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Comment by arcfour | Hacker News Reader

Jeez. Imagine walking into a construction site from 2 decades ago.

The A-35 (a highway in Quebec) has been under construction since 1966. When finished, it will be 34 miles/55 km long.

Two decades isn't very long for an infrastructure project, which is unfortunate since long-term planning benefits greatly from political stability, and many areas are seeing large shifts for the worse in that regard.

Two decades ought be a very long time for an infrastructure project. I guarantee you China and India aren't taking 47 years to build a 55 km highway.

I would be stunned if it took 47 days.

But only lasts half that..

??? I think you’re thinking of US roads, which are generally shoddily constructed and poorly maintained compared to chinese ones.

No, what you meant to say was “and only 47 people died constructing it!”

China has had more than 150 modern bridges collapse. Some of them collapsed in less than a year. China is not building or maintaining bridges any better than the US.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/268466718_Statistic...

https://www.bbc.com/news/av/world-asia-china-19365886

Montreal roads are famously bad.

It’s an extremely poor example. It’s a multi phase project and for many years government didn’t provide any funding as it was not a priority. It’s not like they were actively trying to build it for 47 years, they built multiple small parts of it through multiple phases but they were never trying to build the whole thing. It was just not anything important to complete.

The criticism still stands. It should not take 47 years from recognition that a road is needed to actually building it.

What if sections will be needed now, and it's easy enough to make a plan to eventually connect all of the parts as needed? Get the zoning work done to prevent anything over 2 stories tall being built over the planned route, and then build the various sections as needed/as budget is available. I'm not saying that's what happened, but I can see smart, modular, as-needed infrastructure projects being drawn out over decades like this.

The irony of software engineers complaining about a project not being feature complete and on time.

When a project that should take 5 months takes 500 months, this isn't a case of the pot calling the kettle black.

The Brno main post office building here in the Czech Republic has been built as a modular structure that can be moved and reassembled once the new main railway station is completed.

That was in 1937 - the new main railway station does not exist yet (though it looks like it might actually be built this time) and post even moved out of the historic building last year. :P

Makes me wonder how much effort went into mothballing partial construction and then unwinding all of that to get it going again. Seems like it would have cost a lot.

You don't have to worry about disposing of any copper pipe!

Check out Satsop, Washington: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WNP-3_and_WNP-5

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juragua_Nuclear_Power_Plant

an abandoned nuclear station in Cuba

shared earlier this year, a blog post about a clandestine visit in 2014:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35672840

Many churches in England took 100 years to build

A lot of the reason for the lengthy construction times in cathedrals and churches was the amount of hand-skilled craftsmanship associated with marble, wood, and stone carving and artistry.

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