I’ve heard so many business guys running startups say the same thing about their brilliant idea. Once the plan is in place you just do daily standups and your engineers poop out perfect features at the rate of 1 ticket/day.
Alright, but one of the central findings of software engineering of the 80s is that software engineering cannot be driven rigidly, unlike other engineering fields.. Such as railways.
Think about it, rail is an eminently standardized piece of infrastructure that has existed for more than a century and millions of kilometers have been laid out. Don't you think _some_ effort has gone into automating the process and making it predictable?
Don't you think _some_ effort has gone into automating the process and making it predictable? Here is a (french) example
This really underscores Klein and Thompson's argument: this infrastructure sclerosis seems to be a uniquely American problem.
This review of Klein and Thompson's book sums it up pretty well:
Adding a kilometre of subway track in the United States now costs twice what it does in Japan or Canada, and six times what it does in Portugal; in the past fifty years, the inflation-adjusted cost of a mile of interstate highway has tripled
False equivalence - railways are things we know how to build pretty well by now. The hard bit is building a corridor straight and level enough to lay the rails. Once you have that, the sleepers are literally just dropped on, rails fed out and then it's all clipped in and welded, and ballast dropped on and tamped with machines.
This is a normal thing done every day around the world, since track has to be periodically re-ballasted and sleepers eventually upgraded and rails renewed as normal maintenance. It truly is the easy bit.
Rail overhead line equipment and signalling systems are much more tricky work, but the rail laying itself is easy. The vast majority of the work though is building cuttings, embankments, bridges, viaducts and stations.
The whole point of building the grade separated guideway is to make the track maintenance (and installation) as predictable and reliable as possible. Once the guideway is there, laying the track really is the easy part.
Hundreds of tons of concrete is no longer a "brilliant idea," it's physical infrastructure designed for the purpose of installing rails.
