There is another degree of freedom here: project cost. Why on earth does 0.32 miles of residential road cost $1.5M? Having just managed a construction project much larger than this stretch of road myself, I am certain that a lot of the blame here lies with the contracting process as well as outrageous fees (and just sheer inefficiency) from the engineers and contractors. There is no valid reason this should be so expensive. In the rest of the world, I guarantee you they are not paying over a million dollars for something like this and their standards are just as high if not higher.
I’m not sure there is an opportunity to fix this - I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about this now and modeling it out - by building a better construction company: most of the problem is, instead, essentially political.
I was just thinking about this same thing with my city. We have a fabulous little downtown square and the parks department is proposing to shut down a portion of a street by the square to make it pedestrian only. In doing so, it would be redeveloped into a "promenade".
This portion of the street is 60' wide (including sidewalks) and 285' long. That's 17,100 sqft or just shy of 2/5 acre. The cost? $10-13mm! I can't believe that taking out the asphalt, replacing it with concrete, and then adding lighting and plants should cost that much. It's outrageous.
It doesn't cost that much. That's how much they're paying.
In my hometown, the city spent $3M to make a single right-turn lane approximately 20-feet longer.
This is a city that went from a population of 60k down to 15k. And the population is still contracting rapidly. There is no traffic, and there never will be. And worse, there is no income! And there's zero growth potential.
Unsurprisingly, at least last year, it was the city with the highest municipal debt per capita. Combine that with the fact the HH income is very low, and the population is shrinking, and it's a disaster.
I find it ironic this is a deeply republican city that constantly talks about the need to cut spending.
Reading articles and seeing situations like this really makes me question whether public agencies, as a rule, should be allowed to use debt to finance projects.
I'll begin by saying I have no aversion to debt whatsoever as a private individual or for an incorporated business. I own several rental properties, I'm probably more indebted than most.
The thing about debt in general though, is that it makes the bad decisions a lot worse. And I think when you design a political system, you have to think about both the best outcomes possible, as well as the worst. Bad things happen. People make mistakes. Calculation errors occur. I'd gladly take a bargain where I could trade 5% of the upside for 50% of the downside.
What I've realized is that most municipal governments are run by people of fairly average intelligence and drive. There just isn't a lot of incentive to kick the apple cart. They want to go home at 5, they're going to see the owner of the construction company whose project they dump on in the grocery store, etc. This is actually a feature, I don't really want too much innovation in how my government does things, I'd rather go with the tried and true for things like road design and water pipes, than something like the BART where they used a novel track gauge, and we're still paying for it 30 years later.
I just think avoiding municipal debt can curtail some of the worst outcomes. It forces cities to save up for maintenance and really make hard choices about what gets maintained and what doesn't, and it also prevents can-kicking to later generations. You might not get a high-speed rail project, or a major bridge, without debt, but I wonder whether we'll ever get high-speed rail in California at all, after spending billions of dollars already [1] on it without anyone having taken a single trip.
I've heard this idea before and I think there's something to it, but it's interesting because for it to function well you generally need to first build up a big savings account which you can then use to fund expensive things, otherwise you're extremely limited in what you can do.
One variation I've heard would be for cities and states to not be allowed to issue debt, that only the federal government could do that. It would mean the local units of government (which actually run and fund most things) would have to operate on a balanced budget, and would provide a lot of robustness in the system relative to what we have now. If they needed a one-time bailout for some reason (natural disaster etc) the federal government could give funds to the local area, potentially issuing debt if necessary.
Of course that doesn't provide any protection against federal debt binging... so I'm not sure how you'd square that. You don't really want to prohibit the federal government from taking on debt - for example, the largest debt the US ever accumulated was to fight and win WW2. But maybe there are strings you can attach.
One such string that makes a lot of sense to me is the idea that you should never allow debt for operating expenses or maintenance. You would think that would be obvious and you wouldn't actually need a policy to enforce that outcome, but unfortunately it's common practice today to just issue bonds if you can't afford to maintain your municipal services.
I think the psychology of spending actual cash, in a bank account, that could theoretically be spent on anything, is completely different from using debt to fund projects.
A lot of my views come from operating perhaps the lowest level of "government" possible: a large HOA. Our CC&Rs prohibit entering into any contract (including debt) lasting more than a year. It works for us because the entire place is run by volunteers, many of them nonspecialists, who could do a lot of damage getting us into, say, a 10-year contract with Comcast that was too expensive, not negotiated well, etc.
I think we expect our politicians to be superheroes. This might be borderline reasonable for large, well-funded federal agencies like the Federal Reserve, BLS, BEA, etc who can attract large numbers of truly great people, and pay them well. It's not reasonable to expect someone like Tim Geithner or Ben Bernake (a Princeton economics PhD) to run the finances of a small city or HOA. You're going to get part-time volunteers who know how to balance their checkbooks. Expecting these people to be perfectly rational decision-makers without formal accounting training, let alone knowing how to think carefully about how to analyze NPV, cashflows, and long-term liabilities, in the face of all kinds of local small-ball politics (e.g. trying to help their friend win a contract, or a personal vendetta against someone's project) is laughably far from realistic.
You could tie the debt to revenue. I think this happens often, but not often enough. You'll see "bond measures" on the ballet. "Raise sales tax by X, to pay for the bond X for purpose Z." I think this works, though you don't want to run every spending measure by the public. Maybe some of them can be more automatically applied, or within the discretion of the local council. But the key is the tie between future revenues and future expenditure.
> you should never allow debt for operating expenses or maintenance
Except these are perhaps the most important expenses. Maybe this requires something like automatic state-receivership or some other loss of local autonomy. Or the shortfall is picked up the state under some set of rules (something like state-wide municipal operational insurance, where in times of surplus everyone is kicking-in)
I'm not American, so I might get American political culture wrong. Wouldn't this transfer a lot of power from the states to the federal government? Isn't that considered a bad thing?
Great question. It's not that cut and dried. You could probably ask ten Americans what either the balance of power between the federal government is, OR what it should be, and get ten different answers.
The reality is that, today, the federal government gets the lion's share of attention but the bulk of day-to-day stuff (roads, schools, police, utilities eg water) are run by state and local governments. BUT--and this is an important caveat--SOME (not a lot, but some) money for this is provided by the federal government through about 20 different mechanisms including federal block grants for education, federal highway funding, and other mechanisms.
It's actually quite complicated, but to a first approximation, most local things are operated locally, financed mostly locally, but the federal government does kick in (fund) a little on certain things, in a way that's fairly haphazard and subject to the whims of politics, than any sort of tradition-driven or constitutional way.
Incidentally, this is part of why the US's COVID response has been literally "all over the map". It's mostly in the hands of the states and you're seeing how 50 different political cultures deal with this crisis.
Debt should be allowed but only when the legislature authorizes it with a 2/3s supermajority vote. Having a higher voting threshold for issuing debt than for other decisions will reduce the amount of debt that gets issued, while still providing a mechanism to issue debt in exceptional situations.
I like this. It's flexible enough that it could be used in times of true crisis, but it's also super-simple, a major under-appreciated aspect of policymaking.
One thing you definitely DON'T want is a California-style "we can spend with majority but raising taxes requires a 2/3 supermajority". That has produced some truly horrific outcomes in government and needs to be repealed. https://www.westerncity.com/article/californias-two-thirds-l...
The government needs to be in debt to a certain degree. Debt is a zero sum game: If someone is saving, then someone else needs to make debt. Private house holds are always saving, they can not make debt. That leaves private companies, the government and foreign countries. Often private companies are also reluctant to make debt if times are not good, so the government has to invest to keep the economy from grinding to a halt. Some countries like Germany manage to save in all sectors, but this only works because they export their debt to other countries like Greece, which is unsustainable and ultimately caused the euro crisis.
What I've realized is that most municipal governments are run by people of fairly average intelligence and drive.
In the UK local government is heavily restricted in what they can do. My parish council gets to mow the grass and paint the village hall. As far as I can see that's about the limit of their abilities.
The downside is some larger municipalities like Manchester or Birmingham have traditionally been ignored by London based politicians and civil servants.
Something is seriously wrong if a single right turn lane took 3 million dollars. I'm in disbelief at that figure. Here is Cuyahoga county in Ohio building out perimeter roads for an amazon facility, with a laundry list of work including road widening, for just under $1.4M even with a local contractor used.
Expect a wave of municipal bankruptcies over the next several years. We kicked the can down the road during the last financial crisis, but holding interest rates artificially low can only postpone the day of reckoning for so long.
How much room for improvement did you net out at? I wonder if there's a point where it'd be significant enough to make inroads...
The recent rebuild of a section of the Bay Bridge took 11 years and went 2,500% over budget. Whereas the original entire bridge was built in 5 years, ahead of schedule and under budget.
