> modern America’s ability to build anything big any more.
The first transcontinental railroad took 6 years to 1,900 miles. All the grading, track laying, and bridge construction was done by muscle. Black powder was used for the tunnels, but the holes to put the power in were bored by hand.
In contrast, Seattle Transit will take 30 years to build 22 miles of track, with modern construction equipment, and that's in the remote possibility they'll be on schedule.
Seattle used to have rail networks. The right-of-ways are still there, but Sound Transit very carefully avoids using them. Nobody is ever able to explain why. Some even still have rusting rail on them, while the ST crews are blasting new right of way a block over.
The build out of the Sound Transit light rail is taking 30 years for the following reasons:
1. ST only has the funds to build out a small % of the project at any one time. The work has to be staged because they can't take out all the $ at once.
2. Project managing the build out of the whole thing at once would require a much larger organization, which would be more expensive
3. Building the whole thing at once would require a much large workforce and much more equipment, which would be more expensive.
4. Staging construction gives them the time to work out the details of the next phase while working on the current phase.
The railroad wasn't built all at once, either. It was two teams, one going east, the other west. The companies were paid as work progressed, they did not have access to all the funds in advance. They didn't even know the route to be taken, they had survey crews working ahead of the construction, marking the best route.
If you don't think they had a much larger logistics problem, consider the problems with supplying the crews with food, water, clothing, rails, ties, horses, wagons, everything they need, from a thousand miles away.
The most important thing, though, was the companies were paid by the mile. The faster they built, the more money they made, because that would push the meeting point further away. They had ENORMOUS incentive to move fast. And it worked.
ST, however, has no incentive whatsoever to move things along. They have every incentive to delay, invent problems, all so they can go back and demand more money.
At a company I used to work for, they hired a team of old software engineers to write a piece of software for a good customer. It took them 3 months, and arrived on time and under budget. Want to know the secret? They had a huge bonus for being on time (I think it was ten grand apiece), which would shrink away for every day late.
I asked if that was what motivated them to be on time, and they all denied it with "we're professionals". I openly laughed at that.
It's amazing what happens when the incentives are aligned with the desired results. We saw that last year when vaccine developers wanted 18 months to develop a vaccine, and Trump gave them a big financial incentive to get it done before the end of the year. Later came the usual denials that these incentives motivated them in any way :-)
After the Northridge earthquake destroyed several bridges the contractors hired to perform the repairs earned millions in bonuses by finishing the job in just a few months. In one case they got an extra $150K bonus per day early. Financial incentives work.
> It's amazing what happens when the incentives are aligned with the desired results. We saw that last year when vaccine developers wanted 18 months to develop a vaccine, and Trump gave them a big financial incentive to get it done before the end of the year. Later came the usual denials that these incentives motivated them in any way :-)
I agree with this point in general, and have some experience with government contracts, but think you’re over-simplifying a complex situation. The big thing which incentives got was zero holding back on capacity: I would say that was by far Trump’s best call in office because there’s no way to claw back that time later at any cost - the mRNA process is both highly specialized and new so there are bottlenecks all the way down. The other thing which saved time, however, was that testing time could be compressed because the disease was running rampant — that didn’t have much to do with incentives and couldn’t be predicted in advance. We also got lucky that the first vaccines were so effective: that was the primary concern with the first batch, that they might not be effective enough - instead, we had a Nobel-worthy unqualified success where the worst performing vaccines were at the warned level but the top candidates were some of the best vaccines ever made. That was welcome but we also got lucky.
Saying incentives work is a pretty banal economic insight.
However, the primary reason Moderna and Pfizer they were able to get to market so fast was because the FDA agreed to a compressed testing schedule, Moderna’s preexisting investments in mRNA technology, and publicly funded research around stabilising spike proteins.
The primary contribution of Trump (and other world leaders) was the willingness to commit to purchasing large amounts of the vaccine and to accept much of the risk of the attempt failed. This accelerated the roll out as they were able to begin manufacturing before being given emergency approval.
However, it’s worth noting that many other successful vaccines were developed by charitable foundations and government research institutions in roughly the same period of time as the American efforts.
