As we hear reports that it will take 10 years (🤯) to replace the 1.6 mile Francis Scott Key bridge in Baltimore, remember that China built the Danyang-Kunshan bridge and Qingdao Jiaozhou Bay Bridge in 4 years each.
Danyang-Kunshan Bridge is 102 miles long, and 100 ft above the water.
Jiaozhou Bay Bridge is 16 miles and 623 ft tall, earthquake and typhoon proof, and can withstand a direct strike from a 300,000 ton cargo ship. That last point is unfortunately topical.
Based on your comment and another comment from a user that's been on the bridge, I think you're right.
Qingdao Jiaozhou Bay Bridge
Construction time: Also 4 years
Clearance below: 623 ft (109 m)
Length: 16.6 miles (26.7 km)
Designed to withstand cargo ship strike (which makes sense given the clearance height, and that it's over open water).
@bgrinter@mekkaokereke@lisamelton I would hope it’s never allowed to be that old. Century-old infrastructure is less of a bragging point than people think.
@bynkii@mekkaokereke@lisamelton
Build things to last. Tower Bridge in London is 130 years old. High Bridge in Lincoln is 864 years old. There are Roman era bridges still in use.
I would be more concerned at infrastructure not built to last.
The Sydney Harbour Bridge is well maintained- there’s no reason for it not to be there in another 100 years.
I always wonder why people think old things like bridges are a problem, it’s not as if the physics that held them up before has suddenly changed: if you maintain them thoroughly enough they should last almost indefinitely… unless you stupidly designed them to be disposable (ie impractical to repair)
@bgrinter@bynkii@mekkaokereke@lisamelton Tower Bridge wasn’t designed for massive cargo ships transiting under it. Even stronger river currents from flooding due to climate change can damage a bridge with stone pilings. Maintenance is important in infrastructure.
@mekkaokereke In China, they also have tunnels instead of bridges under shipping channels at major ports like Shanghai and Ningbo. Europe, same thing - Rotterdam and Antwerp have no bridges over the shipping channels, and Hamburg has one over a subsidiary one and that one is getting replaced with a higher bridge (and is already anchored on land, not in the river).
@Alon@mekkaokereke And Baltimore has tunnels under their harbor as well. I've been through them plenty of times, it's a major part of the drive along the NW corridor between DC and Philly/NYC.
@UncivilServant@mekkaokereke Yes, but Maryland's hazmat rules are so restrictive that a tunnel-free truck route is required under current regulations. In the US, each state has different rules, whereas in Europe there's a single set of rules governed by an international agreement called ADR. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ADR_(treaty)
@mekkaokereke damn these comments are racist as fuck. Has nobody been paying attention to how incredible Chinese industrial engineering has gotten in the last 60 years? America could learn quite a bit from other nations on how to build high quality infrastructure quickly and cheaply at this point, because we do not seem to have gotten good at high quality, cheap, quickly, or frankly, having It exist at all
Ah, Americans and Europeans. People that love to point out how evil prison labor is when talking about China, but have nothing cute to say about Black prison labor in the US. 🙂🙃
The lack of self-awareness to drop into a Black American's mentions, to complain about prison labor in other countries.
Let me help y'all avoid some awkward conversations: If you are talking to a Black adult in the United States, statistically, it is much more likely than not, that you are talking to someone that knows someone personally that has done prison labor after being mistreated by the US criminal justice system. 🤷🏿♂️
@mekkaokereke@glasspusher@hazelweakly Just to say it a bit louder for those in the back: It's a very common misconception in the US that the 13th Amendment outlawed slavery. Of course this is not entirely true, because the 13th Amendment has a specific exception for prison slavery as a punishment.
@hazelweakly@mekkaokereke I don't consider it racist to point out that it's difficult to believe official info from the PRC, because it is illegal to contradict the official party line of the CCP in China.
And yes, American whistleblowers face retaliation as well, but the American government doesn't execute whistleblowers. The Chinese government does. So if you're a Chinese engineer and you know a bridge isn't built to spec, you stay silent and you live, or you speak up and die.
@McBeth@hazelweakly@mekkaokereke I work for a state government. I have walked into our policy director's office and told her I was concerned about whether we were in compliance with certain federal laws...actually on multiple occasions, now that I think of it.
I regularly drink tea on my balcony without any worries.
🤔 I'm sorry, what does any of this have to do with believing or not believing that the infrastructure that China built in the 1990s, 2000s, and 2010s, is still standing?