And something I just came across: SF allegedly had 6 Salesforce subscriptions at $1M/YR, and not even using them[1].
Given stuff like that, I worry you're right, it may hardly matter how much better a construction company is.
Part of the costs is our low tolerance for detouring car traffic. Recently, LA metro made waves by shaving 7 months off of their purple line extension schedule, since the lightened pandemic traffic allowed them to dig an open cut along wilshire and install decking over the future station. Beverly Hills fought that closure from happening since the build began, but the pandemic forced their hand and removed any ground for their argument to stand on.
We could save so much money if we didn't focus so much effort on minimizing construction impact to existing traffic. We would rather take a longer, slower, more painful bleed of the public purse, than cheaply ripping the bandaid off and dealing with a 15 minute longer commute for a few months.
Well that is just offloading costs onto the public as tax is it not? At a $15/hr min wage, adding 15 minutes to a round trip commute for 20'000 people/day M-F costs after 7 months $10.5 million dollars too.
That's not a good comparison. You can actually spend the money saved by finishing construction faster. Nobody gets a check for all the supposed "saved time" when you do that math. You can't pool that money together and build a nice neighborhood park -- because there is no money.
What happens in real life is that people largely don't just stick to their same behavior and suffer like lemmings. They time shift a little bit. They find a different route. It's not magic, it's just a complex system adapting to a change in conditions.
"Dollar value of time saved" calculations are a common distraction peddled by lazy engineers who can't actually make the numbers for their project make sense and instead need to dupe the public into supporting a project they want to do.
I am not fond of this cost-based argument - you hear this one (longer commute times priced at hourly wage) and similar ones.
But no company pays me for my commute time. If I take an extra hour commute I don't get that 15 bucks. And that commute time does not go onto GDP either. It's hard to argue the economy lost the time I was doing nothing productive.
And if we really want to take it to the extreme, if it costs the country 15 bucks each hour people are not paid to work, but could have been doing something useful, Avengers Endgame must have cost the country more than it made in ticket sales. Thanos' final revenge:-)
> But no company pays me for my commute time. If I take an extra hour commute I don't get that 15 bucks. And that commute time does not go onto GDP either. It's hard to argue the economy lost the time I was doing nothing productive.
I suppose that's true if you believe that things without a price are worth nothing.
Truly, it's a mystery why people spend time with their families and friends instead of working another job. Such a waste of time.
>But no company pays me for my commute time. If I take an extra hour commute I don't get that 15 bucks.
Pretty much anyone paid to show up in a windowless van and do some task is paid (or their boss is paid) by billable hour. Anything that decreased the ratio of billable hours to hours worked is going to mean they need to charge you more. Obviously it might amortize out to only be pennies on the dollar but when you start adding a pennies on the dollar sized inefficiency to the economy of an entire region it's gonna hurt.
Imagine if you made the day 5min shorter for 50% of the population. That's what crappy transportation infrastructure does (be it car, rail or otherwise).
>And if we really want to take it to the extreme, if it costs the country 15 bucks each hour people are not paid to work, but could have been doing something useful, Avengers Endgame must have cost the country more than it made in ticket sales. Thanos' final revenge:-)
Is there a word for when you actually agree with a reductio ad absurdem? Because man, what a waste of time movies like that are.
> If I take an extra hour commute I don't get that 15 bucks. And that commute time does not go onto GDP either. It's hard to argue the economy lost the time I was doing nothing productive.
Presumably on average you work an hour's less overtime/day while the diversion is in place, or maybe you quit your job and take a less productive one that's in decent commuting range, or so on.
> And if we really want to take it to the extreme, if it costs the country 15 bucks each hour people are not paid to work, but could have been doing something useful, Avengers Endgame must have cost the country more than it made in ticket sales. Thanos' final revenge:-)
I mean it's certainly worth thinking about how much time you're putting into things like movies and whether that's worth it to you. If something that takes 1 hour and costs $45 is more fun than something that takes 3 hours and costs $15, you might well be better off doing the former.
It's not just a car detour issue. When a city shuts down a street for months to do construction that is likely to destroy any adjacent restaurants and retail businesses. When customers can't easily drive to business and park nearby then they stop coming. Naturally business owners strongly object to this and advocate for slower, less disruptive construction techniques.
This is a valid complaint, but the problem is that slower and less disruptive techniques are still disruptive and still often kill businesses. In many cases it would be much faster and more cost effective to give transfer payments to the businesses for their expected revenues during the closure and then just have them close temporarily to get the project done a lot easier and faster.
No one going to any store in LA is able to park in front of it. Even if there were a street parking spot at that artery, it will probably be occupied by someone not going to that restaurant or store. Plus the sidewalks don't close when the city does this sort of work, and there are ample parking garages in every neighborhood with a commercial corridor that remain open. I saw a figure that said LA had 3x as many parking spaces as cars.
Offer a 10% tax free finders fee to anyone who finds any wasteful spending like that. $600k once for a $6 million annual savings (and that's before you fire whomever is in charge of auditing the books already) is a steal. Accountants and auditors could work like bug bounty hunters.
This is a great idea, but waste is in the eye of the beholder. A $6M environmental impact study might be considered waste by me, considered politically nice by the politician who agreed to it, considered legally necessary by the government's lawyer, and considered vital by the contractor paid to perform the study. Who's right?
If similar environmental impact studies cost half as much or if the study was not read by those who ordered it that is a pretty clear case. Some things are ambiguous I admit but I'm willing to bet there is enough low hanging fruit to keep a good number of people employed looking for it.
Edit: This is a HN faux pas however, please don't downvote the person above, they added to the discussion. I suspect that may be a common objection and I'm glad to be able to clarify it.
If similar environmental impact studies cost half as much...
Who defines "similar"?
Is a study performed in Texas similar to one performed in California? Is a study performed on land that drains into the municipal water supply similar to one performed on land that doesn't? Are two studies performed near each other location 10 years apart "similar" if new laws have come into existence, or a local species has been declared endangered in the meantime?
No matter how obvious the matter might seem, people will still disagree. And the people spending money can always come up with justifications.
...or if the study was not read by those who ordered it that is a pretty clear case.
How do you prove that those who ordered it did not read the study? And what if they did not read the study, but instead read a summary of it prepared by someone qualified who did read the study?
> Is a study performed in Texas similar to one performed in California? Is a study performed on land that drains into the municipal water supply similar to one performed on land that doesn't? Are two studies performed near each other location 10 years apart "similar" if new laws have come into existence, or a local species has been declared endangered in the meantime?
I don't have the answer to these questions but I wager that we can find experts who do. Presumably firms exist that do hundreds or thousands of studies annually, those firms could testify how they would bid such a project. What the cost structure typically looks like.
> How do you prove that those who ordered it did not read the study?
A government employee could send a email to the effect that the report was not considered that is later discovered. Alternatively, a whistle-blower may clandestinely gather evidence in order to collect the bounty for themselves.
> And what if they did not read the study, but instead read a summary of it prepared by someone qualified who did read the study?
That seems like a reasonable use of funds.
This isn't going to catch every case, the purpose is to provide a natural check to government corruption and waste. Discoveries made by this system may lead to the judicial branch investigating those who made these choices. The FBI could use these tips to target sting operations. The voting public may use this information to decide whom they are going to elect, and the best part is it's free.
If you think these projects are overpriced now, you can’t imagine how expensive they’ll be when every private citizen has been armed with legislation that lets them take the city to court in an attempt to win these cases. Every project will need a team of lawyers and auditors to check that absolutely everything in the project is beyond reproach. It’s just insane how much things would blow up.
In fact https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/2019-07... argues that most of the increase in construction costs since the 1960s can be attributed to an increasing role for "citizen voices". I have to believe that increasing the power of citizens to impact the process will only make it worse.
You want to involve a court of law in order to bring costs down? You've just massively increased the project budget and timeline without solving anything.
That's an interesting point but it's arguably not the same because you should be able to enforce a strict separation between parties such that it isn't possible for the people who collect bounties to create the waste/corruption that they are being paid the bounty to identify.
In theory, of course. But when there's money involved, it has a funny way of flowing towards "value creation". In theory, you should be able to keep politicians from benefiting from a quid pro quo with lobbyists. In practice, politicians seem to frequently attain cushy jobs in private industry after their terms end (and sometimes before another begins).
Humans are unfailingly creative. I don't know how they'd game the system you set up, but I assure you they will!
Even if safety has that magnitude of penalty, it doesn't explain years of delays and 2500% over budget. It would've been factored into the original timeline and budget.
And surely after 80 years of improvements in technology, materials, process, etc we have the ability to build in less time AND have no deaths?
And surely after 80 years of improvements in technology, materials, process, etc we have the ability to build in less time AND have no deaths?
I don’t think this follows. MRI machines save lives. MRI machines did not exist a century ago. MRI machines have made healthcare more expensive, not less.
