Quote:
Originally Posted by fflint
It seems the tower is behind schedule, but they may have padded the delivery date to account for such things. It's not like this never happens. This is a huge and complicated tower, much more so than anything we've seen in San Francisco before.
It also seems there is a subset of forumers who strongly feel any potential deviation from the most optimistic schedule means the sky is going to fall and the tower canceled, and they apparently cannot be calmed or reassured, even by professionals in the field, because of an inexplicable emotional investment in playing the role of Chicken Little.
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Speaking for myself at least, I really don't care or have any emotional investment in Salesforce Tower or any other particular building. But what bothers me is that these overruns, long schedules, huge budgets, etc. seem symptomatic of a larger problem for infrastructure/city development that is particularly acute in SF, but also present across the USA -- we can't seem to get anything done anymore, despite pressing and obvious needs for more infrastructure, housing, and office space.
As cited in this thread, the Golden Gate Bridge and Bay Bridge were constructed in in 3-4 years and the Empire State Building was built in 2 -- all in the 1930s during the Depression. Just re-doing the Eastern span of the Bay Bridge took 11 years (2002-13) and apparently the project has a variety of defects; building Salesforce Tower (much smaller than Empire State) is taking 5-6. This doesn't even take into account the costs that are magnitudes higher today, after adjusting for inflation. Presumably construction/materials technology are now light years ahead today than in the 1930s, so it just doesn't add up. Fortunately, Salesforce Tower appears to be a privately funded project; for publicly funded projects, the current timelines/budgets/overruns are outrageous
Meanwhile parts of Asia are building epic projects that are analogous to the grand projects that this country used to do, but are now no longer possible for a whole host of reasons (cost, NIMBYs, litigation, financing, reliability)
(The same can be said about a lot of other things; e.g., military costs; healthcare costs, etc, but that's for another forum).