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TLDR: Roads were built despite the market's desire for mass transit.

The first automobile suburb was Long Island. Created by Robert Moses. Copied by all. Money was stolen from public transit and spent on roads, stolen from urbans to pay for suburbs.

In fact, cars did not scale. The road capacity did not, could not, ever, accommodate the demand. Physically, logically, economically impossible.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_Broker

https://www.amazon.com/Power-Broker-Robert-Moses-Fall/dp/039...

⬐ sudosysgen

There is literally 0 market desire for mass transit. Mass transit is not viable on the free market functionally. It doesn't mean we should not build it.

Before the first automobile suburb, cars were already in sufficient concentrations to require infrastructure to be taken away from other modes of transport and onto cars - the first example was in the 1910s, MUCH before Robert Moses designed any suburb - see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaywalking#Origin_of_the_term

This is simply an a-historical take on reality. Cars got infrastructure by being enough of a nuisance to force the government to build around them. And it started in the city, not in the suburbs. Not that suburbs are good, but it's important to get these things right.

Things can scale without scaling enough. Cars did scale, they just did so unsustainably. Since we're being pedantic anyways.

⬐ withinboredom

I wouldn’t say 0 desire. I don’t own a car anymore and rely on good mass transit to get around. It’s far less expensive than owning a car.

There are also people who cannot drive who desire mass transit.

⬐ sudosysgen

Desire != market desire.

At the price it would be to make and operate a transit system without taxes or eminent domain or enforced monopolies, or land value increase kickbacks, almost none of the people that need it would find it a compelling value proposition. And then as a result low ridership would lead to even higher per person price, which makes it even less feasible.

It's just not possible for the private sector to make a good transit system without most of the heavy lifting coming from the public sector. Public transit has to exist outside the market.

For example even in m city with a really efficient system, even with all of the infrastructure already built using government powers and mostly paid off, even if the price increase did not increase ridership, I would have to pay ~3x more for transit, which would make it unaffordable.

⬐ withinboredom

Ah, I see! Thanks for exposing that. TIL

⬐ drak0n1c

Isn't Japan a counterexample? While government was essential for establishing the initial feasibility and cultural proof of concept, private competitors grew so much more successful than JNR rail that 30 years ago they decided to privatize the entire rail system. Since then, there has been unabated upgrades and additions of lines and regular train car improvements. The only major inefficiencies and decline has been in remote extremely low ridership areas.

The trains are still pretty affordable, and everyone uses them.

⬐ sudosysgen

Even the JR group in Japan does not build the lines themselves. The actual infrastructure is built by the JRTT, which is a state agency. It's complicated because JRTT owns many companies of the JR Group and is a shareholder in others so one may get the impression the JR group is building the infrastructure, which it's not.

The JR group itself is only profitable because the Japanese government took on the vast majority of the debt from actually building the infrastructure.

So no, the JR Group is not a counterexample. It's still unable to actually build infrastructure without government power despite having inherited so much of it, and it's not able to profitably pay off that infrastructure which is instead paid by the government.

⬐ specialist

Except every where which has mass transit.

⬐ specialist

Methinks a pendant would have read the Pulitzer Prize winning book before commenting, rather than blythely dismissing one of the most influential books about city planning as "ahistorical".

But perhaps your dictionary has a different definition for "pendantic" than mine.

⬐ sudosysgen

I don't really care about that. I have provided a source for the fact that cities attributed infrastructure to cars exclusively before the event you cited, and I have provided a source for the fact that this was done because cars would kill people otherwise.

Saying that the reason for cars dominating the urban landscape and replacing the "anarchy" that came before them as GP said it is something that happen 30 years after it becoming illegal to walk in the street and cars legally becoming the preffered denizen of the road is ahistorical. Unless you believe Robert Moses is the reason these laws were passed.

⬐ specialist

> I don't really care about that.

The enabling innovation begetting suburbs was the concept of highways, roads dedicated to cars to the exclusion of non-cars.

From this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good_Roads_Movement

To this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highway#History

In response to jaywalking? Sure, I guess, a bit. But mostly because of traffic, congestion.

> Unless you believe Robert Moses is the reason these laws were passed.

Exactly.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northern_State_Parkway

At the time, New York state was the center of the universe. Whatever happened in Albany became the template for federal policy. (Another example is the New Deal.)

