
Why We Can’t Figure Out Why Infrastructure Is So Expensive - jseliger
http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/07/why-we-cant-figure-out-why-infrastructure-is-so-expensive.html
======
tomohawk
A family member in the DOT told me this as but one of many tales of woe.

Several hundred miles of an interstate were going to be rehabbed. There was a
proven technique to redo the joints between the concrete slabs, which were in
good shape. A contractor was hired to do a small number of miles as a test,
but they had a learning curve. The first few joints that they redid were not
done well, but they rapidly improved and the approach looked really good.

However, the state selected a different approach which required tearing up the
road and redoing it. The excuse was those first few bad joints. There was also
the unstated matter that the contractor favored by the state did not know how
to do this technique.

The result was billions of wasted money to redo the road with an inferior
material. That material failed within a few years, and they now need to redo
it again.

And this is not just a cost issue. Its estimated that failure to adhere to
known safer pavement designs is resulting in 10,000 - 15,000 unnecessary
deaths a year.

~~~
aldoushuxley001
Almost certainly they switched contractors because of corruption.

Here in Montreal, it's well known that the mob runs the construction industry
and quite frankly you're not allowed to even bid on contracts without their
say so, otherwise you'll get visited for a very frank chat.

So I can't speak for why infrastructure is expensive elsewhere, but atleast
here in Quebec (& likely RoC) it's simply because of corruption. See the
recent woes of SNC Lavalin.

~~~
Analemma_
The thing is, even if this is true, it still doesn’t explain the cost
difference between us and e.g. Japan. Construction firms and public
infrastructure works in Japan have well-known ties to the yakuza, yet they
still finish these at way lower costs than us (even though labor is more
expensive!) Why?

~~~
smolder
Cultural differences: Japan is pretty homogenous and they seem to see
themselves as part of a whole whereas in the US, for example, exploiting your
fellow citizens for profit is almost a matter of duty in business.

~~~
BubRoss
Seems like a cliched and simplistic explanation to just waive away a large
difference with 'culture'.

~~~
siphon22
Sometimes things really are that simple though. Why can you (most of the time)
leave your bike outside a store you stop at in Japan but not in America?
Because it isn't part of Japanese culture to take what doesn't belong to you,
but is normal for a number of Americans. Why can you get relatively wholesome
food at a 7-11 in East Asian countries while you get junk and trash at ones in
America? Because Japanese people prefer real food over getting chips and a
crappy sandwich for lunch. Why are nice public facilities possible in those
kinds of countries and not America? Because those people don't wreck,
vandalize, and spray grafiti on them, while Americans do.

~~~
Theodores
Would you steal a bicycle in Japan?

I wouldn't and it has nothing to do with hand-wavy culture.

The reason I would not touch the unlocked bicycle is because I know it is
registered with the police. If I got stopped on that bicycle and they looked
up the frame number then I would have some explaining to do. Even if I claimed
it was mine I could still be prosecuted for not registering 'the change of
ownership' with the police. You could imagine the lying, language difficulties
and the situation spiralling out of control to end up with time spent in the
cells and a few million yen in fines. Could happen.

Note that in America a bicycle is a toy. It has only survived as a vehicle
that can be used on the highway by fate, there have been plenty of efforts to
fully ban the bicycle from the road and to denigrate it as a toy.

To extrapolate from the bicycle theft situation in Japan to assume that
Japanese people are Not Like Us and therefore don't steal is wishful thinking.
Personally I believe that Americans are exceptionally unlikely to steal your
stuff. I am actually sure that if I did go on a round the world tour that I
would find this matter of being honest to be a near universal human trait.

~~~
nitrogen
_Personally I believe that Americans are exceptionally unlikely to steal your
stuff._

I guess the people who stole my former startup's hardware prototypes and
thousands of dollars of equipment didn't get the memo, nor did the
professionals who broke into the bike lockers at a previous residence and
stole thousands of dollars of bicycles.

~~~
BubRoss
I don't think your personal anecdote is a good indictment of corruption of a
country on a statistical level.

------
nisten
The author briefly touched on how it's also expensive in countries with
similar law-systems like Canada and Australia. It may just be that our laws
make it a lot easier for contractors to jack up government contracts.

