I really don't understand all the hyperbole around this bridge. It's a suspension bridge, so the relevant bits are at the pylons, which just happen to be on either side of a huge canyon. It clocks in at #14 on Wikipedia's list of longest suspension bridges, with a main span that is 603 meters shorter (2023 meters vs 1420) than the longest.
More interestingly, to me at least, is the fact that 31 of the longest 50 are all in China (as are all but two of the 24 in the "under construction or planned").
> The 2,890-metre-long structure, which took more than three years to complete, reduces travel time between the two sides of the canyon from two hours to two minutes.
Pretty impressive. I feel like things in the US take a lot longer and cost a lot more. The prime example is the second avenue subway extension which has been planned since 1920. But I just searched for a few significant bridges like the Gordie Howe bridge which took about 7 years and 6.4bn Canadian (connects US and Canada). And this bridge which seems a lot more of an engineering feat took 3 years and 8 months and cost between $280 to $292 million
Chinese civil engineers, and engineering orgs, are good because they get a lot of practice.
In the West, and especially in the US, individuals and orgs don't get practice, so when they finally do get a new contract they have to stumble around for 5-10 years figuring out all the institutional knowledge that was lost.
By the time they figure it out, the project is over budget, so it gets canceled, and then it's 20 years until the next half-hearted attempt. Lather rinse repeat.
At root, a lot of this stems from a "managerial" mindset in which people and skills can simply be "reallocated" on a dime. They can't. You can't uproot trees all the time. You plant one and then it grows over multiple human lifetimes.
To say nothing of the NIMBYism. To acquire the land for use, you have to fight some armies of lawyers retained by a population with a lot of disposable income. (Yes, the US for all her problems has the biggest pool of disposable income in the world)
I know it would be attacked politically, but I wish in the US we would be more open to hiring foreign firms for these kinds of projects. Could we have high-speed rail if we just asked some French or Japanese company to build it for us? And we should structure contracts with them in a way that keeps the plans from being changed for political reasons. "Sorry state senator, we can't alter the route to pass through that town without re-opening negotiations which might cost billions."
I think the lesson here might be to solve your problems on a more local scale, as the fit of the solution is as important as checking the boxes.
What works in Japan works in Japan because it was a solution built for the problems, politics, and people of Japan. Sometimes there are lessons we can take from projects in other countries, other times it turns out like Cali HSR where the proposed 'foreign' solution might be logical but not politically tenable.
The problem isn't physically building the rail, the problem is the legal framework in which governments operate in. Multiple rounds of environmental impact statements, eminent domain lawsuits, preferred contractor RFP's, zoning, permitting, endless red tape...
>> The 2,890-metre-long structure, which took more than three years to complete, reduces travel time between the two sides of the canyon from two hours to two minutes.
The construction timeline and travel improvement are comparable to the New River Gorge bridge, which was completed in the US in ~50yr ago back when systems were structured to and the people who ran them actually were capable of producing results.
Freakonomics just had an episode about how China is run by engineers, who get things done, while the US is run by lawyers, who prevent things from getting done.
This is the central thesis of Ezra Klein's "Abundance" book. Basically, things like this (or high speed rail, or public housing) don't get built in the USA because the government has hamstrung itself with so many rules and regulations that it becomes prohibitively expensive and/or tied up in lawsuits.
Places like China, for better or worse, are not burdened with the problem of making sure every constituency is accommodated.
As a bridge Carpenter, you are correct. I have never seen a construction project of that size for that price completed in that amount of time in the USA. Not even close. I've done projects that are worth over 20 billion today. I've done projects as small as a sidewalk repair. There's no way you can turn out that scope of work for that price at that scale in America it's not even close. They have to be lying about the budget there's no way.
> I really don't understand all the hyperbole around this bridge. It's a suspension bridge, so the relevant bits are at the pylons
I understand what you're saying, but the experience is quite different for the people driving over it compared to a bridge where it isn't a 2000 foot drop.
Is this true? Does the center of a canyon have higher wind speeds than the edges of that canyon? And what about gusts? I'd assume that boundaries are more turbulent.
I think the point being made is that if you followed two ridgelines that make up a valley up to a common summit you could just jam a plank in there. You've got the world's highest bridge. It's only 4 ft long, but it is technically a bridge.
I'd be more interested to know how they raised individual components into place. But I presume they just started with small cables, then used those to raise larger ones into place over time.
I understand the point being made, and it's a valid one. My point, though, is along the lines of "engineers/tech-minded folk often miss the bigger picture". Yes, from an engineering perspective, it doesn't matter a whole lot how far the bottom of the valley floor is from the bridge (though I'm sure it matters some during construction).
But the "user experience" of someone driving over the bridge is vastly different, to the point where I know specifically of some people who wouldn't be willing to drive over it, and it's not "hyperbole" to point out how high this bridge is compared to the ground below.
All I'm seeing is fairly straightforward fact-based announcements. "The tallest bridge has opened - here it is." If that doesn't interest you, fine... but the reports are not hyperbole.
This project is beautiful. This is an incredible work of art. It might not be the longest, but have you ever tried to pull cable over 2,000 ft hole? Have you ever seen what it takes to actually do those columns? The work looks nice very nice design. It fits with the landscape very well. And the fact that it cost only 140 million is an incredible. For a comparison if you look up one of the bridges I did. We spent 280 million on this
We spent 280 million on this
Years ago I remember reading about an economist who stated something like, "the best way to stimulate an economy is to pay people to dig holes and then fill them in." (I wish I remember who said that.)
In modern times, that translates to paying people to build roads and bridges. Why pay people to sit on their butts and eat bon-bons when you can pay them to get something of value?
In more tangible terms, building infrastructure does elevate peoples' situations.
I feel like the metric needs to be "greatest distance of road from solid ground" or "greatest distance from linear interpolation between ground attachment points".
I was going to make some joke about not wanting to be the dude driving over the bridge for the load test - entirely presuming there was some more sophisticated way to load test new bridges . . . but no:
They do this to measure load vs deflection and check agreement with models, not to get anywhere close to yield. It's a low end proof check, drive trucks on, measure deflections, drive trucks off, confirm reset of deflection;
The margin on actual load to a permanent set is likely 2-3x what those trucks are carrying. And the margin to actual failure from just this quasi static loading and no external environmental loads (wind)... even more so.
Unless there was some catastrophic fuck up in construction process or calculations, this is completely safe.
If you see it as a punishment to be the first to cross the bridge that you designed, then you should probably be increasing the factor of safety in your calculations and the number of site checks you conduct.
It's only a punishment if the bridge falls down. But if someone is making truck drivers drive heavy trucks out onto a bridge to "test" if it will stand up under the load it only seems fair to me that the engineers who designed and built it take the risk alongside them.
Very impressive. The economic angle is a bit confusing. Wonder why China thought this was a worthy investment. Guizhou is a poor part of China, without much international tourism or trade.
Wikipedia indicates it is meant to increase tourism, but even China's most attractive regions (Beijing, Shanghai, Great Wall, Chengdu, Chongqing) are under-visited. I can't imagine that Guizhou will be on foreign tourist's agenda for at least a couple of decades. I think this is an attempt by the local govt. to get more internal tourism. It might work out. We'll see.
> reduces travel time between the two sides of the canyon from two hours to two minutes.
Think of it this way.
Every 2 hours round trip to 2 minutes saves imported fossil. For trucking/freight that's like ~$80 of diesel both ways.
PRC construction workers, though less abundant is cheaper than it ever will be. So best time to build infra is always now, especially one that reduces long tail imports.
Every piece of infra that cuts time (apart from cutting X time) is basically frontloading (domestic) steel and concrete to reduce future oil imports (and emissions). Rough napkin math, 2B rmb construction cossts = ~3m barrels of oil, 2b kms of travel. Shaving off 2hrs (guestimate ~150km) and it pays itself off in imported fuel metric between ~10m trips (for freight , more for passenger). Guizhou has 40m people, if a fraction goes to see the bridge, do some tourist shit (induced demand) it would go a long way to basically subsidize a bridge that cut logistics times and wear on tear for the region.
Yes, but on the other side of the coin is the pending maintenance for all of these projects. You don't just build a road, rail or bridge anad then be done with it. They all require upkeep. If the project itself was a jobs program masquerading as a infra, they'll just let all these fabulous projects rot as it won't make sense to keep them up.
TBH potential future problem, scales to whether/how much construction industry get captured to point where maintenance costs is onerous. Developed west forgets, upkeep doesn't have to be expensive to defer which snowballs costs. The broader consideration for PRC is they are per capita, infrastructure POOR, i.e. less unit of infra in variety of categories per capita - there simply isn't that much excess infra relative to population.
Some of the bad investments won't pay back, will get abandoned with demographic change (baked in lower utilization when population drops), but IMO infra serves 10s millions, cuts millions of barrels of oil imports has good chance of paying for itself. Like 2hour -> 2minute infra for 2B rmb = 0.1% of Guizhou GDP. Seems like a no brainer.
As an average, definitely. Whether that is relevant to the area in question I don't know. Materials and fuel costs are rising globally too, China's population-size based buying power shields them from that a little more than some places, far from completely.
Undereducated workforce willing to do hard construction decreasing -> wagse rising. There's still big/experienced construction work force, build while it's cheap, build bigger and more than you have to etc.
Could not part of its poverty problem be caused by the restrictive travel time and rough terrain that this bridge avoids and could help them become prosperous? If you only build prosperous things for prosperous areas, poorer areas will never get better and could even get worse in comparison as competing becomes even harder.
Its like if you put a dimensional portal across a Great Lake, even if neither side of the portal is currently not very prosperous, the fact that hours of ferry turned into minutes of travel would be a huge boon to both sides and gather attention, investments, and economic benefits that could turn both sides into prosperous cities.
Bridges are expensive to build and to maintain. Maybe people could be helped better other ways; economics is about making choices with limited resources.