I think the same could apply to buildings with new materials and construction methods.
Not all healthcare requires MRI machines, no? Presumably most (not all, I will agree) of the marginal expense is shouldered by situations which make use of the MRI, versus those that could carry on without it (plus another small concession for those situations that use the MRI that would’ve resulted in similar outcomes pre-MRI invention).
I agree with your point generally though. It reminds me of the “websites got slower faster than computers got faster, thanks to computers” argument.
I do electronics repair on an offshore oil rig, so not quite the same as construction.
When I'm working, using a harness usually doubles to quadruples the time it takes. There is extra paperwork, you need to verify that what you are tying-off to can support the dynamic shock load of a person falling, they tell us 5000 lbfs. We have to put together a plan for if we do fall how the person going to rescue us is going to retrieve us. Also, we can't work alone because if you fall someone needs to be able to notify the rescue team.
A 30 second job for one person on the ground may take 2 people an hour when the job is at heights.
If you aren't working from scaffolding, you may be working from an unstable work position. There is also intolerance for dropping anything, even if the area under the work area is barricaded off, so each move and fastener removed requires much more concentration. We use special no-drop-tools that are all on lanyards that no matter what sort of organizational strategy frequently end up in a knot.
It really comes down to everything is a trade-off of some sort. The companies hiring us look at our safety records as part of the vetting process, no one wants their name in the news for bad reasons or dealing with the liability that comes with a worker being injured. Also, nothing slows down a job like an accident investigation.
Some of it is depending on how high up you are something can bounce pretty far, possibly outside the barricaded area. The term used is ALARP- As Low As Reasonably Practicable. The trade off is, when someone's working really high up you can make everyone else stay inside but this wouldn't really be productive so you barricade off directly under where the work is going to take place and where you could anticipate something bouncing too, then do everything to still prevent dropping something. I mentioned with the tools, everything needs to be secured, so for example if I'm removing a CCTV camera, I need to attach some form of attachment to the camera before un-bolting it. Of course it's still not possible to secure the nuts or bolts holding the equipment in place so move slowly, pay close attention to every move made. If something does get dropped, there is more paperwork to do and everyone in the company is notified. They calculate what the potential harm to someone is [1].
I'd bet a dropped tool on an offshore rig could end up causing an expensive breakdown or even explosion. Similar to why aircraft grade stuff needs tool checking and checkouts and all bolts use safety wire, where for a car there is less need as the failure modes are less catastrophic.
It takes more than hard hats and harnesses to ensure safety. Of the 11 fatalities that occurred in the Golden Gate Bridge construction (which took place at the same time as the Bay Bridge), 10 of them occurred simultaneously when a platform collapsed.
In large-scale construction, safety needs to be built into every aspect of planning and execution of the project. That can add large costs.
We haven't won that battle yet. A worker passed away recently at the sofi stadium construction site, due to a miscommunication on maintaining a panel. I don't think preventing this unfortunate death, which would have just required one person mentioning to another that they are working in a particular area, would have added high costs to the build. I'm curious to know the actual costs of worker safety. It's always painted as the boogyman of the high budget project, but how expensive can PPE, building hasty wooden railings, and importantly communicating danger to employees which was the failure in this case really be? I must be missing some key costs here, and would love to be more informed.
Any solution to safety problems that relies on people just never making a mistake ever isn't realistically a solution at all. What you need is some process to ensure that when work like this is carried out, the area is appropriately marked as unsafe, and processes add cost. In this case, safety would probably have dictated not carrying out the work on top of the roof whilst the work underneath was in progress due to the risk of them misjudging where the weak area started and falling through, potentially blowing up the schedule or even meaning workers were paid to stand around doing nothing, which adds more cost.
It isn't just worker safety that has improved in the last century, it's the safety of people in the building throughout its life. Building codes have expanded in scope and complexity over the years. Part of their scope includes installation method restricts and worker training and qualifications.
The other aspect of it is general workplace safety regulations which have expanded over the years as well. When budgeting a project, you need to consider both, however. And workers also benefit from both. For example, the restriction on the use of asbestos in building insulation was brought in to reduce the health hazards of living or working in such a building but the construction workers handling the asbestos are clearly the most at-risk group which benefits from the regulation.
>The recent rebuild of a section of the Bay Bridge took 11 years and went 2,500% over budget. Whereas the original entire bridge was built in 5 years, ahead of schedule and under budget.
To use an analogy from heart surgery:
Fixing a car is easy.
Fixing a running car is hard.
There comes a point at which starting from scratch is better than trying to fix the original mess. Which in our business means the company goes out of business and is replaced by something new.
If an earthquake knocked it down somehow people managed to move on until it was rebuilt. The same for the I-85 collapse in Atlanta. Amazingly, traffic was slightly worse but it’s always disastrous so it wasn’t that much worse. Freeway projects should probably shut down the road more often and just get done.
It's also a design problem. There are perfectly adequate designs that cost a lot less and function just as well, but if something isn't part of the official standard it generally can't be used. The official standards are set with a lot of industry involvement, and unsurprisingly they're not focused on being cheap.
This is partly why the only legally mandated building codes ought to be ones without which people and property outside the private lot in question are put at negligent levels of risk. Any risk inside the lot is yours alone.
Even if there were no legally mandated building codes banks and insurance companies would probably require most of what we have on the books now in order to get anything done.
Why don't cities/counties in-source repetitive maintenance and construction tasks? I'd expect that a county has sufficient need to build roads that a small construction crew + equipment could be kept on staff for road work.
Because there are now structural incentives put in place by lobbyists to prevent public engineering. Everything has to be contracted and red taped so the bribers of politicians can inject themselves into the taxpayer money pipeline.
Its in the same hilarious inefficiency ballpark as medical. Both are built on the foundations of what should be a public service being parasitized from all sides by regulatory capture.
That doesn't always work out cheaper. The sanitation department here needed to replace 80 meters worth of pipes and first went to the in-house construction crew and was quoted a cost of 250,000 SEK (~$25K USD), then shopped it around town and a contractor could do it for 80,000 SEK (~$8K USD).
It usually takes longer too. They replaced a pipe in the street in front of my parents house and it took them one month to complete the job, whereas contractors typically take less than a week start to finish for that length of road.
Those prices are almost an order of magnitude less than what we'd see in the US ( often due to upgrades etc. that accompany such projects ).
Right now there isn't much incentive for multiple contractors to setup and be efficient in a given town - heavy equipment is expensive to move, so the TAM of any given construction crew is likely limited to a 1 county radius. Based on the math in this thread it's unlikely that many towns need more than 1-2 crews, and the incentive is minimal for that crew to negotiate a fair price.
In the example where there is a public crew for most work the contractor always needs to underbid the public crew, and the city/town has influence on the costs of the public crew as there are no middle men and capex can be amortized over long periods. Most public projects in the US lack this "price ceiling".
Let's say a county is a 15 mile by 15 mile square with a square grid of streets spaced on average 1000 feet apart. That would be 2370 miles of road in the county. Assuming a lifetime for that road of 35 years, they need to replace 68 miles of road per year which works out to about 1000 feet per day.
At $1.5/.32 miles, they would be spending $881K per day on road replacement. If a county run crew could cut 10% of this cost out, and 50% of that was used for labor, they could employ 198 people at 80k per year on average. A paver capable of paving 1000 feet of 24 foot wide road per day costs approximately 60k. Assuming 10% of cost savings went towards capital equipment, they could purchase 52 such pavers per year. For a more reasonable but still quite liberal budget of $1 million per year of capital equipment financing and maintenance payments and salaries of $200k for 40 employees, that 10% cost savings would allow the county to pocket $22 Million per year.
Even if the streets were spaced on average 1 mile apart, that would still be 100 feet per day, and the 10% cost reduction would be $3 million per year.
This does not include new construction or regular maintenance of roads, nonetheless other construction projects.
Only very small or sparsely populated counties should have any trouble justifying the expense of an in-house construction crew.
As a frame of reference we were quoted $160,000 USD to resurface two miles worth of residential streets, including ground work like changing drainage pipes and upgrading drains etc.
This is in Sweden so YMMV, but we were quoted $80K per mile and these people got told $1.5 million for just over a quarter mile?
An obvious and common problem is just corruption. In many instances, the construction company will have personal ties with lawmakers, but let's pretend that corruption is a non-issue.
Another large issue is government bureaucracy. The process for proposing projects, winning bids, and being able to start work is a very long process which incurs increased staffing costs due to the time it takes to navigate red tape. This is one reason that government projects cost so much.
I have a family member that works for a heavy civil construction company and it sounds like it's a combination of politics and... wait for it, corruption
It's probably a combinations of many factors. Here are some theories, and they could play together:
- the population has grown a lot. The demand is way higher, but the offer is propotionally smaller.