> Saying incentives work is a pretty banal economic insight.
It should be banal, but it isn't generally recognized by government planners, who expect that self-sacrifice and altruism governs peoples' behavior rather than selfishness.
Seattle is experiencing this as recent onerous regulations placed on landlords supposedly to protect renters is causing rents to rise and landlords to exit the business.
I feel like you didn't really respond to my point.
Anyway, people of course respond to incentives. However, that doesn't always means that the outcomes will be positive. There is such a thing as a perverse incentive, even in a free market utopia.
Perverse incentives in a free market are often the unintended result of regulation. For example, regulations to make it harder to fire people have the result of making employers pickier about who they hire.
The problem with you Murray Rothbard types is that you all too readily descend to panglossianism when evaluating market outcomes.
It's no great insight that markets are generally the most efficient means of allocating resources. However, it's also no secret that greedy individuals will gleefully extract economic rents from their monopoly over resources when they feel free to do so.
> The urgency to create a vaccine for COVID‑19 led to compressed schedules that shortened the standard vaccine development timeline, in some cases combining clinical trial steps over months, a process typically conducted sequentially over years.
Over a year ago, I suggested this very process for vaccine development here, in HackerNews. This was strongly dismissed by people who told me I knew nothing about vaccine development (true) and that it couldn't be done (false).
At that time I was paying attention to people actually knew something about vaccine development. They said it would take at least 18 months. Being a practical pessimist I decided to take the under and say 12 months.
The guys that knew what they were talking about were mostly right, most vaccines making it are taking about 18 months to make it to distribution. But I bet that out of ~100 vaccine programs a couple of them beat that by six months.
I believe those are the reasons in the sense that they are result of [thing-we-can't-change] + [best-decision-under-the-circumstances]. But it's an example of the "a bunch of reasonable seeming decisions adding up to something preposterous" system that is quite common today.
Notably, if Seattle wanted a light rail could spend what it cost. Spending over thirty clearly has all sorts of problems - their supplies could go out of business in the middle of the process etc, etc.
I'm sure I find someone who could make the 3 billion dollars of planning money that went the California high speed rail sound sensible too.
>2. Project managing the build out of the whole thing at once would require a much larger organization, which would be more expensive
>3. Building the whole thing at once would require a much large workforce and much more equipment, which would be more expensive.
This doesn't work out in a linear model. You either hire N people for 2T years, or you hire 2N people for T years, either way a total cost of 2STN for a mean salary of S per year. It works the same way with project management. With equipment you might have something of a point, but not if the equipment is leased.
You can point to nonlinearity, but then that looks like a weakness of the system.
>4. Staging construction gives them the time to work out the details of the next phase while working on the current phase.
The city is a moving target; details you work out today may not be true tomorrow. Worse, the different pieces of the system are interdependent: changing conditions may invalidate work already done, incurring additional costs.
Ultimately, it seems like the only compelling reason on this list is (1), which itself points to a lack of overall strategy on the part of the government.
Life was generally more dangerous and harder those days, and medical practice was terrible. Horses, for example, regularly killed people in those days (more than cars do), and their use is not the romantic image we have of them today.
If you can show that the railroad was built on blood, I'd be interested.
Exactly. It was a high dollar construction project. If anything it was safer than a mundane bottom dollar "cut whatever corners we need to be the lowest bidder" project. Everything was just that much more dangerous then.
If I recall correctly, the Central Pacific had to resort to advertising for railroad labor in China to get sufficient labor force (so not merely able to recruit from recent immigrants, but having to induce immigration to get labor). The Union Pacific, for its part, relied heavily on Irish immigrants and ex-soldiers from the Union and Confederate armies.
That's hardly people flocking to the railway jobs.
That's not the point, the point is people weren't flocking to these jobs as you claimed.
