| I have no experience building infrastructures in the US, but I have some in Europe, working in construction companies. I will give you some (sparse, 1 every 10 years) datapoints: 1983 - 2 or 3 copies of any drawing or letter/calculation 1993 - 6 to 8 copies of any drawing or letter/calculation 2003 - 12 to 20 copies of any drawing or letter/calculation 2013 - 16 to 24 copies of any drawing or letter/calculation And of course this increase of copies is due to the increase in permissions/authorizations/approvals/checks needed and due to "stricter" (actually only more complex) construction codes and changed calculation methods I would say that the number of documents (before making the copies) has increased by 1.5x every ten years, i.e. something that was built on 1,000 drawings/documents in 1983 was built in 2013 on the basis of more than 3,000. The number of people involved (not labour, but management, engineers, surveyors, technicians, etc.) need also to be multiplied by a factor of 3 2013 vs. 1983. The actual production (thanks to a few computer-related innovations and the availability of better, bigger machines) has increased, but all in all you do the same amount of work with less people (labour) and lots of people looking at what the workers are doing. This is a classic meme, but is not that much far from reality:
https://web.archive.org/web/20131005125257/http://ajotube.it... |