> We don't need an economic angle [...] We aren't just cogwheels in an economic system
This kind of thinking is exactly how people go bankrupt. "But I deserve those shoes" "I need a Starbucks to get the day started" "This McMansion would make me happy" "I'd rather commute in a BMW than a Toyota"
I believe that the saving four hours (two hours each way) to travel from or to the city, multiplied by the amount of current and potential vehicles, is a clear opportunity benefit.
Not to mention the fuel saved and pollution prevented. And increased economic development for the city.
Having spent a lot of time in Japan, construction there was a way to provide money to poor regions. You build some big project and pay people good wages and encourage growth of local industry. Not saying it's good or bad but the economics may be secondary to these goals
having crossed one of these superlative Guizhou bridges i can attest to their ability to inspire a sense of wonder like other large-scale human accomplishments.
Not the least of which is the fact that infrastructure needs to be maintained. The US has a lot of infrastructure and we are in a phase now where we are having to make hard decisions about what to keep. In my neck of the woods, which is mountainous, many bridges have closed and it looks like they may not come back. Presumably China understands the long-term costs of infrastructure so I wonder what their analysis is. It would be kind of crazy to build something like this on spec…
Prior generations made these same decisions too. I’ve discovered that the area I live in used to have a fair number of electric trams. They all went away with the advent of the automobile.
The Wikipedia page currently also states that it reduces the gorge crossing time from 70 minutes to one minute. So it definitely serves a purpose - whether we each judge that to be worth it is another question.
> Wonder why China thought this was a worthy investment. Guizhou is a poor part of China, without much international tourism or trade.
Could be part of a bit of internal “not leaving anyone behind” propaganda, rather than a concern for national or international trade.
Less cynically, it could be a genuine attempt to help pull the area up economically. Lack of good transport infrastructure can be a major factor among those that hold areas back in that regard.
Apart from what others already mentioned (build and improvements will follow): construction is the main tool the CCP uses in padding economic numbers. And that sectors has not been doing well for a while now, with all the unused ghost metropoles sitting idle. These projects are there not just to improve the local region, but also to keep the construction sector afloat.
.....Are you why we don't have infrastructure in the US?
If you want to uplift a region, you invest into it.
A bridge that cuts travel time by 2 hours increases domestic trade, it can even increase domestic and international tourism long term.
Say what you want but the only region in the world I went that felt like looking forward is Asia, even borderline decaying countries like Japan are clearly looking forward, you can see it from what and how they build, and not just in major centers.
When I first visited Asia 13 years ago, this is the feeling I got too. It's wonderful and intoxicating and new.
It spoke to me so strongly, that I immigrated and started my first business. Not to China, but nearby (Viet Nam). It was a very tough road, I never ended up particularly wealthy, but I have no regrets.
China is superlative in every way possible and many people don't really seem to get it.
It has several of the tallest mountains in the world—dozens over 7 km, and many of the eight-thousanders, given it borders the Himalayas and contains part of the Hindu Kush and most of the Tibetan Plateau. Given such immense mountains it also makes sense that there's a huge rain shadow behind them, and therefore China also contains both the Gobi and Taklimakan deserts.
It also has historic old cities that form the core of their modern glass and steel cities, with plenty of Chinese architecture to go around.
It also has 50 000 km of newly-built high speed rail with rolling stock that rips through all of those mountains and deserts at 350 km/h.
Patriotism is funny to see. A lot of people are so proud of their country, yet they are just pawns in a game played by the state and their leaders.
If one can think rationally, it's best to be born in smaller countries like Switzerland, Luxembourg, Qatar, Singapore .. Nothing to be proud of besides having the highest chance to live a very comfortable life.
In Argentina it is said, half-jokingly, that 1 week of news cycle in Argentina is 10 years of news cycle in Switzerland.
On a similar note, leave Argentina for 2 years and everything is different. Leave for 20, and everything is the same.
In summary: There are far crazier places to be born than Argentina, but oh my god I would pay to see what a billionaire would do if they had to live there with the median wage and the current cost of living...
I wasn't really focusing much on the tourism part.
I was more pointing to the fact that asiatic countries seem much more focused on the present and future in a way we are culturally not. How and what they build is just an aspect of it.
There's quite a few places that have them, but don't prioritize bridge height. The other Himalayan countries (India, Nepal, Pakistan, etc) have similar terrain, but prefer vastly cheaper slope-hugging roads, and tunnels with shorter bridges. Not to mention the danger of winter winds in Himalayan canyons.
The US or Mexico could build a bridge over the deeper bits of their national canyons and hold the undisputed crown, but won't.
It's hilariously depressing to imagine how impossible it would be to build something like that in the US. It's not only the fact that it's an engineering feat—it's also the fact that it was built in such a human-centric way. The cafe at the top, the light show with the water. These things are all superfluous, but make these projects exciting and add novelty which makes these areas just fun places to be. The U.S., in it's current form, could never build any infrastructure projects in such a human-centric way, because, well, we apparently have an inability to build anything at all.
Seriously, when's the last time we built something like this. The only initiative I can even think of is California high speed rail and that project just so happens to be a testament to the absolute antithesis of what I'm proclaiming.
The two longest floating bridges in the world are in Seattle, Washington. The longest, Evergreen Point Floating Bridge, has a mixed use lane for cycling and walking and supposedly took 5 years to construct after construction started (ignoring that it replaced a bridge that existed there and also planning took longer, I'm not sure how to compare that). Seattle also has the world's only floating bridge that has rail on it, Homer M. Hadley Memorial Bridge, which is also the world's 5th longest floating bridge. While not the same exact sort of feat of engineering, it's pretty cool.
And the best demonstration of Seattle's hapless "can't do" attitude is that they left the watertight doors open one day in 1990 and the bridge pontoons filled with water and the bridge sank. Back then, by some miracle the bridge was fixed in a few weeks, but today it would take 10 years.
When the light rail line was installed on the I-90 bridge, after the whole thing was done it was discovered that the rail ties were built incorrectly. This was in April 2023. Thousands of concrete ties had to be demolished and construction had to start over. Of course this took years. God forbid that someone should check the work along the way.
If Seattle was a Simpsons character, it would be Ralph Wiggum when he's grown up and has one foot permanently stuck in a bucket.
Nobody in the Seattle area uses those names. They are always just the I-90 bridge or 520 bridge among the people I talk to, although both roads actually use multiple bridges to span Lake Washington.
Yeah, I had to look up the bridge names. The "I-90 bridge" is actually both the Homer M. Madley and Lacey V Murrow Memorial bridges, and that's excluding the two bridges that are east of Mercer Island. I wanted to be more exact, and at that point I also added the 520 bridge's real name.
I'm not saying America can't build at all, I'm just saying it can't build in the modern era. Apparently the i90 bridge you are referring to was built in 1940.
I realize that Seattle has the only floating bridge with rail on it. Actually my mom is the lead photographer for Sound Transit, the agency in charge with it's development. Sound Transit.. to say the least, is a huge embarrassment for the region. They're way over budget, way behind schedule on all of their initiatives with the lightrail. Sure, there are engineering marvels that exist here and there on the project—but it's not a testament to the U.S's ability to deliver infrastructure at a reasonable speed or budget.
Again, the wikipedia article that you linked points to a preposterous insufficiency in our ability to maintain infrastructure:
"[...] On February 26, 2014, in the wake of another suicide from the bridge, independent Rep. Joe Brooks of Winterport proposed emergency legislation to the Maine Legislature to require the installation of a suicide barrier on the bridge.[22] This proposal was rejected due to cost, as a barrier was estimated to cost between $500,000 and $1 million, plus additional costs for regular inspections. As an alternative, two solar-powered phones were installed on each end of the bridge in May 2015 which connect users to a suicide hotline. The phones cost $30,000. State officials were aware of instances the phones were not functional, and increased inspections of them to weekly from the previous monthly. They could not determine if the phones were functional when a March 5, 2017 suicide, the first since the phones were installed, occurred. The phones were found to be out of order on June 23, 2017, when an abandoned car on the bridge resulted in a search of the Penobscot River by authorities looking for its driver.[7] The emergency phones on the Penobscot Narrows Bridge were reported out of order following another suicide in 2021.[9][23] They were subsequently replaced.[24] In May 2022, the Maine legislature was reportedly planning to "pull together a study group on suicides by bridge."[25] Funding was subsequently approved for a barrier, but the installation slated for 2024 was delayed for further testing..."
Why are our systems like this? There is no culture of accountability, for one. There is also no desire to dream big, anymore, it seems.
If you get a chance, you should read (or listen to) Robert Caro's biography of Robert Moses[1] who built much if not most of the parks in New York. He built many of them at a time with Roosevelt was using public money to provide jobs for people thrown out of work during the Great Depression. These public works projects are often scorned by today's electorate.
But perhaps more importantly, getting insights into how the government building things gives the people who can grant contracts tremendous political leverage and power. It is remarkable to see that what he built was definitely good for New Yorkers (although as the book points out, really for rich and white New Yorkers) and the distortions they caused in the political machine caused some people serious grief from loss of property to loss of their entire livelihood.
Authoritarian systems can operate like that but it comes at a tremendous cost.
And it’s amazing that this got built in only 3 years! I can’t imagine anything this substantial being built that fast in the US. I can’t think of any examples either but I’d be happy to see some that anyone knows of.
Visiting China will shake your world view as a westerner. It did mine.
I’m still grateful at a personal level to live in a democracy, but I’m not as certain as I used to be that it’s the only way to run a country that benefits the people.
The infrastructure is incredible yes, but the complete lack of fear on the streets, and the positive consequences of that, are something to behold. Women are not afraid to walk home alone at 2am. People young and old dance together in the street. You never feel on your guard, at all.
They haven’t completely eradicated poverty, but they seem to be giving it a real go. In one very rural area I saw an elderly couple living in a rundown shack, but they had a bunch of modern medical equipment, provided to them for free by the state.
Going to need a business case that translates to value, sorry. Common sentiment, apparently, is that our postal service must generate profit. Clown show.
