California bullet train contractors botched bridge project

https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2020-08-10/california-bullet-train-bridge-snafu

by gok • 6 years ago

87 120 6 years ago

jeffbee2• 6 years ago

The bridge is for cars. The rail authority really should not build it. They should budget for it and block-grant the money to a local authority who can then take responsibility for building it. That way the LA Times can write a scathing article about how Caltrans went over budget, except they would never do that because they never have done that, even when the SF-Oakland Bay Bridge went 800% over budget.

When you look at the budget of this project, a lot of the cost and complexity is due to accommodating cars and drivers. The rail authority really needs better strategic PR so the public begins to understand what's being spent on what.

shuckles2• 6 years ago

The rail authority builds very little. The article discusses how it has only 220 employees and vacancies at key positions. As with many horribly over budget and shoddy civil engineering projects in California, general contractor Tutor Perini is at the center of this mess.

jeffbee2• 6 years ago

Sure, but the point is they need to insulate themselves from cost overruns on these pieces which aren't critical path for the train. If Merced County takes a grant of $50m to build a bridge and it doesn't end up costing $50m, that shouldn't be the railroad's problem. Tutor Perini can go take their change orders to some broke county and try to squeeze blood out of those stones.

coderintherye• 6 years ago

Uh except they did: https://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-bay-bridge-spri...

and again: https://www.latimes.com/local/la-xpm-2014-jan-24-la-me-bay-b...

and again: https://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-bay-bridge-repo...

and again: https://www.latimes.com/local/la-xpm-2013-jul-08-la-me-bay-b...

and again: https://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-bay-bridge-repo...

and again: https://www.latimes.com/local/la-me-bay-bridge-troll-2013090...

gok• 6 years ago

And even if they didn't...why would an LA paper be writing about SFBA much anyway?

Rebelgecko• 6 years ago

Nothing is more LA than freeway Stockholm Syndrome. Regardless, LA Times is more than happy to criticize Caltrans

https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2019-12-06/waste-fr...

https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2000-sep-17-me-22481...

https://latimesblogs.latimes.com/lanow/2008/12/caltrans----n...

https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1995-04-26-mn-59080-...

https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1989-12-03-mn-402-st...

https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1999-mar-28-mn-21927...

jrockway• 6 years ago

The company declined to answer a series of written questions or to make a statement.

Clearly this is because they're being sued, and they want to minimize their losses. Sometimes I wonder what the world would be like if we just said "that sucks" and required a full postmortem instead -- no legal liability, just a thorough public review that everyone could read and learn from. We see this in other fields, like aviation; the NTSB investigates and publishes their finding of facts. The field learns from the mistakes, and as a result it's incredibly safe. (Even if you account for random chance, like MH370 or the whole 787MAX debacle, we're still doing better than we were 10 years ago.)

Instead we just keep making the same mistakes again and again. Everyone pretty much expects to get on a plane and arrive at their destination alive. Everyone also expects their megaproject to be delayed and be finished over budget. When are we going to fix this?

csdreamer7• 6 years ago

Wouldn't that also be the responsibility of the NTSB? NTSB means National Transportation Safety Board. Doesn't the state have their own equivalent that can publish facts as well?

Simulacra• 6 years ago

When we get politicians who care more about government responsibility than re-election

netcan• 6 years ago

Sometimes I wonder what the world would be like if we just said "that sucks" and required a full postmortem instead.

I think this way of thinking is crucial. Ultimately, these projects start to take this shape at conception... long before the failures are realized. The heads-i-win-tails-you lose games. The liability avoidance. The negotiation of guilt for the expected failures down the road.

It's a similar game in the corporate world, like with enterprise software. Everyone knows that an ERP project will blow the budget and timeline. Lots of lawyerly hours are spent creating liability frameworks for it. The result is always ambiguous, pinning failures on specification failures, changing requirements or whatnot.

Systems respond to incentives in many ways, but institutional (government, commercial, NGO, charity...) response to liability is rarely a positive sum game.

Not saying I have the answers, just that the obvious ones have been tried and failed.

