For the Van Ness Bus Line example: one reason there were major delays was because maps of underground sewer lines and plumbing were inaccurate, and needed to be relocated. The 6 years of construction was really a bus lane + major sewer infrastructure project.<p>Which brings up another reason why some of these projects were Fast -- they operated in places where there there wasn't existing infrastructure or residents to deal with, or cut corners on planning and mapping, which future projects now have to deal with.<p><a href="https://sfstandard.com/transportation/van-ness-brt-bus-rapid-transit-history-timeline/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://sfstandard.com/transportation/van-ness-brt-bus-rapid...</a><p><pre><code> Immediately after breaking ground, construction delays began. Existing maps of old gas, water and sewer lines flowing beneath the center of Van Ness Avenue proved inaccurate, slowing excavation and causing the city to bring in utility contractors. The utility placement also made the BRT’s center-lane design a challenge: Any future sewer and water repairs would disable bussing for the duration of repair. Plus, overhead bus electrical wires would need to be fully removed for the safety of the crews. Water and sewer infrastructure needed to be moved to the outside lanes to keep the center-lane BRT design — deemed the best for traffic flow.</code></pre>
Major one missing: China built 5,000 miles of high speed rail in 6 years. In California, it's been 15 years and we have 0 miles complete. Also built numerous hospitals during pandemic in a couple weeks. Demolished and replaced a bridge in 43 hours: <a href="https://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/infrastructure/a18277/beijing-overpass-replaced-in-less-than-two-days/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/infrastructure/a...</a>. General pattern of completing infrastructure projects at a blistering pace - and they work.<p>Also landed a rover on Mars in 2021 <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zhurong_(rover)" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zhurong_(rover)</a>, but I"m not sure how it compares development speed to NASA. Designed for 90 days, lasted 4x that.<p>As much as the US denigrates China for allegedly trampling on "freedoms," I bet our way of doing speedy big projects in the past has a lot in common with China's current progress. You just have to quash special interests sometime. Autocracy gets shit done.
Back in the early COVID days, an airplane with PPE landed in Prague. Responsible agency has been short handed so the staff of national budget oversight agency came to help in what was a prime example of violation of budgeting discipline and just unloaded the airplane.<p>I could not stop laughing about that for days. Other ministries were literally excusing themselves since "they were not allocated funds to deal with the pandemic and had other matters to addend to" and "doing job of another organization would be a violation of budget discipline". And then the literal guys responsible for auditing them for such violations just broke the rules and did the right and necessary thing.<p>In the end, it boils down to a simple rule. If you live in a society where rules outweight the public good and you can get into trouble for doing the right thing the "wrong way", progress grinds to a halt.
> Tony Fadell was hired to create the iPod in late January 2001. Steve Jobs greenlit the project in March 2001. They hired a contract manufacturer in April 2001, announced the product in October 2001, and shipped the first production iPod to customers in November 2001, around 290 days after getting started. Source: Tony Fadell.<p>Just 290 days for the iPod to go from idea to customer is crazy fast
What if they add some <i>fast</i> ones that were fast but that didn't work out so great, like Theranos or the submarine guys. Also Apollo 8 is in there but I mean a relatively large percent of astronauts died compared to like your company's new agile plan how many agile blackbelts do you expect to literally decease because of shortcuts taken in the implementation of their workplace environment.
Having worked at a top 5 big tech company from college hire to a high level position, I have seen many factors that contribute to things being much slower than a startup. Some of them might be valid, but others are just the result of tragedy of large organisations (a big tech company is surprisingly similar to governments in terms of internal bureaucracy).<p>* Large number of people and orgs willing and fighting to take credit. If you need 1 week of support from an org, forget it unless you give them large credit worth a huge amount of work. This means you need to justify that credit via creating more work.<p>* Centralized internal product offerings which act similar to government given monopoly companies (think AT&T before breakup). Since that is the only entity offering that product, their offering doesn't have to compete with the in market offerings and thus can be as bad as needed, as long as it is tolerable.<p>* Everyone laser focused on their own org size and org power. This means tons of metric chasing, a lot of which requires creating work. For instance, if writing an if else can have a big impact delivering a lot in revenue, you write 5 new applications to soak up the revenue impact and show that something big was done. (A brilliant 2 liner regardless of impact will receive some claps but won't do much for the org power).<p>* The slowly increasing number of incompetent hires. The politically savvy ones survive and keep moving up and keep doing whatever needed to increase their power.
