this post was submitted on 10 Jun 2025
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That's the hilarious part. You watch Japan repair their roads after an earthquake in a weekend. Scheduled maintenance in the States takes weeks or months. Hell, one project near me took YEARS to finish.
I listened to a podcast recently about a book called Abundance, and while I don't necessarily agree with all of the author's points, it was accurate in describing the bureaucracy of the United States and why the situation you describe happens.
The US is a very litigation-happy country, where any given public works project of significance either needs to proceed at a crawl to make sure it is utterly unimpeachable, or spend years fighting lawsuits to begin work. Cost in time results in a cost in capital, budgets balloon, and a lot of projects that are needed for the public good simply become non-starters.
Emergency powers gets around that to an extent, which is where that scenario from Japan would come into play. And when emergency powers are invoked in the US, you see similar results (another example mentioned by the author of that book), but you can't let "emergency" be the only standard by which anything actually gets done in a reasonable amount of time.
In my home state, there has been a long ongoing project for east-west high speed rail which would make it feasible for people to work in Boston while living further away from it. It would theoretically help alleviate ballooning costs of living here around the city and provide more economic opportunity to people in the western part of the state. But everyone accepts that the project will basically never happen, because the Big Dig is still a lingering collective memory for everyone here and no one wants to go through that again. So no matter how much potential good it could do for people, it will likely never happen as long as anyone is negatively affected by it.
I am reminded of this blog post.
The fact that less infrastructure is needed per person (or per building) in many places compared to North America is probably a contributing factor as well, especially if we're comparing NA to Japan.
A road construction project within view of my old place could have been finished in 6 months, given the speed they set up 90% of it.
All that was left was a small ramp and a slightly curved road.
Then some locals found out that the plan for the surrounding fields (that had been untended and growing wild for almost a decade before hand) were going to be used for solar power.
Suddenly they became very concerned about proper land surveys and impacts, supposedly solar installations bring in crime, and all kinds of other stall tactics.
Well since they put the project on hold for over 5 years, the price of solar dropped a TON and when the bullshit finally got sorted, the solar field ended up being almost 3x the original intended power output.
And the only crime that has happened as a result is occasionally they have to replace some panels because some good old boys keep taking pot shots at the panels. Normal people might call that "domestic terrorism" and do something about it, but the local sheriff didn't seem go care until their offices needed renovating and they had to shack up down the street.
Just a rambling way to say all the problems with the road projects around my area are caused by locals.
They took down all the overpass bridges near me, for whatever reason.
They have been down for months already and the last handful of times I’ve driven by, the equipment has not moved at all. So they tore them out all at once, making getting into my town from the highway virtually impossible, and now aren’t even doing anything with them.
Cool, cool, nobody needs to get here anyway.
This is often caused by multiple different crews working on differing schedules.
The demo crew was told “have it done by [x] date, so the dirt levelers can get to work.” So the demo crew starts at the beginning of the work window.
Then the dirt leveling crew is told “you have between [x] and [y] to get done, so the steel workers can come lay rebar.” The dirt levelers see that it can be done in three days, and their company over-committed on some other projects anyways, so they wait until the very end of their month-long window. This means the site sits demoed for an entire month before the levelers even show up.
The steel workers are told “you have between [y] and [z] to get this done.” They start right at the beginning of their work window, meaning the dirt gets leveled and rebar almost immediately gets done. Then it sits for another month before the concrete crews start, because the concrete formers were told that they couldn’t start until [z]. Then the concrete needs to cure before the forms are removed, and grout/seal is applied. This takes another month, because the crew coming back to remove the forms is delayed on other projects. So the concrete just sits there for another month before the forms are removed, seams are sealed, and the road actually opens again.
All in all, it was only like a week of actual work, but it took 3-4 months to complete, because of the massive delays in between each crew. And these delays are because every single company has over-committed their crews, (because none of them want to turn down work because they’re too busy, and later regret it), and requires a massive window to be able to schedule their crews at some point in that month.
Those fast tracked projects cost multiple times over tho