
Killing a congressional inquiry into America’s high transit construction costs - jseliger
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/5/24/15681560/gao-report-transit-construction-costs
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m0llusk
This is completely idiotic. Conversation about transit construction costs is
being dominated by the New York City Second Avenue Subway. This is an extreme
outlier among transit projects. Initially proposed in 1919, the Second Avenue
was considered too complex and expensive to be built. Since then it has
repeatedly been considered and shot down because of the extreme complications
and expense involved for nearly one hundred years. After all of this it was
finally decided that the value of having such a conveyance matched or exceeded
the extreme cost and complications and plans went ahead. Having completed this
people are now shocked, shocked to find out that it was expensive because of
complications. The real lesson here is how utterly disconnected the supposedly
sophisticated modern world is from history and basic constraints. We can't
even inquire reasonably about the costs of things because they might be larger
than we would prefer even when there is nearly a hundred years of
documentation regarding that.

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gozur88
>It’s precisely the people who do want to see the United States build great
new transportation projects who ought to worry about why we are so bad at
executing on them. Unfortunately, not everyone in politics sees it that way.

Absolutely true. In the US transit projects are big ticket items, so it's a
chance to take care of the people who put you into office. After awhile voters
become cynical and won't support these projects at all. It shouldn't cost a
billion dollars to lay a mile of track and people realize that.

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Gravityloss
May or may not be related, but I've heard that a certain traditional country A
has been supplanted by B in many new certain kind of technically demanding new
construction projects. A:s worker salaries are not exactly high compared to B
but for some reason the projects tend to have high costs. Almost as if the
money went somewhere else...

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matt4077
It's probably the overhead of trying to parse certain sentences in the
blueprints that are somehow obfuscated for no reason at all except to appear
meaningful when they are actually just peddling certain unspecified conspiracy
theories.

