Forego those "bullshit industrial complex" studies, and there'll be some environmental, safety or cost fuck-up. Outside observers will then get to comment derisively on lack of foresight or planning, so it's really a win-win for us.
>It seems like there must be a way to go back to building stuff as fast as we could 100 years ago in the US.
There is. Forego a lot of the building/safety code, cut corners, and optimize speed over all else.
>In China they can still build that way today[0][1] in a way I find embarrassing and annoying.
Imagine how embarrassing and annoying it must be for Chinese people to see the relatively sub-par quality of the end result.
>How different would the world be if in 3 months SF build 19 giant skyscrapers full of apartments you would want to live in?
I can almost guarantee it would not happen. They can build it, but it's not likely to be an apartment I would want to live in, at least long term.
Don't get me wrong, there's certainly a middle-ground somewhere between the extremes you're talking about. However, when it comes to, say, transit, I'd much rather aim for a first-world country that builds "less slowly" and cheaper without compromising safety or quality, like Spain or the Netherlands, over a place like China, which may set the record for speed but won't be setting any records for quality or longevity of its infrastructure. (And I'd even say that's okay for China, they need it deployed quickly because they, until recently, were growing fast from a very low baseline.)
there's no evidence that infrastructure projects in china, built for 1/3 of the price of what it would cost in the US, is any less quality. In fact, things like highspeed rail is much higher quality, due to leap-frogging of technology!
His greatest frustration was the lack of quality in the finished buildings he'd design. As he put it, the designs that Chinese firms were putting out were just as high quality as anything in the rest of the world, but the end result was always worse. It was largely procedural -- in the US, the architect is involved not only during the initial design phases, but throughout the project, and is responsible approving any changes and for certifying that the result matches the intent. In China, that's not the case -- they make a design, bundle it up, and then hand everything over the contractor. The contractor then makes whatever changes they want during the construction process, without any input from the architects. This means materials may get changed, the wrong construction methods may be used, etc, and no-one knows. From a distance, the building will look amazing, but the details will have been skimped on.
That said, I'm not certain that engineers are in a different situation. Judging by videos I've seen of collapsing buildings and other issues, I wouldn't be surprised if structural, electrical, plumbing, and other engineers also hand over their designs in the beginning, and then leave it to the developer / contractor to interpret them and 'value-engineer' as they see fit.
when i visited beijing about 10 years ago, i was astonished at how much construction was going on, and i could see that the sheer amount of construction happening would make it seem like there were more issues than here in the US. without more concrete data, i'd be skeptical of that kind of anecdote simply playing into our own biases.
In the US architectural process, an architect specifies a particular material (say a roof sealant) that has certain characteristics. During construction, the contractor will look at the material, check its price, and then use their suppliers to see what the best available deal is. The contractor identifies another roof sealant that's half the price. Because they've bid on the project for a fixed price, if they can use that other product and cut their costs, they'll increase their profit margin. So they put in a change request and submit the new product with its data. The architect may review it, see that it is functionally the same as their specified product, and approve it. Or they may look at it and determine that while they're both roof sealants, the specified one has a 10 year lifespan, and the proposed alternate has a 2 year lifespan. They reject it, and the builder uses the specified material.
Without the architect verifying that the material is comparable, the contractor (intentionally or not) will use a lower-quality material that will lessen the quality of the building, because there are no checks in place.
That’s honestly just cope. China has the best rail network in the world by far and there’s really nothing even close to what they’ve accomplished in about 15 years.
In the time the US has been twiddling their thumbs planning and throwing billions at contractors to consider high speed rail and scams like hyper loop, China went from 0 miles of high speed rail to thousands.
There’s a lot of cruft in construction in the US and it’s impossible to deny. I lived near a highway that was being repaired for years. It was ongoing before I moved to that city and apparently only finished after I moved out 5 years later. Thorough environmental checks for building dams, okay. But just build a goddamn road—especially when all you’re doing is fixing what’s there. Quit selling it out to your biggest donor/lowest bidder. Pay someone who delivers results with a record to back it up even if the initial budget looks higher.
Infrastructure is like a pair of boots. Pay a little extra now and you’ll quickly realize why it’s good you didn’t cheap out.
That safety record is equivalent to commercial aviation in the US.
While this may be true for many shady developer-led real estate projects, it's absolutely not the case for the country's major infrastructure projects like airports, subways, high speed rail, highways, bridges, dams, etc. They rival or surpass anything you will see in the west in scope and quality, and built in a fraction of the time.
I mean, just look at any other developed country like France and look at how they can still build things at a reasonable pace while doing environmental studies. Everyone knows that environmental studies in the US are insane, you just have to read one to be convinced of it.
https://www.justice.gov/enrd/history-federal-use-eminent-dom...
In China they just move everyone
So what? Are you the only person that matters? How about the intern at tech company. How about the guy that cleans the offices.
Should the have to rent a house 2h away and then be forced to buy an old shitty polluting car, wasting 5h of their life and polluting the whole area instead? Is that a better result.
And of course if you do it correct and you don't just build dumb towers, you can pretty easly build nice high density neighborhoods where people wont need a car and you can get density not unlike huge skyscrapers.
Yes, they too deserve safe accommodations.
>Should the have to rent a house 2h away and then be forced to buy an old shitty polluting car, wasting 5h of their life and polluting the whole area instead?