My personal opinion is that managers and regulators in Europe and South Korea
are a lot more efficient because they have a lot more freedom to apply common
sense and personal judgement without fear of getting sued over a stupid
technicality in a contract dispute.

Whereas in US & Canada it's common for companies to sue the government over a
small/irrelevant technicality and win a big settlement.

Thus regulators and contractors interpret rules as literally as possible in
order to avoid this legal confrontation and I think it's precisely this that
drastically reduces the construction efficiency of public projects.

One thing that surprised me in Germany, both in Munich and Berlin was that
while the central train & subway stations were quite grandiose (Hauptbahnhof's
interior looks like something out of Halo), the stations in the periphery of
the city were surprisingly quite "thin and light", built frugally with thin
weather shielding and a minimal amount of materials.

Whereas in Toronto it's the opposite. We built a $6Billion subway extension,
with 6 stations at a billion each, all overbuilt in exactly the same standard.
Only half of them actually have any population within walking distance and one
is a complete ghost-town. The reason why this happened was because treating
all 6 equally was safe and no one complained.

It's not hard to see how you can provide the same service for 1/4 of the
price.

~~~
mratsim
As an European, I'm always surprised when someone says that our governments
are efficient. We're always complaining about them.

~~~
wil421
The grass is always greener on the other side. It’s funny OP mentions Berlin
train stations but fails to mention the Berlin Airport.

~~~
defterGoose
I always appreciate peoples' willingness to be self-deprecating about their
situation, but just because the world is imperfect doesn't mean that that
imperfection is evenly distributed. At least here in the US, it seems we have
a dearth of _both_ understanding and ability to reason about the degree of
that understanding.

------
keerthiko
A hard-to-capture cost factor is keeping highly used services operational or
replaced while doing work on it. A super-fancy new subway with lots of
stations in Shenzhen where people weren't already taking trains and expecting
to use stations for their daily commute will be much cheaper than disrupting a
line service to open a new station in London or New York City. Replacement bus
bridge services, network-wide service advisories, staff and enforcement
training, are all costs that are not easy to quantify or justify because it
doesn't directly manifest in the construction of the infrastructure.

Of course there are other factors that vary a lot across cultures:

* China's heavy-handed governmental decision-making leaves no room for inefficiencies via neighborhood antagonism towards the constructions or zoning;

* Car culture differences create different magnitudes of popular roadblocks to investment in non-automobile infrastructure, which can result in large expenditures on lobbying and campaigning;

* Significantly more arbitrary middlemen making their way into the process because of "let the market figure it out" _does_ , in fact, create some process inefficiencies in supply chains and contract pipelines. Few countries are as aggressively market-based for things meant for public good as the US.

~~~
granshaw
> A hard-to-capture cost factor is keeping highly used services operational or
> replaced while doing work on it.

Anyone who does any kindof "building" (whether it be software engineers making
schema changes, or a general contractor adding to an existing house vs
building from scratch) knows this intimately, so really it shouldn't be any
kind of surprise at all

~~~
rafiki6
But to the article's original point, the people conducting the research to
prepare these reports are non-experts. So they wouldn't even know where to
look for these figures.

------
atotic
"why is American infrastructure so bad?" has been a topic I am curious about.
The above article does not answer the question.

I'd prefer not to care about American infrastructure costs. Unfortunately, I
occasionally have to leave my house, and the consequences of bad
infrastructure stare me in the face: people living in their cars, traffic
jams.

The best attempt to actually answer the question I've seen has been
"Pedestrian Observations" blog. Their take on the same GAO report is:

[New Report on Construction Costs Misses the
Mark]([https://pedestrianobservations.com/2019/07/22/new-report-
on-...](https://pedestrianobservations.com/2019/07/22/new-report-on-
construction-costs-misses-the-mark/))

"The GAO report is out now, and unfortunately it is a total miss, for
essentially the same reason the RPA’s report was a miss: it did not go outside
the American (and to some extent rest-of-Anglosphere) comfort zone"

~~~
rthomas6
Check out strongtowns.org.

