It's common practice here to take demolished concrete from a structure and pavement and use it as structural fill for new development. Sometimes on the same property. Some agencies will not allow contractors to haul it off as it has salvage value.
Concrete rubble is also salvageable on the job site. Recycling would require transporting to a mill, crushing, separating, transporting to a furnace, and then the process described in the article starts.
I think abrogating the property rights of every property owner in exchange for some people getting a shortcut is not a very good trade.
There are legal routes for public agencies to purchase portions of land to create routes for transportation, including pedestrian paths, that ensure you're at least paid for the lost property. If there is a need, then lobbying your mayor or council is the way to go about this. That's a lot less risky than letting anyone enter your property anytime for any reason as long as they say they're on a nature walk or something.
You are right! CAD users encode a design intent into the software, just like you encode a design intent into an editor. I model a construction outcome with geometry like you might model business rules with functions and objects.
Some of the wisdom from programming would do well to pass onto design software. Like how strong type systems can provide safety by pushing rules to compile time and make some errors unrepresentable. Meanwhile, I can fire up Microstation, draw roads crossing at the same elevation with no intersection (think stops and signals, not geometry) between them. Or a drain culvert could terminate in a big Hello Kitty picture. These things should be impossible. If the task is designing a road, I don't need the ability to draw anything I can possibly imagine. I really need the software to know what a road can and can't do, produce a model that obeys those constraints, and to give me files and documents I can give to an owner and a contractor which convey an accurate understanding of what that model is.
"The biggest reason this hasn't happened so far is the lack of a truly capable parametric kernel"
Does parasolid not fit this requirement? The capabilities I've seen in Plasticity are very impressive. Or do you specifically mean FOSS?
The more I use CAD platforms, the more I develop the sense that general-purpose CAD is much less useful than single-purpose applications that provide tailored solutions to narrow problem domains. SVG/DXF/DWG output is a plus, but I think a drawing software that works for high-volume machine parts, one-of-a-kind architecture, highways, 50-mile pipelines, circuits, urban transit plans, and art is the wrong direction. I use industry standard roadway design software and a "road" does not exist in the object model. Horizontal, vertical, and sectional components are all independently defined despite these things being inseparable and having some very obvious and well-specified rules about their interaction. I really think designers should spend more time thinking about outcomes and less time telling the computer how to display them.
They may just be renderings or heavy edits. I noticed a total lack of parking facilities for almost all buildings pictured. Highways are also pretty small for being next to what should be major traffic generators. There is also an absence of signalization at intersections where I would expect them. No auxiliary lanes or turn bays are marked on the pavement. Pavement markings are unblemished by tires. It doesn't make sense.
It might not be that bad. Auto workers produce more cars per employee, but some of the really repetitive activities are done by robots now. I think not having to do the same weld 8+hrs a day every day with consumers still getting their car is a net positive for owners, consumers, and labor.
Personally, I would love to deliver more projects. The vast majority of my time is spent on mind-numbing drudgery that makes the job extremely unsatisfying. If someone offered me a job where I got to focus on the fun parts of my work, and I didn't have to dump the drudgery on a poor intern (the AI does it), but at half my pay, I'd resign the same day.
The productive output of many people is also just mediocre. I think of chat AIs as near-zero cost interns or the boss's nephew. Probably doesn't know what it's talking about, but can get a lot done with supervision.
I hope the net result will be a shift toward upskilling employees to achieve the expertise handle the difficult edge cases and less time spent on the routine or the trivial. Seems like a win-win. Incentive structures might make this hard.
Some people manage projects that aren't software at all. Git has little utility for construction documents, and big construction design projects may involve interdisciplinary teams of dozens of people of widely varying cost and availability.
Buy a quality printer for their asking price and make your own molds. If it's fairly large, you may want to put the mold in sand for support, or cast in sections. Just remember to leave yourself pick points for lifting, and use dowels to join your segments. Embed a little steel, like a mesh, if any parts may be in tension or subject to bending.
The CAPEX seemed a bit glossed over. $50ish billion isn't a small ask.
Perhaps I missed a zero somewhere, but 5MAF/yr would require pumping 6,900cfs of water to/from the gulf with 230+ft of head. We're going to need a bigger boat.
Sharing a wall with a neighbor is something I happily to pay a premium to avoid. Hearing a neighbor beat her son or listening to top volume manufactured R&B beats at 2AM when I needed to be at work at 530AM are not fond memories. It was powerful motivation to take my career more seriously.
Sometimes offices are empty because banks that own them dictate the lease rates and building managers can't adjust price to fit the market rate. I sometimes think city councils and codes get too much heat on this issue and the 800lb finance gorilla in the room is politely ignored.
100m at 1 lane is around 430SY. That's probably 2hrs of milling and an hour of tacking and paving, with maybe another hour or so for incidentals. So you may only get half a workday of production. For time consuming repairs, like full-depth replacement, the setup time cost may not be significant.
Keep in mind, though, you don't lose a lane of traffic. There is no need to truck in jersey barriers. You don't have to build an entire temporary detour road. You don't pay a consultant $200/hr to design a traffic control plan.
I think the real value is safety. The crew is shielded by the bridge and you have complete grade separation from traffic. That's a lot better than an orange barrel being the only thing between you and a minivan.
If that bookkeeping overhead is fed into analysis and process mining to drive improvement, it might be a net gain. More often though, I see yet-another-spreadhseet applied as panacea, then it's forgotten in a few months and the process repeats over many years.
There is also the effect of decriminalization and depolicing which I did not see well addressed in the article. There are parts of the US where local government has the social leaning or at least their key donors have the social leaning to take a permissive attitude towards activity that was previously criminal. Effectively this makes activity like buying and selling drugs and shoplifting legal and, thereby, meaningless to report.
If anything the article may more likely be an indicator of the delta between crime as-is and as-reported or a cautionary tale of decision-driven-data
To your last point, Bentley software is standard for most DOTs for highway design. All their offerings are rife with quality issues to the point that I have never run their software without some spooky behavior requiring a reset or flushing the ProjectWise cache.
For software enabling a $150B industry, you would think it would at least run reliably. That there aren't objects that are aware that they are roads (just lines, arcs, and spirals) makes it laughably bad. The cost of this waste is tragic.
I wish I had listened to this a long time ago. That starting so niche nobody bothers you is a winning strategy would not have occurred to me. Thanks for sharing!
I don't think it's logistically or politically possible, but I really wish DWG, DXF and DGN would be replaced by SVG. That 2D drawings for the AEC industry are unusable by the majority of programs is absurd.
Concrete rubble is also salvageable on the job site. Recycling would require transporting to a mill, crushing, separating, transporting to a furnace, and then the process described in the article starts.