The issue in California is not at all that apartment buildings take too long to construct due to pesky safety and building codes. The issue is that NIMBYs prevent them from being constructed at all.
>And of course if you do it correct and you don't just build dumb towers, you can pretty easly build nice high density neighborhoods where people wont need a car and you can get density not unlike huge skyscrapers.
So you agree with me. Didn't sound like it at first, so it's a bit confusing.
What has to be understood about the situation back then is that he was responsible for a totally undemocratic infrastructure companies. If he built a bridge, he could collect tolls, and then build more infrastructure with those tolls. So in effect, he was operating basically an infrastructure business. And not just any old infrastructure business, he basically controlled access to one of the world major cities. He was more powerful then the major or any elected official.
Today the process just incredibly different. Today there are about 500 steps of 'public engagement' that have to be cleared. Funding has to be pulled together from lots of source, federal, state, local, private and so on. This basically leads to a situation where no city can really do anything for itself, it always requires far more. And on all levels a project needs to be agree on. When the federal government was pushing highways based on the Moses template, there was a top town push, the states bought in and the cities happy plowed over their cities to build highways.
Today for most of these policies there is no clear aliened solution. For a while the Obama administration was pushing 'light rail' and a few such systems got built by cities tried to hook into that subsidy. But then not really much expand unfriendly beyond that. And instead of looking at 'what is the right public transit solution' cities instead will just check what subsidies does the federal or state government provide that we can use to invest in public transit. State DoT meanwhile have been historically created to build highways, and that is really what they are good at and focus on, so if you build a highway, state will likely give you money, if you build a bikelane the state wont. Even worse the state DoT will just plan a highway threw your city and you can't stop it.
And then of course there is the environment piece. Almost any tram line will be better for the environment then using the car. But the horrible bad for the environment existing infrastructure, the 20-lane highway doesn't have to clear 'environment' review. It might have to clear some if you want to extend an existing highway, but that's much easier. So the burden put on new infrastructure projects, is far larger then the burden put on existing systems.
But the problem is really even deeper then those first other problems. The whole land use polices the US has done for 60 years is hurting the country when it comes to public transport (trains, trams and so on). Because of the sprawl style of development cities are broke and can't even fix or maintain existing road and water infrastructure. The city center and the poor parts of the city are systematically subsidizing the sub-burbs. The politically influential suburb of course do not want to finance city center public transit because are not well connected. But they do support another lane of highway that they use to get into the city. A transit line into the suburbs never makes money because you simply can not connect suburbs because there is just to much sprawl, not enough density for it to make sense.
When you do, your train station just ends up being a gigantic parking lot, see for example Torronto Go network. Granted this is better then not having rail at all, but far from ideal.
So, to even start to fix this, and start to make sensible public project choices and investments a lot has to change. First of all the tax system has to change to reflect reality (example being a land tax rather then a property tax). Shitty parking lots and cheap warehouse building shouldn't get better taxes then nice mixed-use apartments. Your infrastructure cost and income have to be realigned, suburbs need to be systematically pay more in fees for utilities to reflect the much higher infrastructure costs. Then you have to reform the zoning code so that you allow mixed use and higher density almost everywhere. Your environmental review process has to acknowledge some fundamental truths about the current system and what it replaces. Then you have to start building your transit together with redevelopment of areas to get higher ridership and higher (property/land) tax from those lines.
At that point these infrastructure projects will still be expensive and over budget, but at least you will get results were people 5 years later say 'well at least we got this amazing infrastructure' and don't remember how much it cost. Because at least you overpaid for right project, an not another lane on the highway that you would have also overpaid for, just with worse result.
Here is the thing, in countries like Switzerland, infrastructure often goes over budget as well. And so did high speed trains in most countries. But if you do it correctly, it still ends up being a good deal. If California does this right, and starts also connecting local rail and builds a true integrated rail system across of all of California, with a high speed back bone, these high cost will be more then worth it.
I strongly recommend 'urban3' check on youtube or their website. They do real data analysis of cities and show in data visualization where your city is losing money and where its making money. You can also see where public transit increases property taxes. Cities need to take that into account and focus their limited funds on places where they are making money (very often the poor districts actually should be more of the budget).
Here are some case studies:
I mean, considering how the Millennium Tower is tilting so badly, I'd give such blitzed construction a hard pass. And anything in the collapse zones too.
A year or two ago I read the book The Power Broker about a guy who was responsible for a lot of the construction in new york city in fairly corrupt ways. You get the idea in the book that they were just figuring out the earliest versions of ballooning costs and slowing projects down in those days.
In the same way private contractors benefit from the military industrial complex and are incentivized to keep it alive and even promote conflict, We have a sort of bullshit industrial complex too of consultants and other nonsense jobs that come in and make projects take longer.
It seems like there must be a way to go back to building stuff as fast as we could 100 years ago in the US.
In China they can still build that way today[0][1] in a way I find embarrassing and annoying.
Patrick Collison explores this idea some on this page[2]. I consider it to be one of the most important problems of the modern age.
How different would the world be if in 3 months SF build 19 giant skyscrapers full of apartments you would want to live in?
Some of these problems are exacerbated by the fact that even if you could do it now, capital isn't as cheap as it used to be. Which makes it even more frustrating that we went through that period without massive infrastructure updates and improvements.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OWp6vSHFG4M
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N6f_sayw0mM
[2] https://patrickcollison.com/fast