- competition is disapearing. Big companies are buying or killing the small builders more and more. They set the prices. They have overhead. They can lobby or corrupt.
- we have more requirements than before. Safety. Going green. Labor laws. This is not free. We are only paying them now because the infra from decades ago was still holding.
- complexity has increased. There are more electricity cables, more water and evacuation pipes, internet cables, gaz pipes, etc.
- price of material has increased. The demand is global now. 3 billions of Asians need roads too.
- administrative burden is higher. This has unexpected costs. Not to mentions insurances and the risk of being sued.
- people are not ready to work as much, and for as little money as before. In my grandma's time, there were plenty of people living very simply, in homes with the bare minimum, working 60 hours a week for a ridiculously small pay. They don't show you that in the movies about "the good old times".
- we have less skilled people than before in those industries compared to the technical level it needs now. Because of our failing education system, the disapearence of parallel ways of learning (you could become good at a trade without going to college 80 years ago) and the lack of respect we show to manual workers, the ones remaining to do the job are often not that good. But the requirements are higher than before.
- we are used to automation. We have machines doing everything for us. Mechanized processes are expensive if not on a mass scale. There are many things that could be made cheaper, but it would require more skill (and painful work conditions) to do them without those tools. Also, while we are getting better at doing hight tech stuff, we are losing knowledge for the mondain tasks.
- it compounds. Industries don't exist in a vaccum. They depend of each other. If machine maintenance, food making and traning people also suffer from the all those same problems, it will affect the building industries situation and hence, prices.
> There is another degree of freedom here: project cost. Why on earth does 0.32 miles of residential road cost $1.5M? Having just managed a construction project much larger than this stretch of road myself, I am certain that a lot of the blame here lies with the contracting process as well as outrageous fees (and just sheer inefficiency) from the engineers and contractors. There is no valid reason this should be so expensive. In the rest of the world, I guarantee you they are not paying over a million dollars for something like this and their standards are just as high if not higher.
Numbers can vary quite a bit but 1m of road costs about 10000 euro [1] in Germany. So this seems cheap in comparison. Mind you the quality is also quite a bit better. I never understand the complaints about investment in infrastructure and having to pay for it in taxes. I'm generally glad to pay taxes and get a functioning society. But then again the country I live in also does not spend as much on military as the next 6 or 7 next countries combined. Funnily enough the same people who complain about taxes for the road in front of their house hardly ever complain about that.
Too little information. If 1m is length, what is the width? where is the road located?
If it's a two-way superwide highway in the middle of a big city, sandwiched between a similarly sized winding overpass, and an underpass, and the cost includes the overhead on the city's economy for shutting down that part of the highway for the given duration, we might be having a conversation.
It fits right in the middle for Autobahn, so in this case I assume 2 lanes each way (with a third at the right for emergency stops), controlled access, no major earthworks, and either steel or steel-reinforced concrete center and side barriers. Also including some trees or brush either side to shield noise and, presumably, also side winds.
Depending on curves, it would be rated between 120 km/h and ~200 km/h (though anything above 130 km/h seem to be declared as "no limit", deferring to the motorist's judgement).
> I never understand the complaints about investment in infrastructure and having to pay for it in taxes. I'm generally glad to pay taxes and get a functioning society.
In the case of the article, the road is not affordable. The writer isn't advocating for not paying taxes. The writer is advocating for not taking on projects you can never net on. That doesn't sound unreasonable.
> I never understand the complaints about investment in infrastructure and having to pay for it in taxes.
In the US, this is largely due to the perception (right or wrong) of budget bloat and cronyism on taxpayer-funded projects. Those projects have a reputation for cost overruns and generally being more expensive than comparable private projects.
The best part is when a city tries to renegotiate the cost of a project, and ends up spending 90% for 1/2 of the original design. Then the overruns hit, and somehow they still pay out more. Then it will turn out that there is some sort of critical design flaw, that they need fix, add solar panels to "save money", and so it goes on.
The whole thing is a racket in many places.
> I am certain that a lot of the blame here lies with the contracting process as well as outrageous fees (and just sheer inefficiency) from the engineers and contractors.
I think a significant cause of this kind of thing is the use of cost-plus EPCM contractors. Sure it's easy to throw a requirements spec and some money at them and have them take care of everything, but ultimately they earn their crust by spending your money. Suddenly, mysteriously, more meetings are essential, more paperwork is required, and more overhead created in every dimension.
I read their comment more as saying that building a better construction company wouldn't fix the issue (e.g. they might not get hired), not that it wasn't possible to build a better company.
Elected officials unfortunately don't have that much incentive to hire the "cheapest" company as the debt will be incurred over the next 100 years while they will be long gone.
They probably hire the company that they feel will give them the least amount of trouble, which is the easiest to navigate or that will do something for them in exchange. It's the "not my money" issue at play.
I think it's quite the opposite. There is heavy incentive to pick the lowest bidder without any consideration paid to how absurd the bid is, which is where you get these crazy cost overruns. The bid was never doable to begin with.
They win when the project is needed. Most of these projects aren't needed. Another HNer pointed out to me that when the East Bay interchange had a collapse due to a tank truck fire, the replacement came in under budget and ahead of time - bidding lower than everyone else and making it back on speed-of-delivery incentives.
The reality of most construction projects? You don't need them. You're not going to get better with them and you're not going to get worse without them.
I don't think you understand how corruption works, so let me share a worked example with you.
A stretch of road is past its shelf life and scheduled to be repaved. The city does some analysis, and estimates the cost for that mile of road to be 1M^1. Then they put out a Request for Bids for contractors to do the work, lowest bidder wins. Corrupting the auction is how things fail.
The simplest corruption is to leak sealed bids so that you know how much to bid. Remember, this isn't a vickery auction, bidders are paid what they bid and no more. If you want to maximize your profits, all else being equal you want to bid one dollar less than the 2nd best bid. If you were going to bid 800k, someone who informs you the second highest bid is 900k is worth 100k. Sending them a bribe for that tip will still leave you ahead, and the city behind. And if you repeat this, eventually that 2nd bidder is discouraged enough to leave the market, or at least stop participating in Corrupt City IFBs. Which raises the cost per mile even higher.
The other method is to disqualify competitors and proposals. Contracts often give a measure of leeway to officials disqualify bids. Or, to advise a bidder to change their proposal before they get disqualified. Or you can just write the work to be done in such a way that only one bidder could feasibly win.
^1 I really don't know the costs here, just examples.
For the necessary projects, no one fucks them, because the costs of failure are too high. They are very rare, though, but when comes around it moves like a grass fire on a windy day[0]. That road "past its shelf life"? It's not. Your standards are just too high for your wallet.
Without a sane monetary system which has a limited supply of money, the ponzi scheme will never pop.
It will keep on quietly diluting the wealth of workers to pay for projects which benefit the owners of existing capital.
The financial system is founded on financial insanity. The idea that one should keep taking out new credit cards to pay off your the ones - Except that this is happening on a global scale.
I've seen Youtube videos of collapsing buildings in China that were built not terribly long ago (someone on HN posted a link in a related discussion a while ago, but man, I would have to dig). So I would need some additional data to conclude that China is doing it better than anyone else.
In response to claims of progress and efficiency, constantly claiming it is done via smoke and mirrors, with what appear to be extreme examples, seems like a good way to be left behind, because it implies there's nothing to learn from others, which is always false.
Uncritically accepting propaganda of an authoritarian regime about the superiority of it's system seems to be a good way to get oneself crushed under the boot heel of authoritarians, either of the same regime or another taking advantage of the attraction driven to that system.
That isn't what I said and completely goes off the rails with and twists what is under discussion.
No one said to uncritically accept anything. In fact, the hidden assumption is usually to uncritically accept that anything the U.S. does is the best.
I simply implied that to attempt to stay ahead, one needs to not blatantly dismiss and discredit what others do, but this is unfortunately very common place in the U.S., whether it regards China or any other country.
I have visited China. Whether there's propaganda or not, it doesn't explain away the amount of nice roads, trains, subways, etc. and the efficiencies of these systems. Coming back to the U.S. felt like stepping back decades when it comes to transportation aside from a few things. China does not magically transport people via smoke and mirrors. They are actually doing it.
In my city, it's taken decades to build mere single digit miles worth of above ground train track, and it's still not done. Propaganda on either side does not magically explain away the disparity.
I've been to China repeatedly over the last 15 years and you can see the pace of change with your own eyes. Large cities built so fast that you can literally walk through neighbourhoods and not recognise where you are after two to three years, that's not propaganda.
The real danger today doesn't lie in authoritarianism but in a lack of state capacity. Decades of fearmongering have led the US and significants chunks of Europe to a point where governments can't provide cotton swabs during a pandemic and can't build housing in their cities.
> The real danger today doesn't lie in authoritarianism but in a lack of state capacity.