This isn't hypothetical. You can go and see the infrastructure today. People in this thread have driven on the bridges, ridden the trains, and live in the buildings.
Sounds a little like, "US infrastructure is better! Trust me bro! Who are you going to believe: me, or your lying eyes?"
@mekkaokereke@McBeth@hazelweakly My point was that one reason to distrust some of China's rapid infrastructure development is because of their government. I agree with you that governments are central to infrastructure development, our fed and state governments have dropped the ball on that for at least 50 years, no argument.
But when a Chinese company builds a bridge rapidly, is it innovation, or corruption and pressure? Worse, we don't know, because the PRC is opaque rather than dishonest
@mekkaokereke@McBeth@hazelweakly And I want to emphasize that last part. The Chinese government doesn't always lie. But they reflexively cover up until they have orders from above with an official story. So it's not fair to assume that everything from China is a lie, that's just as bad as taking the CCP's word, or any government's word.
I don't trust the American or Chinese governments. The US fed and most state governments are relatively transparent, is a difference.
@mekkaokereke@McBeth@hazelweakly So it's not even just "is this bridge safe" but a more big-picture "do they have the appropriate regulatory structures in place" and "what is the oversight of the building and maintenance process".
I'm just saying, if someone promises to build it faster, better, and cheaper, it's worth asking how and why. I'm sure we can do better than we are, but I'm reluctant to follow a path laid down by a government that is fundamentally inefficient, corrupt, and evil.
I don't trust our government more than theirs. We regularly lie about stuff too. Half of the stuff I post on here is about how the US government regularly lies to its people, on purpose, for financial and political gain, usually at the expense of Black people.
When the pandemic 1st started, Fauci told people not to buy masks, because they weren't really necessary. He knew this was a lie. He later admitted the truth: it was because there was a mask shortage
BYD responded to the mask shortage, by going from "We don't make masks! We make Electric Vehicles and batteries!" To "We are the largest N95 and surgical mask producer in the world!" in under a month.
When the pandemic started, the US didn't have enough ICU capacity. So we "triaged," and sent Black and Brown people home to die. China responded by building multiple entire hospitals in under 10 days.
There is no Chinese President in history that is as corrupt as Trump was. It's not close.
We're still understanding who paid for Supreme Court justice vacations. We have national guardsmen in NYC subways, even though the mayor and governor know the subway is safe. We have senators smuggling gold bars.
The belief that the US government is somehow less corrupt than the Chinese government, is just not based on reality. It's based on vibes and sinophobia.
I'm not a criminal or criminal underworld expert. But it seems like if you're going to do a bribery, and plan to use hard to trace cash equivalents like gold bars, try not to use gold bars that were:
*Recorded into sworn evidence
*By local and federal agents
*In front of a judge
*Who certified sworn testimony that the gold bars belong to the alleged briber
*And then later have said gold bars show up in the house of the alleged bribe recipient
Building the Baltimore bridge in under 10 years is not something that is only possible if you have a "corrupt or authoritarian government." Building quickly has nothing to do with China at all. It has to do with the US accepting the fact that we are not very good at this anymore. That's the first step required for real change.
Our arrogance and belief that anyone who's better than us must have cheated, is the biggest obstacle to us getting good at infra.
@mekkaokereke@McBeth@hazelweakly I would love it if we could construct megaprojects with the scale and organization of Japanese industry, the tech infrastructure from South Korea, and the transportation infrastructure of the EU.
Those are countries worth learning from (maybe not pre-80s Korea). I'm not saying we can't do better.
As for Sinophobia, dunno. It's been 20 years since I studied foreign policy or since I've had friends living in China, I could be wrong about one-party states.
Every country is worth learning from. We just don't have to take every lesson.
The lessons in rapid construction we should take from China is: Rapid approval of permits needed to execute against critical infrastructure projects.
We are so afraid of "Big government." We think more government employees slow things down. But many of those people approve permits and conduct inspections. That bottleneck is a primary driver in slowing US infra projects vs China
@mekkaokereke@UncivilServant@McBeth@hazelweakly The US has a political consensus that the government, broadly constructed, should not be able to tell a white man what to do, about anything, ever. (Or his balls will fall off and roll away.)
It's there because an exercised civil power would put an end to a lot of profit-extraction and slavery-equivalent behaviours that make rich individuals richer. It's an assertion that there's no such thing as a legitimate government.
