Comment by russellbeattie | Hacker News Reader

Comment by russellbeattie | Hacker News Reader

Why does it seem that the U.S. has become incapable of building large projects in a reasonable amount of time and budget? It seems every major bit of construction is always years late, and billions over budget. Whether it's the Bay Bridge (half of it), or a new Space Shuttle replacement, or just fixing our bridges and other infrastructure, I've never read of a large public project actually coming in on time and on budget.

In China, they're building infrastructure so fast it's crazy. Regardless of the different social and political systems, we just seem to have lost all ability to function as a society to create big things that we need. Imagine if we wanted to build something like the Hoover Damn today?

I have to assume it has something to do with half the population trying to actively disrupt anything positive the government wants to do, and if they can't completely kill the project, they try to profit off it as much as possible, essentially "proving" that government is inefficient, if not outright incompetent.

We’ve empowered local bodies with veto power. This raises costs because of the holdout problem translated to regional politics. Add to the mix trade unions (not wild speculation, see NY MTA paying $1k/hr for non-existent jobs), large project fanboys, and exceptionalism (“this line will have a signaling mechanism that’s first in the world”) and you have sheer economic suicide. And that’s not even counting that there’s no project management expertise on this scale still present in America.

In the decades between now and completion, you’ll see the price rise continuously. Each time, you will be subject to the subject cost fallacy and people will say things like “but isn’t 150 billion worth it?”, “isn’t 200 billion worth it?”

People were told the 46 billion was not going to happen and all the way up to today’s 97 billion they’ve pulled these tactics. Many of the fans will think it’s worth it at 1 trillion for no reason. They won’t admit it now, but as the price rises you’ll see that no price rise will faze them.

  the U.S. has become incapable of building large projects in a reasonable amount of time and budget?

Private projects come in on time and on budget, or nearly so, all the time. It's the public sector projects that are layered in graft.

The last major public project that came in near the original budget that I can recall is the San Jose Area (now SAP).

Private projects come in on time and on budget all the time? Do you have any evidence to support this? I’ve seen plenty of private projects gonoff the rails. The difference is that private projects can keep their budget information, well, private.

Which private enterprise has the power to run a hundred billion project that isn’t funded by the government. Not one.

Uber, Google Search Engine, Facebook, etc.

None of them have done anything on this scale, have they? They’re valuable because they don’t make investments like this. Their work is on a long lever so they have great margins over massive volume.

I’m pretty sure Uber has terrible margins :)

Haha, or potential for great margins, right. It's not one big project that costs $100 bil, right. There's very little incrementality to HSR, etc.

Google has spent over $200 million on land alone... in the valley alone... just in the past month.

I heard that it seriously depleted HQ's petty cash fund. (But seriously, these were, in fact, all-cash deals.)

Yeah, but they don't do that every month. And $200 million is 1/500 of 100 billion. This is like the difference between going to a nice restaurant and buying a McLaren P1. Or spending all your money as an L7 at Google vs. going to space yourself.

Think of all the high-rise apartments (which so many on HN claim to want) and large commercial complexes that are constructed purely by private enterprise.

AT&T Park, Levi's Stadium (over $1 billion), and the new Warriors arena (over $1 billion) were privately funded.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com