------
cosmodisk
Here's my simplistic answer to this in three words: incompetence, corruption,
self-interest. Having worked on a multiple construction projects and witnessed
all 3 abovementioned aspects in various shapes and forms,I'd like to give a
real life example. In the second largest city in Lithuania,a retailer got an
approval to build a massive shopping center in the very center of the city.An
agreement between the city council and the retailer was made and part of the
project was to build a small bridge connecting the road outside the shopping
center and a small island in the river alongside the road. The contract was
won by a company that specialises in road and bridge building..So far so good.
The works started. I used to go past the site on daily basis and often
observed many people simply standing on the upcoming bridge and not doing
much... Eventually a guy I used to know got a job with the company to work on
that bridge project.Money was good..He quit after only a month.When I enquired
what happened,he said that he is a man of work and can't stand idle. Even
thought he tried his best,he couldn't stand the fact that he simply couldn't
not work.On his first day,he went to the site manager and asked what he should
be doing.He got told to collect a massive spanner and tighten 12 bolts on the
metal construction.He returned to the manager in 45min or so and asked what's
his next task.The site manager looked at him with anger and disappointment and
said: look, it's your first day and you already making mistakes.I have given
you a task for the whole day,not just for 45min..So now I now have to come up
with something else for you to do.. Don't you ever do this to me again.You
need to preserve your work,not rush with it.. Now scale it up to a massive
underground project and you'll get the idea where the money is going to..

------
xt00
A couple of facts that should at least provide a baseline for costs (like the
best case scenario): Shenzhen metro: 198 stations, about 180 miles of track
(soon to be more like 250 miles), majority of it built in past 10-12 years.
All I can find so far on cost is the phase iii cost which says it will cost
about 20 billion. Phase I was quite small. So maybe they have spent about 30
billion to get almost 200 miles of rail and lots of stations? I’ve used the
Shenzhen metro and it’s pretty nice. Also used the Shanghai metro as well.

Often in the US, stations are cited as a big cost.

Would be interesting to get a pie chart for costs between US and China like
land acquisition costs, labor, raw materials, management, etc.

A bit disappointing that the report essentially ended in a “it depends” type
of non-informative report.

~~~
BurningFrog
In China the purpose of infrastructure projects is to get infrastructure.

In the US the purpose of infrastructure projects is to enrich everyone
associated with the project.

~~~
seanmcdirmid
That simply isn’t true at all. There are plenty of unused or underused
highways and bridges in China that made a few red families lots of money.

It’s fascinating to me that some people think corruption in China is lower
than the USA. Not even the Chinese would make such a claim.

~~~
BurningFrog
I did not at all claim there is no corruption. But look at your own quote:

> _There are plenty of [...] highways and bridges in China_

I think we agree that the infrastructure _does_ get built!

~~~
thehappypm
China, especially a few decades ago, was so poor that eminent domain was a
complete non-issue. Combined with a fairly authoritarian government system,
building a train line faced basically no resistance.

In the US, it's almost the opposite. The places where public transit is most
needed are the most highly valuable, densely populated areas, where eminent
domain is a nightmare. In the US, all of our highly populated areas are
already urban. In the past, that was certainly not the case in China, and to
an extent, still so today.

~~~
cestith
One of China's more ambitious solutions to this was newly founded, planned
metropolises where no major city had previously stood.

~~~
seanmcdirmid
Aka the infamous ghost cities?

~~~
BurningFrog
China has no shortage of people. These cities will fill up.

Maybe it's my Bay Area PTSD, but if too much housing is the worst problem in
your society, I envy you and want to subscribe to your newsletter!

~~~
seanmcdirmid
I’ve been to a few that haven’t filled up in 10 years, eg kangbashi is going
nowhere unless coal makes a big comeback (unlikely).

