Comment by Ithildin
4 days ago
Aside from the debate, 600k seems insanely high for this intersection. No wonder this country's infrastructure is crumbling when it takes over half a million dollars to put in a few lights.
4 days ago
Aside from the debate, 600k seems insanely high for this intersection. No wonder this country's infrastructure is crumbling when it takes over half a million dollars to put in a few lights.
You've got the capital costs of having the several lights, built for 24/7 operation, plus the traffic controller. Then you've got to wire that up, and get an electrical connection for the controller box. Plus all the cuts in the pavement for vehicle detectors. Additionally the pedestrian intend to cross buttons and accessibility indicators for pedestrians. And you may need to resurface before or after, and redraw the lines. Likely you'll need signs. Possibly any other curb work that had been neglected, but needs to be done on a new project.
Plus it costs money to do the traffic survey and analysis to decide if you wanted to build the thing in the first place, and to determine the cycle timings. If you need to run an environmental impact report, that's more money on analysis.
Here's some estimates for component prices https://wbt.dot.state.fl.us/ois/tsmo/TrafficSignalBudgetingC... which I don't think includes installation. Probably $50k to $100k for the hardware, but there's a lot of labor, and engineering time.
This sort of work usually costs 3x what is should, because the firm doing the work has to pay state minimum wage and/or hire union labor.
Minimum wage in California seems to be $16 an hour. I doubt this intersection took 37 500 man-hours to finish, so I don't think the cost is explained by wages. Also, $200K would still seem like a gigantic amount of money for adding stop lights to a single intersection.
You probably need an engineer. A couple. They might have to run traffic studies beforehand to estimate the design requirements and light timing. They might have to consider other network nodes beyond this in their modeling. They might have to also run studies afterward to retime the lights to meet realized demand.
I’m surprised its not a $6m project honestly.
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Would it be better if they hired non-union labor at $5/hour (1/3 the minimum wage)? Would you apply for that job?
Obviously that would be better. If no one applied for the job you raise rates until someone does.
You don't artificially start unnecessarily high.
If you do you are basically stealing from taxpayers to give gifts to unions.
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the issue is the prevailing wage requirement (3x+ minimum wage). it would be easy to complete this cheaply with just minimum wage labor