Literally every single thing in this list was produced by a group of people moving towards a well-defined, unified goal.<p>But in today's FAANG and FAANG-wannabes, these kinds of efforts are near impossible because of middle-management politics. So much of time goes in stack ranking and performance reviews that no engineer is ever going to collaborate.<p>Perhaps CEOs are so far removed from their employees that they don't even realize what is actually going on in the company.
This may be one of the best (worst) examples of how bad things are today. The California High-Speed Rail was funded over 15 years ago and they haven't begun building it yet. They are 82% of the way through their environmental studies.<p><a href="https://hsr.ca.gov/about/capital-costs-funding/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://hsr.ca.gov/about/capital-costs-funding/</a><p><a href="https://twitter.com/cahsra/status/1674900759677227012" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://twitter.com/cahsra/status/1674900759677227012</a>
One semi-common thread to these is how much of the invisible groundwork had already been laid, in order to execute so quickly. I wonder how much is "fast" and how much is "right time, right place" and/or "right preparation."<p>I'm reminded of Alexander the Great, and his massive conquests within a short lifetime. But my understanding is that his father Philip II paved the way for him, building a lot of the political and military structure that he would leverage. But people don't remember the accomplishments of Philip II nearly as much as Alexander.
For a recent infrastructure example, I would point to Beijing's high speed rail expansion. Around 24k miles constructed since 2008, and around ~12k in five years [1].<p>[1] <a href="https://www.cnn.com/travel/article/china-high-speed-rail-cmd/index.html" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.cnn.com/travel/article/china-high-speed-rail-cmd...</a>
> Brendan Eich implemented the first prototype for JavaScript in 10 days<p>And thousands of developer years have been wasted smoothing over pre ES6 JavaScript warts.
Apollo 8 is not a very good example; it's not like the hardware pipeline wasn't well on its way to be ready to go by the time the decision was made.<p>Don't get me wrong, Apollo 8 was an extremely risky and critical part of the program, but it's not like somebody conjured everything up from thin air in 134 days.
> On August 9 1968, NASA decided that Apollo 8 should go to the moon. It launched on December 21 1968, 134 days later<p>But they were planning to get to that destination, with the same Apollo program, for years before that...<p>This example seems a bit of a stretch, which makes me hesitate on the other examples.<p>And another source of hesitation comes from this parallel:
- During Covid, it was said that China built a new hospital in like 8 days, and it was claimed "we can't do that" etc
- But then we created a temporary 1000-bed hospital in 7 days: "It was much quicker than we usually design, engineer and construct a project... We worked 24 hours a day, seven days a week with our vertical team to spec out the sites [and] award contracts, and then began work immediately after the contracts were awarded." [1]<p>[1] <a href="https://www.defense.gov/News/News-Stories/Article/Article/2133514/corps-of-engineers-converts-nycs-javits-center-into-hospital" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.defense.gov/News/News-Stories/Article/Article/21...</a>
I was really interested that the current Haggia Sophia structure was built in less than 6 years. I am used to construction times of cathedrals and other religious buildings spanning multiple generations.<p><a href="https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hagia_Sophia" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hagia_Sophia</a>
We like to focus on how long it takes governments to build things these days (especially US government(s)), but these discussions remind me of the Washington Monument, which was under construction for 36+ years depending on how you count it! And this was in the 1850's, when this type of construction was certainly feasible. As may sound familiar today, construction moved haltingly due to lack of funding.<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washington_Monument" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washington_Monument</a>
“ The physical infrastructure projects enumerated above occurred before 1970 to a disproportionate degree. Why? ”<p>If you Google image search “growth of environmental regulation”, there is a huge increase in the slope of those graphs right around 1960-1970. A simple explanation might be that environmental regulation strangled the speed of physical infrastructure building. A more complex explanation might be that environmental regulation, along with other regulation, experienced this massive growth as a symptom of massive growth in management, consulting, and bureaucracy employment - and it is this proliferation of managers and consultants and bureaucrats that have slowed things down.<p>I do like the second explanation more. The Atlantic <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/01/where-did-all-the-workers-go-60-years-of-economic-change-in-1-graph/252018/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/01/where-d...</a>) tells me that “professional and business services”, their catchall for managers and consultants, grew from 2.3% of GDP in 1947 to 12.1% of GDP in 2009. This sextupling of management work could very well correspond to a sextupling of the length (in time) of projects. A mile of road takes just as much <i>asphalt</i> whether you build it in one month or six months, but it takes ~six times as much <i>management</i> when it takes six months.
