Big infrastructure projects I feel like is where America's democratic system starts to fall apart, and we honestly need a better solution.
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.
I used to live in Chicago. In my old neighborhood, there is a right-of-way reserved for future high-speed rail. Most of it is now “tunnel” because high rises and stores have built out around it, taking all the space except that reserved portion. The grocery store has a parking deck cantilevered over the right of way; a high rise literally has a tunnel through it, etc. it looks crazy in the present, but that’s what planning ahead looks like.
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.
Can you give an example of successful recent (say, from last 30 years) passenger rail project that, unlike your Chicago one, actually exists? I mean, it is easy to set out space for project in advance, it’s actually building it that is the hard part.
$210 million a mile for rail is a great value compared to the cost to build here in the Puget Sound region. Sounds Transit 3 is adding 62 miles of rail for $53.8 billion and central portions like Ballard and West Seattle are still over a decade away from starting construction.
Do you have an example? Your example can hardly be called a success. The last big infrastructure project I recall that can even be called a success is the Big Dig in Boston, which came at a huge (unplanned for) cost.
This is a feature not a bug. We have a system of government designed to prevent abuse not to maximize project completion.
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.
It's a bug. Nowhere in any of the rationale you lay out is there anything about competence and active involvement/oversight on the part of the government. Neither major political party in the U.S. focuses on this, though the Republican mentality is largely that the government can never be competent. However, at a minimum, the government is the buying agent of the people in procuring infrastructure or infrastructure improvements. It sets the requirements, oversees execution, and signs off on the delivered products. Companies perform work, but their interests are not aligned with the interests of the taxpayers. Incompetent or unempowered government employees cannot prevent the abuse of the taxpayer by companies, nor can they establish boundary conditions for successful project completion. The checks you indicate, e.g., environmental review, are procedural devices that can have radically different outcomes depending on the competence of government employees.
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.
America was a democracy when we built the Interstate, TVA/Grand Coulee/Hoover, Manhattan Project, space program, etc. Many of these overran budgets and schedules, but they are there to see.
A bigger problem than our democratic system is our Republican ideology, which has lost the stomach for large-scale cooperation.
Most people wouldn't mind bringing back a non-military federal job guarantee in the form of returning the WPA in some form.
It won't be a particularly glorious or high paying job but I definitely believe such a program would have a place in rebuilding various pieces of infrastructure.
Ah, that tired old cliche. Basically every country on the planet is a "republic" (See People's Republic of China/etc, Islamic Republic of Iran, et al) and has a constitution. Your statement could be rephrased "America is a country". Turns out adjectives matter.
In any case, it doesn't really effect my first point, because whatever America's system of government is today, it's the same one as it was before.
To the actual point, all of these great projects for which we will be remembered by 25th century historians, ran over budget and over schedule, and we had people talk sh*t about them, and they got built anyway. Who remembers the naysayers (today it happens to be the Reagan/Trump Republicans, yesterday it was 'Whitey's on the moon')? Nobody. They are not memorable.
That said, as is always pointed out on HN, high-speed passenger rail doesn't make a lot of sense for this country at this point in time, it's a high-hanging fruit without that much juice. Better places to spend our billions.
Fair enough but it doesn't make the phrase "constitutional republic" any less meaningless in the context it was offered (saying America is not 'a democracy'), does it? Incidentally, aren't most of those monarchies constitutional (ie ceremonial) in which the public elect the actual government, thus in practice democratic?
> Only now, though, is it becoming apparent how costly the political choices have been. Collectively, they turned a project that might have been built more quickly and cheaply into a behemoth so expensive that, without a major new source of funding, there is little chance it can ever reach its original goal of connecting California’s two biggest metropolitan areas in two hours and 40 minutes.
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.
Being able to build infrastructure is a core state/social capacity that has to be improved; there's nothing special about trains. There's also no alternative, because roads, bridges, pipes, water filtration plants, transmission lines, fiber, power plants, refineries, etc. are all impacted by the exact same forces.
America did a spectacular job of redesigning society around maximizing car usage and continues to subsidize that pattern of land and resource use.
Even it's opponents, underestimated the cost. We knew it would never be $10 billion. It's rare that a boondoggle is such a doggle that even the opponents underestimated how much of a budget overrun it would be.
This kind of thing is what, to me, puts into doubt the idea of a full migration to electric ground transportation in anything less than a scale that could range between fifty and one hundred years.
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.
> Here in CA we've already have the government ask electric car owners to alter charging behavior due to power grid problems.
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.
Very few people charge their cars at the most expensive time of day anyways.
For about a 3-day period during a historical heat wave throughout California we all did have to reduce our electricity usage for about 3 hours each day, which was mainly AC but also charging electric cars.
To conclude based on this that the grid is broken or that electrical cars (which mostly charge at night) are going to result in the grid deteriorating further makes no sense through.
