Amtrak Projects/Priorities in an Infrastructure Stimilus

[bdawe]

Maybe any plan for passenger rail could also include some of the local commuter rail lines. Money to rebuild old track, build new cars & locomotives. Following a similar plan for Amtrak rebuilds the NEC, gets new train sets. Either way means lots of American Jobs!

Call it "Cash for Clunkers!" And by clunkers, I mean almost all of the commuter rolling stock in revenue service today

[David Benton]

I wonder if more weighting is given to the number of local jobs created for stimulus proposals . I.e a project creating 100 jobs is given more points than one creating 10 jobs for the same money.?

[Tadman]

In regards to Shovel Ready and stimulus:

I'm currently reading The Power Broker, by Robert Caro. It's a biography of Robert Moses. I think most here are familiar enough with the name I don't need to go into details.

That said, one of the things that Caro goes into, was that part of Moses success during the Great Depression was he showed up prepared down to the last detail. Or rather, at least that's how it looked. He had every t crossed, every i dotted, every blueprint available, every form they could ask for. He was the epitome of shovel ready. I think the book says that at one point 1/3 of all WPA in the US was going to NYC through Moses. (now the truth was he'd often then... expand the scope after he got the money, but that's another day).

But, it definitely sets the precedent, as does 2008, you want the money, you show up with plans complete to the last detail and you're far more likely to get the money.

This is an interesting point and begs the question of how much detail was required in 1930 versus today. I have the feeling Mr. Moses could've showed up with three or four giant blueprint rolls and some hefty binders and built most of what he wanted.

[Tadman]

the problems with design build are that you degrade the in-house capabilities of your agency, leaving it up to consultants who benefit by spending more public money in the long run, and you create a fairly small market of large general contractors who have the capacity to manage whole projects (while you don't anymore) and charge according to their market power.

The places-with-cheap-infrastructure costs don't do design build.

I think it's a balancing act. When we have customers, especially government customers, the specifications usually have both loopholes big enough to drive a bus through and also present value engineering opportunities to genuinely save the public lots of money.

Your position also assumes that agencies have the engineering back bench to write and manage specifications adequately in the first place. My experience is that they do not. Most of the times when a medium-size project is done, they pull out an old spec and doctor it. After 20-30 years, the spec has been doctored so many times that it contradicts itself horribly and refers to technologies long out of date, thus creating the loopholes I mentioned above. Then they bring in a consulting engineering firm to update it, and the firm may or may not be expert on the project. Often all they do is create bigger loopholes.

On a recent Amtrak project I was on the consulting engineering firm did a great job of managing this and we saved the public a boat load of money. On a much older USAF project, we were required to build to spec (whatever that meant) and then rework it on change orders after things went awry, despite written warnings of problems projected.