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PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   33912 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 12, 2025

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There is some discussion of cost disease around here. Scott wrote a bit about it. May I present its cousin: schedule disease.

There is a particularly silly recent example. The city of Pasadena in California has a project to bury some power lines. That's the sort of thing you expect a local government to do. There are various benefits to buried power lines. All good so far. Not obviously silly or indicative of a broad societal failure.

Guess what the estimated schedule will be? This is a town of 133k people. 23 square miles. The scope of this project is small. Take your best guess and check the spoiler below.

400 years. https://www.pasadenastarnews.com/2019/02/05/with-no-consensus-pasadenas-underground-utility-program-to-continue-despite-imperfections/ The city government website had a 400 year timeline, but they are buzzkills and removed it two days ago due to criticism. Screenshot here: https://imgur.com/a/oT82UMD City website that has been "updated for clarification" by deleting the schedule: https://pwp.cityofpasadena.net/undergroundfaqs/#footnote Not that they plan to do it faster, they merely deleted the schedule from the website.

We used to be able to build things. Infrastructure. Nuclear power plants. Trains. The California high speed train project is a much more impactful example of cost and schedule disease. But this Pasadena buried power line project stands out for the combination of small scope and deranged schedule.

Do the links show through the spoiler for others too?

Yes. That's okay for these particular links since the URLs are not particularly informative. Other links would have to be better obscured.

Yes, blue on black.

I suppose if you factor in everything possible (disruption to supply, closing off streets, getting all the legal stuff around planning permission etc.) that it does make sense they could only do under a mile of power lines per year, but the proposed timeline does seem.... excessive.

Since I don't have anything useful to contribute, here's a classic song that is applicable. At least the linemen of Pasadena will have job security!

Yup. Blue text on a black background for me.

That would actually be cool if they really did it. Imagine if a city 400 years ago had set up a project like this and they were still going at it, generation after generation. The Notre Dame cathedral took almost 200 years to finish, but this would put even that to shame.

Sagrada Familia in Barcelona. That's only about a hundred and forty years or so, but they're still working on it.

The power line project costs $5.5 million every year for 400 years. Sagrada is so slow because they are using privately raised funds.

From your article, it seems like the obstacle is simply the cost recovery mechanism - i.e. they build it as they fund it and it takes that long to fund it using the current surcharge. I don't think that really says anything about "schedule disease" as such, it's just another example of cost disease.

it sounds bonkers that they planned a project like this, and when it came to "how do we pay for it?", their answer was the equivalent of "uh, look down the back of the sofa for some spare change".

I mean it's possible they had additional funding mechanisms in mind back in the 60s when the program started that just never materialized. Here's some trickle of cash, get started, if it goes well then later we can expand it and yet 60 years later no one wants to pony up the cash (and regulatory reforms) to make it happen.

It does seem like poor planning if the project is sixty years down the line and nobody figured out "how do we fund this?" though to be fair, it does sound like the usual local government "kick the can down the road" methodology.

The project started with a tax to fund it. That has lasted to this day. Depending on how high an electricity bill is, a progressive tax is applied to fund this program.

https://pwp.cityofpasadena.net/undergroundfaqs/

Q: How is the Underground Program funded? A: Initial construction costs are funded through an Underground Surtax on electric bills. As of now, the Surtax ranges from 1.21% to 4.34% of the total charges depending on your monthly electric usage. For a typical 500 kwh-per-month residential customer, the Underground Surtax is about $44 per year.

$44 per household per year does sound anemic. Some resident asked if they could double it to make the project move faster. City leaders say no, other constraints prevent moving faster.

But residents proposed increasing taxes to speed it up and the response was that won't work.

Some have suggested doubling the tax to halve the life of the project, but city officials say the disruption to traffic and available crews would make that impossible.

They're kind of pivoting from one excuse to another.

But sure, cost disease and schedule disease are close relatives. To some degree this would speed up if it was very cheap.

If it was cheaper to do then the same funding rate would finish it sooner

I guessed like 10 years. 400 years is insane! My first impression is that this is malicious compliance by some disillusioned engineer to highlight the absurd state of the project.

California

It seems like every ridiculous example of government imposed lengthy timeframes has that in common.

I wonder if they will continue it for hundreds of years and it will end up like Sweden's navel oak Forrest's (planted 20 years before steel became common for shipbuilding now they have a forest of oaks that are usually tall and straight).

This isn't a real schedule. This is an artifact of legal and bureaucratic processes. Some polity passes a law that says, "Entity X must formulate and implement a plan to do Y." Entity X doesn't actually want to do Y for whatever reason (usually political opposition, but not nessesarily). The thing that Entity X always does in this situation is spend their time coming up with insane plans that will take forever and hope that they will never be implemented. The endgame is to abruptly cancel the project years later and hope nobody notices. Radioactive waste disposal projects are the poster boy of this phenomenon. Yucca Mountain was abruptly cancelled for no reason as soon as the planning was done, $10 billion over decades for absolutely nothing.

