At least one reason is that we have substantially different safety regulations since we're not accepting of deaths on a project like that. 5 people died on that project. 11 died to build the Golden Gate. Original Bay Bridge? 24.
They actually had a rule of thumb at the time: 1 death for every $1M spent on a project[1]. Any metric like that would be absolutely unacceptable today.
Death rates are probably better than absolute number of deaths for comparison. Here are death rates per 1000 workers of some well known construction projects:
80 Transcontinental Railroad
80 Suez Canal
50 Brooklyn Bridge
17.46 World Trade Center
6.4 Sydney Harbor Bridge
4.47 Hoover Dam
3.37 San Francisco Bay Bridge
3.33 Eiffel Tower
2.67 Titanic
2.5 Sears Tower
1.47 Empire State Building
1.17 Trans-Alaska Pipeline System
0.75 City Center Las Vegas
0 Chrysler Building
Topping all of those by a large amount are the Panama Canal and the Burma-Siam railway, which I did not include because I don't have numbers--they are literally off the chart. I mean that literally. On the bar chart I'm getting the numbers from [1] the bars for those are so big they are clipped and the number is not visible.
Are you on mobile? Or something else might be breaking formatting for you. The chart linked does have numbers for the Panama Canal (408.12) and Burma-Siam Railway (385.45).
The history of the canal itself is pretty interesting. It was an effort started by the French, who lost too many workers to tropical diseases (specifically malaria). Then the Americans took over, and one of the reasons they succeeded was they made sure to take preventative measures to protect workers from malaria.
Vancouver’s “Second Narrows” bridge was built in the late 50s and completed in 3 years. Midway through the project a major accident killed 19 people. It was the result of an engineering error.
In the mid 90s the bridge name was changed. It is now generally referred to as the “Ironworkers memorial bridge”. Anyone crossing that bridge since is constantly reminded of that engineering error.
“Better safe than sorry” is rising belief.
Once this truism became generally accepted, as it generally is, it has precedent over other considerations. Since “safe” means more than physical safety, practically any human action is subject to exponentially increasing levels of scrutiny. It takes time to come to an agreement that everything is safe. In big projects it takes a lot of time. On bigger projects it might never come.
I think this is a cowardly and inaccurate belief and agree it is what it driving changes across all areas.
It is the institutional flaw of democracies and free markets. People (demand) are capable of acting irrationally and emotionally leading to a reduction of individual and public good.
I’m assuming your OP thinks “better safe than sorry” is stupid because it doesn’t actually help you make decisions.
I would much rather drive on a bridge of someone whose motto is “do it right.”
This isn’t the Apollo program. We know how to make safe bridges. It’s not a matter of being cautious and talking to every stakeholder. It’s a matter of hiring actual
engineers,* letting them work, believing them, and then giving them the resources to monitor construction properly.
It means sometimes rejecting a lot of bad material and holding the project up for 8 months.
It does not mean “lean safe” and cross your fingers.
* meaning licensed engineers. The word engineer has I guess been made meaningless by thousands of people writing code and calling it “engineering”. It used to mean someone had completed training as an engineer.
I believe you are either arguing in bad faith, or not giving the post you are replying to enough credit.
Better safe than sorry MEANS do it right. It means that human life is more valuable than material wealth.
If you are hiring amateurs to build your bridge, or you are “crossing your fingers”, then you are not being “better safe than sorry” — in the sense that what you are doing can not be an implentation of “better safe than sorry” that can be reconciled with the broader cultural context in which people use the phrase and discuss it.
> Better safe than sorry MEANS do it right. It means that human life is more valuable than material wealth.
This is not accurate on both accounts.
First, material wealth can be converted into quality of life in multiple different ways. Consuming additional millions to push death rates down by a few percentage points is taking away from other places, ostensibly hurting others.
Second, better safe than sorry does not mean do it right. Mistakes will happen, and acting like nothing will ever go wrong is a fools errand. Planning for failure is a significant portion of project management and engineering in general. The goal is 0 mistakes, but severe negative overreactions in response to failure can have a net negative impact.
> The word engineer has I guess been made meaningless by thousands of people writing code and calling it “engineering”.
A friend of mine was just hired as a project engineer at a construction company. He was confused since he has no engineering experience. Turns out, at this company, it means you are training to be a project manager.
“Do it right” is what we want, “better safe than sorry” is what we usually get. “Better safe than sorry” in practice usually ends up looking like a tool for acquiring broad agreement with stakeholders and spreading accountability. I have seen many “better safe than sorry” initiatives that result in complete garbage that loses the purpose, spirit and original intent of its mission.
There are plenty of places, such as western European countries and Japan, that have strong safety regulations and still manage to complete large-scale infrastructure projects quickly.
Another way to look at this is to ask why the United States seems incapable of even maintaining existing projects. For example, look at the current state of the New York City subway.
I suspect slowness in building new infrastructure, and poor maintenance of existing infrastructure, have the same root cause: lack of political will.
American voters don't expect their governments to be good at this kind of thing. European voters would vote politicians out of office if their transit systems got as bad as the NY subway has become. It would be seen as a failure to execute one of the basic duties of government.