Here is a response, that PC himself references on his site:<p><a href="https://nintil.com/building-skyscrapers-and-spending-on-major-projects/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://nintil.com/building-skyscrapers-and-spending-on-majo...</a><p>Excerpt:<p>> So all in all, if we control away war, and increasing complexity, and the fact that you can't optimise people beyond a certain point, and sprinkle on top some regulation-induced slowdown it's not clear that there has been a slowdown or stagnation in general for major projects.
One of the examples here is the Berlin airlift. If you are interested in the Berlin airlift, I'd really recommend the book "Checkmate Berlin" (Giles Milton). It starts in 1945 and covers the whole arc of the Soviet-Western relationship. You could argue that it is rather rah-rah anti-Soviet, but I read it in mid-2022 and was down for that. Really fun read with great spy and political stories.
<p><pre><code> One day in mid-November, workers at OpenAI got an unexpected assignment: Release a chatbot, fast. The chatbot, an executive announced, would be known as "Chat with GPT-3.5," and it would be made available free to the public. In two weeks. The announcement confused some OpenAI employees.
OpenAI's top executives were worried that rival companies might upstage them by releasing their own A.I. chatbots before GPT-4. And putting something out quickly. So they decided to update an unreleased chatbot that used a souped-up version of GPT-3 which came out in 2020. (snipped)
</code></pre>
Ref: <a href="https://archive.is/d6dI2" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://archive.is/d6dI2</a> / <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/03/technology/chatgpt-openai-artificial-intelligence.html" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/03/technology/chatgpt-openai...</a>
Some things are pretty fast considering what they accomplished.<p>The Lockheed A-12 was built 2 years after its designs were approved, with 2 years before that of planning. Still the fastest air-breathing airplane in existence. Its first flight was in 1962.<p>In March 1940, John R. Dunning's team at Columbia University verifies Niels Bohr's hypothesis that uranium 235 is responsible for fission by slow neutrons. August 6, 1945, the first atomic nuclear bomb is dropped on Hiroshima, Japan.<p>During the Great Depression, in 1931, the largest dam in the world, the Hoover Dam, was built. At the time, no such large-scale uses of concrete had been proven, and it was unknown how construction could be finished in a way that would cure the concrete in time and prevent it from deteriorating. Construction was completed in 1936, over two years ahead of schedule. Testing in 1995 concluded that the dam's concrete has gotten stronger over the years.
Given how impossible it is to build anything here anymore the spped in which the Victorians built the railway network in the UK amazes me. 6,000 miles of track were built in 1846-1848 alone.<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railway_Mania" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railway_Mania</a>
I'd like to add the 2017 Atlanta I-85 bridge collapse and rebuild to this list. The entire rebuild took only 45 days!<p><a href="https://transportationops.org/case-studies/i-85-bridge-collapse-and-rebuild" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://transportationops.org/case-studies/i-85-bridge-colla...</a>
A classic 20 year old article on the principle of Stop Energy.<p>"Stop Energy is not reasoned, it never takes into account the big picture, it is the mirror image of Forward Motion. In the Stop Energy model, everyone, no matter how small their stake in a technology, has the power to veto. Nothing ever gets done, and people who want to move forward are frustrated in every attempt to move. Unfortunately, Stop Energy is the rule, not the exception"<p><a href="https://radio-weblogs.com/0107584/stories/2002/05/05/stopEnergyByDaveWiner.html?ref=buffer.com" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://radio-weblogs.com/0107584/stories/2002/05/05/stopEne...</a>
Very interesting thing(maybe sample representativeness) is that there aren't any "fast" things from the 2010-2020 decade. Does anyone have anything impressive in mind? Personally can't think of anything myself.