About 6 hours ago, I watched a video of this from a motorcycle Youtuber who crawled down a sketchy, enclosed, temporary ladder into an unfinished visitor area.
There will be a place for people to run on a track on the outside (with an above harness), bungee jumping, misting rainbow effect sprayers, and visitor's areas underneath and in the top of one of the towers.
The team of engineers who developed this are also quite young.
Well it's not the same game. Here in China we're in this phase of accomplishing big stuff to help each other and flex a bit and wow at our own development. When the British colonized America, it was exactly the same - an insane accomplishment to capture and re-develop that land into something half-working so far away. When China starts capturing and colonizing other continents, you can start being really jealous !
Now, the US is focused on other stuff like maybe having some return on their investment, or looking at its people as first-class problems rather than ants meant for a greater national goal. It's not that bad, it depends on what you focus on, I think people in the US have nice stuff to look forward to, like I don't know, a holiday in Disneyland with their kids, when Chinese people often don't see our kids for years while we're building bridges far away.
Plus you know, we don't get to vote for great politicians like in the US and are stuck instead with bureaucrats that care more about infrastructure than pleasing the people. Be proud of that, I'd love for us to have your president (yes, I'm teasing you :p)
They're saying it tongue in cheek, and everyone here is wowing over the infrastructure.
But China still believes that Taiwan (and other places) is theirs.
I think one reason this infrastructure is possible is not just regulations, but first party construction + private companies for construction that can't grab corrupt contracts or overcharge because it's a gov contract. Whereas in the West getting a gov contract is the opposite; it's a business' chance to overcharge to fuck, paid by the public who are too distracted to petty squabbles to care.
I'm a foreigner in the UK and the infra here is ailing. The UK voterbase will complain about rising bills, costs, etc. But will they change the way they vote, will they protest for change, will they actually work together for once to demand value for their tax money? Nah, of course not. Because people would rather argue about which bathroom someone can use, rather than intelligent discussion, fair compromise and moving the fuck on to the next problem.
Outdated or not-- it's already happening. China is creating "economic colonization" zones across second/third world nations by lending loans such that countries that can't pay up have to settle by giving up strategic bastions of power.
I don't know, when "westerners", aka the Spanish, colonized the Americas, they would arrive in a village where almost everyone was already dead of the flu before they even started a fight. It seems more violent a colonization than us spending tax money in Africa in soft influence white elephants to gain the favors of dictators.
But it's true it almost, almost, sounds like the protectorate system the French and British used there. And I'm not under any illusion we treat the locals much better in our exported factories.
But you know, the reports of our continuous and desperate colonial expansion across the world are vastly exaggerated and it seems to be mostly a complete failure so far (they seem to kill our factory owners over un paid wages a bit more than they learn our languages with abandon, for one). As someone pointed out, we didn't even get back our stolen gold from the "Republic of China", nor convinced them to join us back in a sort of S.A.R., Hong Kong-style, alliance. I don't blame them, for sure (Hong Kong isn't particularly happy about it, themselves), but we seem to be far from a colonial empire - or, let's give you that, we already have it in our local sphere around the Beijing-Shanghai-Guangzhou triangle and we seem to stick to it with difficulty... for now ?
I think a large missing piece to being a successful super-colonizer like Europe was in the past, is we don't have that big a gap with Africa or other candidates for invasion: China is advanced but not super advanced. The Europeans surprised the Americans with horse riders, it was that bad. Us, meh, not sure our army is worth anything or that terrifying compared to the Russian mercenaries these countries hire for their defense. All we can do is make them build cheaper iphones or some such I guess and pray they listen to us when we need them ?
I think the weight should be expeessed in average yearly banana haevests to keep the numbers low and comprehensible. It's going to be intuitive, I promise.
In China, recently, there was a bridge collapse of one of their tallest bridges. I hope it was an isolated incident and not a lapse in their process or principles.
Takes 3yr to replace a 50ft I beam bridge across a small river where I live, mostly because of unnecessary permitting and process. When you add up all the months here and there for every sign off from every party at each stage it adds up fast.
When 18-wheelers cross a bridge, it has to be engineered correctly. Unnecessary red-tape happens, but in no way would I want a bridge you "shoot from the hip" carrying my family alongside commercial trucks.
It doesn't need to be "engineered" at all. You don't need some six+ figure person supported by a whole office of other 6 figure people to run numbers on cookie cutter stuff that's only slightly different than the last stuff. Hell, 99x/100 they're taking the numbers and then picking the closest cookie cutter beam shapes, rebar arrangements, concrete forms, etc, etc that do the job. What even is the point of having situation specific numbers if you're going to constrain your choices to finite options?
This is the kind of work that, before industry lobbyists got involved, used to be done using reference tables and all the intermediary make work didn't exist. Someone building a bridge would say the span is X, traffic is Y, and that would get them their beams, their spacing and their decking specs. From there they'd get their weight numbers and they'd cross that with the soil and get their footings.
And it's not just bridges, it's everything.
But there's too many people, too much money, and too many careers tied up in the racket and they'll screech every step of the way so it'll never get fixed until it's so flagrantly the source of problems that it's undeniable, and even then it probably won't, look at healthcare.
I'm not sure about this particular project, but while riding on their high speed trains between various cities, I witnessed a great quantity of tunnels of a variety of lengths. Some of them were very, very long.
China is doing a lot of drilling, based on what I've seen first-hand.
I'd imagine the amount drilling is dependent of the quality of the mountain you are drilling. If it is pure granite it is easy, but if it is a mix of other softer materials it is a lot of work.
China's infrastructure building is beyond impressive. I always come back to this map of China's high speed rail built in 16 years (2008-2024) [1].
China is actually run by a meritocratic bureaucracy rather than the dumbest of people who do nothing more than sell pardons, run crypto scams, transfer government funds to the wealthiest of people, pander to religious hallucinations and sell out their constituents for board seats and jobs after their political career from the very billionaires that were buying them in office. And no, it's not just one party that does this although the current administration is particularly egregious.
I, too, am jealous of China's high speed railroads. However, on the whole, China has overbuilt their infrastructure, and that may not look so smart in 40-50 years when the maintenance bills start coming due.
Is it factually true? Because some routes that I’m personally aware of are constantly over booked when it comes to rails. Some, I guess, might be overbuilt, but time will show. I’ll agree on some malls though, but it’s more like private stuff, than government-led initiatives.
So, perhaps 2020s China ~ 1950s US demographics. The bridges that recently collapsed in the US (2024 Baltimore/Francis Scott Key Bridge and 2007 Minneapolis I-35W Mississippi River Bridge) were built in 1964 and 1972-1977 respectively.
Noone has yet compared the Chinese construction times/costs to the replacement Baltimore Francis Scott Key Bridge: cost ~$2b, estimated October 2028. Will have 600ft bridge towers, 1600ft main span (increased from 1209ft), total span length 3300 ft, improved pier protection. Surprised they didn't add a freight rail link.
There's some very heavy lifting you have to do to make the parties look at all close. If the Democrats had a supermajority for long enough, you would see some real change for the better, because we can actually protest Democrats to get them to do things, while the Republicans will just silence any dissent using US military against its citizens. Unfortunately a Democratic supermajority is unlikely to ever happen again the way things are going now. And this is 100% because how people voted, or didn't vote at all.
The Democratic Party is absolutely complicit in everything going on. The term used is "controlled opposition". With the current government shutdown, I think it's taken the Republicans by surprise that the Democrats have (thus far) actually stood up for something and they really don't know what to do because it so rarely happens.
Like why wasn't this happening with the last debt ceiling increase earlier this year? Particularly because there was a fairly awful amendment in the last CR that ended Congress's ability to end the state of emergency the president could declare to use extraordinary powers. That seems like worth standing up to.
Go back to 2012 or so when Bush's tax cuts were expiring. Harry Reid had the Senate Republicans over a barrel until... Joe Biden got involved and just capitulated for absolutely no reason. And got nothing in return.
The last Senate supermarjority was in Obama's first term. It was fairly brief actually (less than a month) due to people taking sick and Republicans using a frivolous court case to stop Al Franken taking his seat. But there still was one.
Obama's signature legislative accomplishment was the ACA and what did it do? It was a massive giveaway to insurance companies. There was even a proposal to allow people to enrol in Medicare at 55 (instead of 65) which was derailed by Joe Lieberman. Why? United Health Care was an employer in his state (Connecticut).
But here's the dirty little secret. Democrats love nothing more than using the filibuster as an excuse to do nothing. If that fails, use "institutionalism". The filibuster is not a constitutional construct. It is part of the rules of the Senate. Originally you had to stand up and speak for so many hours to filibuster. Now you just raise your hand and say "filibuster".
If you have a majority in the House and Senate and a president in the White House, you can pass whatever you want.
And let's not forget we just had an election cycle where the Democratic Party openly and intentionally chose to materially support a genocide (that they could've stopped at any point with a phone call) rather than win an election at a time they were (rightly) calling their opponent a fascist.
>The Democratic Party is absolutely complicit in everything going on.
The Democrats simply have no power to stop anything going on. If you think they do, then you don't understand how the government works at all.
Every single thing you mention Democrats doing wrong, is because they have tried to compromise. If one side dictates what everyone else should do, you don't get a functioning country, you get a lot of dissent, and you know what - fucking forget it, you're just too lost to explain any of this to.
Surprisingly, this conversation is not totally out topic.
You can try to convince yourself that an elected administration has no actual power to do anything because of $reason (law, how government works, searching to compromise, not antagonizing people, etc), but this exercise in self delusion is not very convincing when the current administration, clearly, do not look like they suffer from the same paralysis.
Like you can try to delude yourself that today is impossible to build great infrastructure because of regulations, maintenance costs, respect for environment, individual freedoms, etc, and Bam! Another country just build it, compliant with the state of the art engineering and respectful of environment without slavery etc. Like they party on your rain.
Your comment would have held true in 2022 or 2015, bolstering your argument that the incumbents cause these issues. Adding the “and no” precondescended statement to the end seems to show your own rumination toward bias.