This isn't a marginal issue. As it stands now, there is are huge categories if things we need and can't have... because the systems for getting them are horribly ineffective.

If trains cost 5X what they could cost, we effectively can't have new public transport systems. That's not sustainable.

bleepblorp2• 6 years ago

It's really unfortunate that the transportation disaster investigation model hasn't, uh, taken off in other sectors where the margin of error isn't so small that there's no alternative.

Even in aviation, however, independent investigations by government (e.g. the NTSB) do not extinguish civil or criminal liability. Incident investigations are inadmissible in court, but civil suits and/or criminal prosecutions can be, and are, conducted as parallel processes.

thomasedwards• 6 years ago

Sometimes I wonder what the world would be like if we just said "that sucks" and required a full postmortem instead.

This is how BAA built Heathrow Terminal 5. They took on all risk and just dealt with each problem as they came up: https://www.christianwolmar.co.uk/2005/04/project-management...

arethuza5• 6 years ago

Didn't they have a disastrous opening day for Terminal 5 because of mistakes that looked like poor project management?

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7322453.stm

Gibbon14• 6 years ago

I read a paper that tried to answer why tunnels cost more in New Zealand/Australia/US and Britain. Part of the answer was labor is a much large part of the cost than one would assume. And second those countries try to push 100% of the risk onto the contractors. One could haplessly think that's free but it's not. Smaller cheaper contractors won't bid[1]. And the largest contractors pad their bids so they will still make money even if everything goes wrong.

[1] If you take projects with a 10% chance of bankrupting you, you'll be out of business in no time.

zaarn• 6 years ago

It's how BER is being built, so I doubt it's a good model.

irrational• 6 years ago

But isn’t every mega project different? Do they all have problems in the same ways? That seems different than airplanes. There are different models of planes, but overall they seem a lot more similar than different so that my findings are probably applicable to any other plane.

dap• 6 years ago

Is aviation actually an example of what you’re describing? Airlines do have legal liability in the event of crashes and it’s the NTSB that investigates.

Hokusai• 6 years ago

Sometimes I wonder what the world would be like if we just said "that sucks" and required a full postmortem instead.

I see that attitude working with individuals. Most people takes their responsibilities seriously.

But for corporations it would never work. Corporations would do literally nothing and take the money if there were no consequences. Even when all the employees are good caring people, the corporation incentive is to maximize profit. Corporations are less than the sum of its parts when it comes to morality.

mjevans• 6 years ago

The consequence is that this record is on file, and arguably could be used to disqualify a corporate entity from future projects. Screwing up big enough would actually be a "corporate death sentence".

barbegal• 6 years ago

It works for aviation though. Individual employees are protected by law (at least in some jurisdictions) to whistle blow on their employer and the evidence they provide can't be used in legal proceedings. This has been tested on multiple occasions such as in the case of an airshow disaster where the police wanted access to evidence collected by investigators https://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=48aa5315-2d99...

mschuster914• 6 years ago

The California High-Speed Rail Authority has long wrestled with its dependence on consultants and outside experts, with a 2018 state audit faulting the agency for being overly reliant on these private interests.

So it's the same problem that plagues government and megacorp IT and construction worldwide: they depend on external entities for oversight, QA and controlling of the vendors instead of having the appropriate knowledge and staff in-house.

That's what happens when public sector employees get gutted to "save costs". The politicians who decided this decades ago are no longer there and cannot be held accountable for the consequences, and we are stuck with the fallout.

dmix2• 6 years ago

I’m a relatively pro-market person and even I admit public-private ventures are almost always worse than purely public or purely private. It always seems to combine the worst features of both.

You don’t have ‘real’ private firms doing work, you end up with these professional gov contractor companies (who focus entirely on gov projects) which act like half baked gov agencies themselves with none of the public oversight/responsibility to tax payers and government agencies acting like profit seeking entities with no competition and bottom feeding talent pools/lowest price contracts (which almost always ends up being flakey organizations mentioned earlier who are entirely designed to get gov contracts as mentioned earlier).

Beyond that, the inherent structure of using a patchwork of consultancies with broken responsibility chains and corrupted incentive structures also kills many over-capitalized tech startups too. It’s a poor way to build any business.

