
Why Does Infrastructure Cost So Much? - jseliger
https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2019/7/31/why-does-infrastructure-cost-so-much
======
heymijo
I think infrastructure in some places in the U.S. ends up looking a bit like a
ponzi scheme.

Example city--Charlotte, NC. Down south in Charlotte there is an area called
Ballantyne. Ballantyne has good schools, new everything, etc.

Ballantyne also has high taxes.

So what do people do?

Move 5-10 minutes down the road into South Carolina where there is abundant
land. They start developing. More people move in. Schools are built. They fill
up. They build new ones. People complain about the old two lane country roads
so they are expanded.

Taxes go up to support this.

Then either people keep playing the move game to a new undeveloped area or the
ROI calculation that nobody does on infrastructure catches up with the town.
Some can support it, others can't and it's a downward spiral.

I'm not sure I've explained this well. I mostly think about this from the
human POV, which I didn't even mention above. The rational thing for someone
living in the high tax area is to go to the new area as it is developing and
everything is new and then to decamp before things go so far downhill that
property values drop.

Game theory? Tragedy of the Commons? What all is at play here and then as
importantly, how do we do better?

~~~
ellius
It's sort of a "Tragedy of Systems." It's very easy for negligent or malicious
actors to make bad decisions in a system context, but to have the consequences
of those decisions not manifest in the same time or place as where the
decision occurred. This makes it really easy to screw things up without
suffering the consequences in complex systems, and people often make decisions
for their personal benefit ignorant of or willfully ignoring the consequences.

~~~
khawkins
I think all of the above comments hint at this but don't state this
explicitly:

One of the general problems with growth is that it always and necessarily
plateaus, and the growth stage has different dynamics compared to the plateau
stage. When your town/business/country is growing it is easy to leverage the
future because there is more wealth to spare.

In the growth period, investing in a new park/office space/spending program is
totally rational if it helps improve growth and quality of life now, given
that repaying that debt will be easy later. But once growth slows down, our
expectations of progress must also wane. This is hard for many people to
accept because they think that past growth was paid for with past success,
when the reality is that it was paid for with current success.

~~~
heymijo
> _because they think that past growth was paid for with past success, when
> the reality is that it was paid for with current success._

Wow, great contribution. I appreciate so much when anyone can pull a nugget
out of my ramblings and explain it back to me in a clearer way.

To add on to what you said and to bring this back to infrastructure, I think
another challenge in the plateau phase is that you either need to spend a lot
to keep old infrastructure working or massively reinvest to upgrade the
infrastructure. If you've plateaued without expectations of future success,
where do you get the funds to do either?

------
danans
> If we made the assembly of steel, concrete, and asphalt cheaper, do you
> think suburban mayors would stop demanding we build them big box
> interchanges?

I generally agree with many of Strong Towns' arguments, but this really seems
to miss the mark. The reason why major infrastructure projects like
regional/urban rail systems, tunnels, etc are so expensive vs other
_developed_ countries isn't due to the cost of commodities like concrete or
steel.

It's due to the lack of sufficient domestic expertise in designing, managing,
and building such large scale works.

Because we don't build that scale of project frequently in the US, when we do
it, we don't do it as efficiently. A recent example would be the use of the
incorrect grade of steel in San Francisco's new Chinatown subway line.

OTOH, we have huge amounts of experience building big box stores, parking
lots, and freeways, which are the sort of infrastructure that the Strong Towns
perspective says (correctly IMO) that we don't need so much of.

We need to build infrastructure with higher utilization, which therefore
doesn't need to rely on what Strong Towns describes as the Growth Ponzi
Scheme, but unfortunately that's exactly the sort of infrastructure that we
are not very good at building.

~~~
erentz
Two things this makes me think of.

1\. The US has a large NIH attitude and is unwilling to adopt overseas
experience or standards.