> the dumbest of people who do nothing more than sell pardons, run crypto scams, transfer government funds to the wealthiest of people
The irony is they are doing all that on the name of “meritocracy” and their side (the wrong Right) is falling for it and cheering it with both hands :-)
> Last month, a team of engineers deployed 96 trucks to strategic points across the bridge to recreate heavy traffic conditions to ensure it would not buckle.
They probably wanted to quantify how much the bridge moved in various ways. There were likely many "it probably won't move more than acceptable in this way, but if it does we've made it easy to add a change here to fix that" facets of the design. All large complex structures undergo testing like this, sea trials for ships being the quintessential example.
Part of me seeing the record and the whole artificial waterfall gave me a sense that it's not a race anymore, we already lost.
On the other hand...we won the space race and we went to the moon, except only 15 guys or thereabout went and for the rest of us didn't mean anything substantial at all.
I think I’m going to visit China soon, to the Pearl River Delta. I want to meet manufacturers and advance a product I am working on, and having lived in the US my entire life, I desperately need to see what it’s like when a country is really trying to build a future.
Rightists are scared of energy sources beyond coal and oil; leftists are scared of information technology that could replace human workers; homeowners are scared to make any physical changes to their neighborhoods and cities because it would "change the neighborhood character"; legislators are scared/incapable of making any fundamental changes to governance because it would be difficult, and can't agree on anything; the president and the average American are scared of anyone and any ideas that don't come from within the country's borders; and for anyone who isn't scared, the cost of enacting change will be a realization that everyone who has skills have either retired or abandoned their trades to become software engineers optimizing ad revenue; and that the young are no longer interested in taking on these challenges because they're doomscrolling TikTok all day; and if they proceed, they will be mired in lawsuits for decades by naysayers; and the financial costs will be 10x the true value paid anywhere else in the world.
Everything is stuck in gridlock in attempt to prevent change, but of course that's futile. There will still be change, it'll just be rust and dryrot and all that ensues. Many would rather see it all crumble than allow progress and risk loss of power and station.
I wonder if two things are massive factors in this:
a) The US is already prosperous. When you have much too lose, your mental trade-offs between gaining something and losing what you have become different.
b) US politics has been dominated by the massive post-war generation. It seems like we drastically stopped building when the boomers had bought their first homes.
Both of these also work for other Western countries that also stopped building.
I think a major cause is how dependent the United States is on the courts to decide the law. China is a technocracy with strong central state control so they can sidestep that; Japan, on the other hand, has a strong bureaucracy that given a set of rules and processes, can execute them efficiently. On the other hand anything you do in the USA starts off in a gray zone and really is decided once you’ve gone to court, limiting risk taking to only those who are well capitalized and have a lot of time to burn.
This is definitely true. I'd also add community input to that.
However, while these are all issues, I think the root cause is a deeper cultural issue. I don't think Western, European countries have the same legal issues but they too stopped building.
There are two United States. A prosperous nation and a struggling nation. See both.
I’m from a now depressed rural town. When I periodically drive home it gets a little more ramshackle every year. My town had 20 operating dairy farms, now 0. Three industrial facilities, now one, which is now fully automated and employs security guards and guys to load trucks.
The best jobs are police, teachers and logistics people at a nearby distribution center.
I pay my entry engineers in real terms 15% less than I made 30 years ago. Housing is about 30% higher in real terms. Our benefit overhead grows 2x inflation.
A confident, unified people under competent leadership can accomplish great things. I wish the Chinese continued success and hope their example eventually spurs the development of a new ruling class in the West.
The West also crushes dissent: try to organize a pro-Palestinian protest on a university campus and tell us how it goes. Crushing dissent is simply what governments do.
In the meantime I would like to see more Hoover Dams and Apollo programs here, with fewer tent cities and high-speed rail boondoggles. This will require a ruling class that 1) is competent and 2) cares for the people it governs.
Note: highest, not tallest. Highest should technically be the building here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kola_Superdeep_Borehole which is more than 12km above ground, that is to say 12km high. Or, rather, was, having been destroyed since. There’s other boreholes too though.
One of these days I’ll get a model railroad bridge and put it over a borehole. But that day shan’t be today because arguing technicalities on HN seems easier :)
If you set up a model train bridge over the Kola borehole, I’ll concede and admit it’s a bridge ;)
I learned something by writing my response, I didn’t know how large the Kola boreholes were and now I do!
Also, thanks for clarifying the distinction between highest and tallest, the span on the Chinese bridge is 2000’ above the ground at certain points but the towers themselves are only 860 feet tall, other bridges have taller towers/pillars but the deck height isn’t as high as this Chinese one.
I really don't understand all the hyperbole around this bridge. It's a suspension bridge, so the relevant bits are at the pylons, which just happen to be on either side of a huge canyon. It clocks in at #14 on Wikipedia's list of longest suspension bridges, with a main span that is 603 meters shorter (2023 meters vs 1420) than the longest.
More interestingly, to me at least, is the fact that 31 of the longest 50 are all in China (as are all but two of the 24 in the "under construction or planned").
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_longest_suspension_bri...
The thing that stuck out to me was this:
> The 2,890-metre-long structure, which took more than three years to complete, reduces travel time between the two sides of the canyon from two hours to two minutes.
Pretty impressive. I feel like things in the US take a lot longer and cost a lot more. The prime example is the second avenue subway extension which has been planned since 1920. But I just searched for a few significant bridges like the Gordie Howe bridge which took about 7 years and 6.4bn Canadian (connects US and Canada). And this bridge which seems a lot more of an engineering feat took 3 years and 8 months and cost between $280 to $292 million
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Avenue_Subway
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gordie_Howe_International_Brid...
https://www.barstoolsports.com/blog/3553875/the-new-tallest-...
Chinese civil engineers, and engineering orgs, are good because they get a lot of practice.
In the West, and especially in the US, individuals and orgs don't get practice, so when they finally do get a new contract they have to stumble around for 5-10 years figuring out all the institutional knowledge that was lost.
By the time they figure it out, the project is over budget, so it gets canceled, and then it's 20 years until the next half-hearted attempt. Lather rinse repeat.
At root, a lot of this stems from a "managerial" mindset in which people and skills can simply be "reallocated" on a dime. They can't. You can't uproot trees all the time. You plant one and then it grows over multiple human lifetimes.
To say nothing of the NIMBYism. To acquire the land for use, you have to fight some armies of lawyers retained by a population with a lot of disposable income. (Yes, the US for all her problems has the biggest pool of disposable income in the world)
There's no NIMBYism in China, so that's a huge barrier that they don't have to worry about.
I know it would be attacked politically, but I wish in the US we would be more open to hiring foreign firms for these kinds of projects. Could we have high-speed rail if we just asked some French or Japanese company to build it for us? And we should structure contracts with them in a way that keeps the plans from being changed for political reasons. "Sorry state senator, we can't alter the route to pass through that town without re-opening negotiations which might cost billions."
> Could we have high-speed rail if we just asked some French or Japanese company to build it for us?
No. Please see SNCF (French rail company)'s involvement in California's high speed rail project.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/09/us/california-high-speed-...
October 9, 2022
"How California's Bullet Train Went Off the Rails"
The (foreign) company's recommendations [...] were cast aside, said Dan McNamara, a career project manager for SNCF
So I guess we have to not only hire the foreign companies, but also listen to them.
I think the lesson here might be to solve your problems on a more local scale, as the fit of the solution is as important as checking the boxes.
What works in Japan works in Japan because it was a solution built for the problems, politics, and people of Japan. Sometimes there are lessons we can take from projects in other countries, other times it turns out like Cali HSR where the proposed 'foreign' solution might be logical but not politically tenable.
The problem isn't physically building the rail, the problem is the legal framework in which governments operate in. Multiple rounds of environmental impact statements, eminent domain lawsuits, preferred contractor RFP's, zoning, permitting, endless red tape...
>> The 2,890-metre-long structure, which took more than three years to complete, reduces travel time between the two sides of the canyon from two hours to two minutes.
The construction timeline and travel improvement are comparable to the New River Gorge bridge, which was completed in the US in ~50yr ago back when systems were structured to and the people who ran them actually were capable of producing results.
Freakonomics just had an episode about how China is run by engineers, who get things done, while the US is run by lawyers, who prevent things from getting done.
This is the central thesis of Ezra Klein's "Abundance" book. Basically, things like this (or high speed rail, or public housing) don't get built in the USA because the government has hamstrung itself with so many rules and regulations that it becomes prohibitively expensive and/or tied up in lawsuits.
Places like China, for better or worse, are not burdened with the problem of making sure every constituency is accommodated.
As a bridge Carpenter, you are correct. I have never seen a construction project of that size for that price completed in that amount of time in the USA. Not even close. I've done projects that are worth over 20 billion today. I've done projects as small as a sidewalk repair. There's no way you can turn out that scope of work for that price at that scale in America it's not even close. They have to be lying about the budget there's no way.
> I really don't understand all the hyperbole around this bridge. It's a suspension bridge, so the relevant bits are at the pylons
I understand what you're saying, but the experience is quite different for the people driving over it compared to a bridge where it isn't a 2000 foot drop.
Yeah, I know it doesn't matter how high the actual bridge is, just the length and pylons, but it feels like it matters!
More height, stronger winds. It matters.
Is this true? Does the center of a canyon have higher wind speeds than the edges of that canyon? And what about gusts? I'd assume that boundaries are more turbulent.
I think the point being made is that if you followed two ridgelines that make up a valley up to a common summit you could just jam a plank in there. You've got the world's highest bridge. It's only 4 ft long, but it is technically a bridge.
I'd be more interested to know how they raised individual components into place. But I presume they just started with small cables, then used those to raise larger ones into place over time.
I understand the point being made, and it's a valid one. My point, though, is along the lines of "engineers/tech-minded folk often miss the bigger picture". Yes, from an engineering perspective, it doesn't matter a whole lot how far the bottom of the valley floor is from the bridge (though I'm sure it matters some during construction).