Fun fact on the Eiffel Tower: during the Chicago World's Fair, they wanted to build something that would rival the Eiffel Tower. After a LOT of proposals, and work, and time, they came up with... the Ferris wheel.
> <i>The physical infrastructure projects enumerated above occurred before 1970 to a disproportionate degree. Why?</i><p>Probably because the author either can't count or doesn't know what disproportionate means.<p>1/3 of the entries on the list going back to 1889 happened after 1970 (which is about 1/3 of the timespan). That sounds very proportionate. Why no questions about the long gap after the Eiffel Tower?<p>The most disproportionate things about the list are World War II and the fact that the list is extremely arbitrary.
As another comment points out, what about "preparation" time?<p>I guess the timelines depend on when you start the clock.<p>Does anyone have a credible example of going fast, and where it really was a "zero to one" kind of process?
In the UK we have been debating building 1 more runway at 1 airport for about 50 years and still it’s not settled. Meanwhile China has built several entire islands in the ocean and put airports on them.
The pattern amongst them? It's a lot easier to move fast with greenfield projects.<p>The NYC subway and TGV are great examples. They were built when land was plentiful and people were sparse!
Fast always has a price.<p>> Construction start was delayed two weeks to allow the 42 families living on Pine Point, which was scheduled to be demolished to build the shipyard, to move.
The Fukuyama interview is available at <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20151211115945/https://publicpolicy.stanford.edu/news/interview-francis-fukuyama" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://web.archive.org/web/20151211115945/https://publicpol...</a>
I recently read the book “How Big Things Get Done”, about planning megaprojects successfully, which incidentally touched on a lot of the projects here. While I mostly found the book to be worthless thought leadership, the authors thesis on why these projects were able to succeed is that they were able to “think slow, build fast”.
The iconic patrol boat river[1] used in Vietnam took just seven days to create a prototype from the civilian boat maker Hatteras Yachts. It used Jacuzzi jets.<p>[1] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patrol_Boat,_River" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patrol_Boat,_River</a>
> To determine the amount of fuel the plane would need, Lindbergh and Hall drove to the San Diego Public Library at 820 E St. Using a globe and a piece of string, Lindbergh estimated the distance from New York to Paris. It came out to 3,600 statute miles, which Hall calculated would require 400 gallons of gas.<p>Seems legit.
> JavaScript. Brendan Eich implemented the first prototype for JavaScript in 10 days, in May 1995. It shipped in beta in September of that year.<p>I find this really easy to believe, actually.
By not overthinking, they come up with very quick and dirty Designs, and leave the rest for future generations to fix.<p>This is why we get lessons like environmental studies assessment. We become extra careful now.
This reminds me of when I interviewed at Stripe, a few years back. It was a surreal experience. We were in a small conference room. I sat at the table on one side, Patrick and Edwin sat on the other side. They asked me questions, I answered them. It was a good discussion.<p>Then there was a brief pause in the conversation. Suddenly, Patrick let off the most absurdly loud fart. I chuckled in surprise. Patrick and Edwin stared back at me, in a stony silence, neither of them making any acknowledgement of Patrick's colonic eruption. I forced myself to adopt a similarly straight face.<p>As the smell of it filled the room and my nostrils, I could only assume this was a power move, intended to dominate. I held my nerve, and continued the interview. Unfortunately, I wasn't offered the job. Now I wonder if maybe it was a cue to speak up and point out the loud, smelly elephant in the room. I suppose I'll never know.<p>Has anyone else here who's interviewed at Stripe had a similar experience? To this day, I still wonder if Patrick's fart was a deliberate and calculated part of the hiring process.
I have to admit this one does make me grumble a bit. Greenfields is fast! You don’t have to keep the old thing going or take care to avoid disturbing it because there is no old thing!<p>It seems an obvious point; I remember watching him present a version of this in person and it occurred to me sitting there.
> Brendan Eich implemented the first prototype for JavaScript in 10 days, in May 1995.<p>And 28 years later, the world is still investing untold millions of dollars, and untold person-years of effort, working around it.