2\. Somehow we have to move away from building infrastructure as stepwise huge
mega projects. And start building infrastructure as an ongoing incremental and
reliable program into perpetuity. E.g. instead of CAHSR designed largely as a
dedicated rail system with huge up front capital costs the benefits of which
can’t be felt until it is all spent, set up a state rail agency to consolidate
and consistently fund incremental improvements to the rail system, with
incremental ROW purchases and improvements that over time reach the really big
HSR goals. Imagine for example CAHSRs capital budget of $80 billion but
instead going to fund an agency for 30 years that can then hire engineers and
project managers and allocate it to its projects that have the best ROI over
30 years.

That last one seems to primarily be a political challenge though. Nobody likes
state run agencies and everyone loves defunding them.

~~~
stellar678
Right on! Was just driving Oakland to Sacramento last week and lamenting the
fact there isn’t a semi-high speed train tracking the freeways all the way out
there. So much of our exurban sprawl puts people on 2 hour commutes along that
route, seems like a perfect candidate for an incremental rail system.

~~~
mateo411
It does seem like a good idea. Happily, this already exists.

[https://www.capitolcorridor.org](https://www.capitolcorridor.org)

~~~
stellar678
Yeah, Capitol Corridor is great! I wonder what it would take to convert a
bunch of those folks who jam up 80 and 680 every day into riders ... I suppose
it’s more complicated than just moving the right-of-way and stations into the
more populated areas.

~~~
hapless
Well, why didn’t _you_ ride it?

The central problem in traffic congestion is all those other drivers ;)

~~~
stellar678
Off peak travel time, and my destination was waaaay past Sacramento. For
journeys like that, a two lane highway would be totally adequate. But the
massive crush of traffic at commute time is another story...

The observation was really about freeways being built on valuable land taken
under eminent domain by the state while passenger rail is mostly relegated to
being a second class citizen on freight routes laid out 150 years ago.

------
DataGata
The Strong Towns line is a pretty simple one, and this article simply
reiterates on it: Nobody does ROI calculations on infrastructure costs and it
will catch up with you sooner or later.

It might be compared to technical debt for the HN crowd: you build fast and
break things for a couple of decades (post-WW2) and then suddenly you find
yourself with an unimaginably complex, catatonic system that can't pay for
itself. The interest payments overwhelm the rest of the system.

However! That doesn't actually answer the question about why _new_
infrastructure costs so much (surely a new subway line doesn't actually care
if half the roads are ten years behind their maintenance schedule).

~~~
robocat
> Nobody does ROI calculations on infrastructure costs

Strongtowns have a great article about costs and benefits
[https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2010/12/21/best-of-
blog-...](https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2010/12/21/best-of-blog-costs-
and-benefits.html) which makes some fantastic points about bogus numbers, and
about how spending $ without gaining $ is a failure mode.

However, sometimes I feel they sideline the point that our government taxes us
to provide shared infrastructure (legal, social, transport, hospitals,
education, etc) and to prevent the tragedy of the commons.

Money spent to encourage social goals can be worthwhile or not, independent of
the financial balance. Spending money that saves everyone time can be
worthwhile, even if the tax base is not increased proportionally (the linked
article disagrees with this). Edit: if the government taxes me $x for an
hour's work, and spends $x to save me more than an hours drive, that is good
economics for everyone even though the government hasn't increased tax
returns.

Anyone who has been to some poor countries can viscerally understand the value
of roading infrastructure, the value of social trust "infrastructure", or the
value of safety and health improvements.