But the "user experience" of someone driving over the bridge is vastly different, to the point where I know specifically of some people who wouldn't be willing to drive over it, and it's not "hyperbole" to point out how high this bridge is compared to the ground below.
What hyperbole?
All I'm seeing is fairly straightforward fact-based announcements. "The tallest bridge has opened - here it is." If that doesn't interest you, fine... but the reports are not hyperbole.
You're not a bridge Carpenter and it shows. .
This project is beautiful. This is an incredible work of art. It might not be the longest, but have you ever tried to pull cable over 2,000 ft hole? Have you ever seen what it takes to actually do those columns? The work looks nice very nice design. It fits with the landscape very well. And the fact that it cost only 140 million is an incredible. For a comparison if you look up one of the bridges I did. We spent 280 million on this We spent 280 million on this
I-91 Brattleboro Bridge | FIGG Bridge Group https://share.google/LKxgk1aEWh9gSIGhD
I don't know how to edit but the original budget for the bridge was only supposed to be like 50 to 70 million. Every single day there is an RFI.
I'm glad I clicked your link though. That I-91 bridge is beautiful.
Years ago I remember reading about an economist who stated something like, "the best way to stimulate an economy is to pay people to dig holes and then fill them in." (I wish I remember who said that.)
In modern times, that translates to paying people to build roads and bridges. Why pay people to sit on their butts and eat bon-bons when you can pay them to get something of value?
In more tangible terms, building infrastructure does elevate peoples' situations.
That was Keynes I think
I feel like the metric needs to be "greatest distance of road from solid ground" or "greatest distance from linear interpolation between ground attachment points".
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I was going to make some joke about not wanting to be the dude driving over the bridge for the load test - entirely presuming there was some more sophisticated way to load test new bridges . . . but no:
https://www.gettyimages.co.uk/detail/news-photo/load-testing...
They do this to measure load vs deflection and check agreement with models, not to get anywhere close to yield. It's a low end proof check, drive trucks on, measure deflections, drive trucks off, confirm reset of deflection;
The margin on actual load to a permanent set is likely 2-3x what those trucks are carrying. And the margin to actual failure from just this quasi static loading and no external environmental loads (wind)... even more so.
Unless there was some catastrophic fuck up in construction process or calculations, this is completely safe.
Calvin's dad was right!
https://www.reddit.com/r/calvinandhobbes/comments/u3dqja/how...
They look so relaxed that a few of them have their feet kicked up on the dash.
I hope the engineering team were riding in the trucks.
To punish them for building a cool bridge or?
If you see it as a punishment to be the first to cross the bridge that you designed, then you should probably be increasing the factor of safety in your calculations and the number of site checks you conduct.
It's only a punishment if the bridge falls down. But if someone is making truck drivers drive heavy trucks out onto a bridge to "test" if it will stand up under the load it only seems fair to me that the engineers who designed and built it take the risk alongside them.
I'm positive those trucks are self driven. There is no need for draconian measures you hoped for. Spaceship engineers aren't forced to go into space.
Well, it's a good way to check their confidence level of their work
Key stone?
Very impressive. The economic angle is a bit confusing. Wonder why China thought this was a worthy investment. Guizhou is a poor part of China, without much international tourism or trade.
Wikipedia indicates it is meant to increase tourism, but even China's most attractive regions (Beijing, Shanghai, Great Wall, Chengdu, Chongqing) are under-visited. I can't imagine that Guizhou will be on foreign tourist's agenda for at least a couple of decades. I think this is an attempt by the local govt. to get more internal tourism. It might work out. We'll see.
> reduces travel time between the two sides of the canyon from two hours to two minutes.
Think of it this way.
Every 2 hours round trip to 2 minutes saves imported fossil. For trucking/freight that's like ~$80 of diesel both ways.
PRC construction workers, though less abundant is cheaper than it ever will be. So best time to build infra is always now, especially one that reduces long tail imports.
Every piece of infra that cuts time (apart from cutting X time) is basically frontloading (domestic) steel and concrete to reduce future oil imports (and emissions). Rough napkin math, 2B rmb construction cossts = ~3m barrels of oil, 2b kms of travel. Shaving off 2hrs (guestimate ~150km) and it pays itself off in imported fuel metric between ~10m trips (for freight , more for passenger). Guizhou has 40m people, if a fraction goes to see the bridge, do some tourist shit (induced demand) it would go a long way to basically subsidize a bridge that cut logistics times and wear on tear for the region.
Yes, but on the other side of the coin is the pending maintenance for all of these projects. You don't just build a road, rail or bridge anad then be done with it. They all require upkeep. If the project itself was a jobs program masquerading as a infra, they'll just let all these fabulous projects rot as it won't make sense to keep them up.
TBH potential future problem, scales to whether/how much construction industry get captured to point where maintenance costs is onerous. Developed west forgets, upkeep doesn't have to be expensive to defer which snowballs costs. The broader consideration for PRC is they are per capita, infrastructure POOR, i.e. less unit of infra in variety of categories per capita - there simply isn't that much excess infra relative to population.
Some of the bad investments won't pay back, will get abandoned with demographic change (baked in lower utilization when population drops), but IMO infra serves 10s millions, cuts millions of barrels of oil imports has good chance of paying for itself. Like 2hour -> 2minute infra for 2B rmb = 0.1% of Guizhou GDP. Seems like a no brainer.
Fantastic analysis of the merits of infrastructure investment. Thanks for working the numbers.
> So best time to build infra is always now
Like planting trees, now is the second best time to build infrastructure. The best time is a decade or two or more ago.
Why is construction cheaper than it ever will be? Because wages are rising in China?
> Because wages are rising in China?
As an average, definitely. Whether that is relevant to the area in question I don't know. Materials and fuel costs are rising globally too, China's population-size based buying power shields them from that a little more than some places, far from completely.
Undereducated workforce willing to do hard construction decreasing -> wagse rising. There's still big/experienced construction work force, build while it's cheap, build bigger and more than you have to etc.
Probably their aging demographics?
> So best time to build infra is always now
What about maintenance costs?
Could not part of its poverty problem be caused by the restrictive travel time and rough terrain that this bridge avoids and could help them become prosperous? If you only build prosperous things for prosperous areas, poorer areas will never get better and could even get worse in comparison as competing becomes even harder.
Its like if you put a dimensional portal across a Great Lake, even if neither side of the portal is currently not very prosperous, the fact that hours of ferry turned into minutes of travel would be a huge boon to both sides and gather attention, investments, and economic benefits that could turn both sides into prosperous cities.
> The economic angle is a bit confusing.
We don't need an economic angle to build great things that help people.
It's a bridge, it's meant to be a shortcut from point A to B.
We aren't just cogwheels in an economic system, there's more to life and progress as humans.
Bridges are expensive to build and to maintain. Maybe people could be helped better other ways; economics is about making choices with limited resources.
Guess China's resources aren't as limited as some of their competitors
I've just finished "The Power Broker" about Robert Moses and it mentions a few times that bridges are actually fairly inexpensive to maintain?
That's not economics, that's optimization with inequality constraints.
> We don't need an economic angle [...] We aren't just cogwheels in an economic system
This kind of thinking is exactly how people go bankrupt. "But I deserve those shoes" "I need a Starbucks to get the day started" "This McMansion would make me happy" "I'd rather commute in a BMW than a Toyota"
It's paradoxical really. On one hand this mindset leads to bankruptcies, on the other it creates demand necessary to grow an economy.
There's probably a balance to be struck somewhere between the two approaches, but I wouldn't know where it is, as I stay firmly on the frugal side.
There is an opportunity cost.
I believe that the saving four hours (two hours each way) to travel from or to the city, multiplied by the amount of current and potential vehicles, is a clear opportunity benefit.
Not to mention the fuel saved and pollution prevented. And increased economic development for the city.
Having spent a lot of time in Japan, construction there was a way to provide money to poor regions. You build some big project and pay people good wages and encourage growth of local industry. Not saying it's good or bad but the economics may be secondary to these goals
> Guizhou is a poor part of China
Look at Schenzen in the 70s... If you want your country to move forward you need infrastructure, otherwise poor parts stay poor
China's population boom has ended. The 70s boom can't be recreated without sufficient youth to move into the newly urbanized locations.
> The economic angle is a bit confusing. Wonder why China thought this was a worthy investment.
American mindset
having crossed one of these superlative Guizhou bridges i can attest to their ability to inspire a sense of wonder like other large-scale human accomplishments.
No this is a very good question to ask.
Not the least of which is the fact that infrastructure needs to be maintained. The US has a lot of infrastructure and we are in a phase now where we are having to make hard decisions about what to keep. In my neck of the woods, which is mountainous, many bridges have closed and it looks like they may not come back. Presumably China understands the long-term costs of infrastructure so I wonder what their analysis is. It would be kind of crazy to build something like this on spec…
Prior generations made these same decisions too. I’ve discovered that the area I live in used to have a fair number of electric trams. They all went away with the advent of the automobile.
> Wonder why China thought this was a worthy investment. Guizhou is a poor part of China
I mean... that's exactly the reason?
Government funds get used to improve poorer regions to spread development. Improving transport links is a good way to do that
Plus it connects the country, which helps long-term stability
Think of these as more of interstate highways kind of projects
That's how you develop a country. If you always go by short term economics, nothing will ever get done.
Because their philosophy is build the infrastructure and the wealth will follow. Fantastic philosophy if you ask me.
The Wikipedia page currently also states that it reduces the gorge crossing time from 70 minutes to one minute. So it definitely serves a purpose - whether we each judge that to be worth it is another question.
> Wonder why China thought this was a worthy investment. Guizhou is a poor part of China, without much international tourism or trade.
Could be part of a bit of internal “not leaving anyone behind” propaganda, rather than a concern for national or international trade.
Less cynically, it could be a genuine attempt to help pull the area up economically. Lack of good transport infrastructure can be a major factor among those that hold areas back in that regard.
