
Can America Still Build Big? A California Rail Project Raises Doubts - jseliger
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/25/us/california-high-speed-rail.html
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geophile
No, America cannot.

I visited Hoover Dam a few years ago. It is impossible for me to imagine a
project like that happening now. It was a massive project. The government saw
the need, put out the project for bids. The project was completed ahead of
time and under budget. It was a spectacular success.

During the tour, we walked through some of the offices -- clean, gleaming
corrdiors.

Now there were fewer regulations way back when the project was initiated. But
even ignoring slowdowns due to environmental concerns (for example), we all
know what would happen now. Democrats would be for it. Republicans would try
to block it (except for those whose districts would benefit directly.) If the
project were approved, it would be very late and way over budget. Hell, this
government can't even approve badly needed and overdue infrastructure
maintenance, (even though that would provide many of the jobs they are always
going on about).

My opinion, as a 62-year old American, is that this country is in an
irreversible decline.

~~~
femto
At the cost of 154+ deaths. That's one thing that has changed since the big
projects of last century: construction workers are no longer considered to be
part of the cost/benefit equation.

I'd argue that a contributing factor to the moderating of big projects is that
the world is now better instrumented and we have a better idea of the costs
and benefits of big projects, so a lot more goes into each decision and it's
harder to push things though on the basis of a grand vision.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoover_Dam#Construction_deaths](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoover_Dam#Construction_deaths)

~~~
KorematsuFred
Cost of life in USA has gone up significantly since then and hence people are
willing to put up with unreasonable and super expensive safety mechanisms
which bloat the entire project. USA could however use immigrants in such
projects with lower safety standards, something that most middle easterns
countries and our very close allies like Saudi Arabia has been doing.

Take above paragraph with a pinch of salt please.

Seriously speaking, large government projects are less about people and more
about misplaced priorities of politicians. California's rail project was
absolutely nonsensical and horribly bloated. Why do we even need a high speed
train between Merced and Bakersfield ? For cows ?

American private entrepreneurs are dreaming big. Those big dreams however are
getting realized only in areas government has not yet killed off with ultra
crazy regulations. Elon Musk alone is doing it with Giga Factory, SpaceX and
Teslas. Amazon through entering healthcare. Google is doing it through Google
brain and so on. There might not be huge structures built with human sacrifice
but the efforts gone into them are nevertheless equally spectacular.

America is building far bigger thing that benefits even the poor person in
remote village of India instead of dams and trains. You just need to look at
right locations. Also America doing it without risking lives of workers.

~~~
masonic

      Amazon through entering healthcare
    

What has Amazon accomplished in healthcare to date?

~~~
KorematsuFred
Not right now, but they will in a big way.

~~~
dmanley
Unless they get into US health insurance, they are not going to have that much
of a difference in US health Care.

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leepowers
> Mr. Richard said California’s strict environmental regulations have become a
> pretext for anyone who wanted to stop the project.

> “The environmental process has become about litigation protection,” he said.
> “You’re going to get sued so you’ve got to go out and basically do process
> upon process, study upon study to make sure that somebody cannot find some
> toehold for litigation.”

Not to knock on the environmental regulations but I think this illustrates why
big monolith projects tend be very difficult or to fail outright. In the U.S.
the system is setup to completely de-risk large-scale construction projects.
We want a large project with a huge footprint to have zero environmental
impact, zero negative impact on any community, displace no workers, and
benefit every potential stakeholder. No trade-offs allowed: either everybody
wins or the project is not completed or even started.

So the era of big top-down monoliths may be over in the U.S. Local, low impact
solutions like Seattle's Link light rail are the future.

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sonnyblarney
It's possible that there are very specific aspects of this project that make
it not a very good example.

Cali is big, and SF is quite a piece away from LA with not that-that much in
between. That's a lot of km.

Consider that you can connect London, Paris, Frankfurt, the Rhine Valley and
the entirety of Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg - with less track
distance. Or roughly.

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partiallypro
Absolutely we can, the problem is that the California Rail project was a
boondoggle from the start.

~~~
ur-whale
We can't, because we're slowly turning into Europe: old, arthritic, short-
sighted, and with complete tunnel vision.

America was the one civilization that could have proven wrong the
inevitability of the (rise-apogee-decadence) cycle ... looks like it wont.
That's very sad.

~~~
bryanlarsen
Europe can do mega projects:
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gotthard_Base_Tunnel](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gotthard_Base_Tunnel)

~~~
ur-whale
That's in Switzerland.

Switzerland is not exactly a standard part of Europe: it's not in the EU, it's
much more capitalist than the rest of Europe and certainly not a country
that's following the current downward socialist path to Venezuela-style hell
many other European countries are on.

If anything Switzerland is closer in spirit to the US than most other European
countries.

~~~
Daishiman
Nice goalpost moving there. So... not Europe, but then all of Europe except
Switzerland. Next up someone's going to bring in the high-speed rail in Spain,
the Rotterdam port modernization, and so on.

Europe can do it, end of story.

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lazide
The problem in California is that none of the folks involved in building it
think finishing it would really benefit them. I've had family members involved
in numerous public works projects in California, and once they saw the way the
sausage is made, all decided to get out.

These projects are setup as a way to extract money from taxpayers, through a
relatively well developed process now: 1) Write an initiative/tax statement
which promises the world. 2) Once it passes, laugh and start doing engineering
planning based on the most naive/known to be wrong set of assumptions. 3) Once
you hit the first roadblock, escalate it and require change orders ($$). This
often doesn't require doing any actual on the ground construction work. In
fact, many of these boondogles (Caltrain electrification?) never hit actual
construction after 5-10 yrs of this. 4) Redo the entire set of plans at great
expense, but without actual forward thinking. Hit the next roadblock, rinse
and repeat prior steps.

This allows them to funnel billions into friendly firms that produce plans
that never get used, doing studies that no one will read.

Since no one with any clout actually cares if this thing gets built (not like
they will use it, and most of the wealthy donors/voters they care about likely
won't either), no rush as long as they have something to point to showing they
are doing 'something'

Eventually, when the money runs low, make up a sob story blaming someone else
for it, and go back to step 1.

When someone actually cares, we still build things quickly - the Oroville dam
fixes, replacing the I80 overpass when the tanker truck burned it down, etc.

The problem is less that we can't build big things - it's that most of the
time, we don't actually NEED to (in a real, existential way) - at least in the
opinion of those with actual power.

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SurrealSoul
This doesn't stop private corporations from attempting. The Hyper loop and
whatever they are calling the subway system that they are developing are
"developing" still.

New York is adding a pretty massive LIRR line, so it seems like things are
going ok

~~~
Gpetrium
Some of the legislations implemented in the past 50 years has led to a bunch
of projects becoming prohibitively expensive, even for the private sector. The
Hyper Loop is a good example of the exceptions.

~~~
setpatchaddress
Hyperloop is not an exception. The technology is not the actual problem. The
problem is right-of-way. Hyperloop, light rail, monorail, pneumatic tube,
whatever, you need someplace to run the line.

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Tsubasachan
I think America lacks a long term vision and a strong central government to
plow on.

Yes the project will take 10 years more than it was scheduled and cost 200%
extra but so what? A week after the railway is in use everyone will have
forgotten about all those issues. A good railway system lasts a hundred years.

