Just based on your terminology, it’s evident that you have no idea what you were looking at.
People often lump all of the people they see on a job site as generic “construction workers,” and that if they don’t see everyone with a shovel in their hand, then they are not working.
Besides the actual laborers, construction sites may have engineers present, inspectors, surveyors, safety compliance personnel, flaggers, etc. To a layman, it may seem that a lot of these people are just standing around.
Also, the initial pavement that was installed may have been intended to just be temporary pavement, which is typical. Temporary paving allows for roadway settlement and allows for the final paving to be done all at once so that the final roadway doesn’t end up looking like Swiss cheese.
I’d write more, but I’m tapping this out on an iPhone.
From what I can tell around here (Texas), the city, county and state fund projects piecemeal, and that’s why they take so long sometimes.
For example, most highway projects are approved, then funded over a series of years, and with relatively weak rewards for being under time/budget and relatively weak penalties for being over time/budget.
They can get things done in a hurry if they so choose; in 1997-1998, a heavily traveled part of I-45 in downtown Houston (the “Pierce Elevated”) was reconstructed completely within that time frame without shutting it down completely. The contractors completed it early and(I believe) under budget because of significant incentives built into the contract.
Meanwhile, out on the western side of town, it took more than 3 years for Wilcrest Rd. to be widened by one lane between Richmond and Westheimer (a couple of miles, max). This had to be funding or regulatory snafus; it just doesn’t take that long to prep and pour 2 miles of a single lane. (saw them pour about a quarter mile of 4 lane road in one morning once in a new development)
There is no slowdown. Period. This whole thread is one magnificent example of confirmation bias and lack of awareness of context.
Start with the Empire State Building. Yes, it is certainly famous as an example of a large building that was completed in record time. Bob Beamon’s long jump in Mexico City in 1968 was two feet longer than anyone else’s and has only been exceeded a few times. Is it reasonable to compare every broad jump to that outlier?
By the time the Empire State Building was started, the crash had essentially shut down construction in New York. The builders had every able-bodied ironworker in the city coming to them, and they could pick the best teams. There was no competition for supplies, no competition for the transportation. The building is an extremely simple design that was the end product of a certain type of form. The exquisite way the operation was managed and controlled is a thing of beauty, and there are many good books about it that go into great detail. But it is not comparable to anything at all.
The history of the New York subway system is a better example. The subways always took forever, always went over budget, always created disruption, and never were completed to the the full extent originally envisioned.
And both of these took form before such a thing as environmental reviews existed. Pressure groups did not rise up to oppose them every foot of the way. Safety was very good for the Empire State, but subways were deadly and tunnels were an order of magnitude deadlier yet. People were disposable then.
They are not today. The replacement world trade center has been resigned and redesigned just to find some sort of balance between safety and aesthetics, since the best solution would be a bare concrete wall. The speed of actual construction has almost nothing to do with the length of time since 9/11. The original WTC started site clearance in March of 1966 and the two buildings were completed at the end of 1970 and 1972 respectively. The first beam for the freedom tower was laid in December 2006. They are now at 58 stories.
There was a range of projects from slow to fast in the old days. There is a range of projects from slow to fast today. If you compare the slowest today to the fastest of yesterday, today will lose out. But that’s a really, really bad and ignorant way of looking at history.
In the old days the philosophy of “If you build it they will come,” was in effect.
They built buildings without the studies to see if anyone would actually occupy it. In Chicago, they gave home owners and businesses the right to veto subway and streetcar/El construction.
The result was the builders went into alleys and poor areas and built. Then the poorer areas quickly became much better. Of course a ton of these El/Streetcar lines were going bankrupt. Again, it was the build it first then worried about would it profit.
Look at Hoover Dam, can you imagine that being built today? I mean it’s doubtful Mexico would allow the USA to drain the Colorado River so it rarely reaches the Gulf of California today.
When I think of things like this, I remember reading about Herman Haupt, a railroad executive who volunteered to help the Union during the US Civil War. Haupt was given unskilled labor and the unenviable task of building and maintaining railroads (and especially railroad bridges) which were undergoing heavy wartime wear-and-tear and occasional deliberate destruction by Confederate raiders. He performed extraordinary feats of construction. I can’t find a cite now, but I recall reading that at one point his crews built scores of permanent railroad bridges in a few weeks. Here is a cite I can find:
Back in WWII, they put out a ship a day. Now, to go from concept to shake-down cruise is measured in decades. I know that is not a fair comparison, but overall, ships are more complicated now and we have less tolerance for risk.
My experience is not so much construction as government project managment and “safety” (good or bad) gets in the way a lot.
We thought a project would take about 1 year, but 5 years later, here we are still working on it. The safety nazis (who are beholden to no one and need job secuity) nitpick every single item in existance. “We think those stairs are too steep, someone could be carying something heavy and fall down. That computer over there, it could go bazerk and find a 1-in-a-million way to hurt someone. We need a full run down of its operation and reliabilty. We need a 10 page of this electronic component, it could interfere with that electronic component over there.”
Safety and usability are usually inversly proportional. If you have to do it absolutely safely, then it will take 10 times as long and take 5 times as much paperwork.
It’s what we are willing to put up with as a society. People used to get hurt all the time. Now, we consider that unacceptable.
It was mentioned before in passing, but environmental impact statements definitely affect large projects. These can be monstrously complicated and take years. (I favor a much simpler design statements, as no one cares to read the things if they have any choice.) And then you get a large number of pseudo-environmentalists who will die in the last ditch to stop you from building anything worthwhile, sometimes seemingly out of spite, even if the project would be a net benefit.