Much like Apple the only things that should be outsourced are manageable isolated pieces, not core parts of the project.

You also can see why people are pro-gutting public agencies when these disasters are all they can produce - while at the same time there are certain areas private firms won’t naturally account for. The whole thing needs a rethinking.

mschuster914• 6 years ago

I’m a relatively pro-market person and even I admit public-private ventures are almost always worse than purely public or purely private.

With public infrastructure projects like roads and railways, why should one go for a purely private infrastructure? The only reason for this is if corrupt politicians want kickbacks from rent seekers (for example like the private prison which paid off a judge).

Much like Apple the only things that should be outsourced are manageable isolated pieces, not core parts of the project.

Actually Apple proves that you can outsource the core part (manufacturing) - provided you have the in house staff for management and oversight of the project. The only lapse in quality stemming from a lack of oversight is the NVIDIA GPU debacle back a decade ago, but to be fair: that one bit the whole industry.

You also can see why people are pro-gutting public agencies when these disasters are all they can produce - while at the same time there are certain areas private firms won’t naturally account for.

The reason for people (in practice: Republicans) wanting to gut and then privatize public agencies is, as I wrote above, corruption. Demolish the funding during the last days of a Republican presidency, have it take effect during the Democrat term, then campaign with "we should privatize XYZ, it doesn't work", win the vote, privatize XYZ, get kickbacks / "donations".

An old, tried and tested playbook, and for what it's worth not even US-specific - our German Conservative party is a real expert at that, too...

icebraining• 6 years ago

Politicians from decades ago may have been the ones that gutted the public sector, but it wasn't them who decided to start a major project with a gutted public sector.

burfog4• 6 years ago

It doesn't really work to have government employees.

Suppose the FBI wants to build an office in Texarkana. Are they supposed to directly hire a bunch of people in Texarkana? Should the people who install the carpet get an exemption from the agency's normal background check, medical exam, and firearms training? Hiring competent people requires competent managers, in this case for construction, so they'd need to hire before they can hire. Suppose the EPA also decides to build an office in Texarkana. Does the EPA need to directly hire people too, maybe competing with the FBI and trying to swipe employees?

There is also the huge issue of government workforce rules. In the business world, bad employees tend to get fired. Businesses don't last if they tolerate too many bad employees, which effectively fires the whole company. Government isn't about to shut down, and there are numerous rules which make it near-impossible to get rid of worthless and negative-value employees. Hiring is also limited by low pay. Corruption thrives when pay is below the norm for the market. The competent people won't stay. It's a miracle government can function at all. Raising the pay gets taxpayers furious, in part because taxpayers see the corruption and incompetence.

The answer is thus, sadly, to minimize the problem by minimizing the employees. There isn't a better choice that is realistic.

mschuster914• 6 years ago

Does the EPA need to directly hire people too, maybe competing with the FBI and trying to swipe employees?

Why not have a central federal agency that does the oversight and planning for all other federal agencies, with local experts in all 50 states that know local building codes and maintain relationships with vendors? That way the agencies don't have individual high costs for the controlling/planning yet benefit from shared knowledge and from having experts that prevent them from getting ripped off.

Government isn't about to shut down, and there are numerous rules which make it near-impossible to get rid of worthless and negative-value employees.

That one has been solved by many other countries. Reform said rules from the ground up, that's it. There are enough examples to copy from.

Hiring is also limited by low pay.

The low pay is caused by shrinking budgets, so having multiple government agencies join forces can reduce the individual costs while still maintaining decent competitive payment for staff.

DominikPeters2• 6 years ago

I wonder whether those consultants and outside "experts" are American (and hence have never been involved in HSR construction) or Japanese/French/Chinese/German/Italian.

baybal22• 6 years ago

The California High-Speed Rail Authority has long wrestled with its dependence on consultants and outside experts, with a 2018 state audit faulting the agency for being overly reliant on these private interests.

This is what I don't like with American big business: everybody hires consultants, who then subcontract consultants, who then subcontract consultants, who then subcontract consultants.