I’ll match your Bay Area PTSD with my Beijing PTSD. The crazy thing is that
even in Beijing there are lots of empty apartments (bought by speculators for
flipping only who don’t want to renovate them so they can be rented out).

~~~
BurningFrog
I always want to defer my theoretical speculative punditry to people's real
experience, so I'll agree you're probably right.

------
ambicapter
> The usual way you produce journalism or policy research on a technical
> question like this is that you hire someone with expertise in journalism or
> public policy to produce a report. That person calls up relevant experts and
> asks them to talk, for free, about their areas of expertise. This is one of
> the great perks of my job: I call up lawyers and other professionals who
> ordinarily charge hundreds of dollars an hour for their services, and they
> talk to me for free, whether because they find it interesting, because they
> have a message they want to get out in the world, or simply because they
> like seeing their names quoted in print.

This is probably uncouth for Hacker News, but let me just say:
Aaaahahahahahahahahha. Is there really an expectation of accuracy if your
method is calling up an expert and asking him to pontificate for a little bit?
Whatever happened to accounting? Shouldn't the way you go about this is run
the numbers, find the differences in isolated segments AND THEN ask the expert
why such a difference exists?

I think it a large discredit to this journalist and the organization he/she
works for if they think this is how they're going to spread important, useful
information to the masses.

~~~
jfengel
As other respondents have said, a good journalist does not rely on a single
expert. Good reporting cross-checks multiple sources, often seeking out
conflicting ones, and trying to form a coherent story out of that.

Unfortunately, that often leads to false dichotomy. It's not sufficient to
seek out a contradictory source... especially if that contradictory source is
not credible. But it's very exciting journalism to say, "We spoke to X and Y,
who bitterly disagree with each other. We'll gloss over the fact that X has a
PhD and the support of the entire community, while Y is funded by motivated
donors and has been repeatedly debunked. We'll go to Y every single time
because they only fund the one."

So yeah, journalism is in trouble. Not for reliance on experts, but for
failing to rely on themselves when a story seems fishy... and for relying on
the public to care about whether they have or not.

~~~
travisoneill1
Why is it that you assume that a PhD or community support makes someone right?
And surely he gets his paycheck from someone just as Y does, right?

~~~
jfengel
It doesn't, in itself. But when a PhD with very widespread support disagrees
with somebody so lacking in the relevant discipline that they keep making the
same elementary mistakes over and over in support of a preconceived notion,
it's a really strong sign that they're not really talking on an equal footing.

It's not always easy to rule out outsider with novel ideas, but there are
lists of warning signs of crankery and motivated reasoning that a journalist
should be able to identify. There will always be a gray area, but that's no
excuse for lazy journalists to repeatedly seek out anybody willing to disagree
just for the purpose of presenting an equal-and-opposite story.

------
legitster
Let alone cost, one thing that boggles my mind is how _slow_ infrastructure
building is in the US. In our area, a multi-billion dollar freeway or subway
line will often be constructed with 5 days of a single 8-hour shift. I get
that certain work needs to be done at night, but surely the work sites
shouldn't sit empty for 16 hours a day!

Just think about the cost of equipment being rented, the overhead that is on
salary, the amount of work to startup and shutdown the site for the day, and
the opportunity cost lost by not having it done 2-3x as fast.

It's seems like it would be a no-brainer to have 3x the workers and get the
job done in 1/3 the time.

~~~
rafiki6
Same principle applies here as with any software development effort. There are
some natural bottlenecks that can't be avoided/parallelized (for e.g. waiting
for a layer of asphalt to dry). Further, more people doing a thing doesn't
mean it will get done faster. You have to contend with overhead of planning,
context-switching and handover overhead between workers leaving/starting
shifts etc. etc.

~~~
athenot
True but those constraints can result in more creative engineering.

Look at this timelapse of a bridge getting replaced in 43 hours. They had the
new bridge built next to the orignal and "just" moved it into place—I'm using
quotes because of course that is an impressive operation.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vz_j_BEkVCQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vz_j_BEkVCQ)

~~~
Steltek
You may want to check out how the Comm Ave bridge over the Pike was replaced
in Boston. It was pretty quicke although not as fast 43 hours. However, we
also couldn't afford to close the lower road (I-90) as above for an extended
staging effort. I believe rail lines were only impacted on two weekend pushes.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zNiACLQtHyg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zNiACLQtHyg)

------
40acres
I'm no expert, but I would wager that costs are so high due to a mix of: state
capture, a complex regulatory scheme, and relatively minor process
inefficiency throughout the value chain that when taken as a whole slow down
large projects.

The Congressional Act cited in the article explicitly states a timeline of 9
months for the GAO report to be delivered and yet it was 7 months late.

Many state budgets have not reached pre-2008 levels and regulatory agencies
are ripe to be exploited by labor groups, lobbying, private property owners,
etc.

------
jp57
The best part of this thread is that the article is about why it's really hard
to understand the cost differences, while the top comments all offer
unsupported and anecdotal speculation explaining the cost differences in 200
words or less.

"HN: Where dilettantes opine."