@mekkaokereke@UncivilServant@McBeth@hazelweakly The US privileges process over people and/or projects at every level. I think most people across the political spectrum would agree with this observation, even as they’d viciously fight about why it is the case and what we could and should do to achieve a healthier balance.
@donaldball@mekkaokereke@UncivilServant@McBeth@hazelweakly Part of the reason we don’t built big infrastructure projects so fast anymore is that, back when we did, stuff like massive corruption in smoky back rooms, labor law violations, and bulldozing whole low-income (also typically minoritized) neighborhoods was usually how we got it done.
@mekkaokereke@UncivilServant@McBeth@hazelweakly you’re not exactly wrong, but while some of building quickly in china is a function of reduced impediments to popular will and there are absolutely lessons to learn there, a LOT of it is due to massive amounts of corruption and cut corners. I would recommend reading about “tofu dregs construction” before suggesting their infrastructure as a model to look to.
Again, my point is not "We should be exactly like China!"
My point is that this has nothing to do with China, and everything to do with us.
Deregulation, cutting corners, corruption, eliminating safety and environmental regulations, are all anti-social and cynical approaches to reducing the amount of time spent in permitting. There are pro-social ways of accomplishing the same thing.👍🏿
Government focus on expedited permit processing is one way.
This example walks through why China can build a skyscraper in a week, but it is structurally impossible for a US company to even do a San Francisco office to residential conversion in under 3 years.
The problem is not the technical challenges around plumbing or windows for retrofitting buildings, or cost of construction.
@mekkaokereke@UncivilServant@McBeth@hazelweakly I don’t think you can get down to China’s benchmark here but you are absolutely correct about permitting being the #1 problem here, particularly in the bay area. And there are second order effects, like construction companies moving out of the area because there simply isn’t enough work, so you end up paying a premium on the labor even after you get the permits. Not in wages, but just in transport and logistics
As an engineer with a mega project company, I can tell you American firms can do it faster. One reason things have been slowed down is that a lot of these projects are around for at least 2 generations (40 odd years) and can be eyesores. There is a history of highways cutting through black neighborhoods at low elevation creating noise and undesirability, hurting black prosperity, see I-35 Austin.
@mekkaokereke@UncivilServant@McBeth@hazelweakly
...do better by minorities, build better infrastructure, with more community input, more consensus and better outcomes than the past, still too imperfect.
An emergency replacement of a critical piece of infrastructure like this should be allowed through without those things by taking a quick pulsar of the community survey.
Identical or easy to construct design that is delivered at the earliest vs a new design that has lot more community...
Agreed. The "community input takes too long!" is one of the arguments that deregulators use. It's also a favorite obstructionist tactic of the NIMBYS. I would classify both of these in the "anti-social" bucket.
People from APAC and EU see this video and think, "Meh. Not that impressive. I mean it's fast, but it doesn't go everywhere. Our fast trains go everywhere."👍🏿
Meanwhile, the US can't seem to operate a train over 12 mph without it derailing, spilling chemicals, and having half of Ohio declared a hazmat zone.🤡
I hate to be the one to tell this to you*, but in this decade, Chinese safety regulations on transportation infrastructure are better than US regulations in many important regards.
The US government is happy to let doors and tires fall off of our planes before they speak up. Every 5th train ride has Pete Buttigieg apologizing in rural Pennsylvania.
@bouriquet@mekkaokereke@AdeptVeritatis@UncivilServant@McBeth@hazelweakly Have you seen how large the military budget is, or big corporate subsidies are? That's all even setting aside how expensive each new round of tax cuts for the extremely rich are. The US can afford quite a bit; it's a policy choice to have poor rail infrastructure and safety regulations.
@bouriquet@AdeptVeritatis@mekkaokereke@UncivilServant@McBeth@hazelweakly I didn’t work on the Shanghai maglev project but Chinese rail companies meet international electromagnetic standards all the time. I think your post here consists of a fact free string of words attempting to put your bias in the clothing of “just asking questions” “skepticism”.
—someone who worked on electromagnetic compatibility engineering analysis for rail systems including for Chinese designed and built rail cars
I don't know where the 10 years figure comes from. Near my home town is the St Nazaire bridge, at the mouth of the river Loire in France. It is larger than the Baltimore bridge, and was completed in 1975 in 3 years. If the French could build that in 3 years 50 years ago, I have a hard time believing it will take 10 years in America now.
In NASA in the US in the 60s, "computer" was a job title for a human being. A very fast, accurate, and extremely detail oriented mathematicians that made orbital calculations. Very often a Black woman.
