[wpietri]

For sure. I think a lot of this is just about how heavy the planning cycles are. A lot of stuff like that is developed through big, waterfall planning efforts and large outsourcing contracts. Most of the choices were made before they had their first user, and once it's all installed any revision would be a) expensive, and b) a black eye for the people in charge.

And in some ways I don't blame people for doing this, because you need really supportive stakeholders to work in an iterative fashion. Otherwise you get a ton of nitpicking that amounts to a lot of "why didn't you guess 100 perfectly everything up front" and "how can we start if you can't give me a full plan and a firm price?" In a blame-hungry environment, waterfall is the safest choice for the people doing the project.

[asdff]

I think a lot of projects have adopted a ritualism around an ideal that only exist in renders vs actual learned pragmatism as well. Despite these glaring shortcomings that I really must not be the only one to realize, the system still creates new stations or other infrastructure beholden to the same shortcomings. Pro transit journalists have their work cut out for them: it's so easy to ding these builds on a usual laundry list of items, but somehow the engineers are like automatons who blindly follow prescription probably from a higher form of government and one again, never seem to test the system beyond simulation I'd presume. How do you fix this? It seems so fouled from the top authority mandating stupid infrastructure to the bottom subcontractors who are hired to implement these plans and use their influence to perpetuate such byzantine planning, where they will be the most qualified contractors to bid on future projects. The inertia of these maligned incentives seems insurmountable. Everything seems so rotten and hard to fix without a total reset.

[wpietri]

For sure. One way I'll talk about this is, "The biggest fantasy novels I've read are project plans." Everybody coalesces around a vision quite detached from reality and then just kind of lives in it for years. It's a weird sort of collective arrogance/faith.

There are alternatives, though! In Rother's "Toyota Kata", he describes a Toyota practice where they pick some far-off goal (which I think is called a "target condition"). That can be something that nobody knows how to do. Then they take one step in that direction and reassess. Over time the path might be somewhat wandering as they learn what works and what doesn't. Or they might revise the goal based on new knowledge. But they keep going, step by step.

That's a lot like short-cycle iterative software processes. Which I know work, because I've used them for many projects. But even software, which is infinitely soft, often gets the same sort of fantasy-driven planning.

I think you're right that the ultimate problem is how authority behaves, and at least in the US there's a terrible managerial culture that this is embedded in. My solution has been to find small pockets of sanity, but I've not figured out how to scale that up. But you might find some hope in this Mary Poppendieck talk, where she explains that it hasn't always been this way: https://www.infoq.com/presentations/tyranny-of-plan/