[mvilim]

>> Why do there seem to be more examples of rapidly-completed major projects in the past than the present?

A large contributing factor is that major projects today are much more complicated than they were in the past. The tools we have built are always advancing, but the size of the human brain is not. As projects become more and more complicated, they require a larger number of people to collaborate, and that comes with almost unavoidable slowdowns and inefficiencies. The Lockheed P-80 is nowhere near as complex as the F-35. The BART extension might take longer to build than the transcontinental railroad, but there was no networking equipment on that railroad.

It's also important to distinguish between projects that are deep vs. broad (i.e. those solved by new thinking vs. those solved by scaling up). To be fair, most of the examples in the original article are indeed "deep" projects, but, for example, the Empire State Building was constructed quickly partly because there were 3500 people working on it. As technology has advanced, deep projects just get deeper. Although each level of technology builds on the last, there is still complexity added at every level.

[tvanantwerp]

I travel to Hong Kong every few years to visit family. Each time, there are more MTR stations--and on some occasions, entirely new lines. The MTR is just as complex as BART, if not moreso. I think it's worth considering why some places can build things like a metro fast, but others can't.

[foolfoolz]

before they build a new station....

do they do environmental impact studies? was enough time given for the study to complete and people to challenge the results? possibly with another study? are there community meetings to discuss the impact? does everyone in the area have a chance to voice their opposition at an open hearing? do all workers on the construction team have strict safety regulations? require certified training for specific tools? the company selected must pass random workplace safety visits? are they allowed to impact existing traffic flows during construction?

we did this to ourselves

[fanzhang]

That's probably also the answer to the time series question as well -- i.e. why construction is more costly today in the US than 100 years ago.

Interestingly, I think those complexities are not imposed by any monolithic person or organization, but is a the bulk result of lots of little regulations. I'm not sure any one specific person is saying "on the whole, this system of complexity is worth it" but rather each one by itself has a specific good (e.g. environmental study) without explicit accounting of the costs.

To be silly and meta, perhaps in addition to a mandatory environmental impact study of each large construction project, there should be a mandatory economic impact study on the environmental impact study.

[enraged_camel]

Yeah but how does any of this explain the 16-month delay in BART due to the installation of the wrong network equipment?

Something is genuinely wrong when it comes to major projects in America.

[mhjas]

I would guess they do that in Denmark and Copenhagen has a very modern subway system.

[LeonidasXIV]

It is modern but the metro is just 1.5 lines and the new ring line takes forever to build. Some of the other extensions are only planned to open by 2024. So it is quite glacial.

[CPLX]

Western Europe has no shortage of worker safety, environmentalism, or democracy, and they don’t have this problem.

[dash2]

Are you sure? I live there and that isn’t the impression I get.

[atonse]

All this might explain maybe cutting the pace in half or 1/3. Instead, the pace in America is almost zero. ZERO.

[ajmurmann]

There was a very interesting article a few years ago (I've tried to find it several times but cannot) that tried to explain at least some of this. The one factor they circled in on is that the US government stopped enjoying their own experts. Instead even publishing project requirements for different construction companies to bid on have to be outsourced. This causes mainly to problems: if you get the contract for writing the spec you cannot bid on the project. So many big and competent players will avoid writing the spec. The other issue is that the project is lacking holistic oversight by someone who understands what's going on and had incentive to keep cost down. Because nobody has a actual career as a construction expert with the government we see the government putting people in charge of these projects who worked at the contracting company the previous day. They had a few examples of the same construction company finishing projects pretty much on time and budget in other countries but going over a lot in similar projects in the US.

[TheCoelacanth]

I think a big part of Hong Kong's success with metro stations is that they own some of the land surrounding the stations, which means that the huge increase in land values from building a metro station goes back into the metro system, unlike most US systems where most of the increase in land values goes to private land owners.

[wallace_f]

Of course there are examples where complexity cannot be the issue. Russia had frankly no legitimate explanation or capacity to out-compete the US on launch systems, yet they did in many ways. Even the US-built Atlas V uses Russian RD-180 engines. Perhaps things like regulatory capture and bureaucratic intertia, among others, are to blame.

There are other examples. I spent a lot of time around Boston, where road work takes ages, the roads are horrendously bad, and the most corrupt large-scale project in history took forever to finish (and then even a ceiling tile fell off and killed someone due to absurdly corrupt quality control). Of course, complex roads projects can be built extroardinarily quickly and safely[1].

1 - https://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/05/25/california-free...

[rubyfan]

I thought this was the most interesting question also.

My own experience bias suggests there is a scale problem related to skilled workers. That is to say there are fewer people with skills needed to achieve the work demanded (by the whole system).

There could be a number of factors here but I’d have to assert education and incentives have not kept pace with the demand. I think this holds true even if we say the projects are more complex than ever or if the technology has advanced rapidly. It still seems like an imbalance of skilled workers to the work.

[dwaltrip]

I think survivorship bias is highly relevant to this question. It may not be the entire answer, but it definitely needs to he accounted for.

[sixdimensional]

I would add the question, do we always need the level of complexity or advanced technology for a given problem?

When would it be good enough to have a simpler or less complex solution and why are we sometimes biased against that?

There’s also a weird sliding window that follows technological advancement and generations - what was complex for one often becomes more simple to the next. With such a rate of technological change and high levels of complexity, this is partly why some get left behind or can’t keep up. But it seems like sometimes we also ignore the simple solution in hand in deference to constant futurism.

[bachbach]

I suspect this appears to be true but it is an illusion. This is because although you're right there's an incredible complexity to manage - we've been actually doing that using abstraction for a long time by inventing black boxes - sometimes literally white coloured boxes like fridges and washing machines that take away the necessity of thinking about the nuance in domain X but also the development of ideas that abstract out.

We can also make something look very complicated if we try, by switching context, multitasking, improper coordination.

The natural world (think of coal mining, making bicyles, stream engines) always looks very challenging if you're starting out.

> It's also important to distinguish between projects that are deep vs. broad (i.e. those solved by new thinking vs. those solved by scaling up).

Agree.

> As technology has advanced, deep projects just get deeper. Although each level of technology builds on the last, there is still complexity added at every level.

But we see conceptually simple projects everywhere that aren't being done!

We literally use the same tech to construct roads as the Romans. That is trillions of dollars in maintenance.

We know that natural sunlight and biomes would improve people's health in buildings where we spend 99% of our time. We just don't do anything about it apart from a window and a potted rubber plant or two.

We clean our butts with paper! The Koreans and Japanese had this one solved years ago!

There is no great wealth of complexity in any of these - it's just that we've decided not to think about them for legacy reasons.