> The Central Pacific hired some Canadian and European civil engineers and surveyors with extensive experience building railroads, but it had a difficult time finding semi-skilled labor. Most Caucasians in California preferred to work in the mines or agriculture. The railroad experimented by hiring local emigrant Chinese as manual laborers, many of whom were escaping the poverty and terrors of the war in the Sze Yup districts in the Pearl River Delta of Guangdong province in China
It's like saying Bangladeshi workers flock to hard labour in Qatar because, sure because working in Bangladesh might be worse, not because the terrible conditions of working on infrastructure in Qatar as a Bangladeshi is some kind of standard for labour conditions or rights we should all aspire to.
> the point is people weren't flocking to these jobs as you claimed
Of course they were. Otherwise they simply couldn't have built it. They could not round people up, chain them together, and force march them to the construction site.
Sure, just like there's girls flocking to become prostitutes in parts of Thailand, and Bangladeshi to become construction workers in Qatar. Not because of desperation, no, out of free will in search for great jobs, they're not slaves you see... The way you completely miss this point and imply we should compare today's construction standards to that of the past and look at the past favourably due to all the potential efficiencies in taking shortcuts on labour conditions ("after all, desperate immigrant impoverished workers showed up freely, it must not be a problem) makes me glad you're not driving public policy today. I'm sure you're just as eager to give up your own comfy labour conditions for the sake of the project. I'm quite done arguing with someone who's not discussing in good faith.
This combative assertion of race-based victimization is not as productive toward the conversation as people may think. Indeed, it tends to drive a great many people into defensive positions where they hunker down.
I grew up in Omaha, the end of the transcontinental railroad that Californians tend to forget about. I'm very sorry that so many Chinese immigrants died working on the railroad. I am also saddened by the many others who died, even though they were not immigrants of Chinese extraction. I'm also saddened by the atrocious conditions these immigrants escaped in China and compelled them to the US (I assume they did not desire to come to the US, and it's worth noting many no doubt landed elsewhere).
While the CRPP may have preferred Chinese labor, I do not find evidence that they did "most of the work". Indeed, the main employer of the Chinese was the CRPP, which laid 690 miles of the 1912 miles of track. The Union Pacific labor was primarily sourced from the remains of the Union and Confederate armies.
It is correct that 80% of the CRPP labor force was eventually (not initially) Chinese. It is also correct that the CRPP laid 36% of the rail by distance. First order approximation would suggest that the Chinese fraction of the built distance is between 15 and 29%.
Pretty normal accident rates are found worldwide for modern HSR construction that doesn't take two decades to build a single line like CA HSR. Look at what China or Spain can build in that time span for less money.
Which Seattle transit of 22 miles? The Line T took 3 years to construct, Line 1 is 22 miles but it's already built, it took 6 years of construction. Indeed it took longer to plan, but we're talking building in a major metropolitan area, not empty land.
> All the grading, track laying, and bridge construction was done by muscle.
It's both an argument to applaud efforts of the past, as well as criticise the nature of the past. I certainly wouldn't want to be a labourer in 1865, when life expectancy in the US was less than half (37) of today's 78 or so. It's not all labour standards of course, but it certainly must have played a role.
Boring through two mountain ranges, crossing many rivers (including the Mississippi). Endless bridges for ravines, creeks, and rivers. Lots of snow sheds, the longest was 29 miles, using 29,000,000 board feet of lumber.
> Boring through two mountain ranges, crossing many rivers (including the Mississippi).
The First Transcontinental Railroad started from Omaha, Nebraska, so it crossed neither the Missouri nor the Mississippi. Indeed, it only crosses the North Platte River, not the main stem itself, and this is the river famously described as "too thick to drink, too thin to plow," i.e., not quite the same challenge as crossing the broader and much deeper Missouri, Mississippi, or Ohio rivers.
Yes, Chinese muscle, many of whom died in the process. And I think we covered the 37 years of life expectancy during that time in the US, let alone for a Chinese immigrant doing heavy labour at a fraction of white people's salaries. I for one would not have preferred being born in 1865 to work on this railroad. But feel free to voluntarily give up all your privileges at your current job, it's definitely easier to get things done at the labour standards of 1860, using underpaid immigrant labour to do dangerous work. Let's all just give up our rights!
