Would it be wrong to say that the US has lost the engineering skills necessary to build this kind of big projects?
During World War II the US was an mind blowingly efficient juggernaut of public projects, but it seems that it has lost is way, and that today its engineering culture lags way behind countries like Japan, Germany, France, Spain, ...
You can only reap what you sow in term of engineering skills.
The best minds in the US are focused on showing marginally more ads, wall street , and lots of other things that pay very well, but not big engineering works.
>Would it be wrong to say that the US has lost the engineering skills necessary to build this kind of big projects?
Yes, that’s not the issue. The US still has many of the best engineering schools in the world and projects very rarely fail in the US because engineers screwed up and couldn’t handle it.
The problem is that the government has lost the backbone to actually disrupt people’s lives in the ways necessary to do large scale projects.
The California rail is not difficult, but it is quagmired in NIMBYism and political trading. The chosen route is not about efficiency or anything engineering related, it’s about scratching the right backs.
>The best minds in the US are focused on showing marginally more ads, wall street , and lots of other things that pay very well, but not big engineering works.
Because big engineering projects don’t ever get greenlit. There has never been a case where we wanted to build mass infrastructure, got all of the approvals, and then went, “whoops, nobody can engineer this”.
I don't doubt that the US can produce good schools and good engineers. Like I said what happened during world war two was unprecedented.
But good engineers from good schools won't stay and become great at their work unless they have big infrastructure projects to work on. Also money and prestige. Their colleagues from Japan, France, Germany and Spain have huge infrastructure projects to work on.
What's the equivalent of that in the US right now?
>What's the equivalent of that in the US right now?
Pick one of those large projects in Japan, France, Germany, or Spain and some big US based company (or international company with a US presence) will have a major piece in it.
The top US engineers get to work on major challenging projects all of the time. They are just not taking place in the US.
I really think this is pretty much solely about politics. The US has plenty of engineering success in the private sector, but public sector projects are weighed down by corruption, environmental requirements, community support requirements, overpaid union wage requirements. Everyone wants a piece of the pie.
Please read the actual article. It's much more complicated than that. France has incredibly strong unions, and yet their costs are a fraction of the US's.
I did. My conclusion is that the issue is over politicization as I said. Every interested party wants a piece of the pie, that includes unions, but it also includes everyone else in a 100 mile radius.
I think your error here is that you assume that politics do not exist everywhere people are involved.
A tram recently got built where my parents live near Paris. They had to involve something like 15 cities, 3 departments, one region, the French state, and the european union. That was lots of people who wanted to have their way. It slowed things down. But it got built anyway and now it works.
I take "over politicized" to refer to what the article was saying about how many of the various departments are elected, and how that causes delay.
The US finds it hard to delegate trust on these things, and parties throw up objections over and over again, either because they want to kill the projector because they want to cover their ass from those that want to kill it.
"Unions" are a generic term, much like "clergy" is.
Generalizations about "clergy" do not make much sense if you want to cover Iranian Ayatollahs and Buryat Lamas at the same time. Same about unions. The context changes across the globe.
The relevant context here is that everything is done to crush any kind of wannabe unions in the united states of America, unlike say in Germany or Northern Europe.
I come from France where the desire from the elite to crush unions is also strong, but the USA is yet another level.
Given that context the unions that do exist today in the USA have been selected for their survival skills more than anything else. Like always you can only reap what you sow
Why be a civil engineer with all of the liability and hard stuff to learn, and earn $35k coming out of school, when you could be CS grad and earn $150k, with way less stress?
>and earn $35k coming out of school, when you could be CS grad and earn $150k, with way less stress?
First, $35k is made up, that’s what someone working full time at In-N-Out now makes.
Second, being an entry level civil engineer is not more stressful than working in CS. You bear no responsibility and don’t do any physical labor. Why is that stressful?
I don't disagree to be honest because there are plenty of US cities where you can't do much in terms of urbanism even if you had the skills to build. They were built at the wrong era, for cars. They are just not dense enough.
As someone who got both degrees from a pretty prestigious US university, this was my reasoning too. I haven't worked a day in Civil Eng since graduation and I don't regret it one bit
I'm sorry $35K? Any source to show that rate? In small-town midwest U.S. the starting rate is at least $60k, so I'd be shocked to see it at anywhere near $35k anywhere in the U.S.
The engineering knowledge is there and growing, and spans borders. Like all construction in the states, the people to construct things are lacking, but that’s not the fundamental cost increase.
Here’s a few things I think are to blame (some as mentioned in the article and some of my own.)
- Desire to minimally disrupt others, this extends beyond rail to other projects, look at the big dig in Boston.
- Planning requirements re ISTEA act, have put engineering in a back seat to local concerns.
- Lack of domestic production/ buy america - leads to paying higher prices and big startup costs on every project
- No standardization of components. Almost every rail vehicle in the US ends up different. Every station is engineered from the start. 150 years ago, stations would come in on a train and be stood up to all look the same. England learned this late with crossrail.
- Political desire and requirements to minimize and mitigate impacts of globally net beneficial projects. Elevated trains are a nonstarter in most cities. If you can’t grade separate more trains mean more delays to cars, which means excuses for ambulances saving lives can be used.
I work on transit projects primarily on the west coast. My experience has been that 50% or more of the engineers were from outside the United States. While I don't disagree that the engineering skills are hard to find within local labor pools, plenty of experienced individuals are willing to relocate.
This is correct, particularly for rail projects, consultants and contractors have to be hired from overseas because there are very few Americans who can do the work.
During World War II the US was an mind blowingly efficient juggernaut of public projects, but it seems that it has lost is way, and that today its engineering culture lags way behind countries like Japan, Germany, France, Spain, ...
You can only reap what you sow in term of engineering skills.
The best minds in the US are focused on showing marginally more ads, wall street , and lots of other things that pay very well, but not big engineering works.