Our government's ability to make bold decisions and execute against them, is less than it was in the 60s. In part because we have allowed bigotry and hatred to rise to levels beyond what they were in the 60s.
A division of NASA in 2024, doing orbital calculations, where most of those calculations are done by Black women, would face accusations of "DEI!"🤡
@mekkaokereke the amazing bridge spanning almost a mile across the Bosphorus took 4 years from international design competition to opening https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yavuz_Sultan_Selim_Bridge I worked on the aerodynamics with the franco-swiss design team and construction was a real international effort. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Yavuz_sultan_selim_k%C3%B6pr%C3%BCs%C3%BC_(cropped).jpg
@mekkaokereke interesting! Is it because China's infrastructure is more efficient or something? I'm guessing it can't be bureaucracy because there's likely to be political will to quickly build the Key bridge too 👀
Yes, it very much is about the bureaucracy, and government+large private industry inefficiency. That makes up more of the cost increase than labor costs or environmental or safety protections.
@mekkaokereke that actually makes sense when I realise that most things in the US are privatised. (I come from the south Indian state of Tamil Nadu, where we have a relatively healthy balance between public sector companies and private enterprises, so I also get to see firsthand the different ways in which they operate)
Yeah, I'll walk through a concrete example so you can see how bad it is.
Q: San Francisco is supposed to be the technology capital of the world. There are empty office buildings in SF, and not enough housing. China can build new skyscrapers from scratch in under a month! And for 1/5th the cost of US construction! How can China build a new building faster and cheaper than the US can even convert one? Is it better tech? Cheaper labor? Corruption? Is it lax environmental or safety rules?
If you and I bought a vacant office building in San Francisco today, and wanted to convert it to apartments and condos, and had a perfect set of plans to do so... It would take us 3 years 🤯 before someone got back to us on if our plans were approved.
That is, we submit blueprints and construction plans to the city. The city will look at those plans and either say:
Let's say the building we want to convert costs $500M.
We buy it and finance $400M @ 5%.
Our loan payments alone are ~$4M a month.
Again, we bought this building to convert it from an office building into an apartment building. We need to do construction to retrofit the building. But we can't even start on the construction, until we have permits. Which will be 36 months later😭
It is not the cost of labor that makes building in the US so much more expensive than China, or that makes building in San Francisco so much more expensive than almost anywhere else in the US.
And it's not that our regulations are so much more strict, or so much safer.
Much of it is just the time required to get the permits and inspections done.
I promise you, cranes do not move any faster in Shanghai than San Francisco. Concrete does not cure any faster. Rebar bends the same.
The right-wing answer is to just get rid of all government regulations. "👴🏻Deregulate! Can't have slow permits if there is no permit required! LOL!"
Deregulation has predictable catastrophic results. But everyone gets rich for a few years before the inevitable disaster. I'm using the Ronald Reagan, trickle down definition of "everyone."
A better solution, is to expedite the permit process. There is no good reason why permits take so long. We can accelerate permit processing capacity.
The US centrist answer is to give money to private industry. "👴🏻Building housing in SF is too expensive for the poor little billionaire mega builders! Let's Incentivize the mega construction companies by giving them tax breaks and barrels of cash to build more housing!"
This is bad and unnecessary, and doesn't fix the problem.
A US leftist solution is that government should build housing. But the government still needs to go through its own permitting process. It's still very expensive
@mekkaokereke but ask yourself which bridge you would trust crossing every day.
China built sufficient housing units for 3billion people.... In 12yrs... the buildings just don't have power. Or sewer. Or any insulation. Other than that, perfect! :)
US auto vehicle safety regulators thought that Teslas were some of the safest cars ever. Chinese authorities were the first ones to sound the alarm. Then afterwards, US authorities acted too.
US aviation safety thought Boeing safety was great! Chinese authorities were the first to flag issues with Boeing. Now years later the US is like "🤔 Y'know what? Maybe we shouldn't let them self-certify."
There's this level of cope in the American mind, where we believe in exceptionalism so much, that we just assume that we must be better than everyone around us, even at things that we are world famous for being bad at.
I don't know which decade you think we're living in, but in 2024, the US is not world leading at building safe infrastructure. We are surprisingly bad at it. We're not just slow and expensive. We're bad at doing it well.
