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Attempting to Fulfill the Plan MNKh Edition

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Nevis said:
It's not so much autobahns that are the issue as it is local roads right? IIRC we did all of the highways and most if not all of the regional roads. Sure we can still ask, but I imagine the kind of technology the Germans might give us is like high speed intersections or something, which might not be so relevant.
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I strongly suspect that many of the "highways" we've built are just two-lane-each-way strips of pavement, probably one-lane-each-way along many stretches. We might still have a lot more to learn.

And more broadly, I'm talking not just about the layout of roads but about techniques for how to build them quickly and efficiently, designs of machinery that they find useful that simply has not been developed in the USSR for lack of demand, and so on.

There are probably countries that would come to us to look at our high speed rail network or nuclear power plants to find out how we did it. Well, we almost certainly have SOME gaps in our institutional knowledge of roadbuilding that should motivate us to close them in a similar way.
 
Eh, or we could just actually fund roads for a consistent amount of time, there is no way to shorten the time it takes us to build roads just like no amount of new techniques or technology will make the sewers project any shorter.
 
Kirai said:
To be fair to the various plan makers here, we're usually not entirely ignoring roads because we hate them with the very core of our being. There are just other projects that we want to pursue. Like this plan we've done Deepwater updates (crucial to making coal power cheaper), Moscow renovation (political promise), grid stabilization (electricity), sewage (which is also behind, if not as badly), and HVDC (electricity). Oh sure I do think it's been needlessly de prioritized, last turn we could've at least started automotive infrastructure, but we're not pursuing other projects for no reason. When the main concern of this plan has been electricity and cheap access to the resources which give it, of course our focus in infra will reflect that.
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Considering the sheer scale of the underinvestment over so many turns & multiple plans, I honestly can not agree. There is a very obvious tendency when it was always roads getting the least investment that has no excuse.
 
RentingViewer said:
Eh, or we could just actually fund roads for a consistent amount of time, there is no way to shorten the time it takes us to build roads just like no amount of new techniques or technology will make the sewers project any shorter.
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I'm not at all sure that's actually true.

Modern industrial machinery actually does have a lot of potential to do good things for building a road faster. It makes a big difference whether you're using 1900-level technology, 1950-level technology, or 2000-level technology. And given how inconsistent and limited US road construction efforts have been, we might well be able to build more kilometers of road, or a better quality of road, for the same amount of budget and/or bureaucratic effort if we were learning lessons from foreign countries that are better at this than we are.

DerechteNikolaus said:
Considering the sheer scale of the underinvestment over so many turns & multiple plans, I honestly can not agree. There is a very obvious tendency when it was always roads getting the least investment that has no excuse.
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For a long time, at least one thing was getting screwed over worse than roads:

Airports. Basically no airport construction of any note apart, perhaps, from repurposing of military airbases took place in the USSR between the 1930s and 1960s, as I recall.

We did address that, but that's in large part because it was a manageable-sized project, whereas with roads we complete a big series of major projects and then they all disappear and are replaced by one project and taking that one project too slowly means everything else goes to pot.
 
General_Urist said:
Caucasus HSR is only a single autodice, so that gives us a way to keep the institutional knowledge alive throught a plan where we can't afford the 3-dice Central Asia rail. That does mean we only have a single plan that we can draw down before we either do the big project or lose capacity.
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Good, we take that and focus down roads and then hope our personnel expansions give us enough leeway to not screw over housing.
General_Urist said:
How it works is that our dam autoprojects, technically in infa, will take two Agri dice first before using infra dice. For example: We currently spend 3 autodice on dams (River Reversal). Two of those use agri dice, and the third dice is taken from infra. If we add more dam projects next plan, they'll use infra dice because Agri is already supplying the max 2 dice it can.
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Okay, as long as those two AG dice are still being used on some dam project so we don't lose the institutional knowledge.
MSH said:
Oh no, I'm not brave enough for politics. She said it a few pages ago.
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What she said was that we are building roads at 25% the pace our advisors want, not that we only have 25% of the roads that we need.
 
Nevis said:
It's not so much autobahns that are the issue as it is local roads right? IIRC we did all of the highways and most if not all of the regional roads. Sure we can still ask, but I imagine the kind of technology the Germans might give us is like high speed intersections or something, which might not be so relevant.
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We are running the MNKH from Moscow, yet have let the road situation of Moscow we can directly observe and get impacted by get so bad that 10 hour traffic jams are considered common events and the public parks we spent a decent chunk of resources on(i.e. ANY) are being used as parking lots due to sheer lack of places for people to park. If Moscow is that badly neglected in terms of roads, its very likeely everywhere else is doing even worse in terms of neglect.