Yes, it does lie in authoritarianism, and that (“lack of state capacity”) is literally always the defense of authoritarianism, especially from those who like to pretend to be merely reluctant supporters rather than ideological devotees.
> . Decades of fearmongering have led the US and significants chunks of Europe to a point where governments can't provide cotton swabs during a pandemic
I'm not going to talk about Europe, but there is absolutely not a “state capacity” problem produced by “decades of fearmongering” I the US of that kind. Both the material capacity and the administrative capacity for the federal executive to direct that material capacity with no effective veto points exists. The present federal executive deliberately choose to apply that power in the worst possible way, withholding it from practical and useful supplies, preventing subordinate authorities from acquiring supplies they had located despite the lack of federal cooperation, and applying federal production mandates to prevent major disease spreading centers (meat packing plants with major outbreaks) from being closed to constrain the spread of the disease.
>Yes, it does lie in authoritarianism, and that is literally always the defense of authoritarianism.
One can turn this around trivially. Vague allusions to tyranny are always made to justify present-day dysfunction, without any clear expanation of how concrete steps actually lead to said tyranny. It usually just resembles a sort of vague, primal fear of authority.
And on the second point, the US doesn't just have implementation problems. It also altogether lacks power. One reason why construction is so expensive is simply the extreme difficulty to overrule local interests when it comes to acquiring land, and related the threat of litigation.
That's a structural issue, not just a sort of temporary failure. The reason Europe can build rail at one fourth the cost per mile is (among other reasons), that local homeowners don't rule supreme. Just look at California to see what a mess it is.
China has vertically integrated the entire construction process, making the machines that, extracting the materials, transporting them, and building the infrastructure all using slave wage labor. Americans would never accept that quality of life.
It's about a bias towards building things and taking action.
Construction in the US bordering on a "Vetocracy". Everyone and their NIMBY uncle can oppose anything being done. So what little gets done happens after many years and at great cost.
The source of this kind of "superiority" is a nearly unlimited workforce with low wages and low living standards. Maybe there is additional planing efficiency established through other large scale projects, but I believe it to be a smaller factor.
From an economic perspective it might look more efficient, yes.
The decision to build something is a straightforward yes/no one that does not get dragged through various permitting instances for years and decades only to probably be denied eventually.
China isn't even a poor country anymore. It's middle income, and is losing jobs to poorer countries these days.
>There is another degree of freedom here: project cost. Why on earth does 0.32 miles of residential road cost $1.5M?
Well, the mayor's family member/Buddy who owns the roadworks business who needs their cut, then his family member/Buddy who owns the flagging company needs their cut and Buddy who owns the asphalt production company and so on. Then, work needs to be done as cheaply as possible, with as many corners cut as possible to ensure maximum profit possible for everyone getting their cut. Then the developers will swim around on their mountain of cocaine and money until it runs out and so the cycle goes.
This is how every developer i've ever subcontracted for has operated.
Not sure why this reply is being downvoted. Could have been phrased differently but it seems like street construction projects are low risk opportunities for corruption on a recurrent basis.
Regulation. Environmental impact surveys, union fees, product compliance, safety regulations and temporary signage all cost money. They increase man hours and require increased materials. You could get rid of all of this but you wouldn’t like the result.
Expenditures for McKinney TX [0] show streets as the third lowest cost department, accounting for under 5% of the city budget. The largest expense, like most other cities, is the police department, at nearly 25%.
While smart spending is important, it's hard to see street paving as something which threatens to bankrupt this municipality.
If there's one thing this "defund the police" movement has shown me, it's how much money is spent on police departments. I would have never guessed that the police department in McKinney would be upwards of 25% of the city budget.
I have read that in a lot of municipalities in a few decades police and firefighters will use up 100% (and more) of the budget once they have to pay out pensions. A lot of them go into retirement at around 50 and will probably live for another 30-40 years more.
> If there's one thing this "defund the police" movement has shown me, it's how much money is spent on police departments.
You have been misled. The US does not spend a crazy or obscene amount of money on the police.
Government spending is a combination of local + county + state + federal. Local governments are not the primary source of funding for health or education. That’s not a bad thing. The fact that city budgets are dominated by police (and fire) has everything to do with tiers of government responsibility and nothing to do with “how much money is spent on police”.
This is an idea about society I've been musing a while. As a society hits prosperity it invests in infrastructure with a limited lifespan (even if decades) and therefore there is a certain depreciation rate of infra happening each year. Eventually the infrastructure will rise such that the depreciation rate will have equilibrium with income. At that point the society cannot take on any new projects without deciding it will abandon something else.
A similar thing often happens in software -- Product Managers are given scope to build projects of a certain size, but rarely does the business commit to keeping a certain percentage of engineers on to maintain the project forever. So the project decays and the customers eventually walk away. But the Product person has already moved on to other things so they're no longer accountable for the long term picture....
Just some musings, not really sure how widespread/factual it is or solutions...
This is really cool, what you have just described is actually a pretty important concept in macroeconomics and is described in the Solow-Swan model [1].
As you say, infrastructure (and all physical capital) depreciates, so some amount of savings must be allocated towards replenishing it. Any leftover savings can be invested into more physical capital (be it tractors, roads, computers), which creates economic growth. However, if you assume that there are diminishing returns to physical capital, then eventually the capital required to replenish depreciation will be equal to the entire income saved (total income less consumption) by an economy. At this point, known as the "steady-state", economic growth falls to 0.
If you are interested in knowing more about the Solow-Swan model I'd recommend these introductory youtube videos [2]. The first three in the playlist in particular outline the basics pretty well.
It must be noted that the Solow-Swan model is quite a simple model and it doesn't completely explain how economies work. For example, the role of human capital (education) and technological advances aren't fully captured. However, it is useful for understanding some of the factors that drive economic growth, particularly in the cases of post-war Germany and Japan or modern day China.
Sure that happens to some products but it's not inevitable. The current Microsoft Word code base has been actively maintained and enhanced for over 25 years. Customers aren't walking away yet.
It would be interesting to see usage figures. Twenty five years ago creating a new Word document would be an almost daily occurrence for me. Now it is a rarity.
I have a sense that one day it will just disappear and nobody will notice.
A lot of roads are pure waste and should probably be reverted into simpler gravel roads, or left unmaintained. Take a look at this one in Columbus (1). You have full storm drains, nearly a mile of sidewalk, and generous street lighting, for a road that connects between the highway and the city inpound lot which closes before dark. I'm willing to bet not a single person has laid foot on that sidewalk ever, given that the neighborhood around this road is simply the impound lot and a concrete factory, connected to the outside world by a single highway connection; you couldn't walk there if you tried without hopping a fence and tresspassing somewhere.
Different agency, but meanwhile King County is spending money to pave a "rails-to-trails" path near Redmond (along Willows Rd. for you locals) that I run on regularly. Until the virus thing, I have never seen another human being use the quite usable gravel trail that's there now. Probably because it's out-of-the-way, no place to park, and it parallels a major paved trail that is less than a mile away. But I'm sure someone's brother-in-law needs a paving contract.
I live here, and while yeah I would sorta kinda have preferred the sidewalks from the start, I have no interest in ripping up peoples' front yards to retrofit them in.
What Seattle is doing now (making a lot of streets limited-access) is way better for pedestrians than a slow, expensive, abortive sidewalk-building-and-street-reconstructing campaign.
Anyone have a clue how there are so many white F150s? All looking identical yet there must be over a hundred. Is there a local cartel buying a new truck every time they get busted?
Even the "improved" sidewalks are barely useful there. Based on my experience (in a very different neighborhood where walking is the default way to get around) I'd be shocked if someone in a wheelchair chose the sidewalk over the street. Even by me (6 ft+ sidewalks, separated from the street, without driveways, with drivers used to looking for pedestrians at crossings, and much busier roads) you almost always see wheelchairs in the street.
Uneven at every driveway and too narrow to get around any obstacles (such as a trash can) make sidewalks like that a horrible experience when you're on wheels. Add in the narrow, quiet streets with slow traffic and the street is very appealing.
Technical ADA compliance doesn't make a good/useful experience.
That just seems like poor design, although admittedly in this case it could be that the lots essentially go to the road. Ideally you would have a grass strip between the road and the path that people can put bins on, park on and so that the driveway won’t make the path uneven.
I would like a post that is clearer on this. Can you get ADA compliance without the full cost of the project? Would that be reasonable?
However, regardless, if you cannot pay for ADA compliant sidewalks with existing tax revenue, then paying for them piecemeal using unsustainable bonds seems like it's only pushing the problem out.
I'm also wondering about this. Maybe some "outside-the-box" ideas could achieve it. Just spitballing here:
If the street were made to be one-way instead of two-way, could it be narrower, leaving room for the sidewalk AND the ditches? Also, it isn't clear from his description, but maybe that would eliminate the need for "additional utilities improvements due to [the sidewalk and widening]".