~~~
FussyZeus
Mmmm, it's a good part, but I think the best part is all the people who have
it figured out because in all of recorded history, nobody thought of checking
into things like the costs of corruption.

It's nice that the city planners include it as a line item, why don't we look
there?

------
asdff
I've been reading a lot about transit lately, and the one theme that seems to
dominate cost and time overruns is reliance on contractors due to there being
supposedly not enough labor.

Contractors bid to deliver an inferior product, because working to deliver a
superior product will hurt their profit margins, and they are insulated from
the fallout as all blame will go to the transit agency and not whichever dime
a dozen contractor failed the project. By relying on the contractor model,
these agencies don't need to maintain a bulky labor pool, but in the process
for every public dollar given to project labor, a portion gets withheld for
that profit margin. Privatization is fundamentally inefficient and has no
place in public works projects.

Public engineering should be the most powerful force in this country, and for
a time it really was. Some of the brightest engineering minds in the world are
trained in our public universities, and many end up contributing to projects
that are a net negative to society, blinded by the private sector paycheck and
the supposed prestige that brings. LA Metro complains that there is a labor
shortage, yet they provide regional transit to Cal Tech, USC (though a private
school), and UCLA, serving the labor pool they claim doesn't exist. Public
infrastructure agencies need to do a much better job at recruiting from our
constant output of talent and preventing these students from being wasted in
the private sector, working hard and wasting their years for someone else's
dollar.

LA Metro also complains about a labor shortage in a region where 60k live on
the street. If this was 1930, those destitute people would be hired and
trained to build infrastructure. But this is 2019, and we can't even build
homeless shelters lest they tarnish our sweet sweet property values.

~~~
Ericson2314
I think in the cheap places they contract too, but yes as a contractor the
incentives are almost always wrong and the balkanization precludes economies
of scale.

------
erentz
I don’t fully buy that we can’t work this out. The author gives examples of
how it’s difficult to compare, but what those examples show is that yes, to
compare properly you need to go very deep on some parts to find out why design
decisions were made the way they were. This may be more time consuming and
cost more but it’s doable.

One other thing we might try is to set aside a hundred billion dollars for a
half dozen key “trial” or “learning” projects, and see if we can get some of
the agencies from say Japan and France and Spain to execute those projects so
we can learn how they do it differently. And they can show up all the things
(regulations, interference, etc) that they encounter here that would be
different to back home.

In the scheme of things it’s cheap, we still get infrastructure out of it, and
it’s one sure way to learn.

~~~
lemoncucumber
> I don’t fully buy that we can’t work this out. The author gives examples of
> how it’s difficult to compare, but what those examples show is that yes, to
> compare properly you need to go very deep on some parts to find out why
> design decisions were made the way they were. This may be more time
> consuming and cost more but it’s doable.

That's exactly what the author is advocating for, so I'm not sure what your
point is. Heck, the last line of the article is "It would be worth paying to
get the answers even if that would be very expensive."

~~~
ambicapter
Sounded like the author was advocating another mega-project, which comes off a
bit weird considering the article they just wrote.

~~~
mcphage
> Sounded like the author was advocating another mega-project

No, they were suggesting that in order to find out why these projects are so
expensive, it would be best to hire people experienced with mega-projects and
pay them for their time to get answers to these questions.

------
chimeracoder
Kind of weird to use a picture of the East Side Access project in New York as
the lede. New York is a whole different case from the rest of the country. We
_do_ know why infrastructure in New York is so absurdly expensive. Outright
theft and fraud is a big culprit:
[https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/nyregion/new-york-
subway-...](https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/nyregion/new-york-subway-
construction-costs.html)

> The budget showed that 900 workers were being paid to dig caverns for the
> platforms as part of a 3.5-mile tunnel connecting the historic station to
> the Long Island Rail Road. But the accountant could only identify about 700
> jobs that needed to be done, according to three project supervisors.
> Officials could not find any reason for the other 200 people to be there.

