Comment by shagie | Hacker News Reader

Comment by shagie | Hacker News Reader

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For a counter example, the rebuilding of the MacArthur Maze in 26 days back in 2007. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacArthur_Maze#2007_I-580_East...

> A contractor with a proven track record of rebuilding damaged freeways (most notably the Santa Monica Freeway after the 1994 Northridge earthquake) well ahead of schedule, C. C. Myers, Inc., submitted a winning bid of $876,075 to repair the damage to the I-580 connector. The bid was estimated to cover only one-third of the cost of the work, but the firm counted on making up the shortfall with an incentive of $200,000 per day if the work was completed before June 27, 2007.

> On the evening of Thursday, May 24, the I-580 connector re-opened, just before the busy Memorial Day weekend. The deadline to finish the project was beaten by over a month, with the contractor earning the $5 million bonus for early completion. The entire reconstruction project was completed only 26 days after the original accident.

Amazing: The Rebuilding the MacArthur Maze - https://youtu.be/-TKjwblp1XI

This is the kind of badassery that inspires me on all levels:

* Bidding low

* Negotiating an incredible daily reward for early completion (I imagine government did consult on the feasibility of this)

* Actually completing such a project in an incredibly short amount of time

There wasn't a negotiation. Caltrans wanted it done before Memorial Day weekend and saw that the economy was losing money from the extra costs of not having that part of the maze in place and so created a structure that had very large bonuses and very large penalties.

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/05/04/...

> The collapsed section of Interstate 580 will be rebuilt and reopened to traffic within 50 days under a Caltrans plan to speed up repairs on the MacArthur Maze, officials announced Thursday.

> Nine construction companies have been given the weekend to prepare proposals to do the work, which Caltrans Director Will Kempton said should cost less than $20 million. Caltrans will choose one of the companies by Monday evening, rushing a bidding process that normally would take months.

> The firms must repair the collapsed freeway by June 29 or face $200,000 a day in penalties from the state. But should they finish the work ahead of schedule, they'll earn a $200,000-a-day bonus for each day they were ahead of the deadline, Kempton said.

> "There is absolutely no question in my mind that any incentives paid to achieve early opening is money well spent," he said at a news conference in Sacramento.

> The clock starts running Tuesday morning, Kempton said, and the contractor is expected to start work immediately.

> ...

> Kempton said that the bonus money offered to open the freeway before June 29 is based on what officials estimate the closures are costing the state. Caltrans will pay for the project initially from a highway safety account, but federal officials have said they will reimburse California for the repairs.

> A state projection concluded that the connector collapse had cost $90 million, based on a $6 million per day economic impact estimate. This includes a $491,000 loss in toll revenue for the Oakland Bay Bridge

Sounds like $200,000 a day for bonus payments was nothing.

Literally nothing. Considering the federal government reimbursed.

Thank you for clarifying. I watched the documentary. So incredibly inspiring. Everyone working on this job knew they were helping solve a major issue and contributing to an extraordinary effort - from the steel workers to the government officials eliminating multiple blockers to the workers to the company owners.

Incredible sense of teamwork, collaboration, support, care, pride in a job well done.

To me, it is efforts at this scale and quality that make “America great” and lets me reclaim the meaning of this phrase.

that supports at least part of the thesis of this video though, that unknown factors in the design contribute to cost overruns - if you're rebuilding an exising piece of infrastructure in essentially the same way it was before it was damaged, you've got a lot fewer unknowns to work with.

Perhaps related, in 2017 a piece of I-85 in Atlanta that carried ~250k autos per day collapsed after a major fire and was rebuilt within 44 days:

Wiki: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstate_85_bridge_collapse

Timelapse: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PR0PB0BvKVI

To be fair, a 26-day project is far more easier to manage (to be on-time and not over the budget) than a multiple-year project, despite the former could be more technically impressive.

Well that is just badass

That just sounds like he gamed a poorly priced incentive.

From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacArthur_Maze#Rebuilding

> A state projection concluded that the connector collapse had cost $90 million, based on a $6 million per day economic impact estimate. This includes a $491,000 loss in toll revenue for the Oakland Bay Bridge.

$200,000 per day bonus vs $6M per day economic impact seems like a incentive that was priced very well for the state.

Maybe, but "economic impact" is an extremely vague measure that some analyst just guessed. People obviously found alternate transportation paths or were dealing with their own damage at home anyway. ...but maybe it's correct.

People did. But it was things like instead of going from some of the mid to upper parts of the east bay just taking 880 across the bay bridge to instead take the San Mateo bridge and go up 101 instead. A longer trip that took more gas.

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