Comment by pcl

This is the central thesis of Ezra Klein's "Abundance" book. Basically, things like this (or high speed rail, or public housing) don't get built in the USA because the government has hamstrung itself with so many rules and regulations that it becomes prohibitively expensive and/or tied up in lawsuits.

Places like China, for better or worse, are not burdened with the problem of making sure every constituency is accommodated.

>> The 2,890-metre-long structure, which took more than three years to complete, reduces travel time between the two sides of the canyon from two hours to two minutes.

The construction timeline and travel improvement are comparable to the New River Gorge bridge, which was completed in the US in ~50yr ago back when systems were structured to and the people who ran them actually were capable of producing results.

Freakonomics just had an episode about how China is run by engineers, who get things done, while the US is run by lawyers, who prevent things from getting done.

Chinese civil engineers, and engineering orgs, are good because they get a lot of practice.

In the West, and especially in the US, individuals and orgs don't get practice, so when they finally do get a new contract they have to stumble around for 5-10 years figuring out all the institutional knowledge that was lost.

By the time they figure it out, the project is over budget, so it gets canceled, and then it's 20 years until the next half-hearted attempt. Lather rinse repeat.

At root, a lot of this stems from a "managerial" mindset in which people and skills can simply be "reallocated" on a dime. They can't. You can't uproot trees all the time. You plant one and then it grows over multiple human lifetimes.

I think the point being made is that if you followed two ridgelines that make up a valley up to a common summit you could just jam a plank in there. You've got the world's highest bridge. It's only 4 ft long, but it is technically a bridge.

I'd be more interested to know how they raised individual components into place. But I presume they just started with small cables, then used those to raise larger ones into place over time.

Yeah, I know it doesn't matter how high the actual bridge is, just the length and pylons, but it feels like it matters!

That was Keynes I think