> “Nobody knew what those people were doing, if they were doing anything,”
> said Michael Horodniceanu, who was then the head of construction at the
> Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which runs transit in New York. The
> workers were laid off, Mr. Horodniceanu said, but no one figured out how
> long they had been employed. “All we knew is they were each being paid about
> $1,000 every day.”

> The discovery... occurred in 2010 and was not disclosed to the public

This sort of behavior is unfortunately commonplace.

~~~
reallydude
The California High Speed Rail was also corruption. It's all over everywhere,
because nobody is accountable for it, except the people over-charging, while
simultaneously pointing out that they are taking all the liability when things
go wrong (and someone actually tries to prosecute).

~~~
jonahhorowitz
From my conversations with people who worked on HSR - a lot of the problem was
we outsourced the decisions to expensive consulting agencies, and those
agencies saw the project as a place to stash their most useless staff members.

So basically we had a bunch of very expensive idiots running an outsourced
project.

If they had kept the whole project in house, we'd have the initial operating
segment already.

See also, CEQA is a terrible law that mostly blocks good things and rarely
blocks bad things.

~~~
rsj_hn
I think rather than generally blaming "corruption", nowadays I prefer to blame
"lack of competence", although there is a lot of overlap.

That's because I see a lot of bad decisions -- stupidity over greed. It only
takes a few bad decisions made by people with power to completely sink a
project. Now imagine building an airport or a subway. How many of these do we
build? They are basically one off projects. Following a manual to repave a
road doesn't require much competence, as it's a project that's done over and
over again -- but doing a one-off project with unique challenges -- that
requires serious competence.

And lack of competence is a much harder problem to solve than corruption. The
incompetent person doesn't admit or know they are incompetent. The incompetent
person can't be scared with lawsuits or investigations to become competent. No
amount of sunshine will help. The only solution is to get rid of the
incompetent person and put someone competent in charge. But that doesn't work
at the national level -- if there is a shortage of incompetent people, or if
our hiring systems aren't able to hire the competent person. So the solutions
are very long term and painful:

* change how governments hire and promote staff to focus more on competence and less on passive traits like seniority/diversity/etc.

* reduce the need for competence by focusing on standardized projects built in a steady cadence. For subways, make every subway the same, or pick just 2 variants, and develop a team of people with experience working on these all across the country, with standardized best practices and a pool of skilled workers who have experience working on these projects.

All of that requires some pretty radical reforms of how our projects are
funded and what role cities have to play in building them, as well as
upsetting a lot of government unions.

Then there is the issue of Federalism. The Swiss have a highly efficient
infrastructure system and have strong federalism, as does Germany, but you're
not in a situation where each state has completely different zoning/eminent
domain laws, or separate licensing so an engineer in one state may not be able
to even work in another. This makes it harder for us to adopt more
standardized practices across states for big infrastructure projects as well
as a national pool of experts that can go state to state and build
standardized projects.

------
rsync
I am fascinated to see that 3 hours, 109 upvotes and 107 comments into this
story, the word "regulation" occurs only once in the comment thread.

I own, jointly with others, a 3 mile long road.

If there could be only two things that I impressed upon someone, in relation
to this road, they would be the following:

1) You have _no idea how costly_ maintaining a road (any road) is. I didn't. I
had _no idea_. Whatever libertarian fantasies you may harbor about private
people coming together to create and maintain anything like first world
infrastructure, I am sorry to dash them: we have a group of 20 or so rich,
well-educated, smart and hard-working people and it's right at the edge of our
capabilities to keep this 3 mile long road in semi-acceptable condition.

2) The difference between doing a safe, reasonable, environmentally
responsible and long term fix and _doing that very same fix but 100% by the
book_ is a cost difference of 3x to 4x. There are minor drainage fixes we've
looked into that required, no shit, the _army corps of engineers_ to be
consulted along with several other county and state regulatory and
environmental agencies. After paying a third party firm to create an
environmental impact report. _Do you understand that I am talking about fixing
a ditch ?_ The army corps of engineers.

I did not, above, refer to "excessive regulation" because I am not ready nor
willing to define that and I don't want to take a political stand on it - I am
merely pointing out that the first thought you should be having on this issue
is: regulations.