Moses was the guy who figured out how to make it happen. His nickname was something like "Master of Albany". Laws are nothing without funding. Moses invented completely novel financial schemes, often bordering on fraud and theft. These innovations were then replicated nationwide. With little democratic oversight or even awareness.

⬐ sudosysgen

Again, roads were allocated to cars at the ezclusion of pedestrians in the 1910s, and not in highways. Cars naturally exclude other modes of transportation by posing a deadly danger.

There's no amount of source dumping you can do to get around the concept of causality. Robert Moses is not the one who killed the pre-car street. Cars and their drivers did by posing a deadly threat to anyone there.

⬐ specialist

> In this case the government didn't do central planning. It didn't pick winners and losers. It went with what the free market decided.

Jaywalking -> Freedom Markets™ -> Highways

No central planning required.

⬐ sudosysgen

The person I was replying to didn't talk about highways. They talked about car-dependence and the death of the pedestrian-first street. That happened with car drivers killing people and scaring the rest into yielding the street, and government then formalizing that to avoid literal deaths. That is to say, the market decided that cars went first and fuck everyone else.

Highways were not the first roads where cars drove out people. The first roads where that happens were just city roads when cars started proliferating.

It's almost like the private, selfish choices of people can lead to negative outcomes for all of society.

> public transit is unreliable

I read the Power Broker [1] about Robert Moses' obsession of disallowing public transit in the public lands that under his control. That results miserable comutting for New Yorkers nowadays. Bob mastered the political system in a way that he can do obviously irrational things under public eyes, and without any fallout at the time, until the book was published much later after Bob actually has died.

I haven't researched extensively in US public transit, but I am inclined to believe that the public transit were handicapped intentionally through the market operators, in collaboration of the political apparatus.

I could not see any obvious evidence of this particular event being positive or negative. But, I am more sure that the political system in US is crippled to the point that it's not capable of producing long-term positive policy any more.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Power-Broker-Robert-Moses-Fall/dp/039...

This book is very long, but a good way to spend a few months for anyone interested in urban planning.

The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York

https://www.amazon.com/Power-Broker-Robert-Moses-Fall/dp/039...

I doubt you'll get hired as a manager; you need to get promoted instead. So go get a job at a large company as an engineer and spend at least six months kicking ass. The ideal company is one with some disfunction and churn -- new hires and such. Then you need to go either out or up with a bang.

Find some major problems with the software development and complain about them strongly to upper management and offer a solution.

Learn to communicate with busy people. Use short emails. Lead with the most important point in verbal and written communication. Learn to tailor your communication to your audiance. Gain the trust and respect of everyone you can. People need to look at you and think, "this guy's/gal's got it." Some will like you and others will not. If you haven't been promoted after doing all this, then straight out ask to be a manager. If you don't get it, leave and do it over.

Also, read The Power Broker [1]

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Power-Broker-Robert-Moses-Fall/dp/039...

⬐ cauterized

Not sure I agree about joining a dysfunctional company to that end - you're liable to either learn or be forced into terrible management habits.

That said, I couldn't agree more about communication. It's a crucial management skill and one that too few engineers develop properly (and I'm not even talking about socially awkward stereotypes). Communicating effectively with management is a very specific skill that's very different from general social communication; and communicating effectively with one's reports is yet another skillset.

"Software engineering estimates and plans often fail to live up to the reality that follows. It seems to be the only engineering discipline in which this is regularly the case."

Is it though? I live in Boston, home of the notorious* Big Dig[1]. While particularly egregious, it's far from the only large-scale civil engineering project that's gone off the rails. In fact, I'd argue that until fairly recently, many more public works projects shared the "surprise factor" of software projects. I'd recommend Caro's "The Power Broker"[2] for a fascinating history of NY-area public works (among other things - great book all around), including how much of that process was about adapting the plan to new things the builders were learning along the way ("oh, turns out that soil is completely different than we planned...")

That's not to say that there aren't particular features that make software engineering its own special snowflake - as there are meaningful differences between how civil, structural, mechanical, etc. engineers operate. But spend some time in another engineering organization and you'll find it's different, but not as different as you think it is.

(And FWIW, even civil engineers sometimes follow "agile" concepts - a company I once worked for was contracted to design a highway, and even after the construction started, engineers were "embedded" with the builders to make on-the-fly adjustments based on the environmental factors they discovered throughout the process... I wish I could find their project write-up, but it was a while ago and the company has long since been gobbled up by a bigger company).

