And the worlds fastest growing subway award goes too...

CalleOchoGringo said:

Beijing subway system today:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/73/Beijing_Subway_System_now.png

Beijing subway system by the Olympics next year:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/ed/Beijing-2008.png

That's just 1 year of work people! It's amazing what you can do when you have an endless supply of cheap labor... Just ask Wal-Mart.

Click to expand...

My God. Just unreal.

it's called Communism & no red tape....or 3 year Environmental Impact Studies

Click to expand...

More than a hundred years ago, Henry Flagler decided to build the FEC railroad from West Palm Beach to Miami, and it was built & open for revenue service less than 2 years later. Keep in mind, at that time, Miami didn't even exist as an official city, and there was no infrastructure to speak of. They literally had to use the railroad to haul the supplies to build the next part down to the construction site as it moved south.

It's horrible what those damn environmental impact studies have done to our country...

There's nothing really magic about rapid building. In California, a 9-month project to widen a road from 4 to 6 lanes would be a major scandal for taking so long. In Florida, it would be nothing short of a miracle (think: the ~decade-long quest to finish widening SW 8th Street west of the Palmetto, the 7 years it took to widen I-95 in Broward, the 20+ years it's going to take FDOT to finally finish the Palmetto, etc).

The problem in Florida is partly due to the way projects are funded... the relevant authority sets the budget and timetable, then dribbles money to the contractor over the course of that timetable. The flow of money can slow down if milestones aren't met on schedule, but the flow will almost never speed up if work goes faster. This is something like how a typical Florida roadbuilding project goes...

* Winning bidder puts up barricades to symbolically show that construction has begun. Then does nothing for the next 6 months besides replace barricades that get run over as the checks start to slowly come in.

* Construction starts. 5-10 people work on a 12 mile road project, starting at one end and working their way to the other. Until, that is, it's time to build something expensive, like a bridge. Then the workers go home for 3-9 months until enough money gets paid to finance the cost of building the bridge. Then work resumes.

* Eventually, 3-7 years later, the project is done. Well, except for the landscaping and barricade removal. But there are still 7 payments to go, so the crews get sent home again for another 5 months while motorists dodge the damn barricades and wonder why the hell the new road isn't open yet. Finally, the last check clears, and the road is finished in 2 or 3 days. Yay.

In California, a roadbuilding project involves a small army of construction workers treating it like dozens, or hundreds, of small projects, all taking place in parallel. One crew builds bridge #1, another builds bridge #2 a mile away, and so on. When the bridges are done, paving starts, with each crew doing a few miles of the new road. That's why they were able to rebuild the collapsed section of the 10 Freeway after the earthquake a few years ago in less than 6 weeks. God forbid, if terrorists blew up a bridge in the middle of Golden Glades, I-95 would be out of commission for years (at the very least, a year and a half) while FDOT f**ked around, spent weeks deciding what to do, then dripped money into the contractor's bank account over some ridiculously long period of time.

What's sad is that the situation in Florida today is still leaps and bounds better than it was 15 years ago, when literally everything FDOT touched took exactly 7 years to finish. I remember one (state) road whose widening from 2 to 4 lanes began the summer before I started middle school, and was finished about 2 months before I graduated from High school. And we're talking about 5 miles of road through what was then still a fairly rural area, and the original road ultimately got bulldozed away to become the ultra wide median of the new divided road... about as uncomplicated of a project as you can possibly get. Now, the same project would probably have taken "only" 3-5 years, thanks mostly to Jeb's 8 year fight with FDOT to make them change their ways (pre-Jeb, FDOT intentionally did major disruptive roadwork at rush hour on the theory that it made things safer for workers because the cars would be slowed to a crawl. Really. And they even had the gall to openly admit it to someone at the Miami Herald around 1993, then wondered why everyone was mad at them...)

The problem isn't whether the price is fixed, the problem is that FDOT takes the total project cost and divides it into n equal payment amounts that get doled out along the budgeted construction period. So if the construction company finished something early and wanted to keep going, it would have to borrow the money to buy the materials, pay the workers, etc. until it finally got paid. They won't do that, so they just go into hibernation mode and wait for enough payments to accrue to finance the next step in the project.