This isn't a real schedule. This is an artifact of legal and bureaucratic processes.

I tend to agree with you on this. I would guess that at some point the town residents wanted buried power lines. Maybe someone was injured by a downed electric line, maybe there was a power failure with especially bad consequences, maybe it was the pet issue of a few leading residents, who knows. At the same time, there wasn't the political will to spend the necessary money to do it. (Presumably it's very expensive to bury power lines as it is very unusual). In that kind of situation, nobody wants to tell some widow that the town doesn't want to spend the money to prevent more possible electrocutions. So one way to square that circle is to set up a situation where you can pretend that there is an actual project to bury the power lines when in reality there is not.

I think that these sorts of situations -- let's all pretend that we are addressing problem X -- are actually pretty common in politics. Anyone with a lick of sense knew perfectly well that the crime bill of 1992 would not reduce crime; that the No Child Left Behind Act would accomplish little or nothing; and so on. More recently, a lot of the policies put in place to fight against Coronavirus were obviously never going to help. So I would guess that the Pasadena power line project is a similar kind of situation.

Yucca Mountain was abruptly cancelled for no reason as soon as the planning was done, $10 billion over decades for absolutely nothing.

On the plus side, they did figure out how to communicate the dangers of radiation poisoning to our hypothetical post-civilizational hunter-gatherer descendants from 10,000 years from now.

I have never been convinced by that warning. Did the Egyptian tomb curses stop anyone from digging up the pharaohs? Local tomb robbers were on the job the moment the tombs were sealed, and 19th century archaeologists were not put off by "don't touch this place or bad things will happen".

I imagine if our far descendants are anything like us, their immediate reaction will be "wow, if the ancients went to this much trouble to warn us off, whatever is here must be really good and really valuable!" and they'll start digging.

The real best bet would be to just cover it up with dirt and rocks in a way that looks like a natural terrain feature and not a man made facility. But that would be a lot more expensive than scary hieroglyphs and concrete spikes.

And also not nearly as cool, which is of course the real reason to build things at a monumental scale.

I understand the schedule is not literally true. This won't be relevant 400 years from now. Someday some political or social change will kill it or make it irrelevant.

They started this program in the 1960s with a special tax to pay for it. They stretched that tax and made it people's income ever since then. It's taxpayer sinecures for consultants. And recently local city board meetings in which local residents ask why this has a multi-century timeline. And of course proposals to increase taxes since the program is in a bad state.

The fact that it lasted 6 decades so far does mean the schedule is not completely made up. It's a long running program and we can compare decades of it's progress to the stated goal.

What is the problem? When in American history have people embarked on projects of such duration? The answer is never. For the closest analog, we must look at the great Gothic cathedrals. Burying those lines is our Notre Dame, our Chartres. A society grows great when men plant trees under whose shade they will never sit.

We are building things, AI, GPUs financial projects. These fields attract talent and money.

A hundred years ago electricity was as hyped as AI is today. It was a complete transformation. It was magic and few people understood it. The projects were massive, high tech and at a scale that was far beyond most industries. Young, smart, motivated people wanted to work in the power grid. Trains were once futuristic, magical high budget projects that were far beyond the scale of what people were used to. They attracted top talent.

Today, capital and talent doesn't flow to maintaining old power lines or freight rail. The cool people have moved on decades ago. Left are less talented people and people with less drive.

Power lines are all kinda important for those other things you mentioned. Maybe we should keep some cool people there.

400 is such an outrageous timeline why would they bother? Was it a joke? Was there one or two certain tasks that sucked up most of the timeline?

They are working at a rate of 0.5 to 0.7 miles per year. Given how many miles of line they have it would take around a century for the high priority phase 1 lines and around another three centuries for lower priority lines. A city engineer did the math and drew a timeline given how fast they work.

They do this really really slowly and at a projected cost of billions of dollars.

They do this really really slowly and at a projected cost of billions of dollars.

And I'm going to guess that the vast majority of that money goes into the pockets of people who were educated as lawyers. The people working to block or enable it, the politicians pushing or decrying the project, the lobbying groups, the justices who review each project...

The real blackpill is that any society with laws will ultimately be put to the service of those who have the right to argue them. Retvrn to kritarchy; abandon ALL laws except those decided on by the arbitrary whims of respected community members.

The article explains: 200 miles of line to be buried ÷ 0.5 mile of line buried (costing 5.5 megadollars) per year = 400 years.

Some have suggested doubling the tax to halve the life of the project, but city officials say the disruption to traffic and available crews would make that impossible.

I hope they aren't building 0.51 miles of new lines every year.

Some years they build as much as 0.7 miles of line.

400 years may be an aggressive timeline if the rate of new above-ground line construction exceeds the rate of line undergrounding.

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