Interstate 95 reopens less than two weeks after deadly collapse in Philadelphia | AP News:
President Joe Biden joined Shapiro on a helicopter tour of the site a little more than a week after the collapse and called the first-term governor, a fellow Democrat, on Friday. In a statement, Biden said he was “proud of the hard-working men and women on site who put their heads down, stayed at it, and got I-95 reopened in record time.”
With rain threatening to delay the reopening, a truck-mounted jet dryer normally used to keep moisture off the track at Pocono Raceway was brought in to keep the fresh asphalt dry enough for lines to be painted.
The 24-hour construction work was live-streamed, drawing thousands of viewers online.
The reason why we don’t build things this quickly all the time is because of planning, not because we can’t actually make things. That is, the bureaucracy of planning tends to take years, and after taking years there is no incentive for the builders to bust their butts to make the things afterwards.
I’m not arguing against the bureaucracy; sometimes you need to take a long ‘think’ about what you’re doing, to make sure you’re not doing something stupid. And sometimes the long ‘think’ worries about the interests of the people who are near the project: we tend not to displace millions of people in this country without at least acknowledging their concerns as we see routinely in China.
But that bureaucracy exists, and it’s why we can’t build things quickly in general.