All the best engineering advice I stole from non-technical people

Re:All the best engineering advice I stole from non-technica... by bluGill on Monday August 05, 2019 @09:07AM (#20613845)

Transit advocates have done a lot of work figuring out why costs are so high. Turns out they don't have to be: Barcelona has significantly lower costs than anyone else doing similar scope projects. However Barcelona is in Spain where they speak Spanish so it is hard to learn from them.

I've seen many analysis of the situation pointing to all kinds of different "reasons". Many of those reasons have been rebutted by someone else. I cannot figure out who is right or what factors cause things, but the bottom line is some places transit costs a lot more than others after you factor in cost of labor and land which seem like the only things that should be different.

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Re:All the best engineering advice I stole from non-technica... by fnord123 on Monday August 05, 2019 @05:26PM (#20619171)

>However Barcelona is in Spain where they speak Spanish so it is hard to learn from them.

Federal infrastructure projects are in Spanish.

But here is a report in English anyway:

http://www.mega-project.eu/assets/exp/resources/High_Speed_R...

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Re:All the best engineering advice I stole from non-technica... by foldr on Monday August 05, 2019 @09:37AM (#20614060)

> However Barcelona is in Spain where they speak Spanish so it is hard to learn from them.

I believe it's about 50/50 Spanish/Catalan in Barcelona.

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Re:All the best engineering advice I stole from non-technica... by bluGill on Monday August 05, 2019 @09:57AM (#20614232)

It is complex. I haven't been there is years, but in general Barcelona everybody speaks Spanish and is learning Catalan. It might be 50/50 now, but Spanish is likely to be the language they speak better. As you leave the city Catalan is more common.

Either way though, they don't speak the same language as the people who want to know what they are doing different.

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Re:All the best engineering advice I stole from non-technica... by foldr on Monday August 05, 2019 @12:04PM (#20615196)

Yes, their wisdom can only be accessed by 500 million Spanish speakers, including around 50 million in the USA.

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Re:All the best engineering advice I stole from non-technica... by bluGill on Monday August 05, 2019 @02:58PM (#20617351)

It isn't just the USA: India has mass transit construction cost problems and could learn - if only they shared a language. Not to mention France (France is better at controlling costs than the US, but still not cheap)

In the US Spanish speakers tend to be poor and thus not in position to do anything about costs if they did look into it.

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Re:All the best engineering advice I stole from non-technica... by foldr on Monday August 05, 2019 @04:56PM (#20618849)

I'm sure Indians who wanted to go over to Barcelona to learn about the transit system would have difficulty finding a common language, or paying for a couple of translators.

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Re:All the best engineering advice I stole from non-technica... by papln on Monday August 05, 2019 @12:09PM (#20615231)

I assume you are making a sly joke, because even if the USA didn't have plenty of Spanish speakers, Barcelona has plentyof English speakers.

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Re:All the best engineering advice I stole from non-technica... by bluGill on Monday August 05, 2019 @03:04PM (#20617453)

I wouldn't expect the people in their transit department are hired for their English ability. Since Spanish and Catalan are important languages there I would expect that I need to learn at least one of them to learn from there. Of course if Spain wanted to teach the world how they do it English would make more sense as it is the dominate trade language today - but I can't think of any reason why Spain would care to teach others. It thus is on the rest of the world to learn Spanish to learn from them.

We might be able to learn from the Chinese or Russians. I'm not sure what their cost structures are like. Learning best practices from high cost areas won't help you control costs, which rules out all English speaking countries.

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Re:All the best engineering advice I stole from non-technica... by bluGill on Tuesday August 06, 2019 @10:04AM (#20625244)

https://pedestrianobservations.com/2019/07/22/new-report-on-...

I forgot about this joke yesterday, but it is a better reply than my previous ones.

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Re:All the best engineering advice I stole from non-technica... by jimktrains2 on Monday August 05, 2019 @11:21AM (#20614877)

> However Barcelona is in Spain where they speak Spanish so it is hard to learn from them.

I'm confused by this sentence.

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