In the United States, much of it is a backlash against urban renewal and expressway projects of the 1950s and 1960s. To make a long story short, in the Robert Moses era, plans for major infrastructure projects were drafted in smoke-filled rooms. There was almost no public input or review, no environmental review, and no study of alternatives, whether it was an alternative route or alternative form of solving a problem. It wasn’t a matter of building an expressway vs a subway to move people, but rather if the expressway should have six lanes or eight.
A group of planners would draw a red line on a map indicating where an expressway was going to go. Weeks later properties along the route would be purchased through eminent domain. A few months later, shovels hit the dirt. Same thing with urban renewal projects of the era; some planners would draw a red line around a few blocks on a map, declare everything inside it “blighted”, submit the map to the Feds, get a healthy check back from them, and the bulldozers would make their appearance soon afterwards.
Because of large freeway revolts, and the massive social costs and unchecked destruction of urban renewal, the processes were changed, and public input has become much more important. The idea of a workshop to study something even as trivial as access management improvements along a regular street would have been unthinkable 40 years ago, but today a project won’t be able to go forward until there’s been a year of public and stakeholder meetings.
The Golden Gate Bridge was built around the same time and where the Hoover Dam had near 100 deaths the Golden Gate had only 11 deaths (only one till near the end when a platform holding 12 workers collapsed and 10 died).
Maybe dam building is more dangerous than bridge building. I dunno. Clearly they could and would build with safety in mind back then. IIRC the bridge came in under time and under budget too.
For what it’s worth, I was not aware that the ESB had a particularly notable construction time before picking it–I chose it only because of the similar size and location to 1WTC. So while I certainly can’t deny an overall confirmation bias, in this particular case it was more coincidence than anything.
Anyway, thanks for the detailed answer.
Do you know of specific reasons why? It seems that tunneling would have been much more of a black art compared to buildings back then–buildings are fairly straightforward, especially if the foundation is taken care of (Manhattan bedrock makes this easy), but tunnels can always run into unknown difficulties (especially given the primitive state of geology).
Got an example of a really fast modern construction project in the West?
I think you’re mixing dirt simple Liberty cargo ships with warships.
Nowadays we can whip out simple bulk carriers or container ships in pretty quick time, maybe 4 months from first metal to delivery. And these are ships 3x as fast and 10 or 20x the payload-carrying capacity.
And back in WWII complex ships of the time, such as aircraft carriers, took several years from concept to delivery. Many of the carriers ordered right after Pearl Harbor never made it into the war. See Midway-class aircraft carrier - Wikipedia
Also you’re comparing build-rate to build-time. Two different issues. The Liberty ship factory did eventually get up to delivering one ship per day as you say. But each ship took 40+days to make; they just had a 40-ship-long assembly line. And they only got that quick after they’d made over a thousand of them. The first one took 230 days to build.
Untrue. Not only did the ESB have lots of other buildings being built at the same time, but they were all also finished on the same schedule.
The Chrysler Building was built around the same time as Empire State Building, and also took only a year and a half (September 1928 - May 1930).
The AIG building was built around the same time, and it is as tall as the Empire State Building if you don’t count the spire, and it also took only 2 years (1930 - 1932).
The Trump Building at 40 Wall Street? Built in 1930 (around the same time as ESB) it was in the running for the tallest building in the world at the time, and it took only 11 months.
The Willis Tower (formerly the Sears Tower) in Chicago was even taller than the Empire State Building, and it took 2 years. (April 1971 to May 1973.)
The John Hancock building (still the 6th tallest in the US even today) took only two and a half years (1965-1968).
The Woolworth Building? Yeah, it’s smaller than the ESB, but it was still the tallest building in the world when it was built, and that took only 2 and a half years (1910 - 1913).
These are not isolated examples.
Check out the list of world’s tallest buildings on Wikipedia. It is impossible to deny that buildings went up a lot faster back then than they do now.
That said, the Trump Tower in chicago (2nd tallest in the US) did manage to go up in only 4 years. Trump International Hotel and Tower (Chicago) - Wikipedia Slower than the old days, but maybe not too bad considering how much more complex building is now.
Good discussion. I spent 20 years as a civil engineer and construction manager (before changing careers), and as been pointed out, the factors that affect the pace of a major project are mostly political and financial. And, the OP’s example of an urban mass transit system, running horizontally through the complex organism of a modern city versus a freestanding vertical structure like a building or bridge.
Back after the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, we needed a detour around the SF bay and a freeway (580 to the Richmond Bridge) was half done when the quake took out the Bay Bridge. They poured on the money to get that freeway up and operational within a few weeks, many months ahead of anything like a normal schedule. We are able to build things incredibly quickly today, but it’ll cost you.
The Ark Hotel in China was built in just 6 days, time lapse video can be seen here. It isn’t particularly pretty but it’s still impressive and there were no worker injuries during construction (or at least that is what the video states).
I would think a lot of the delays in construction in major cities is caused by simply trying not to cause too much disruption to the surrounding area. They are building a tram system where I live at the moment (no idea why!) and it is taking a long time as they need to keep re-routing traffic whilst at the same time trying to keep it flowing. I’m sure construction would be much faster if they could just close all the roads but that isn’t feasible.
Interesting… I’m surprised those abandoned cities aren’t being subjected to rampant looting/salvaging for materials/homeless colonies/college parties. At least that’s what would happen to places like that if it happened in the U.S.
It’s also worth noting that EIS are not just about “environmental” like tree-hugger style. It’s also environmental like “there is a church and school near the new highway, how will they be affected”. Just studying how a major project will impact the entire community is a huge deal.
I assume a lot of it came out of the major projects done in the 60’s that essentially said “fuck the community, we need roads”. There is a lot of regret on what was lost due to that.