And in the end it comes to nobody knows anything, despite n-times of my annual salary being spent every few weeks.

Where are those experts really, why they are not being hired instead of the type of "experts" whose only competence is to hire another consultant?

mschuster914• 6 years ago

Where are those experts really

At the bottom of the ladder in the chain.

why they are not being hired instead of the type of "experts" whose only competence is to hire another consultant?

Because the actual experts don't have experience in how to properly react to government tenders or the political connections to have tenders written so that only a specific company or two match it, and because public sector HR does not have any way of actually evaluating experts (as the historical knowledge of senior employees all got removed).

brnt3• 6 years ago

Merced to Bakersfield? Can someone explain why a HSR project is between nowhere and nowhere? Or will the train be on regular tracks the rest of the way? (LA<>SF I presume.)

pirocks• 6 years ago

Because going from San Francisco to LA was too expensive(I would assume high nimby density as you get closer to both those cities), but the doing a high speed train thing was already decided. Apparently there will be extensions to SF and LA at some point.

brnt3• 6 years ago

But the train won't stop at these places I hope?

jayd16• 6 years ago

It was the cheapest section to build and the easiest to start on.

DoreenMichele4• 6 years ago

My recollection: LA to SF is the long term goal.

I'm guessing it's easier to start in that area and it's not "nowhere."

Merced is north of Fresno which is a larger city than many states have at all. It has a half a million people and an international airport.

Bakersfield is also a fairly large city. They are only small by California standards. In most states, either of them would be the biggest or one of the biggest cities in the state.

shajznnckfke• 6 years ago

But you wouldn’t spend tens of billions of dollars to connect cities of that size in other states. I don’t think the plan would have been approved by voted if they expected the project would stop there.

Gibbon14• 6 years ago

If you look at the map it's only about 25 miles longer to go down Hwy 99 instead of I5.

Also Bakersfield Metro is 850,000 people. Fresno is 970k.

pech0rin• 6 years ago

How much the US botches large scale infrastructure projects is mind blowing. What is the purpose of having 5 different layers of agencies etc? Just to cover liability? Is there no company in the US that can build a high speed rail? And if so why not hire a Japanese or Chinese company that is obviously proficient at building these types of rail systems?

oritsnile2• 6 years ago

There is a buy america act, which requires the government in buying from American companies, there are also federal similar laws which might be the reason here

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buy_American_Act

Retric2• 6 years ago

The other consideration is why the government doesn’t just build bridges with government workers.

Nobody gets rich when government workers do something, it’s outsourcing which enables significant wealth transfer from government to private individuals. That creates huge incentives and means it’s those same companies try very hard to influence the rules.

bleepblorp2• 6 years ago

The Pedestrian Observations blog[0] has a lot of thoughts on this. The content is too long to go into here in depth.

However, the TLDR is that the US (and, to an extent, the rest of the neoliberal world) botches transit and rail transport projects because government agencies lack the in-house capacity for effective management and rely too much on outside consultants whose interests are poorly aligned with those of taxpayers.

Bringing in outside firms to do turnkey rail solutions does not have a good history, generally because non-local prime contractors want to do things the way they do in their home countries, which often isn't economical, or even possible, elsewhere. Bring in a Japanese, Chinese, or European high-speed rail prime contractor and they'll want to build a system using parts that aren't widely available in the US (think metric vs. imperial fasteners and go way up from there), which will make construction and maintenance very expensive.

[0] https://pedestrianobservations.com (this is not my blog)

arethuza5• 6 years ago

That reminds me of the Edinburgh trams project - which was a bit of a disaster during construction (mind you the end result is excellent):

https://www.insider.co.uk/news/edinburgh-tram-inquiry-john-c...

jld89• 6 years ago

(and, to an extent, the rest of the neoliberal world)

France, Germany and Spain have a skilled railbuilding workforce...

M2Ys4U• 6 years ago

The Metrolink in Manchester,[0] the UK's largest tram network, is a good counter-example.

The expansion of the network been consistently well delivered over the last ~decade.

