It seems that in the US we want both good infrastructure but also to have out hands and inputs in every project. We all need to collectively understand that you can have one or the other but not both. That new rail project may not go down the exact route you want but realize that if you start suggesting changes, it will never go down the route you want because it will never be built.
This rail project could have been completed years ago if political leaders didn't always change the plan to benefit themselves.
The US can do big infrastructure projects. It is happening all over the place. You just don’t notice because nobody is writing about non-failures.
We like low taxes so we need voters to either directly approve a project’s budget or politicians who approve the budget need to keep getting re-elected. Politicians know that increasing taxes during their term for a project that will be completed after their term or career is a difficult sell. We Starve the Beast so we don’t have a Ministry of Transportation with career workers but rather everything is contracted out. We like federalism instead of a unitary state to avoid the problem of distant inaccessible decision makers. But then any projects that cross jurisdiction boundaries require the equivalent of negotiating a treaty. And each town controls zoning and can refuse to give up land unless they get a stop. Rural areas are overrepresented in Senates. We have environment review, lawsuits, and anti-racism laws so the little guy doesn’t get steamrolled like in the Robert Moses era. But this slows down projects tremendously.
When there is a strong mandate things get done.
The U.S. system will not get appreciably better until we focus on government competence. The layperson's go-to explanation for these outcomes is something in the tree of corruption but the truth is likely closer to Hanlon's razor.
The replaced I-35 bridge went up fast. It would have cost radically less to maintain the old one properly.
A bigger problem than our democratic system is our Republican ideology, which has lost the stomach for large-scale cooperation.
I received some good advice a long time ago, which is that don’t spend too much time beating your head over your weaknesses, because then you’ll be spending your life focusing on what you’re bad at instead of what you’re good at.
I feel like Americans should do this about trains and transit. We can’t do it. Just let it go. Find some other outlet that harnesses our strengths as a society instead of playing into all of our weaknesses.
America did a spectacular job of redesigning society around maximizing car usage and continues to subsidize that pattern of land and resource use.
#headduck
https://dilanesper.substack.com/p/people-who-draw-lines-on-m...
We need to double our power generation and transportation infrastructure before full electric transportation is possible.
We can't build anything at scale any more. The CA high speed train started as a ten billion dollar promise. It quickly became $33 billion. Now it is at over $110 billion and no idea of when or if it will be completed. I would not be surprised if it ends-up somewhere between $250 to $500 billion dollars. People will work on this thing their entire lives, retire and die before it is finished.
Cost overruns and what is indistinguishable from systemic incompetence means we cannot possibly afford both the time and cost of doubling our entire power infrastructure in support of electric transportation. In other words, before we can dream of such things and approach large projects, we have to fix the cultural, bureaucratic and structural problems this nation has.
BTW, for all his faults, Trump was the first US President to seriously engaged in some of this work. I don't remember all the details. I do remember reading about such things as the permits and process to build a road or bridge being reduced from decades to perhaps a few years. We are in desperate need of more work on this front.
Today electric vehicles exist in this gray area where they don't demand enough electricity to create serious problem most of the time. Here in CA we've already have the government ask electric car owners to alter charging behavior due to power grid problems. At some point we will start to approach various thresholds that will make electric vehicles very problematic without matching infrastructure enhancement at local, city, regional, state and national levels.
Not sure we can make that happen. We can't have every project cost ten times more than planned and take ten times longer to complete. That's not a formula for success at all.
This bit of propaganda has been surprisingly successful, especially since it doesn't really make any sense.
Someone referencing it while being skeptical about high speed rail reinforces my supposition that the high speed rail is just a boringly average big project and that most of the negative coverage is barely coherent lies.
> This bit of propaganda has been surprisingly successful, especially since it doesn't really make any sense.
What doesn't make sense to you? California did ask electric car owners to charge off peak hours to avoid overloading the grid. See https://www.newsweek.com/california-facing-power-crisis-fret...
It was not a legally binding request, so electric car owners could ignore it if they wanted to.
No, it didn’t.
System cost estimate referenced in the ballot booklet for Prop 1A was $45 billion. $9.95 billion was the Prop 1A bond issue, which was explicitly never intended to represent full funding.
http://vigarchive.sos.ca.gov/2008/general/argu-rebut/argu-re...
Find me one mainstream media political add, just one, that discloses anything other than ten billion and I'll retract my statement.
Voters don't read ballots in detail at all. They vote based and what got pounded into their heads during the election cycle. Politicians know this well.
Solar and wind megaprojects seem to avoid this fate by a combination of easy accounting -- unit cost x total units = expected cost -- and incremental delivery -- they can start delivering power almost immediately, both demonstrating progress and helping fund further work. Those that fail to deliver early and on-budget are easier to cancel. (Cancelled big solar and wind projects are called failures, but are successes of project management; and equipment can often be sold on to other projects.)
For most big infrastructure projects, nobody really knows how much it ought to cost at each stage, or how far along it really is. The stakeholders who gave it the OK expect a piece of the action, continuously. They never want the money flow to cease, which would happen on completion.
America's innovation is that the corrupt money flows to stakeholders are wholly legal, with no risk of indictment. This makes it easier to start projects, even though harder to finish them. The people promoting the project can't afford to buy off gatekeepers, but the project budget itself can. The bigger it is, though, the more backers it will need, so it is easier to estimate low, and overrun.
Sometimes, if the money will be cut off anyway, it can be face-saving to deliver something at that point. Thus, Olkiluoto, Second Avenue, and Bay Bridge. NASA is required by law to buy a new, useless SLS every time they shoot one, but can delay launching pretty easily. The sooner SpaceX SuperHeavy starts launching cans, the sooner the obligation might be lifted. Expect to see a big new missile program approved immediately after that.
Thing is, most things somebody would like government to spend $billions on really shouldn't be built. So we need gatekeepers. And, some should be, so they need to be overcome sometimes.