Apart from what others already mentioned (build and improvements will follow): construction is the main tool the CCP uses in padding economic numbers. And that sectors has not been doing well for a while now, with all the unused ghost metropoles sitting idle. These projects are there not just to improve the local region, but also to keep the construction sector afloat.
Bridge building in China is a way to flex for provinces right now. For better or worse, I guess, but infrastructure investment is cool.
I suspect that it's a "bragging rights" thing, more than anything else.
Nations, companies, etc., build these things to "show off." It's nothing new, the Babylonians, Sumerians, and Egyptians did it.
.....Are you why we don't have infrastructure in the US?
If you want to uplift a region, you invest into it. A bridge that cuts travel time by 2 hours increases domestic trade, it can even increase domestic and international tourism long term.
Uplifting is woke in the US.
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As someone who doesn't keep up with bridge news, China seems to have a monopoly on incredible new mountain bridges.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_highest_bridges
China has incredible engineers and architects.
Say what you want but the only region in the world I went that felt like looking forward is Asia, even borderline decaying countries like Japan are clearly looking forward, you can see it from what and how they build, and not just in major centers.
When I first visited Asia 13 years ago, this is the feeling I got too. It's wonderful and intoxicating and new.
It spoke to me so strongly, that I immigrated and started my first business. Not to China, but nearby (Viet Nam). It was a very tough road, I never ended up particularly wealthy, but I have no regrets.
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China is superlative in every way possible and many people don't really seem to get it.
It has several of the tallest mountains in the world—dozens over 7 km, and many of the eight-thousanders, given it borders the Himalayas and contains part of the Hindu Kush and most of the Tibetan Plateau. Given such immense mountains it also makes sense that there's a huge rain shadow behind them, and therefore China also contains both the Gobi and Taklimakan deserts.
It also has historic old cities that form the core of their modern glass and steel cities, with plenty of Chinese architecture to go around.
It also has 50 000 km of newly-built high speed rail with rolling stock that rips through all of those mountains and deserts at 350 km/h.
> China is superlative in every way possible and Americans don't really seem to get it.
A a latino it's amusing to watch. After the soviet union failed, Americans thought they had won the civilization game forever.
I would never move to China due to political concerns, but at the game of empire they are kicking butt, and that unnerves some Americans.
Must be odd being born and raised in a first world country (?)
Patriotism is funny to see. A lot of people are so proud of their country, yet they are just pawns in a game played by the state and their leaders.
If one can think rationally, it's best to be born in smaller countries like Switzerland, Luxembourg, Qatar, Singapore .. Nothing to be proud of besides having the highest chance to live a very comfortable life.
In Argentina it is said, half-jokingly, that 1 week of news cycle in Argentina is 10 years of news cycle in Switzerland.
On a similar note, leave Argentina for 2 years and everything is different. Leave for 20, and everything is the same.
In summary: There are far crazier places to be born than Argentina, but oh my god I would pay to see what a billionaire would do if they had to live there with the median wage and the current cost of living...
I wasn't really focusing much on the tourism part.
I was more pointing to the fact that asiatic countries seem much more focused on the present and future in a way we are culturally not. How and what they build is just an aspect of it.
They do also have a lot of incredible mountains that would benefit from bridges. There aren't that many 600m deep canyons in the world.
There's quite a few places that have them, but don't prioritize bridge height. The other Himalayan countries (India, Nepal, Pakistan, etc) have similar terrain, but prefer vastly cheaper slope-hugging roads, and tunnels with shorter bridges. Not to mention the danger of winter winds in Himalayan canyons.
The US or Mexico could build a bridge over the deeper bits of their national canyons and hold the undisputed crown, but won't.
There's Peru and Bolivia as well.
Youtube link for the bridge https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mytGMsn4wvk
It's hilariously depressing to imagine how impossible it would be to build something like that in the US. It's not only the fact that it's an engineering feat—it's also the fact that it was built in such a human-centric way. The cafe at the top, the light show with the water. These things are all superfluous, but make these projects exciting and add novelty which makes these areas just fun places to be. The U.S., in it's current form, could never build any infrastructure projects in such a human-centric way, because, well, we apparently have an inability to build anything at all.
Seriously, when's the last time we built something like this. The only initiative I can even think of is California high speed rail and that project just so happens to be a testament to the absolute antithesis of what I'm proclaiming.
The two longest floating bridges in the world are in Seattle, Washington. The longest, Evergreen Point Floating Bridge, has a mixed use lane for cycling and walking and supposedly took 5 years to construct after construction started (ignoring that it replaced a bridge that existed there and also planning took longer, I'm not sure how to compare that). Seattle also has the world's only floating bridge that has rail on it, Homer M. Hadley Memorial Bridge, which is also the world's 5th longest floating bridge. While not the same exact sort of feat of engineering, it's pretty cool.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evergreen_Point_Floating_Bri... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lacey_V._Murrow_Memorial_Bri... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homer_M._Hadley_Memorial_Bri...
And the best demonstration of Seattle's hapless "can't do" attitude is that they left the watertight doors open one day in 1990 and the bridge pontoons filled with water and the bridge sank. Back then, by some miracle the bridge was fixed in a few weeks, but today it would take 10 years.
When the light rail line was installed on the I-90 bridge, after the whole thing was done it was discovered that the rail ties were built incorrectly. This was in April 2023. Thousands of concrete ties had to be demolished and construction had to start over. Of course this took years. God forbid that someone should check the work along the way.
If Seattle was a Simpsons character, it would be Ralph Wiggum when he's grown up and has one foot permanently stuck in a bucket.
> Evergreen Point Floating Bridge
> Homer M. Hadley Memorial Bridge
I’ve biked and driven across these bridges many times and I’m quite certain I’ve never heard these names until this moment.
Nobody in the Seattle area uses those names. They are always just the I-90 bridge or 520 bridge among the people I talk to, although both roads actually use multiple bridges to span Lake Washington.
Yeah, I had to look up the bridge names. The "I-90 bridge" is actually both the Homer M. Madley and Lacey V Murrow Memorial bridges, and that's excluding the two bridges that are east of Mercer Island. I wanted to be more exact, and at that point I also added the 520 bridge's real name.
I'm not saying America can't build at all, I'm just saying it can't build in the modern era. Apparently the i90 bridge you are referring to was built in 1940.
I realize that Seattle has the only floating bridge with rail on it. Actually my mom is the lead photographer for Sound Transit, the agency in charge with it's development. Sound Transit.. to say the least, is a huge embarrassment for the region. They're way over budget, way behind schedule on all of their initiatives with the lightrail. Sure, there are engineering marvels that exist here and there on the project—but it's not a testament to the U.S's ability to deliver infrastructure at a reasonable speed or budget.
The Penobscot Narrows Bridge (opened, 2006) was the first thing that sprang to mind.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penobscot_Narrows_Bridge_and...
One end has an observation deck, built just for fun! It’s on the slower, non I-95 route up through Maine to Bar Harbor / Acadia National Park.
Again, the wikipedia article that you linked points to a preposterous insufficiency in our ability to maintain infrastructure:
"[...] On February 26, 2014, in the wake of another suicide from the bridge, independent Rep. Joe Brooks of Winterport proposed emergency legislation to the Maine Legislature to require the installation of a suicide barrier on the bridge.[22] This proposal was rejected due to cost, as a barrier was estimated to cost between $500,000 and $1 million, plus additional costs for regular inspections. As an alternative, two solar-powered phones were installed on each end of the bridge in May 2015 which connect users to a suicide hotline. The phones cost $30,000. State officials were aware of instances the phones were not functional, and increased inspections of them to weekly from the previous monthly. They could not determine if the phones were functional when a March 5, 2017 suicide, the first since the phones were installed, occurred. The phones were found to be out of order on June 23, 2017, when an abandoned car on the bridge resulted in a search of the Penobscot River by authorities looking for its driver.[7] The emergency phones on the Penobscot Narrows Bridge were reported out of order following another suicide in 2021.[9][23] They were subsequently replaced.[24] In May 2022, the Maine legislature was reportedly planning to "pull together a study group on suicides by bridge."[25] Funding was subsequently approved for a barrier, but the installation slated for 2024 was delayed for further testing..."
Why are our systems like this? There is no culture of accountability, for one. There is also no desire to dream big, anymore, it seems.
Why is everything so expensive when it's paid by the State?
>non I-95 route up through Maine to Bar Harbor / Acadia National Park.
Which basically means that that whole bit of $$ producing tourism infra is that much closer to everything south.
If you get a chance, you should read (or listen to) Robert Caro's biography of Robert Moses[1] who built much if not most of the parks in New York. He built many of them at a time with Roosevelt was using public money to provide jobs for people thrown out of work during the Great Depression. These public works projects are often scorned by today's electorate.
But perhaps more importantly, getting insights into how the government building things gives the people who can grant contracts tremendous political leverage and power. It is remarkable to see that what he built was definitely good for New Yorkers (although as the book points out, really for rich and white New Yorkers) and the distortions they caused in the political machine caused some people serious grief from loss of property to loss of their entire livelihood.
Authoritarian systems can operate like that but it comes at a tremendous cost.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Power_Broker
And it’s amazing that this got built in only 3 years! I can’t imagine anything this substantial being built that fast in the US. I can’t think of any examples either but I’d be happy to see some that anyone knows of.
Visiting China will shake your world view as a westerner. It did mine.
I’m still grateful at a personal level to live in a democracy, but I’m not as certain as I used to be that it’s the only way to run a country that benefits the people.
The infrastructure is incredible yes, but the complete lack of fear on the streets, and the positive consequences of that, are something to behold. Women are not afraid to walk home alone at 2am. People young and old dance together in the street. You never feel on your guard, at all.
They haven’t completely eradicated poverty, but they seem to be giving it a real go. In one very rural area I saw an elderly couple living in a rundown shack, but they had a bunch of modern medical equipment, provided to them for free by the state.