But my point was, the land was empty, i.e. not void of nature, but empty of people making political claims, e.g. like when building a transit line through Seattle. They're not remotely similar projects. The Seattle line of 22 miles you mentioned was built in the same 6 years, with need for far less 'muscle'.
At least empty of political claims if we forget about the de facto genocide of the native Americans that had to go at some point to make the US what it is today. I'm not sharing any nostalgia you may have of construction in this time.
> Chinese muscle, many of whom died in the process.
There were many thousands of others. The eastern team did not employ any Chinese.
> rights
Nobody gave up any rights to work on the railroad. None were conscripts or forced labor. Any could walk away anytime they pleased.
> They're not remotely similar projects.
Nothing resembling the project had ever been done before. Lots of people thought it was infeasible. It was a triumph, exceeding even the wildest expectations. It arguably was the lynch pin that created the modern America.
The railroad also saved lots of lives. Before the railroad, an estimated 65,000 people died on the Oregon Trail. After, they hopped on a train and arrived intact 3 days later.
> Before the railroad, an estimated 65,000 people died on the Oregon Trail. After, they hopped on a train and arrived intact 3 days later.
"Railroad travel was dangerous in the early years. Train wrecks and derailments were common killing and injuring countless passengers and railroad men. Boilers blew up, bridges collapsed under the weight of trains, brittle iron tracks cracked, primitive breaks overheated and failed. The lack of a signal system sometimes caused two trains to be accidentally switched onto the same track and sent speeding into each other. The wood passenger car seemed almost to self-destruct on impact."
"Passengers could be crushed and thrown out. Windows would shatter because there was no safety plate glass in that day. Stoves would overturn spilling hot coals through the crushed and broken wood and instantly trains were set on fire. Cars would fall into rivers off of bridges."
"In the race to build the line there was naturally a long list of defects, unsafe bridges, tunnels too narrow, road bed not properly level. Poor rail alignment and carelessly laid cross ties. One government inspector declared it the worst railroad he had ever seen. But that didn't stop the railroaders."
"More than six times as many railroad men as passengers were killed or injured in accidents during the early days of the transcontinental railroad. Railroading ranked as one of America's most dangerous jobs."
"The technology was so dangerous that virtually every break man was maimed."
Source: The Railroads That Tamed The West, Modern Marvels Season 2 Episode 9. 1996.
> Nobody gave up any rights to work on the railroad.
Because they didn't have any. Like the right for equal pay. The right to a safe working environment. The right to adequate breaks. The right to insurance etc. You think they had the same rights as you do today?
I'm not saying the project was a bad project, it was amazing. I'm saying that the speed of its development isn't something we can long for, without also mentioning it requires conditions which completely suck for its workforce in 1865, just to mention one thing.
> The railroad also saved lots of lives. Before the railroad, an estimated 65,000 people died on the Oregon Trail. After, they hopped on a train and arrived intact 3 days later.
That's great, I'm happy it was built. You're missing the point. I'm not criticising the project, for its time it was amazing. I'm criticising the fact that it shouldn't be held as a standard for construction today. I'm not sure in what field of work you're in, but I'm sure if you give up half your salary, work twice as hard, take fewer breaks, give up your insurance and workplace safety, that the company could save money, hire more people, get things done faster. But while a project would get doen faster, actual society (i.e., the measure of your wellbeing, which is what much of life is about) would become worse.
For example, we can probably build things faster if we took into Bangladeshi labourers and paid them a fraction of our salaries, let them sleep in barracks, give them no health insurance, no workplace safety, see tons of them die. Indeed, it's how Qatar is building out its infrastructure massively at the moment, at breakneck speeds. But it's no example to me of how we should look to construct things today, nor is the transcontinental railroad an example for today, however amazing it was to build in the 1860s.
There were no guards to prevent the workers from dropping their tools and leaving. That is a fundamental right.
> I'm criticising the fact that it shouldn't be held as a standard for construction today.
A 100 times increase in distance in 10% of the time with no powered construction equipment cannot be explained as merely paying people half as much and not giving medical insurance (though I'm sure they had medical teams on site to do what they could, but medical practice in those days was a bit frightening to us today). There was no intent to grind up workers blood to use as lubricant, and in fact they did many things along the way to reduce worker deaths and injuries. See my other comment about how they cut down on the use of nitro as it was too dangerous, despite being twice as fast as black powder.