The Airport Line opened a year ahead of schedule,[1] the Trafford Park line eight months ahead of schedule,[2] and the Second City Crossing was only a year behind it's aspirational opening date because of the discovery of a crypt buried under where a new station was being built.[3]

I think this is mainly because there has been a pipeline of new projects enabling both the contractors and TfGM to retain skilled engineering and project management staff.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manchester_Metrolink

[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-manchester-29879147

[2] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-manchester-51801265

[3] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-manchester-30779807

moltar• 6 years ago

Canada uses metric system yet all of the problems are the same.

renewiltord2• 6 years ago

POSIWID. These are jobs programs and they work for that. If you get a bridge out of it, you just count it as a bonus.

It's like tipping. No one reports cash tips. IRS looks the other way. Why? It's a tax credit to these workers in that industry.

throwaway0a5e3• 6 years ago

What is the purpose of having 5 different layers of agencies etc? Just to cover liability?

Political power. Five different middle management hierarchies the politicians can appoint people to as favors.

And if so why not hire a Japanese or Chinese company that is obviously proficient at building these types of rail systems?

Because it's not about building infrastructure. It's about the government serving itself.

foofoo4u2• 6 years ago

Is there no company in the US that can build a high speed rail? And if so why not hire a Japanese or Chinese company that is obviously proficient at building these types of rail systems?

Texas is about to build their own bullet train: https://www.texascentral.com/. It'll be the same technology as the Japanese Shinkansen.

In 2014, it was announced[71] that Texas Central Railway would build a ~300-mile (~480 km) long line using the N700 series rolling stock. The trains are proposed to operate at over 320 km/h (200 mph). source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shinkansen#United_States

The difference between Texas and California is that the bullet train being built in Texas will be a private venture. It will be interesting to witness the difference in cost, quality and construction speed between the two states. It will be a test to see which state's economic and regulatory environment is more conducive for large-scale construction projects.

tr33house• 6 years ago

As someone who studied civil engineering but then turned to computer science, I'm surprised the bridge wasn't designed to fail more gracefully. Designing how structures failed was emphasized over and over again in my classes. Unfortunately, I'm also reminded of some of the reasons why I left the field: takes forever to do anything and getting any new major projects is more politicking than anything else, nowadays.

monadic2• 6 years ago

Ultimately the us government and states cannot be trusted with basic infrastructure.

Cyberdog4• 6 years ago

The last election I voted in was in 2008, voting in California against this stupid boondoggle-in-the-making. At the time, I lived in the northern third of the state which won't even share a line of latitude with a roadmapped high-speed rail line, but I knew my taxes would have to pay and pay and pay for this anyway. But I've since been fortunate to move out of the state so now I get to witness the predictable from afar.

I know we are all in love with the idea of high speed rail. I've been to Japan and have ridden the shinkansen alongside Mt Fuji (which is even larger in real life than it looks in pictures), so I definitely get the appeal. But I have zero faith in any state agency to be able to do it sensibly. Get private investors to do it. They will do it affordably, financially sustainably, and safely, and they won't steal money from all the citizens of the state to build something which won't be of use to many of them.

growlist• 6 years ago

I definitely get the appeal. But I have zero faith in any state agency to be able to do it sensibly

This is how I feel about goverment in general - I want a country that spends enough to look after the less fortunate, but with the administrators' incompetent/thieving/malign hands removed from the till (preferably by slamming it shut on them).

xorcist• 6 years ago

Get private investors to do it [...] they won't steal money from all the citizens

Yes, that's completely unheard of.

apexalpha• 6 years ago

Get private investors to do it. They will do it affordably, financially sustainably, and safely, and they won't steal money from all the citizens of the state to build something which won't be of use to many of them.

This is such a weird position to hold. Are Japanese high speed trains build by private investors? Are American interstate highways?

Highways are build by the government because they are enablers of society. They don't need to make a profit themselves, they lift society as a whole.

Similar with high speed train. It's infrastructure, not an investment portfolio.

Cyberdog4• 6 years ago

Are Japanese high speed trains build by private investors?

