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Comment by shazbotter | Hacker News Reader

The article highlights a failure, which is good, but gives a very surface level review of what failed here. Some gestures are made at environmental review but it's not clear that the root cause here was regulation. If the project needed three redesigns, why? Maybe electrical capacity for 8 high capacity outlets on that site was tricky. Maybe the transformers and their cooling was louder than that site could accommodate. Maybe this was a low priority project and other things kept stealing time from it.

I can think of many reasons why a project like this stalls. And too be clear, regulation could absolutely be one of them. The article just doesn't support that as a root cause beyond conjecture.

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Spot on. I read the article wondering when they were going to describe what specifically failed or got stuck. Instead it's just a vague implication that such redesigns must have been unnecessary, but never saying exactly why such redesigns were being done. What/who is the project currently waiting on? It's never specified.

In light of that, maybe a better description of the problem is more the absence of responsibility/accountability (for both the proponent and the reviewers, although it's not indicated which is dropping the ball here) rather than the processes/regulations themselves.

I think the article was clear that this was a series of delays at all steps -- no one issue (eg redesigns) that prevented progress. I would like to have seen more details, however it's possible they just don't exist in any one place.

That is the opposite of being clear - there is no analysis of what was responsible for each delay, leaving the reader to fill in their own imagined idea. And we can imagine many different scenarios. Maybe permits were stonewalled and denied for petty reasons. Maybe the muni electric company assigned the project as a low priority to an intern who kept missing key requirements. Maybe the better charging station vendor had too long of a lead time, and the muni electric was trying to ram it through with a different vendor that is more aggressively trying to privatize the commons. Each of these things are going to have wildly different fixes.

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