Comment by Awelton | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Awelton | Hacker News Reader

I work for a place that designs and manufactures parts for a lot of these NYC projects. There are several factors that slow them down, and every step of the process is horribly inefficient. We start the bid and design process years before groundbreaking because it takes so long to get reviews and approvals. Permitting, planning, and impact studies that should take a few months drag on for years. The land prices are so high and putting lots together so difficult that they build tall skinny buildings. Tall skinny buildings take longer to build than shorter, wider buildings. Everything is so hush hush in the preconstruction phase that we don't even know who exactly is building it or where it's at until a few months before they start demo on the existing structure. Shipping and delivery is a logistics nightmare downtown and crane time is always at a premium. Imagine how hard it is to get around NYC anyway, and then imagine how many hundreds of tons of material have to be delivered 24 hours a day by big trucks that aren't as quick and maneuverable as a car. The whole process is just years of waiting followed by half a decade of absolute madness trying to get it all crammed into a city block.

This is interesting stuff, but the article was focused on the actual construction phase, not the pre-construction planning and approvals. The duration of those is a related problem but not the one Brian was looking at.

That's the delivery part. There is no room to stage anything on the site, so the mad 24/7 logistics nightmare has to happen during the entire construction process. There are 2 million more people in NYC now than there was in the old highrise heyday and that doesn't count commuters. That's a lot more traffic to have to negotiate. Not being able to physically deliver enough materials during the construction phase is an enormous slowdown. Coupled with the new smaller footprint/higher elevation slowdown it winds up being a slog. You can only fit so many workers in a given area. There are other differences that add time and complexity that the old buildings didn't have to deal with as much as well, like the thousands of miles of additional cabling that goes in now for higher electric loads and data. I would also imagine that inspections weren't near as thorough and time consuming in the past. It's death by a thousand cuts. Hundreds of little things add a little time and complexity and it all adds up.

How do Asian cities manage all those factors?

Asian cities are new.

An example from the Netherlands: you have Amsterdam which is 500 years old. It's an infrastructure nightmare. And there is Rotterdam which was conveniently carpet bombed by the Germans in WW2.

Guess which city got a subway first?

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