Early shinkansen lines were built by Japanese National Railways, a state-owned enterprise; currently they are operated by Japan Railways Group, a private company. Certainly there is still a lot of government integration/interference with their operation, but JR won't, for example, build a shinkansen line which they know will never be able to pay for itself. At any rate there is much less of an expectation that large infrastructure projects will be over schedule and over budget and that's just the way things are.

Are American interstate highways?

Of course not, and that's why highways are prone to the exact same schedule and budget overruns.

Highways are build by the government because they are enablers of society.

Society can operate just fine without government.

Keverw• 6 years ago

Yeah I been following California's rail project, last I heard they were far behind past deadlines they have to give some money back to the feds. Maybe getting private investors could be the answer, Florida is working on their own rail project of going from Miami to Orlando which seems cool, could fly to the theme park capital of the world for a few days and then take a train to the cruise ship capital of the world. I know people like theme parks but some don't really feel relaxed after running around the parks all day and waiting in lines and stuff haha. So pack your vacation with some action, and then be a lazy at sea for some slower pace. I know Disney sometimes have deals for both a cruise and theme park, but they have the Magical Express bus.

supernova87a3• 6 years ago

Sigh, well this is a generalization, but I think this is what happens when a country gets out of practice with building big infrastructure things. They have to learn the mistakes again because the capabilities and knowledge fade across time and across the sparse workforce.

In China (put aside all the political issues at the moment), they were building elevated track to the tune of something like a mile a day at the peak. (On the order of that magnitude -- elevated! Not even just plain track on bare earth)

What does that produce? A rail-building skilled workforce (10,000+ engineers) that has lots of practice, expertise, and templates to stamp out that stuff like it's their business. Here, we do this now, what, once per decade? Are there even 1000 such engineers that US companies could muster together to work on a project, not even to speak of the necessary contributing industries supplying the specialized tooling, materials, expertise for such a project?

I realize the story in question here was about a road bridge, but still it involves coordination and management with the rail component, and the point still stands I think.

Industry-wide skills and personnel fade and atrophy when a country doesn't do these things any more, or go overseas to where there are projects for them. These generational shifts in capabilities happen, unfortunately, while a country is not looking.

verylittlemeat• 6 years ago

I don't think China is really ready for primetime when it comes to speed and quality of infrastructure.

https://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/25/world/asia/collapse-of-ne...

renewiltord2• 6 years ago

We dropped a bridge in Florida too so maybe the slow approach doesn't work either. Killed more here too.

walrus01• 6 years ago

As an example on that, when the UK resumed domestic manufacturing of nuclear powered submarines, the first boat had a huge number of technical issues. Because in the time between when they had launched the last generation submarine, and the beginning of design/finalization/construction of the new one, 80%+ of the work force who knew how to build one had retired.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astute-class_submarine

In a number of highly specialized military subsystems and platforms, it is easier to understand the decisions that the US DOD makes when looking at it in the context of a minimum viable production rate to retain a core skilled workforce of engineers and factory workers.

throwaway0a5e3• 6 years ago

It has nothing to do with experience and everything to do with accountability. We all know what happens to Chinese bureaucrats who make the government look farcical. Californian (and many other states) bureaucrats have no such fear to keep them in line and the lack of accountability rolls down hill all the way to the lowest guy on the construction site.

kgermino• 6 years ago

That’s definitely an issue, but I don’t think it applies here.

It looks like the bridge that failed is a road bridge to carry cars over the tracks. The US driving infrastructure has a lot of issues, but you can’t say we’re “out of practice” building roads and bridges for cars and trucks.

hackerman123469• 6 years ago

China is a poor example, especially for bullet trains as they literally just did bad copying from Japan. They have a lot more accidents than ex. Japan.

Japan would be a prime example and it's a shame you didn't use it.

paledot• 6 years ago

I feel like that makes China a better example than it otherwise would be, because it shows that the Japanese model can work elsewhere too. Although this is also the country that built a hospital in Wuhan in a weekend. Perhaps European comparisons would be more apt.

roenxi• 6 years ago

Presumably most of what happens in China infrastructure-wise would be flat out illegal in the US. My big issue is nuclear power and I go green with envy watching as China sets up a generation of engineers who know how to turn atoms into useful forces.