Not to put too fine a point on it but how much of this is due to a homogeneous census?
> "Seriously, when's the last time we built something like this."
Easy to check: look up Wikipedia's "List of highest bridges", and sort by date.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_highest_bridges#Comple...
Just the environmental reviews would cost over $1b.
Going to need a business case that translates to value, sorry. Common sentiment, apparently, is that our postal service must generate profit. Clown show.
thanks, that website is horrible
I was curious about the drone footage mentioned in the article. Here is a link to a video of a fly over.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/video/news/world%E2%80%99s-tallest...
That link doesn't seem to work.
It works for me, hm.
Wow, look at the surrounding scenery! Just gorgeous.
I love the mountainous look of that region. It reminds me of the Guyun Stone Forest in Genshin Impact.
About 6 hours ago, I watched a video of this from a motorcycle Youtuber who crawled down a sketchy, enclosed, temporary ladder into an unfinished visitor area.
There will be a place for people to run on a track on the outside (with an above harness), bungee jumping, misting rainbow effect sprayers, and visitor's areas underneath and in the top of one of the towers.
The team of engineers who developed this are also quite young.
https://youtu.be/sm5kLw54uVA
That video was very triggering for my vertigo, kind of enjoyed it though.
I didn't even like driving over the West Seattle Bridge and it's only 140 ft up.
With a lot of these high bridges they block the view so you barely notice that you are on a bridge.
There’s no way to do that on the descent without blocking necessary sight lines.
Imagine the amount of rubbernecking-caused accidents if they didn't.
I’m with you on that. I live in NJ and unfortunately I have to deal with bridges, fear of heights or no.
I find it hard to swallow my jealousy of the chinese. It's hard to imagine america collectively accomplishing much of anything in my lifetime.
Well it's not the same game. Here in China we're in this phase of accomplishing big stuff to help each other and flex a bit and wow at our own development. When the British colonized America, it was exactly the same - an insane accomplishment to capture and re-develop that land into something half-working so far away. When China starts capturing and colonizing other continents, you can start being really jealous !
Now, the US is focused on other stuff like maybe having some return on their investment, or looking at its people as first-class problems rather than ants meant for a greater national goal. It's not that bad, it depends on what you focus on, I think people in the US have nice stuff to look forward to, like I don't know, a holiday in Disneyland with their kids, when Chinese people often don't see our kids for years while we're building bridges far away.
Plus you know, we don't get to vote for great politicians like in the US and are stuck instead with bureaucrats that care more about infrastructure than pleasing the people. Be proud of that, I'd love for us to have your president (yes, I'm teasing you :p)
> I think people in the US have nice stuff to look forward to, like I don't know, a holiday in Disneyland with their kids,
Probably not for most Americans these days:
https://archive.is/CLoEC
I like the /s here
We're still doing /s right? This mentality is outdated..They're saying it tongue in cheek, and everyone here is wowing over the infrastructure.
But China still believes that Taiwan (and other places) is theirs.
I think one reason this infrastructure is possible is not just regulations, but first party construction + private companies for construction that can't grab corrupt contracts or overcharge because it's a gov contract. Whereas in the West getting a gov contract is the opposite; it's a business' chance to overcharge to fuck, paid by the public who are too distracted to petty squabbles to care.
I'm a foreigner in the UK and the infra here is ailing. The UK voterbase will complain about rising bills, costs, etc. But will they change the way they vote, will they protest for change, will they actually work together for once to demand value for their tax money? Nah, of course not. Because people would rather argue about which bathroom someone can use, rather than intelligent discussion, fair compromise and moving the fuck on to the next problem.
Outdated or not-- it's already happening. China is creating "economic colonization" zones across second/third world nations by lending loans such that countries that can't pay up have to settle by giving up strategic bastions of power.
Take a look at (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hambantota_International_Port). Overtly, not owned by the Chinese government but you can draw your own feelings.
This is how western colonization started.
They've been doing it to the neglected railroads in Africa for decades now.
I don't know, when "westerners", aka the Spanish, colonized the Americas, they would arrive in a village where almost everyone was already dead of the flu before they even started a fight. It seems more violent a colonization than us spending tax money in Africa in soft influence white elephants to gain the favors of dictators.
But it's true it almost, almost, sounds like the protectorate system the French and British used there. And I'm not under any illusion we treat the locals much better in our exported factories.
But you know, the reports of our continuous and desperate colonial expansion across the world are vastly exaggerated and it seems to be mostly a complete failure so far (they seem to kill our factory owners over un paid wages a bit more than they learn our languages with abandon, for one). As someone pointed out, we didn't even get back our stolen gold from the "Republic of China", nor convinced them to join us back in a sort of S.A.R., Hong Kong-style, alliance. I don't blame them, for sure (Hong Kong isn't particularly happy about it, themselves), but we seem to be far from a colonial empire - or, let's give you that, we already have it in our local sphere around the Beijing-Shanghai-Guangzhou triangle and we seem to stick to it with difficulty... for now ?
I think a large missing piece to being a successful super-colonizer like Europe was in the past, is we don't have that big a gap with Africa or other candidates for invasion: China is advanced but not super advanced. The Europeans surprised the Americans with horse riders, it was that bad. Us, meh, not sure our army is worth anything or that terrifying compared to the Russian mercenaries these countries hire for their defense. All we can do is make them build cheaper iphones or some such I guess and pray they listen to us when we need them ?
So it's 2000ft tall and 2890m long. I wonder how much bananas it weighs
It’s as wide as two Olympic size Eiffel towers.
I think the weight should be expeessed in average yearly banana haevests to keep the numbers low and comprehensible. It's going to be intuitive, I promise.
/s
That's pretty nuts, they should make a mini documentary on how they made it and all the hurdles they had to overcome and all that jazz.
In China, recently, there was a bridge collapse of one of their tallest bridges. I hope it was an isolated incident and not a lapse in their process or principles.
https://youtu.be/glZr4dR4Xyw
Takes 3yr to replace a 50ft I beam bridge across a small river where I live, mostly because of unnecessary permitting and process. When you add up all the months here and there for every sign off from every party at each stage it adds up fast.
Unnecessary until it's removed and a bridge collapses. Then it's the incompetent government.
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Nobody is advocating for unnecessary checkboxing.
When 18-wheelers cross a bridge, it has to be engineered correctly. Unnecessary red-tape happens, but in no way would I want a bridge you "shoot from the hip" carrying my family alongside commercial trucks.
It doesn't need to be "engineered" at all. You don't need some six+ figure person supported by a whole office of other 6 figure people to run numbers on cookie cutter stuff that's only slightly different than the last stuff. Hell, 99x/100 they're taking the numbers and then picking the closest cookie cutter beam shapes, rebar arrangements, concrete forms, etc, etc that do the job. What even is the point of having situation specific numbers if you're going to constrain your choices to finite options?
This is the kind of work that, before industry lobbyists got involved, used to be done using reference tables and all the intermediary make work didn't exist. Someone building a bridge would say the span is X, traffic is Y, and that would get them their beams, their spacing and their decking specs. From there they'd get their weight numbers and they'd cross that with the soil and get their footings.
And it's not just bridges, it's everything.
But there's too many people, too much money, and too many careers tied up in the racket and they'll screech every step of the way so it'll never get fixed until it's so flagrantly the source of problems that it's undeniable, and even then it probably won't, look at healthcare.
Is China drilling less than Switzerland/Austria/France, or are they mixing bridges and tunnels, and the tunnels don't get press releases?
I'm not sure about this particular project, but while riding on their high speed trains between various cities, I witnessed a great quantity of tunnels of a variety of lengths. Some of them were very, very long.
China is doing a lot of drilling, based on what I've seen first-hand.
I'd imagine the amount drilling is dependent of the quality of the mountain you are drilling. If it is pure granite it is easy, but if it is a mix of other softer materials it is a lot of work.
Impressive engineering and build.
Looks like a great spot for BASE jumping!
I knew it was going to be China.
China's infrastructure building is beyond impressive. I always come back to this map of China's high speed rail built in 16 years (2008-2024) [1].
China is actually run by a meritocratic bureaucracy rather than the dumbest of people who do nothing more than sell pardons, run crypto scams, transfer government funds to the wealthiest of people, pander to religious hallucinations and sell out their constituents for board seats and jobs after their political career from the very billionaires that were buying them in office. And no, it's not just one party that does this although the current administration is particularly egregious.
[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/highspeedrail/comments/1drmc2v/grow...
I, too, am jealous of China's high speed railroads. However, on the whole, China has overbuilt their infrastructure, and that may not look so smart in 40-50 years when the maintenance bills start coming due.
Is it factually true? Because some routes that I’m personally aware of are constantly over booked when it comes to rails. Some, I guess, might be overbuilt, but time will show. I’ll agree on some malls though, but it’s more like private stuff, than government-led initiatives.
So, perhaps 2020s China ~ 1950s US demographics. The bridges that recently collapsed in the US (2024 Baltimore/Francis Scott Key Bridge and 2007 Minneapolis I-35W Mississippi River Bridge) were built in 1964 and 1972-1977 respectively.
Noone has yet compared the Chinese construction times/costs to the replacement Baltimore Francis Scott Key Bridge: cost ~$2b, estimated October 2028. Will have 600ft bridge towers, 1600ft main span (increased from 1209ft), total span length 3300 ft, improved pier protection. Surprised they didn't add a freight rail link.
Perhaps. One would hope that ability to build would correlate with ability to maintain, so that nothing falls into disrepair - but we'll have to see.
Americans try not to make a thread about themselves challenge: impossible
Is a comment line this still made when foreigners chime in on their own experiences on America based posts?
Not an American btw.
> And no, it's not just one party that does this
There's some very heavy lifting you have to do to make the parties look at all close. If the Democrats had a supermajority for long enough, you would see some real change for the better, because we can actually protest Democrats to get them to do things, while the Republicans will just silence any dissent using US military against its citizens. Unfortunately a Democratic supermajority is unlikely to ever happen again the way things are going now. And this is 100% because how people voted, or didn't vote at all.