It would inconvenience the residents on that street and motorists who pass through. But presumably that's better than bankruptcy.
Or here's an even crazier idea: Could the underground drainage be avoided if the city annexed a strip of land from the adjacent properties? That would surely piss them off, but if it were implemented city-wide, as part of a "we're all in this together" kind of campaign to revitalize the city without going bankrupt, maybe it would be more palatable. At least it might seem more "fair" if everyone loses a little land, rather than only some streets. And if owners were compensated monetarily, heck, some might even like it.
Could the underground drainage be avoided if the city annexed a strip of land from the adjacent properties?
This one might not even be that crazy. Utility easements on private property that are large and greatly restrict what the owner can do with the land are fairly common. Your idea seems along those same lines.
One way streets encourage faster driving and make things less safe and welcoming for pedestrians. See the baffling Hayward loop as a worst case example. A highlight from the article
“
Jones told the Pioneer that when he was newly hired as city manager, he thought the better alternative would have been to create an underpass at the “Five Corners” where Mission Boulevard, Foothill Boulevard and Jackson Street meet. However this would have almost doubled the project cost and the city was already under pressure to use state funds to construct something, he said, before the funds are taken back and allocated to other cities.”
> Author should be thankful to not need the ADA compliance.
It frustrates me how people use this line to shame anyone who questions the costs of ADA compliance.
There’s a legitimate discussion as to whether it would be socially optimal for that money to be allocated elsewhere. $1.5M could go a long way towards education, community centers, internet infrastructure, or any other public project - and maybe it would go farther than improving wheelchair access on 0.32 miles of sidewalk in a low traffic residential area.
There is wheelchair access. It's called roads. In a low traffic suburb like that there's no reason roads can't be multi use. In fact in all the low traffic suburbs I've lived in that's exactly how they're used. People walk on them, ride on them, kids play on them, I don't see many wheelchairs but tons of the electric scooter things used by both the disabled and elderly.
Cancel the upgrade, send some of the money to wheelchair users so they can buy a nicer wheelchair, a flag for it, hell a new tv, whatever they want; and everyone would be better off.
Indeed. No one capable of locomotion is excluded here. When there's no sidewalk by a neighborhood street it is generally legal for pedestrians to walk in the street. Typically they are required to walk on the edge of the road facing traffic.
agreed. If there isnt a wheel chair bound person for 3 miles, maybe it's not worth having _that_ specific sidewalk upgraded first. Of course, there will come a day, but does it have to be this project specifically?
The takeaway is that ADA compliance only has value when it's consumed and despite a specific rule accessibility is actually a spectrum that can be balanced in a case by case basis.
I was just thinking about that. If I were in a wheel chair there's no way I'd just roll down the middle of the street like OP does. If a car comes down the street, what am I supposed to do? It doesn't matter if only "people who live on that street use it." That just means people in wheelchairs can't really live on the street
Even where there's good sidewalks people in wheelchairs often just "roll down the middle of the street." It's smoother, easier to be seen (.˙. safer) and you're less likely to get blocked by an unexpected obstacle.
It seems reasonable to me that you would want to build high-quality, cost-effective, high-utilization wheelchair-friendly infrastructure in a few areas rather than spend a huge amount of money on low-quality low-traffic infrastructure everywhere.
And if I'm driving on a street like that and encounter a guy in a wheelchair I'd yield to them until they could yield to me. It's so small that we can easily create ADA compliance by cooperating as individuals, no need to blow a bunch of money to add a sidewalk. Hell they could add speed bumps and stuff to really slow traffic down.
The Dutch have a concept called "woonerf". Basically, the car is a guest on that street and pedestrians have priority. You're only allowed to drive 10mph, and street furniture enforces this quite strictly.
So, a wheelchair riding in the middle of the street? A car is just going to either drive slowly behind him, or pull over to let him pass. Pedestrians have absolute priority, provided they aren't intentionally hindering cars.
Is ADA compliance even so expensive? Making sidewalks a certain width and grade isn't hard nor any more expensive than not doing that, I helped my dad pretty much do this when we repoured his driveway apron ourselves.
On the other hand, what I notice more often is a lack of ADA maintenance, after the initial construction might have been compliant. Back in the 80s, LA planted a lot of trees which seemed like a great idea. Today, we are no longer planting that type of tree because it has destroyed sidewalks all over town, making it impossible to travel if you needed ADA specifications to get around. When the city repairs the sidewalk, they don't cut down the newly formed 1' skateboard ramp at all, they just fill in the cracks crudely and quickly with asphalt, which pits in no time. I am stumbling and tripping on the sidewalk all of the time, and I don't even have any conditions affecting my mobility.
Easy solution, give the streets back to the people. The use of the phrase "side walk" is telling. We don't need two roads when people should take precedent.
It doesn't take a lot of work find photographs of roads like that in Australia. This isn't a main road, it's a tiny neighborhood road. It doesn't need a lot of infrastructure and I kind of wish that more roads looked like this because they're usually a lot more pleasant than the big ones.
Sure, I've seen roads like this in tiny regional towns with half a dozen houses and a single pub, but Pine St is in McKinney, TX, roughly the same size as Bendigo or Ballarat, which don't have roads like this in residential areas.
"roughly the same size as Bendigo or Ballarat, which don't have roads like this in residential areas."
Eh, I don't know. Munroe in Ballarat is a residential road but doesn't have sidewalks or street parking either. I mean, the gutter is nicer, but that might be down to a soil/landscape difference. Pine St might have the better drainage because it's been built up so high from the ground.
Climate is a massive factor in the deterioration and accelerated wear of roads. Australia doesn't have harsh, freezing winters with lots of freeze/thaw cycles creating potholes and expanding crack lines in your roads.
It's a lot more expensive to maintain "good" roads in climates that have wide temperature cycles throughout their seasons.
I live in germany where we do have freeze/thaw cycles. Our roads look better both from my experience when I went to the US and looking at pictures from the US. Don't think climate is a good excuse here. Nordic countries also manage a much better infrastructure in roads from what I hear.
A lot of comments saying this is a small town, and small towns in Australia are just as bad, googling shows the US town has a population of 191,000! That's bigger than Townsville.
I live in rural Australia, in a town with a population less than 20% of the town referenced in the post, and I regularly drive the the nearest town which has a population of 0.2% of the US town, and the road in the post look absolutely dilapidated to me.
Even the fixed up road, if I drove through that in my town, I would think "the council need to do something about that"
Your comment reminded me of playing GeoGuessr when it was first released, I remember being absolutely shocked at some of the random locations in the US, the streetview looked about like I would expect a town here with a population of 100 people to look, and the map would show it as being part of an urban sprawl, 50km from a city center.
One thing you'll notice if you look at a lot of suburban sprawl in the US is that most of the roads are wide and have sidewalks, but the houses are ugly and samey for miles. Interspersed among those neighborhoods will be roads with smaller--or at least older--houses, and smaller streets. The reason being that those smaller streets are from the neighborhoods that existed before the area was built up and the locals resisted development in their neighborhoods.
McKinney is a town that has apparently undergone rapid expansion in the past 20-30 years and I'm willing to bet that Pine St was initially build well before McKinney reached its current population. If you believe that every single residential road needs to have a certain width and have sidewalks as a matter of course, I don't know that I can dissuade you, but I'm willing to bet that the residents on that road are not eager to give up a portion of their yards for a wider road and sidewalk and they almost certainly would rather that road not receive more traffic as a result of 'improvement'.
This is a small town on the outskirts of Dallas. A few blocks from this neighborhood it becomes completely rural. Back when the streets were put in it was a distant commuter town.
But there's no potholes in those pictures. Are you referring to others? Though there are really bad streets in some places. Generally seems to happen when the streets are not as needed as they were previously (e.g. urban decay where businesses and people left the area), and the city doesn't have good options about what to do with it.
Street parking and walkways are optional things anywhere depending on whether they're useful. More of a dependence on the population density. Really expensive subdivisions often lack them too.
There is a good article in the Atlantic (I will try to dig it up) about how the relatively unexplainable reasons (or maybe, lazily not explained reasons) why construction and public infrastructure projects in our country are costing so much (billions of $ more than you would expect), is really hindering our development and collective wealth as a country (wealth in terms of infrastructure, modernity of our facilities).
The example was the rail development of the 2nd Ave subway line in Manhattan, but take almost any example of a large project.
Think about how, if the cost of our projects is 2-3x what it "should be", we are doing without 2/3-1/2 of the improvements to our physical world that we could otherwise achieve.
For some reason, it's a confluence of aging infrastructure, cost of displacing entrenched residents / businesses to make improvements, labor cost, insurance, etc.