We can all see waste and bogus numbers in our governments, but yet most of us
wouldn't move to a more anarchic country. We should fight against government
waste and misincentives, but we should encourage improvements to our common
good (the opposite of a tragedy).

~~~
burlesona
Just FWIW, the Strong Towns team would mostly agree with what you're
saying.[1]

Chuck would liken spending public money on things that don't have a measurable
return on investment to "ice cream." There's room for ice cream in life. The
problem is when its your entire diet.

What we're more worried about is that cities are losing so much money on bad
investments that they're increasingly unable to afford "bread and butter," let
alone ice cream.

And to be clear, as a response to this problem Strong Towns doesn't advocate
stopping all spending/investment, but rather to take a careful approach that
seeks to invest in things that produce a return, so the city will have more
resources over time, so that there's money to pay for ice cream :)

I understand why you might get your impression though. Strong Towns content
mostly is a blog stream and you can read a lot of it without getting the
entire picture. Chuck's book is coming out pretty soon [2], and I think
that'll help. The book boils down the entire Strong Towns "philosophy" (if you
will) into something you can read in a day.

[1] Source: I'm on the board.

[2]
[https://www.strongtowns.org/strongamerica](https://www.strongtowns.org/strongamerica)

------
Balgair
I have some family in the large public works business, so I have some
persepctive here.

Large public works projects are really expensive and take a lot of know-how to
get done _properly_. It's only been since the 70's that we've had the
engineering chops to even understand how ground water works around a dam [0]
let alone what to do with the older dams. The computer models of how the soil
works around the transbay tube duing an earthquake is basically guessing, we
just don't have good data. Heck, even with good models and good firms, you
still have to just pray that the rain isn't too bad for a few years.

One of the main issues is that we just do not have a good idea what the
ground/climate is doing over a 50 year timeline here in the US. Look at all
the cliff-side houses in Santa Barbara, or the houses along the Mississippi,
or the houses in Paradise. As such, it's very hard to insure, plan, and
estimate what kinds of tolerances the public works should be built to.

To do things _properly_ is basically a guess most of the time. As such, when
that gamble fails, the clean-up is really something.

[0]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0EzoHXEzdwY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0EzoHXEzdwY)
esp. around minute 3.

~~~
thephyber
> or the houses along the Mississippi

This one is different from the rest.

People have lived along the Mississippi for hundreds of years and the river
reliably floods beyond its banks every. single. year.

The problem with dwellings along the Mississippi is the "moral hazard" by
allowing the US Federal Government to insure these houses without
preconditions and never denying a claim, despite the fact that one property
has flooded more than 53 times in the last 50 years (claiming on flood
insurance every single time).

I would argue that it's just not politically sexy to say "I am going to
maintain this X" as it is to say "We are going to build this Y". They are the
"blocking and tackling", but the voters are in the stands waiting for the
quarterback drops back to pass long.

~~~
jjeaff
If it is flooding that frequently, I wonder if there is any required proof
that things were fixed up since the last flood?

Seems like the owner is likely just making cheap patches and then waiting for
the next flood to collect another payment.

Otherwise, I can't imagine anyone wanting to go through that every year.

------
Scoundreller
I feel like eBay is like this.

Everything is a new front end on top of a new front end.

Every once in a while, you’ll get directed toward some ancient looking page
designed for 800x600 that’s running everything.

Particularly on the account payments side.

~~~
gamblor956
If the accounts payable system is still working and can handle eBay's volume,
why spend the money to "upgrade" it?

Not everything old needs to be remade anew.

~~~
elliekelly
I once worked with a company where this line of thinking had infected all of
senior management. That’s how they ended up with an “intranet” that consisted
of a shared excel workbook with hyperlinks to hundreds of other shared files.

But it wasn’t broken, so why spend the money on SharePoint, right?

~~~
awakeasleep
I'm not being facetious when I say I'd prefer a spreadsheet with links to
Sharepoint. At least you can ctrl+f the spreadsheet.

------
robocat
Cost-benefit analysis is an engineering solution to a political problem - it
seems great but it doesn't solve political issues.

In NZ potential changes to the national road system are ranked by cost versus
benefit. Only the most beneficial projects are commenced, and low or negative
value projects are not funded. Projects must also exceed a minimum benefit vs
cost ratio.

The political problem is that national infrastructure project spending and
lending is seen as overwhelmingly occurring in Auckland.

Cost-benefit leads to perceived imbalance because costs are massive in
Auckland but the benefits are huge too (a large population, multiplied by
large congestion).

~~~
DataGata
Is that a political problem? Surely, a person who lives in rural NZ might
think, "Oh, my tax dollars are being used to help those in Auckland; I'm being
shafted", but if NZ is anything like the United States, urban centers are the
producers of tax units and rural areas consume tax units.

~~~
seem_2211
It's worth pointing out that Auckland has recently added a regional fuel tax
to pay for some of their roading infrastructure.

I haven't lived in NZ for a few years now, but I grew up there. I wouldn't be
surprised if your analysis on urban vs. rural centers being producers vs.
consumers might be slightly off as the economy is heavily dependent on
agriculture etc.

