A local Hofer (=Aldi) here can repave a whole parking lot and the access road in basically a weekend, while the same thing (parking lot) for a local government office can take a year or more, at approximately the same size.
The contractor crews showed up in April, closed the road with detour signs, tore up and removed the previous pavement, and left. All summer and fall a third of the city choked through a residential detour around a road project nobody was working on.
With their deadline so far away, the the contractor was free to chase lucrative summer work elsewhere and returned only in late November to meet their contractual obligation to the city. They hurriedly poured the concrete and left it to cure in freezing winter temps, undermining a good cure and ensuring it'll need to be redone decades sooner than would be otherwise necessary.
For all the sub optimal contract writing, construction work, and traffic inconvenience, there was no news story, no outrage, and no politicians lost their jobs. People are too busy to punish incompetence if things start to work _eventually_, so the incompetent can keep calm and carry on.
Solely? Editing out the contractor's actions seems to leave an incomplete picture.
edit: I suggest there is a fault with society, when society gives a pass to a business operating unethically - simply because it leveraged (or purchased, fed/state) loopholes that allow it to do so.
City contracting office failed to specify the requirements correctly. In particular the curing schedule/temperature.
If this was a homeowner getting a driveway paved, it would be one thing. But a city needs to employ people who know how to write contracts. If they do not, and bad contracts are legally fulfilled, then yes I'd argue that it's entirely the city's fault.
And the contractor's unethical exploitation, of course. But that's contracts.
To your edit: I agree, and it sucks! But this is not a novel problem, and people in this business know how to get their desired results. I would argue that this kind of error does not happen accidentally.
You either must really not care about the job, or be corrupt (and get some under-the-table money) to sign something like this. Somehow in the private sector people complain, and once it comes to someone high up, heads fall until it's solved... but not in the public sector.
On example of this going right: there was a local public works project to widen a highway. The contract was written so that if the company working it completed the work early they got a small % bonus depending on how quickly it was complete.
It got done early - the incentives were aligned properly.
Yes, there are all the obvious caveats about correct quality standards and corners weren't cut, but that would be the case anyway.
https://www.planacademy.com/construction-project-acceleratio...
As far as private infrastructure, I don't see how that would make much of a difference here, other than that a private company would probably have a harder time with permits to dig up the street on and off for 8 years.
The TL;DR is that the Vancouver line was mostly on time, on budget, and is working well, while the Eglinton line is massively over-budget, still not ready (should have opened in 2020) with an "indeterminate opening date".
The big difference between the two? Vancouver's doled out ONE contract to design, build, and operate the line. It was up to the one company to decide how and where to contract out or subdivide, only being held to certain conditions with reasonable flexibility for unexpected issues. Toronto had a (notoriously bureaucratic provincial government organization called Metrolinx) subdivide a bunch of contracts and essentially act as a project manager (of which a lot was also contracted out) with government-level accountability. The results were all over the place. Tracks were installed with slightly bad gauges, signalling software was bought and didn't have interoperability with other components, substandard construction was used, some contractors were probably hired for political reasons, etc.
There's plenty of studies from all over the world that compare cost differences for infrastructure between countries. The French are actually really good at it - they tend to spend a fraction the cost of infrastructure compared to England. https://www.bcg.com/united-kingdom/centre-for-growth/insight...
Possibly they should consider engaging some sort of dial-before-you-dig program - https://newyork-811.com/homeowners/ sounds promising on a quick search - or keeping better records. This situation sounds a bit weird to me, I'm not sure how they made the mistakes the article is suggesting they made.
Big construction projects also routinely did as-built drawings, and this was a cost built into the contracts. So if the physical plant people didn't have, or had lost the record drawings, they knew which architect or engineer to call. This happened all the time. I can recall pulling out a drawing from the early 80s to answer a question in the early 2000s.
However, all of this was a cost center. Starting some twenty years ago or so, everybody has been rooting out these cost centers as cost-cutting measures.
Institutional knowledge is an unquantifiable asset, but it's far, far, far from zero. You lose it at your peril.
Some of this infrastructure in NYC is old enough that there likely isn’t anyone alive who remembers what went there.
Not to mention the fact that NYC is orders of magnitude bigger than a hospital complex. Good luck finding anyone who worked on that exact section decades ago, even if they were still alive.
> Institutional knowledge is an unquantifiable asset, but it's far, far, far from zero. You lose it at your peril.
There is no possible way a city could store their institutional knowledge spanning more than a century within employees.
Institutional knowledge is how they got into this problem, not a solution.
Not sure where you get the idea that I think the answer is solely institutional knowledge as you seem to imply. It is but a part of the whole solution, which includes record keeping, standard practices, etc.
The articles shows a single example of a more persistent problem plaguing NYC. Not being able to deal with 500 feet of water and sewer in 10 years and millions upon millions of dollars indicates a deep problem, and there is no acceptable excuse for it. NYC has kicked the can down the road for a long time, and now they are paying the price for that. My issue is that many places and institutions have been doing this as well, and it will bite us in the ass.
I think the issue is that those historical records are simply not available and the best you can do is record whenever you dig out something new..
They keep records of modern infrastructure.
It’s the extremely old infrastructure that is missing records. It’s part archaeology project, with potential missteps creating outages for many people who depend on the infrastructure.
I was just comparing a project length (while price should also be compared) between a private business needing something done and government needing something done.