This solar/wind gambit had better work out for the West or I will be a very grumpy old man.

baybal22• 6 years ago

In China (put aside all the political issues at the moment), they were building elevated track to the tune of something like a mile a day at the peak. (On the order of that magnitude -- elevated! Not even just plain track on bare earth)
What does that produce? A rail-building skilled workforce (10,000+ engineers) that has lots of practice, expertise, and templates to stamp out that stuff like it's their business. Here, we do this now, what, once per decade?

Economies of scale, and "economies of knowledge" are a very sensible argument when it comes to operating a fleet of expensive capital equipment, or capital intensive building projects.

Take a look on Emirates Airlines. They are the only company in the world who made money on their Airbus A380. Why? They operates 100+ of them.

Same with HSR in China, not tricks involved. Though it's still a heavily subsidised, loss making business, but their "core" service in between major cities makes quite a lot of money.

Nexxius• 6 years ago

Emirates also has excellent service and the coach seats are first class in comparison to United or AA. The prices are even pretty good against the alternatives.

pbronez• 6 years ago

I agree, although designing institutions for building doesn’t necessarily mean they can maintain what they built.

For example, in DC the subway system (Metro) is run by the Washington Metro Area Transit Authority (WMATA). In recent years they’ve had a pretty poor safety and service record, which much hand wringing over how to fix the system. There are some financial challenges, some corruption, a good helping of standard union pathologies... but a lot of it is just that the system stopped growing a couple decades ago.

To hear the elders tell it, WMATA really figured out how to build in the mid twentieth century. As long as they were building stations and laying rail regularly, the system worked pretty well!

But then they finished and stayed finished for 20-30 years. Maintenance was under-funded. Power structures calcified, public accountability weakened, constituents took the system for granted.

When they tried to start building again, it was HARD. New stations have structural problems. Contractors fail to deliver. Corruption hits the papers.

And the safety and service levels stay low. They shut down for maintenance sprints that never seem to pay off... and then the pandemic shows up. So now ridership is way down, and the finances look worse, but at least they have more time to repair things..

I dunno where Metro goes next, TBH. I just wish it was efficient, reliable, safe and ubiquitous. Building institutions like that is hard.

supernova87a3• 6 years ago

I guess what happens over time is that the expertise has to get consolidated -- here it goes into private companies like Parsons, etc. And then they shop themselves around the country looking for projects to staff.

And then what you see is as you mentioned above, the cities (customers) having lost their ability to supervise properly and pay for such projects.

blaser-waffle• 6 years ago

So now ridership is way down, and the finances look worse, but at least they have more time to repair things..

A boon! Finally the Red Line can get fixed.

I dunno where Metro goes next, TBH. I just wish it was efficient, reliable, safe and ubiquitous. Building institutions like that is hard.

It is safe, efficient, and ubiquitous. Outside of the public transit systems that I used in Australia (esp. Melbourne and Adelaide), there are few systems that compare to the DC Metro. I'm from Fairfax and used to ride it into the city all the time, and when I was stationed at Bethesda I would ride it across the city to see my folks on the other side of the river. It ain't Tokyo, but it's pretty good.

ehnto• 6 years ago

Jonathan Blow had a talk about this that was related to software complexity and losing institutional knowledge over time.

Because technology is essentially knowledge, it has a tendency to deteriorate over time as we build abstractions and people with foundational knowledge move on and people with abstracted knowledge move in.

As a contrived example, China made templates for these bridges, which are an abstraction of the underlying knowledge. In say 50 years time, all the engineers capable of designing the templates have died and no one was needed to make new templates for another 20 years, so no one learned howto design them. So you have lost your ability to design bridge templates and likely no longer understand what makes the current templates work.

That probably wouldn't happen with construction but just an example.

foofoo4u2• 6 years ago

I believe you are correct. As decades go by in which the construction of a particular "thing" is no longer done, the skills, knowledge, experience, and even the institutions that are a part of it wither away. Unfortunately our lost abilities is not limited to big infrastructure projects. Even the manufacture of something as small as a simple screw is difficult in America. Here's an excerpt of what I mean.