> To conclude based on this that the grid is broken or that electrical cars (which mostly charge at night) are going to result in the grid deteriorating further makes no sense through.
No, that is not what leads to the conclusion. The conclusion is based on two things: Physics and mathematics.
What is happening now is merely a preview of things to come if we don't have the right conversations or people, as you are doing, dismiss the warnings some of us are issuing without making any real effort to understand.
About five years ago I designed and built (as in, I did it myself) a 13 kW solar array at home. Far more than we needed to supply the house. The plan was to use some of that for electric vehicles once they became viable. Note I didn't just say "affordable". The term "viable" is meant to include the entire ecosystem. As a comparison, a gasoline-powered vehicle is viable because you can easily refuel it without even thinking about it and it can be maintained and repaired anywhere and almost by anyone.
Anyhow. This led to me devoting a lot of time for about a year to try to understand energy, climate change and electric transportation realities. What I mean by that is that I invested time and effort seeing just how well the math and physics of what we were (and are) being told, actually align.
What I discovered was a surprise to me: They do not.
I wrote some code to simulate power requirements for a varying scale of EV adoption, all the way up to 300 million vehicles --our current fleet. The simulation predicted a need of between 900 GW and 1400 GW in addition to existing capacity. The current US capacity is 1200 GW. In other words, we need to double our power generation capacity and double (or more) our ability to transport power. As it turns out, this prediction was reasonably accurate.
One of the often hand-wavy things people talk about or write in articles is energy, rather than power. This is a huge mistake. Energy is power delivered over time. One can make outlandish claims about energy while ignoring the time element.
When, in a state like California, you have 31 million [0] EV's plug in to charge at, say, 6:00 PM every night, what you need is power, instantaneously, not energy. The fact that you generated <pick a number> of energy in the prior n days means nothing in that moment unless the energy was stored for delivery as power to each car in that instant.
What I discovered is that, at the end of the day, the hand-wavy stories just don't hold up. As a hypothetical, if you consume ten days worth of stored energy in one to nine nights, you are still short. The truth turns out to be that the EV problem, ultimately, is about power, not energy.
One way I think of this is that all 13 million+ households in CA [1] suddenly get TWO 5-ton air conditioning systems that are turned on every night at 6 PM for several hours. That's what we are talking about. And, no, we don't have the power and, if we had it, we could not deliver it.
So, yes, very much so: The grid is broken (in that it just can't cope with these loads) and a large installed base of electric cars will cause severe grid deterioration in multiple ways.
We can stick our heads in the sand an pretend this isn't so today because EV owners live in a privileged environment where they can take as much power as they need from the system and people, for the most part, don't notice any issues. I am going to guess that if we double the installed base of EV's in CA --which is mostly concentrated in large urban areas-- people will start to notice and this will lead to very interesting outcomes. I could get ugly for EV owners in so many ways.
I don't know how else to say it. I have written a lot about this. People prefer to be dismissive and continue to exist in ignorance of our future reality. We can't even build a high speed train and now we are talking about a transition to EV's that will require a doubling our our power generation and delivery capacity (this is absolutely indisputable). Why aren't we talking about mass adoption of nuclear power? It's because the easy political gains are not there, that's why.
Why do you assume that every EV is going to charge immediately at 6 PM? Any reasonable software controlling those chargers is going to a.) at least delay that till 9 PM so that you aren't at peak rates and b.) stagger charging so that not everyone's EV charges at once.
> The CA high speed train started as a ten billion dollar promise.
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.
> I am reading prop1A, and it seems to propose that 9.95 billion is enough for a 800-mile railway.
What you linked to is the “argument and rebuttal”, which has…very little information, one way or another (though even there, both the argument for and the argument against clearly indicate that the bond issue is not the whole cost, the former noting “Matching private and federal funding to be identified BEFORE state bond funds are spent”, the latter indicating a potential $90 billion system cost.) The “analysis” has, as one might expect, the actual analysis, including this:
“The authority estimated in 2006 that the total cost to develop and construct the entire high-speed train system would be about $45 billion. While the authority plans to fund the construction of the proposed system with a combination of federal, private, local, and state monies, no funding has yet been provided.”
Exactly. It's amazing how uninformed people are. And then they go and vote.
People are lied to by politicians with agendas, they vote out of ignorance and then we all end-up paying for it. No state in the US is immune to this, but CA seems particularly good at it. This is why moving out of CA (personal and business) is a high priority for me. It just isn't as easy as one would wish it to be. When the time is right, we are gone and I'll take all the jobs we created with us.
It was sold as a ten billion dollar project. That what politicians drove into people's minds with their ads.
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.
Article misses the point that the cost and schedule overruns are really the whole point of the project. A project's nominal purpose -- train, tunnel, nuke plant -- is just there to fend off pressure to pull the plug. Sunk-cost fallacy keeps the money coming.
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.
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.