New Zealand has two major problems: 1: Housing is completely out of touch with
reality in Auckland (and to a lesser extent in all major centers). Auckland is
one of the least affordable cities in the world to live in, and unlike San
Francisco, lacks an industry that pays enough to keep up. 2: The regions are
suffering from a death by 1000 cuts type scenario.

I have a working theory that the move towards bigger and better and more
powerful cities has been one of our gravest errors in modern urban planning.

------
maximente
this seems like a natural end to the author's aptly named 'Suburban
Experiment'. once these true costs are factored in and some really unpleasant
decisions made, it's not unreasonable to think that a lot of smaller tier
cities/burbs will fold up due to a cycle of tax increases due to true revenue
required => people leave => less tax base => death.

but honestly, that seemingly had to happen. the true cost of 'burbs is just
way higher than anyone wanted to admit (or tax). the huge overhead of services
+ spreading them out over massive areas (relative to dense cities) seems to be
untenable long term.

~~~
asdff
The suburb where I grew up is like this. The city can't get any tenants for
vacant commercial and industrial lots. The school district is loosing
enrollment and closing branches. Recently trash and recycling has been
privatized. The budget hole cannot be closed because the governor cut funding
to municipalities. I think it's starting to hit a bottom though. While there
isn't any new construction to speak of, as boomers pass or move a surprising
amount of younger families are moving in, probably because houses are only
100-200k.

I don't know what the end results look like. More ebb and flow I guess. I will
say that this is a middle-middle class suburb; the upper middle class suburb
it borders with the excellent school district and an equinox is doing great
with homes selling for north of 500k.

------
someguydave
Demand for new infrastructure competes with maintenance of old infrastructure,
so decades of overbuilding will eventually exhaust the supply of construction
services.*

*who are willing to deal with government red tape

~~~
bilbo0s
Around here, it's not inaccurate to state that the construction services are
the ones who _created_ the red tape. Politicians and construction firms around
here concert to keep a steady stream of money flowing to only designated
buckets. So not only are they willing to deal with it, but they would very
much protest if it weren't there.

I try to keep in mind that it might be for the purposes of creating BS jobs
for economic purposes. But here in Wisconsin, and everywhere else too
probably, there is definitely a very large element of skimming tax revenue by
funneling it to your buddies.

~~~
heymijo
I wish everyone had the knowledge of The Power Broker by Robert Caro in their
heads. It's a mammoth book, mainly talks about early 20th century NYC
development, but my god is it enlightening into how infrastructure got built.

------
viburnum
I see a lot of comments here are missing the point. America just has too much
infrastructure (roads for cars), spread way too thin. Walkable, bikeable
neighborhoods require much less in the way of paving, highways, interchanges,
etc. It's way cheaper to invest in places for people than it is to try to
solve every problem with more concrete.

------
ralusek
This is, IMO, a terrible article that doesn't even begin to discuss any of the
reasons why infrastructure in the US costs so much.

~~~
dkhenry
The article gives two reasons. The first starts in the paragraph that begins
with

    
    
      The first underlying driver of U.S. infrastructure costs is that the U.S. has felt so rich as a country that, for decades, we spent freely on infrastructure and never asked serious questions about the return on that investment
    

And then lists some of the things we spend freely on that aren't really
necessary. The second reason is

    
    
      The second underlying driver of U.S. infrastructure costs is how deeply embedded infrastructure spending is within our model of economic growth.
    

both of those essentially boil down to we spend so much because the market is
set up to encourage us to spend a lot. Probably not the answer you were
looking for, but at the end of the day we spend so much money because we have
set up the market to enable high prices.

~~~
someguydave
The underlying factor really is that the people in charge of spending
infrastructure money are not really incentivized to be careful or ask tough
questions about how it is being spent. Furthermore, they are often bound by
piles of regulations and restrictions on their freedom for contracting the
work, so they also lack agency.

~~~
IfOnlyYouKnew
Yeah, that's just the old and cynical "everyone-is-corrupt" talking-point.