Yeah, that's just not true.
The Democratic Party is absolutely complicit in everything going on. The term used is "controlled opposition". With the current government shutdown, I think it's taken the Republicans by surprise that the Democrats have (thus far) actually stood up for something and they really don't know what to do because it so rarely happens.
Like why wasn't this happening with the last debt ceiling increase earlier this year? Particularly because there was a fairly awful amendment in the last CR that ended Congress's ability to end the state of emergency the president could declare to use extraordinary powers. That seems like worth standing up to.
Go back to 2012 or so when Bush's tax cuts were expiring. Harry Reid had the Senate Republicans over a barrel until... Joe Biden got involved and just capitulated for absolutely no reason. And got nothing in return.
The last Senate supermarjority was in Obama's first term. It was fairly brief actually (less than a month) due to people taking sick and Republicans using a frivolous court case to stop Al Franken taking his seat. But there still was one.
Obama's signature legislative accomplishment was the ACA and what did it do? It was a massive giveaway to insurance companies. There was even a proposal to allow people to enrol in Medicare at 55 (instead of 65) which was derailed by Joe Lieberman. Why? United Health Care was an employer in his state (Connecticut).
But here's the dirty little secret. Democrats love nothing more than using the filibuster as an excuse to do nothing. If that fails, use "institutionalism". The filibuster is not a constitutional construct. It is part of the rules of the Senate. Originally you had to stand up and speak for so many hours to filibuster. Now you just raise your hand and say "filibuster".
If you have a majority in the House and Senate and a president in the White House, you can pass whatever you want.
And let's not forget we just had an election cycle where the Democratic Party openly and intentionally chose to materially support a genocide (that they could've stopped at any point with a phone call) rather than win an election at a time they were (rightly) calling their opponent a fascist.
>The Democratic Party is absolutely complicit in everything going on.
The Democrats simply have no power to stop anything going on. If you think they do, then you don't understand how the government works at all.
Every single thing you mention Democrats doing wrong, is because they have tried to compromise. If one side dictates what everyone else should do, you don't get a functioning country, you get a lot of dissent, and you know what - fucking forget it, you're just too lost to explain any of this to.
Have a nice day.
Surprisingly, this conversation is not totally out topic.
You can try to convince yourself that an elected administration has no actual power to do anything because of $reason (law, how government works, searching to compromise, not antagonizing people, etc), but this exercise in self delusion is not very convincing when the current administration, clearly, do not look like they suffer from the same paralysis.
Like you can try to delude yourself that today is impossible to build great infrastructure because of regulations, maintenance costs, respect for environment, individual freedoms, etc, and Bam! Another country just build it, compliant with the state of the art engineering and respectful of environment without slavery etc. Like they party on your rain.
Your comment would have held true in 2022 or 2015, bolstering your argument that the incumbents cause these issues. Adding the “and no” precondescended statement to the end seems to show your own rumination toward bias.
> the dumbest of people who do nothing more than sell pardons, run crypto scams, transfer government funds to the wealthiest of people
The irony is they are doing all that on the name of “meritocracy” and their side (the wrong Right) is falling for it and cheering it with both hands :-)
How to make the highest bridge in the world : find a deeper canyon. You're welcome.
Did this part concern anyone else?
> Last month, a team of engineers deployed 96 trucks to strategic points across the bridge to recreate heavy traffic conditions to ensure it would not buckle.
Reminds me of this https://featureassets.gocomics.com/assets/74c15210deb9013171...
A bridge that high up and that long I'd imagine wind loading would be more of a problem than static load from stopped trucks.
Reminds me of this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j-zczJXSxnw
I wouldn’t want to be one of those truck drivers, I’ll say that much. Maybe they were remotely operated.
They deploy trucks to see how the bridge vibrates.
And to ensure it would not buckle, per the article.
Implying they were not sure it would not buckle, until they drove the trucks on.
Well, that's how it was reported, but not necessarily accurate.
They probably wanted to quantify how much the bridge moved in various ways. There were likely many "it probably won't move more than acceptable in this way, but if it does we've made it easy to add a change here to fix that" facets of the design. All large complex structures undergo testing like this, sea trials for ships being the quintessential example.
That's like saying unit testing implies there are bugs in the code.
If I was sure my code had no bugs, I would not need unit testing.
That's dubious. Unit tests make future development easier.
I'll trust the truck-test far more than any simulation.
Part of me seeing the record and the whole artificial waterfall gave me a sense that it's not a race anymore, we already lost.
On the other hand...we won the space race and we went to the moon, except only 15 guys or thereabout went and for the rest of us didn't mean anything substantial at all.
USA greatest product for the last decades was illusions, that's all.
Illusions, bombs and coups...
And reality always wins over illusions in the end. China will show that with great joy to the people of the world.
Lots of tech was developed and commercialized as a byproduct of the space program. https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/infographics/20-inventions-we-would...
Very poor return on investment if you look at it only in those terms.
I think I’m going to visit China soon, to the Pearl River Delta. I want to meet manufacturers and advance a product I am working on, and having lived in the US my entire life, I desperately need to see what it’s like when a country is really trying to build a future.
Is there any reason why you believe the US isn't that country?
Rightists are scared of energy sources beyond coal and oil; leftists are scared of information technology that could replace human workers; homeowners are scared to make any physical changes to their neighborhoods and cities because it would "change the neighborhood character"; legislators are scared/incapable of making any fundamental changes to governance because it would be difficult, and can't agree on anything; the president and the average American are scared of anyone and any ideas that don't come from within the country's borders; and for anyone who isn't scared, the cost of enacting change will be a realization that everyone who has skills have either retired or abandoned their trades to become software engineers optimizing ad revenue; and that the young are no longer interested in taking on these challenges because they're doomscrolling TikTok all day; and if they proceed, they will be mired in lawsuits for decades by naysayers; and the financial costs will be 10x the true value paid anywhere else in the world.
Everything is stuck in gridlock in attempt to prevent change, but of course that's futile. There will still be change, it'll just be rust and dryrot and all that ensues. Many would rather see it all crumble than allow progress and risk loss of power and station.
All of this. Everyone in the US is basically afraid of something.
Innovator’s dilemma at social scale.
I wonder if two things are massive factors in this:
a) The US is already prosperous. When you have much too lose, your mental trade-offs between gaining something and losing what you have become different.
b) US politics has been dominated by the massive post-war generation. It seems like we drastically stopped building when the boomers had bought their first homes.
Both of these also work for other Western countries that also stopped building.
I think a major cause is how dependent the United States is on the courts to decide the law. China is a technocracy with strong central state control so they can sidestep that; Japan, on the other hand, has a strong bureaucracy that given a set of rules and processes, can execute them efficiently. On the other hand anything you do in the USA starts off in a gray zone and really is decided once you’ve gone to court, limiting risk taking to only those who are well capitalized and have a lot of time to burn.
This is definitely true. I'd also add community input to that.
However, while these are all issues, I think the root cause is a deeper cultural issue. I don't think Western, European countries have the same legal issues but they too stopped building.
Travel.
There are two United States. A prosperous nation and a struggling nation. See both.
I’m from a now depressed rural town. When I periodically drive home it gets a little more ramshackle every year. My town had 20 operating dairy farms, now 0. Three industrial facilities, now one, which is now fully automated and employs security guards and guys to load trucks.
The best jobs are police, teachers and logistics people at a nearby distribution center.
I pay my entry engineers in real terms 15% less than I made 30 years ago. Housing is about 30% higher in real terms. Our benefit overhead grows 2x inflation.
Then travel abroad.
The result of monomaniacal focus on GDP and DJIA as the sole indicators of economic success…
But the good news is that Musk reached $500 billion net worth, the Gini index be damned. /s
Chinese bridge, designed by Chinese engineers, built by Chinese workers, captured with (we assume) a Chinese drone.
What a spectacular scene.
I am proud on behalf of all the people who worked together to achieve this.
China is like a modern Roman empire. Masters of civil engineering.
Yup, similar number of slaves too.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demography_of_the_Roman_Empire
https://www.walkfree.org/global-slavery-index/country-studie...
That website has the US at 3.3 slaves per thousand people compared to China's 4.0.
You're catching on.
A confident, unified people under competent leadership can accomplish great things. I wish the Chinese continued success and hope their example eventually spurs the development of a new ruling class in the West.
Especially when dissent is ruthlessly crushed and any record of it is erased.
Also coming to other parts of the world, but without any new bridges.
The West also crushes dissent: try to organize a pro-Palestinian protest on a university campus and tell us how it goes. Crushing dissent is simply what governments do.
In the meantime I would like to see more Hoover Dams and Apollo programs here, with fewer tent cities and high-speed rail boondoggles. This will require a ruling class that 1) is competent and 2) cares for the people it governs.
Honestly, I would give up my right to vote or to speak against the government in exchange for free healthcare and cheap housing.
Or you could exercise your right to vote and speak against the government to get healthcare and cheap housing.
Yeah, that's been so effective!
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Note: highest, not tallest. Highest should technically be the building here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kola_Superdeep_Borehole which is more than 12km above ground, that is to say 12km high. Or, rather, was, having been destroyed since. There’s other boreholes too though.
The Kola boreholes are 22 centimeters (9 inches) in diameter, that building is not a bridge in any way, shape, or form.
One of these days I’ll get a model railroad bridge and put it over a borehole. But that day shan’t be today because arguing technicalities on HN seems easier :)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tallest_bridges vs https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_highest_bridges
If you set up a model train bridge over the Kola borehole, I’ll concede and admit it’s a bridge ;)
I learned something by writing my response, I didn’t know how large the Kola boreholes were and now I do!
Also, thanks for clarifying the distinction between highest and tallest, the span on the Chinese bridge is 2000’ above the ground at certain points but the towers themselves are only 860 feet tall, other bridges have taller towers/pillars but the deck height isn’t as high as this Chinese one.