@mekkaokereke I'm living in the decade when China built 3bn housing units in useless buildings, trying to pass them as a real estate boom, and when their latest nuclear sub sunk, their "5th gen" fighter lacks secondary engines, their latest landing ship caught fire on maiden voyage, their newest rifle "keyholes" rounds at 15m, and so on.
Which one are YOU living in? The maga scare "china is coming" decade based on dezinfo?
"China is not as good at us at building weapons of war!" 100% factual! Our killing machines are far superior! We are the best at war, and making war machines! USA! USA! napalm and brimstone smell intensifies
"China has a housing bubble." Again, facts! We had 1 too a few decades ago. And then a crypto bubble. We have bubbles.
None of this negates the fact that baselined against the EU, China is very good at building critical infrastructure fast+cheap, and the US is very bad at it.
@mekkaokereke also we should keep in mind that no one has any idea. Almost everyone engaged with the project is focused on clearing the debris and resuming ocean traffic to the port.
@CStamp@mekkaokereke (I will know more in a year than I do now, but it looks to me like major infrastructure projects in China aren't terribly different from in rich democracies - there are engineering studies, environment reviews, competitive bids, etc. Costs aren't even too different from the average in rich non-English-speaking states. It's just the US, UK, and the rest of the Anglosphere that can't build.)
Every day I find out new problems I didn't know about with US infrastructure.
Freeways collapsing and in disrepair. Contractors cutting corners on concrete quality making apartment buildings collapse. Train tracks not built to withstand heavy use. Sewage systems built long after New York's, needing to be replaced long before New York's. Airport runways cracking. Hyperloop tunnels to nowhere. Very expensive "Border wall" racist vanity projects that do nothing.
@mekkaokereke
I use stuff like that to explain why government contracts are written to specify every detail - otherwise some contractor will low-bid and then use cheap, low-quality materials to make their profit.
@PJ_Evans@mekkaokereke from my understanding the government is compelled to accept the lowest bidder. And it also has to contract everything. So it can't even build up a list of reputable vendors really.
If that's the case then it's not even that they have to specify everything, it's that (I think??) they can't even necessarily go "we'll use the high quality and honest contractor"
But I'm remembering a very fuzzy conversation from years ago so I'm not sure how accurate that is
@hazelweakly@PJ_Evans@mekkaokereke from my time in (non-US) government, the government has to get "the best deal". That doesn't always mean the cheapest bid - price can be say 40% of the points and other scored elements will make up 60% (it was always a struggle with the procurement people to get the percentage for cost as low as we could to have a chance at a decent product), or all the non-financial features will be awarded points and the contract awarded based on cost per point.
@hazelweakly@PJ_Evans@mekkaokereke The important thing was everything about how "value" would be judged had to be spelled out in advance, more rigourously the more the contract was likely to cost, because losing proponents might sue if they thought they lost on vibes, reputation, prior relationships, etc. - anything not spelled out in the call for bids.
@hazelweakly@PJ_Evans@mekkaokereke My dad was a federal highway engineer back in the day and I remember him telling me that they were actually mandated to pass over bids that were thought to be unrealistically low. This is in marked contrast to my area where a contractor that I knew lost out on a bid to do the sidewalks on a huge project by so much that he actually took the time to recalculate it after the fact. And verified that the winning bid was less than the cost of the concrete alone. And we wonder why so much of our infrastructure is shit.
@JamesK@hazelweakly@PJ_Evans@mekkaokereke when I was in the USAF back in the late 80s/early 90s, we had a short-lived idea that was supposed to make buying tools (like socket sets & similar) easier and cheaper: rather than the whole mil-spec thing, we’d just get bids from local places.
Save money, buy local, win-win, right?
lol.
For six months it was:
get bids
review bids
pick lowest
other people sue because they could have beat price in 3)
@JamesK@hazelweakly@PJ_Evans@mekkaokereke at no point did we ever get to the “buy and get tools” part, and as it turns out, flightline maintenance on Very Large Aircraft (B-1Bs) is hard on tools.
So we went back to the old more expensive way because it actually resulted in tools.
I suppose not buying any tools saves money, but our flight hours took it in the shorts.
@mekkaokereke@PJ_Evans not government related, but did you hear about entire developments of houses in Arizona falling apart even though they are new builds? And I’m sure these people overpaid for these crappy houses too.
@maggiejk@mekkaokereke@PJ_Evans Friend of mine is a carpenter. He gets called in to fix leaks on 1 or 2 year old houses all the time. The American construction industry is thoroughly corrupt at almost every level.
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