~~~
megabl8
> You have no idea how costly maintaining a road (any road) is.

And after your comment, I still do not. Telling us might help.

~~~
Steltek
MassDOT recently published their capital budget with a little more fanfare
than usual, to soothe Red Line passengers hurting from the recent derailment
perhaps. It included $3 billion in major repaving efforts but that seems to
have gone without challenge. However the Green Line Extension is barely alive
politically on their $2.4B capital budget.

Likewise, a nearby overpass on Rt 128 was repaired for $30M.

Highways eat money but when Massachusetts looks to obvious transit
improvements, suddenly cost is a major concern.

------
notadoc
Really? Are we sure we can't figure this out? Who believes that?

Private contractors seem to be very expensive. No-bid contracts are obviously
not competitive. And when the tax payer is picking up the bill, is there
really any incentive for a contractor to keep costs low? Who advocates for the
taxpayer?

And how much corruption, kick-backs, lobbying, political favoring, porking,
and other questionable activity goes on behind the scenes that increase costs?

This isn't rocket science, it's mostly about accounting and accountability.

~~~
bps4484
But wouldn't all those same problems you outline be the case in other
countries?

I think the question isn't "Why are infra costs so high?" which I think your
list answers, but instead "Why are infra costs so high _in the united
states_?"

~~~
noobermin
Bribery is legalized in the US in the form of campaign contributions. In fact,
the Supreme Court determined it was _speech_ , something whose freedom is
enshrined in the constitution.

------
nova22033
This article linked from another Josh Barro piece tells you exactly why it's
so expensive

[https://www.city-journal.org/html/fifteen-stories-
under-1410...](https://www.city-journal.org/html/fifteen-stories-
under-14105.html)

In Britain and France, only the “miners”—or tunnelers—work in unions similar
to America’s. Contractors hire other workers largely as they wish. The jobs
pay well but not American-construction-union well. In New York, everyone works
by the same union rules, which include hourly wages and staffing requirements
that can mean 25 workers per tunnel-boring machine, compared with a dozen or
so in a nonunion state and as few as five in countries such as Norway.

~~~
spenczar5
If it that were simple, the GAO report mentioned in the article would surely
have found it. It's not just labor cost.

~~~
pas
[https://pedestrianobservations.com/2019/07/22/new-report-
on-...](https://pedestrianobservations.com/2019/07/22/new-report-on-
construction-costs-misses-the-mark/)

------
golover721
Honestly I think there is a lot of incompetence involved with local
transportation agencies as well. Often they are extremely underfunded so it’s
not always their fault. But living in a metropolitan area where the population
is very much for innovative and forward thinking infrastructure, the agency
responsible has time and time again made very costly mistakes and decisions.

As well as try and deceive the public by doing things such as claiming they
are providing BRT but really it’s just new buses with an HOV lane. So at this
point the public has very little faith in them being able to provide what we
so desperately want.

------
noobermin
May be this is just too much cynicism but isn't it possible the GAO just
failed to do what it was supposed to do and is offering that paragraph as a
poor way to explain away their failure?

The trend of it being more expensive in the US is a real, statistically
determinable fact. That hints there are structural reasons for it. They should
at least give a stab at it rather than throwing up their hands and claiming
there's nothing they can do.

~~~
pas
yes, the report is shit.

[https://pedestrianobservations.com/2019/07/22/new-report-
on-...](https://pedestrianobservations.com/2019/07/22/new-report-on-
construction-costs-misses-the-mark/) \+ see the design-build vs design then
build comment(s) too.

------
gok
It's surprising infrastructure in the US is as cheap as it is. It is built
with no meaningful cost controls. Environmental impact studies are uniquely
slow and hard to navigate. Only a few well-connected firms are able to bid,
and they get picked for mostly political reasons. "Buy America" restrictions
make a lot of obvious projects actually impossible. Those responsible for cost
overruns are never held to account.

------
rayiner
There is a saying: it’s good to work on your weaknesses, but don’t dwell on
them because otherwise you’ll spend all your time doing things you’re bad at.

