Comment by prasadjoglekar
Comment by prasadjoglekar 5 days ago
This sort of work usually costs 3x what is should, because the firm doing the work has to pay state minimum wage and/or hire union labor.
Comment by prasadjoglekar 5 days ago
This sort of work usually costs 3x what is should, because the firm doing the work has to pay state minimum wage and/or hire union labor.
You probably need an engineer. A couple. They might have to run traffic studies beforehand to estimate the design requirements and light timing. They might have to consider other network nodes beyond this in their modeling. They might have to also run studies afterward to retime the lights to meet realized demand.
I’m surprised its not a $6m project honestly.
There's a proposal to redo a playground in San Mateo's central park—bids have come in around $16M.
https://www.cityofsanmateo.org/4142/Central-Park-Playground-...
It's a nice playground design for sure, but it's kind of amazing to consider what could be built privately for the same amount. You could literally build a palace on a giant estate with fancy landscaping, a swimming pool, tennis courts, movie theater, etc.
Of course there are reasons why public projects are more expensive, but it does seem pretty crazy on the surface.
The actual scenario at hand is paying 3x wages "just because".
You said 1/3 minimum wage as a strawman. Not to mention minimum wages aren't necessary anyway - like you said "it’s really hard to hire even at minimum wage these days".
Pay market wages, without external forces driving wages higher. Because, higher wages means higher costs, and if you are government that's essentially theft from your taxpayers.
the issue is the prevailing wage requirement (3x+ minimum wage). it would be easy to complete this cheaply with just minimum wage labor
Minimum wage in California seems to be $16 an hour. I doubt this intersection took 37 500 man-hours to finish, so I don't think the cost is explained by wages. Also, $200K would still seem like a gigantic amount of money for adding stop lights to a single intersection.