It's quite interesting how you're completely unwilling to argue the original point (which is that a 1860s construction project is no model for today as it came at a great cost we're not willing to accept, besides being completely incomparable to the modern-day example you gave), but completely willing to argue quite meaningless aspects to the discussion seemingly for the sake of it.
And the lives of between 1,000 and 2,000 largely Chinese immigrants for the transcontinental railroad alone. Certainly more died during the construction of the remainder of the US rail network. Construction projects in other countries were significantly more deadly.
That wasn't due to speed, that was due to a lack of safety regulations. Spain and China built out national high speed rail networks in timely fashions in recent years with pretty normal accident rates for modern construction. French companies even offered faster and cheaper proposals for california HSR, and we said 'no' because they were French and not in some Bakersfield politican's donor list.
But there were no neighborhood activists protesting every foot of track, demanding endless environmental impact studies, attending every city council meeting to complain about the project, etc, etc.
Building a bridge across a ravine is a fairly well understood and easy to solve problem as long as no one is actively trying to stop you.
> But there were no neighborhood activists protesting every foot of track, demanding endless environmental impact studies, attending every city council meeting to complain about the project, etc, etc.
People love to get their pitchforks out against eminent domain but I assert without it not a single large public works project would ever get built. No dams, no sewer treatment plants, no water lines, no power lines, no power plants, no trains, no highways, no anything. Without eminent domain, there will always be some holdout somewhere that throws a wrench in things no matter how many truckloads of money you toss at them.
To actually build massive public infrastructure, you need a way to force people to cooperate. Without, you'd never get the project off the ground.
It's mostly infant mortality, not labor standards. Average remaining years of life at age 10 has gone up, but nothing like as dramatically as the average life expectancy at birth has (expected age of death for a 10-year old white male: 58 in 1850, 76 in 2011).
The 5 is a disaster of a freeway. It sees such an amazing amount of traffic and I feel like the state honestly has no idea what to do about it as it gets worse and worse each year with more commuters and increased trucking traffic, since freight rail is evidently at capacity in California. I have hit gridlock on that freeway at 10pm dozens and dozens of times. The entire way from LA to SD is marked by death, with scrape marks on every single barrier pretty much continuously over hundreds of miles, and tire marks of cars careening in a spin across all the lanes into a wall.
The solution is not to build more highways and roads, as much as many people hate to hear that. Basically as soon as it is made slightly easier and faster to drive, people will adjust by driving more.
There are quite a few instances where an already large interstate has been increased in size and the traffic got /worse/ after the fact. Cars just aren't an efficient way to move people around for the money they cost.
I'm genuinely curious if things are going to start swinging back in the other direction where there is more focus on other transportation modes outside of cars. There have been some small scale rail expansions in larger cities, some intercity rail lines opening (brightline) and being built (california high speed rail). It hasn't been enough to hit a sort of tipping point yet though.
While it is true that commute times might go down when freeways get wider, that's only half the coin. The purpose of the 5 is not to facilitate commuters like many other local highways in SD and LA, but to facilitate international trade between the U.S. and the world. Speed goes down, yes, but throughput goes up. Throughput is what is needed when you are trying to move trucking traffic from Central America through the southland north up the the central valley of CA, or east along the 10. It is what is needed when you need to move trucking traffic carrying all goods ordered by Americans from Asia from the port of long beach or LA into the heartland, because the freight rail grades are already at capacity. It's like having a bucket of water with a few holes vs a lot of holes; rate of flow might be unchanged per hole (lane), but you are moving more water (trucks) in the given span of time with the bucket with more holes. Right now there are dozens of supercarriers anchored off the coast of Long Beach, waiting weeks to unload goods into clogged logistical networks.