>> American voters don't expect their governments to be good at this kind of thing. European voters would vote politicians out of office if their transit systems got as bad as the NY subway has become. It would be seen as a failure to execute one of the basic duties of government.
Americans often vote those people out of office and their replacements are equally useless or worse.
Unfortunately that's often not accurate. The vast majority of the time the incumbent wins. We vote by party here and if the incumbent is our party rep. we will vote for them regardless of track record as we assume the other party is worse.
We have created a system where results often don't matter as long as there is the correct capital letter next to your name on the ballot.
Compounding this further is that politicians know that they can count on your vote but they rely on the money of industry and lobbyists to campaign. Thus the very industry that is supposed to be fixing the problem under contract is able to overcharge and take longer than agreed becuase our politicians rely on them for funding.
Which is mostly due to safety concerns, the fire regulations are not met by BER due to a complete chaos in planning the construction.
Nowadays, big projects in the West are far more complex since have to meet more demands and more stakeholders are involved. In authoritarian countries, this is not so much a problem, the new airport in Istanbul is built very fast, but concerns from citizens are not respected etc.
This will sound horrible but is it rational? E.g. say you are building a huge hospital and due to the above it will take 4 years longer at 2x the cost so basically you could loose X lives due to hospital not being there and due to increased cost of care.
Yes, it is rational. We should live in a society where the expected human sacrifice of a construction project should be 0.
Pure utilitarianism leads to outcomes that are clearly out of step with almost everyone's moral codes. For example you could kill someone and take their organs to save the lives of 4-5 people. Is it rational that we're not allowed to do that? Why do some people get to keep 2 kidneys when there are others with none?
This is solved at least somewhat by using 'rule utilitarianism' instead of 'act utilitarianism'. Society is better off as a whole if we adhere to rules such as protection of the human body or safety regulations when constructing buildings.
> For example you could kill someone and take their organs to save the lives of 4-5 people. Is it rational that we're not allowed to do that? Why do some people get to keep 2 kidneys when there are others with none?
There was a pretty good short story, "Dibs" by Brian Plante, about that published in the April 2004 issue of Analog Science Fiction and Fact.
Everyone was required to be registered in the transplant matching system. Occasionally you'd receive a letter telling you that someone was going to die soon unless they got one of your organs. That person now had dibs on that organ, and if anything happened to you before they died they got it.
Usually you would get another letter a couple weeks or so later telling you that the person no longer had dibs, which generally meant that they had died.
Sometimes, though, you'd get a second dibs letter while you already had one organ under dibs.
And sometimes you'd get a dibs letter when you already had two organs under dibs...meaning if you died now it would save three lives. At that point you were required to report in and your organs were taken to save those three other lives.
The story concerned someone who worked for the transplant matching agency who got a second dibs letter and was quite worried. He illegally used his insider access to find out who the people were who had dibs on him, and started digging around to try to convince himself they were terrible people who didn't deserve to survive to justify illegally interfering, if I recall correctly (I only read the story once, when it was in the current issue).
I don't remember what happened after that. I just remember thinking that it was an interesting story and explored some interesting issues.
Do you believe we should make the national speed limit 25? If not, you're accepting that people will die needlessly, and that the value of a human life is not, in fact, infinite.
The value of a human life is not infinite, but that doesn't mean it isn't worth more than a certain amount of time spent on a construction project. The people who make executive choices about construction projects should not decide that it is acceptable for x people to die on this project in exchange for y fewer months construction time. Accidents happen, but we should not plan to trade lives.
Consider if by sacrificing someone on an altar you could magically cause several months of construction work to happen overnight. That would still be murder.
FWIW, I would [make the national speed limit 25] if I could. (With some hopefully obvious qualifications.)
The current traffic system as an insane "death and mayhem lottery" that we force ourselves to play, with out respect of youth, age or anything.
The current interest and action towards bike-friendly cities is a symptom, I think, of a healing of societies' psyches. We have been pretty brutal to each other since the Younger Dryas, and it's only recently that we've started to calm down and think about what we really want our civilization to be like.
Ok, so from 50 to 25 will reduce some deaths. That's right. But now we can reduce to 20, will reduce even more deaths. Then 15, 10... Where do we stop?
The real thing I would advocate (if this weren't a beautiful Sunday afternoon, calling me from my keyboard) is a design for traffic that began from the premise of three (or four) interconnected but separate networks, one each for pedestrians, bikes, and rail, and maybe one network of specialized freeways for trucks and buses. Personal cars would be a luxury (unless you live in the country) that few would need (rather than a cornerstone of our economy) with rentals taking up the slack for vacations and such.
But if you're interested in this sort of thing, don't bother with my blathering, go read Christopher Alexander.
My other answer is really just an invitation to a kind of thought experiment: what if we really did restrict ourselves to just walking, biking, and trains? How would civilization look in that alternate reality?
And what is the real human cost when we factor in the number of human lives wasted sitting in traffic at stupidly low speeds.
If decreasing your speed from 100km/h to 50km/h gives you a 1% lower chance of dying in a road traffic accident, but you spend an additional 2% of your life stuck in traffic, is that a win?