It fails rather obviously because (a) the article is comparing costs across
countries, and other countries haven't found some magic system to increase
accountability of politicians and beaurocrats that goes beyond not re-electing
them.

And, (b), there are plenty of incentives for decision-makers to keep costs
down. Don't you think the governor or Mayor of New York would crow endlessly
if they managed to build subway <x> or tunnel <y> for a fraction of the usual
costs? Have you noticed how California's high-speed rail project and its cost
overruns have been terrible for three governors in a row?

~~~
liability
Whether anybody is practicing witchcraft or any other form of magic is beyond
the point; it should be obvious to anybody who's not totally naive that some
countries have more corruption than others.

------
ghobs91
For new infrastructure specifically, it costs a ton in the US because of a
combination of non-transparent bidding system from contractors (politicians
give their buddies bloated contracts) and construction unions overstaffing
construction sites.

In other words, taxpayer money is being taken for a ride. For a good example
of the latter situation, look up the rampant overtime abuse that's been
discovered at the LIRR. There's little incentive to keep costs down and use
funds efficiently, because it's tax payer money.

------
rayiner
Environmental regulations. The average infrastructure project in the US spends
4.6 years in environmental review, which provides rich opportunities for
NIMBYs to block the project.

The purple line in Maryland, a 16 mile long above ground light rail line
through the DC suburbs, is so plagued by litigation, it will cost almost twice
as much as Copenhagen’s massive new subway expansion (27 miles of tunnel under
downtown Copenhagen).

------
sword_smith
Why do people subscribe to the myth that US infrastructure is bad? I am Danish
and was on a road trip from Houston to LA, to Caspar WY, to Denver CO in 2017
and the roads we were driving on were excellent. Better than even the German
highways which are some of the best roads in Europe. Is it the construction
lobby that wants more funding and creates this narrative?

~~~
Redoubts
If your interest in infrastructure begins and ends with cars, then the USA
won't disappoint.

~~~
Aperocky
TBH that's the American definition of infrastructure anyways.

------
magicalhippo
Reminded me of my mom's place. They've got a multi-year project to dig up the
road, replacing main water pipe and other stuff, so whole road is closed off
for a few miles. So far in 2019, my mom (who's a pensioner) and me have only
seen people working there during weekends or after five in the evening. Mostly
sporadically, nothing for a week, then a small group on Sunday afternoon, then
nothing again.

Meanwhile all those construction vehicles and tools are just sitting around.
Somehow these guys ended up being the lowest bidders.

------
tabtab
The costs probably went up for the same reason healthcare, education, and
rent/housing* costs have gone up relative to inflation: they have not been
able to take significant advantage of automation and outsourcing like most
everything else has. It's one of the high-hanging fruits of automation and
outsourcing.

(I'm not putting a general value judgment on overseas outsourcing here, only
saying that it lowered prices.)

* You can't make land in a factory, barring a collision with Mars.

------
situational87
It's really bizarre to complain about how roads cost "too much" when we are
now spending $1 Trillion per year on stock buybacks.

A few executives and directors (who are already the richest humans that have
ever lived) are adding orders of magnitude to their hoards with these massive
buybacks. Google just broke records by announcing an unprecedented $25B in
buybacks for this quarter. Over the same time period they are spending $6.2B
for all of research & development.

Expect these buyback numbers to grow wildly in the coming years.

How much does a bridge cost again?

~~~
christophilus
It's not just executives and directors who benefit from buybacks. It's
shareholders. I've personally benefited, and I'm not in the 1%. Anyone who has
an index fund or mutual fund in their 401k benefits from buybacks. So, you
could make a case that buybacks (when used intelligently) benefit retirement
accounts, which is a kind of public good.

Now, the question is, how long do the benefits last? And are buybacks always
beneficial? I think that's debatable. There's data on both sides of that
argument, but I do think that most companies don't use buybacks judiciously.
Berkshire Hathaway does-- buying back only when they have cash that can't be
put to a better use, and only when their share price is below intrinsic value.
But most companies are using leverage to fund buybacks, which is a short-term
way to benefit shareholders at the cost of long-term deterioration of the
balance sheet.