* As a (subjective) kicker, I'd add that the Big Dig, over-time and over-budget as it was, was ultimately quite worth it... much like many software projects!

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Dig

[2] http://www.amazon.com/The-Power-Broker-Robert-Moses/dp/03947...

⬐ agumonkey

EPR nuclear plants are suffering delays and far over budget.

⬐ iancackett

Yep, you're right... I'm forgetting that physical engineering also suffers from some of the same problems. The thing that it adds though is a level of rigour, and ability to reason about the project, that we're still struggling with somewhat in the software world. Believe me, in 20 years since I was taught it's not strict "engineering", I've yet to see that change much, other than in safety-critical and cleanroom projects.

⬐ StavrosK

Engineering is much more straightforward, you have the plans and know that you need X amount of parts and Y amount of labour. Software is more like research, where you don't even know if you can solve the problem acceptably, most of the time.

⬐ agumonkey

I feel it's the lack of hard laws that kill software. Unless it's a very constrained project, where limits drive your design, you'll have freedom to think about things and then it shifts into ontologies, people trying to find 'tiny theories' to express their problem in the best way. Each layer adds variability and we end up in hard to bridge technology silos.

⬐ iancackett

Great point!

⬐ vonmoltke

If you have the plans, it's manufacturing, not engineering.

The engineering in the design is in developing the prototypes and proving that theoretical concepts can be implemented practically. There is nothing straightforward about that, unless it is an incremental improvement to an existing implementation.

The engineering in manufacturing is about deriving ways to manufacture parts with greater yields and greater efficiency. In some cases, it is about developing manufacturing techniques that were hitherto impossible. Again, not much straightforward about this.

All of the above is rigorous, but that is not the same thing. This rigor can be applied to software development just as easily as any other product development, and when it is it becomes software engineering.

As I feel obligated to do whenever there's a related posting, an HN-level-of-detail book about power and the development of NYC, I have to throw a shout-out to the Power Broker:

http://www.amazon.com/The-Power-Broker-Robert-Moses/dp/03947...

about Robert Moses, another legendary NYC figure who fundamentally changed the shape of the city.

I hear that "The Power Broker", a biography of Moses and winner of the Pulitzer in 1974, is a fantastic read :)

http://www.amazon.com/The-Power-Broker-Robert-Moses/dp/03947...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Power_Broker

⬐ jfb

Yes, it is. I read it in a public policy seminar my freshman year in school and it's had a huge effect on how I understand politics and power. In some ways, I like it better than the magisterial "Years of Lyndon Johnson".

Highly, highly recommended.

⬐ thaumasiotes

Well, great. A 1300-page book available for under $15 plus international shipping... or as an audiobook, 66 hours long ( but free shipping!) for... $70?

Something has gone deeply wrong in the market here. If only there were some way to convey three and a half pounds of information across the ocean in less than a month and for a reasonable price. :(

Ironically, it seems to be easy to buy an ebook of cliffs notes to this one.

⬐ icebraining

It's a book from 1975, so there's no digital version, and it's probably not worth the time to make an ebook for the sales it gets.

⬐ thaumasiotes

I've read plenty of older books in ebook form; they're riddled with obvious OCR errors but perfectly intelligible. Making an ebook from a paper book, as far as I know, involves no more than putting it into a special-purpose shredder that separates and scans the pages, and since those already exist, the cost of doing so is extremely low.

IP issues are something else again.

⬐ mattzito

I actually emailed the publisher about this, as the power broker is one of my favorite books (but totally impractical to carry around).

I got a response saying that they would love to do an ebook version of TPB, but Robert Caro won't allow them to do that - he even refuses to submit his writing digitally, instead writing everything by hand, then typing it up with a typewriter, which is then retyped by a typist at the publisher into Word.

⬐ saraid216

If you're going to sully the Caro read with Cliff's Notes, you may as well just read the Wikipedia page.

⬐ thaumasiotes

Obviously I'm not going to. I'm complaining that while the book itself is ludicrously difficult to buy, getting the cliffs notes is easy.

⬐ venus

Ludicrously difficult? I just ordered it for AUD$32.19 delivered, to Australia, in two or three clicks.

⬐ michaelt

Where are you trying to get it shipped to? I see paperbacks of the Caro book with free delivery on Amazon US, DE, UK and JP.