In one sentence
Large, consequential projects can sometimes be completed far faster than contemporary expectations suggest. The widening gap between historical examples of rapid execution and today’s slow infrastructure projects points toward institutional, regulatory, and coordination failures—not merely technical difficulty.
Overview
“Fast” is primarily a curated list rather than a conventional essay. Collison presents projects with strikingly short timelines, then asks why major physical infrastructure is disproportionately represented among the older examples. The closing section points to theories involving bureaucracy, permitting, special interests, institutional change, and declining state capacity. The page invites readers to contribute more sourced examples.
Core ideas
Speed is historically achievable
The examples challenge the assumption that ambitious work must take decades. The BankAmericard launched in 90 days; the P-80 jet fighter took 143 days; Apollo 8 reached the Moon 134 days after NASA made the decision; JavaScript’s first prototype took 10 days; Git became self-hosting in four days.
The list spans different kinds of coordination
These are not only software projects. The catalogue includes airports, highways, ships, skyscrapers, aircraft, vaccines, consumer products, and even a man-made island. The common feature is concentrated effort toward a clear objective under strong urgency or authority.
Older physical projects look especially fast
Collison notices that the rapid infrastructure examples occurred disproportionately before 1970. He contrasts projects such as the Empire State Building, completed in 410 days, with the Second Avenue Subway, whose first three-station phase took many years, and California high-speed rail’s projected multi-decade timeline.
Execution speed depends on institutional conditions
The page’s final section points toward explanations beyond engineering: red tape, permitting, fragmented authority, special-interest influence, altered government procedures, and what Mancur Olson described as stable societies accumulating organized interests. These are presented as hypotheses and sources for investigation, not as a settled causal theory.
Urgency can compress decision-making
Several examples followed a crisis, military imperative, competition, or unusually forceful mandate: the Alaska Highway, Berlin Airlift, Apollo 8, the Pentagon, and COVID-19 vaccines. This suggests that speed is often enabled by unusually clear priorities, authority, resources, and tolerance for concentrated risk.
The comparison is provocative but selective
The catalogue highlights successes and short timelines. It does not systematically compare failed projects, hidden preparatory work, total lifecycle costs, quality tradeoffs, environmental consequences, or the institutional conditions that made each case possible.
Practical takeaways
- When a project feels impossibly slow, look first for decision rights, approval layers, coordination failures, and unclear ownership—not only technical complexity.
- Define a concrete outcome, deadline, and responsible leader. Many examples benefited from a specific mission rather than an open-ended planning process.
- Separate reversible from irreversible decisions. Move quickly on decisions that can be corrected; reserve more scrutiny for genuinely catastrophic or permanent risks.
- Use historical benchmarks to challenge inherited timelines. “That is how long this normally takes” may describe a process constraint rather than a real engineering requirement.
- Treat urgency as a design variable: clear priorities, dedicated teams, rapid feedback, and protected resources can radically change throughput.
- Do not copy wartime or crisis methods blindly. Their speed may depend on exceptional authority, reduced consultation, externalized costs, or risks unacceptable in ordinary civic projects.
Caveats and counterpoints
- The article is an anecdotal collection, not a controlled comparison. Fast projects may be memorable precisely because they are unusual.
- Some timelines begin after substantial prior research, design, or institutional preparation, so elapsed time may understate total effort.
- The examples differ greatly in scale, standards, risk, and definition of completion; comparing a prototype with a public infrastructure system can mislead.
- The page does not establish that regulation or bureaucracy is the sole cause of modern slowness. Financing, litigation, safety requirements, distributed governance, labor conditions, and project complexity may also matter.
- Collison’s final explanations are pointers to other authors’ arguments. The article leaves the central causal question open.
Questions worth revisiting
- Which examples remain fast after counting prior research, site selection, financing, and failed attempts?
- What specific approval or governance changes explain the apparent post-1970 slowdown in infrastructure?
- When does speed improve outcomes, and when does it merely shift costs or risks onto less powerful groups?
- Could modern democratic institutions preserve consultation while sharply reducing redundant delay?
- Which current projects could be redesigned around a single accountable decision-maker and a genuinely fixed deadline?
Return to this when…
Return when a project, institution, or public works effort seems destined to take years by default. The page is useful as a compact prompt to distinguish necessary complexity from accumulated process—and to ask what conditions would make ambitious execution dramatically faster.