What it also produces is a country that does not have a lot of practice in doing big, important infrastructure projects. Maybe once every 10 years. Compared to growing younger countries where they have major projects, say, every other month. And as a result, fewer experts are around to bid for such work, and also as a result, the cost of such projects goes up.
It's a big problem as a country ages and gets more expensive.
And this article is not specifically on the problem of cost, but how replacing signals in the NYC subway has lessons like managing a massive software project:
"Think about how, if the cost of our projects is 2-3x what it "should be", we are doing without 2/3-1/2 of the improvements to our physical world that we could otherwise achieve."
This is far, far underestimating how many projects we lose.
If things were 3x cheaper, one could justify many more than 3x the projects, as there would be more return on investment and more willingness to fund additional projects.
> confluence of aging infrastructure, cost of displacing entrenched residents / businesses to make improvements, labor cost, insurance, etc.
What about corruption e.g. ghost employees, inflated billing rates, intentional delays, knowingly letting things be done wrong according to a mistaken spec to bill more hours later, all done by a company owned by the mayor's cousin? Construction is famous for those kinds of things.
That definitely may come into play. But I think the bulk of the 2-3x (or more cost inflation) for the average project is larger factors that no particular entity is trying to "cheat". Just a gradual creeping up of expectations and willingness to tolerate higher and higher costs.
Part of the reason is the insistence of not using international help to greatly advance projects, and favoring making the most minimum impact on car traffic possible. When newer nations are able to rapidly and cheaply build infrastructure, chances are they are using outside help and have no qualms about de-prioritizing car traffic. We lack experience building infrastructure since we largely gave up on mass transit projects for decades; NYC and Boston are reliant on vestigial rail infrastructure that hasn't had a serious expansion for decades, D.C. metro almost didn't happen, and LA managed to build 1.5 subway lines in the 90s before metro was banned from digging new lines until the 2010s, under the unfounded idea that the city might explode into a methane fueled fireball if the tunnel boring machine made its way under Beverly hills high school. That half line they started in the 90s won't be completed until 2030, and will be 3.5 miles shorter than originally planned.
Our ignorance and unwillingness to take off the shelf solutions is what has driven up our costs. The patriotic label of 'american made' is regularly used to hide greed and waste. This LA times article (original la times link was dead, this is a mirror) talks about how an established french company offered to construct the project under budget, but officials dismissed them and opted to reinvent the wheel for massive costs along a political route, not an optimal one (1).
The contractor consultant model that we rely on for public works is designed to loot the public purse first, and improvements to public welfare take the back seat to maintaining the status quo of a car dominated way of life. If we were serious, calhsr would have been spooled up into an actual agency with its own labor and engineering pools, and not be this big resovour of public money being sucked dry by parasitic consultants who smelled the billions of dollars of chum we put in the water and convinced us explicitly not to try this in house (2).
Another example of compromised by design infrastructure is the expo line in LA. It takes 15 minutes for the train to travel two miles from USC to downtown LA, because the train runs at grade and is only this year being given signal priority at traffic lights, despite the line opening 8 years ago. Embarrassing to spend millions on a vehicle that can be beaten by someone in decent shape sprinting those two miles along the train tracks.
The N Judah in SF is actually slower than it was 100 years ago. I lived on 12th ave and if I missed it I could usually beat it to the 9th and Irving stop and get on there.
These guys suck at actually doing the math. Property taxes won't remain constant. They will rise with inflation while the bond repayment stays the same.
I'm not an expert, but usually bonds are bought at a discount. The city would sell 1.5 million worth of bonds for 1.3 million, for example. The effective interest rate comes from that discount.
That said, they don't seem to provide a lot of details and I've seen some wildly misleading numbers from Strongtowns. They're not to be trusted to provide objective numbers.
On average property taxes will increase - in some areas they will decrease. If everyone is betting on their local tax pools increasing there are going to be some big losers.
There are a number of factors, but the simplest gist:
1. The models for road funding and development were developed in the 1920s and 30s, were based on much denser areas (old towns) that paid a lot higher taxes per acre, and much simpler roads (which cost a lot less).
2. The models haven't been significantly updated or reconsidered since, even though the development patterns have been mandated by law to become much less dense, while street standards have also greatly increased, meaning much less tax base to support much more infrastructure.
3. This often pencils out in places that are growing because there are heavy state and federal subsides for "growth" projects where the up front capital cost is 80-100% paid for by non-local funds. That infrastructure works without maintenance for a while, and likely won't need heavy maintenance for 20-30 years, but at that point it'll need to be rebuilt at about the same cost adjusted for inflation as it cost to build.
In theory what should be happening is cities should be piling up money from taxes on these projects that were subsidized, so that when the maintenance bill comes due they have the funds to do the maintenance.
But in practice, the taxes that come in from "today's" new growth are used to pay for the maintenance on "yesterdays" old infrastructure that needs to be replaced.
Thus, things appear to "work" as long as steady growth continues and new tax income continues to be generated locally while the costs associated are funded from outside. But when growth slows down or stops, things quickly break down.
You can see this pattern of "rolling blight" all over the country, where so many of the older suburbs are falling apart with decaying infrastructure, and people who can are moving farther out to the "shiny and new" suburbs where everything is in good shape.
The problem is especially pernicious in the rust belt, where we have seen metro areas dramatically expand in surface area every decade even as their population has barely increased (or shrunk) since the 1950s.
> The models haven't been significantly updated or reconsidered since, even though the development patterns have been mandated by law to become much less dense, while street standards have also greatly increased, meaning much less tax base to support much more infrastructure.
This sounds like the utter lack of critical thinking which might result in a failing grade for a college term paper, so what gives? As in, what is the thinking with which sane people could justify using such models and/or approving estimates?
A lot of it is time and culture gaps. These problems take 20-30 years to unfold so the people who create the problem are gone before the problem appears, and then the people who face the problem look at the budget and go "I dunno, in the past we made money when we took state subsidies and grew, we should do more of that." Suburbanization is a cultural phenomenon, and the result of a lot of social engineering and propoganda from as early as the FDR administration and continuing into the 80s and 90s. That makes it harder to question.
It's worth reading the Strong Towns book that goes into this in more detail.
We haven't always afforded paving streets in cities. Many cities started with dirt roads in a small settlement. As the settlement grows, the investment in roads (sometimes) begins to make sense. As that investment happens, you can see over time an increase in the quality of buildings and population density.
Perhaps you still disagree with it, but the point is that towns routinely make infrastructure improvements for which there is no cost socialization that makes the improvement worthwhile over the improvement's lifetime. You're right to suggest there is some benefit. In the example from the article, however, another street is used as the through street, so the benefit to people in other parts of the town from this road being improved is vanishingly small. It would not be worth however much their taxes would go up. You can also socialize across time through borrowing money, but in this case you would get 30 years worth of road for 35 years worth of money.
It's an interesting book, because it does not even suggest that socialized costs or central government planning are bad in themselves, only that the way we're socializing costs is setting up our towns for bankruptcy.
1. Previously, the streets were simply pavement and a ditch. Now they're being upgraded to pavement-sidewalk-internaldrainage-internet-power. It's more expensive and potentially unsustainable.
2. We can't afford it, b/c we're relying on all of these bonds. If _every_ block in the city requires a bond that the property tax from that block can't pay, eventually the banks will recognize that this city isn't a good debitor.
But furthermore, is this the best use of funds? Is adding a sidewalk worth 1.5m, when it could be spent elsewhere?
So the people living in small, dense dwelling and apartments can foot the bill for the nice roads of the folks with big properties ...
I wonder how the dynamic would change if all 'access roads' i.e. roads with homes on them, and not 'artery roads' had to be paid for by the local neighborhood.
This has been considered. For example, Virginia greatly restricted cul-de-sacs[1], and my understanding is that the mechanism by which they accomplished this is changing the rules so that only "through streets" would be eligible for public maintenance going forward, hence if you had a cul-de-sac or private loop road or something you had to maintain it yourself. But I think that's only forward-looking, it doesn't change things for all the private roadways built in the past.
The way VA does road maintenance is wildly different than nearly every other state though. Every road outside of independent cities is state maintained. Not county or town, but full state maintenance. It makes it much easier to do these types of changes.
How many people need that road, i.e. how many people live on these 0.3 miles of road? It's not a through route, so it does not benefit much more people than that. How many people live on 0.3 miles of city streets lined with multi-story buildings? That makes all the difference in how the math works out.
When you have finite resources, you need to make tradeoffs. We probably don't have money to make every single sidewalk in the US ADA compliant, and there are also other things the city needs to fund. Given that, it's better to focus on streets where ADA compliance would be the most useful, and that's probably not in a street like this. Here, pedestrians, cars and wheelchair users can probably just share the road given that it's not a through street. The 1.5M can then go towards funding other initiatives that would help more people.
