Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit
baoooooooooooo | on: Guerrilla bike lanes: San Francisco makes illicit infrastructure permanent (2016)
It’s effectively crowdsourcing urban planning, I’m in support.

I honestly think if we invited this type of empowerment/interaction in the physical world a bit more it would probably be good for spurring creativity in society (I think we do a pretty good job of it in software). It’s just a nice reminder that everything is just made up by someone else, likely no smarter than you.

Also I can’t believe this was 10 years ago, I remember being super involved in SPUR in SF (and getting coffee there almost every day) and going to talks about this kind of thing

tcdent | parent
It's admittedly appealing because it feels far closer to ordinary citizens having an influence, but I can't help feel like this is a failure on the part of the professionals whose responsibility the planning and implementation of this is.

Have we really gotten to the point where we can't trust public infrastructure to be properly implemented, and so the only solution is to take it into our own hands? What are the tax dollars paying for then?

stetrain | root | parent | next
I think in many places we have gotten to the point where the planning, processes, and public approval process for some of these simple projects is more costly in time and money than just building it as a temporary experiment and revisiting it in a year or two to measure the outcome.

Not that there shouldn't still be some kind of standards and community approval, but I think we can afford to set that at a lower bar for certain categories of easily reversible projects.

And hopefully incorporating more of these ideas can teach us to be more efficient on transit infrastructure projects in general, where the US often significantly trails other countries on cost and implementation time.

Karrot_Kream | root | parent | next
Changes are stymied by bureaucracy put in place due to fear of litigation. The primary reason that things are studied, studied again, given community input, and checked for environmental impact is that if a city or municipality gets sued due to a road change, the onus is on them to demonstrate that they didn't create an unsafe condition. For example in cases where cars crash and are liable for property damage, car owners try to sue the city to claim that the area was unsafe. Pointing to a massive paper trail like this removes liability from a set of city or municipal concerns.
cucumber3732842 | root | parent
Nah, that's just the bullshit they tell you.

A municipal or state government will not be held liable for the consequences of shitty infrastructure unless there's like 9/11 levels of "the system was blinking red and you ignored it" and even then it's coin toss at best. Like maybe if they kill a ton of people there might be a lawsuit that sticks that's sooooo unlikely for the scope of the kind of thing we're talking about here.

The bureaucracy is put in place because none of the people putting it in place are paying for it, headcount is power, control over resources is power, etc, etc, and all the other perverse incentives you see in government workplaces. And of course once the gravy train is running all these parties have an incentive to keep it running.

loading story #50371823
nemomarx | root | parent | next
We kind of have reached that point. You can look at the cost overruns and public consultation before every new project as failures of the system to deliver what people want.
ishouldstayaway | root | parent
> a failure on the part of the professionals whose responsibility the planning and implementation of this is.

Don't forget the short-sighted NIMBYism.