One of the major themes we are working on these days at the Extra Crunch Daily is trying to understand why America and many other Western nations can’t seem to build infrastructure anymore. The answers are complicated but critical: our infrastructure is decrepit, climate change is intensifying, and population growth will put even more strain on existing facilities.
In our first part in this series, we wrote about a book entitled Politics across the Hudson, which was written by Phil Plotch. He formerly headed the redevelopment of the World Trade Center following 9/11 and is now a professor finishing up a book on the travails of the Second Avenue subway slated for publication later this year. We interviewed Plotch this week to get more details on what causes delays and cost overruns in infrastructure, and these are some of the most interesting highlights of our conversation:- Misinformation is a huge challenge at all levels of infrastructure planning. “People at the bottom don’t understand what is happening at the top, and the people at the top don’t understand what is happening at the bottom,” Plotch said. A cost increase that might be relatively cheap to handle immediately won’t be reported since it might piss off politicians whose support is critical for a project.
- That type of purposeful misinformation is a huge problem at the Federal Transit Administration, which administers funds for mass transit across the country. Many of the funds are competitive, and “when there is competition, there is a lot more … gamesmanship,” Plotch said. Cities will overstate benefits and understate costs in the hope of winning funding from the federal government. “The FTA figured this out and Congress figured this out so they put in this whole bureaucracy to review the benefits,” he said. “They are trying to do the right thing … but it just slows down the process.”
- Plotch uses a term called “vaportrain” (the locomotive version of vaporware) to describe many American infrastructure projects. Politicians want to demonstrate their bold and entrepreneurial risk-taking on infrastructure, but are daunted by the time and expense required. So they study things. Regarding the Tappan Zee bridge replacement, which is the focus of his book, Plotch wanted to ask “why was the state studying the same thing over and over again? … It wasn’t until I talked to three governors that I realized what was going on.” The issue was that a train over the bridge was widely popular but expensive, so it “just got studied year after year … it was easier to study something than actually cancelling it.”
- Another challenge is scope creep, which should be familiar to any software engineer. While working at the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation, Plotch worked to draft a plan to connect a train from lower Manhattan to JFK Airport in Queens. When he reached out to a Congressman in Queens for federal sponsorship, “he came back and said he wanted 5%.” What he meant was “5% to be invested into his community in some shape.” Plotch analogized it as “they see it like a Christmas tree with a whole bunch of ornaments on it, and they want to add their ornaments to it as well.”
- A better model for infrastructure today is to focus on minimal operable segments. The idea is that, instead of planning an entire route such as California’s SF to LA high-speed rail line, try to identify more limited routes that can be built efficiently and get to operation as quickly as possible. It’s the equivalent of an MVP in startuplandia, except that the MVP here often costs billions of dollars.
- Wicked problems are policy challenges that are “difficult or impossible to solve because of incomplete, contradictory, and changing requirements that are often difficult to recognize” in the Wikipedia definition. In infrastructure, Plotch said that wicked problems are often just problems of realistically assessing what is possible given constraints. When it came to the Second Avenue subway, “by overpromising they tied themselves up” for years, and with no progress to show for it.
France’s new high speed rail trains will do everything but cure cancer
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India’s overlooked SaaS startups
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“If only we could also make it attractive for global talent from anywhere in the world to work in Chennai or elsewhere [in India], a lot of challenges can be solved better,” says Chargebee’s [Krish] Subramanian.India’s SaaS sector is an interesting candidate for examination. On a global level, the ecosystem is yet another example of how talent can make or a break a country’s entrepreneurial future, as we’ve discussed several times in regards to immigration. On a national level, India’s SaaS community seems to mimic a broader dynamic in India’s tech industry, where critical structural impediments stand in the country’s path to becoming a dominant innovation economy.
India’s founders are losing trust in VCs?
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Obsessions
- We have a bit of a theme around emerging markets, macroeconomics, and the next set of users to join the internet.
- More discussion of megaprojects, infrastructure, and “why can’t we build things”