In 2012, Apple attempted to move production, or at least assembly, of the Mac Pro back to Texas. It found it couldn’t domestically source a tiny screw needed for the Mac, indicative of the challenges of trying to produce things in the United States. According to the New York Times account of the fiasco, in China Apple could turn to any number of factories that could produce custom screws.9 Texas had almost none. Further, as said by none other than CEO Tim Cook himself: “In the U.S., you could have a meeting of tooling engineers and I’m not sure we could fill the room. In China, you could fill multiple football fields.” Eventually, Apple had to import the screws from China, and this was merely one production bottleneck among many. In June 2019, Apple announced that the next version of the Mac Pro will be produced in China.10
If even the mighty Apple can’t source simple things such as screws in the United States, or find enough tooling engineers, we shouldn’t expect one company to solve what is now a systemic problem. It is not rational to expect individual CEOs to expose their companies to the higher costs and bottlenecks that come with reshoring. We should not expect the market to fix this suboptimal Nash equilibrium problem, either, nor can a one-time injection of taxpayer’s money, however large. These coordination, demand, and financial problems are just too staggering for even our most powerful corporations to solve by themselves.

source: https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2020/05/reshoring-supply-...

It is concerning to me our increasing inability to produce material things.

supernova87a3• 6 years ago

I was a big supporter of CA high speed rail until the mismanagement situation became clear, and the costs became apparent that the value for money was not materializing for this project.

In the beginning, when I tried a back of the envelope calculation that the distances were just beyond economical for high speed rail systems (versus air travel), I was willing to support it. However, the gradual resistance to acquiring the right of way cheaply, and the financial mismanagement (along with engineering mismanagement) caused me to lose faith in the CAHSR leadership capabilities. And now honestly, I think the money would be much more efficiently spent to solve some of our other many traffic/transportation problems.

One of the worst times that convinced me the management was not being honest (with themselves even) was when the linked reporter's story came out about the geotechnical problems about crossing the Tehachapi/San Gabriel range, and how this major (really major!) problem had not been solved yet. The CAHSR CEO kept on going on about how they'd saved $1B or something on the current Central Valley construction costs -- as if saving a few pennies on the cost of a bolt on the Space Shuttle they didn't know how to design the rest of, was a great achievement.

Anyway, this is all wrapped up in the larger story of how major projects in the US simply cannot build things cheaply and efficiently any more. It's a big problem for our infrastructure in general... We are getting 1/3 to 1/2 of what we could build (or maintain properly) because it's so expensive to do this now.

jaclaz• 6 years ago

At face value, the corrosion makes no sense whatsoever.

This is central California, there is no way an un-grouted steel cable can develop such a serious corrosion issue and in such a short time.

If it was some place with acid rains, exposed to the sea, etc, that would take tens of years, AND it would have needed traffic on the bridge, possibly above the theoretical allowance.

Disclaimer: I have been site manager in the construction of several pre- and post- tensioned reinforced concrete bridges, I have dealt with this stuff for years, but of course I know nothing of the specific project and/or exact type of cables used in it.

AlexTWithBeard3• 6 years ago

Say the governor finally appoints a chief engineer who manages to drive the project to completion - by working 18 hours a day, ignoring his (or her?) family and ruining his health.

What's in it for him?

Recognition? Nope. He'll be blamed in problems with minorities, unions, views from someone's mansion and for all other deadly sins somehow related to the construction. A railroad built on time and within the budget? Come on, folks, it's just his job!

Money? Nope. Government jobs don't pay that well.

Interesting engineering project? Again, nope. It will be a political fight, PR project, bookkeeping exercise, endless lawsuits - whatever, but not the engineering project.

Why bother?

mensetmanusman2• 6 years ago

You have to assume a 10% mistake rate in all large projects.

anamax• 6 years ago

Why shouldn't they botch the bridge? The folks who did the financial projections botched those. (The projected ridership times the promised fare was never enough to pay the bonds. Since it will cost money to run and maintain...) Other than getting the bonds approved, what has worked?

It's not about the train and never was.

California bullet train contractors botched bridge project

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