I haven't noticed any oil socialist republics in Europe lately. Though a lot of countries indeed are on a downward path, but more akin to America's. Ie. the great dumbfuck uprising.
>If anything Switzerland is closer in spirit to the US than most other European countries.
Switzerland is closer to the countries it borders than any other place, and by a long shot.
And in any case there are still big engineering projects all over the continent. The Lyon-Turin railway project includes a 57km tunnel being dug, but it's now threatened by the current Italian government (we're coming back to the dumbfuck uprising).
Funny you should mention because Europe does big projects that span decades.
They have the greatest rail infrastructure in the world.
Even projects that require considerable more nuance and social integration, such as the revitalizing of Dutch public spaces to accommodate bicycles. [1]
I think the bit you are missing is that European nations have more centralized authority, they're somewhat naturally more communitarian, and not quite as big on individual rights, and they're also not quite so big. For better or worse, it enables them to make longer term plans on some things.
Here is a list of major European undertakings, granted the Norwegian one's are a little unfair given their vast oil wealth. [2]
[1] https://bicycledutch.wordpress.com/2011/10/20/how-the-dutch-...
[2] https://nordic.businessinsider.com/11-giant-infrastructure-p...
They have the greatest rail infrastructure in the world.
Even projects that require considerable more nuance and social integration, such as the revitalizing of Dutch public spaces to accommodate bicycles. [1]
I think the bit you are missing is that European nations have more centralized authority, they're somewhat naturally more communitarian, and not quite as big on individual rights, and they're also not quite so big. For better or worse, it enables them to make longer term plans on some things.
Here is a list of major European undertakings, granted the Norwegian one's are a little unfair given their vast oil wealth. [2]
[1] https://bicycledutch.wordpress.com/2011/10/20/how-the-dutch-...
[2] https://nordic.businessinsider.com/11-giant-infrastructure-p...
the greatest rail infrastructure in the world
Interesting, according to CIA World Fact book, Railways:
USA: 293,564 km
EU: 230,548 km
China: 124,000 km
Edit to add: With the EU, however, having an area of about 4.5 m km^2, while USA and China have about 10 m km^2 each.
USA: 293,564 km
EU: 230,548 km
China: 124,000 km
Edit to add: With the EU, however, having an area of about 4.5 m km^2, while USA and China have about 10 m km^2 each.
The problem in California is that none of the folks involved in building it think finishing it would really benefit them. I've had family members involved in numerous public works projects in California, and once they saw the way the sausage is made, all decided to get out.
These projects are setup as a way to extract money from taxpayers, through a relatively well developed process now: 1) Write an initiative/tax statement which promises the world. 2) Once it passes, laugh and start doing engineering planning based on the most naive/known to be wrong set of assumptions. 3) Once you hit the first roadblock, escalate it and require change orders ($$). This often doesn't require doing any actual on the ground construction work. In fact, many of these boondogles (Caltrain electrification?) never hit actual construction after 5-10 yrs of this. 4) Redo the entire set of plans at great expense, but without actual forward thinking. Hit the next roadblock, rinse and repeat prior steps.
This allows them to funnel billions into friendly firms that produce plans that never get used, doing studies that no one will read.
Since no one with any clout actually cares if this thing gets built (not like they will use it, and most of the wealthy donors/voters they care about likely won't either), no rush as long as they have something to point to showing they are doing 'something'
Eventually, when the money runs low, make up a sob story blaming someone else for it, and go back to step 1.
When someone actually cares, we still build things quickly - the Oroville dam fixes, replacing the I80 overpass when the tanker truck burned it down, etc.
The problem is less that we can't build big things - it's that most of the time, we don't actually NEED to (in a real, existential way) - at least in the opinion of those with actual power.
These projects are setup as a way to extract money from taxpayers, through a relatively well developed process now: 1) Write an initiative/tax statement which promises the world. 2) Once it passes, laugh and start doing engineering planning based on the most naive/known to be wrong set of assumptions. 3) Once you hit the first roadblock, escalate it and require change orders ($$). This often doesn't require doing any actual on the ground construction work. In fact, many of these boondogles (Caltrain electrification?) never hit actual construction after 5-10 yrs of this. 4) Redo the entire set of plans at great expense, but without actual forward thinking. Hit the next roadblock, rinse and repeat prior steps.
This allows them to funnel billions into friendly firms that produce plans that never get used, doing studies that no one will read.
Since no one with any clout actually cares if this thing gets built (not like they will use it, and most of the wealthy donors/voters they care about likely won't either), no rush as long as they have something to point to showing they are doing 'something'
Eventually, when the money runs low, make up a sob story blaming someone else for it, and go back to step 1.
When someone actually cares, we still build things quickly - the Oroville dam fixes, replacing the I80 overpass when the tanker truck burned it down, etc.
The problem is less that we can't build big things - it's that most of the time, we don't actually NEED to (in a real, existential way) - at least in the opinion of those with actual power.
This doesn't stop private corporations from attempting. The Hyper loop and whatever they are calling the subway system that they are developing are "developing" still.
New York is adding a pretty massive LIRR line, so it seems like things are going ok
New York is adding a pretty massive LIRR line, so it seems like things are going ok
Some of the legislations implemented in the past 50 years has led to a bunch of projects becoming prohibitively expensive, even for the private sector. The Hyper Loop is a good example of the exceptions.
Hyperloop is not an exception. The technology is not the actual problem. The problem is right-of-way. Hyperloop, light rail, monorail, pneumatic tube, whatever, you need someplace to run the line.
I think America lacks a long term vision and a strong central government to plow on.
Yes the project will take 10 years more than it was scheduled and cost 200% extra but so what? A week after the railway is in use everyone will have forgotten about all those issues. A good railway system lasts a hundred years.
Yes the project will take 10 years more than it was scheduled and cost 200% extra but so what? A week after the railway is in use everyone will have forgotten about all those issues. A good railway system lasts a hundred years.
I visited Hoover Dam a few years ago. It is impossible for me to imagine a project like that happening now. It was a massive project. The government saw the need, put out the project for bids. The project was completed ahead of time and under budget. It was a spectacular success.
During the tour, we walked through some of the offices -- clean, gleaming corrdiors.
Now there were fewer regulations way back when the project was initiated. But even ignoring slowdowns due to environmental concerns (for example), we all know what would happen now. Democrats would be for it. Republicans would try to block it (except for those whose districts would benefit directly.) If the project were approved, it would be very late and way over budget. Hell, this government can't even approve badly needed and overdue infrastructure maintenance, (even though that would provide many of the jobs they are always going on about).
My opinion, as a 62-year old American, is that this country is in an irreversible decline.