I certainly hope we don't outlaw buybacks, but I think there's a case to be
made that they shouldn't be done via leverage. Good luck trying to legislate
that behavior, though. Money has a way of finding loopholes, and such
legislation will almost certainly have negative, unintended consequences.

~~~
gamblor956
Companies do buybacks instead of dividends because it benefits _the company_
tax-wise, not because it benefits the stockholders.

From an investor's perspective, they're taxed the same.

~~~
ummonk
Not really. As an investor you get more tax-flexibility with buybacks, since
you can decide when you sell your stock. Lets you defer taxes, unlike
dividends, which get taxed even when you reinvest them.

~~~
gamblor956
With a dividend, you get an amount of income, X, _and_ you get to keep the
stock and sell it in the future for even more money, Y. Yes, you get taxed on
it both times. But you get two payments of income: X and Y, both taxed at
capital gains rates.

With a buyback, you might get X income. But in order to get you X gains the
company needs to pay Z (current share price), which is always more expensive
than paying a dividend (generally for dividend paying companies, a share
trades for 10x-100x the amount the dividend would be for). So the company
either pays 100x or it buys back less stock, rewarded fewer investors.
Additionally, any shareholder that participates in the buyback is now closed
off from getting income Y for any stock sold back. Alternatively, if you don't
participate in the buyback, you must hope the company maintains or grows its
share price, or else your gains fall below X and you're no longer deferring
tax, you're just losing money.

(IOW, for the same amount of cash, a buyback is several times less efficient
at returning gains to investors as a dividends. And this means that rather
than increasing the price per share, buybacks frequently have the opposite
effect, or no effect, because the company also has significantly less cash on
hand after the buyback.

Then why do companies love buybacks? Executives love buybacks because it lets
them exchange their equity compensation out-of-schedule. This is the primary
driving force behind the rise of buybacks. The reason they open buybacks to
the public is to avoid running afoul of SEC insider trader regulations.)

------
hackeraccount
I tend to think it's lack of competition. The industries that do best in the
US are ones that foreign competitors have the easiest ability to compete in.
Construction is almost inherently a domestic affair. With efficiencies gained
in more competitive the money saved has to go somewhere so it gets spent on
construction.

Of course a problem with this is that I don't think all forms of
infrastructure spending of gone up in price - look at housing; per square foot
I don't think the cost has gone up _that_ much.

------
aussiegreenie
But it does not in Europe. America pays about 2-3 times the price per mile for
roads and rail than in Germany.

Australia pays even higher prices than in America.

eg Sydney purchased surplus trams from Spain. The Spanish tram system cost USD
115 million for about 40 km (25 miles) and Sydney has already spent nearly $3
billion (USD 2.1 billion) for about 40 km and it will cost another $500
million before a single tram starts. The project is already years behind
schedule.

------
massysett
Health care is expensive.

Infrastructure is expensive.

Education is expensive.

What all these things have in common is that they are labor intensive and must
be performed with American labor—and well-trained American labor at that.
American labor is expensive because we’re a rich country. So it’s absolutely
no surprise these things would be expensive, and not much we can do about it.

At least that’s become my theory and it’s so obvious to me that I don’t know
why it hasn’t been analyzed that way.

------
javajosh
For a long time our culture seemed to produce honest people doing work for an
honest wage. They would be reluctant to "charge more than it's worth". There
was an element of honor to it, and avoiding the shameful act of gouging your
customer. If something takes 2 days to do, and it costs you $30/day to live,
then you charge, say $120 - you're not only living, but also you're saving for
a rainy day. It's a good thing.

Cynical market manipulation has soaked into real world work at every level
both public and private. Sociopaths with the balls to ask 10x or 100x the
traditional, cost based price have succeeded totally, and have lured workers
with 2x or 5x wages, essentially starving any potentially honest competition.
It stuffs all the good workers into a profit-maximizing corporation that now
has a lot of other priorities that often conflict with "an honest days work
for honest pay".

The city politicians and admins responsible for actually spending the peoples
money are often unable and/or unwilling to actually take responsibility for
the projects. Partly this is the moral hazard of spending other people's
money; but partly it's passing the buck, not wanting to take on any risk
associated with real project execution. The public's awareness is dim and