Straight up, I argue that people have been trying to shut down trying to actually properly invest in roads in fear of becoming suburbia road hell so much that they basically just instead became the very thing they are screeching against and are now actively the thing getting in the way of smart road design.
 
The roads were never the source of the suburban and urban hell anyway. The former is caused by housing policy and socioeconomic dynamics driving people from the cities, and the latter is caused by making cars into a liability that every person has to maintain. You can avoid "one more lane bro" just with good zoning and buses, maybe pedestrianization should we ever be so lucky as to make the conditions for it.
 
Tbf were also bad at supporting public transit, like how we're at best just coming out of a massive shortfall in buses caused by us not building the factories.

Lol that we keep discovering the shortfalls of central planning organically lmao
 
Woggie said:
What she said was that we are building roads at 25% the pace our advisors want, not that we only have 25% of the roads that we need.
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Depending on how consistent a pattern we exhibit, that may actually not be much better. :(

Daedwartin said:
We are running the MNKH from Moscow, yet have let the road situation of Moscow we can directly observe and get impacted by get so bad that 10 hour traffic jams are considered common events and the public parks we spent a decent chunk of resources on(i.e. ANY) are being used as parking lots due to sheer lack of places for people to park. If Moscow is that badly neglected in terms of roads, its very likeely everywhere else is doing even worse in terms of neglect.
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Well, Moscow may have proportionately more motorists per capita and indirectly making some areas worse... but even so you may well be correct, and the situation in Moscow in particular is terrible.

I honestly am rather stunned when I think about it, because we've done two rounds of major urban 'modernization' on Moscow in the quarter-century since WWII, exactly the same kind of stuff that in the West would result in the High Modernists tearing lots of stuff down to make room for, among other things, more space for automobiles. And apparently we have none of that.

The road situation is also a good illustration that we are really, really, really not a democracy despite things being a little more open than they were in canon OTL. Because in a democracy someone would have voted to make the government fix this shit no matter what.

VonVonson said:
Tbf were also bad at supporting public transit, like how we're at best just coming out of a massive shortfall in buses caused by us not building the factories.
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Who knows. Maybe we'd only need half as many buses if it weren't for the urban buses spending all their time stuck in traffic instead of moving around their delivery routes at reasonable speed, and for the rural buses running over such shitty roads that they break down every five years and have to be replaced. :p
 
Personally I think one of the larger issues is that the mechanics of the quest which are visible to the playerbase do a lot to discourage infrastructure spending in general, and roads in particular. Given how often we struggle to have enough resources to use all our dice, it really shouldn't be surprising that people pick the options that give us direct, visible returns in the form of Rpy, as helpfully denoted by the profitability indicators. Road networks have narrative impacts and may have behind the scene impacts, but from the perspective of a player, they have no visible impact on our goals or resources. This naturally makes them seem less important than other options.
 
Honestly road infrastructure should be a new mandatory goal because at this rate even the most deaf and blind politicians should be concerned about it.
 
Nervos Belli said:
Personally I think one of the larger issues is that the mechanics of the quest which are visible to the playerbase do a lot to discourage infrastructure spending in general, and roads in particular. Given how often we struggle to have enough resources to use all our dice, it really shouldn't be surprising that people pick the options that give us direct, visible returns in the form of Rpy, as helpfully denoted by the profitability indicators. Road networks have narrative impacts and may have behind the scene impacts, but from the perspective of a player, they have no visible impact on our goals or resources. This naturally makes them seem less important than other options.
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That's good though, that's the kind of mistake that might result from our current type of economy. It's also not what's happening though. we like spending on Infra, it's just roads specifically we neglect to an unreasonable degree.
 
If the economy is suffering due to the lack of roads. Then the market will obviously self-correct it by people no longer buying cars once they realize cycling to work is faster and more efficient. I say we continue building more rail.
 