If we’re bad at centrally planned public infrastructure, we should just do
less of it, and focus more on the things we’re good at doing.

~~~
lutorm
Except that just because you're bad at taking care of your health, it does not
follow you should spend less time on it. You'll still die early.

What you're saying only makes sense if you're talking about things that are
optional, not if they're required.

~~~
rayiner
Centralized public infrastructure is not required. Decentralized
infrastructure works.

------
avanderveen
My gut instinct is that the mob might be a (potentially significant) factor
here. I could be wrong, but this is their bread an butter after all: bribe
politician to get large-scale infrastructure project and then artificially
inflate costs (false purchase orders, buying materials from companies they
operate in amounts that are far in excess or what's required and not actually
shipping them, etc.) so that they can siphon away tax dollars.

------
AcerbicZero
I think the answer is in the first few lines actually.

>Here are the instructions Congress gave last March: Not later than 9 months
after the enactment of this act, the GAO shall report to the House and Senate

>Sixteen months later, the GAO has produced its report and it doesn’t actually
perform the cost comparisons as instructed.

Bureaucracy at its finest. Over promise, under deliver, and make sure its late
too, just in case anyone thought there might be a competent system in play.

~~~
mcphage
> I think the answer is in the first few lines actually.

Not really, given that the main focus of the rest of the article was about how
what was asked of them is difficult to determine, and not even well defined.

~~~
pas
That's just a long excuse, an appeal for incompetence, to hide the intent of
face saving: [https://pedestrianobservations.com/2019/07/22/new-report-
on-...](https://pedestrianobservations.com/2019/07/22/new-report-on-
construction-costs-misses-the-mark/)

------
dimitar
I love how the word "corruption" doesn't appear once in the text. If this was
an article about Eastern Europe for example it would be in every paragraph.

So, I'm wondering if corruption overemphasized in my region and Project
Management is just very hard, or there is corruption in the US and rest of the
English speaking countries as well, but people are not talking about it much.

------
fblp
I wonder if someone has found a strong correlation between infrastructure
costs and legal or land costs?

~~~
6nf
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RY-
mlcgFCc4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RY-mlcgFCc4) Legal costs is
definitely an issue sometimes

------
arthur5005
I’m surprised by the cynicism here. Working in software we know that high
complexity projects are _really_ hard to estimate.

Hofstadter's Law says it always takes longer than you expect, even when you
take into account Hofstadter's Law.

Too many unknown unknowns. If the projects were broken down into smaller
chunks, the incremental costs would be better understood as the project
progressed.

~~~
bluGill
Construction generally is not doing a brand new greenfield project.
Experienced web developers can put together another website for pretty close
to budget. As soon as you deviate from the framework and tools that the
experienced web developer knows well though estimates go out the window.

Big construction projects have a lot of well understood parts. Sometimes you
get unexpected rocks or something, but for the most some countries have done
much better than others at controlling costs in projects of similar complexity
which suggests that the difference isn't because it is hard to estimate.

------
jedberg
Before we make a report on how our costs differ from other G20 countries, how
about a report on how our costs differ from ourselves 100 years ago.

In 1900 it took four years to lay nine miles of subway in NYC. The second ave
tunnel was just a couple miles and under construction for 12 years.

That's just an example. It also took longer to build the new Eastern span of
the Bay Bridge than it took to build the whole bridge.

I think we should start by figuring out why these things happen.

~~~
jakewins
As I understand it, most of the NYC subway was built by basically just closing
of major chunks of streets and excavating them, sticking the subway in and
then covering it back up.

Compared to boring underground tunnels, you can imagine how much less involved
it is to simply dig a hole from above.

I'm not sure why they don't do that anymore, though I can imagine it's some
combination of where the new routes are (maybe they aren't following the
street grid?) and higher impact of year-long closures of streets.

The NYP has a good article comparing the methods of construction then and now:
[https://www.nypl.org/blog/2015/05/04/subway-construction-
the...](https://www.nypl.org/blog/2015/05/04/subway-construction-then-now)

~~~
sagarm
I think what you are describing it's called cut and cover.

Presumably, the idea of inconveniencing motorists for that long "just" for
transit is no longer acceptable.

------
g00s3_caLL_x2
I'd wager there is plenty of 'dark money' that never gets reported i.e mob,
and politicians being bribed.