I have developed a habit of hitting Esc when modal dialogs pop up on web pages as I'm scrolling down reading. I never want to sign up for the mailing list. The webinar. The sales pitch. Never.
But on sites hosted by Squarespace, Esc gets you into a login prompt, presumably for the site owners? Try it! Weird choice, Squarespace!
I too was very weirded out by this. The worst part is I couldn't even figure out that esc was doing this till I read your comment. Esc is usually used to stop or close something, not open something new.
The author seems to suggest that the maintenance of the road 30 years from now will cost as much as the current major reconstruction. I expect the maintenance of a 30 year old road is significantly less. I’d determine the bond required to provide the equivalent maintenance over 30 years, levy a one time charge against the individual properties (as a lien against the property value of needed), equal to the total costs minus the expected post 30 year maintenance costs. Then issue a bond for the expected 30 year maintenance costs. Eventually the properties will pay off the lien, and have a predictable yearly bond. Propose that to all the impacted property owners, let them vote on it, and go with a majority rule. If the property owners expect their property values to increase more than the lien, they should vote for it, if not, it’s an inefficient use of resources and they should vote against it.
The road in front of my childhoom home was originally built to the blog post author's "new" standard, and then replaced after 30 years. Rebuilding the road involved breaking up the concrete, laying new rebar, and pouring the concrete. This happened over a period of about three days. I think the road was drivable on day five once the concrete had set. Since the concrete comes out in great big chunks, the mould is already ready for the concrete to be poured. It was pretty fast, I think they really had to work to even stretch it out into a three day project.
That said, this project in the blog post is a total upgrade of the street, what exists currently is two ditches, which are probably a mosquito spawning ground several months a year, and in the middle is asphalt on top of dirt which is a small step up from a dirt road. The end result of curbs, concrete road and ADA-compliant sidewalk is huge. People will want to move to this neighborhood after the upgrade goes in. With the bare strip of asphalt, the curb-appeal of the houses in this neighborhood is quite low.
Also also, concrete residential roads typically have a 40 year lifespan, not 30. My town could have easily ground down the top 1/2" of concrete road surface for a fraction of the price and gone another 10 years without any further maintenance.
Concrete roads aren't as good where it winters. They shift as the ground changes temperature and expands or contracts, and trucks and plows destroy them at the seams.
The author is saying the road has a life of 30 years and will need to be replaced in 30 years, since the repayment of the bond will take 35 years they will have to do another bond to replace the road again, and still be paying 5 more years on the road that was replaced
> levy a one time charge against the individual properties
that is not how public infrastructure works, or should work
We pay property taxes and estiblish a government so the government assumes those costs and liabilities not the property owners
There are many communities that operate like the way you suggest, they are PRIVATE roads, not public roads.
The trade off for the property owner is they can not disallow members of the public access to that road, the property owner gives up this control because they no longer own, control or have any liability over the road however if you are going to place a lien on my property for the cost of the road then I better have more ownership interest and control over it
I can easily walk my dog there so there's no need for the sidewalk. If you break your leg, if you're old or disabled - tough luck. I stopped reading after this ableist argument. Those overreaching regulations trying to make life easy for disabled - how are we going to pay for those?
Locally we had a similar response to the idea of replacing pedestrian overpass bridges with regular crossings. Cost of maintaining the bridge and its accessibility are less important than those poor cars which may now have to stop on a red light.
Lots of city infrastructure changes are under the assumption that the city may keep growing. So revenues keep growing, and the money borrowed today may seem small tomorrow.
Its a ponzi scheme. But with population growth pretty much constant for a century, this has worked in lots of towns. Now with the new norm being replacement (families have 2 or fewer children), the assumption is going to be challenged. The infrastructure-debt bubble may burst.
Even out east, we are seeing rural areas depopulate and nearby metros absorbing that local population. For instance, Columbus is often cited as a fast growing city. However, almost all of that growth is from people already living elsewhere in Ohio and moving into the city for greater economic opportunities. As a net it looks like there isn't growth or even decline, as the population of Ohio has been relatively stagnant since 1960, but it's a shift of where the population is located that is also playing out everywhere. Part of it is also due to a lower need for labor in rural areas as farming and manufacturing become more automated, and cities are increasingly centers of knowledge workers and research, rather than industrial centers.
In the context of climate change, it is also better to favor investment in cities which are already well scarred by human activity, and have a lot of infrastructure and capital already in place, than to expand into or increase the existing environmental impacts on our natural and rural areas. In California, we've built to the edge of what is sensible given the fringes of civilization perennially burn to the ground.
That's why giving the government even more money never works: it's not theirs, so a third of a mile of a road nobody uses costs $1.5M, and it will get built anyway. Because why the fuck not. An illustrative example was when after the recession the federal government allocated a shitload of federal funds for infrastructure. A busy local road which _did not need repair_ ended up getting torn down and re-paved several times to use the funds over the course of a couple of years. Why? Nobody asked the question why or did the math. There were roads immediately adjacent which did need repair, those still have potholes. Where I live it costs about $1M to install traffic lights on a simple intersection. A local hospital (which I don't even use because it's out of network with my insurance) is raising hundreds of millions of dollars for "renovations" through levies (which are, thankfully, voted down repeatedly). If I were to vote in favor, they'd still charge me hundreds of thousands of dollars if I get cancer and end up getting treated there. Same with "cancer awareness" campaigns. Dude, you're charging an arm, a leg, and a first-born already, why do you need even more money for "awareness"?
Looking at the rest of the economy, public infrastructure projects like this are the only hope to keep the economy running. Yeah there will be some paper debt on municipal books but the net benefit of the money unlocked from this is much higher. At least from an economic sense. In a perverse way the more these projects costs, the more money is redistributed.
The Strong Towns book goes into this in more detail. What you say might be the case sometimes, and when it is the case, the money unlocked is reflected in higher property taxes, so the municipal balance sheet stays even. If the town can't somehow get higher property taxes for its improvements, then it spent more money than it will make on the project. If you do that enough time, municipalities start going bankrupt. If people aren't willing to pay higher property taxes for the improvement, then it isn't really helping them.
If a large percent of the money just goes to the few owners of the construction company and not to an army of workers, then it was all for naught, so that has to be factored in too.
Because if the numbers don't work on overhauling a single block based on the tax revenue generated by that block, they also don't scale up to work if you draw the tax revenue in from "elsewhere." Everywhere else ALSO has its own road, sewer, etc. to maintain, not to mention fire and EMS services.
If either of these roads serve as an arterial, then the footprint of the change is quite a bit bigger and you are correct, we should consider a wider tax base reflecting the radius of the impact of the roads.
If however it's mostly a residential road, which it seems like it might be, then the scalability point being made by the other responses is probably closer to the truth.
Presumably as a nod towards scalability, on the assumption that in aggregate it ought not take more than the entire town's property tax revenue to keep the town's roads in good condition.
Because other areas will have their own projects (definitely, over the lifetime of the loan, even if not right now), and you can’t make one pay for the other to be long-term sustainable.
Municipal law, spending, etc. seems to me like a ripe avenue for software being used to improve society. Here's why: most people don't even know what things are happening in their area, much less do the math to see the full picture. There's an enormous gap between what information is technically available to the public and how that information is put on people's radar so it can influence voting and activism. I feel like I've also read that, for this exact reason, municipal governments are some of the most corrupt parts of our system.
I wonder how well road projects scale in terms of length - if it would be better or worse per mile to have to do 50 or 500 miles of contiguous road vs 0.32 miles. The absolute cost would be far higher of course but if it it scales slower than linear it suggests a consolidation process as more efficient or whatever the "peak efficency segment" may be.
Has anyone done a high-quality analysis on the actual cost of implementing ADA compliance, both in public and private contexts? There are going to be a lot of social and opportunity costs that are hard to capture (e.g. the social losses associated with fewer swimming pools due to high ADA-related costs), but even the raw construction costs would be interesting.
So much doom and gloom in that article. The town in question is McKinney TX, and I grabbed their annual budget[1]. Property taxes make up 50% of their ex-services (water, sewer, trash, parks/rec, airport, etc) revenues.
And, the bonds in question will yield ~1.5% at today's rates. In other words, less than inflation. Meanwhile, McKinney has lowered property tax rates in response to higher appraisals (inflation is a major driver of increased appraisals on balance).
So, I take 2 issues with the article. First is the payback period, since property tax revenue only makes up 1/2 of the ex-services income and will increase with inflation. And second, with the idea that every area must cover its own expenses. In general commercial, high-dense and/or rich areas subsidize projects in other neighborhoods. You're going to be able to cherry-pick a project that can't be paid by its beneficiaries in every single city.
:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/20038723/Screen_Shot_2020_06_16_at_11.27.07_PM.png){kind=link}
I’m not sure there is an opportunity to fix this - I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about this now and modeling it out - by building a better construction company: most of the problem is, instead, essentially political.