Nervos Belli said:
Personally I think one of the larger issues is that the mechanics of the quest which are visible to the playerbase do a lot to discourage infrastructure spending in general, and roads in particular. Given how often we struggle to have enough resources to use all our dice, it really shouldn't be surprising that people pick the options that give us direct, visible returns in the form of Rpy, as helpfully denoted by the profitability indicators. Road networks have narrative impacts and may have behind the scene impacts, but from the perspective of a player, they have no visible impact on our goals or resources. This naturally makes them seem less important than other options.
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Yeah, see also what I said about not having a general quick-look indicator of how our transport infrastructure is doing (which we had pre-statplan surprisingly, a very cooked one of course but still). If the supply of steel or labor or coal or aluminum gets moderately lacking we get a clearly-listed moderately negative modifier that tells us things aren't great and from which we can easily extrapolate to how much worse things will get if we don't fix the problem (which decently nudges us in the direction of even non-profitable projects). You don't have that with roads. Yeah technically the signs are THERE, but the warnings stay hidden in the bureaucraticese text of one or two single actions, easy to mentally dismiss until suddenly things are ON FIRE and the supsov is up our ass.
Pox said:
If the economy is suffering due to the lack of roads. Then the market will obviously self-correct it by people no longer buying cars once they realize cycling to work is faster and more efficient. I say we continue building more rail.
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This is what we in the rail gang HOPED would happen. Given the situation in Moscow with people continuing to drive their cards despite hour long traffic jams and needing to park on what's supposed to be greenery, we must sadly concede it's not working.
 
General_Urist said:
This is what we in the rail gang HOPED would happen. Given the situation in Moscow with people continuing to drive their cards despite hour long traffic jams and needing to park on what's supposed to be greenery, we must sadly concede it's not working.
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That's defeatism comrade. We just need to give even more stick to keep the proletariat disciplined. Let us introduce the "Certificate of Entitlement". If anyone wants to buy and use an evil bourgeois mode of transport, then they need to pay up around 3 years of salary which will give them the privilege of renting a car until their certificate expires after 10 years. We shall follow the Singapore model.

P.S.
The price of bourgeois cars is obviously too cheap due to the extraction of surplus value caused by shifting to the "market" and chasing after "profitability". Now that the neo-stalinists are on our side. It is time to head back onto the correct path.
 
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Pox said:
That's defeatism comrade. We just need to give even more stick to keep the proletariat disciplined. Let us introduce the "Certificate of Entitlement". If anyone wants to buy and use an evil bourgeois mode of transport, then they need to pay up around 3 years of salary which will give them the privilege of renting a car until their certificate expires after 10 years. We shall follow the Singapore model.
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Singapore actually has the proper infrastructure to facilitate alternatives to cars. We don't because we don't have good road infrastructure. You need roads for buses. Hell you need roads for bikes.
 
Stormingart said:
Singapore actually has the proper infrastructure to facilitate alternatives to cars. We don't because we don't have good road infrastructure. You need roads for buses. Hell you need roads for bikes.
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The proper infrastructure you are thinking they have is a car centric infrastructure. They close down bus routes and direct everyone to use the rail. If last mile transit takes 30 minutes then that's obviously the fault of the commuter for not owning a car.

Once more it showed the wisdom of Comrade Malenkov in continuing to build rail and avoiding the bourgeoise mode of production.

If we are going to build roadways, there needs to be 1 lane for bikes and 1 lane for pedestrians to walk on, 1 lane for a tram and obviously 1 lane for buses.
 
Ngl tho, there is a road shortage since we kept building those automative plants and did nothing about roads. But now that it has become this severe we can't just rush 10 dice on roads and think that will fix the problem. The moment we announce we are doing large road infra plan to the public there will also be a huge surge in demand. This would end up with us spending the next decade trying to keep building roads to keep up with demand eventually leading to car centricity. Since we are going to do a huge road infra plan, we need to find a way to curb demand before the roads are built.

Another point people should not forget is that the political elite are all corrupt and are traitors to the proletariat. They obviously have a vested interest in more roads because they own cars and are sick of the traffic.
 
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Pox said:
Ngl tho, there is a road shortage since we kept building those automative plants and did nothing about roads. But now that it has become this severe we can't just rush 10 dice on roads and think that will fix the problem. The moment we announce we are doing large road infra plan to the public there will also be a huge surge in demand. This would end up with us spending the next decade trying to keep building roads to keep up with demand eventually leading to car centricity. Since we are going to do a huge road infra plan, we need to find a way to curb demand before the roads are built.
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Oh don't worry we have a trusty tool for that. It's called Oilshock.
 
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