Is this the argument you want to plant your stake in the ground on as absurd? Because the modern debate in the tech community is "should people be allowed to operate motor vehicles at all?"
lol, I hear people frame the self driving car discussion that way regularly, but it is just wrong. Noone is going to be making human driven vehicles illegal.
They may be more like classic cars than regular vehicles at some point, though.
Nah, you'll just see the insurance cost spike to the point where driving is a weekend activity for rich weirdos. Give it a generation and it will be as strange and morally suspect as smoking.
> it will be as strange and morally suspect as smoking.
You could have picked a better example. I see tons of young people smoke and wonder what the hell is wrong with them, whether or not they haven't been paying attention for the last 40 years and then I realize they didn't because they weren't there to begin with. So the tobacco industry can work their nasty charms on them with abandon because there are new potential suckers born every day.
Smoking is a weird analogy. I'd expect a better one to be something like "give it a generation and it will be as strange and morally suspect as a horse and buggy".
Or alternatively, maybe as strange as a motorcycle or vintage MG.
I wouldn't be surprised to see an increasing number of (express-type) roads or perhaps dedicated lanes where human drivers were not allowed on though, after self-driving capabilities become the norm. (yes I realise that's an assumption).
I think people underestimate the cultural impact that self-driving vehicles will have - imagine a whole generation or two after self-driving vehicles are generally available - how many people will bother learning to drive? I think it might become more of a job-specific skill than a general 'adult life' skill as it is now in most places.
I think you are absolutely right about some limited circumstances that make them the only legal option. But the analogy that I keep making is to classic cars. A lot of them don't have the safety features that we expect today. It isn't uncommon for their owners to say things like "I'm only safe on roads that existed in 1960". It is obviously an exaggeration, but the point is that even today there are plenty of cars that are legal to operate but probably wouldn't be anyone's preference on a busy 70 MPH interstate.
At some point, human driven cars become novelties, just like that. There is no reason to ban them, but as you suggest, maybe there will be some HOV-like lanes where they don't really have access. Or even some time constraints (not during rush hour on some key roads, not in lower manhattan, etc).
Your "pure utilitarianism" is a complete straw man.
Killing someone to take their organs to save 5 lives is utilitarianism to only first order effects. We live in a world that does not terminate after one time step, so we have to consider Nth order effects to calculate utility.
For example, the second order effect is other humans' moral judgements. "How horrible, he murdered that man" is a valid moral reaction to have, and this is disutility that must be accounted for in a "pure utilitarian" world view. Third order effects may be the social disorder that results from allowing such ad hoc killings as means to an end, and so on.
The only thing preventing pure utilitarianism from being viable is a lack of compute power, and "rule utilitarianism" is a poor heuristic based approach for philosophers without patience ;)
> We should live in a society where the expected human sacrifice of a construction project should be 0.
No, but that should be the ideal which you should strive to move towards, when practicable. But you can't ever actually get there, and shouldn't try infinitely hard either.
Yes, but only up to a point. If all the rules and safety checks inflate the cost and timeline of projects exponentially then barely anything would get built.
The question, as always, is: "Where do we draw the line?".
Yes, it does sound horrible. Not because of the objective, but it is so uninformed and low effort that it is really pain full.
Yes, it's a great idea. Killing one person will allow us to double speed. How exactly I wonder, but this seems like the kind of project where asking questions is strictly forbidden.
This has nothing to do with specifically killing people but has to do with creating regulatory environment were very few entities can complete and comply with regulation. I am not sure anyone can contribute the improved stats to that burdensome regulation easily as it can be just general tech and process improvements.
You make a reasonable point, health and safety bullshit can go too far at times, but equally exploitation often goes further - in that the effort to save/pockets costs shadows the good will. Very difficult to quantify
China built their national high speed rail in remarkable time. Like less time to cover their entire country, than it will take California to build one high speed rail line. The difference seems to be that autocracy gets shit done.
Sure, they didn't have to worry about property rights, environmental impact studies, etc. They just did it.
We built the first interstate highways pretty quickly too, and part of why is we just plotted a line and set the bulldozers to work. Nobody worried about habitat destruction, erosion, endangered species, etc.
Interestingly the author cites Hong Kong in another question as a city that should be replicated. It's a city where at least 10 (and likely a great deal more#) workers died and 234-600 were injured in the last few years building a bridge of questionable utility to other local cities.
# 10 are confirmed dead on the HK portion, the death toll on the Chinese portion is unknown.
There's little question that lax worker safety and weak labor laws can contribute to faster economic growth, but I'm not sure that's something we should be trying to replicate.
I'd be surprised if safety is a significant contributor. Assuming it is, why haven't we gained, in almost a hundred years, efficiency to counter balance it?
At least one reason is that we have substantially different safety regulations since we're not accepting of deaths on a project like that. 5 people died on that project. 11 died to build the Golden Gate. Original Bay Bridge? 24.
They actually had a rule of thumb at the time: 1 death for every $1M spent on a project[1]. Any metric like that would be absolutely unacceptable today.
[1] - https://www.npr.org/2012/05/27/153778083/75-years-later-buil...