In a future where everyone takes a bus or a train or a bike to work, they are still ordering all their shit online from Asia and stocking their grocery stores with food from Central and South America, and there will therefore always be increasing demand for the movement of more goods over time as the population continues to grow.
yeah i'm sure we could have those breakneck speed railway construction in the middle of the open, unihabited plain for the majority of it and then for the incredibly dangerous stuff we could send in the marginalized at the time chinese/irish workers to handle unstable dynamite paid half that of other workers and ignoring any and all safety regulations and building codes of today.
China managed to build a massive high speed rail network across rough terrain and completely inhabited land in a few years. Their network is safe and reliable.
I've noticed it's becoming increasingly common to just give up and excuse everything in the US. "Well we could build new rails, but..." "Well we could get health care prices under control, but..." "Well we could solve (x problem that most other countries don't have), but..."
It's kind of a sad decline from being the world leader by far like the US was 50 years ago. There's always a billion reasons to not do something, but not much push to actually do something.
They used black powder, dynamite only became available towards the end.
You have good points, but consider it ran TWO THOUSAND MILES, not 22, and still took only 10% of the time. You say "open plain", but try driving it some time. It had to go through two mountain ranges, for example.
The workers came because they got better pay than anywhere else. This includes the Chinese and Irish. It was not built by conscripts.
death toll is not known but it's over 1000 they estimate of just chinese laborers. at the peak there were 15,000 or so workers working on the rail. in fact the main suspected etymology of "chinaman's chance[0]" (aka no chance) was because they were the demographic that did the super dangerous work that killed 6% on the low end. The construction was also not one large project but two large projects constructed in parallel and the blasting/excavating was done ahead of the time. Sure they could lay down 10 miles of track a day on open plains but the hard work was through the mountains and that's the stuff that slows the construction down like if you were to build 22 miles of track in a heavily populated area with land already claimed by other entities and having to deal with easements and other legal battles + logistics.
Nitroglycerin was used in large quantities on the central pacific railroad construction and were predominantly chinese laborers whereas the union pacific was more irish laborers. The central pacific rail owned their own TNT factory even. I am not sure what you are getting at; black powder was used but it certainly wasn't the only thing in use especially in the west.
"At the tunnels, especially Summit Tunnel, the Chinese were using great amounts of black powder, up to five hundred kegs a day."
"The CP found that, when they got to drilling holes of fifteen to eighteen inches into the granite, poured in the liquid nitroglycerin, capped the hole with a plug, and fired it with a percussion cap, the nitroglycerin did a far better job than powder. The work progressed at nearly double the speed, and the granite was broken into far smaller pieces. But the accidents proved too much. In one, after a number of charges had been set off simultaneously, a Chinese worker hit a charge of nitro that hadn't exploded with his pick.
It exploded and killed him and the others working near that spot. Strobridge declared, "Bury that stuff." Crocker said to get it out of there. And even though Nobel perfected dynamite in 1866, it was never tested or used by the CP. In 1867, the CP ignored the dangers and did make and use its own nitroglycerin, but except at Summit Tunnel did not make a practice of it."
"Nothing Like It In The World", Ambrose, pg. 200-201
I'm not just quoting the book, I read the whole thing. It's really a great story.
Because they had a government mandate. ST continually must renegotiate with every level of local government. This could all be sidestepped by a state law, but this is just another cost of FPTP voting.
It wasn't quite that simple. It was a giant project, and there was the usual squirrel fire drill one sees with any large government project where everyone has their hand out for bribes and corruption.
People do things fast when they think it’s the most important thing, like the Covid vaccines.
Government officials and most of the contractors are going to keep on using their stupid inefficient 25mpg SUVs and pickup truck and never take the train anyway, why would they want the project to go any faster?
The first transcontinental railroad took 6 years to 1,900 miles. All the grading, track laying, and bridge construction was done by muscle. Black powder was used for the tunnels, but the holes to put the power in were bored by hand.
In contrast, Seattle Transit will take 30 years to build 22 miles of track, with modern construction equipment, and that's in the remote possibility they'll be on schedule.
Seattle used to have rail networks. The right-of-ways are still there, but Sound Transit very carefully avoids using them. Nobody is ever able to explain why. Some even still have rusting rail on them, while the ST crews are blasting new right of way a block over.