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Comment by taeric | Hacker News Reader

Suspension bridges tend to be much prettier than other styles. I think this every time I get to cross the Tacoma Narrows.

I'm assuming that is just a preference of mine based on how much rarer they are to see? Could be that they tend to be more expensive and have the maintenance baked into the costs?

Good examples in the article of how to make others pretty. I'm assuming cost is almost always the limiting factor. Many "ugly" bridges have a hard time keeping up with required maintenance. Keeping any art clean and maintained is almost certainly not in the budget.

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Here's another hypothesis: making it look utilitarian is a way to preempt accusations of cost bloat. The first question anyone's going to ask about a nice looking design is "how much did we spend on that?". Ugly, utilitarian design says "I do exactly what you need and nothing else", which we interpret as cost efficient.

This is exactly it: I know people who, whenever they see something funded through taxes that is anything beyond the absolute bare minimum, start grousing about money regardless of any actual underlying costs.

People wildly overestimate the costs of making things nice; penny-wise pound-foolish stuff.

Right, I think that plays into my assertion? Budgets are so tight that places tend to go out of their way not just to adhere to them, but to make sure it is clear that they are adhering.

In my experience, the number of people that will say "it was expensive, but it's really beautiful" on the reverse situation is overwhelmingly larger than the people that will say "how much did we spend on that?".

In fact (and it annoys me to no end), people tend to think of expensive infrastructure as a positive trait, not a negative one.

The problem here is that people will like the expensive things. They will not like the bill that goes with it, though. And we seem to reward people for drumming up complaints on the bills.

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