short-lived, so the upside of project success isn't worth the risk. So you
hire a firm to hire the firm to do the project, and you have plenty of
scapegoats if things go sideways.

I don't think successful projects can just happen. You need individuals,
visibly, identifiably, running projects, and building reputations. I think
it's wrong for a small town's admins to throw money at a big corp to do an
infrastructure project, and pay themselves 6-figure salaries to "oversee" it
for 10 years, "darn those overruns!" In fact, I think it would be great if
infra project competence was second only to running a self-restrained police
force as a topic of city elections (the distant third being capability in
running other city services well).

But from what I've seen American voters only show up if they have strong
emotions, and don't know anything about government or the people running to
rule them. So, this is what you get.

------
dbg31415
Digging costs a lot of money.

[https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/03/dig-once-rule-
re...](https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/03/dig-once-rule-requiring-
fiber-deployment-is-finally-set-to-become-us-law/)

------
mempko
Wait, if we freely spend on infrastructure, and infrastructure assumed to be
just a given, then why do we have a D rating on infrastructure by our
engineers? Why do we have so much neglect in our infrastructure? Something
doesn't make sense here.

------
gok
The first part is quite good. Those who could be making infrastructure cheaper
have no incentive to do so. The comparison to education and healthcare is
spot-on.

The second part is a bunch of Malthusian nonsense.

------
bin0
Union contractors and brothers-in-law are most of it. I lived in Houston for a
while, which is a very large and bureaucratic city. They can't get
infrastructure done right. In the area are a few small towns which
incorporated before being sucked up by Houston, and are much more efficient.
They are called the Villages, and banded together to run their own police,
fire, public works, etc. Instead of dealing with stupid unions, they hire
normal private contractors and get things done quickly. Get rid of your
horrible union agreements, and be more like the Villages.

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hos234
He is right in the sense when local bodies have decent leadership good things
happen. But who wants to go work in local govt? There lies the problem.

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obelos
As another perspective, a recent draft paper[1] notes a correlation between
transportation infrastructure costs and how much community involvement there
is on the project. TL;DR, infrastructure was way cheaper when we could just
bulldoze through neighborhoods and wetlands without meaningful pushback.

[1] Brooks, Leah, and Zachary D. Liscow. “Infrastructure Costs.” SSRN
Scholarly Paper. Rochester, NY: Social Science Research Network, July 31,
2019.
[https://papers.ssrn.com/abstract=3428675](https://papers.ssrn.com/abstract=3428675).

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randyrand
Do the numbers support this conclusion? Because without numbers this seems
like complete conjecture.

What a waste of time reading this article.

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ryanthedev
Bad code

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madengr
It’s not just infrastructure, or cost. After watching Apollo 11 the other
night, I can’t fathom how that was done in 8 years.

Also, in the movie, one of the mission controllers looked to be about 70. To
think that when we he was born, flight, radio, and computers did not exist.
Here he was putting men in the moon.

Here I’m, born a couple of years after that, and seems not a damn thing has
happened since. Everyone has a piece of shit in their pocket with which they
can sext. Call that progress; Truly depressing.

~~~
someguydave
It was done in 8 years because the US was spending 4% of GDP on NASA, which
was probably a mistake in retrospect. The other reason is that it was a
greenfield project with competent management, generally.

~~~
melling
Has anyone done a good analysis of this? It can probably be argued many ways.

The program did cost much less than the Vietnam War, and did pay off in future
dividends. The war not so much.

[https://thevietnamwar.info/how-much-vietnam-war-
cost/](https://thevietnamwar.info/how-much-vietnam-war-cost/)

~~~
wongarsu
Also the Moon landing was at least as much defense spending as it was science
spending. The Soviets derived a lot of national pride from holding all the
major space achievements and beating them had great propaganda value. Also
without knowing how useful the moon would be it was deemed unacceptable to
risk the Soviets gaining a foothold, exploiting all its resources and
defending it as their territory.

~~~
someguydave
Doesn’t that sound kind of whacky in retrospect?

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baggy_trough
Awful article. The primary reason is that government has very low
accountability, so it's ripe for corruption.

